Whole Lotta More Lot And An Even Bigger Asshole - How Scripture Will Have To Be Used If It Is To Survive

Still getting flack from those Sodom and Gomorrah posts

LOT HAD NO RIGHT to offer his two little girls to be gang-raped as an alternative to the two angels who were visiting him and who were about to rain fire and brimstone down on the town where Lot lived.  Lot had a right to offer himself to be gang raped, if he had any right to offer up victims to the mob of men at all.  You'll notice that neither he nor the unnamed Levite in the clear recycling of the folk-tale to give an excuse for a bloody civil war in Judges 19-20 are ever questioned as to why they saved their own asses by offering girls up to mobs of male rapists.  The Levite in Judges is even a bigger asshole than Lot because the crowd not only raped his concubine to death, when he woke up in the morning and saw her dead body lying on the door step, he ordered her to get up because he was ready to go on his way. Perhaps he'd enjoyed the hospitality he was offered so much to have it trouble his mind. According to Scripture, he slept away the night as his concubine was being raped to death outside.   No doubt the implication made at the start of the tale, that she had not been faithful to the Levite, is seen as her having deserved it.   If you didn't figure this story is told from a typical straight-guy POV.

I'll point out that when Lot offered up his little girls to suffer a similar fate the two angels don't point out to him that he's doing something wrong.  If nothing else in the story tells you there's something entirely screwy about using the tale as a guide to what "God's unchanging moral law is" for the purpose of forbidding the faithful marriage of two fully competent, consenting adult men or Women to marry, it is that the alleged agents of God's moral retribution fail to tell Lot that he shouldn't be offering his little girls to be raped to death, nor do they warn him that he shouldn't get plastered and rape them, himself, not many verses along in the story.  Some angels, huh? 

I'll also note that in the Sodom and Gomorrah stories, though it was gangs of men who committed the crimes, women and children were obliterated as a consequence, no doubt, if they thought about women and children at all, the scribes and editors and commentators would certainly have figured even children too young to have moral discernment or even language would have been obliterated as, in fact, Lot's wife was when she didn't offer anyone up to be raped and wouldn't share in her husbands crimes after her death.  From now on no hermeneutic that doesn't ask what happened to the Women and Girls who the men don't mention in the text should be considered to be legitimate.

Those two pieces of Scripture (and I only use the capital as a courtesy, not because I think those passages reveal the mind of God) are and always have been too immoral, themselves, to guide a Christian's moral judgement. It is a serious indictment of the process and character of "Scripture" that those questions have not figured decisively in the understanding of those stores.  

One of the greatest things that Christianity accomplished was the elevation of children, especially female children to the status of persons instead of chattels of their fathers.  The ubiquitous practices of infanticide, of child rape, of children being prostituted, etc. that characterize the pagan cultures of the Mediterranean regions and elsewhere being somewhat destroyed by Christianity is one of the most convincing arguments that can be made in favor of the truth of Christianity.  

Either it is a father's absolute moral duty to protect his children from, among other things, gang rape, now, in the future and in the past, or it is not moral duty today and no father has such an obligation.  Either it is and always has been wrong for a father to have sex with their daughters or it is not.  And if you entertain the idea that it wasn't then, you should not have access to children without court supervision by responsible adults. And that's just a tiny bit of what's wrong with that use of Sodom and Gomorrah and Judges 19 in any argument about morals for anyone. especially faithfully committed, consenting, adult gay men.  

That the idolatry of Scripture has not allowed such questioning of those passages, and similar ones, and their clear identification as morally depraved and of no use to determining how we should live now shows how with just how little seriousness the truth of the Law and the Prophets, do to others what you would have them do to you, is taken.  I think Jesus was speaking with divine authority when he said that, I think that a similar conclusion is attributed to the great exponent of Jewish law, Hillel, should lead to the conclusion that any part of Scripture that contradicts that is false.*  Either the Golden Rule is true for all time as the will of God, as I believe it is, or those parts of Scripture which don't promote that are a refutation of it as eternal Law.  

You put that together with "by their fruits you will know them," as the absolute standard of moral discernment in light of The Law and the Prophets and the entire case against faithful, committed, free and competently entered into gay and Lesbian marriage is demolished.  Even identifying those with the depravity of all-male rape mobs who don't appear to have been gay in Genesis and who were obviously not in Judges with faithful same-sex marriage is bearing false witness, another breach of a very serious Commandment.

I don't think that Scripture can retain that status without that critique AND WITHOUT THOSE CHOICES EXPLICITLY BEING MADE FROM NOW ON.  

I think we are going to have to choose on the basis of those Commandments which passages that were inserted into Scripture by the many, many hands that wrote down and edited and commented and assembled those written Scriptures that come down to us because without making those choices, the truth in them are going to be discredited by not only the presence of those but the evil results of them in history.  The Scriptural arguments for the subjugation and harm of Women, the Scriptures used to oppress, discriminate against and murder LGBTQ+ People, those which were used to establish chattel slavery even in its most evil forms,should be used to identify the false passages of Scripture which should be made infamous for their falseness.  That must be done no matter what the vintage and pedigree of those are because they clearly contradict the real Law and real Prophesy and the real Gospel.  

Clearly no one needs to take any argument that sets up what Lot and the unnamed Levite did as having anything to do with today's marriage equality seriously.   The asshole isn't even presented as having been married to the woman he threw to the wolves to save his own ass, he kept her as a concubine.   I wish those who have argued for marriage equality had gone through those to see just how morally corrupt they are.  Especially Lot and the unnamed Levite who seems to have been a totally asshole as well as a self-indulgent idiot.  I'll bet the reason his concubine fled to her father's house was because the asshole beat her.  Though, of course, that wouldn't have made it into the story.  

* In preparing this, I tried to find out how reliable the provenance of what Hillel is said to have said is and am left wondering why the same standards that are used in terms of Christian manuscripts aren't used to question the sources for him and the others recorded in the  Pirkei Avot .  

I wonder if anyone has ever wondered if the attribution of the negative statement of the Golden Rule to Hillel was due to it having been said earlier in the Christian Gospels.  I wouldn't be surprised if a great Rabbi had come to that conclusion, I'm not questioning its authenticity but I have read it claimed that the Gospel writers were cribbing Hillel in that attribution of the positive statement of The Golden Rule to Jesus, on those grounds.  I think fairness demands that the rules that are habitually applied to Christian sources as a means of debunking those must be applied to all other texts with a similar and, sometimes, even less well documented provenance.  That includes those which are pagan and secular (just how anachronistic is that category for that time?) as well as those which are religious.  

I think the mess that Scripture and its commentary are leaves us with no alternative but to choose what we believe is authoritative and what we are forced to reject on the basis of what we believe to be the Truth of God. I think that's how Scripture has always been used in practice, no matter what lip-service is paid to the daffy notion that it is a consistent and entirely true whole.

Coventry Carol 2 - Truth That's Deeper Than The Mere Facts

RMJ has written a very fine post on this.  

AN INTELLECTUAL RUCKUS IS MADE every year about the birth narratives of Jesus in Luke and Matthew being so different and pointing out that none of what is said in them can be confirmed to have happened. The census, the slaughter of the children, etc.  Though it's become so rote a ruckus that it should be considered untellectual by now.

Even those who are supposed to be academics don't much fact check themselves on the neo-pseudo-pagan anti-Christian liturgies these days. It's not as if there's any professional price to pay if they get that wrong.  I will mention in passing that most of the history of that period, earlier and later is similarly undocumented but no one will seriously question it.

While it might be reasonable to figure that something so profitable to rulers as a census for purposes of taxation as in Luke's narrative might have left evidence which survived, anyone who thinks something as routine as the Matthew Gospel's ordered massacre of a bunch of babies of poor people would survive in historical records has an extremely naive view of how power is still routinely wielded by the rich and so powerful and what they figure is worth keeping records of. Routine murder of poor children is still too routine to matter much.  The recording of history and what gets paid attention to is a question of what those in a position to do that really value and it's still mostly money.  The United States can't even manage to change the damned Constitution to prevent even the murder of middle-class children in their schools and it's become so routine as to have no effect, whatsoever.  And we're supposed to be a republic.

I think, though, the assertion that the slaughter of the innocents is undocumented so is merely a myth gets it wrong in what is the most important way.   I think that of all of the birth narratives, the slaughter of the innocents and the family fleeing into Egypt, the El Norte of that time and place, is absolutely documented and it isn't because we can be any more certain that the actual family of Jesus experienced it.  But, I will speak up for an even standard in academic proclamations and note that even the single attestation in the Gospel of Matthew lends weight to something like that having happened even if you don't believe in astrology or significant, prophetic dreaming.  There is certainly nothing unbelievable in the general outline of the story.  A known to be murderous king coming to believe an unspecified new born baby in a specific town is a danger to his rule and his dynasty ordering his thugs to kill all the babies in that district, a parent finding out the danger and fleeing with their children. The modern fashion in historical speculation says that the actual number of such babies in such a town wouldn't be the numbers imagined by renaissance and baroque painters, more like what the peasants of 1970s Nicaragua discussed  in The Gospel At Solentiame, as they could understand the Gospel on this better than almost any American or Brit academic expert could.*

Despite the vulgar significance at the heart of that academically trivial and pointless responsible, modern obsession, that exercise in scholarly responsibility doesn't get near the heart  of the two birth narratives.  As that sermon by Bishop Gene Robinson noted, not everything has to have happened for it to be true, that is if by "truth" you mean having a coherent and important  true meaning instead of being an objective report on something that had happened in pedestrian, abstract clerical reporting.

As I've said last week, my preferences tend to be with Luke's interpretation with frightening angels telling very low status shepherds about the most significant event in human history, the birth of the Son of God, of God choosing to become incarnated as a human being - no one understands the Incarnation - and them having the faith to go look for him in an animals shed, sleeping in the feed trough. I contrasted that to the wise men with their three Christmas presents, though Matthew doesn't specify that the child was a baby and may well have been more of a toddler by the time they caught up with what their astrology told them was going on with the Jews.  Too bad their astrology didn't tell them Herod was a complete rotter.

But there is an aspect of Matthew's account we can be certain was absolutely true in the Gene Robinson way, the attempt of Herod to kill him, showing that from the start the baby who was to have the future of Jesus would be a danger to earthly power and would be the object of their murderous violence as soon as they found out about him.  He could well have been the victim of their uninformed, routine violence, anyway.  The Crucifixion of Jesus under the Romans is the final proof of the truth of Matthew's perhaps symbolic nativity story of the three astrologers and their symbolically portentous gifts. The accounts in Matthew are true in the most important way.  Certainly it's more important for human experience.  That event has been  repeatedly reenacted and expanded on. How much truth would there have been in an accurate live-birth record as found all round the United State these days as compared to the perennial truth of Matthew's scary Christmas stories?   How much would the record of a live birth be an important truth as opposed to the life of the child that followed that birth?  Just what is truth supposed to be good for, in the end?

Herod is Trump putting babies in concentration camps to keep his power through appealing to racism and hate and his media and the Republican-fascist party supporting him, many of them those "evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics."  He is Trump denying Covid-19, advocating Darwinist "herd immunity" sacrificing so many more babies and children than Herod had available to murder.  Herod is the entire Republican-fascist caucus of the Congress and the majority on the Supreme Court. And that's just here in one country.  Herod has led most of the world for most of history, including the so-called Christian world.  Imagine how different things would have been if people had taken him more seriously.  The secular world hankers for a time when even fewer people will take him seriously. Even the alleged left.

That other story in Matthew 25 in which Jesus, himself, identifies the least among us as being enough of a of God so that what we do for them we do to God and what we neglect to do, we neglect to do for God. Poor children aren't in that list as given in Matthew 25 but they would certainly have been the least of the least as they are now and for every age in the past and will be into the future as it looks now.  Children are marked out for murder by oppressive worldly power, they are certainly marked out for the violence of poverty, for neglect, they are the targets of official and unofficial violence, for both the violence of the state and the other worldly powers of organized crime, some of that organized crime conducted by other children.  And just as the parents of Jesus, Mary and Joseph are so terrified for the life of their child, they were forced to leave their homeland to save his life, just as so many are fleeing from the Herods of Central America and Eastern Africa and the Middle East and Ukraine and in so many places that none of us could come up with an adequate list.

All of those "white evangelicals" (we aren't supposed to notice the ones who aren't fascists) and in many cases their fellow "traditional Catholics" who participated in Trump's and earlier Republican-fascists use of those fleeing violence in Central America were reenacting Herod's side of the story, they still do and for exactly the same reasons.  

The blasphemy of those who mouth "Jesus Christ" or "The Bible" as they worship Mammon and take on the mark of the antichrist is unremarked in the nice, polite Christianity of the mainline churches and Catholicism, indeed, the majority of those incumbent in the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops are fully in on the act as are those billionaires and millionaires who fund the "trad-catholic" corruption that is engaged in a hostile take-over of the Catholic Church.

And that doesn't get to the foremost murderers of Children, killers of their souls, their lives if they achieve adulthood, the specters terrorizing their parents, their physical and spiritual welfare, murderous, self-satisfied neglect, addiction, sex trafficking.  Poverty is its basis.

That truth is one that you won't read or hear any snark about but it is a far more important truth than whether or not Matthew would have gotten an A in a properly conducted history class while a critique of the historicity of the most pedestrian facts of his Gospel would get the top grade. We know it's accurate history of THIS child because what this child said about the Least among us and that what we do and neglect to do for it we do to God and the consequences of that action or inaction would be the gravest alternatives we will ever provoke in our lives.  But that is held to be less important than getting his hometown right and date of birth accurate.  The real truth is Jesus was born last week in the Congo, in North Korea, in El Salvador, in Ukraine, in Somalia.

If she were close enough, her or his single-mother will have to make the flight into America's Pharaonic regime maybe as soon as they can travel, maybe the baby's father will go with them but quite likely not.  Mary was lucky she had a husband who stuck by them and who could.  The Supreme Court and the Republican-fascists in Congress, FOX with its mythical war on Christmas are Herod.  So are the gangs they'll be fleeing. So is every member of the Republican-fascist party.  And what you can say about that incarnation of The Lord, you can also tell in stories of so many places it will make you weep. And you can even weep more for the children, infants, toddlers, older children and least among us adults who are the victims of the ever reincarnated Herod power among us.  It doesn't get any truer than the most significant of real history, a narrative that is continually re-happening right before our eyes and which is the only history that matters because we have some power to do something about it.

* I will point out how acceptable "ethics" talk about killing babies after birth is and generally has been since the second half of the 19th century.  I am unaware of any "ethics" professor, any biologist, any medical guy ever being fired for advocating the killing of babies.  In the ever widening game of "I can take an even more extreme stand," which is as much a part of competitive academics as it is in degenerate politics, there are perfectly respectable and respected "ethicists" who have toyed with the assertion that parents should get to have their children killed if they don't measure up to their standards.  I'm not aware of anyone ever getting canned for that.  I'll bet someone who asserted the accuracy of Matthew's accounts would be looked more askance at than even the most infanticidal "ethics" faculty would.  If I were online as much as I used to be I'd make up a faculty identity so I could access academic publications to see what the status of that issue is in academic scribblage is these days. 

Compare:

In ghetto settings, Jewish children died from starvation, disease, and a lack of adequate clothing and shelter. The German authorities were indifferent to the high death rates. They considered most of the younger ghetto children to be unproductive and hence “useless eaters.” Because children were generally too young to be used for forced labor, German authorities often selected them, the elderly, ill, and disabled, for the first deportations to killing centers, or as the first victims led to mass graves to be shot.

I am, of course, obliged to point out that I'm talking about post-partum murder of children, not access to abortion which is an entirely different matter which I've dealt with, favoring legal, accessible, medically safe abortion and universal education and availability of effective, scientific contraception. That and education in how to avoid STDs belongs in every school from earlier than kids are going to be screwing around.  Anyone who claims to be against abortion who isn't for that is a liar.  
 

Fats Navarro Move

 

Fats Navarro, trumpet; Don Lanphere, tenor sax; 

Linton Garner, piano; Jimmy Johnson, bass; Max Roach, drums.

My resolution for the new year is to post more music. 

Magnificat in C - George Dyson

 

Treble Choir of St. Paul's, Houston.

Noël, Grand Jeu et Duo n°10, Louis Claude Daquin

 

Olivier Latry organist

Noel Notre Dame de Paris - A babe is born William Mathias / Improvisation Olivier Latry

 

 

Noel à Notre-Dame de Paris
Maîtrise Notre-Dame de Paris
Henri Chalet Chef de Choeur
Yves Castagnet Orgue de Choeur
Olivier Latry Improvisation Grand-Orgue

Luke and Matthew Are More True Than Accurate History Could Be - Why I Choose To Be A Christian

It is not historical criticism, searching for the essential message, which has emptied the Christmas message and the Christmas feast of meaning, but on the one hand the trivialization of these things, reducing them to a romantic idyll, a cosy private affair, and on the other hand the superficial secularization and ruthless commercialization.  As if the "holy infant so tender and mild" - not indeed in Luke and Matthew, but in the holy pictures - were always smiling and never cried in his very human misery (which is indicated, without any social-critical protest, by the crib and the swaddling clothes).  As if the Savior of the needy, born in a stable, had not clearly revealed a partisanship for the nameless ones (shepherds) against the great ones who are named (Augustus, Quirinius).  As if the Magnificat of the grace-endowed maid, about the humiliation of the mighty and the exaltation of the humble, about satisfying the hungry and sending away the rich, were not a militant announcement of a revision of priorities.   As if the lovely night of the newborn child meant that we could ignore his work and his fate three decades later and as if the child in the crib did not already bear on his brow the mark of the cross.  As if already in the announcement scenes (the center of the Christmas story) before Mary and the Shepherds - as later in the process before the Jewish tribunal, the complete profession of faith of the community were not given expression by bringing together a number of the majestic titles (Son of God, Savior, Messiah, King, Lord) and by ascribing these titles to this child instead of the Roman emperor here named.  As if here instead of the illusory Pax Romana, brought by increased taxes, escalation of armaments, pressure on minorities and the pessimism of prosperity, the true peace of Christ were not announced with "great joy," founded on a new order of interpersonal relationships in the spirit of God's friendship for man and the brotherhood of men.

It is in fact obvious that the apparently idyllic Christmas story has had real social-critical (and, in the broadest sense, political) implications and consequences.  This is a peace opposed to the political savior and the political theology of the Imperium Romanum which provided ideological support for the imperial peace policy, it is a true peace which cannot be expected where divine honors are paid to a human being and an aristocrat, but only where God is glorified in the highest and he is well-pleased with man.  We need only to compare Luke's Christmas Gospel with the Gospel already mentioned of Augustus at Priene to see how the roles here are exchanged.  The end of wars, worthwhile life, common happiness, in a word complete well-being, man's "salvation" and the world's - are expected no longer from the over-powerful Roman Caesars but from the powerless, harmless child.

Within the scope of the present work, these few references must suffice to confirm the fact that these infancy stories correctly understood are anything but innocuous, edifying accounts of the child Jesus, based on profound theological reflection, to be used in a carefully planned proclamation, seeking to portray artistically, vividly and in a highly critical light the true significance of Jesus as Messiah for the salvation of all the nations of the world:  as Son of David, and the new Moses, as the commentator on the Old Covenant and the initiator of the New, as Savior of the poor and as true Son of God.  Here then is obviously not the first phase of a biography of Jesus or a precious family history.  It has much more the character of a Gospel;  a message of invitation, according to which the Old Testament promises are fulfilled in Jesus, the chosen one of God, who did not provide any detailed political prescriptions and programs, but in his very existence, in his speech, action and suffering, set up an absolutely concrete standard at which man in his individual and social action can confidently aim.  

Hans Kung: On Being Christian p 452-453