Bible Topics

As I watched the hostages being brought to freedom, last night, I kept thinking of two notions that have been striking me so forcibly the last few weeks. The first is the fact that the Arab world felt they had been openly robbed by the Israeli movement in 1947. For centuries the Arabs had lived there in their nomadic way. Then Israel, with the backing of the U.S. and other powers, simply shoved the Arabs out and claimed the land for themselves.

The resentment of the Arabs smoldered until they are strong enough to strike back at everyone until they get their land back. Israel has developed the country so it is more desirable for the Arabs.

Secondly, the hatred that has kept the Jewish people united is strong. As long as this hatred is alive, I foresee wars and threats of wars. It's true, they have been brutally treated because of their racial unity. Yet, their whole philosophy insists they must never become a living part of any nation in which they live. The U.S. is the only country where they have been fairly well integrated.

I can remember when the Dutchman, Schillebeeckx, first broached the subject (of the Resurrection). It really shook the Catholic world of biblical scholars. Then Dominic Crossan picked up the question and pursued it here in the United States. It was the first time I saw Ahern and Murphy and McKenzie go quiet. They never once discussed the point in writing and refused the question orally. All three gave the same replies. They respected the scholarship and thoroughness of the two writers but unless they could present the whole question, they did not want to open the discussion.

In actual fact, it pulled the floor right out from under all organized apologetic courses and fundamental theology books. It put responsibility for action and decision back on each individual and restored the center of the Christian ethic. The organized church could never accept this and so discussion was stopped.

In the late 30's and early 40's, the position of Halley's Comet was a huge topic of discussion among Scripture men. They wanted to use it to date the birth of Christ from the star over the house in Palestine in those days. They figured it was Halley's comet that appeared in 12 BC. of our calendar. Therefore Christ was born in 13-12 BC. This date also coincided with the miscalculations in the Gregorian calendar. Therefore, Christ was born in 12 before Christ. (This was considered a tremendous joke in fundamentalist circles and a giant step forward in biblical groups.)

The other point was far better taken. The description of the end of the world in the Apocalyptic literature and in the Apocalypse of Matthew, c. 25, was taken from the descriptions and fears and superstitions about Halley's Comet. The Comet had appeared in 64 AD. Matthew's Gospel was in its final version about 100 AD.

The notion of God gradually evolved. By the 7th century, Jeremiah saw that the notion of God had to be divorced from plurality and idolatry. Then the next century Ezechiel and the group called Isaiah II & III stressed the idea that God is really "spirit." This was the real breakthrough and dividing point in theology. From the 5th century BC to the 3rd century AD there was a steady growth in the notion of God in spirit. Then the legalistic categories reestablished the personal alterity of God and all the other bilge developed. This totally emasculated the true notion of God and the developmental influence of the Christian ideal.

I'm thrilled with the Zarim's theory about the literary origins of the 1st eleven chapters of Genesis. I couldn't count the number of theories I've read on those few lines of the Bible. Bea made the statement at a gathering of Biblical scholars: "If you can explain Gen 1-11, the rest of the Bible is easy. They are the foundation of the structure and the key to the puzzle."

The Bible is a collection of short writings flowing from the Jewish culture in the face of other cultures through the centuries. The Bible is important because of the formational role it has played in western civilization.

The basic message of the Gospel especially as modified by Luke is a good human ideal. He founds everything on the dignity of each person. This struck Luke forcibly because of his gentile background and the Greco-Roman world.

I don't think Christ himself ever said anything except his plea for the poor Jews who were overrun by the Jewish and Roman leaders. Christ was a strong social reformer, highly gifted, totally dedicated, fearless in the face of inhumane structure. He died in the same martyr frame of mind as the Maccabee family in the century before. He had intense followers the same as they (Maccabees).

When the Romans took the ideas, they spread to all the Roman Empire. They rewrote the ideas in the legalistic structural framework of the Roman mentality and society.

The Pax Romana of pagan Rome lasted as long as the Roman armies could keep the rest enslaved. It was the peace of distraction. The Peace of the "Holy" Roman Empire consisted of a series of wars and building of cathedrals. The peace of the post imperial period has been two World Wars.

The Smithsonian film on Islam was informative. I was happy to hear the stress the Islamic teaching places on literacy. Ed Arbez traced this same picture for us at the beginning of Arabic class. In the 9th & 10th centuries the Islamic scholars saved the whole Greek tradition for the Western World in Arabic. The system of Arabic numeration replaced the cumbersome Roman numeration system. The stress on the constant renewal of the Koran to fit new circumstances is also a big plus.

You talked about faith and its strength. I think you have a lot of faith — not in a god you cannot see or some miraculous way of dispelling difficulty. You have faith in human capabilities but it is tempered by each person's limits & efforts and by the cooperation of people who work in the same area.

It involves a struggle for each person of each new generation. We know from experience how necessary this is. If too much is given to a person, it is not appreciated and is soon gone or neglected.

As for life hereafter or some sort of continuance in being, I feel sure each person continues to enjoy what he/she has made self to be. I don't know how because it is the next stage of life.

Our celebration of Christmas was the essential meaning of the day. There was delight in sharing. The family sang together. There were the traditions and others picked up through the years.

The notion of the Kingdom of God or the Reign of God as the establishing of the family of man is the thought that appeals most to me and is at the basis of biblical ideas.

The phrase "of God" in Greek is the epexegetic genitive. This means the Kingdom which is God. When John says in his first letter "God is spirit," he is saying the same thing in a clearer fashion. God is as real and as powerful as the spirit of mankind established by the sense of family built up from the basic family unit at all times. It is universal in scope but always local in practice except for occasional large gatherings.

Last night's program had a long treatment of the notion of evil in philosophy & theology. The question of an all-good God permitting the just to suffer all the evil unjustly never proved a stickler for me. I never saw God as all-good. The depiction of the deities by the pagans clearly had much evil even in their good gods. The Old Testament always presented Yahweh as a vengeful God if people did not follow his plan. The Apocalyptic tradition the 1st century BC gave us "Satan" or the "adversary." The Gospel writers developed this notion of God as Father and Satan as the rebelling angel. Theologians developed a demon to cover every possibility.

The crudity and barbarity of the fertility rites appalled and disgusted me. The apocalyptic writers of the OT, starting with Ezechiel, began to write against them.

Then the synoptic gospels offered the various aspects of the Kingdom of Heaven as the counteraction. Finally by 125 AD the Joannine writer was able to take the analogies of Life and Death, seed, plant and fruit, death and renewal, and show how all of these were to be established in this life by the sincere respect and love the people had for each other, and shared in their community meals or family meals. I think the "ritual" as seen in John was every meal (evening) was to be an expression of "Koinonia" as the Passover had been for the Jews. The Christian life would then change death into life as Christ had done by his willingness to die for his ideals.

This, I think, is the essence of Christian ideals. It is a philosophy of life with no community larger than the local one, no ritual other than a family meal or a potluck supper, and no organization other than world about them. This would become "the eternal life" of John — the life that would last forever.

The Bible is rife with contradiction and variations. No one tried to scrub up the original writings. Only the preachers and teachers later on tried to make a system of Semitic story.

To Telos (Greek) means end in the sense of fulfillment or fulness. Matthew goes a step farther in his summary of the Gospel story in the last 3 verses of the Gospel (28/26-28). "Go forth: Make disciples (Amen) of all nations. Behold: I am in your midst until the 'synteleia' (Greek word) of the world."

The Christians are not to be an isolated little people like the Jews. They are to go everywhere. They are not to live in ghettoes but to mingle with everyone and bring about "the perfect & harmonious working together of everything in the world." This perfect harmony is "I am" or the Divine Presence.

All this would be readily understandable to Matthew's readers: the Jewish Christians. It had to be explained and applied for John's Gentile followers. He called it "love eis telos" (cc.13-17)

The basic ideas of the creation story is in Genesis 1-3. Out of the primeval chaos or mass was "fathered" a creature who was as weak as the "dust" around him. Yet he possessed "life." These creatures are to possess and govern the world around them by constant growth. They "possess" each other but this possession is "fleeting." Growth is a matter of testing and measuring up. There are no shortcuts and the major dangers to harmony will be deceit, anger and violence.

As the society progresses, 3 other men appear: Saul, David, Solomon. Progress must be made by a "request" from the group. This request must be based on "love." This love must be expressed in "Wisdom." This is an ideal picture of individual and community responsibility that did not reach fulfillment in OT.

"Fiddler on the Roof" was certainly a play worth seeing. The playwright captured the essence of the Jewish struggle throughout their long history. Their ethnic strength lay in their strong attachment to tradition and the inner band of unity that this established. The man was the head of the household but the woman truly ran the household and controlled the thinking. The gradual merging with the Gentile population through marriages of the girls gave them contact with the other nations. Their business "savvy" and shrewdness gave them control of the purse strings. The persecution they endured gave them an inner strength that is still alive.

I did a lot of thinking about the motion of "baseleia" or Kingship in the Bible. It is a verbal noun in Greek and means the action of "kinging" as in a checker game. It is not the defining of a set territory like "kingdom" in our English sense. The first time the idea is broached in 1050 B.C., Samuel gets extremely upset and then tells us what a king will do. His dire predictions are fulfilled and the people are wiped out.

Then Christ comes along and the people want him to be a king. The people still have the OT notion of king and kingdom. Christ then develops his idea in keeping with and developing further the ideas of the prophets and wise men of the OT.

The basic NT idea of kingship means that each person is made "personally responsible" for his or her own development and how this is to be carried out by oneself and in relation to others. The kingdom never ends because the person is continuously growing or developing.

I had to take time out to verify a lot of texts from the Hebrew to the Greek to the English in OT, and from Greek to English in the NT. I want to verify each passage before I use it.