Lamentations of Jeremiah for Holy Saturday

 

You Have To Choose - There Is No "Objective" Mechanism You Can Put That Off On To

IN THE ATHEIST FAD OF THE OO's I shocked some people online when I pointed out that in many cases history is capable of producing some far less conditional and ambiguous facts than even physics can.   I gave the example of the date when the Nazi government invaded Poland, which any rational person looking at the documentary evidence would acknowledge to be certainly and reliably known.  That wouldn't, possibly, keep liars and the willingly gulled from denying that evidence but such deniers would have, even then, I assumed, rightly be seen to have discredited themselves for any honest, rational consideration.   At least the kind of honest, rational consideration that used to be the milieu in which serious adults operated in most of their lives.   That assumption has undergone extreme revision in witness to the Trump phenomenon and the journalistic and judicial handling of its blatant lies.  Now the treatment of many I once had some respect for of Putin's lies.

I still hold that that is one of the potential strengths of history, especially when that is an honest, non-ideologically controlled view of and analysis of what primary documentation there is of what is being studied.   

Of course, history being something created by People, it is vulnerable to all of the practices and procedures, for good and bad, that humans will bring to it.   There is nothing in human culture, even the most exact sciences that is not vulnerable to human folly, weakness and dishonesty and, most of all, our limits.   About history as an academic study, we are allowed to admit that, about the sciences, we are generally required to deny that, especially in the milieu of modern intellectualism. But anyone who looks at the historical and continuing record of retractions and scandals in the scientific literature and the fact that even physics and chemistry sometimes undergo minor and, periodically, major revisions of even some of its most basic current holdings can't rationally hold the naive, ideological faith that science produces absolute truth about some of the simplest, most reliably generalized phenomena of the physical world.  And much of what is included in "science" is nowhere near as possibly rigorous as physics and chemistry. Some of it is, I would assert, less rigorous than the best of history.

I think the rigorous methods of history can do, sometimes about some things, what science never could about extremely complex phenomena of human experience, produce absolutely reliable knowledge.  But not about everything.  In order to get on with that you have to maintain a level of faith in the reliability of the evidence of history and that evidence has to be subjected to a rigorous evaluation as to its reliability, though there is never going to be an absolute and objective means of doing that.  NOTHING IN HUMAN CULTURE IS POSSIBLY REMOVED FROM THE LIMITS OF HUMAN MINDS THAT PRODUCE THAT.  The idea that there is any such thing as "objective truth" is a myth created by ill-considered and non-rigorous thinking about whatever is under discussion.   

It was one of the great achievements of modern physics that it finally admitted that the act of human observation could not be removed from the science of physics as a major and necessary component of its results.   I think that is something which will, actually, withstand any level of future testing because it is a basic, foundational condition under which any science, history, philosophy, religion, political behavior, etc. will ever be done.  We can't escape our own limits and our own necessity of acting and thinking from our own location and times and experience, at least not while we're confined to physical bodies with the limits that physicality imposes on us.   If those who believe that the soul continues on are right, perhaps we will, then, enjoy a freedom to find absolute truth that is impossible for us now. 

The complaints about what I've been writing about during Holy Week impinge on the question asked by Pilate in the Passion story as told by John, 18:33-38

 Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him,  Are you the King of the Jews?”  Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”  Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?”  Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”  Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”  Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” 

NRSV

It's easy to hear Pilate drawl that question in the tones of a bored, cynical, college-credentialed, modernist.  When those like Richard Dawkins and his fellow atheists rail against the "post-modernist" skepticism about the declarations of science, especially the imprecise sciences such as so many of them are high-priests of, if they had more discernment they'd know that comes from the same place they pioneered in their materialist-atheist-scientistic dismissal of so much of non-science.

Jesus does not answer the question but he did.  He testified to the truth.  Pilate didn't have the prerequisites that would allow him to understand it.  There is no easily or quickly given answer and none that won't be accepted by those who don't want to believe it. 

Having started in on Luke Timothy Johnson's book The Real Jesus - which I honesty had not intended to use as much as I suspect I will, now that I've re-read it - in Chapter 4, The Limitations of History,  he starts by pointing out something seldom taken into consideration:

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the spate of Historical Jesus books is their authors' assumption that "history" is unproblematic.  They apparently think there is no need to define what is meant when the term "history" is used since none of them bothers to do so.  The confident contrast made, without any further explanation, between "faith" and "history" assumes a shared understanding of those terms. 

In fact, however, the nature of history and the historical is deeply problematical.  It is not clear how aware the authors of these books are of the problems.  What is clear is that they are trading on popular rather than critical understandings.  In popular usage, the term "historical" is often opposed, for example, to the mythical with the assumption being that one refers to "what really happened" and the other to "something that is made up."  In popular usage, the historical can likewise be opposed to the fictional, with the same implied contrast between what is "real" and what is "made up."  In short, casual usage bears within it the implications that "historical" equals "true" and "nonhistorical" equals "false."  The Jesus Seminar exploits this popular distinction when it speaks of its historical deliberations delivering "the real Jesus" in contrast to the "Christ of faith," who is by implication somehow less than "real." 

It is important to sort out some of these claims.  A good start is to consider in a straightforward way what the business of history is,  what its problems and possibilities are, and how these apply generally to the study of early Christianity.  Then we shall be in a better position to think more clearly about "the historical Jesus."

And that, my friends, shows that the book is worth the time spent reading it and re-reading it.  He goes on in the book to investigate just how problematic the problems are and that the methods of voting on what experts think doesn't really do much to mitigate those problems.  Those problems we will always have with us.

Johnson's book is a quarter of a century old, now, as is the product of The Jesus Seminar,  it was written just at the start of the widespread use of the internet, the e-mail debate I linked to a couple of weeks or so ago among Johnson,  John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg may have been one of the earliest such debates I've come across.  It wouldn't have fit on Twitter or been tolerated on most third-party blogs I was aware of.  Such is the popular degeneration from even those more  promising uses of the internet.

I think a lot of what Johnson assumed about the sophistication of even those on the PhD level, distinguishing between history and fiction was naively complementary of the educations of those within our "educated class" because it was one of the most shattering discoveries of interacting with even sophisticated academics online that a dangerously large number of them either can't or choose not to discern those distinctions on a routine basis, especially when the topic is a matter of ideological polemics.  

I found out that many people with such credentials regularly believed that overtly fictitious books and movies were historically reliable, even in the case of Shakespeare in Love when you could produce the quote by the author who admitted that every single thing in his screen play was fiction, in the case of The Crucible when the age of the characters made it clear that Arthur Miller's story proved he hadn't done much in the way of research - unless he wanted us to understand his hero was a child raping pedophile, for which there is no historical evidence - you can find some brawls about those and  me mocking the historical credulity of the college-credentialed such as I've encountered online.  Perhaps my feeling that Biblical Studies and, especially, theology are conducted at a somewhat more rigorous level of self-doubt than much of the rest of academic life, these days is somewhat accurate.   Like the scientific study of psychic phenomena, they always know they're facing against strong headwinds and conduct their research accordingly.  At least sometimes.

I don't remember which historian of philosophy once summed up the 19th century as "the century of ideology" but I don't see any evidence that the 20th or 21st century escaped that through "analysis."   I think it's possible that the adherence to rigid ideological loyalties and preferences is as bad as that ever was.   And a lot of it doesn't even rise to the level of the ideological but is more like a tribal identity than having even the intellectual rigor that the debased adherence to an ideology requires.  

This meditation on Pilate's question is more random than I'd intended it to be because the longer I go on the more complex it is.  I think that's what you get when you try to find absolute truth on the basis of logical analysis of evidence, I think in the end, you have to make a choice.  You have to choose.  That's a choice as old as Deuteronomy 30:15-20, the choice of the way of life and the way of death.  You are free to make the choice, there isn't any way you can foist that off to some alleged oracle of "objectivity."   You can choose the truth and it will set you free or you can choose something else, fiction, make-believe, being fashionable, being "more popular than ever," nationalism, racism,  etc. and it is the way of death.  

I have to admit that it was about the time that I read Johnson's book that what I'd gained by reading Crossan's The Historical Jesus was shaken, though the choice I made from reading it didn't change.  I will say that one of the earlier problems I had with it came from me reading a translation of The Gospel of Thomas which I'd had hopes for from reading Crossan's evaluation of it.  Reading it didn't do much for me.  The idea that it was not, as Crossan claimed, based in what might have been among the earliest traces of the literature but a later production influenced by the canonical Gospels made sense to me.  I haven't gone into Johnson's skepticism over Crossan's claims about an "earlier version" of the apocryphal gospel of Peter to support his entirely unevidenced claims about what became of the body of Jesus.   I do remember wondering what Crossan based his unequivocal declarations about that on.   I believe it was hearing him make the declaration that "the dogs ate it" on a talk show even before reading his The Historical Jesus, that I wondered what evidence he had for that and found, on reading the book, that he had no evidence at all.

I say that while saying I still respect Crossan's scholarship more than I do a lot of what gets out there.  I just don't believe a lot of what he concludes or claims based out of that assumption.  Like I've said about someone I respect far less, Carl Sagan, when he's based solidly on factual evidence, he's very good, when he goes much farther than that, not nearly as good.  I remember that I was at first very hostile to Luke Timothy Johnson when I first encountered what was written about him because I thought he was unfair to the Jesus Seminar, but then I read him and I had to admit I found him persuasive on many points, especially because he was so honest about what he believed to be on the basis of faith, something which the more would-be scientific academics seldom if ever admit to.

Lamentations of Jeremiah For Good Friday In English

 

Here is part of it chanted in English from St. Mark's Coptic Orthodox Church in Houston, Texas. 

 

The chanting of the Lamentations on Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday is a very old tradition.

Holy Thursday Chant In English - The Lamentations of Jeremiah For Holy Thursday

THE TRAD-CATHOLICS have ruined the posting of Latin language music for me, I wouldn't want to risk doing anything that encourages that atrocious misuse of the venerable musical tradition that used Latin texts, reducing that to oligarchy-funded Catho-fascist political pantomime.

Here is an English language chant for the Lamentations of Jeremiah for Holy Thursday.  If I can find the translation being used online, I might post that later. 

 

Complaints, Complaints Complaints, that's all I get! - Hate Mail Before The Triduum

The Director's voice vibrated with an indignation that had now become wholly righteous and impersonal - "If ever I hear again of any lapse from a proper standard of infantile decorum,  I shall ask for your transfer to a Sub-Centre- preferably to Iceland."

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World 

I USE THAT spelling of "antisemite" because it was recommended by the fine historian of antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt.   I'd used variant spellings of it in the past but figured I'd go on her authority even though we have serious differences on just what it is and what it isn't.  As to the rest of that, see the comment I broke my Lenten resolution to post yesterday.

I write for public posting despite the fact that I have vision difficulties and have a very hard time reading what I write without great magnification, sometimes I can't get complete passages on the screen as I'm editing so I can see it all at once, it's not unusual for parts of sentences to get cut out and not put back during editing.  

The spelling, I'm indifferent to the standard spelling of English, I said before if they'd make it even more approximately phonetic so as to cut out the absurdities of the standard spelling I might care enough to conform to it but the snobs with the knack for visual memory and the majority of those who cravenly pretend to, have control of academia and the media so nothing so rational and humane is going to happen, not within my lifetime, at least.  So screw it.  

The spelling of names is so variable that anyone who was a grownup would get over someone misspelling their name, anyone who is offended by that should be advised to grow up.  I find it amusing when someone calls me "Andrew" or even funnier "Andy." 

Let's see, what else have people been whining about?

I make no apology for saying the forbidden, what makes the lazy, college-credentialed middle and upper-middle class and above furious.  The name on the masthead indicates you can expect that if you come here.  In my case the forbidden isn't the safe, conventional, bourgeois,  pseudo-transgressive and thrilling (for the stupid and lazy) stuff that is pretended to be forbidden but which never has been forbidden.  I mean things like telling the truth about scientific and other racism, bigotry, the encouragement to selfish, stupid, indulgent, childish bad behavior, it's what's really a thought crime in late 20th, early 21st century English speaking and "Western" "civilization" advocating equality, democracy, the truth and noting that if we don't suppress lies and unprivilege corporations and level the ultra-rich to levels where they are not a clear and present danger to us all, we are doomed. 

The college-credentialed class are as apt to kick down as the rest of cowardly humanity, they're afraid to take on the rich and so powerful.  That's why they were such suckers for the "anti-political-correctness" bullshit when that started in the 1970s. And when they're not doing that they're doing the lazy slacker version of Don Quixote, tilting at pretend windmills that they don't even have to risk getting on a horse to go at.  Christianity is their safest target for that kiddie's game.   You want something that'll get you in trouble, try going after the Warren and later courts' "free speech-press" rulings that have been such a boon for the fascists and neo-Nazis and Republican-fascists that they're the biggest fattest fans of those these days.   Play-lefties are the biggest suckers on the planet. 

Update:  When I cited Luke Timothy Johnson a few days back I didn't intend to harp on what he said, but I did and then I went back and re-read his book The Real Jesus and he's on my mind now.   

He made an interesting statement once, that he'd rather have lunch with the heretic Anglican Bishop John Spong with whom he had enormous differences on issues important to him about religion than he would some televangelist who professed to believe many of the things that Johnson believed in, as I recall he mentioned the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, etc.   That's because for many an orthodox Catholic who believes in those will, from reading the Gospel, Paul, the Prophets, etc. will find themselves to be far more of a political radical for equality and justice on the basis that they believe those are stated to be the will of God as taught by Jesus, Paul and the Prophets of the Jewish Bible.    I have never been more of a radical than I am today and I was considered a flaming radical for more than a half a century, even when I professed to be an agnostic.   Though I'd just as soon not have had lunch either with Spong or the televangelists.  I really wouldn't have wanted to have lunch with any of the EWTN crew, especially that nasty nun who started it.  

"Liberal" "conservative" the conventional meanings of those don't work.  I'm a lot more interested in if someone really believes in equality and the common good, those are the real radical positions.   I am a workers-own-the-means-of-production socialist, I am, in almost every case, opposed to the government owning,  as I am shareholders owning those.  I think when shareholders control wealth egalitarian democracy is endangered if not doomed.  Capitalism is unillegalized theft, state capitalism is just the capitalists getting direct control of the government as well as the wealth.  That's what "socialism" devolved into meaning, which is why the word is useless for anything productive, now.

Hate Mail

IT STRIKES ME AS MILDLY SAD that Julian Lennon can't think of anything more original and meaningful to contribute to the cause of support for the People of Ukraine than to intone his old dad's old, old, old, thread-bare, tuneless, vapid, dreary dirge.  I'd imagine you know which one just by that description.   

But I have a policy to not comment on the relationship of children and a parent who abused, neglected and belittled them.  It strikes me as sadder than Frank Sinatra jr. used to seem to me.

I wish the kid had found his own voice.   

Other than that, no, you're right,  I don't care about it.  

Aren't you glad you got me to say it? 

Friendly Commentary And Hate Mail

RMJ HAS A  much more informed commentary on my posting about John the day before yesterday.   As I said, I'm not even a beginner and these issues have a huge body of scholarship with so many points of view it's hard to imagine anyone really mastering it as a topic.  Good information of where to go with the topic, too.

It's worth noting that there are Jewish Christians today,  it's not something that ended c. the second century or even the forth century.    Being sort of Catholic Plus, that's what I'm most familiar with.   As I've noted here before, there have been Jewish Popes, certainly Peter and Evaristus would have been considered Jewish.  I'm convinced that's how they probably saw themselves.   There have been powerful converts in the clergy and even high in the hierarchy, Juan de Torquemada, the uncle of the infamous Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada was a Cardinal elector, was from a family of conversos, was something of a Pope maker in several papal elections who used his influence to shield other Jewish converts from discrimination.   His nephew obviously had power and used it for other ends. 

In the modern period the late Archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Lustiger was Jewish, he left instructions to put up an inscription in Notre Dame where his body is in the crypt there along with other Archbishops of Paris:

Je suis né juif. J’ai reçu le nom de mon grand-père paternel, Aron. Devenu chrétien par la foi et le baptême, je suis demeuré juif comme le demeuraient les Apôtres. J’ai pour saints patrons Aron le Grand Prêtre, saint Jean l’Apôtre, sainte Marie pleine de grâce. Nommé 139e archevêque de Paris par Sa Sainteté le pape Jean-Paul II, j’ai été intronisé dans cette cathédrale le 27 février 1981, puis j’y ai exercé tout mon ministère. Passants, priez pour moi.

A translation of the relevant sentences would be. 

 I was born a Jew.  I received the name of my paternal grandfather, Aron.  Became a Christian by faith and baptism, I remeain a Jew as the Apostles remained Jews.  I have for patrons, Aaron the Great Priest, Saint John the Apostle, Sainte Mary, full of Grace.  .  .  

When he was made an Archbishop he said:

I was born Jewish and so I remain, even if that is unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim. That is my hope and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it.

The Chief Rabbi of Paris said he went to the Synagogue to recite Kaddish for his mother who was murdered by the Nazis. 

He was prominent enough that he was considered a credible candidate to be Pope after JPII died. 

Though he was a very conservative Catholic, when he was named Archbishop the vile Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre spoke out against it, antisemitism and even Holocaust denial has found a home in Lefebvre's schismatic sect,  The Society of Pius X.  Which I like to think means that such people don't find the Post-Vatican II church, even its most conservative part, a comfortable home for them.   Even the conservative two most recent popes wanted to leave that as a sin of the past.

I will admit that in church politics and politics in general, I find one of the Bishops Lustiger, JPII and Benedict XVI came down hard on, Jacques Gaillot, to be entirely more admirable.  One of a number of liberals he had a hand in sandbagging.  He was a conservative and, if you want to consider me a Catholic, I'm on the far left.  Though I don't think those labels help much if accurate description is the goal.

There was another recent Jewish Auxiliary Bishop, Jean-Baptiste Gourion, who among other things was assigned to advise the movement of Hebrew Catholics who I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually gain the status as an official Rite of the Catholic Church, with their own distinctive liturgy, tradition and hierarchy.  

And there are figures such as the martyr St. Edith Stein whose work I'd like to know more of but there's only so much time to read.  

I don't have any right to comment on how Hebrew Catholics view themselves, that's their right and their place to do that.  They're Catholics as much as anyone in my family ever was.  I don't know much about Protestant messianic Jews so I won't comment on that.  I like the idea of Catholics who keep The Law,, or at least take it seriously enough to try to, worship and pray in Hebrew, etc.   I like that a lot more than the trad-Catholic stuff with its idolatry of the Tridentine mass- or, rather, their comprehension of it as a talisman of their neo-fascist politics.  

Now, aren't you glad you made me say it?

Notice

TO LET YOU KNOW I'm intending to continue with excerpts from Louis Boudin's Government by Judiciary after Easter because the Supreme Court is out of hand, lawless, corrupt and solidly in the hands of increasingly brazenly partisan Republican-fascists and the defective Constitution has no real means of constitutionally forcing them to behave ethically or morally or even lawfully, they are, in fact, a collection of life-time petty monarchs who are a law unto themselves.

The dangers of the Court to equality and even unequal electoral democracy are as serious a danger as the United States has ever faced and part of that serious danger is the fact that alleged liberals and leftists are suckers for what has created that danger and I see no reason to believe that the media will ever alert people to it even as it gets worse and, in fact, deadly.

The media may bewail the part that lies have played in this but their self-interest leads them to discount or ignore the fact that if we allow the mass media, the corporate media to lie with impunity, there is no way to protect equality or democracy as long as the media can lie with impunity.  That is how we got here, starting with the election of 1968, there is a direct line between where we are now and the election of Richard Nixon that year and a line back from the Nixon win that year and the Sullivan Decision of 1964.   The decision that gave the media permission to lie with impunity.

Yet Again The Always Needed Commentary On John's Extremely Troublesome And, Variously, Valuable Gospel

BEING LESS THAN A BEGINNER in this sort of thing, I have to admit that I find the scholarly writings about the Gospel of John some of the most confusing and confounding aspects of looking more deeply into the Scriptures.   The disagreements over the often fraught, confusing text, sometimes at odds with the synoptic Gospels (which also have odds among themselves) is enough to make you throw up your hands if, as beginners will, you expect to find one final, convincing description of it.  I will tell you one thing I have learned conclusively, we don't have access to that one final, convincing point of view on it.   On any of it.   So that is typical of all human texts dealing with just about anything of any more real life complexity than pure mathematics.

Of course when the cycle in the lectionary comes to the year that concentrates more on John for the end of Lent and into the Easter time,* the troublesome use of the word "Jews" in that particular Gospel forces us to contemplate the origins and long-standing sins of antisemitism, antisemitic murder and genocide, discrimination and stereotyping, much of it derived from readings of the Gospel of John, ignoring the fact that John is as explicit as the other Gospel writers and those who wrote the rest of the Second Testament in noting that Jesus was a Jew as were all of his closest followers, those who are presented as being saved or, at least, had expectations of being saved as well as those who play the role of villains in his narrative.  

In noting that Creation didn't stop when Paul expected it to but has gone on for two millennia and that along with that change, which is the ongoing act of creation, it's certain that today, after the genocides of the mid-20th century, many of the variant understandings of  the Gospel of John in those approximately 1900 years was not only wrong, they were malicious and evil.   Out of the several papers I've read online on the topic, this one by Reverend Lawrence E. Frizzell, D.Phil. of Seton Hall University, goes into great detail, noting the very different uses of the word "Jews" throughout the text and how later writers such as Jerome and John Chrysostom exacerbated through their misunderstanding,  the very complex and often confounding text of John, trying to tease out of it meanings that are certainly wrong.   Frizzell presents a lot of variant readings of John's Gospel to show that what he used one word for, "Jews" means at times the Temple Priesthood and its functionaries, other definable groups of Jews who were not included in that elite, all of the Children of Abraham, and how what is said in the Gospel is likely indicative of the complex late First Century relationships between Jewish believers in Jesus who were being expelled from synagogues - most of whom, if not all of whom, considered themselves to be Jews and how events such as the Bar Kochbar revolt, the attitudes and beliefs about him among various groups of Jews in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple and other extremely complex issues that most later writers and commentators may well have known nothing about.   

In one of his lectures Luke Timothy Johnson points out that we probably know more about the First Century Middle-East than was even known to the best of scholars at the beginning of the 20th century.  And with that knowledge should come an appreciation that a lot of the most fraught issues of New Testament interpretation and the role that later,  often quite ideologically interested commentary had in creating some of those fraught conditions that a more informed reading of the texts - APPRECIATING THE COMPLEXITY REVEALED BY THE CONTRADICTORY LITERAL READING OF THE TEXTS WITHOUT THAT BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE.  

In Frizzel's paper he admits that some, maybe much of what John says is more of a reflection of conditions in the late 1st century, several very turbulent decades after the death and Resurrection of Jesus and the passing of the generation who were there to witness his life and ministry, to testify to his Resurrection.  He specifically says that we can't rely on the Gospel of John to come to a view of "the historical Jesus" while admitting the value of much of it.  Having so recently written again about the story of The Woman Taken in Adultery and have written about the account of Mary Magdalene as the first witness to the Risen Jesus, the one Jesus ordained with the role of Minister to the Apostles, I certainly don't reject the MEANING of everything in it as I will admit that it is one of the most difficult books of the New Testament and is undoubtedly cited by those who interpreted it maliciously in the past two thousand years.  

I would note this passage, Chapter 8: 21-59 because it contains just about all there is to be seen in the problems of John's inspecificity when talking about "the Jews" in a context that probably has more to do with the hostilities among various factions of Jews, those who believed in Jesus, those who didn't, the, no doubt, different factions within those two categories, keeping in mind the tendency of groups to internally hold some of their most violent and inflammatory talk for those within different subsets of the set of all Irish (some of the stuff said about those accused of pro-Brit sentiments is hair raising), French (those who claimed to be involved in the resistance [an ever expanding number] to those accused of collaboration) and Americans  (as someone online recently said, the Republican-fascists really do want to disenfranchise us, and that's not counting tens of thousands of those who want to kill us) . . .  Note that as the argument continues and gets more heated, they even accuse Jesus of being a Samaritan, from what I understand it would probably have been like an antisemite calling someone "a Jew" today.   Perhaps even the author of John's Gospel shared in that prejudice. **

That later Roman and Greek gentile commentators had no knowledge of or appreciation for the complex background against which the Gospel of John and, to an extent, the other books of the Bible were written is to be taken for granted. Whatever insights they may have had on some things that seem to still be of value, they're worth taking into consideration.   But much of what they said was out of ignorance and out of sin.  

That passage from Chapter 8 noted that Jesus said that salvation would come to those who followed his word, not lying and, certainly, following his commandments to love not only those who were your family and friends but those who opposed you.  

Those commandments are some of the ones that Christians have hardly taken as binding while they investigate the sex lives of other people with such minute scrupulosity and look for the least sign of infidelity with their own, entirely sectarian codes and rules and creeds.  

If Jerome, Ambrose and Chrysostom had been careful to keep that stuff out of their commentary, if John had been more careful to designate just who he meant when he abbreviated their identity to "the Jews" (I wonder if he did that in the way of early scribes because paper was rare and expensive, something that should always be kept in mind) centuries of evil could have been avoided, perhaps.  People do have such a habit of being able to find their way to doing that, which we should all confess and keep in mind to avoid.

*  The paper notes that the post-Vatican II Catholic lectionary has used the Gospel of John a lot less than previously.  

The Fourth Gospel is not proclaimed throughout the three-year lectionary of the post-Vatican II Roman rite in the same way as the Synoptics.  Certain passages of John are introduced sporadically in "Ordinary Time.  John 4:5-42; 9:1-41 and 11:1-45 are chosen for the third, fourth and fifth Sundays of Lent in Year A.  These dramatic passages are used as well in the two years when catecumens are progressing through the revised Rite of christian Initiation for Adults.  . . .

He goes on to note that any use of the Gospel should be accompanied by rigorous instruction that prevents an anti-Jewish understanding of them, no doubt on the basis of that potential being proven in the whole history of their misuse and the evil that has come of that.

That said, it's never been my experience that antisemites, other racists, misogynists, queer-bashers take the teachings of Jesus that seriously, the commandments to love opponents and even enemies, those who say mean things about us, etc.  I've never noted them to be especially pious and, in the several experiences of threat and violence I've experienced from them, they are quite willing to take The Lord's name in vain,  blasphemy is the dialect of their mother tongue, which is lying.

** For Christians of any age to grasp the message of John, they must be imbued with a deep understanding of Jewish worship in the Second Temple Period. 

In other words, hardly any but a few rare specialists in such topics will really be able to get a lot of what John wrote.  I will note that if this is true then the author of John and his intended audience must have been Jews because he would certainly have written it differently if he didn't expect his readers to get the distinctions and subtlties that he'd never have expected gentiles to get. 

Perhaps the single most devastating statement about "the Jews" in the Fourth Gospel is the Accusatory dictum summarized as "Your father is the devil" (8:44).  In this text (or the tradition behind it) the background for the phrase "synagoge tou satana" (Apoc 2:9, 3:9).  Rather than showing an appreciation for the Jewish heritage of Jesus and his Gospel, the Church Fathers (especially Ambrose and John Chrysostom) and later generations of Christian teachers used this image of the diabolical to describe the synagogue and Jewish prayer in their own times.

In reading the whole argument that Jesus is having with a specific group of People - no doubt they were the ones he was making admonitions to, not "the Jews" as the whole nation, as later antisemites would read it.  As I said, I think John almost certainly would have considered himself to be a Jew, maybe one who was sore about having been kicked out of the local synagogue.

These [later Christian] preachers and writers did not realize that the intense pitting of life against death, truth against falsehood, God against Satan in John was a literary approach that derived from polemics between Jewish teachers of the age.  They must have understood that the reprimand of Jesus to Peter "Get behind me satan!" (Matthew 16:23) was an admonition rather than a declaration of definitive rejection.  Unfortunately, it suited their purpose to construe this debate among Jews being the children of God and of Abraham so that Jesus seemed to be making an eternally valid condemnation of all Jews of all periods of post-biblical history, except those who converted to Christianity.

We should now explain that, like the prophets of earlier times, John the Baptist and Jesus exercised the function of mokeah, "admonisher" to their peers as teachers of the ordinary people.  Name-calling was a method commonly used to shake those judged to be complacent leaders into a realization of the effect of their instruction  Sometimes a title, such as "guides to the blind" would be reversed (see Romans 2:19, Matthew 15:14; 23:16, 19, 24) to startle the opponents into a reflection on their work.  Because misinterpretation of Scripture could be attributed to the devil (see Matt 4:6) erroneous teachings might be wittingly or unwittingly diabolical (see 2 Cor 11:14-15).  Scandals or obstacles to the faith of the "little ones" must be avoided at all costs (see Matt 18:6-10).  But, on the other hand, in situations of conflict or disagreement, people should harken to the advice of Gamaliel:  "Any group of human origin will break up of its own accord,  but if a movement comes from God you will not be able to destroy them,  but you might find yourselves fighting against God" (Acts 5:39).

I doubt that Ambrose and Chrysostom and almost all later commentators on this would have had much if any understanding of that background.  We, on the other hand, have access to a level of knowledge of the necessary primary texts, many in their original languages, many in English and other translations, so many of the modern commentaries on it which take those as a more reliable guide than late Classical, medieval - even some current traditionalist commentators on them, are likely far more accurate.  It's not unlike what I've found with studying other controversies I've gone into, Darwinism and its relationship to eugenics, the U. S. Constitution.   It's one of the tragedies of the internet that with all of that so available that so much of what else is put on it is sheer evil, some merely banal in its evil, much of it far worse. 

Note:  Reading through this, again before posting it,  I have to point out that, just as John's use of "the Jews" is, the word "antisemtism" is extremely problematic in itself.  The word has radically different meanings depending on what AND WHO it's used to describe.  

The "antisemitism" of those who want to convert Jews to Christianity is certainly not the same thing as the biological-eugenic antisemitism, the antisemtism of someone like Voltaire who attributed malign stereotypes to Jews based on their biological inheritance or the later, materialist, "enlightenment" forms of that as found in German romanticism and pseudo-scientific linguistics, Darwinist eugenics (English as well as Nazi-German and other) and on to the post-WWII genetic neo-Nazism which has found a home both in English language neo-Nazism and in evolutionary psychology on an academic level.   

There is all the difference in the world as to whether someone wants to convert you and, if you choose not to convert,  to leave you alone, or someone who wants to kill you whether or not you convert to Christianity, especially to those who also reject Christianity.   I've noted before that the German antisemite who invented the term to make his hate more sciency, the bizarre Wilhelm Marr,  hated Christianity as "the new Judaism" which he dis-credited with bringing Judaism into the gentile world.  

To call all of those wrongs the same thing is anything from confusing to unhelpful and in many of the uses of the word, now, for many things which are not remotely anti-Jewish, unjust.   And far worse than that, when it is used to label People. 

Witness To Crucifixion

THE CONTINUING NEWS of the Putin invasion of Ukraine,  Russian's support for it (apparently we can forget any dreams of them overthrowing his gangster mob rule), resurgent Republican-fascism, the fondest dream of Putin for us, the "free press" freed to lie and propagandize promoting it, the New York Times doing to Democrats in the mid-terms what it did to Hillary Clinton even as it made a pantomime gesture of endorsing her, the perfidy of Manchin and Sinema in the goddamned Senate, the Republican-fascist Roberts Supreme Court proving what Louis Boudin said about government by judiciary more than any court since the Taney Court, lower courts and alleged prosecutors hampering any attempt to bring Trump and his thugs to justice, the media and the comedians playing their role in that and a hundred other things that could be named has made this one of the most difficult Lent's in my experience.  

Now we're at Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week with evil closing in all around us.   

That's how I'd be going on if I were going to write a post but I think instead, something that might be more worth while is to recommend Sr. Mary McGlone's weekly column on the Sunday Liturgy:

Today, we begin the most solemn, liturgically charged week of the year. When we recite the creed, we bow at the memory of the Incarnation, and this week reminds us that the ultimate effect of the incarnation of Christ is that human nature participates in God.

While that can be said simply, the church’s prayer this week leads us to realize that it happens through a long and difficult process of watching Jesus be stripped of human power so that we can learn something about what divine power is.

Luke, like Matthew and Mark, tells the story of the last week of Jesus’ earthly life as if it were the opening of a theater production with a well-prepared script. We could say that Jesus’ procession into Jerusalem had been in process since the moment described in Luke 9:51 when, shortly after the Transfiguration and the conversation with Moses and Elijah about his “exodus,” Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem.” Now, with carefully chosen vocabulary, Luke tells us that Jesus was “ascending” to Jerusalem.

Before arriving, Jesus sent disciples to a nearby village to bring him a colt whose owner simply accepted the mysterious explanation that “the master” had need of it. The disciples set Jesus on a borrowed beast as if on a pauper’s throne, and Jesus entered the holy city to the chanting of people acclaiming him as the king coming in the name of God. Their singing echoes that of the angels at his birth (Luke 2:14).

Luke’s narrative draws us into a liturgical drama. Preplanned and carried through with obvious references to ancient prophecies, Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem signaled the beginning of the final act of his earthly ministry, the baptism he said he had to undergo (Luke 12:50).

His meal with the disciples, prepared with the same mysterious precision, announced the immanent arrival of the reign of God, the realm where he would eat and drink with them after going through his own Passover.

Luke’s depiction of Jesus’ Passover supper adds to those of Matthew and Mark and even reflects John’s. In Luke, Jesus tells the disciples, “Do this in memory of me,” a phrase only he and Paul put on Jesus’ lips (1 Corinthians 11:23-25). By emphasizing that phrase, Luke teaches that all who share the “supper of the Lord” are called to do what Jesus did: consecrate their lives for one another and for the salvation of the world.

To remind us how challenging it is to share this communion of life with Jesus, Luke tells us that at the very table of the Last Supper the disciples got into an argument about who was the greatest. In response, Luke quotes Jesus as teaching in words what John portrays in gesture when Jesus washed the feet of his disciples: “I am among you as one who serves.”

That becomes the key to interpreting everything we hear in today’s Gospels, from Jesus’ humble and peaceable entry into Jerusalem through his last prayer for others, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”

I've probably already given more than I should have, the whole of it is worth reading.

Witnessing the undeserved suffering of People today, in Ukraine, around the world, Nature, the flourishing of evil is going to make Good Friday a lot nearer to our experience than usual.  Covid continuing, the flourishing of lies,  it turns everyday experience into a meditation on the execution of Jesus by the Roman Empire and the local powers who held power by cooperating with it (Luke's account is being read today during Mass) is as fresh as the daily news.  Especially seeing what's happening to The Least Among Us.