What's on the Shelf?

Here's a picture of the Dr. N. T. Wright at his desk. (I suspect it's from before his consecration to the episcopate, and the See of Durham.) I love the ordered chaos. But I really enjoy picking over his bookshelf. Click on the picture and you should get an enlarged version. (And it's quicker than reading one of his tomes!)

What do we have in common? What should I add to my own library? Any surprises?

Always happy to see the Loeb Library set (note both Greek Green and Roman Red). Oxford Encyclopedia of Saints, New Oxford Commentary on the Scriptures, and a Sacra Pagina volume here and there. But what caught my eye was the postcard we both have of the arms of the constituent colleges of Oxford University.

Anglican Evangelicals are blessed to have such a formidable intellect on the side of orthodoxy. May this bishop always be a defensor fides.

Kenotic Hymn to O Danny Boy

Finally, this tune - London Derry Air - can appropriately be sung at funerals!

Homily for Advent4B

This homily was preached yesterday at St. Stephen Church on the 4th Sunday of Advent (Year B). It's a short homily instead of a sermon because we had our Christmas Play as part of the service.


Here's a link to the readings for the day. Be blessed!

Last week I asked what kind of Christmas you were hoping for.

The texts this week ask a different question of us: what kind of Christmas are you working for?

Sure – holiday flurry:

• 1 or 2 more people to shop for
• Several gifts to wrap
• Food to prepare and a house to clean

How will it all get done?!?

Only one sane answer: teamwork. Everyone pitches in. At our house we have a song: “clean up! Clean up! Everybody everywhere! Clean up! Clean up! Everybody do their share!”

The task before us is insurmountable, unless we have some help from our family. That’s the challenge we find – surprisingly enough – in our lectionary readings today!

Consider David’s plight: David has vowed to establish a house for the worship Lord. In turn, the Lord has vowed to establish David’s house – his royal line – forever!!!

David knows this task will be too much for him, so he rests in the knowledge that his son will be seated on the throne after him. David may not get the job done, but surely his son will carry on for him.

Thankfully for us, David’s greater son was in view – not Solomon, but Jesus. For Solomon would build a beautiful temple, but it would eventually be torn down.

Jesus – David’s greater son – spoke of his own body as a temple; if it be torn down, he would rebuild it in three days! Moreover, Jesus builds his body – the church – as a temple of the Holy Spirit. And he made a promise that the gates of hell could not withstand it.

It’s an amazing promise to David – so great that he doesn’t fully understand what is being given to him in having the messiah come from his family lineage. But this grace will be celebrated by future generations. It will be reiterated by the prophets, until the time is ripe.

As Paul puts it: “the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed and through the prophetic writings is made known to all nations, according to the command of eternal god, to bring about the obedience of faith.”

God hid these things until his work of establishing David’s line should be complete. The entire nation desired to hear the good news of the coming king. Then, the Lord revealed it. But notice to whom he reveals it!

Our rehearsal of the Christmas story shows that he chose strange people to be witnesses to the miracle: shepherds – the social outcasts of his time; and gentiles – astrologers far removed from the covenant!

God had tried to reveal his plan to a pious priest in David’s lineage named Zechariah, but he didn’t respond – and so his mouth was shut for 9 months until the birth of his son, John who was to become the baptizer.

Contrast that with the annunciation of our Lord to the Virgin Mary. She receives the news of god’s amazing – even far-fetched – plan in humble submission – what Paul would call “the obedience of faith.” She plainly but sincerely responds: “behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”

Let me ask again: what kind of Christmas have you been working towards?

Advent exists to prepare our hearts to receive Christ just as he is – not as we would want him to be.

So what was it about Mary that made her able to receive the message with such immediate credulity and submission – to perceive the mystery with an eye to obedience?

Some churches have said all sorts of things about her that have little, if any, basis in scripture. Ideas like Mary being conceived without sin – whether true or not (and I doubt they are) keep us from seeing the source of her real power, and thus emulating it.

We can’t afford to miss this, so look with me briefly at your gospel lesson.

1. Notice that she relied on god’s grace. “Hail favored one” it caught her off guard, because she knew she didn’t merit god’s goodness. So she – in her humility – let god define his relationship with her on his own terms.

2. Notice that she relied on god’s presence: “the Lord is with you!” One certainly gets the sense that Mary was a woman of prayer – one who knew how to enter the presence of god. Her prayer in the Magnificat (later in this chapter) shows a personal appropriation of god’s presence for her personal and community life. That sort of intimacy can only come in prayer.

3. Notice lastly that she relied on god’s word. The Magnificat shows a grasp of god’s covenant words and works in the history of Israel, as recorded in holy writ.

4. Moreover, when the word of god comes to her on the lips of an angel, she believes it fully. She knows that virgins don’t have babies – but she knows even more that whatever god purposes, he accomplishes. And whatever his word says must come to pass.

It’s her reliance on god’s grace, mediated through scripture, confirmed in a vibrant prayer life, that ultimately enables her to submit to god’s plan when he presents it and render that obedience of faith.

I’ll ask it again: what kind of Christmas are you working toward?

Christmas is one of those few times, where the space between the world and the church gets thin. People who ordinarily wouldn’t give a second thought to Jesus and the things of god find themselves strangely drawn into the promise of the Christ child.

Sadly enough, it’s a time when those of us who should have Christ at the center of our everyday lives – can somehow manage to edge him out in our rush to make it a perfect holiday season.

I’ll ask it one last time: what kind of Christmas are you working toward?

It’s not too late to take up Mary’s way.

It’s not too late to stop and re-center ourselves in what Christ has done for us:

To trust him completely for your future,

To ardently seek him as he is revealed in his word,

And to adore him in prayer.

But you’d better hurry up… just four more stopping days till Christmas.

Have Yourself a Koine Krismas

I took Greek in undergrad, so I didn't get to sit through Dr. Garrett's punny Greek songs. (I've been told that Movable Nu - to the tune of "Run Around Sue" is a pedagogical riot. Apologies to Dion - or Dio...) Still, since I love parodies and nerdy songs, I couldn't resist.

Hey Dr. Garrett...I think we might have found a new recruitment song!



Because even though I'm now a parsin' presbyter, I'm still a Greekin' DEACON.

Maundy Thursday is now Mandatory

Today, most of the Latin-derived churches are celebrating Maundy Thursday. The name comes from the Latin word mandatum, which means "command." It refers to the Last Supper, when Jesus said:

"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." (John 13)

This isn't a command to "like" one another but to LOVE. He didn't say "tell people that all belief systems are equally salvific as a means of showing how friendly you are" (love means telling them that apart from Christ, they're bound for Hell). It's not a command to seek institutional unity at the expense of truth. It's a command to love as Jesus describes Christian love.

Attention, Church (especially those who have existed as either an implicit or explicit established institution):

Jesus gave us the marching orders, and we need to be on about it.

In other words, sh*t or get off the pot (else you may end up like this poor woman). The legacy churches desperately need to be dethroned. And for you pastors out there: quit letting your lay leaders get away with just sitting around doing nothing. You're only making their inactivity more acceptable. And you are depriving yourself of great joy.

Same thing for you lay leaders: if your pastor isn't feeding you a steady diet of the God's Word, then don't enable them. Demand they hie to the study and come out when they've heard from God. Demand that they lead by example. Don't let a numpty waste your time with fables.

Catch that Calvinism

I just got an Easter card from a friend. It's lovely and well rendered, graphically. Take a look at it here. Do that before you read the rest of the post.





Now....can anybody guess why I find this card disheartening? Two thumbs up to the first contestant that gets it right!

Discovering Divine DNA

Okay...they've tested the DNA of the Talbiot tomb and found that the woman named Mariamene and the man they claim is named Joshua (the name is scratchy and hard to make out) are not related on their mother's side. Big whoop.

If the skeptics want me to believe that it's really Jesus of Nazareth, they're going to have to show one convincing bit of evidence: haploidy. Of course, if he's really virgin-born would we even be seriously considering that his bones would be on earth?

Talpiot Tomb Tricks Truant

I just posted the following at John Shuck's blog. No claims to originality - most of this was culled from various readings and some outright copied from Ben Witherington.

A couple of things:

1) Craig Evans has written a recent (2003) article on Jewish burial traditions, focusing on how they illuminate the Gospel narratives. You can find it in a PDF file here.

By following his footnotes, you can find a wealth of information. Take a look at the Anchor Bible Dictionary or the Encyclopedia Judaica (you can read the old article on burial here). You'll find that the Gospels reflect intimate acquaintance with these traditions.

You'll also discover that the tomb of the family of Jesus would not be in Jerusalem. It would be somewhere in Galilee or Bethlehem (either the one in Galilee/Zebulun or the one in Judea/Judah).

2. The tomb was discovered in a suburb of Jerusalem back in 1980 by arcaheologists of the Israeli Antiquities Authority (though outside of the Jerusalem of ancient times, as all burials had to be done outside the city). Amos Kloner and Joe Zias, two of the original archaeologists involved in the project, have openly repudiated the findings of the show in strong terms, both on television and in the public forum.

Let's face it - if Jews could prove that they had the body of the man Christians say was resurrected (and Muslims say ascended without death), why would they sit on it for twenty years?

3) It does seem to date from before the second century, and it is a very nice tomb belonging to a middle-class (or better) family. It was decorated from the outside and on the inside with a strange rosette shape, indicating the attention was to be drawn to it rather than being a secret.

Do we believe that Jesus' family was well-to-do? Do we believe that anyone associated with Jesus and his family closely enough would want to draw attention to his burial place? It could hardly be argued that any of his disciples would want to do so.

4) The names are a big problem for those who believe it's the biblical Jesus. Some names are in Hebrew, others in Aramaic, and the one of Mariamne is in Greek! That suggests it's a multi-generational tomb (rather than everyone being piled in there at roughly the same time).

5) History of the names - Richard Bauckham provides the following statistics. Out of a total number of 2625 males, these are the figures for the ten most popular male names among Palestinian Jews. the first figure is the total number of occurrences (from this number, with 2625 as the total for all names, you could calculate percentages), while the second is the number of occurrences specifically on ossuraies.

1 Simon/Simeon 243 59
2 Joseph 218 45
3 Eleazar 166 29
4 Judah 164 44
5 John/Yohanan 122 25
6 Jesus 99 22
7 Hananiah 82 18
8 Jonathan 71 14
9 Matthew 62 17
10 Manaen/Menahem 42 4

No mention is made in the documentary of the fact that though we only have a few hundred ossuaries with inscribed names, there is in fact another ossuary with the inscription 'Jesus son of Joseph'. Apparently this was not a rare combination of names at all.

For women, we have a total of 328 occurrences (women's names are much less often recorded than men's), and figures for the 4 most popular names are thus:

Mary/Mariamne 70 42
Salome 58 41
Shelamzion 24 19
Martha 20 17

At one juncture we are told that the name Mariamenon is found in Hippolytus a second century church historian. Two problems with this. Firstly so far as I can see, that name never occurs in the works of Hippolytus [I'm using the Lightfoot The Apostolic Fathers vol. i, part ii (London, 1889-1890)]. Secondly, Hippolytus died in about A.D. 236. He comes to us from the end of the second century A.D. He could never have known any eywitnesses or even second-third generation followers of Jesus. Even if he did mention the name in question (the one on the ossuary found at Talpiot), he provides no early second century evidence for this name, much less for the theory that this name is one way of referring to Mary Magdalene.

In fact the Acts of Philip, at best a fourth century document is the basis of the theory of Prof. Bovon that Mariamenou Mara= Mary Magdalene, but nowhere in that document are the two equated. The woman referred to in that document is an evangelist in Greek who is the sister of Philip (whether Philip the apostle or the later Philip the evangelist found in Acts 8, is up for debate).

In sum, there is a reason that every Biblical archaeologist, save possibly one, interviewed either in the Discovery Channel special or in the hour long debate thereafter repudiates or is unpersuaded by the findings of the show.

It's not the tomb of the biblical Jesus of Nazareth.

If you want to find his body, you'll see it come together (usually on Sunday mornings) to be fed on the Word and then sent out into the world.

Or you can ask John Dominic Crossan to point to some fossilized dog turd to find the remains of a Jewish rabble-rouser that people falsely called God.