Back of the Envelope

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting story about the "Jesus fish":

During a 1991 visit to Istanbul, a buddy and I found ourselves in a small restaurant, drinking, dancing, and singing with a bunch of middle-class Turkish businessmen, mostly shop owners. It was a hilariously joyful evening, even though they spoke little English and we spoke considerably less Turkish.

At the end of the night, after imbibing unquantifiable quantities of raki, an ouzo-like Turkish liqueur, one of the men gave me a worn-out business card. On the back, he’d scribbled an image. It was little more than a curlicue, but he seemed intent on showing it to me (and nobody else). It was, I realized, a Jesus fish.

It was an eye-opening moment for me, though obviously trivial compared with the experiences of others. Here in this cosmopolitan and self-styled European city, this fellow felt the need to surreptitiously clue me in that he was a Christian just like me (or so he thought).

Traditionally, the fish pictogram conjures the miracle of the loaves and fishes as well as the Greek word IXΘΥΣ, which means fish and also is an acronym for “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” Christians persecuted by the Romans used to draw the Jesus fish in the dirt as a way to tip off fellow Christians that they weren’t alone.

In America, these fish appear mostly on cars. Recently, however, it seems Jesus fish have become outnumbered by Darwin fish. No doubt you’ve seen these, too. The fish is “updated” with little feet on the bottom, and “IXΘΥΣ” or “Jesus” is replaced with either “Darwin” or “Evolve.”

It's been a long time since I've really thought about the Darwin fish. At first, I found it offensive. A deliberate mockery of what, to my mind, was the purest symbol of my faith. Unlike the cross, which is often used as a piece of art with no real meaning, no one wears an ichthus unless they mean it. They know that it was a symbol of Christianity when being a Christian was dangerous. And, from Jonah's story, it's still used that way in places where it's dangerous today. So no one mocks that symbol in ignorance of what it means.

It's hard to maintain outrage for a long length of time, however, and after a while I phased it out. I even used it in advertising for a discussion on evolution hosted by MIT's Christian groups. Still, it is the sort of insult that polite people are offended by. As Jonah is:

I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there’s the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers.

The hypocrisy is even more glaring. Darwin fish are often stuck next to bumper stickers promoting tolerance or admonishing that “hate is not a family value.” But the whole point of the Darwin fish is intolerance; similar mockery of a cherished symbol would rightly be condemned as bigoted if aimed at blacks or women or, yes, Muslims.

Civilized debate would be greatly encouraged if people were more polite to one another.

I've mentioned this idea before, but I'd like to expand on it a bit. So let's start with the story from Genesis 3 (NIV translation):

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ ”

“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”

The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all the livestock
and all the wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.

And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”

To the woman he said,

“I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”

Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.

The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

There are a number of ways of looking at this story, and I'm not talking about whether the story is literal or figurative. What is the Knowledge of Good and Evil? Why was this knowledge forbidden to mankind? I had one mythology teacher who believed that the whole thing was an immortality story, quite common in ancient mythologies, where the gods jealousy guard their immortality from humans who always want to live forever. After all, Adam and Eve were cast from the garden in order to prevent them from eating from the other tree, the Tree of Life. Of course, this interpretation tends to overlook the fact that the two were free to eat of the Tree of Life before they partook of the Tree of Knowledge.

Many heretical philosophers view God as the antagonist of this story. To them, knowledge is the ultimate good, and innocence is a vice, not a virtue. They see God as trying to keep mankind ignorant and compliant. They read that last line, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever" as proof that God was trying to horde his knowledge so he could subjugate mankind, and believe that the wisdom gained by eating the fruit is worth it, no matter what the price, or the arbitrary punishment of a vain and greedy God.

There is a strain of Christian thought which runs along similar, but less cynical, lines. They see the coming of Christ as the greatest good possible, and the redeemed man in Revelations as superior, or at least wiser, than the innocent man in Genesis. Because it is the Fall that led to these things, they see the Fall as a good thing, and that ultimately we are better off for it having happened. Some of them even believe that the Fall was meant to happen. After all, how could the Lamb of God have been slain before the beginning of the world (Rev 13:8) if redemption, and thus the Fall, were not already in the works. And if God wanted us to Fall, who's to say we had much choice in the matter? Maybe I'm not the one, but I'll say it anyway: I reject this belief for the very simple reason that it portrays God as a capricious deity who made us Fall and then punished us for it. It's probably true that I don't understand God as well as I think I do, but I do think I'm staying truer to a straightforward reading of the text than those who imagine a divine conspiracy to undo us and then remake us.

What are we to make of this story then? What's so wrong about the knowledge of good and evil? God has it, why shouldn't we? Why is immortality okay for us as long as we're ignorant (i.e., not like God)? And who's the us of "one of us" anyway? (There are a variety of interpretations for that one line, some which see God as being sarcastic--as man by no stretch of the imagination became like God, despite the serpent's promise, I can see that--and others that take it more literally.) I will, for the moment, put that aside and reflect on the Tree itself. What was the purprose of the Tree? Why give man the opportunity to fail like that? Was it simply a test? And what knowledge of good and evil did we gain from eating the tree? Shame is the only thing mentioned. Did Adam and Eve lack a conscience before? Did our innate sense of right and wrong only come from the tree?

Here's where I'll start speculating, and to begin, I'll concede that the Christians who believe that redeemed man is wiser than innocent man have a point. We have gained something through the Fall that we've endured. I hold to the belief that while Adam and Eve were perfect, they were immature. They were intelligent, but not yet very wise. The serpent offered them a shortcut: eat the forbidden fruit, and you'll become like God. Notice that becoming like God wasn't a matter of power and immortality (to some extent, they already had that), but of knowledge. The wisdom which they knew they lacked. The fruit of the tree didn't necessarily have any supernatural properties. Merely by eating of it, they broke God's commandments, bringing sin and death into the world. They gained a firsthand knowledge of evil by partaking of it, and in this intimate knowledge of evil, fully understood the difference between it and the good they had forsaken. But, I maintain, there is another way to know evil. God, after all, knows good and evil, and it has not come from doing evil. Jesus knew good and evil, and not in the way the rest of humanity knew it. He knew it by facing it, resisting it, and overcoming it. If the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was a test, then failure was not the only option. There was also the possibility of success, and that would have meant understanding evil in the same way Jesus did, by opposing it. The Tree, then, would have taught mankind what they needed to learn, and they would have gained the knowledge that they needed to mature, without the catastrophe of the Fall, and the suffering it brought.

That, I believe, was the purpose of the Tree, not as a test, but as a lesson. Failure made the lesson a much harsher one, but even so, we are learning. And ultimately, that failure itself is redeemed.

This is a continuation of the previous post on the Harmony of the Gospels, specifically as it refers to the resurrection. There I quoted from all the gospels, here I talk about the differences.

You'll note that there are differences between the gospel accounts. In my younger days, this troubled me a lot. I've had twenty years now to think on this, but while I won't claim to have fully figured it out (although I do have some thoughts I'll share in a moment), I have learned that the weight of the evidence is convincing, even if my belief in the Gospels' inerrancy remains troubled. Before I discuss some possible interpretations, it's fair to ask whether it's worth the effort. Lee Strobel in The Case for Christ rightly points out that there is enough agreement that the essential story is clear, and enough differences to indicate that the four accounts came from different sources. C.S. Lewis in Miracles (Chapter 16) points out that there's more to the Resurrection than the first morning:

When modern writers talk about the Resurrection they usually mean one particular moment--the discovery of the Empty Tomb and the appearance of Jesus a few yards away from it. The story of that moment is what Christian apologists now chiefly try to support and sceptics chiefly try to impugn. But this almost exclusive concentration on the first five minutes or so of the Resurrection would have astonished the earliest Christian teachers. In claiming to have seen the Resurrection they were not necessarily claiming to have seen that. Some of them had, some of them had not. It had no more importance than any of the other appearances of the risen Jesus--apart from the poetic and dramatic importance which the beginnings of things must always have. What they were claiming was that they had all, at one time or another, met Jesus during the six or seven weeks that had followed His death. Sometimes they seem to have been alone when they did so, but on one occasion twelve of them saw Him together [by twelve here C.S. Lewis (and Paul) means the Twelve, who in fact were only eleven by that point], and on another occasion about five hundred of them. St. Paul says that the majority of the five hundred were still alive when he wrote the First Letter to the Corinthians, i.e. about 55 A.D.

The "Resurrection" to which they bore witness was, in fact, not the action of rising from the dead but the state of being risen; a state, as they held, attested by intermittent meetings during a limited period (except for the special, and in some ways different, meeting vouchsafed to St. Paul).

The actual events of Resurrection Sunday are, for the most part, skimmed over very briefly in the first three gospels. Why? One reason is pointed out by C.S. Lewis--those events were actually a very minor part of the Resurrection story. The apostles themselves didn't see any of it, and the story told by the women didn't convince them. Women, after all, were not considered reliable witnesses in first century Judea, which may be another reason that their involvement wasn't dwelt upon. There are a few other points to keep in mind, which have more to do with the nature of ancient histories and biographies than the gospels themselves. The first is that chronology was never considered terribly important in ancient histories: the point is to tell the events, not necessarily to get them in an exact order. The second is that quotes are not full quotes. Go ahead and read the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). I doubt it will take you more than fifteen minutes. Yet Jesus usually taught for hours on end. None of the sermons we have are full transcripts; they are all highly abridged, and that likely applies to all quotes found in ancient writings. Some commentators argue that all the quotes are paraphrased; they are at the least translations, as Greek, the language in which the gospels were written, was not the spoken language of Judea at this time. There are some scholars who believe that no quotation used by ancient writers is even meant to be exact, simply what the writers think the speaker should have said. I don't subscribe to that theory myself. The third and final point is that when listing people present, writers usually just listed the important people, leaving an assumed "and others." If you want more on the nature of ancient histories and the reliability of the gospels, I recommend F.F. Bruce's The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?

Since John is the most clearly different, and the most detailed of the accounts, we'll start with his gospel account and build on that. Clearly, John was telling the story of Mary Magdalene, so the focus is on her, and the other women aren't even mentioned. According to Luke, there were at least five of them there: he lists three, and then says there were other women (plural). Of these, four are named in the Gospels: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Salome, and Joanna (I suppose it's possible that Salome and Joanna are two names for the same woman--I don't really know). The exact time is around dawn. John says that it was still dark, Mark says that it was "when the sun had risen." I'll admit that this bothered me at one point, but I don't remember why. It can be pretty dark just as the sun is rising, and I imagine the episode--travelling to the tomb, arriving, witnessing, then leaving--took long enough that it was dark when it began and light when it was over. In any case, Mary Magdalene arrives, sees the tomb is empty, then runs to get Peter and the other disciple (John, who carefully avoided naming himself throughout the gospel). There's no account of angels or Jesus yet in John. Of course, there's no mention of the other women either, and I wonder what they were doing. Did they go with Mary, or did they remain there? One possibility, which is one I've never heard mentioned in any commentary I've read, is that they split up. When they found the tomb empty, Mary went back to find Peter and John--perhaps alone, perhaps with some of the others--while the others remained there. There they saw the angels. This, then, could be the main source of the discrepancy between the gospels. If the other women remained while Mary went to get Peter, then perhaps there are two encounters with the angels, one by these women and one by Mary Magdalene, and perhaps, although I'm less certain of this, two encounters with Jesus. Jesus and the angels were, after all, in the area. Jesus would be meeting with lots of people that day, including some of his disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:12-32), and the apostles that evening (Luke 24:33-49). 1 Corinthians 15:5 tells us that he met with Peter before the apostles, although we're not told exactly when (he may have been one of the disciples on the road to Emmaus).

This resolves most of the difficulties involved, except for a couple of details. First off, how many angels were there? At least two. There could have been a whole choir involved in this event (I imagine there wasn't any lack of volunteers). All the accounts except Matthew's mention two, but Matthew's is the only one which has an angel doing more than talking to the women. After doing all the hard work of subduing the guards and moving the stone, before the women arrived it appears, this angel gets top billing in doing the actual speaking. Where were the angels? While Matthew's active angel was sitting on the stone at one point, there's no reason to assume he was still there when the women arrived. Who reported to the disciples? All of the women, apparently, but it seems that it was Mary's report, when there were still very few facts, that got Peter to go and look, as recorded in Luke and John.

This is clearly not the only possible explanation for the differences, and I make no claim that it is the correct explanation. It's simply the one that makes the most sense to me, but I've been convinced that the weight of evidence is such that the exact details are less important than I once thought.

I've posted these two posts on Easter Sunday before, but I haven't done it for the last year or two. I thought I'd start it up again, as I think they're good Easter posts.

From Matthew:

Now after the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the grave. And behold, a severe earthquake had occurred, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it. And his appearance was like lightning, and his clothing as white as snow. The guards shook for fear of him and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid; for I know that you are looking for Jesus who has been crucified. He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said. Come, see the place where He was lying. Go quickly and tell His disciples that He has risen from the dead; and behold, He is going ahead of you into Galilee, there you will see Him; behold, I have told you."

And they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy and ran to report it to His disciples. And behold, Jesus met them and greeted them. And they came up and took hold of His feet and worshiped Him. Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid; go and take word to My brethren to leave for Galilee, and there they will see Me."

(Matthew 28:1-10)

From Mark:

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought spices, so that they might come and anoint Him. Very early on the first day of the week, they came to the tomb when the sun had risen. They were saying to one another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?" Looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away, although it was extremely large. Entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting at the right, wearing a white robe; and they were amazed. And he said to them, "Do not be amazed; you are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who has been crucified. He has risen; He is not here; behold, here is the place where they laid Him. But go, tell His disciples and Peter, 'He is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see Him, just as He told you.' " They went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had gripped them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

(Mark 16:1-8)

From Luke:

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb bringing the spices which they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men suddenly stood near them in dazzling clothing; and as the women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, "Why do you seek the living One among the dead? He is not here, but He has risen. Remember how He spoke to you while He was still in Galilee, saying that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again."

And they remembered His words, and returned from the tomb and reported all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. Now they were Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James; also the other women with them were telling these things to the apostles. But these words appeared to them as nonsense, and they would not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen wrappings only; and he went away to his home, marveling at what had happened.

(Luke 24:1-12)

From John:

Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came early to the tomb, while it was still dark, and saw the stone already taken away from the tomb. So she ran and came to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and said to them, "They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid Him." So Peter and the other disciple went forth, and they were going to the tomb. The two were running together; and the other disciple ran ahead faster than Peter and came to the tomb first; and stooping and looking in, he saw the linen wrappings lying there; but he did not go in. And so Simon Peter also came, following him, and entered the tomb; and he saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the face-cloth which had been on His head, not lying with the linen wrappings, but rolled up in a place by itself. So the other disciple who had first come to the tomb then also entered, and he saw and believed. For as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that He must rise again from the dead. So the disciples went away again to their own homes.

But Mary was standing outside the tomb weeping; and so, as she wept, she stooped and looked into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white sitting, one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had been lying. And they said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him."

When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, and did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?" Supposing Him to be the gardener, she said to Him, "Sir, if you have carried Him away, tell me where you have laid Him, and I will take Him away." Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to Him in Hebrew, "Rabboni!" (which means, Teacher). Jesus said to her, "Stop clinging to Me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to My brethren and say to them, 'I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.' "

Mary Magdalene came, announcing to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord," and that He had said these things to her.

(John 20:1-18)

More later.

On a superficial level, Judaism looks a lot like other ancient tribal religions. Why would the real God, someone wholly different from the tribal gods which so many cultures created for themselves, deign to interact with humans in that way? Unless, perhaps, it was to make a point. We spend a lot of time demanding that God deal with us on our terms. We ask questions like, "Why doesn't he just reveal himself to us directly, with clear and undeniable revelation? Set up our government, and tell us exactly what he wants us to do? Give us clear rules and judges to rule over us? Provide for us and destroy our enemies?" We ignore the fact that the story of Israel is the history of him doing exactly that. He chooses Abraham, makes him into a tribe to compete with all the others, and promises him that he will prove that he's greater than all those other gods. Then, in the time of Moses he calls the Israelites from bondage, demonstrates his power through plagues and the parting of the Red Sea, gives clear instructions as to what he wants, physically dwells with the Israelites in the form of cloud and fire. And the Israelites reject him anyway. They complain and whine, they're fickle and hard-headed. Despite all they've seen, they don't trust that he'll fulfill his promises: on the threshold of the Promised Land they turn away, fearful that they can't beat the Canaanites living there, even though God has already demonstrated his ability to defeat the far more powerful Egyptians. God doesn't give up, though. He gives them chance after chance, as a tribe, as a nation, as a kingdom, as two kingdoms. He gives them prosperity and hardship, judge and prophet, king and priest, making sure they have every opportunity to see that he's faithful, that he's good. And time after time, we see that this sort of relationship doesn't work. Obedience predicated on punishment, the type which the ancient world so indoctrinated, had a hard enough time getting strict obedience: it could not draw out love. Belief based on proof is not the same thing as faith, and will soon find excuses to revert to disbelief anyway. The story of Israel isn't the story of one nation's rejection of God, but rather a demonstration of all humanity in a microcosm.

And that's where the new covenant comes into play. When God called on Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, he was doing more than testing Abraham's faith. He was teaching something as well. Love is demonstrated through sacrifice. And for Abraham to sacrifice not just his firstborn son, but his only son, the long awaited fulfillment of God's promise miraculously given to him and Sarah in their old age, was an amazing act of love and faith in God. But why demand it at all, even if it was turned away at the end? Wasn't it cruel? It was hard, but it was a lesson. At the foundation of the Jewish religion is the story of the painful sacrifice of the son averted. At the foundation of Christianity is the story of the painful sacrifice of the son carried out, not as a sacrifice to God, but as a sacrifice by God for us. I won't attempt a full explication of the Crucifixion here, except to note that the son went willingly, every bit as committed to saving humanity as the Father. This sacrifice changed the covenant between God and Man. No longer was God demonstrating his power and asking for our obedience; instead, he was demonstrating his love and asking for our love in return.

I hadn't even heard about this one, but Parableman does an excellent job of both explaining the issue and dissecting Obama's argument.

A lot of people are discussing Barack Obama's recent off-the-cuff remarks about the Bible and same-sex civil unions. I want to delve a little bit into the contrast he draws between the Sermon on the Mount and Romans 1. The gist of his statement is (1) the Sermon on the Mount is more central to Christian faith than an "obscure" passage in Romans, and (2) the Sermon on the Mount should influence our attitudes toward civil unions in some positive way.

Generally arguing about how the Bible should be interpreted is the wrong way to win people who believe the Bible to your side. This is not because the Bible-believers are not open to multiple interpretations, but rather because, after 2000 years, there are very few new interpretations. The argument that the Sermon on the Mount is more important than Paul's letters is one I've heard before, especially when the argument is that the most central part, the lens through which the entire Bible should be read, is through the two greatest commandments, loving God and loving your neighbor. This then, especially the loving your neighbor commandment, is seen as justification for letting your neighbor do whatever he wants. Oddly, the loving God part gets left by the wayside, ignoring the fact that it means listening to his word and obeying it, not tossing it out as if loving God is merely having positive feelings towards him. Even though I agree that all commandments should be interpreted in light of the two greatest, it's still not a convincing argument, as love has always required correction.

Jonah Goldberg's recent column cites this eschatological interpretation:

For example, many Christian conservatives support Israel and look kindly on Jews because they believe they have a holy duty to do so. The Messiah will not return, according to the book of Revelation, until the Jews restore the Kingdom of Israel.

Evangelical Christians believe that when the Messiah returns, things won’t go too well for the Jews — two thirds die, one third convert. Gershom Gorenberg, author of The End of Days, once complained to 60 Minutes, “As a Jew, I can’t feel very comfortable with the affections of somebody who looks forward to that scenario.”

Well, boohoo. In the horrible annals of Jewish problems, the fact that a whole bunch of Christians love Jews for the “wrong” reasons has got to rank pretty low. Besides, since presumably Jews don’t believe in Christian prophecy, what’s the problem? If it’s not true, then no harm, no foul. If it is true, well, who are we to argue with God? My guess is God’s response to the morally decent Jew who gets really worked up about this would be something akin to “Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered.”

To be honest, I've never heard this particular interpretation of Revelation before. That's not too surprising, as there are so many interpretations of Revelation that I doubt anyone's heard all of them. Although the actual numbers are new to me, the hope for the salvation of the Jews is not, and is quite apparent, although less in Revelation than, say, Paul's letter to the Romans. In any case, that's hardly the central point of Jonah's column, which is instead about the role of theology in American politics, leading to the bottom line:

Irving Kristol has cited the fight over Utah’s statehood as a quintessential expression of how America practices theological pluralism while insisting on moral conformity. It is the American way to care about what people do, not about what they think. Every religion’s theology has some wacky stuff in it, not only from the atheist’s perspective but from the perspective of pretty much every other religion. It’s impossible to know how much this or that theological tenet guides a person’s actions. All we can judge is the person’s actions.

This came about on account of Romney's Mormonism, of course, and it's a legitimate question how someone's religion may or may not influence their governing. But it's also true that it's better to judge people by their actions than their politics.

So what do I think? Well, I consider Mormonism a heresy, in the literal sense: a belief at odds with orthodox Christianity. That doesn't mean that I consider Mormons evil. People can believe wrong things without being evil. I'm reluctant even to say that Mormons aren't Christians--they believe themselves to be followers of Christ. It's not for me to say that their incorrect doctrine excludes them entirely from his call. That said, I still see heresies as dangerous, and it is important to correct those who have fallen into them. In this context, that correction doesn't look that much different from evangelizing.

All that doesn't answer the question of what to do with Romney. Here, I'm reluctant to give advice to other Christians, but I'm willing to vote for him. As Jonah said, it's what he does that matters, and if given a choice between Romney and Clinton, I'd rather choose him.

I'm barely blogging these days, but I just had to quote this:

This is not to say that the only worthy scholarship is that which is produced by Christians. In his infinite wisdom, God saw fit to spread the gifts of reason and science among all of the mankind. Because he knew we Christians would be spending much of our intellectual capital debating such issues as infant baptism and church structure, he enlisted non-believers to help carry the load on such areas as physics, economics, and medicine.

That's from Joe Carter's essay on "Reductionism and Religiously-based Explanations." Go read it. It's interesting, although I haven't had a chance to fully digest it.

So on Thursday, I got into work and suddenly remembered that I was supposed to be leading the Bible Study for my Thursday night small group. As I hadn't even thought about what I would be presenting, my Bible study got to see "whatever Donald's currently reading in his personal quiet time," which happened to be the beginning of Ezekiel, and his vision of God's glory. I guess I should be glad it was something easy ;) This post is based on that Bible study, complete with some of the illustrations I shared with my group.

Let's begin by reading Ezekiel Chapter 1 (NIV):

1 In the thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth day, while I was among the exiles by the Kebar River, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God.

2 On the fifth of the month—it was the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin— 3 the word of the LORD came to Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, by the Kebar River in the land of the Babylonians. There the hand of the LORD was upon him.

4 I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north—an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, 5 and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance their form was that of a man, 6 but each of them had four faces and four wings. 7 Their legs were straight; their feet were like those of a calf and gleamed like burnished bronze. 8 Under their wings on their four sides they had the hands of a man. All four of them had faces and wings, 9 and their wings touched one another. Each one went straight ahead; they did not turn as they moved.

10 Their faces looked like this: Each of the four had the face of a man, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle. 11 Such were their faces. Their wings were spread out upward; each had two wings, one touching the wing of another creature on either side, and two wings covering its body. 12 Each one went straight ahead. Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, without turning as they went. 13 The appearance of the living creatures was like burning coals of fire or like torches. Fire moved back and forth among the creatures; it was bright, and lightning flashed out of it. 14 The creatures sped back and forth like flashes of lightning.

15 As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces. 16 This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like chrysolite, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. 17 As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not turn about as the creatures went. 18 Their rims were high and awesome, and all four rims were full of eyes all around.

19 When the living creatures moved, the wheels beside them moved; and when the living creatures rose from the ground, the wheels also rose. 20 Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, and the wheels would rise along with them, because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels. 21 When the creatures moved, they also moved; when the creatures stood still, they also stood still; and when the creatures rose from the ground, the wheels rose along with them, because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.

22 Spread out above the heads of the living creatures was what looked like an expanse, sparkling like ice, and awesome. 23 Under the expanse their wings were stretched out one toward the other, and each had two wings covering its body. 24 When the creatures moved, I heard the sound of their wings, like the roar of rushing waters, like the voice of the Almighty, like the tumult of an army. When they stood still, they lowered their wings.

25 Then there came a voice from above the expanse over their heads as they stood with lowered wings. 26 Above the expanse over their heads was what looked like a throne of sapphire, and high above on the throne was a figure like that of a man. 27 I saw that from what appeared to be his waist up he looked like glowing metal, as if full of fire, and that from there down he looked like fire; and brilliant light surrounded him. 28 Like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the radiance around him.

This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. When I saw it, I fell facedown, and I heard the voice of one speaking.

Ezekiel's vision of God's glory is one of the stranger visions in the Bible. There are a few in Revelation and Daniel that might be stranger, but it's a near thing. It's so strange, in fact, that some people don't think that Ezekiel actually saw what he claimed to see. Some of these folks think that what Ezekiel actually saw was a UFO that he simply mistook for God. The picture on the left is a NASA scientist's idea of what Ezekiel might have actually seen. (From Josef Blumrich's The Spaceships of Ezekiel.)

Christians, of course, believe that it is a prophecy of God, which is backed up by the fact that the next forty-seven chapters of Ezekiel contain rather straightforward Biblical prophecy directed at the nation of Israel: predicting its judgement for disobeying God, then the judgement of the other nations, and finally Israel's restoration. Not exactly what you'd expect from space aliens. No, Christians have a different problem, namely that their eyes glaze over when they read all the wheels within wheels covered with eyes stuff, so they ignore it. This can be seen even in Renaissance paintings of the event, such as Raphael's The Vision of Ezekiel shown on the right, which pictures God reclining on some very Renaissance cherubs, who lack any of that distracting plethora of wings or heads. Eyed wheels and crystal expanses are likewise missing, giving us a vision in the Renaissance style which has little resemblance to the one described by Ezekiel.

Once you give an artist modern software and the ability to do lighting effects, you tend to get illustrations that focus on the brightness of it all, sometimes making it hard to see the actual details. While that may have been the case even to Ezekiel, it's still not very helpful in visualizing it. Maybe one of the closest illustrations is this one, from a woodcut in the Bear Bible, on the left. It does a decent job of illustrating the perpendicular wheels within wheels, the four headed angels covering their bodies with wings, and God in his throne atop an expanse, even if the expanse looks more like a cloth canopy than crystal and it's atop what looks like a wagon. It's not the prettiest of the illustrations, and there's some additional stuff, but it gets more of details correct than most of the others. And confusing details those are, too.

What most people seem to be missing is that while Ezekiel's version is extreme, the symbology employed is not unique to him. Ezekiel is describing an encounter with the throne of God, such as that described in Isaiah 6, who also mentions creatures with a multitude of wings, and in Revelation 4, where we get not just lots of wings, but plenty of eyes and also the same four animals: ox, lion, eagle, and man. Neither vision is identical to Ezekiel's, but then, all three are visions. There is, we may take for granted, symbolism involved, and a message in the symbols that relates not just to the nature of God, but also to the condition of the one receiving it. And here, I think, is the key to understanding Ezekiel's vision.

The Book of Ezekiel opens by describing the where and the when of his vision, which occurred shortly after the first group of exiles was taken from Judah into Babylon. Ezekiel was among them, and had this vision while in Babylon. Jerusalem, and most importantly the temple there, had yet to be destroyed, but it would be happening soon. Ezekiel himself was of the priestly line, so he would have been intimately familiar with the temple, where the presence of God dwelt, specifically in the holy of holies on the mercy seat, between the two cherubs of the Ark of the Covenant. The vision in chapter 6 of Isaiah takes place there, with God's throne filling the temple. While God's presence had traveled with his people in the Exodus, it had dwelt with the Ark of Covenant since it had been built, first in the tabernacle and later in the temple. This fact was central to the identity of the Jewish people at the time: God dwelt among them, in their temple. The temple was where they went on their pilgrimages, to make their sacrifices and to celebrate their holy days. Only now they were in exile, banished to Babylon and unable to return to Jerusalem, denied their pilgrimages and their holy days. Had they left God behind when they came to Babylon? Was he still in the temple while they were there? Did he even see them or hear their prayers any more? Those are the questions this vision was intended to answer.

The first thing to notice about this vision is movement. It fills this passage: it's central to it. The rushing wings and gigantic wheels are symbols of movement, and they come and go with tremendous speed, like lighting (Ezekiel 1:14). They move from side to side, even lift aloft (Ezekiel 1:19), but they don't turn (Ezekiel 1:12,17). The wheels within wheels are perpendicular, so that the wheels may move in any direction without turning. The creatures likewise have four heads, looking in every direction, so they too can move without turning. The idea conveyed here is effortless, natural, and fast movement. And above those wheels and the angelic beings, between their outstretched wings, is the throne of God, just as he dwells between the outstretched wings of the cherubs atop the Ark of the Covenant. The idea here is actually pretty easy to see. Whereas in Isaiah's vision, God's throne had been fixed in the temple, here we're shown a mobile throne. God is not confined to the temple. He goes where he wills with the speed of thought, even to visit his people in Babylon, to let them know that he was there too. Although it's not clearly stated, the suggestion of omnipresence, the fact that God is everywhere, echoes through this passage.

The second thing that stands out in this passage is the eyes. Each of the four creatures has eight eyes, two for each head, and all four living creatures are looking in the four cardinal directions at once. The wheels themselves are covered with eyes, and since the wheels within wheels are perpendicular, they too look in all four directions. Eyes are one of the most common symbols throughout literature, both ancient and modern. They indicate seeing and knowledge. The message is that God is not ignorant of anything. His fast-moving chariot is filled with eyes which see all, so he fully knows the plight of his exiled people in Babylon. Aside from omnipresence, we also get an indication of omniscience.

The creatures themselves have four heads: man, eagle, ox, and lion. Although it may not be obvious to our modern sensibilities, these four represent four types. To the ancient Near East mind, at least, the eagle was chief among the birds of the sky, the ox the strongest of the domesticated animals, the lion the most powerful of the wild animals. And man was the noblest of all, created in God's own image and given dominion over all the Earth. So the four faces of the living creatures can be seen as four lords, each with a separate dominion. And yet these four living creatures are under the control of the figure on the throne. The spirit unites them and their wheels, guiding them as one unit, and the figure on the throne dwells above and separate from them, an expanse like crystal between. The word "expanse" is the same one used in Genesis 1:7-8. for the sky. God on his throne is exalted in dominion not only over the creatures of dominion, but also above the sky itself (an important point, as astrology played an powerful role in Babylonian culture).

And surrounding God is a rainbow, the symbol of his first covenant with man, made to Noah after the flood (Genesis 9:8-17). It was not a two-way covenant like the one made with the Israelites on Mt. Sinai, but a promise motivated by nothing more than simple mercy on God's part, and thus a promise that could never be broken, for it depended on God's faithfulness rather than man's.

There are, of course, numerous other symbols that I could discuss (the fire and lightning, for example, or the hands hidden by the wings), but I think this is sufficient to understand the central message of the passage, and while the vision itself was awesome and frightening, its message was one of reassurance. God had not been left behind in Jerusalem. His presence and perception were with the exiles in Babylon, and his dominion extended there as well. And while his people had broken their covenant and were being punished for it, God still intended to keep his promise, one of mercy that reached them even there, and which in the fullness of time would bring them back.

What's this? A post other than a Webcomic Update or a Storyblogging Carnival? Well, last night I gave a talk for our Thursday night homeless ministry, and I thought I'd share it here. It turned out fairly well. Of course, technically this isn't the version I actually shared. As is usual in these cases, I had everything written out, but I set it aside and winged it when the time came to speak. This version is what I would have said if I had actually said what I initially wrote.

In case you're skeptical, I will say that the story is true, and I've recounted it as faithfully as I could. Which is not to say that I'm 100% certain all the details are correct.

“Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.” That’s from Proverbs 27:6. A more modern interpretation might be “A friend’s criticisms are for our own good, but an enemy’s flattery only hurts.”

Back when I was in school, I had this bear of a senior project I had to do. I remember staying in the lab until two or three in the morning pretty much every night for months on end, trying to get this robot I had built to work. It did, too. I was proud of the work I had done, about how well it did its job. Then came the day of the demonstration: its performance that day would decide whether I passed or failed my class. I hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before, making sure it would work. So I placed my robot on the table and told it to retrieve the little metal balls, and for some reason, it failed. It did terrible that day, dying the first two trial runs. The third run, it finally managed to do what it was supposed to, which was just enough for me to eke out a passing grade in the class. Barely.

I was devastated. I had worked so hard, sacrificed so much, and for some reason—what seemed to me to be merest chance—I had done terrible. I went home, and lay down in bed, trying to get some sleep. There was a knock at my door just a moment later.

Grumpy, not wanting to deal with anyone, I opened the door to find my roommate standing there. He had heard me come in, and had deduced, probably from all my foot-stomping and door-slamming, that I was upset. He asked me if I wanted to talk about it.

The last thing I wanted to do was talk about it. Whenever I’m upset, I need time alone. And right then, I was exhausted… I needed to sleep. So I snapped at him. I’m not sure what I said exactly, aside from telling him to leave me alone and let me sleep. I do remember what he said to me, though. He told me that he was trying to be compassionate. That that was what real Christianity was about, not about knowing a lot of stuff.

I’m not sure whether he stalked off before I managed to slam the door in his face or not.

I couldn’t believe it. Had my roommate just accused me of not being a real Christian? After all, I was the one with the reputation for knowing a lot of stuff, for being knowledgeable about the Bible, knowing the details of archeology and history and religion. And here I was, depressed, miserable, and exhausted, and my roommate was being “compassionate” by telling me I wasn’t a real Christian. It was ridiculous. He was being hypocritical. I had some nasty things I could say about his faith. But, this small nagging voice insisted, what if he was right?

I wasn’t really doubting my salvation. What I was doubting was whether I was acting like a Christian. And the simple truth is that I wasn’t.

I had always been introverted, but while I’d been working on this project, I’d become positively reclusive. I had neglected everything else for this: my church, my friends, my spiritual life. What compassion I had—and I was far from the most compassionate person in the world—had been shunted aside, along with whatever sense of responsibility I had to my friends, my family, my classmates. If ever there was a time in my life when I had not acted like a Christian, this was it. Maybe the failure at the end hadn’t been merest chance, but God’s way of getting my attention.

So I did the only thing I could do: I prayed for forgiveness. I asked God to help me rebuild those relationships that I had let waste away, to restore me to a right relationship with him, and to not let me ever again sacrifice those things on the altar of the all-consuming project. And once I’d done that, I was finally, blessedly able to sleep.

My roommate later apologized for his words. Maybe he should have: I can’t judge the attitude of heart with which he spoke. I also apologized for mine. The simple truth, though, is that I needed to hear those words. I needed them much more than any comforting words he might have spoken. Despite my initial, angry reaction, I had received precious correction.

We all like to hear nice things said about ourselves. Flattery is something we all respond to. And because our friends like to hear nice things too, we like to say nice things to them. It makes our friends happy, it makes them like us more, and it encourages them to say nice things about us. Unfortunately, it’s usually what they, and we, need least.

The truth hurts, but when we’re doing something wrong, when we’re harming ourselves and others, we need to hear the truth. Human beings are very good at lying to themselves: they don’t need help from their friends. Nor do they need their friends talking about them behind their back. We always prefer gossiping to confrontation, because gossiping is easy, and confrontation is hard. Yet when we gossip about someone, we’re demonstrating that we know someone has a problem, but we don’t respect them enough to be honest with them. Instead, we go behind their back and find someone else to talk to.

I’m not saying you should be harsh. Given the choice, I think we all prefer gentle words. But harsh truth is better than gentle lies, and true friends speak truth. Better are the criticisms of a friend than the flattery of an enemy.

Have you been following the story of the Tomb of Jesus? I haven't been following it in detail, I'll admit, just reading the odd blog post here and there. What I'm finding, however, is that a lot is being read into a rather crude back-of-the-envelope calculation, one which I'm fairly certain is wrong. Let's put this in perspective.

In a tomb discovered near Jerusalem, there are a number of ossuaries (bone boxes), inscribed with names. This is nothing unusual. Something on the order of a thousand tombs have been discovered in the area. The archeology based on them tells us a lot about the naming conventions in 1st century Judea. This particular tomb, however, contains ossuaries inscribed with the names Yeshua bar Yehosef (Jesus son of Joseph), Yose (an abbreviated form of Joseph), Maria (Mary), and Mariamne (an odd form of Mary). There were also the names Matia (Matthew) and Judah the son of Jesus. Now, all of these were very common names in 1st century Judea. So common, in fact, that 1 out of every 190 men were named Jesus the son of Joseph. Now James Cameron has produced a documentary, arguing that although the names were common, the odds of finding this particular combination of names in one tomb are so miniscule, that this must be the family tomb of the Jesus in the gospels. To support his argument, there's the aforementioned "back-of-the-envelope calculation." With a blog called "Back of the Envelope," I am, as you'd imagine, all for back-of-the-envelope calculations, especially the crude kind. However, I do think that if you're a world-class statistician putting your reputation on the line for a high-publicity documentary purporting to disprove the world's largest religion, you ought to maybe put a mite more effort into it. So let's take a look at the calculation involved, conveniently transcribed from the documentary's flash website by StatGuy:

Click on “Enter the Tomb”, immediately above tomb photo. When the next page has loaded, click on “Supporting Evidence” at the bottom right of the main window. When the next page has loaded, click on “Statistical Evidence”, the fourth item in the list to the left of the main text.

This is the full text:

Statistics Overview

Dr Andrey Feuerverger, Professor of statistics & mathematics at the University of Toronto, has concluded A [sic] high statistical probability that the Talpiot tomb is the Jesus Family tomb.

In a study, Feuerverger examined the cluster of names in the tomb.

This involved multiplying the instances that each name appeared during that time period with the instances of every other name.

To be conservative, he then divided the number by the statistical standard of 4 (or 25%) to allow for unintentional biases in the historical sources.

He then further divided the results by 1,000 to account for all tombs that may have existed in First Century Jerusalem.

Taking into account the chances that these names would be clustered together in a family tomb, this statistical study concludes that the odds — on the most conservative basis — are 600 to 1 in favor of this being the JESUS FAMILY TOMB. A statistical probability of 600 to 1 means that this conclusion works 599 times out of 600.

Statistics Tables

Frequency of names:
Jesus Son of Joseph: 1 in 190
Mariamne: 1 in 160
Matia: 1 in 40
Yose: 1 in 20
Maria: 1 in 4

Initial Computation: 1/190 x 1/160 x 1/40 x 1/20 x 1/4 = 1/97,280,000

Second Computation: Eliminating Matia since he is not explicatively [sic] mentioned in the Gospels:
1/190 x 1/160 x 1/20 x 1/4 = 1/2,400,000

Third Computation: Adjusting for unintentional biases in the historical sources:
2,400,000 / 4 = 600,000

Fourth Computation: Adjust for all possible First Century Jerusalem Tombs:
600,000 / 1,000 = 600

Probability Factor = 600 to 1

There are a number of problems with this.

First, much is made that Mariamne is a distinctive form of Mary referring to Mary Magdalene, and that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus. Unfortunately for the documentary, this particular belief in the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene has no ancient pedigree. It can't be traced back to the gospels, or any of the early Christian writings or traditions. Not even the Gnostic gospels, such as the third century Gospel of Phillip, which is often cited by supporters of this belief, specifically make that claim. In fact, it seems to be an entirely modern invention dating back to the pseudohistorical book "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail." It's also highly unlikely that Mariamne is, in fact, a distinctive name for Mary Magdalene. The gospels always use Maria or Mariam, and the use of Mariamne, as a variant of the Hellenized form Mariamme, doesn't appear until the Gnostic gospels in the late second century, and even there it doesn't appear to be a unique name for Mary Magdalene. Further, the name on the tomb is not Mariamne, but Mariamenou, which Richard Bauckham convincingly argues has a very different etymology.

The second may be a simple misunderstanding on my part, but several references point out that Yose is an abbreviated form of Joseph. If that is the case, is there good reason to believe that the Joseph that Jesus is the son of is not Yose? If that’s the case, the presence of Yose is most definitely not an independent variable, and should not be included in the probability calculation. Finding Joseph, Jesus the son of Joseph, and Judah the son of Jesus all in the same family tomb really only gives us one independent variable, Jesus son of Joseph, to connect to the Jesus of the Bible. Now, it is true that Jesus's brother was referred to as Yose in the gospels, so it may be argued that it is unlikely that Yose and Joseph are the same person. However, they are still related names, and having a Yose and a Joseph in the same family are still not independent probabilities.

That, however, is archeology, genealogy, and etymology, and I promised you a little statistics. In this analysis, I'll continue to include the names Yose and Mariamne, despite the aforementioned problems with them. You'll have to bear with me, as I explain the problems with the back of the envelope calculation above, but the basic problem is that the expert, Dr. Feuerverger, treats as a permutation what should really be a combination. Okay, those terms are not entirely mathematically precise here, but let me try to explain:



If you read the hidden explanation (hidden mainly because it's pretty long), I think you see where this is going. If not, well, the bottom line is that Dr. Feuerverger's calculation gives the correct result for computing the odds that a man named Jesus son of Joseph has a mother named Maria, a brother named Yose, and a wife named Mariamne, respectively, whereas the archaeological find doesn't indicate what their relationship is. The proper way of formulating the question is if four people, at random, are buried together, what are the odds that their names would be Jesus son of Joseph, Maria, Yose, and Mariamne, which is the odds calculated by Dr. Feuerverger (1/2,400,000), divided by 2^4, and multiplied by 24 (4*3*2). Wait a moment, you say. Where does the 2^4 come from? That's a normalization, assuming that there's a 50% chance the person is male and a 50% chance that the person is female. In this formulation, you only improve the odds slightly, to (1/1,600,000). Ah, but I'm not done yet. You see, there were more than four ossuaries there: there were at least six, probably ten, and possibly as many as thirty-five. Now the odds start to look better. With six, the odds of finding this combination of names is 1/107,000, with 10, it's 1/7,600, and with 35, it's 1/31. Updated: However, the approximation I'm using (that there are no repeated names requiring the removal of duplicates) begins to break down as the number of names get higher (and it becomes pretty unlikely for there to be no more than one Mary). It's accurate with 10, but doesn't work with 35. See the update below for another method, which does work. End of update

Now, if you want to prove something, show me that these people are connected in the way proposed by this presentation. Then, the odds start to work out the way they suggest.

Update: Okay, I've corrected a math error in the work above. The 1/31 probability is just too high. It's a result of my assuming that I wouldn't have to account for duplicate names, when one name, particularly Maria, is just too common for that to work. When the number of names from the tomb is small, it works fine, but as it gets bigger, so do the odds of another Maria in the works, thus creating duplicate permutations that need to be removed. You can see this by the fact that if the number of bodies increases, say to a thousand, the probability of the tomb having all four names becomes greater than one, which is impossible.

So, let's approach this a different way. This is also approximate, but this approximation becomes more accurate as the number of names becomes larger, rather than smaller. Let's start with ten Jewish names selected at random. What is the probability that there is at least one Maria among them? Hmm, that's a lot of permutations to list... but, you can find the probability that there are no Marias pretty easily. The probability of a random individual being named Maria is 1/8, so the probability of an individual not being named Maria is 7/8. Now, the probability that ten such individuals have no Marias among them is (7/8)^10. So, the odds that at least one is named Maria is 1-(7/8)^10.

So let's list them:

At least 1 Maria: 3/4
At least 1 Mariamne: 1/32
At least 1 Jesus son of Joseph: 1/38
At least 1 Yose: 2/9

So, for ten names, you get a 1/7,600 chance of a tomb having all four of the significant names, which is the same result we got with the other technique. However, if you have thirty-five names on your ossuaries, you get a different set of odds:

At least 1 Maria: 99/100
At least 1 Mariamne: 1/10
At least 1 Jesus son of Joseph: 1/11
At least 1 Yose: 3/5

This gives a tomb with thirty-five names a 1/188 chance of having all four significant names. So there's a difference of a factor of six from the other method.

I'll finish up by noting that although both techniques are correct, they're both approximate. (What do you expect from a blog named "Back of the Envelope"?) The second technique works better for a larger set of names, while the first works better for a smaller set of names. They give similar results around ten.

This is yet another installment about how my light blogging friends are still posting higher quality stuff than I.

Jaimie J, a real world friend of mine, has a post on her online journal (I'd call it a blog, but it doesn't seem to permalink too well--I can link to the day but not the exact post) discussing a small group her roommate is in:

In her small group, she is encountering ideas on prayer such as, "God knows what's going to happen anyway—why pray?" And "For God to affect a change would entail that He's NOT immutable, which is part of His nature." You might be able to construct an almost consistent position including these attitudes, but it wouldn't conclude with Christianity, which is why I think it's interesting that these folks are in the Christian, Protestant small group. Kind of cool and unexpected.

Full disclosure time: I also know Jaimie's roommate, and I'm in the aforementioned small group, and the frustration Jaimie's roommate is expressing is one I share. And if any of those folks are reading this blog, I apologize in advance if I offend, but you already know how I feel.

As Jaimie's a philosopher, she uses a philosophical argument against this idea:

Anyhow, my first college philosophy prof. had the same hangups (can't remember if he was a soft or hard determinist) about what it means for God to be unchangeable. [Jaimie's roommate] points out that God's character is unchangeable, but he can make decisions and act. I think this is on the right track. If God is a Person (which Christianity claims..and this claim really sets the stage for everything else, esp. faith), then God:

1. Wills (freely)
2. Acts
3. Relates

What does it mean to be a person? That is a crucial question. I think (1)-(3) are important elements and go in order. (Yes, someone can be isolated his entire life and still hit (3) via introspection, relating to self. And: God self-relates via Trinity.) Because one wills, one acts; because one acts, one relates. (Isn't absolute perfection in relation love? Notice how God is Love.) Also, consider what it means to be made "in God's image": could that have anything to do with the fact that we have free will like God?

Then Jaimie starts talking about the de-personalization of society, but I'll stick with the initial argument. There is a tension in Christianity between the Biblical assurance that our prayer is effective and the Biblical caution that God is not beholden to our prayer. God does what he wants. This Bible study fully believes that much. The problem is that the study doesn't seem to believe that God wants to answer our prayers, even though the Bible is just as clear about that. Perhaps they need to reconsider the analogy, used with some frequency in the Bible, that God is our father and we are his young children. A father does not give a three-year-old everything she asks for. On the other hand, nor does he never give his daughter what she asks for. He decides and does what is best for his daughter, but part of the decision-making process involves considering what his daughter requests. Or, to put it in other words, "Which one of you, if your daugher asks for a loaf of bread, gives her a stone? Or if she asks for a fish, gives her a snake? If you, who are evil, know how to give good things to your children, then how much more does your Father in Heaven give good things to those who ask of him?" (Roughly paraphrased from Jesus's words in Matthew 6:9-11.)¹

I think that the reason Christians don't like to talk about the power of prayer is fear. I've heard people say things along the line, "What if I pray really hard for something and I don't get it, while someone who's not a Christian and never prays does get it? How can I say prayer is effective then?" They're afraid to believe that their prayers influence God, because they're afraid of what it means if God does not answer. Does it mean that God doesn't really care? Does it mean God doesn't hear our prayers? Does it mean that we don't have enough faith? That we're praying wrong? That we aren't really Christians?

Well, it doesn't mean either of the first two. As for the next three, while they're possible, a negative answer doesn't necessarily mean any of those things either. Quite often what it means is that we're asking for the wrong thing: we're asking for stones and snakes, when we should be asking for loaves and fishes. That's okay. Three-year-olds don't always know what's best for them.

An unanswered prayer doesn't prove that prayer is not effective, any more than an answered prayer proves that it is (barring miraculous answers, which tend to be pretty obvious). A better experiment is whether you'd get something if you prayed for it and wouldn't get it if you didn't. There's no way to empirically test that, which is why prayer is an act of faith. We have to believe that when God says he answers prayer, that's exactly what he means.

If prayer is totally ineffective, then it doesn't matter what we ask: stone, serpent, bread, or fish. He's going to give us fish anyway, and we better like it. If we believe that prayer is effective, though, then while he may never give us a stone or a serpent no matter how hard we ask, we really do have a choice between bread and fish.



¹I broke with my own preference of using the gender in the Bible, even when it's non-PC, for two reasons. First, because it's easier to keep the child and the father distinct in the analogy when they're different genders, and second, because I couldn't write about that analogy without thinking of the three-year-old I know best, my niece. Although she just turned four in June.

I miss Skeptics Anonymous! To the best of my knowledge, no one has used this webform to ask a question about Christianity in a long time. As originally conceived, Skeptics Anonymous offered seekers an opportunity to ask their most pressing questions about Christianity to believers who would try their best to answer with no strings attached. You didn't even have to include your contact information, just curiosity and a willingness to wait (generally about 2 weeks) for us to come up with a response.

It hasn't been used for years, and I'm not sure it will again. However, if you have a question about Christianity, you could try asking me. I'm certainly willing to give it a try.

I've neglected to do my normal Easter thing, with the harmony of the gospels, but I did want to wish you guys a happy Easter. Enjoy the day, and I'll see you around.

Christ is risen!

The latest Christian Carnival, number 115, is now up at The Secret Life of Gary.

I've mentioned before that I'm in a service small group at Park Street Church, where the idea is to spend some time in prayer and Bible study, then to go out on the Boston Common and serve the homeless. Last night was our first night out there, and it went pretty well. I didn't take a headcount, but my impression was that there were about twenty homeless visitors, which is a good number for us, as there are twenty or so in our "small" group. We gave them muffins and coffee, but more importantly, we spent some time talking with them, often one on one, but more often in small groups of three or four. About seven of us went out on the common to look for other people to bring to our service. I spent the first half-hour or so with this group, and the next half-hour with the stationary one. I had anticipated that the roaming group would have the harder job, walking up to strangers, but there really weren't that many homeless on the Common who hadn't found the stationary group already. After the time we spent talking, sometimes just lending an ear, sometimes helping with difficulties, finding shelters and transportation, we had a short worship service, with singing, a homily, and prayer at the end.

Overall, I really enjoyed it.

The latest Christian Carnival is up at All Kinds of Time. Have a look.

A Martyr in Afghanistan?

We realized that when we toppled the Taliban and replaced it with a democratically elected government in Afghanistan that they weren't ready to fully embrace Western values. We might even argue whether or not doing so is a good thing. However, I would have hoped that they would more fully embrace freedom of religion than this:

An Afghan man is being tried in a court in the capital, Kabul, for converting from Islam to Christianity.

Abdul Rahman is charged with rejecting Islam and could face the death sentence under Sharia law unless he recants.

He converted 16 years ago as an aid worker helping refugees in Pakistan. His estranged family denounced him in a custody dispute over his two children.

It is thought to be Afghanistan's first such trial, reflecting tensions between conservative clerics and reformists.

Conservatives still dominate the Afghan judiciary four years after the Taleban were overthrown.

The BBC's Mike Donkin in Kabul says reformists, like the government under President Hamid Karzai, want a more liberal, secular legal system but under the present constitution it is hard for them to intervene.

It's unlikely that we could have convinced the government of Afghanistan to include an establishment clause in their constitution, especially since they can see how thoroughly it's managed to drive religion from the public square in the US. However, the right to convert is central to what it means to allow freedom of religion, and if Afghanistan can't manage that, then they are not a modern civilized country, no matter how democratically their government is selected. Joe Carter and National Review have more on this, but the real question is what can we do about it.

Well, if we allow Afghanistan to have its sovereignty, then obviously we cannot simply say, "No, you're not allowed." However, considering how dependent their country is on us, they may want to think twice about offending the US. We shouldn't leave completely, since we're still hunting terrorists in Afghanistan, but there's something to be said for our support of the country, financial and military, being dependent on the degree to which they embrace fundamental human rights.

I haven't been too good at linking to the Christian Carnival recently, but the latest one is up at Light along the Journey. It's number one hundred and thirteen.

It's come up as I was reviewing some material from Eyes in the Shadow and trying to decide whether Dominic's views on demons in Chapter 6 was un-Christian. Here's what I told a friend in an IM chat:

DonaldCrankshaw (11:05:16 PM): Anyway, the question Dominic is directly addressing is whether a demon can physically harm a believer. So far, Red-eyes hasn't, not really, but is he allowed? I think many Christians would say that a demon, or a demon-possessed human, couldn't physically harm or kill a believer, but I think there is little Biblical basis for this.

DonaldCrankshaw (11:06:01 PM): A madman with a gun can kill a Christian. When Judas betrayed Jesus, the Bible says the Devil entered him.

DonaldCrankshaw (11:07:01 PM): Why should we think our protection against demons is any different from our normal protection, the assurance that God is in control, and that we won't die except by his allowance?

DonaldCrankshaw (11:07:54 PM): If God allows Christians to be martyred by pagans, why should we think it won't be allowed if demons are involved?

DonaldCrankshaw (11:08:34 PM): Satan was involved with Jesus's death, even though God worked his own purposes through it.

Depressing thoughts, I suppose. These are the sort of things that keep me up at night. Of course, I know that many Christians feel very strongly about these things, and are eager to argue. If you do so, please provide Biblical references.

My blogging is always light these days, but last night I had my service small group, and I didn't get home until after 10:30 pm, and after eating dinner and writing a lengthy e-mail to a friend, I just didn't have much time to prepare anything for today.

What's a "service small group", you ask? Well, it's a Bible study whose focus is outward rather than inward. In this case, it's focused on serving the homeless in Boston. We're just starting, but once things are rolling we'll meet for about an hour of prayer and Bible study, then spend another hour out on the street providing food and clothing to the homeless in Boston. Right now we're still doing training for going out, but I think it'll be a powerful experience.

The most recent Christian Carnival is online at Pursuing Holiness. This is the 109th carnival, making it the second anniversary, if I'm not mistaken. Huh, the Christian Carnival is the same age of my blog. Isn't that interesting?

Of course, there could have been a few skipped carnivals or something, so I think the Christian Carnival is a little bit older, but not by much.

It's been a while since I've linked to the Christian Carnival, so here's number one hundred and eight. This week's lacking a theme, but that's okay, as the themed versions always make me feel inadequate. If you'd like to participate in the next carnival, please send your recent post (something you've put on your blog since the last carnival's deadline) illustrating a Christian perspective to ChristianCarnival-at-gmail-dot-com with the following information:

• Blog name
• Blog URL
• Post name
• Post URL
• Brief description of post

The deadline is midnight on Tuesday.

Lileks has n post on a Christian organization that has run afoul of the intolerance of the tolerance dogma:

I read stories like this, and the very first paragraph makes me tired.

A UNIVERSITY Christian Union has been suspended and had its bank account frozen after refusing to open its membership to people of all religions.

I could understand a University turning a cold narrow eye to a group that declared, in its charter, that nonbelievers and sodomites alike would be cast into the lake of fire on Judgment day - and to prepare them for that event they would be set alight should they attempt to attend a meeting of the Christian Union. But:

Members claim the actions have been taken against them after they refused on religious grounds to make “politically correct” changes to their charitable constitution, including explicitly mentioning people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered.

Personally, I suspect that the organization would welcome anyone who showed up for services, and not inquire too closely about what they wish to do with whom. But the Union isn’t in trouble for excluding people. They’re in trouble for not rewriting their constitution to “explicitly mention” some noisy people who, one suspects, are less interested in access to this particular group than enforcing the use of a wide bland smear of magic words that somehow insulates them from exclusion. It gets richer:

The Christian Union was advised that the use of the words “men” and “women” in the constitution were causing concern because they could be seen as excluding transsexual and transgendered people.

Something similar to this happened at Tufts University not so long ago, although there it was a little less absurd. The Tufts Christian Fellowship refused to let a practicing lesbian join its leadership team, apparently on the theory that the leadership of an organization should agree with its beliefs. They were suspended for a while, then eventually reinstated on a technicality, with the core issue--whether anyyone has a right to be a leader in an organization, even if they disagree with it--left unresolved.

MIT's Graduate Christian Fellowship, where I was an active member, did not hold elections for its leaders. Instead, the outgoing leadership team would ask people to take over positions for the next year. All in all it was very informal, as our problem was always finding enough people for the leadership team, not dealing with competition for positions. I doubt we would have run into the same problems as Tufts, as the passed over candidate would have no way of knowing why they were passed over. However, every once in a while, there would be problems with one of the current leaders. I remember a very difficult meeting I was involved in (actually I remember a lot of very difficult meetings--it wasn't always fun and games), where the organization's secretary had reached the point where he no longer agreed with the central tenets of the Christian faith. He asked us whether he should step down--he argued that he should remain since, even if he no longer believed in Christianity, he believed it was a good thing. We said he should. Being a leader in a Christian organization means more than just being an advocate for it. It means being a functioning member of the body of God. It means being a servant, first of God and then of the Fellowship. You don't have to be perfect--none of us were. But if you aren't trying to serve God, if you don't believe in Him or aren't willing to obey Him, then how are you going to help the Fellowship serve and obey God?

My church has started a blog, Blogma Dogma. It includes posts from the ministers on various topics, mostly theological. It's a cool idea, and I hope to see more blogging from churches.

No Christmas trees, either. I am sticking with my holiday tradition of not following any holiday traditions. My apartment is as bland and undecorated as ever.

But while I'm at it, what's the point of Holiday Trees? Besides Christmas, what other holiday has decorated trees? Does Eid? Does Hannukah? How about Kwanzaa? As far as I, and Wikipedia, knows, decorated trees is purely a Christian Christmas tradition. So if only Christmas has a tree, how do people get off calling it a Holiday Tree? Isn't that imperialistically imposing our holiday traditions on other religions and their holidays, who don't have or want a tree?

Apparently, other religious people have less problem with Christmas trees than secularists. From Karen Dabdoub of CAIR, which I don't often quote with approval: "Who are we fooling? The Jews don't put up a tree for Hanukah; the Muslims don't put up a tree for Ramadan. It doesn't take away from my celebration of my holiday for other people to celebrate their holiday. I don't want anybody's holidays to be watered-down. I think they're all wonderful." (Hat tip to View from the Pew.)

It seems to me that the only people who have problems with the religious traditions of Christmas are not people who have a different religious tradition, but those who have none. They want to have a claim on the celebration of the holiday without having to acknowledge its religious origin.

I'm ashamed I've never linked to these before now. These rewritings of Jesus's parables were done by friends of mine, Debbie and Loren Haarsma. Why would anyone want to rewrite Jesus's parables to place them in a modern academic setting? Well, here's what I had to say years ago, when I did a review of them for MIT's Graduate Christian Fellowship:

Jesus's parables were meant to teach the principles of the Kingdom of God in terms of everyday activities. Although we sometimes think of them as allegories, where every object has a deeper, spiritual significance, their true purpose is usually to transmit a singular idea in terms we can understand. Unfortunately, we sometimes miss that idea today. Sometimes this is because what was everyday in Jesus' time is foreign to us today; more often our very familiarity with the story lessens its impact. Debbie and Loren Haarsma's Parables for Modern Academia does a great job of reminding us what those parables really mean. Rewriting Jesus' parables in terms of the modern academic world, they make the now foreign context of the parables once again familiar, which in turn makes the lessons of the Kingdom strikingly otherworldly. There are a few weaknesses, such as the unavoidable interpretation involved in the modernization of the parables, and some compromises to the lessons to make them believable in the new context. I certainly would not recommend these parables as a replacement for Jesus' own words, but reading them can help illuminate the parables recorded in the Gospels.

And, as a special treat, here's a small sampling, a retelling of the Parable of the Great Banquet: