So how did a bunch of monotheistic Jews rapidly come to regard Jesus as the Son of God? The answer is basically that they had seen him in action. In saying that, I include his Resurrection even though, strictly speaking, that can only have been an act of God. It was also because of what he said of himself.

With John the Baptist in prison, his disciples were at a bit of a loss as to what to do. They kept in touch with John and he told them to ask Jesus if he was “the one who is to come or should we look for another” (that is, was he the Messiah)? Jesus told them to tell John what they saw him doing as he healed diseases, cast out evil spirits, cleansed lepers, gave sight to the blind and made the lame walk. All of this was exactly what Isaiah had said the Messiah would do.

You say, “Fine but the Messiah was not God.” Not to the Jews, no, but be patient here. Consider the question of how Jesus did all this. By the way, he did indeed do it. As I have shown (see my 2/23/16 post The Inadvertent Evidence for the Miracles of Jesus) the Gospel accounts make no sense in terms of motives and behavior unless Jesus was in fact doing miracles. And miracles are evidence of the presence and power of God. That is of course why and how the ministry of Jesus stirred up the Jewish populace as it did. It implied both that he was “the one who [was] to come” and that he was uniquely connected to God. He exercised and displayed the power of God.

The earliness of the belief that Jesus was God incarnate is widely doubted (mostly by academics) but is easily defended. The books of James and Jude provide unexpected and much overlooked evidence here. By their language, styles and perspectives, both are obviously examples of Jewish Christianity. Historically, James (the Just) was effectively the first bishop of Jerusalem (see my 12/27/25 post James the Just). Jude was his brother. That is to say, these books reflect early Christian thought. James begins saying, “from James, a servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Jude begins, “from Jude, servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, to those whom God has called, who live in the love of God the Father and in the safe keeping of Jesus Christ.” Interestingly neither of them claimed to be a brother of Jesus.

These are standard letter greetings of the time but they are also inadvertent evidence of belief in Jesus as God incarnate. Firstly, note that both of these brothers of Jesus group Jesus with God the Father as if it is an obvious and unquestionable pairing. Secondly, Jesus is specified as the Messiah (Christ). Additionally, here, and in some other parts of the two epistles, Jesus is called Lord. Now, Lord is the usual translation of Yahweh (I am) in Hebrew and of Kyrios in Greek. It is a title for God himself. James then uses kyrios not only of Jesus in 1:1 but then clearly of God in 1:7, 3:9, 4:15 and 5:4,10 and 11. Jude uses it of God in verse 9 and also verse 14. Lastly, James and Jude both often refer to God as Father echoing Jesus’ own typical language about God. Thus, the seemingly straight forward greetings of the epistles are loaded with the implication that these men, the formerly unbelieving brothers of Jesus, now understood him as God incarnate, God in human form.

Additional evidence comes from Jude’s benediction; “Now to the one who can keep you from falling and set you in the presence of his glory, jubilant and above reproach, to the only God our Savior, be glory and majesty, might and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all time, now, and for evermore. Amen.” It sounds all the themes we have already noted except God as Father. It adds the comment, “before all time, now, and for evermore” in reference to Jesus! That is not the sort of remark one could conceivably apply to a human being. It is an, almost out of hand, statement of eternal existence applicable only to God. As I have said, the early church clearly believed Jesus was God incarnate.

With the later increasing influence of Gnosticism, the humanity of Jesus came to be an issue but the question could not even arise for the disciples and early Christians who had interacted with the obviously human Jesus. So, the only question the early church had cope with was who Jesus was with respect to God. Greek and Roman culture happily elevated all sorts of very human characters into deities. Indeed, their gods were barely distinguishable from humans anyway. So many of them were killed at one time or another that being mortal was not much of a human distinctive. To the Jewish Christians of the early church that was all just pagan and repugnant nonsense. Far from making it easy to make Jesus into God incarnate, it made the idea objectionable on further grounds. So why and how could they have so swiftly moved to God incarnate?

The earliest indication comes from Peter’s discourse at Pentecost (Acts 2:36) mere weeks after the crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus where he said, “Let all Israel then accept as certain that God has made this Jesus who you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.” Lord here is the sacred name of God so Peter was equating with Jesus with the Messiah and God. Peter was arguing that the Resurrection reveled Jesus as both God and Messiah.

Incidentally, for those who claim the Trinity is not “in” the New Testament, in the following two verses Peter connects the remission of sins by baptism in the name of Jesus with receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit. He did not mention the Trinity; the word did not even exist at the time, but the concept is latent therein.

From Pentecost onward we find the church time after time avowing that “Jesus Christ is Lord.” That four word mantra encapsulated their beliefs and their message, the gospel (the good news) of Jesus the Messiah and God incarnate. The use of kyrios in reference to Jesus through out the New Testament is so frequent that making a list would be dull reading. If you aspire to such a word study, look it up in Vine’s Expository Dictionary.

Note too that Luke points out (4: 13) that Peter and John were “untrained laymen.” Astonishing theology for untrained laymen. But they had had a good teacher; so perhaps “untrained” does not apply to them after all.

Possibly the most important explanation of the church’s rapid adoption of the belief that Jesus is God incarnate is what Jesus said of himself. I have come to this last because historically this explanation has been the focus of a long and widespread assault. Thomas Jefferson famously literally took a razor to the Gospels and excised all miracles, especially the Resurrection, and anything he judged supernatural leaving only moral precepts. He admitted this left only “fragments” but he claimed they were “fragments of the most sublime edifice of morality which had ever been exhibited to man.” The liberal German theologians followed suite as did Bultmann’s form criticism and the Jesus Seminar of the twentieth century with much the same results. As I have already pointed out, the Gospels make no sense without the miracles. That’s what happens when you throw out the baby with the bath water. What remains does not “make sense.”

Jesus was confronted with a serious problem in explaining who he was not only to “the multitude” but also to his disciples. His audience was, as we have noted, profoundly monotheistic and, in addition, they had a strongly embedded view of the Messiah as a conqueror of the Romans. Then too, they were well drilled in Scriptural instructions to kill false prophets who led the people astray. Blunt explanations of just how errant their opinions were was potentially a capital offense. Consequently, where Jesus came closest to open claims of his status as the Son of God were also where he came closest to being stoned to death or otherwise killed by a mob. Oh! In fact it got him killed. The exceptions were in discourses with his disciples. These always befuddled them and, at times, drew strong objections from them.

Perhaps the earliest explicit statement by Jesus occurred in the episode of walking on water. That scene directly evoked the encounter with God of Moses on Mt. Sinai when God hid Moses in the cleft of the rock and walked past so Moses could see his back but would not see his face and die. Jesus appeared to be walking past the disciples (especially in Mark). In fear of a ghost, they cried out and Jesus responded, “I am. Do not fear.” All the translations of Matthew, Mark and John are incorrectly rendered as “It is I. Do not fear.” In all three Gospels the Greek text is just “I am,” the sacred name itself. Jesus was telling them he was God to their Moses. That calmed them down and also the wind and waves.

Chapter 8 of the Gospel of John also gives a blunt statement. The chapter contains an extended dialog of Jesus with the scribes and Pharisees in which Jesus is definite that he is the spokesman of the Father. It ends with their claim to be children of Abraham to which Jesus responds,“Before Abraham was, I am.” So they picked up stones to kill him. They had no trouble spotting a claim to be God and had to see it as blasphemy, not truth. Somehow Jesus evaded them.

A little later, (John 10:30-38) Jesus again was asked in the Temple who he was. Once again, he defined himself in relation to the Father. Eventually, he told them, “I and the Father are one.” Again, the Jews picked up stones to stone him for claiming to be God. He defended himself by quoting Psalm 82:6, “You are gods.” This slowed them down and cooled them off a little but then they decided to arrest him. Once again, he escaped them.

A last statement will have to do now. When Jesus appeared to the eleven, he showed his hands and side to Thomas so that he would believe Jesus had been resurrected. Thomas replied, “My Lord and my God.” The implications were abundantly clear.

Thus, Jesus was recognized as God by the many monotheists of the early church from its very beginnings. How then did they make sense of two, seemingly antithetical, beliefs? It took the church several centuries to reach equilibrium on the issue. The term Trinity itself appeared at least by the mid second century and may have come into use much earlier but that merely gave the church a word by which to specify an antinomy.

The Council of Nicea eventually formulated the long standing solution that Jesus and the Father are “of the same substance.” That conforms with Jesus’ claim to be one with the Father but the Trinity remains a fundamental and perhaps impenetrable mystery.

It is, nonetheless, compatible with two vastly important and fundamental prepositions of both Judaism and Christianity 1) God is personal and rational and also that 2) he created us to live in relationship to him and his creation. By the way, although Islam is also monotheistic it does not fully share those two prepositions and that has made a great difference between western culture and Islamic culture. But that will have to be the subject of a later post.

On a number of occasions he read Scriptures in a Synagogue. Standing to read, as was the standard practice, then sitting down to indicate he was now in teaching mode. At that point he would lecture, explicating and commenting on the text. It seems he soon abandoned this practice however. This was possibly because the synagogues became wary of him but another reason may have been that it became dangerous to him or his ministry.

The Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:1 – 8:1) is perhaps the primary example of Jesus using this standing/sitting behavior. It was the formal way a teacher indicated intentions to an audience. Matthew tells us that the audience was astonished because he taught with an authority they had never before encountered. In fact, his behavior reflected authority like that of Moses because he was in fact replacing the Mosaic covenant with the new covenant Jeremiah had foretold.

Although he often taught by explicit statements of what the kingdom of heaven is like, Jesus taught also by enacting the nature of the kingdom. The cleansing of the Temple then followed by the cruxifixion and resurrection were the most dramatic examples but there were numerous others. All the healings and raisings of the dead are cases in point as are too the feeding of five thousand and four thousand, walking on water and calming the storm. Yes, even paying the Temple tax with a coin from a fish’s mouth taught Peter something about the kingdom of heaven.

Also, Jesus quickly developed a technique of explanation by telling stories. We call it teaching in parables but it was another familiar Jewish style of teaching called agada. Jesus was the greatest master of agada we know of. An example of this par excellence is the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37). It began when a lawyer “stood up” and tested him asking, “Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus replied, “What does the law say? How do you read it?”

The lawyer promptly answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind and your neighbor as yourself.”

It was the agreed on summary of the law and the prophets so Jesus merely nodded and replied, “That’s right. Do that and live.”

But the lawyer had been setting Jesus up and had now maneuvered him where he wanted him so he now threw his grenade. He asked, “And who is my neighbor?” Would Jesus go with a narrow definition or a broad one? Pitfalls on all sides!

Jesus must have smiled here. He was ready for the question. He began, “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell among robbers….” And Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan with not a Pharisee or a lawyer as the “good guy” but a despised Samaritan as the hero of the story.

Now it was Jesus’ turn to ask a nasty question. “Who was neighbor to the man.”

The lawyer was not prepared for this. He managed to more or less give the right answer although he couldn’t say “the Samaritan.” Too painful! He replied with a more formal circumlocution, “the one who showed mercy to the man.” At least, he had understood the importance of mercy.

Jesus nodded again, “Go and do likewise” he said.

What happened to broad or narrow definitions? Is your neighbor anyone in need? How do you read it?

I want to look now at another style of teaching Jesus often used that inverts the structure of the Good Samaritan story. Jesus was very good at “setting up” his questioners and leading them along in dialogue to where he wanted them to go. This was perhaps not the Socratic method but it has affinities with it. Time after time we see it as Jesus engaged in dialog that guided the direction of discussion.

The night time visit by Nicodemus, apparently in Jerusalem, is an example. Having arrived, Nicodemus began graciously, “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher sent by God. You could not perform the signs you do if God were not with you.”

Going right to the point, Jesus responded bluntly, “I tell you truly, you must be born from above if you are ever to see the kingdom of heaven.”

“Born from above” puzzled Nicodemus so he took it literally and asked, “How can a man be reborn? He can’t go back into his mother’s womb and be born all over again.”

Jesus responded, “I tell you truly, you cannot enter the kingdom of God without being born of water, that is, the spirit. Flesh gives birth only to flesh; it is spirit that gives birth to spirit. So don’t be surprised when I say you need to be reborn. The wind blows wherever it wishes; you hear its sound but know neither where it comes from nor where it is going. The same is true of all those born of the wind.”

By “born from above” Jesus meant a spiritual birth. Wind and spirit are the same word so Jesus is punning here to repeat his point.

Nicodemus answered, “How can this be?” Obviously he didn’t see what water and wind had to do with the kingdom of heaven

“What!” said Jesus. “Is this famed teacher of Israel actually ignorant of such things? I tell you truly, I speak of what I know and testify to what I have seen and yet you reject my testimony. If you don’t believe me when I speak of things on earth, how can you hope to believe me when I speak of things of heaven?

“No one ever went up to heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of Man whose home is heaven. This Son of Man must be lifted up like the serpent was lifted up by Moses in the wilderness, so that everyone who has faith in him may in him possess eternal life.”

Jesus was saying that he, the Son of Man, is like the bronze serpent Moses raised to save Israel from viper bites. Believing in him was the pathway into the kingdom of God.

Did Nicodemus understand him? Well later, of course, he defended Jesus among the chief priests and Pharisees and then helped bury him, actions carried out publicly. So the meeting was, after all, a rebirth for Nicodemus.

As another example, Jesus had headed northwest to where Galilee bordered Syria near Tyre, looking for a safe and quiet place to celebrate Passover. He found a house and settled in for a few days rest but it was not to be. His fame had preceded him. A particular problem arose when a Syro-Phoenician woman arrived. She was a Canaanite, a Gentile, of course, from across the border. She claimed her daughter had a demon and she wanted Jesus to cast it out of her. She actually pushed into the house, shouting about her daughter and crying, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” Using that title implies she knew more than the typical Gentile.

Jesus at first said nothing and the disciples begged him to send her away. She had been following them around and shouting at them. “Just get rid of her!” they told him.

In her hearing, he said “I was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

She then knelt before him and said, “Lord, help me.”

Jesus thought a moment and then replied, “It’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

She said, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their Master’s table.”

We may be dogs, she was saying, but we are the Master’s dogs. The Master supplies our food as much as that of the children. We are all fed at the Master’s table, children and dogs alike.

Much impressed, Jesus looked at her and said, “Woman, great is your faith! It shall be done as you wish. The demon has left your daughter.” She went the long road home and found the child lying quietly on her bed, the demon gone.

There are other good examples. I particularly like the story of the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:4-26) and the paralytic man and his friends (Mark 2:5-12). Others can be found in Luke 20:1-8 and John 8:12-59 but I’ll recount just one more from Matt. 22:15-46.

Some of the Pharisees decided to trap Jesus. They sent some well coached fellows to him accompanied by Herodians who were fully prepared to legally charge him.

The spokesman of the group began with flattery, “Master, we know you are an honest and incorruptible man who teaches how God expects us to live our lives.

“Give us then your ruling on paying taxes to the Emperor in Rome.”

Knowing them as well as he did, he saw the trap and recognized their dishonesty and deceit.

He replied, “Hypocrites! Why are you trying to trick me? Show me the coin in which the tax is paid.”

Someone came up with a silver denarius, very likely with the profile of Tiberius Caesar on it.

Holding it up, Jesus asked. “Whose head is this and whose inscription?”

“Caesar’s” they said. He had trapped them What else could they say?

“Well then,” Jesus answered, “give Caesar what is due him and give God what is due Him.” The Herodians had nothing they could charge him with and the Pharisees knew everything belongs to God so neither could they bring a charge against him. Their pincer movement closed on nothing and they left.

Then the Sadducees came to take their shot at him. They denied the whole idea of resurrection because, they claimed, it does not appear in the Pentateuch, the only Scriptures they allow. So they wanted to show the absurdity of the belief.

“Master,” they said, “There were seven brothers. One was married but died without issue. So another of the brothers married the widow but also died without issue. The same thing happened five more times with the woman marrying each brother in turn. Lastly, the woman died. Now, in the resurrection, whose wife will she be?”

They thought they had shown how stupid the belief was. Notice just two brothers would have sufficed for the issue so, with seven, they were just piling on.

Jesus told them bluntly, “You make mistakes because you are ignorant of the Scriptures and of the power of God. In the resurrection there is no marriage, men and women are like the angels of heaven then.

“But as to the resurrection, have you failed to notice that God says, ‘I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.’ That’s present tense, not past tense. Thus, God is the God of the living, not of the dead.”

The people were astonished at his teaching but the Sadducees left shaking (and scratching) their heads.

As word got around of the Sadducees’ failure, the Pharisees decided to have another go at Jesus. One of them got the ball rolling with a “chestnut.”

“Master,” he said. “What is the greatest commandment?”

Jesus gave the familiar answer. “The greatest commandment is, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind. And the second is like it. “Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All of the law and the prophets follow from those two commandments.”

Before they could move to their next stage, Jesus turned to the whole assembly and said, “Now I have a question for you. What is your opinion of the Messiah? Particularly, whose son is he?”

Well, the Pharisees thought they were sticking to chestnuts. “That’s easy,” they said, “He’s the son of David.”

“Well,” Jesus answered, “Then explain why David (by divine inspiration, mind you) called him ‘Lord’ when he said, “The Lord said to my Lord ‘Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.” If David calls him ‘Lord’ how can he be David’s son?”

They looked at each other but not one of them even opened his mouth. Their mouthpiece shrugged and led them away and no one tried to question him again.

Of all of them, John is the best story teller and he tells stories found in no other Gospel (I’ll leave it up to you to track them down...a good homework assignment). His Gospel also has the feel of long and penetrating thought applied to the tales he tells.

I may never finish trying to follow his thinking but what has recently struck me lately is how his stories hang together and track physical aspects of life. Water, bread, wine, light and life appear in most of his stories as well as themes like shepherds, word and wind (spirit). The Temple is another major topic. John wants us to see that Jesus replaced the Temple as the very presence of God on Earth. Lastly, John tell us repeatedly that Jesus is the great “I am.” The name God gave Moses when he wondered what to tell the Israelites when they asked him who had sent him.

Every one of these themes deserves attention and comment. For this post, for no reason I can pinpoint, I’m going to retell what is mostly John’s version of events in the ministry of Jesus that have to do with bread.

The Bread of Heaven (John 6:1-15)

It was near the Passover when the disciples returned from their mission. They brought the sad news of the death of John the Baptist but they were full of news too of their experiences; what they had done and taught, who had welcomed them and who had not. They had been very busy with all the coming and going and had hardly had time even to eat.

[Note: I once had to straighten out two colleagues who averred that Jesus did not prepare his disciples for their role after he was gone. Since they both had Catholic backgrounds, they should have known better. He sent out the twelve and then the 72 (70?) and, then too, his entire ministry was directed towards preparing the disciples. I include the above paragraph from the Gospels in case you have forgot it too.]

Jesus said, “Come, let’s go off by ourselves to some lonely place where we can rest a bit and be quiet.” So they got in their boats and took off, headed for the Bethsaida area, looking for a likely, lonely spot.

As you might expect, people by now kept close watch on Jesus and a great crowd from the nearby towns followed the progress of the boats. They hurried on foot to wherever they thought the boats were headed and got ahead of us so we gave up on Bethsaida and put in at were the crowd was mostly concentrated. So the lonely spot soon became simply a crowded but isolated lonely spot.

Seeing the crowd, his heart went out to them because they were like sheep without a shepherd and he had much to teach them. On landing, he firstly healed many people who had come for healing.

Then Jesus went up the hillside a little way and sat down with his disciples and taught. When the day began to wane the disciples pointed out that the place was desolate with no food for the people. They thought they should send the crowd off to the farms and local village to buy food and get lodging.

Jesus answered them, “There’s no need for them to go, give them something to eat yourselves.”

Someone said, “Are we to spend two hundred denarii on bread to give them dinner? That’s a good half a year’s income!”

Then Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread to feed these people?” He asked this to test him for Jesus already knew what he meant to do.

Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii wouldn’t buy enough bread for everyone to have even a little bit.”

Simon Peter’s brother Andrew said, “There’s a boy here with five barley loaves and two fishes, but what use is that for so many?”

“Let me have them,” he said, “and have the people sit down in groups, there’s plenty of grass.” So, they all settled down (having carefully avoided sheep droppings, no doubt).

So the disciples sat the people in rows, a hundred rows of fifty each. Then, taking the five loaves and two fishes, Jesus looked up to heaven, said the blessing, broke the bread and gave it to the disciples to distribute. He also divided the two fishes among them. They all ate to their hearts’ content, Jesus then had the disciples collect all the leftovers so that nothing was lost and they filled twelve wicker baskets. Those who ate the loaves numbered five thousand men, not to mention the women and children. It was like God feeding the children of Israel quails and manna in the desert for forty years.

Bread of Life (John 6:41-66 and 12:35, 36)

After the feeding of the five thousand the people could not find Jesus so some went to Capernaum looking for him. Jesus knew what they were up to and said to them. “You must work not for perishable food but for lasting food, the food of eternal life.”

They asked him, “If we are to work as God would have us work, what are we to do?”

Jesus replied, “The Son of Man will give you this food of eternal life for the Father has set His seal of His own authority on him. The work God requires is that you believe in the one He has sent.”

Realizing he was speaking of himself, they immediately asked, “What is the work you do? What sign can you give us so we can believe you?”

[Amazing! They had chased after him because he had feed five thousand of them and then they asked for a sign and what his work was? What was wrong with them? Were they really as blind as all that?]

“I tell you the truth,” Jesus replied, “My Father gives you the real bread from heaven that brings eternal life.”

“Then give us this bread all the time,” they demanded.

Jesus replied, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry again and whoever believes in me will never again be thirsty. But, as I said, even having seen me, you do not believe.

“Everyone the Father gives me will come to me and whoever comes to me I will never turn away. I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but to do the will of him who sent me. It is his will that I should not lose even one of those he has given me but raise them all up on the last day. For it is the Father’s will that everyone who looks upon the Son and puts his faith in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

[I think most everyone immediately realized he was likening himself to the bronze serpent Moses lifted up in the wilderness when the plague of vipers attacked them (Num. 21). Just looking at it cured their viper bites.]

Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”

They said among themselves, “Isn’t this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven?’”

[By the way, does this remark imply Joseph was still alive at that time?]

Jesus answered them, “Don’t mutter among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me: and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life.

“Your ancestors ate the manna from heaven in the wilderness, and they died. I am the bread of life. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

The people then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat of my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

This was spoken in the synagogue when Jesus was teaching in Capernaum. On hearing it many of his disciples exclaimed, ‘This is more than we can stomach! Why listen to such words?’

[The Jews are forbidden to drink or eat blood and so they have elaborate rules on draining the blood from animals before eating them. The suggestion of eating flesh without following the rules or of drinking blood was nauseating.]

Jesus was aware his disciples were murmuring about it and asked them, ‘Does this shock you? What if you see the Son of Man ascending to the place where he was before? The spirit alone gives life; the flesh is of no avail; the words which I have spoken to you are both spirit and life. And yet there are some of you who have no faith.” For Jesus knew all along who were without faith and who was to betray him. So he said, ”This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it has been granted to him by the Father.”

From that time on, many of his disciples withdrew and no longer went about with him.

John now made a curious choice. Of all the Gospels his is the only one that does not include the institution of the Lord’s Supper at the Last Supper (although his above remarks are almost a statement of what he said then). John’s is also the only Gospel to tell that Jesus washed the feet of all the disciples and told them it meant they were to serve one another. The bread and wine of Holy Communion would seem a nice opportunity to continue the bread theme but John did not handle it that way. Instead, he returned somewhat later to the feeding of the five thousand. As we was finishing the last of what may have been two or three editions of this Gospel, John of course was well aware the churches were famous (and notorious) for always sharing bread and wine together whenever they met so he may well have thought he could profitably break from the already well established Synoptic tradition. His Last Supper discourse greatly adds to what we know of the events of that evening.

Jesus had told the women to tell us he was going to Galilee where we should meet him. Simon couldn’t stand waiting around so he said, “I’m going fishing,” and we went with him, all seven of us in one boat. Fortunately, we trailed a small boat in case we needed more leverage on the net. You can tell we were at our wit’s end. But it was kind of nice to be doing something familiar again.

We worked all night, caught nothing and could see we were out of condition and maybe losing our touch. We headed back in and got to about a hundred yards from shore when we thought we saw a man on shore. As usual, the morning air was moist and misty You know how it is with first light just growing you can’t quite tell what you’re seeing. Getting a little nearer to shore we definitely saw a man on the beach who called out to us, “Friends, have you anything to eat?”

We thought he was mocking our failed efforts so we replied shortly, “No.” He called back, “Cast the net on the right side of the boat and you’ll get some.”

It sounded like more mocking. After all, we were getting into the shallows now. But some of us had been here before. Simon was certainly getting a glimmering of what was happening because he just said, “Do it.”

He was the boss so we did as he said and the net came up so full we about tipped over. With seven of us in the boat, we had our hands full for a while. Some of us had to shift to the small boat and that can be a bit awkward when trying to also hold on to a full net.

I said to Peter, “It’s the Lord.” Ever impulsive, he put on his cloak (he’d been working without it) and jumped in the water and swam ashore. I think it would have been smarter to leave the cloak behind but perhaps he meant to be respectful. Between the two boats we eventually got the net ashore.

Jesus already had a bed of coals going with a fish laid on and bread. He told us to add some of the catch. Peter went over and counted the fish out. They were all nice big ones, 153 of them! We’d gotten into one of those schools of all the same sized fish. For all that, the net held and had no tears in it.

Jesus called us again, “Come, get some breakfast.” Nobody had the nerve to ask him who he was. We knew him, we’d done this scene once before with him. He brought the bread and some fish over to us and broke the bread and then the fish. We’d seen that before too. How many times! Then we knew for sure it was Jesus.

A similar story pertains to the American Revolution. A man turned up in Harrisonburg, VA asking leading questions about how the townsmen felt about the Revolution. His accent sounded a bit “British” so people asked where he was from. He told them he was from Staunton, VA. It was his misfortune that he pronounced the name STAWNton instead of the local STANton. They hanged him as British spy.

These are not isolated situations; language pronunciation have long functioned to distinguish among us both for purely cultural and social distinctions but also, as these stories indicate, as signs of threats or danger. In fact, seemingly incidental details of stories can reveal interesting and important things about the author of a text. Analysis of the frequency of word usage, for example, has often been used to establish authorship, or conversely, to disestablish it. Personally, I remain skeptical of such arguments without denying they have a degree of value. I would never agree to hang a man with such stuff as the sole information against him.

Honestly, my interest here is not in literary criticism but in inadvertent evidence. For example, I happen to be rereading a Louis L’Amour western at the moment. Occasionally, I check his place names and the names of mountains or other terrain features. I have never uncovered an error in any of his stories. He was ever meticulous about such details and apparently had himself seen many of the places where his stories are sited. He often told readers how to pronounce the name the Mogollons correctly. It’s the Muggy-owens.

Even ancient sources have proven their worth in this regard. For example, Herodotus wrote in his The Histories (c. 450 BC) that Phoenician explorers, had traveled around Africa from the Red Sea to Gibraltar and thus rounded Africa. He remarked, “And they said, which I for my part do not believe, that in sailing around Libya [Africa] they had the Sun on their right hand.” He was an honest reporter and, surprisingly, so too were the Phoenicians. They were well south of the equator as they rounded Africa (36^O south of the equator) and the Sun had to be north of them as they sailed west. This was in marked contrast with their northern hemisphere expectations and therefore deserved to be widely remarked. The report Herodotus past on, though he doubted the truth of it, is inadvertent evidence of the truthfulness of Herodotus’ reporting and additionally of the truth of the Phoenician claim to have circumnavigated Africa. I know AI sources will tell you Bartolomeu Dias was the first European to do it in February of 1488 but even AI hasn’t caught up with the full truth.

I always warned my students, when working with ancient sources, that assuming the sources are wrong risks making big mistakes. The places in Homer’s Odyssey, fantastic as they seem, may be a case in point. A good case can be made that Homer’s tale outlines a very real map of travel in the Mediterranean so be careful judging such material. The places may actually be real while the storyline adds fanciful or exaggerated descriptions. Was the cyclops actually one-eyed? Well, probably not. And no, I don’t know how to account for the blond, sweetly singing and deadly sirens. Maybe it was FOB syndrome (fear of blonds).

With all that as a preliminary, I want to examine some examples of inadvertent evidence from the Gospel of John. The first examples are John’s occasional references to traveling up or down in Galilee and Judea. For the record, Capernaum is by the Sea of Galilee at about 680 feet below sea level and Cana is at about 1,000 feet above sea level so it is a good quarter of a mile down to Capernaum from Cana and then some.

Jerusalem is at an average altitude of 2,474 feet above sea level and up hill from almost anywhere in Judea, certainly also most anywhere in Galilee. The Temple at that time was higher than its immediate surroundings so that one entered it by climbing stairways that where quite enormous and apparently had a height of 20 cubits, say 30 feet, above the surrounding Temple precincts. The Temple Mount itself had been elevated above its initial altitude of Mount Moriah. Therefore, one definitely registered a “going up” when entering the Temple.

John correctly puts Capernaum down from Cana at four places in his Gospel text. The first is the interesting sentence about the early ministry movements of Jesus, his freshly called disciples, his mother and his brothers. John tells us they altogether went down to Capernaum from Cana but they did not remain there for long (2:12). Jesus then went up to Jerusalem (2:13) for the Passover.

After Jesus returned to Cana with a growing reputation, the son of a certain official of the court of Herod Antipas was dying at home in Capernaum of an unspecified illness. Frantic with fear, the father apparently walked about 20 or more miles to Cana, found Jesus and begged and pleaded with him to “come down” (4:47 and also 4:49) and heal the boy before he died. He evidently thought proximity was required for Jesus to heal people. Jesus was cautious at first, possibly he was suspicious of the man’s motives since he was connected to Herod; alternatively, he was dubious of the faith of the crowd listening in. Eventually, Jesus told the man his son was healed. Perhaps uncertain of this response but seeing there was nothing more he could do, the man went on his way back down (4:51) to Capernaum but was met by some of his servants seeking him to tell him the boy was healed.

Shortly afterward Jesus again went up to Jerusalem (5:1) from Galilee and, somewhat later his brothers urged him to go to back to Jerusalem for a feast (possibly Purim) because, they argued, it would be good public relations move. Jesus told them to go up (7:8) without him for it was not yet his time (to die). However, he then went up (7:10) secretly and went up (7:14) into the Temple and taught openly!

In all these passages the ups and downs seem no more than statements of fact told by one who was describing scenes from personal memory, relating what he had himself seen and experienced. They are almost side remarks generated as an eyewitness recounted what he had seen. They constitute what I call inadvertent evidence, in this case, evidence that the writer was an eyewitness of these actions, someone who most likely walked the ups and downs with Jesus. This does not prove that John the disciple of Jesus wrote this Gospel. It does prove that the writer of this Gospel knew the territory of the stories from having personally experienced it; he walked up it and down it like he says Jesus did. Unlike me, he had no access to Google Earth and could not generate information from the position of the cursor on a topo map.

The Greek text differs significantly from the English text in that the Greek words for down and up do not appear! Kato can mean down and ano can mean up but they are not usually used quite that way because, in Greek, the adverbial sense of the words is most often directly incorporated into the actual verb used. The senses down and up are concealed in the verbs John uses in all these passages. That is, he uses a verb that means go down rather than a word for go and then a word for down. The same is true for the up passages. The point is is that there was no simple way of faking “inadvertent evidence” surreptitiously by just adding the words down or up. Anyone intent on so foolish a project would need to discard the verb used and add a different verb, not to mention altering the grammatical structure of the text. Thus, you make take it as read that the wording here is definitely inadvertent evidence.

Returning now to issues of language niceties, I have a little more inadvertent evidence to add. There were idiomatic differences between Judean and Galilean language (Aramaic) that the writer of the Gospel of John was quite alert to. A case in point is language about weddings. In particular, the Gospel of John refers to a wedding party as friends of the bridegroom (3:29). This was the expression used by John the Baptist. John was Judean and he and Jesus at that time were operating in Judea.

Friends of the bridegroom as a Judean idiom contrasts with the Galilean idiom found in Matthew’s Gospel (9:15) where Jesus explained to John the Baptist’s disciples why he and his disciples did not fast. Jesus said (translating the Greek literally), “Can the sons of the bridechamber mourn while the bridegroom is with them?” This was the way Galileans said it.

So, the writer of John’s Gospel was not only an eyewitness of the ups and downs of walking with Jesus but he was familiar with linguistic distinctions between Judean and Galilean Jews. We only know of these differences thanks to much recent work on such issues by (often Jewish) New Testament scholars. We have not only the Dead Sea scrolls but many other contemporary Jewish sources available to make such fine shades of idiom clear. Some of the first readers of the Gospels likely were well aware of these subtle distinctions but the distinctions were quickly lost to the church for these many centuries. Happily, they are now being recovered, to our great advantage.

None of this proves John the disciple wrote the Gospel. However, it gives us substantial warrant to believe it was, indeed, John the brother of James and the son of Zebedee who wrote it. And that, folks, is the value and power of inadvertent evidence.

A teacher is also an advisor and over the years and in a few instances I have advised young women to never consider marriage to a Moslem. A physics professor is certainly not a marriage counselor and has no wish to be one but, in these few cases, it was in fact an appropriate response to comments the young women made to me. Why would that be good advise? Let me explain.

Some time ago I constructed a post about Women in Islam. It outlined the status of Islamic women, often in words directly from the Qur’an and Islamic scholars. Moslem language is often far more blunt than we are accustomed to in the west even if one allows for the vulgarity becoming so common now. [Nota bene; vulgaris is Latin for common and I don’t want you to miss my pun]. I tested some reactions and will never use that post. It was too accurate a portrayal of the nastiness of Moslems. However, it is an important topic and I have decided to write an expurgated version of it.

Over the years I have known perhaps a half dozen Islamic women well enough to understand to some extent their concerns and motivations. None of them wore the hajib (certainly not the burqa) and they spoke to me face to face, a man from outside their family circle. Both actions are condemned within Islam and can even provide legal reason for the family to kill them. They are thus not typical of Moslem women.

I have visited with men in a mosque nearby their women, not all of them covered. Although these were Shia twelvers and therefore fairly strict, they were perhaps not typical either. I have eaten in a Moslem home with the wife’s head uncovered. All of these women were in the USA and were therefore, to some degree, not typical. My overall impression is that they were well aware that being in the west had made their lives more comfortable. Some told me directly of their fears of having to return to the more fully Moslem world.

What is the status of women in Islam? How are they treated? In a nut shell, Islam is a man’s world. In particular, it is a world invented by a man, Muhammed, for men. Once he realized he needed an army, it appears that Muhammed’s revelations became increasingly male oriented. Apparently the 70 or 72 virgins in heaven had to be replaced by the more immediate gratification of license to rape, murder and plunder all outsiders in the down to earth here and now. With the army thus created he was then able conquer Medina and Mecca and eventually much of the Mediterranean world.

Marriage

Perhaps the best way to tackle the question of women directly is to look at the most authoritative teaching of Islam, the Qur’an, on marriage. A Moslem man can have up to four wives at a time. Surah 4:3 says, “and if you fear that you will not be able to deal justly with the orphan girls, then marry the women that seem good to you, two or three or four. If you fear you cannot treat them all fairly, then marry (only) one.”

Moslem sources love to stress the concern for fair treatment of all wives they see indicated here. Indeed, my younger brother, in Saudi Arabia for the Persian Gulf War, noted with amusement the numerous houses with two mirror image sides to give each of two wives an exactly equal share. He never mentioned houses for three wives but surely they would be odd looking. While men can have many wives simultaneously, a women can have only one husband at a time and Sharia law assigns death to women for adultery. Adultery is a fault only women can commit. In Islam, fair treatment of women merely means treating all women alike. Under Sharia law, a woman is worth a half a man. By comparison, in the early USA, a black slave was worth three fifths of a white man under voting laws.

The Qur’an projects seriousness about this matter of fair and equal treatment of wives. It is clear that men with multiple wives must attempt to pay them equal sexual attention and must not leave any “hanging.” Surah 4:129 says, “And you will never be able to be equal between wives, even if you should strive. So do not incline completely [toward some wives] and leave another hanging. And if you amend [yourself] and fear Allah - then indeed, Allah is ever Forgiving and Merciful.”

The exception to the four wife restriction was Muhammed himself whose 13 wive were not all alive at the same time, although at least ten or eleven were. His first wife was literally his boss and the mother of his two oldest daughters (a son died very early) so he had only one wife for 25 years then a dozen in the next dozen years. The list of wives does not include his numerous concubines.

Muhammed’s marriage to Ai’sha is very important in this regard because it is much cited by Moslem men in defense of their own behavior. She was married to him when she was six years old and he was fifty years old.

How did Muhammed escape sanction for violating Surah 4:3? Allah gave him a special dispensation. Revealed to him in Surah 33:51 is this, “you, [O Muhammad], may put aside whom you will of them or take to yourself whom you will. And any that you desire of those [wives] from whom you had [temporarily] separated - there is no blame upon you [in returning her]. That is more suitable that they should be content and not grieve and that they should be satisfied with what you have given them - all of them. And Allah knows what is in your hearts. And ever is Allah Knowing and Forbearing.” As you see, Allah is a really decent chap and makes allowances for a man’s needs.

When Muhammed wanted Zaynab, the wife of his adopted son, Zayd, for himself, he made it known to Zayd, who then “offered” to divorce her. At that point Allah stepped in with more revelations to “the prophet.” Surah 33:4 told him, “Allah has not made for a man two hearts in his interior. And He has not made your wives whom you declare unlawful your mothers. And he has not made your adopted sons your [true] sons. That is [merely] your saying by your mouth, but Allah says the truth, and He guides to the [right] way.” So Zayd, the adopted son, was suddenly not a son.

Then too, Surah 33:37 revealed that, “and [remember, O Muhammad], when you said to the one on whom Allah bestowed favor and you bestowed favor, “Keep your wife and fear Allah,” while you concealed within yourself that which Allah is to disclose. And you feared the people, while Allah has more right that you fear Him. So when Zayd had no longer any need for her, We married her to you in order that there not be upon the believers any discomfort concerning the wives of their adopted sons when they no longer have need of them. And ever is the command of Allah accomplished.”

In other words, Allah decided to make Zahd’s wife, Zaynab, into Muhammed’s wife by divine intervention. It was Allah’s idea, not Muhammed’s, to shift her from Zahd to Muhammed. Allah is really, really a decent chap for his best buddies.

All this is in addition to the houri wives men will have in Paradise. Surah 56:22 says,“and for them are fair women with large, beautiful eyes and houris maidens with intense, black eyes set against the whiteness of their irises with wide eyes.” who will be “full breasted (companions) of equal age.” (78:33). “Indeed, We have produced the women of Paradise in a [new] creation and made them virgins devoted [to their husbands] and of equal age for companions of the right” (56:35-38).

However, Surah (56:21) says, “Those who believe and whose descendants follow them in faith – We will join with them their descendants, and We will not deprive them of anything of their deeds. Every person is pledged for what he has earned.” So believing offspring join the men but there is no mention of believing wives.

In fact, it is very difficult to get Moslem commentators to give specifics on women in Paradise although most do take pains to be sure women are warned against asking questions. The answers the commentators are willing to give are invariably very general. Perhaps the clearest statement in the Qur’an is in 4:124, “Those who do good deeds, whether male or female, and have faith will enter Paradise and will not be wronged, even as much as the speck on a date stone.”

On the subject of what equivalent of houris awaits a woman in Paradise, the Qur’an and Hadiths are, so far as I can find, completely silent. The Qur’an does assure widows that Allah will assign them a husband in Paradise but I do not see that as an equivalent of the promise of houris. The characteristics of the assigned husband are in no way elaborated.

W

omen and Sharia Law

The word sharia refers to the system of transferring Arabic writing from Arabic script into a Romanized script. The word sharia itself is an example of this transfer. Sharia law is a compendium and extension of material from both the Qur’an and Hadiths. As legal codes go, Sharia law is an exceptionally punitive system with a preference for swift and harsh, even capital, sentences over other options such as confinement. Especially with reference to women it is by far the most repressive of any system in use anywhere today. Related features of Sharia Law include:
Female “circumcision” commanded by Muhammed himself.
Girls can be sodomized until 8 years of age and vaginally raped after that.
A female who has been raped cannot testify in court against her rapist(s).
Testimonies of 4 male witnesses are required to prove rape of a female (24:13).
A female who alleges rape without producing 4 male witnesses is guilty of adultery.
A female found guilty of adultery is given a death sentence.
A male convicted of rape can have his conviction dismissed by marrying his victim.
Moslem men have sexual rights to any woman/girl not wearing the hijab.
A woman can have only 1 husband, who can have up to 4 wives
A man can beat his wife for insubordination and rape her (4:34).
A man can unilaterally divorce his wife; a wife needs her husband’s consent to divorce.
A divorced wife loses custody of all children over 6 years of age or when they exceed it.
A woman’s testimony in court, allowed in property cases, carries ½ the weight of a man’s.
A female heir inherits half of what a male heir inherits
A woman cannot speak alone to a man who is not her husband or relative.

Treatment of non-Moslem Women

These Moslem attitudes apply towards all women whoever they are and wherever Moslem men encounter them. They are embedded within Moslem cultures, laws and thinking but more particularly and significantly, in the actions of of Moslems, male and female alike. Western women, particularly those who are confident all people world-wide are alike and must accordingly be treated alike, are vulnerable when confronted by Moslems. They are particularly vulnerable in any context that Moslem men regard as their own demesne. Wandering the world without male protection is a recipe for disaster. Moslem men always say, “She was asking for it.” By their lights, she is. A woman alone and unprotected by a man venturing within speaking distance of an unknown Moslem man is “asking for it.” Speaking to the man hugely increases the risk. A Moslem woman who behaved that way would be “asking for it.” Islam is a culture even more than it is a religion. That is why it is so dangerous to allow Moslems into Western countries. As a culture, it is diametrically opposed to Western ideas, beliefs and behaviors.

Sadly, there is an almost endless supply of examples. I will not tell the painful and horrible stories but here is a list for you to look up.

A new Zealander recently traveling alone in Sri Lanka encountered a Moslem who propositioned her in a shocking way.^†

The tortures and murders of Louisa Vesterager Jesperson and Maren Ueland in Moroco. ^#

Mohammad Farukh killed his wife and two young daughters in Garhi Daulat village, India because she went out without wearing a burqa. To their credit, the Indian Hindu population is greatly disturbed by this and similar situations but feminist groups have maintained strict silence.

In Iran, the 2022 death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini after her arrest for allegedly violating hijab rules sparked nationwide protests and international outrage, highlighting the consequences of state-enforced dress codes.

In Pakistan and parts of Iraq “honor” killings and family violence because of perceive violations of the various Sharia regulations.

I could continue but will end now by referring you to current news releases from Nigeria. The recurring, despicable actions of Moslem men against Christians and especially against Christian girls is not terrorist Islam. It is the very heart of Islam.

† Revolver News, 11/19/25

# RAIR The Source: Amy Mekelberg

The Mosaic covenant is the covenant for which the Old Testament is named although, in a very real sense, it is an extension of the Abrahamic covenant. Actually, make that an enormous extension. Moses was obvious the representative of the people of Israel here and God the sovereign. Circumcision remains the covenant sign although annual keeping of the Passover (Seder) feast functions as a cross between an additional covenant sign and a covenant meal. Remember, the covenant sign should be a perpetual physical reminder of the covenant. Like the Abrahamic covenant, this covenant too had an extended, slow development with the covenantal components spread over time and Scriptural passages.

How much Moses at first knew or understood about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not clear. The burning bush that was not consumed was an obvious reference to Abraham’s encounter with God but Moses seems not to have grasp that and God had to tell him, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (Ex. 3:6). Moses was told to bring the Israelites out of Egypt so he asked God’s name and was told “I am” (YHWH). As already established, this extraordinary name implies monotheism, not to mention a good many other attributes of God. That God communicated with Moses implies God intended a relationship with Moses and the Israelites whom Moses represented. That is, it implies the immanence of God. This scene initiates then a covenantal relationship; it constituted some of the usual initial negotiations and discussions preliminary to the writing out the covenant. It also involved Moses in lengthy negotiations both with Pharaoh and with his fellow Israelites.

After the ten plagues of Egypt, Pharaoh let the Israelites go, his hand forced by the killing of all Egyptian first born in the Passover which established the annual Passover feast. Having been circumcised was the condition for participating in the Passover feast (Ex. 12:44-48) so the Abrahamic covenant was a decisive prerequisite for the Mosaic covenant.

God communicated a great many covenant conditions to the people through Moses even before giving them the summary ten commandments, which was essentially the writing down of covenantal stipulations to be adhered to by the people of Israel (Ex. 24:19-24). Surprisingly, we are never told exactly what was on the tablets. It is usually assumed it was just the ten commandments but we do not know that. Moses read to the people from the Book of the Covenant, which we also do not have, (Ex. 24:7) and they verbally agreed to its conditions. Moses then built an altar at the foot of Mt. Horeb (Sinai) plus twelve pillars for the twelve tribes (Exodus 24:4).

On their forty year journey the Israelites were guided by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, another version of the representation of God with smoke and flame rather than a human form.

Covenantal injunctions, conditions, rules, laws, or whatever one may wish to call them are distributed throughout the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy along with statements of curses and blessings so the Pentateuch is not a tightly organized version of a covenant but it contains all the appropriate written features of one.

Seeing God is dangerous and likely to be fatal so God usually appeared as fire or smoke or cloud. Even Moses could not be permitted to see God but was allowed to see His back (Ex. 33:18-23). However, there is a curious passage on the subject (Ex. 24: 9, 10) where “Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu and seventy elders of Israel...”saw the God of Israel. Under his feet there was something like a pavement of sapphire stones, like the very heaven for clearness.” Since real sapphire was unknown in the area this is a mis-translation. The Hebrew word used must refer to something like lapis lazuli (see my latest wonder world post on blues). Immediately after this vision, however, they all ate a covenantal meal and drank something (probably not wine which would have been in short supply). Finally, Moses was given tablets of stone, the written form of the covenant, manifesting the covenantal nature of the events. What was actually written down on the tablets could hardly have been all the Pentateuch.

The ten commandments, as a sort of summary of all the enormous number of the Pentateuch’s covenantal conditions, are listed in two places, Ex. 20:1-17 and Deut. 5:4-21 separate from the tablet tale. Significantly, Israel’s covenants invariably invert the normal pattern of listing curses first followed by blessings. The emphasis here was on benefits of upholding the covenant then followed by curses for covenant breakers but also curses for enemies of the covenant group which are effectively defenses of the group. The first of the blessings is “rains in their season,” a vital concern of an agricultural people.

Interestingly, Moses instructed Israel that, after crossing the Jordan, six of the tribes of Israel were to stand on Mt. Gerizim declaring the blessings with the other six tribes on Mt. Ebal responding with the curses (Deut. 27:11-15). It is not recorded that they actually ever did this but imagine the chaos of organizing the people to do it! How could they keep the recitations synchronized? For compact listings of blessings see Lev. 26:3-13 and Deut. 28:1-14 followed by a listing of curses Lev. 26:14-33 and Deut. 28:15-68. For a bit more on blessing and curses, if you’re really into it, see Deut. 22-27.

The next important covenant is important but not exactly a covenant. It is more of a promise and about as simple as the Noahic covenant. It lacks almost all the standard features of a covenant. In that sense is more like a codicil to a will than a will. God promises King David that his son will 1) have his kingdom, 2) make a Temple to God, 3) the kingdom will be forever, 4) God will be like a father to him and he like a son to God 5) God’s love will never be taken from him. No condition are imposed on David although “when he commits iniquity I will punish him with a rod such as mortal use, with blows inflicted by human beings.”

That’s it. No sign, no walk unto death (not even a hint of a flame), no list of curses, no written form of a covenant. There is a bit of rehearsing history and praise for both God and David. One might well ignore the whole thing except that it is a major step forward in God’s plan to choose people for His plan to undo the damage to His relationship with people occasioned by the fall, that is, the failure of the first covenant.

The Davidic codicil to the prior covenants then begins the movement towards 1) the kingdom of God and 2) the coming of the Messiah who will fulfill and complete all the covenants. These themes are then elaborated by the prophets, preparing the Jewish people for the arrival of the kingdom of God and of the Messiah. Jeremiah 31:31-34 in fact declared there would also be a new covenant, “...I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah...I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people….for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest … for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sins no more.” The writer to the Hebrews uses this passage several times in driving home the point that “[Jesus] is the mediator of a new covenant..that those whom God has called may receive the promise of eternal life.”

The word covenant is not commonly mentioned in the New Testament. It does not appear in the Gospels except at the Last Supper. Matthew (Mt. 26:28) and Mark (Mk. 14:24) refer only to the “blood of the covenant” but Luke (22:20) speaks of “the new covenant in my blood” as does St. Paul (1 Cor. 11:25). Then Hebrews 8 and 9 discuss the new covenant as does 2 Cor. 3:6 where Paul says, [God] has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letters but of spirit.”

The kingdom of God is decidedly the central theme of the Gospels and Jesus was exceedingly cautious about claims to Messiahship. I do not mean to suggest that the covenant is incompatible with the message of the arrival of the kingdom of God. All the kingdom teachings are also the conditions of a new covenant; they announce God’s expectations of the covenant people. I suspect Matthew had the written lists of a covenant in mind as he collated the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. Accordingly, we should read them as a list of covenantal blessings.

Assuming we then accept the life and ministry of Jesus as the framing of a new covenant, how well does it fit the covenantal pattern? Since almost the entire Pentateuch is the written Mosaic covenant, the Gospel texts, in fact, the entire New Testament can stand as the written form of the new covenant.

But now comes a surprising innovation in covenant making. Jesus is the representative of the God in the construction of the new covenant (Phil 2:5-8) but he is also the representative on behalf of mankind (Hebrews 2:17-18)! Furthermore, Jesus is also the sacrifice for the new covenant (John 1:29, 1 Cor. 5:7) and he is mediator of the New Covenant (Heb. 8:6). I think it is safe to say this is a covenant like none other. Oh then too, Jesus exchanged robes (Phil. 2:5-7) when he exchanged his godhood for the “likeness” of humanity. As to blessing and curses, there are only blessings pronounced within the new covenant.

Speaking of Jesus as a sacrifice fulfilling the Mosaic covenant, St. Paul takes pains to point out two significant details. He says, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Cor. 5:7) because Jesus died when the Paschal lambs were being slaughtered. In addition, he refers to Christ as the first fruits of those who rise from the dead (1 Cor. 15:20), because the offering of the first fruits in the temple occurred on Easter Sunday.

Paul was there when it happened and saw the connections. By the way, this also shows that the Last Supper was indeed a Passover meal celebrated a day early because Jesus was intentionally controlling the timing of his death to coincide with details of the Passover. Jesus explicitly told the disciples of the new covenant and then created further connections to the fulfillment of the old covenant. Since Paul was aware of it you can be sure the Temple cabal noticed too. That accords with Luke’s remark that soon very many of the priests adhered to the faith (Acts 6: 7).

What about the sign of the new covenant and the covenantal meal? The meal is the easy question. Just as the Passover meal (Seder) was both a covenant meal and a covenantal sign, Jesus very obviously transformed it into the Eucharist or Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper, whatever you call it or however you perform it. Unlike the Seder, it is perpetual, not annual, performed as often as we do it in remembrance of his death, burial and resurrection.

The Gospel of John does not recount the bread and wine scene at the Last Supper but gives its precursor in (John 6:53-56) where Jesus “turned off” some disciples when he said we cannot partake of him unless we eat his body and drink his blood. Jews were forbidden to eat blood so this was disgusting. This seems to be a fairly explicit reference to the covenantal practice of mingling blood with wine.

Is there a separate covenant sign? The answer is complicated here because, to be blunt, there is no covenant sign compared to the usual expectation of a permanent, bodily mark. St. Paul says in several passages (Rom. 2:28 29; Col 2:11-12) a circumcised heart is the covenant sign. That is, the covenant, as Jeremiah said, is written on our hearts and “spiritualized.” if I can get away with that description.

Like all the other covenants except the Abrahamic, there is no “walk unto death” scene. But the scene at Pentecost in Acts 2:1-4 seems a stand-in for one. They were all seated in one place and suddenly a sound like a great wind came from the sky (remember, the word for wind also meant spirit) filling the whole house. And what looked like tongues of flame appeared, resting on each of them, and they began to “speak in tongues.” All this drew an audience to them and each understood them “in his own tongue”, the reversal of the Tower of Babel. Thus, once again, God, now as the Holy Spirit, appears as flames. This is the coming of the Holy Spirit which Jesus had told them they must await and definitely was a sign but perhaps not a covenantal sign. We can be sure, however, that it gave great confidence and boldness to the disciples.

Baptism is done only once (though it originated in a cleansing ritual that was repeatable) but it leaves no physical mark. Like circumcision, baptism can be “spiritualized” but it has no physical aspect like that of circumcision. Ananias told Saul to “be baptized at once, with invocation of his name, and wash your sins away.” [By the way, this gives us clear statements both that baptism removes sins and that it requires complete immersion (e.g., washing just your hands would not be enough)]. Thus, baptism is not a good fit with typical covenant signs but then again, of all the biblical covenants, only the Abrahamic covenant has a proper sign. The specifically designated rainbow of the Noahic covenant is, to say the least, ephemeral. The other covenants have no signs that are specifically so designated. Circumcision is a stand alone procedure. Nothing in the other biblical covenants is really comparable.

Both baptism and communion make visible, ceremonial connections to the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. In that sense, they serve as signs of the new covenant. All the evidence we have implies the church has always practiced both from its very outset. Ananias’ statement likely dates from 35 AD and pagan sources refer to the communion meal in transparent efforts to denigrate the churches. Both are extremely strong, inadvertent evidence that in 33 AD the impetus of Christian belief was an actual, very real crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus.

In conclusion, we, the church, are in a covenant relationship with God. What was broken in the fall, the death and resurrection of Jesus has repaired. “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” God’s plan worked. Jesus has fulfilled and completed all the covenants and all the people of the world are thereby blessed.

The Bible is full of covenants; one might say it is all covenants. In fact, the Old and New Testaments of the Bible should really be called the Old and New Covenants (and, sometimes, they actually are). There are quite a few more than just two in the Bible but let’s set that topic aside for the moment because we know about even older covenants. In my view, God has used the language of covenants as the best way of expressing how humans relate, or ought to relate, to Him.

Covenants were such vital matters that they were written out as soon as there was writing to enable doing that. Think about that a moment. When writing came into being very, very few people could write. By the “laws” of economics, being a scribe was then the road to riches, more or less. Getting a covenant written down was expensive so also highly valued and well paid. It also gave the scribe high status. Everyone can write in the modern world so the status of writers is much lower now.

Ancient covenants were just as variable as modern contracts or treaties; those we have in hand (and we have quite few) reflect that. Like contracts and treaties, they certainly were legal documents but they went well beyond that in that they established or even created firm and culturally stabilizing relationships, usually between a sovereign and a people. There were covenants between equals or near equals too but I’ll focus on the former because my interest here is the biblical covenants between God and groups of people.

A formal, written covenant began with a recounting of the history and circumstances of this incipient accord, indicating along the way the parties involved, the sovereign first and usually identified in highly complimentary and even exaggeratedly glorious terms. Additional witnesses were named. They typically were gods whose, shall we say cosmic roles, were relevant to the particulars of the covenant. They were also potential enforcers of the covenant. Then the terms were stated in detail. Finally the curses and blessings were specified for infractions and for obedience with the corresponding retribution for the former and rewards for the latter. All that would be recorded in writing.

Very solemn ceremonies were also part of the establishing of a covenant. Often, perhaps even usually, an animal was killed and cut in two from head to tail. This might be done by a priest of one of the gods involved in the issues. The animal would be large so all could see the action which now occurred.

A pre-selected representative of the group then acted in the place of all individuals of the group. Typically the representative and the sovereign conferred before any official covenant writing or ceremony, reaching agreement well in advance of all terms of the projected covenant. This representative and the sovereign stood by during the slaying and splitting of the sacrifice.

The very bloody animal halves were laid out with space between them or among them and the sovereign and the representative would walk around the pieces. When they were between the pieces, they would face each other and solemnly and loudly proclaim something like, “If I [we] ever violate this covenant, may I [we] be slain and split like this animal.” Very serious and solemn indeed, not to mention scary. This performance is sometimes referred to as the “walk unto death” so I will use that phrase later where useful.

That was not the end. As a way or symbolizing the covenant, the participants might exchange robes to proclaim their unity and to take on each other’s joys and sorrows. They might also exchange weapons and belts (part of the armor) to indicate taking responsibility for the partner’s strengths and weaknesses or military needs.

As a way of keeping awareness of the covenant alive, the two then established a continuing sign or token of the covenant. Frequently the participants would cut themselves to draw blood, add blood from each participant to wine and drink the wine. Then a pigment would be rubbed into the wounds to make a permanent scar as an ongoing reminder of the covenant. I suspect this part of the ceremony somewhat inhibited sovereigns from making many covenants.

Sometimes the sovereign would then rename the representative by changing his name. Often the new name was a co-mingling of the names of the sovereign and the representative.

Finally, the covenant making would end with a celebratory meal which included eating bread and drinking wine together. It both expressed and confirmed the unity established and imposed by the covenant. The bread and wine were understood to represent the body and blood of the covenant partners. Since Jewish law forbade consuming blood (Lev.17:10-14 and Deut,12:16) for Jews drinking wine replaced any covenant action where drinking blood was expected.

I expect you have been hearing echoes of biblical accounts as you read this. In fact, the biblical presentations of our relationship with God are permeated with covenant structures from the first chapters of Genesis into the Book of the Revelations of St. John. Covenants of the Bible are not always full scale covenant ceremonies with all the features I have sketched but most of the interactions of God and man recounted in Scriptures incorporate at least several facets of a covenant.

For example, Genesis 2 is purportedly the genealogy of “the man” and “the women” but it is more than that. God made “the man” (or “the earthling”) from a clod (so he is of the Earth) in God’s own image (so he is of the heavens) and then breathed into him the breath of life making him a living being and implanting him his Spirit (the word used here means both breath and spirit). God then placed him in the Garden of Eden (the Orchard of Eden, actually) and set out rules: the fruit of every tree in the orchard can be eaten except the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Violating the rules will result in death. [By the way, how could the man know the meaning of death, good and evil?]

So, the rules were set out with the consequences and we have a covenant form right there in Genesis 2. The woman is then made from the man and therefore has the same inheritance as the man (the heavens and the Earth) but she had to be told the rules by the man.

Genesis 3 introduces the serpent whose attack is directed right at the issue of what God told the man. The man and the woman violate the rules and as a consequence are stripped of the benefits of Eden but, more importantly, of the relationship with God. Having lost the protection of that relationship, they feel vulnerable and make protective clothing from leaves. They hide from God. God of course finds them and puts them on trial; their defenses reveal an already well developed sense of excuse-making. Then God pronounces curses and blessings on them and evidently sacrifices some animals to create better garments for their protection. A name change occurs now; the man and the woman become Adam and Eve.

If I am right about the covenant, who then do Adam and Eve represent? Several features of the narrative, such as the orientation of the Temple-like orchard, suggest they are proto-priests. If so, priests for whom? Chapter 4 reveals there are other people on Earth from whom Cain obtains a wife and is fearful of retribution. St. Paul then gives us the answer, “for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22).This is covenantal representation in both cases. It cannot be that we are made alive in Christ because we are descended from him. So too all die because “we all fell in Adam’s fall.” Adam and Eve are our covenantal representatives, not our genetic antecedents (pace, St. Augustine). What applies to them applies to us all.

From the beginning then, humans had a covenantal relationship with God and managed to break it. This sets the tone of the entire Bible where the theme is then how God has make more covenants to repair the damage done with the breaking of that first covenant.

Was there a sign of this covenant? Yes, the image of God imprinted on humans is the permanent and ongoing sign of God’s first covenant.

What follows now is a series of covenants between God and humans. The covenant with Noah is the next one and also the first explicitly cited as a covenant (Gen. 6:18). The purpose of this covenant is to spare Noah and his family from the devastation of the flood. God benefits in that all his creation is not destroyed but has hopefully improved prospects for the future. God was the sovereign in this covenant and Noah the representative of his family. They were instructed in making the protective ark and provisioning it. They acted on those instructions. At the successful conclusion of these actions, Noah built an altar on which he sacrificed animals and God vowed to never repeat the Noahic destruction and he blessed Noah and his family, giving the bounty of the Earth to them. Then God set the rainbow in the sky as the explicit sign of the Noahic covenant.

God’s covenant with Abraham is the dominant covenant of the Bible. In some ways it is also the most complex and convoluted of the biblical covenants. Terah and Abram, his son, together with his grandson Lot, Abraham’s nephew, moved from Ur of the Chaldeans to Haran on their way to Canaan. For some reason they stopped there and Terah died. It is never suggested that the two events were connected.

Then God somehow spoke to Abram. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the Earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12 1-4).

It is not clear Abram knew God before this but he obeyed God and Lot went with him to Canaan. God then continued the covenantal relationship, saying, “To your offspring I will give this land.” Abram then built an altar between Bethel and Ai and there “invoked the name of the Lord (Yahweh)” (Gen. 12:8). It seems he thought of the stones as permanent, standing witnesses of the covenant. Stones as witnesses appear too in Joshua 24:27 and the ebenezer stones in the Jordan River (Joshua 4:1-9 also 1 Sam. 7:12). Covenants typically were witnessed by gods who were explicitly named so Abram invokes God’s personal name as a witness although God is a principle of the covenant. That was quite improper but necessitated by the situation where there were no other gods. This scene then is a declaration (sotto voce) of monotheism.

Subsequently, Abram and Lot moved about in Canaan, soon crossing the land to as far south as the Negev (Negeb) where their enormous herds (and also dissension among their herders) occasioned a decision to split up with Lot going east to the plains of the Jordan valley (including Sodom and Gomorrah) and Abraham occupying the hill country of Canaan.

The promises of the covenant, however, appeared quite moot because Sarai, his wife, was barren. After a battle to retrieve Lot and his family from “kings” of the area, God spoke again assuring Abram of His protection. Abram responded by complaining that God has given him no child. So God sent him outside to count the night stars, then said to him, “so shall your descendants be.”

To that, Abram responded by basically asking why he should believe it.

God answered, “Get me a three year old heifer, a three year old female goat and a three year old ram. Also get a turtledove and a squab.” Probably knowing what God meant to do, Abraham complied. Leaving the birds aside, Abraham split the animals in two and laid them out, “each half over against the other.”

He waited then on God to come and fell asleep, finding himself in terrifying darkness, he wakened. God spoke again, “Know for certain that your offspring will be aliens in a land not theirs, made slaves and oppressed for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment against the nation they serve and afterwards bring them out with many possessions. You will die in peace, buried at a good old age but they will come back here in the fourth generation for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”

As night came on, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch passed between the pieces of the slain animals. And God said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the erizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites the Girgashites and the Jebusites.” This God’s first appearance as a flame. It will not be the last.

Notice that Abraham did not walk the walk of death, only the flame and smoke passed among the sacrificed pieces. The implications here are significant. In effect, God swore an oath by his own name rather than those other gods. It was a symbolic statement of monotheism; there are no other gods. Furthermore, it states symbolically that this covenant depends for its fulfillment on Him alone (Hebrews 6:13–18), not on Abraham or any people he represents. In particular, if we are included, it does not depend on us. God alone is responsible for it.

In spite of all the promises, still nothing happened. To make a long story short, eventually Sarai had a son, Isaac, the son of the promise. Then God renamed Abram and Sari to Abraham and Sarah, part of covenant ceremonies that made plain the authority of the sovereign over the other party. Typically, the previous name was mingled with the name of the sovereign as is here the case. God added the “heth” from YHWH (trust me, it’s there) to their names, thus making them Abraham and Sarah.

Two questions remain. What was the covenant sign and who did Abraham represent? The sign was circumcision, a cutting with the sort of permanent effect typical of covenant signs. However, it was an ongoing and repeated sign in that it applied to all male descendants of Abraham thereby making them the specific representatives of the covenant for their own families.

What group Abraham represented has just now been made a much more difficult question. Was Abraham then a representative of just his immediate family or perhaps solely of his direct descendants? The terms of the covenant suggest Abraham was standing in for all mankind in that all mankind will be blessed through him. Different writers have argued different positions, true, but in this regard note that the church rejected circumcision as a requirement for coverage under the new covenant. That implied, then and still does now, that new covenant coverage (i.e., salvation, being in the kingdom of God) is universally available. So, Abraham was your representative, regardless who you are. Do not, however, ignore then the covenant curses against those that curse the Abrahamic group or reject the terms of the covenant..

The covenant with Abraham was later extended to his son Isaac for Abraham’s sake (Gen. 26:24,25) and was further extended then to Isaac’s son Jacob (Israel) in the place he named Bethel (“the house of God”). Here too Jacob set up the stone he made a pillow into an ebenezer as a memorial stone (Gen. 28:13 – 22).

We still have the Mosaic and Davidic covenants to consider, not to mention the new covenant foretold by the prophets which Jesus fulfilled, completed them all. That will be the subject of the next post.

Have you ever heard the term “Christian mysticism”? Any idea what it means? At heart, Christian mysticism is simply a radical realization of the Scriptural teaching that God is present everywhere at every moment. In theory, all Christians believe this, but in the fog, I might say, of day to day living, this simple fact becomes obscured or at least forgotten by most of us. When, for example, I mentioned a galaxy many millions of light years from our own to my granddaughter and told her that God was present at that galaxy’s formation long ago, is present in that galaxy now, but is—and was—also present with us today, I realized she didn’t believe me. She was perhaps eight years old at the time of that conversation; I can easily forgive her for her unbelief.

However, when as a college senior I learned that the theologian Paul Tilllich called God “the ground of all being,” I thought “there goes that crazy Tillich again!” In my defense, it sounded to me at if Tillich was advocating a sort of pantheism. The important distinction is that the “god” of pantheism is merely an impersonal characteristic permeating the universe. By contrast, Christian mysticism sees God as quintessentially Personal (specifically Three Persons bound so deeply by love that they are actually One Person) Who yet permeates and is present in all of Creation at every moment. Tillich’s “ground of all being” simply echoed the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, whom few would call a mystic: “God is in all things; not indeed as part of their essence, nor as an accident, but as an agent is present to that on which it works. . . . Now since God is very being by His own essence, created being must be His proper effect; as to ignite is the proper effect of fire. Now God causes this effect to be not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being. . . . Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it . . . . But being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things . . . . Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly.”

Yet though Wikipedia has a very lengthy article on Christian mysticism, I couldn’t find one mention of what I’ve defined as its essence. There is much valuable in what Wikipedia has to tell us on the subject, but the writer has totally missed the core feature. The fact is, Christian mysticism has such a vast history and so many facets, that it’s very hard to find the forest for the trees, and this particular author has failed completely. So I continue with some amount of trepidation; Christian mysticism needs book form to cover, not an article.

I will refer only tangentially to the pagan Greek philosophers who helped shape it and begin with Dionysius the Areopagite, one of the converts persuaded by St. Paul when he preached to the Athenians at the Areopagus. It seems likely that Dionysius was a judge and a member of the Areopagus council, an important judicial and administrative body, so he was one of the elite. Church authorities later claimed he became the first bishop of Athens, which may or may not have been the case. In any event, at the time bishops held only minor authority. What’s important is that in the 6^th Century, works by Dionysius began to show up. What’s more, the learned of the day came to realize they had a major philosopher on their hands. His extensive writings, emphasizing relationship with God, particularly as this applies to seeking out the nature of God are often so intense that they are difficult to grasp. But it was Dionysius who first articulated the Via Affirmativa and Via Negativa. These two “ways” of coming to God have since come to define religious experience not just for Christianity but for religion in general. In short, the Via Affirmativa can be encapsulated in the statement “This also is Thou,” while the Via Negativa is captured in “Neither is this Thou.” In other words, The Via Affirmativa affirms that God is present in everything at all times—the very way I’ve defined Christian mysticism. But there is a mirror-image side I’ve not yet mentioned. The Via Negativa rejects all the natural world to focus on self-denial and continual contemplation/meditation. Since this is also a means of seeking God, and since finding God is the goal of all Christian mysticism, we must make way at the table for the Via Negativa as well.

My doctoral dissertation, Theophany In The English Corpus Christi Play treated the ways in which medieval playwrights had sought to confront their audiences with the living Christ, a completely affirmative approach. One member of my committee had at a time been preparing to be a monk and had apparently been schooled in the negative. As I was defending my work he said to me, “You’re either pregnant or you’re not; you either fish or cut bait. St. Benedict spent hours on his knees in prayer and contemplation before he was granted the Beatific Vision. So which is the way to God, St. Benedict’s or this attempted theophany of yours?” “Both,” I told him.

For something like exactly a millennium the Church traced its mystic branch back to Dionysius in the First Century. Then in the Renaissance a very bright scholar named Valla noticed that some of Dionysius’s Latin was anachronistic—that he used certain phrases and vocabulary that didn’t exist in first-century Latin. He declared Dionysius’s works to be forgeries. Then others began to see that the writer had also made reference to things that had not occurred by 100 A.D. Even the great scholar Erasmus joined the fray. The upshot was that the Church realized it had been fooled for the last 1,000 years. Someone had borrowed a famous name to make his work sell faster. But who? No one knew. So they just started calling the writer the pseudo-Dionysius, or Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite, and the “name” has stuck. The controversy over who the man was does not diminish the brilliance of his insights. But now we have to say that at least formally Christian mysticism started with the pseudo-Dionysius around the Sixth Century. But by then, forms of monasticism, employing mainly negative techniques, though presumably not exclusively, had already developed, especially in the Eastern Church with the Desert Fathers by the late Third Century. So mysticism has been practiced in the Church for a very long time.

Where to go from here? From the pseudo-Dionysius to today there are so many Christians whose insights and practices as mystics have blessed us. Within my limited frame I can’t even mention them all. I’ll simply reference some of my favorites. My first happens to be the first woman we know who wrote in English, Julian of Norwich. I’ve personally visited the cell in which she lived. Living in the thirteen hundreds, she took sick and thought she was about to die, but instead God granted her sixteen extraordinary visions “of Divine Love,” as she later wrote. Recovering completely, she became an anchorite. Anchorites lived in cells literally attached to a church. A small window into the nave allowed them to participate in worship and receive the Eucharist, while an opposite window allowed them to communicate with people who might come by to be prayed for or who might bring food. Julian developed a mystical theology that included the Motherhood of God. Unsurprisingly, she’s recognized as a great champion of feminism. Her most famous metaphor is the hazelnut as an example of how God and God’s love fills the entire universe. Her most famous saying is “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

In the Sixteenth Century, as part of the counter-Reformation, St. Teresa of Avila reformed the Carmelite order of nuns and monks to stricter observance. The Roman church granted her group the more particular name of Discalced Carmelites. By the time John and I had grown up, a community of the Discalced Carmelites had taken up residence in our hometown. Teresa wrote her autobiography, The Life Of Teresa of Jesus to defend her own ecstatic, mystical experiences. In it she describes four stages of the soul’s ascent to God: mental prayer and contemplation; the prayer of quiet; absorption-in-God; and ecstatic consciousness. In fact, Bernini’s The Ecstasy Of St. Teresa, is considered the very height of Baroque sculpture. Teresa was also known to levitate on occasion. She wrote two other important books: The Interior Castle and The Way Of Perfection, both very influential works explaining her thinking and practice of Christian mysticism. St. John of the Cross became a Carmelite under Teresa’s influence and aided her in establishing the Discalced Carmelites. Over the years they communicated—and even traveled—a great deal with each other. Rome considers John one of the 38 Doctors of the Church, and in fact his writings to this day are classics of Spanish literature. Not only his prose but his poetry as well is highly regarded. His work on the development of the soul stands at the very top of Christian mystical literature. He thought of the spiritual life as separated into the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways with the “dark night of the soul” intervening between them, and his insights have been particularly influential on Roman Catholic thinking. There is much more I wish I had time and space to say about Teresa and John, two very great saints, but I must hurry on.

In the very next century another Discalced Carmelite, a French friar named Brother Lawrence, who took the religious name of Lawrence of the Resurrection, wrote a substantial series of his experiences of God in his daily life as a cook in his monastery. When he died in 1691, his writings were collated into a book titled The Practice of the Presence of God. During my college years I frequently read it, and today its insights remain embedded within me. If I am truly a Christian mystic, Brother Lawrence is largely responsible. Monasticism tends strongly toward the Via Negativa, but almost no one nor institution adheres exclusively to just one of the Viae. Almost all of us tend in our own practice to mix the two. So this friar, as a Discalced Carmelite a practitioner of the Via Negativa, in his life as a cook was decidedly affirmative. His writing has transferred his affirmative mysticism to me. His consistent and continual sensitive and joyous response to the Presence of God beside and within him as he works is awe-inspiring. The Practice of the Presence of God is not a long or difficult read. I would recommend it to everyone.

I am skipping now to the Twentieth Century where I will end with two men, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Merton. Teilhard was a French Jesuit priest and a scientist who took the theory of evolution very much to heart. After all, if God is quite literally life and is in all things, then God is intensely involved in the evolution of species. Teilhard’s Christian, mystical sense bent him toward the belief that humanity’s consciousness led upward to a converging, unifying Omega Point—his term for it—Who was, in fact, God. Quoting him on this, the American, Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor entitled one of her collections of short stories—and in fact one of the stories itself—Everything That Rises Must Converge. Much more should profitably be said about Teilhard, but again time is short. The Roman church thought it saw in Teilhard’s work an undermining of the doctrine of Original Sin and so warned its faithful against reading him. But in the present century, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis spoke positively of his work. Many of his fellow scientists are wary of his thinking. For my part, I have always been enthusiastic to see a Christian priest and scientist work at merging science and theology in a mystical framework, even if his efforts may not have always been successful.

Thomas Merton, the last mystic I’ll mention, was a Trappist monk turned deacon turned priest who wrote more than 50 books. He died of a seemingly freakish accident with an electric fan in1968 (Teilhard had died in 1955). Some scholars question his qualifications as a mystic for reasons I honestly don’t understand. I suspect that his interests and activities were so wide-reaching that it is perhaps difficult for students of his work to see the total scope as a whole. And his works cover so many subjects! For example, during his life he studied Buddhism Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Sufism and thought other religions could teach Christianity much in terms of the depth of human experience, though not so much in terms of doctrine. That didn’t really interest him. He also found parallels between Christian mysticism and Zen philosophy (as opposed to Zen Buddhism).

Again, Merton deserves so much more time and space than I have to give him here. (Am I talking myself into a book?) He was born in Prades, Pyrénées-Orientales, France in 1915. His father was Owen Merton, a painter from New Zealand of Welsh origin, and his mother an American Quaker. His father had him baptized in an Anglican church. Shortly thereafter the family moved back to America (World War I had begun.). They moved in with his maternal grandparents in Queens then a little later settled near them in Douglaston, NY. In 1917 they moved to Flushing, Queens, where Thomas’s brother, John Paul, was born. With the war over, they considered moving back to France, but then his mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. After she died in 1921, the family did return to France where in Montauban his father enrolled him, at the age of 11, at the boarding school Lycée Ingres. In the summer of 1928 they moved once again, this time to England. In 1933 he matriculated at Clare College, Cambridge to study French and Italian. Instead of studying, however, he fathered a child whom he never met, later signing at least two court documents stating that he had “no children.” Surely on some level that had to bother him for the rest of his life. I wonder if he ever tried to establish contact with the child and/or the mother.

He moved back to New York and entered Columbia University as a sophomore in 1935. He made several important and long-lasting friendships there, graduating with a B.A. in English in 1938.A friend introduced him to Mahanambrata Brahmachari, a Hindu monk, who surprised him by suggesting he return to his Christian roots by reading St. Augustine’s Confessions and also The Imitation of Christ. Merton did so then continued to read about Catholicism. He became Catholic then acquired an M.A. in English in 1939, decided to work on a Ph.D., and felt himself called to the religious life. After some fits and starts, he came to the Abbey of Our Lady Of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky in December, 1941. He became a postulant then later was accepted as a novice Trappist monk. He made his temporary vows in1944 and his solemn vows in1947. In 1948 his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, was published to much acclaim. In 1949 he became an American citizen, a deacon, then a priest. All the while he was publishing a string of works and receiving a heavy amount of fan mail. The National Review now lists The Seven Storey Mountain as one of the top 100 non-fiction books of the Twentieth Century. He had become politically involved, opposed to violence and supporting peace, racial tolerance and social equality. You can see how with all the other activities, Merton’s Christian mysticism might pass unnoticed. But a mystic he was. I would go so far as to say that his Christian mysticism undergirded all his other work. He was sensitive to the Spirit’s leading and responded to God as he saw God in all things. There were certainly moments of contemplation when the Via Negativa dominated. But most of the time, with Merton it was the Via Affirmativa with a vengeance.

Have you noticed I’ve not mentioned a single Protestant? (As a Western Christian writing to western readers, I haven’t pulled the Eastern Church, rich in mysticism as it, into the discussion at all.) As a baptized Anglican, Merton comes closest to being Protestant, but he’s obviously really to be treated as Roman Catholic, and anyway we Anglicans, we Episcopalians, are too Via Media to fit neatly into the Protestant box. There surely are Protestant Christian mystics. But where are they? I mentioned to three of my friends that I was working on this article. Two of them are Southern Baptists, the other has been raised Southern Baptist but married into the Episcopal church. They all agreed that God was life, was in and present with everything at all times, but they didn’t quite have the radical sensibility of the Presence of God. One of the weaknesses of the Reformation is that it tended to turn us into killjoys. Still, I don’t think it was so much the Reformation but the following Enlightenment that has numbed Protestant sensibilities to the Real Presence at every moment in their lives. It isn’t that they don’t believe it; it’s rather that they don’t feel it. I think that’s sad. On the other hand, do I in fact feel the Real Presence at every moment in my life? We all have a good way to go on that one, I think.

Not surprisingly, one’s world view colors one’s view of the world. But, surely, a world view is framed around a view of the world. So which comes first, the world view or the view of the world? This conundrum serves to point out how difficult it can be to “compare and contrast” world views. Competing world views may not even refer to the same world! A world view helps us explain and understand the world but, simultaneously, it often restricts our sense of the world and makes other views of the world harder to imagine and understand.

An example of how views at once restrict and liberate thinking is how the numbers line has changed the way we think of numbers. We think of a horizontal line with zero in the center. To the left are negative numbers; positive numbers are to the right. At spots at equal distances are the counting numbers. Every number has a spot: zero, 1 and -1, and so on. The negative numbers, fractions, decimals and even irrational numbers are all imagined as spots on the numbers line; they seem alike, just numbers on the numbers line.

But these are hard won insights. For thinkers from Pythagoras through Galileo and Newton, zero and one were not numbers. Numbers, for them, were the geometric shapes in which one laid pebbles on the ground. Zero was literally nothing because it had no pebbles, and, therefore, could not be a number (or anything else, for that matter); 1, just a single pebble, had no shape. Negative numbers were not even conceivable, and legend has it that the poor Pythagorean who proved the existence of irrational numbers was thrown from a boat for his efforts. You cannot believe a thing to be true if you cannot imagine it is true. The imagination controls what can be even considered for belief.

Prior Considerations - Commitment

Another complication is that world views require trust. We expect a world view to provide reasons why things in the world are as they are but this in itself is a commitment that reasoning cannot provide. Any attempt to do so necessarily generates circular reasoning in the form, “I am committed to reasoning by this line of reasoning…” The commitment is necessarily prior and that requires faith in reasoning. Well, so does everything! Yes, but there is more to it than that.

Reasoning cannot show me that the world exists, nor that you exist, nor that my past truly occurred. Worse, it cannot show me that my knowledge is true. That means I have no reason to believe the truth of the premises from which I reason. If there is evidence to warrant accepting a belief, I must trust that it is evidence and that the source is reliable. So, we commit to a belief because we can do no other; we put faith in it and hope that is the right thing to do. The effort to understand the world, the construction of a world view, demands motivation and that must come from love, a passion for understanding that sustains the effort to understand. “There are three things that last forever: faith, hope and love; but the greatest of them all is love.”ⁱ

Commitment and imagination, then, are prior to framing a world view. Their priority may be temporal but I am here speaking of it as primarily epistemic and ontological. They are more basic and fundamental than the world view and they thus will, in ways we cannot predict or fully describe, delimit the world view.

The Structure of World Views

If we have to choose a world view, understanding the nature of world views seems a good starting point. What are the characteristics of world views? How do they function? What do they do for us?

Nicholas Wolterstorff has provided a scheme I find helpful.ⁱⁱ He calls it a “theory of theories” and it applies to theories great and small. We form theories to make sense of data. What we take to be data he calls “data beliefs” because there is no certain way of getting general agreement on what comprises the “data” appropriate to a theory (competing world views may not even refer to the same world.) Thus, we must also have reasons for picking the data set we actually select. Wolterstorff refers to these reasons as “data-background beliefs.” We then set about finding an explanation for the data, that is, we frame a theory about the data (actually, we may have had the theory first and then selected the data). But there may be a number of theories that “fit” the data. To select our theory, we invoke “control beliefs” that serve as filters on the types of theories we can accept. The names of the belief types are descriptions of how they function. A particular belief may function as a control belief in one situation and, say, a data-background belief in another.

Note these are all beliefs, a matter of faith. They cannot be reasoned to, although one will certainly try to show evidence for them. We expect them to be warranted, preferably well warranted. For example, there was no proving the control belief that the stars circle the Earth. As the fourteenth century thinker, Nicole Oresme, saw clearly, it was that or let the Earth rotate, and he explicitly noted the choice was a matter of faith.

Criteria for Weighing World Views

From my world view, how do I make a fair judgment of a different world view? As I have already observed, competing world views may not even refer to the same world. We expect world views to encompass “the world” but the sets of data beliefs involved may not be identical.

The truth of a world view seems too complex to be a criterion for judging world views. Can we calculate a truth batting average for world views? Would we also need a “times at bat” statistic? It seems best to sort world views by clearer criteria and then regard the best world view(s?) as the truer or the most likely to be true.

A number of criteria are used; familiar ones would be rationality, comprehensiveness and coherence. Note that comprehensiveness creates a very heavy burden for a world view. The Greeks had a word for the danger faced by those who defend and teach world views, hubris (ὕβρις). In this context it means overconfidence leading to contemptuous treatment of other world views (and the holders of other world views). Anything with “positivism” as part of its name is likely to inspire it; Richard Dawkins, for example, seems to be suffering a severe case. Coherence is a complex idea with a substantial literature.ⁱⁱⁱ It goes beyond consistency and rationality.

I suggest an additional criterion is what might be called fitness. A world view is not just about the world, whatever that is taken to be. World views are held by people. They guide not just our thinking but our living. So, a world view must be fit for human consumption. Any world view that deserves to be called true must make room for all aspects of being human without denigrating or denying any of them (although disapproving of aspects of human behavior is, perhaps, requisite). Stoicism is an example of a world view that failed to fit human need. I suggest materialism is another.

Fitness is really a consistency requirement with two facets. Because world views guide our lives, we require a world view to fit our needs for living. This must include our emotional and/or spiritual lives, not just the life of thought. Secondly, a world view must fit the reality that only humans hold them. A “world view” that denies this human uniqueness fails the fitness test by being self-contradictory in a fundamental sense. If it denies this human uniqueness, it makes itself unable, in principle, to account for the fact that only humans hold world views. It is self-defeating. As with evolutionary “survival of the fittest,” only a fit world view should survive an encounter with the fitness criterion, others should be “cut off from the earth [and] rooted out of it”.^iv We can translate that last phrase “eradicated.” If Ockham can wield a razor, surely we may wield a hoe.

Fitness of Materialism - Homelessness

Materialism denies human uniqueness but it also has another fitness problem. Materialists are not comfortable in a material world! As Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg says, “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”^v Though pointless, comprehension apparently has some value for he thinks, “the effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”^vi He yearns for a world of purpose but his materialism refuses to validate this need. Weinberg is hardly a lone voice. Perry G. Miller, the Harvard historian has said, “... It is only too clear that man is not at home in this universe, and yet he is not good enough to deserve a better.”^vii

Miller and Weinberg believe reason drives us into accepting a world view that satisfies our reasoning but is emotionally and spiritually disappointing. If they are right, then we are indeed not at home in the universe. It seems we are amphibians, creatures of reasoning, spirit and emotion forced to live in a universe satisfactory only to the emotionless Vulcans of Star Trek.

There is something very odd about this conclusion. Only humans feel homeless in the universe. Neither Miller nor Weinberg seems to recognize the obvious question of what this homelessness might mean. Merely to raise the question suggests the answer that there must be more to the world than just matter.

Summary

We usually suppose that materialism has had great success explaining the world of ordinary matter. This is not quite right. It is its twin brother, naturalism, as embodied in modern science, to which credit belongs. Materialism has severe and embarrassing problems that, as I have argued, are quite intractable because they are inherent to the basic beliefs and structures of the view. Lastly, materialism, as a world view, is unfit for human consumption. It radically undermines reason and denigrates human needs. That is why I am not a materialist.

Notes

i 1 Corinthians 13:13

ii Nicholas Wolterstorff, Reason within the Bounds of Religion, (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, 1976), 62-66.

iii To pursue the subject further, research “coherentism.”

iv Pr. 2:22

v Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (1993).

vi Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes, updated addition, (Basic Books, New York, 1993), 155.

vii Perry, Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, Ch 1. (Harvard University Press ,1939).

How did life arise from non-life and how did the universe and the laws of nature come to be? These are the questions of origins. Complicating and connecting the last two is the question of why our universe is “fine tuned.” Modern science is the source of these problems for materialism. We think science has created challenges for religion but do not realize it has not treated materialism kindly either. Of the two, Alvin Plantinga shows that religion has had the best of it because there is a “superficial conflict” with science but actually a “deep concord.” Materialism, on the other hand, is in “superficial concord” but also “deep conflict” with science.¹

The Origin of the Universe

It might seem that the Big Bang origin of the universe is good agreement with materialism, provided we ignore the first hundredth of a second or so. Two important things happened in the first hundredth of a second of the Big Bang. The universe exploded and then, about 10^-34 seconds later, it inflated. The problem is that materialistic science cannot account for either event. The conditions of matter over this hundredth of a second would have been so unlike anything we know about now that physicists like to say the first hundredth of a second is outside the laws of physics, we cannot be confident the known laws hold true for those conditions. Actually, the known laws cause trouble.

Consider the Big Bang. Thanks to the work of Stephen Hawking, we know that tiny black holes explode (with a big bang). Big black holes do not explode. The whole universe has a very great mass and, recombined, definitely qualifies as a big black hole. So what produced the Big Bang? Remember, whatever it was had to throw all the enormous mass of the entire universe apart with such force it could never reassemble under gravity.

The Big Bang must have been hot and chaotic. The present universe is surprisingly “smooth.” We think some sort of phase change might have occurred very early in the life of the universe to make it expand and smooth out. The idea yields testable results that have been confirmed. The problem is that no one has any idea what matter and what phase change could have been involved. The particle involved has been named an “inflaton” but no one knows what sort of thing it might be. The Standard Model in particle physics satisfactorily accounts for almost everything except gravity and the neutrino mass. However, it has no room whatever for dark matter, dark energy or “inflatons.” It predicts they do not, or possibly cannot, exist.

The origin of Physical Laws and Fine Tuning

The origins and detailed nature of physical laws is in principle connected to the origin of the universe itself and, hence, to Big Bang cosmology. Since we do not, and likely cannot, get to the conditions of the actual origin of the universe and, presumably, its laws, we are largely left to consider the nature of the laws as we see them today. At this point we are projected into the “fine tuning” question because a close study of the laws reveals they meet some startlingly narrow restrictions.

Discussions of fine tuning usually focus on dimensionless quantities in physical laws because the values of such constant are independent of observer defined quantities. For our consideration, the important dimensionless quantities are:

1) the fine structure constant - α = e²/2ε_ohc = 1/137

2) the gravitational coupling constant - α_G = 2πGm_p²/hc = 5.84 x 10^-39

3) the ratio of the proton mass to the electron mass - β = m_p/m_e = 1833

4) the nuclear force constant - α_S ~ 0.2

It is now widely acknowledged that all these parameters must lie in a very narrow range of values for the universe to be anything like what it is. Change even one slightly and we would not be here. The physical laws and fundamental constants in them, then, look for all the world as if someone planned the universe. If someone planned the universe, then there is someone or something beyond the matter of the universe and that decisively falsifies materialism.

The materialist has few good choices at this point. The basic materialist answer must be that the fine tuning is really a matter of chance so chance, not planning, is behind fine tuning. There are three ways this might work. Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog² suggested that during the Big Bang there were a number of universes possible and our present universe was selected from these by chance. A second line of thinking was proposed by Robert Dicke.³ His thought was that we live in a sort of “golden era” when the, possibly changing, values of the dimensionless quantities are “just right” for us to be alive and hence to notice how finely tuned the values of the dimensionless quantities are. Lastly, a number of “multiverse’ theories have been proposed. All of them hold that our universe is just one out of many universes which actually exist or perhaps only exist potentially. The tuning of these universes is random. By chance, our universe is finely tuned and here we are, living in a finely tuned universe and wondering how we got so lucky.

The Hawking/Hertog proposal is possibly not scientific in the sense that it conflicts with the consensus view that details of the moment of origin of the universe are forever hidden from us by the early conditions. The “golden age” idea was formulated at a time of wide-spread speculation on possible time variations of universal constants. These speculations are out of favor currently. Consequently, the multiverse idea is the only option given much credence. However, it too is unscientific in the sense that we can have no contact with the many universes posited so the idea is not testable.

The fine tuning problem suggests the fundamental tenet of materialism is false and the multiverse “fix” is, at best, close to unverifiable in principle. Perhaps it is, in fact, unverifiable in principle. This is not a stable position for materialism. The situation is serious enough that quite a few physical scientists have found it necessary to abandon materialism. The late Antony Flew, the most famous and careful thinking twentieth century atheist, is perhaps the most notable defector. His flight from materialism to philosophical theism was, by his own account strongly driven by this issue and the issue of the origin of life.⁴

The Origin of Life

The origin of life seems an area of triumph for materialism but this is too simple a summary. As Darwin explicitly noted, evolution assumes the pre-existence of species.⁵ In the century and a half since the publication of Darwin’s great work, considerable very sophisticated scientific work has been expended, but we still have no answer to the question of how life began.

For the materialist, the only possibility seems to be that some sort of “emergent” process inherent to matter, some self-organizing” principle, was at work, shades of the ancient atomists’ atoms of soul. The Urey/Miller demonstration in 1953 that amino acids can be produced by lightning discharges in reducing atmospheres provided enormous energy and enthusiasm for this line of reasoning. Subsequent successes have been minimal by comparison.

All this is cause for considerable angst, even for rethinking of world views. Antony Flew remarked: “…the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.”⁶ There are, of course, a vast number of true believers who are still convinced the materialistic answer will be found. There are even some who will tell you it has been found and will provide references to the appropriate scientific articles. The truth is that their accounts are nothing but speculations, suggestions and bright ideas.

I may surely counter speculation with speculation of my own. I think hope of finding life on Mars will prove futile. Mars has never been in the “habitable zone” of our Sun. Yes, some sources disagree with me but, occasional liquid water notwithstanding, Mars has basically been too cold too long for life. The calculations are not all that difficult and the results are clear. To make it warm enough for life, however briefly, one must assume Venus-like conditions (CO₂ concentrations) that are most unlikely. Those who disagree must stretch the meaning of the term habitable zone beyond what makes good sense. The latest enthusiasm, methane on Mars, is presently dying quietly, slain by accumulating data from the rover Curiosity. Like the all but defunct SETI enterprise, life on Mars enthusiasm is destined to die out eventually. Once that case is clear, hope of finding life elsewhere will deflate and the astrobiology community will lose momentum. Even worse, it will lose funding. What will happen then will not be good for materialism.

The Origin of Species and The Mind

Things may sound bad for materialism but I can make them worse. Since materialism’s fundamental problem is centered on the human mind, the modern theory of evolution seems just the ticket for showing that reason has arisen out of unreason. As Alvin Plantinga⁷ has been at pains to show, this is greatly mistaken.

Evolution is not a good recourse for the harried materialist because it is about fitness for surviving and reproducing. Note I did not mention reasoning. It is irrelevant. But if reasoning is irrelevant to evolution, why should we expect natural selection to generate a reasoning mind? If the goal of an organism is to reproduce “the selfish gene,”⁸ it is highly improbable the organism would apply energy in the direction of creating a mind. With surely at least a billion species on Earth having no mind, we have a probability of mind then of about 10^-9 or perhaps 10^-11. Your chances of winning “powerball” are better (and I bet you haven’t won yet).

It does no good to protest that holding reasonable beliefs enhances survival and will therefore be selected for by natural selection. Natural selection should select for behavior that favors survival but that is not the same as selecting for true beliefs. For example, a nematode doubtless has behavior that favors survival because of natural selection but will anyone seriously claim that a nematode has beliefs? The problem is that humans not only have adaptive behavior, just as an evolutionist would expect, but also have beliefs. That brings us back to the question, whence came the beliefs? But now the answer cannot be “by natural selection.”

If we still insist that my mind is a product of natural selection, how likely is it that my beliefs are reliable? If materialism and evolution are right, nothing selects beliefs for truth. So, any given belief has a 50% chance of being true (or false). Plantinga settles on the “modest” requirement that a “reliable” mind should be 75% right in its beliefs. Considering a weak mind with only 1000 beliefs, the probability is then just 10^-60 of meeting the requirement.⁹ The probability that 50% of the beliefs are true is just 2.5%, and for 55% correct it is 0.668%. A better mind, capable of holding 10,000 beliefs, has a probability of 10^-568 of meeting the requirement. Note that the probabilities get worse as the number of beliefs increases. Such minds can hardly be called reliable.

For a materialist, the only way out is to throw chance away and insist that matter has some inherent tendency toward a more reliable mind, some “emergent” property or “self-organizing” principle that greatly alters the probabilities. Quite a large number of such solutions have been proposed. That fact alone shows how unsatisfactory they are. They must all fail because the basic requirement, getting beliefs from states of matter, permits no “solution.” Beliefs and states of matter are in different categories of being. Equating them is a “category mistake.”

1 Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict really Lies: Science, Religion & Naturalism, (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011). This is the entire thesis of his book.

2 S.W. Hawking and Thomas Hertog (February 2006). “Populating the Landscape: A Top Down Approach. Phys. Rev. D73 (12): 123527.

3 R.H. Dicke, “Dirac’s Cosmology and Mach’s Principle”. (1961) Nature 192 (4801): 440–441.

4 See especially Antony Flew, “A Pilgrimage of Reason” and also Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, (HarperOne 2007).

5 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species chapter 14.

6 Antony Flew, stated in a letter to Richard Carrier.

7 See, for example, Plantiga, ob. cit., Part IV in particular.

8 The reader no doubt realizes we have Richard Dawkins to thank for this felicitous turn of phrase from his book by that title.

9 Using Stirling’s approximation, I get the exponent -56.81 but -59.54 using an improved approximation. In Where the Conflict really Lies: Science, Religion & Naturalism, p. 333 Plantinga gives -58 and credits the result to Paul Zwier. The differences are immaterial.

The Historical Development of Materialism

In the sixth century BC, the city of Miletus on the Ionian coast was the richest of all Greek cities. Its well laid-out streets became the standard pattern for later Roman cities. It was here, in the Miletian school of philosophy, that naturalism and materialism first appeared. Thales of Miletus, the founder of the school, also gave mathematics its start as an abstract and deductive discipline. His contribution to materialism was the claim that “all is water.” It began a lengthy assault on the problem of “the one and the many;” how to explain our enormously diverse world in terms of just a few elements (preferably only one). In choosing water as the one thing out of which all is made, Thales founded materialism. All is water and water is matter, ergo, all is matter.

This move was a deliberate rejection of mythic explanations of the world. Henceforth, explanations would be naturalistic, in terms of the inherent nature of things without reference or recourse to external entities, particularly, the gods, titans and heroes of Greek myth. It was also materialistic in that it tried to explain materials and the actions of material bodies solely in terms of their own nature and that of other materials. Thus, from the beginning, materialism and naturalism were Siamese twins, different but related ideas joined at the hip.

Even at that time, the two were separable. If there is more to the world than matter, then naturalism must explain the world in terms of natures other than just material entities. The hip that joins the two views is the reductionist assumption that matter is all there is and all that needs explaining. This is the fundamental tenet of materialism. It defines materialism; it is its crucial and controlling belief.ⁱ Thales and his immediate followers did not explicitly make this assumption. Indeed, Frederick Copleston remarks, “they were not materialists in the sense of deliberately denying a distinction between matter and spirit, for the very good reason that the distinction had not been so clearly conceived that its formal denial was possible.”ⁱⁱ

A century later however, the atomists made that denial explicit. Leucippus, possibly of Miletus, and his student, Democritus of Abdera, saw everything as “atoms and the void.” They advanced a thorough-going materialism where even “soul” was a material, with its own type of atoms. This early atomism was acausal. As Lucretius explained Epicurean atomism, events in the universe occur through “chance swervings” of atoms.ⁱⁱⁱ To the early atomists, the human mind was a passive receiver of projected thin films of atoms (simulacra or eidola) which are perceived as thoughts. Their universe was wholly purposeless but also deterministic and mechanical.

Even at that early date, human reasoning was a sticking point and it seems the problem was recognized as far back as Democritus. A mantra of the old atomists was that “nothing comes from nothing.” It seems a corollary that only irrationality comes from irrationality and no atomist wanted to attach any form of rationality to the behavior of the atoms. Indeed, for the early atomists, all events, especially our thoughts, occur without cause and are necessarily irrational. Materialism thereby undercuts its own claim to be a true description of thought including, of course, all thoughts about how the world really works which sum together to be materialism.

There is something very odd about this conclusion. If materialism is true, it makes itself false. Like Jörmungandr, the Norse World Serpent, materialism swallows itself. Unfortunately for materialists, their beliefs and reasoning cannot be taken seriously unless materialism is false. If materialism is true, there are no grounds for believing that any belief at all is true and, hence, there are no grounds for believing materialism is true. This difficulty does not falsify materialism,^iv but it does eviscerate it. This, the fundamental problem of materialism, is an inherent, and therefore an ineradicable, flaw.

Epicurus tried to ameliorate this difficulty by using atomism to create an ethical view of the world based on the belief that pleasure is the determiner of the good. He made what is now the classic move of materialism, “explaining” the human mind in materialistic terms.^v His was the first of the many unsuccessful efforts to construct ethics from materialism. The difficulty is that positing that all matter has some measure of mind is simply a return to animism or pantheism, not a panacea but a deadly poison that will destroy the patient.

The crux of the matter is the human mind. As Aristotle acutely noted, with special emphasis on the soul (ψυχή) “the difference is greatest between those who make these [elemental principles] corporeal and those who make them incorporeal.”^vi That is, in fact, where the matter still stands although we might update the language to say that the main difference is between materialists and theists.

Epicurus saw the chance swervings of the atoms as a way of escape from the deterministic bounds of earlier atomism and claimed we can freely choose our views and actions. He was confident an understanding of the world would free men from the fear of death and thus lead them to a life of tranquility. Despite his efforts, the Stoics were more popular and came to dominate the ethical teachings of the late classical era. Both these world views held that understanding and a disciplined mind are the proper anodyne to pain, fear and suffering.

Materialism is a classic monism where being is constructed from only one type of entity or thing. The classical Greeks followed Thales into monism, merely offering variants on the “all is…” theme he began. “All” is a most inclusive word. All monisms are thereby necessarily world views; that is, they are attempts to explain everything whatsoever. Proposing a world view takes courage but proposing a monism takes a special boldness, perhaps hubris.

Naturalism is a less bold view but it does not thereby escape difficulties. The fundamental problem of naturalism is that it is inherently circular. In order to explain a thing in terms of its nature, one must already know its nature, a chicken and egg problem that is methodological and, hence, not as serious as the fundamental problem of materialism. We may hope to circumvent it by admitting the circularity but claiming we are “spiraling in” on the truth in the process of circling it. We must not be too hard on naturalism here for it may well be that a degree of circularity is an unavoidable feature of any philosophical system, a fly in all ointments. Materialism, on the other hand, has a radical problem, a problem at its very roots. There is then nothing left to do save to “cry ’havoc’ and let slip the dogs of war.”^vii

Current Difficulties of Materialism - What is Matter?

Since its beginnings, materialism has had to respond to scientific changes every bit as much as has religion. Over the centuries, views of matter and the material world have altered continually and substantially. Indeed, materialism all but died out with the rise of Christianity only to be resurrected by the Enlightenment.

What matter actually is, Kant’s ding an sich, has always been a lurking problem. If all is really matter, then, of course, there is no difficult; whatever you can see or name is an example of matter. Thus, the fundamental tenet screens from sight an examination of the critical issue of exactly what identifies matter.

Early materialism had to cope with many suggestions as to the one element from which all is constructed. They resolved the issue by following a pathway already pioneered in dealing with a multiplication of gods, that is, syncretize and call them all matter. The decision seems to have been made effortlessly and without objection.

With the rise Modern Science and Enlightenment came a serious attempt to get at the ding an sich. Early chemists like Robert Boyle recognized the importance of conservation of weight (mass) in chemical processes. Isaac Newton then gave mass additional responsibility for both inertia and gravity. Making his new list of elements, Lavoisier could not make mass the defining character of matter because his list still contained the old element “fire/phlogiston” in its renamed form of “caloric.” As phlogiston, it had had a tendency to take on negative weight as well as positive weight. Accordingly, he simply required that all matter must obey a conservation law.

Thus, by 1800, two persistent and significant problems for materialism had made their debuts, fields (gravity) and energy (caloric). Einstein made energy and matter equivalent and showed that gravity is an inertial effect but this came at the expense of blurring the definition of matter. Since energy thereby gained a gravitational interaction, it seemed we could simply broaden the definition of matter to be anything that interacts with gravity and, more or less, restore the equilibrium of the mid-seventeenth century emphasis on matter having weight. The only difficulty was where to put gravity. It does not seem to be material. Studies of electric and magnetic forces and fields only served to increase the difficulties.

Quantum Mechanics then arose to sow more confusion. The wave-particle duality of the new Quantum Mechanics further blurred the sense of what matter “is.” Is the wave function merely an expression of the probabilities of where a particle will be or is it identified with the very being of the particle? Physicists tend to talk out of both sides of our mouths on this; I think we have to conclude that our understanding here is still uncertain.

Furthermore, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle opened a Pandora’s box of “virtual particles.” Are they matter too? Maybe not; they are so ephemeral. Unfortunately, ephemeral or not, they cause physical effects like the Casimir Effect and now, with the discovery of the Higgs boson, they create all the mass of all the “real” particles in the universe! Rewriting Quantum Mechanics and Relativity into Quantum Electrodynamics added the difficulty that fields are mediated by exchange particles. Oh, all except gravitational fields but we hope those are mediated by particles called gravitons although they do not fit the Standard Model which is so satisfyingly confirmed with the discovery of the Higgs boson. Gravity is still the odd man out.

To these woes we must now add dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter, which makes up about 27% of the total “matter” of the universe, may eventually prove to be made of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMP’s), whatever they might be. As yet we do not know what dark energy is but it makes up about 68 % of the universe. WIMP’s interact with “ordinary” matter only by adding to the total forces of gravity, the weakest of the four forces in the universe. Hence, physicists gravitate to the name WIMP’s. Dark energy weakens gravitational affects, possibly by contributing a fifth, repulsive, force to the other four. It would be nice to believe that dark matter and dark energy will be singular entities but the history of our developing understanding ordinary matter does not encourage that hope. Things may be much more complicated than we can now imagine.

Science has, of late, had great success explaining things about our world from a materialist (or, more precisely, a naturalist) perspective. Since much of what we see of the world is “ordinary” matter, the success leaves us with the impression that materialism is an extremely successful world view. With the recent realization that 95% of the universe is quite unexplained, that perceived success rate seems due for re-evaluation. Despite the success of materialism at explaining ordinary matter, problems of real significance, both old and new, beset it. We can, at least, still hope that the defining characteristic of matter is that it is whatever interacts with gravity.

Perhaps. But, if we overlook the still missing magnetic monopole, there remains yet one more clinker, “inflatons.” I will soon introduce them to make the universe “inflate” immediately after the Big Bang but what they are (or were) and how they interact with each other, let alone with gravity, is quite unknown.

i There is a tendency today to distinguish “methodological naturalism” from “metaphysical naturalism.” But the latter is identical with materialism and I much prefer the shorter form for its bluntness. As I use the term, “naturalism” is necessarily a method and, hence, equivalent to “methodological naturalism.”

ii Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy: Vol. I Greece and Rome Part I (Image Books, 1960), 44.

iii Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of the Universe (Penguin Books Ltd, 1987), 66.

iv It was Dr. Merold Westphal who first pointed this out to me.

v Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1991) and Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis: the Scientific Search for the Soul (1995) are two of the most recent (and no more successful) versions of this maneuver.

vi Aristotle, De Anima, Book I, Chapter II; trans. By Kenelm Foster and Silvester Humphries, (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1959), p. 76

vii William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar 3.1.268.

Moslems naturally say the same is true of Jesus but that is not the case. As my last post demonstrated, that Jesus was crucified, dead, buried and resurrected is one the best attested facts of history. In terms of witnesses and first hand accounts, it is better attested than that Julius Caesar was stabbed to death on the Ides of March, 44 BC by a group of senators.

The Qur’an itself contains some items of possible historic relevance. But these for the most part are unquestionably explicit claims of historicity. On that account, they may then be attempts to establish an unreal “historicity.” What one needs is inadvertent evidence and that is as much in short supply with respect to Muhammed as explicit evidence. As to the paucity of explicit evidence, there is no early coin or stone inscription evidence of his existence but there ought to be some, given the cultural context and assuming Islamic tradition is accurate.

The other main source of material about Muhammed resides is in the Hadiths. The word means “reports” and it is what others reported of the actions and sayings of Muhammed. Here again, there is a dearth of inadvertent evidence; the hadiths are even more obviously propagandistic than Qur’anic sources. They were transmitted orally for several centuries after the death of Muhammed. The various written forms date from about two centuries after Muhammed and his contemporaries had died. As a result, hadith studies in Islam has long be hugely involved and controversial, making determinations of historicity even more difficult.

By the way, the word Qur’an means “the recitation.” It is, in fact, inadvertent evidence at last. It indicates, that Muhammed memorized and recited the Surahs comprising the book. In turn, that supports his claim to being illiterate, a claim I, nevertheless, rather doubt. He was an apparently able businessman to whom illiteracy would have been a significant disadvantage.

Faithful Moslems are therefore also expected to memorize and recite. Compare that with “the man” in the first Psalm “whose delight is in the law of the Lord and he meditates in His law day and night.” Memorizing to be faithful is a different motive from memorizing from delight and for meditation. I am not saying Moslems do not delight and meditate but that the emphasis and sense of purpose is different. Performing the “five pillars of Islam” is central to Islam compared with the command to “love the God with all you are and your neighbor as yourself” as Astronaut Victor Glover has just now so nicely rendered it for us from the Moon. The underlined verbs are very different. The first signal from the US colonel rescued in Iran this Easter was “God is good” and, not very much to the credit of the CIA, it raised the question that it might be from a Moslem. No Moslem says that; rather “God is great.” The two are very different comments on the attributes of of a very different God.

So what was Muhammed main mistake? Stated baldly, he mistook Allah for God. As I have discussed in other posts, Allah is not noted as a loving god or a good god but as a merciful and beneficent god and therein lies a vast difference. Allah is not interested in fellowship or relationship with us; God is. Allah is not involved in human life or history; God is. If you ask if Allah is holy, the answer will be yes in that he is unique and all-powerful. If you ask if God is holy the answer is yes, in that he is morally pure and good and loving. Transcendence attaches to both Allah and God but Allah is utterly other where God is immanent as well as transcendent. God is personal and much more than that. Allah may be a personal name or perhaps not; but other than that, there is nothing personal about Allah. Let me try again with a somewhat bizarre analogy. God is like Captain Kirk and Allah is like First Officer Spock (and give a thought to the Captain’s name). Yes, the Qur’an says God loves the righteous and God loves the pious, and so on. What it does not say, because it cannot conceive it, is that God loved the whole world so much he died for it. Not the same God.

Asked for a (personal) name, God tells Moses “I am.” The subtlety of the name is truly beyond my ability to expound. I’ll have do something here however to help you see a little of what it must mean. For one thing, it means God exists but it makes reference to nothing else because God is contingent on nothing else. We, and all we can see around us, are contingent on God. God is thus unique and like nothing else. So God is utterly transcendent yet there He is interacting with Moses, a burning bush that is not consumed, then a speaker telling Moses to remove his sandals out of reverence. So He is also immanent, personal and involved in the problems of Moses and his people.

Allah is not the great I am. God is.

Muhammed’s main mistake is he took Allah in place of God. How this came about is hard to say given the uncertainty of all the “information” available about Muhammed. He certainly knew of God through his contacts with Jews and Christians. The Qur’an has much to say of Noah and Moses and Jesus (Isa). It is invariably inaccurate but he did know a bit about both faiths. Indeed, recent scholarship shows that a sizable fraction of the Qur’an is rewritten Arabic Christian hymns from a Syrian liturgy. Don’t ask me why Allah should decided to plagarize what he had Gabriel make Muhammed recite.

The name Allah itself is of uncertain origin but it occurred in Arabic well before Muhammed’s time and applied to the chief god in a pantheon of Arabian gods. Influenced by Jewish and Christian monotheism, Muhammed took up monotheism and applied the name Allah to the one God.

His motivations are uncertain. According to Islamic tradition, he took to pondering the failings and difficulties of his contemporaries in a cave close to Mecca. When he was forty (610 AD), the angel Gabriel appeared to him and said, “Read” to which he replied, “I can’t read.” [Just what form the text was in is never mentioned.] Gabriel said again, “Read.” [Moslems insist this is important because it shows Muhammed could not have invented the Qur’an.] Gabriel seized him, crushing him in a vise-like grip until Muhammed could take no more. This was then repeated twice. Once more Gabriel said “Read.” Apparently this made Muhammed literate and he learned to recite what is now Surah 96 of the Qur’an. Yes, the 1^st revelation is now the 96^th Surah. Here is what Muhammed memorized and recited:

1. Read: In the Name of your Lord who created. 2. Created man from a clot. 3. Read: And your Lord is the Most Generous. 4. He who taught by the pen. 5. Taught man what he never knew. 6. In fact, man oversteps all bounds. 7. When he considers himself exempt. 8. But to your Lord is the return. 9. Have you seen him who prevents? 10. A servant when he prays? 11. Do you think he is upon guidance? 12. Or advocates righteousness? 13. Do you see how he disbelieved and turned away? 14. Does he not know that Allah sees? 15. No. If he does not desist, We will drag him by the forelock. 16. A deceitful, sinful forelock. 17. Let him call on his gang. 18. We will call the Guards 19. No, do not obey him; but kneel down, and come near.”

He went home and told his wife the story. Frightened and greatly confused, he thought Gabriel was a jinn who now possessed him. It was either that or that he was now a poet!? I must say, if I had been in his shoes, I would definitely have been confused too. It is as incoherent a mess of a message as anything I can imagine. But it came from Allah through Gabriel.

Khadija, his wife, was sure Allah would not disgrace him so and she called on the aid of her cousin Waraqah ibn Nawfal, a Nestorian Christian. Hearing the tale, Waraqah said he was sure it was a revelation from God and that Muhammed had been appointed prophet to his people. He vowed to support Muhammed toward this end then had the good sense to die a few days later. I can’t see how Surah 96 could make him think Muhammed was a prophet. It makes me wonder if Waraqah wasn’t just exercising a malicious sense of humor.

Apparently on the strength of this experience, Muhammed took on the task of being the prophet of Allah for his people, whether they liked or not. He literally had to create an army to make it so but, over the next two decades, revelations from Allah through Gabriel which were memorized and recited by Muhammed became the dominant religion of the formerly pantheistic Arabs.

How and by whom the recitations were later transcribed is unknown and unmentioned but the leavings of it were in disarray at the time of the death of Muhammed. But that was characteristic of the man; he left no designated replacement behind and no instructions as to how his followers should proceed to find one. One is left with the feeling that it was a matter of indifference; he’d gotten what he wanted out of the set up and Allah could shift for himself.

This main mistake of Muhammed had numerous consequences and I can’t possibly expound them all. Regardless of what Islamist say, looking at the actions under Muhammed himself and since that time, the default setting of Islam is to use violence against non-Muslims either to forcibly convert them to Islam or simple to destroy them (“strike the neck”). The Qur’an is a cautious document and all permission to commit violence is qualified as fighting for the faith, resisting oppression or outright violence from those outside the faith or oathbreakers. However, Muhammed set the tone himself and stretched fighting for the faith and because of oath breaking into many tens of battles against those who opposed him.

The hadiths are not as cautious but here the different sets of accepted hadiths among the different sects of Islam make generalization a treacherous undertaking. As I write, the Shia of Iran, who have been shouting “Death to America” for almost fifty years simply for supporting Israel (and/or being “Christian”?) and exporting and supporting terrorism world-wide, have been almost obliterated but they persist in the path they have long chosen.

An extention of Muhammed’s poor choice is also involved here as I pointed out in my post of 3/7/26 on the Mahdi. Allah has, the Twelvers believe, sequestered the 12^th Imam until the end times. Since the news right now seems the best of times to fit their views, the failure of the Mahdi to appear should eat away at their confidence. It seems it has not yet begun to do so except there are whispers of the growth of conversions to Christianity. This all is a true reflection of their vision of Allah, a direct consequence of Muhammed’s main mistake.

Another consequence of this mistake is that Allah, as presented in the Qur’an, frequently makes anachronistic errors. I’ll mention two:

Surah 20:71 Pharoah threatened, “How dare you believe in him before I give you permission? He must be your master who taught you magic. I will certainly cut off your hands and feet on opposite sides and crucify you on the trucks of palm trees. – Pharoah is angry with his magicians for believing in Moses. Crucifixion was invented by the Romans many centuries after the life of Moses.

Surah 20:95 Moses then asked, “What did you think you were doing Oh! Samiri?” After the escape from Egypt, the claim in the Qur’an is that the Samaritans lead Israel astray. Moses is here speaking to a Samaritan! Samaritans did not exist until many centuries later than Moses.

There are really only two ways these errors can be explained. The first is that Allah does not know what he is talking about. In that case, Muhammed has indeed made a big mistake in choosing gods. The other possibility is that Muhammed is making up the Surahs on his own and he is ignorant of these historical details. The errors can only have originated with Allah or with Muhammed. Neither explanation benefits Islam.

Choose your world carefully.

The date is not mine. Here I rely on what I regard as the definitive work of Colin Humphreys and Graeme Waddington^* and I will summarize their argument so you can understand what lies behind their conclusion. Their most important move is dating by lunar eclipses but they also use an improved evaluation of the first century Jewish calendar. From this, their date for the crucifixion is April 3, 33 AD and that places the first Easter on April 5 of that year.

The evidence bearing on the date is found solely in the Gospels and most of you are probably aware that the three synoptic Gospels seem to imply the Last Supper was a Passover meal (Seder) which would ordinarily be eaten on Nissan 15 (which we would count as Friday night). If so, the crucifixion was on Nissan 16.

John’s Gospel explicitly states (18:28 and 19:14) the trial and crucifixion ran from the early night hours of the day before the Passover until before the coming of the next evening when the Passover arrived as darkness fell. That places John’s Last Supper discourse, the subsequent trials and the crucifixion on Good Friday, Nissan 15. John does not disagree with the Last Supper as a Seder but clearly implies it was eaten a day earlier than the official Passover (the beginning of Nissan 16). You must ever keep in mind that their “day” began as evening fell not at midnight like our “day.”

In all the Gospels the Last Supper is obviously a Seder that Jesus deliberately and spectacularly reformatted to extend the Passover understanding of salvation. The apparent disagreement disappears if we understand the timing needs Jesus foresaw. Taking John as correct, Jesus was, I think, holding Passover a day early as one of his standard re-enactments. He was preempting the old Passover with a new, and thus necessarily earlier, Passover. His blood and body was to replace the blood and flesh of the Paschal lamb and he was crucified as the Paschal lambs were being slain before the beginning of the official Passover.

Passover that year was on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. That meant the body had to be hastily buried before sunset and the arrival of both the Sabbath and the Passover – a doubly holy day.

As a conservative procedure, Humphreys and Waddington thus looked for years when the Nissan 14 or 15 was a Friday. Nissan begins with the first sighting of a tiny crescent after the first new moon after the vernal equinox. There is some uncertainty here because spotting the tiny crescent is tricky and weather dependent. Additionally, the Jewish religious calendar is lunar and that introduces difficulties with the year because twelve lunar months are usually short of a year by 11 days and leap years compound the problems. The year is not an integer multiple of days and the month isn’t either. We are not completely sure how the Sanhedrin managed the leap year intercalation of the necessary thirteenth month in the first century. Oh, neither did they have Arabic numerals to calculate with. Yet they were stunning good at working with what they had. I have personally worked through most of Ptolemy’s tables of calculations (in sexagesimal fractions) and found absolutely zero mistakes! Humphreys and Waddington coped with these issue. I’ll be happy to send you a copy if you cannot get one otherwise.

What they discovered is that Nissan 14 Fridays (by the then current Julian calendar) were possible only in the years 27, 30 and 33 (Pontus Pilate was procurator only from 26 to 36). Only 27 and 34 fit if the crucifixion was on Nissan 16.

Luke 3:12 explicitly tells us that John the Baptist began his ministry in the fifteenth year if Tiberius Caesar which dates 28-30 AD. That rules 27 out. Then too, 34 is the likely date of the conversion of St. Paul and that was a year of bad weather that made the tricky lunar observation difficult and doubtful. Yes, Sir Isaac Newton favored 34 but Humphreys and Waddington (fellow Englishmen) venture that “his main reason seems to have been that 23 April is St George’s Day!” The choice then comes down, as it so often has before, to 30 and 33 AD, the “usual suspects.” An important possibility has, however, been eliminated. Nissan 15 is eliminated as the day of the Last Supper. It can only have been at the close of Nissan 14. John’s Gospel got it straight and the vagueness of the synoptic Gospels on the point is no more than that.

Humphreys and Waddington summarize much of the New Testament evidence as follows:

Thus Jesus died at the same time as the Passover lambs were slain. This is consistent with many New Testament statements, for example, ‘Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us’ (1 Cor. 5:7). In addition, Paul refers to Christ as the first fruits of those who rise from the dead (1 Cor. 15:20), a clear analogy with the offering of the first fruits in the temple, which occurred on Nisan 16. Paul would surely not have used this analogy had the crucifixion been on Nisan 15 and the resurrection on Nisan 17. Thus in describing Christ symbolically as the Passover lamb and as the first fruits, the Pauline chronology of the crucifixion events is identical to that of John. Both are consistent with the Synoptic chronology, provided the Last Supper was not a Passover meal held at the official time. In addition, the Babylonian Talmud records that Jesus’ death was on the eve of Passover, i.e. on 14 Nisan (Sanhedrin 43a). Thus there is an impressive unanimity from all sources that the crucifixion was on 14 Nisan and consequently the only two plausible years for the crucifixion are A.D. 30 and A.D. 33.

So which year was it, 30 or 33? Fortunately, there is yet unused evidence in what I call the inadvertent evidence of the Gospels. For one thing, the Gospels indicate three or perhaps four Passovers during Jesus’ ministry. Since John the Baptist began his ministry in 28-30 and Jesus’ began his after John had baptized him, 30 is ruled out because 3-4 Passovers cannot be fitted in. Also, John 2:20 tells us the Jews told Jesus the Temple had been being built for 46 years. Thus, the interaction that generated the remark well before the crucifixion must have occurred in 30 or 31.

We must check beyond the Gospels for the necessary and crucial inadvertent evidence. In Acts 2:14-21 Peter at Pentecost, addressing the crowd on the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ quoted the prophet Joel (2:30), “The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before that great and glorious day of the Lord shall come.” Because “everyone” was hearing the speech “in his own tongue.” Peter was insisting the disciples were not drunk but were bearing witness of these things. He is referring to the events on the Nissan 14. The Synoptics all tell us that from the sixth hour to the ninth hour there was a darkness over the whole land. Apocryphal sources support Peter in affirming the moon turned to blood on the crucifixion of Christ.

The darkness cannot have been a solar eclipse because Nissan 14 would be time for a full moon and a possible lunar eclipse. It is widely thought that the darkness was a khamsin dust storm. The “moon turned to blood” was in fact a standard ancient idiom for a lunar eclipse. And then too, it presaged Easter, “that great and glorious day of the Lord shall come.”

In response to this evidence, Humphreys and Waddington turned then to astronomy, searching for lunar eclipses during those years. They found seven eclipses in 27-34 AD, none in the year 30 AD. Strikingly, there was only one serious candidate. It occurred on April 3, 33 AD on a rising moon. It was a 60% eclipse, not a full one, visible in Jerusalem at eventide and red as it rose. So there you have it. The crucifixion occurred on Nissan 14 in the Jewish religious calendar, April 3 by the Julian calendar date.

Mentioning Julian calendar dates introduces a new problem. We now reckon by the Gregorian calendar. In each calendar the year begins with January 1 but the Julian calendar started count in 45 BC and the Gregorian in the year October of 1582 AD. So the Julian calendar was the official, legal calendar of the first century. It was the only one available.

So what was Julian April 5, 33 AD by Gregorian count? The difference is that the Julian calendar year used a year of 365.25 days and the Gregorian calendar year is 365.2425 days closer to the more accurate 365.2422 days in the year. The implication of this difference is that, in the Julian calendar every year divisible by 4 is a leap year but the Gregorian calendar denies leap year status to every year divisible by 100 except for centuries that are multiples of 400, e.g., 400 and 800 etc.

What this all means for our Easter date this year is that April 5 this year corresponds to what was called April 3 in the Julian calendar. That was the date of the crucifixion so this year’s Easter will be exactly 1,993 years after Good Friday, the day of Jesus’ crucifixion, not of his resurrection after all. His resurrection was on April 5. 33 AD by the Julian calendar then current. At the time, and if anyone was counting, it was April 5. Like it’s April 5 this Easter. Sorry about that. I know it’s confusing but this happens all the time.

Oddities of counting procedures are actually common. Chinese count a newborn as 1 year old. Hey, the day you’re born is your first birthday, right? As someone who has both counted weekly income from a paper route and church offering receipts, I know well how often two counts disagree. More to the point here, Jesus said himself, and has been said by many, to have been buried for three days. But that was Friday evening to sometime Sunday morning. We would count it as about 36 hours and a day and a half but it was Friday, Saturday and Sunday and equal to three days! It’s all in how you count. As it transpires, even counting incurs uncertainties. Just try counting ballots in an election!

Many authors tell you Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642. It’s perfectly true but England switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregory calendar in 1752 thereby reassigning his birthday to January 4, 1643. A different month, day and even year! Poor Isaac! Fortunately, he had the good sense to die in 1727 so he was spared the chaos occasioned by the 11 day difference. It caused riots in England with the farmers shouting, “Give us back our 11 days.” They realized they would have 11 fewer days for harvest that year, what with the church calendar holy days coming at them sooner than expected. The 11 days were calculated to restore the church calendar, that is, to realign dates of Easter with the vernal equinox. They had to compensate for the leap years mistakenly imposed by the Julian calendar over the intervening centuries.

Let me explain the effect of those 11 days on the English speaking world (that’s us). Take April 5, a Sunday, as the day to change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. The next day should be Monday, April 6 but we lose 11 days now. Get your calendar and count 11 days from April 6 to April 16, a Thursday. Now wave your magical, Gregorian wand and make them disappear. So the next Day after April 5 is Friday, April 17. The Julian calendar is thus -2 days on the Gregorian, back up the weekly day count by two, Sunday back to Friday. And that’s why our April 5 this year is exactly 1,993 real and actual Earth years from the Julian date of the actual Good Friday, Julian day April 3.

There are lessons to learn from this peculiar excursion that was, purportedly, about the date of Easter. First of all, notice again the value of inadvertent textual evidence. Little, incidental, almost sideline remarks can provide valuable information. Indeed, they may provide critical and vital information and/or evidence. Precisely because it is given almost incidentally it is quite free of any possible accusation of bias or of attempts to mislead the reader. It is plainly no part of any propaganda campaign, no matter how a reader or, even worse, an academic may wish to find such a thing in the text. Call it inadvertent evidence, subtext or stuff read between the lines, it is an important, potentially indispensable, part of any text. In certain texts it may be the only thing you can trust.

Another valuable lesson is that John’s Gospel nails down details where the Synoptic writers seem a bit confused. The significance here is not obvious because few of us realize that John’s Gospel was “later” and is therefore suspect among the literary crowd. But time after time, the subtext of John’s Gospel reveals a precision of detail that implies it is the work of one who was there when it happened and who ought to know. It is John who correctly distinguishes speech differences between Judeans and Galileans that only very recent Jewish New Testament scholarship has exposed again.

Other lessons relate to the correspondence between Old Testament prophesies and the events of Holy Week. Peter’s use of Joel 2:30 is just one example. Paul’s connecting of 1 Cor 5:7 and 15:20 and details of the crucifixion are more examples. If you recall, Jesus expounded at length to Cleopas (and surely Mary, his wife) on the road to Emmaus on how his crucifixion, death, burial and resurrection were prefigured in the (OT) Scriptures. Some of these events were, to some degree, potentially under Jesus’ control but most were not.

What you have been reading is a post on a substack section about making a good choice of your world view. Let me suggest that this post strongly contributes to the case for choosing a Christian worldview. The crucifixion, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus all really happened and seeing how even the subtexts of the accounts of reinforce those statements makes the reality more striking. In physics, things like atoms and electrons were transformed from science myths to scientific facts once we had good values of characteristics like mass and size. In much the same way, a specific date like April 5, 33 AD brings the reality to life in ways not much else can.

* Colin J. Humphreys and W. Graeme Waddington, The Date of the Crucifixion, PERSPECTIVES in Science and Christianity, Vol. 37, (March, 1985) , pp. 2 - 10.

The background goes well back into Old Testament times and subsequent events. It involves some geography, which is where I will begin. Grossly oversimplifying, Israel, then and now, was a north/south corridor for trade and warfare separating Egypt in the south from northern cultural and power centers.

Its eastern border, roughly speaking, was the Great Rift Valley which runs well into Kenya in Africa. The whole Rift Valley is tectonically active with frequent earthquakes and the volcanic activity that probably destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Much of East Africa is drifting away from the rest of Africa along the rift.

The Jordan River tracks through the rift in Israel, along the way creating the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea shoreline lies at 1,440 feet below sea level. It is the lowest spot on land anywhere on Earth. The very ancient city, Jericho, is in the Jordan valley near the north end of the Dead Sea so the road down to it from Jerusalem is steep, rough and dangerous which is why Jesus used it as the setting of the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Going west from the Jordan River, one encounters highlands, the mountainous region of Israel that includes Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The latter is the higher so when Jesus was born Bethlehem’s two reservoirs supplied water to Jerusalem. After much work had been done making “the crooked straight and the rough places plain” (borrowing Isaiah’s words) the highlands long ago became the best trade route around the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

New mountains are rich in minerals and soil eroded off them, collecting below them, makes good croplands. Thus, going further westward toward the Mediterranean we find the rich and much coveted lowlands occupied early on primarily by the Philistines. These people were evidently mostly refugees from the wars (Trojan War, etc.) and tectonic disturbances of Greece and surrounding territories.

Geography always establishes constraints on trade, culture and politics. Israel was no exception. Physical constraints made its two primary roads the only realistic choice for all trade east of the Mediterranean Sea. Coastal travel was not as good nor as continuous. Naturally, that made the highlands the military choice as well. Consequently, Israel was forever fearful of attack or just simply under attack. The people decided they had to get themselves a king.

Eventually, Samuel anointed Saul the first king and he immediately took on the rich lands of the Philistines but was not a great success. King David replaced him so well that he became the ideal king of Israel. Significantly, he took Jerusalem as his capital and moved the Tabernacle and arc of the covenant from Shiloh to Jerusalem, thus initiating its role as the Holy City. His military abilities eventually brought Israel a brief respite of peace.

Solomon, David’s son and successor, was thus able to turn his attention to organizing the kingdom and its infrastructure. He built many government properties and most especially he replaced the Tabernacle with a grand and elaborate Temple. The first Temple.

All this cost money, of course, which Solomon naturally extracted from the people by taxation. That’s what kings do. When he died, his son and heir, Rehoboam, promised not tax relief but heavier taxes and in the following revolt, in about 992 BC, he lost the northern part of the kingdom to Jereboam. This kingdom retained the name Israel while the southern kingdom was named just Judah for its major tribe. Judah and Israel then carried on fraternal warfare for more than two centuries.

The fraternal warfare ceased when the highlands once more became the route for war against Egypt. The Neo-Assyrian empire, under Tiglath-Pileser, decided it needed to push back against both Egypt and the rise of Babylon. Israel and Judah stood in the way of their attack on Egypt and, in 722 BC, Samaria, then the capital of Israel, fell to king Sargon II. Most of its people were carried off into slavery or just displacement. They disappeared and became the ten lost tribes of Israel. This was Assyrian policy for pacification so additionally, foreigners were displaced from their lands and introduced into Israel. A remnant of Jews remained near Samaria and became the Samaritans, a people who are still there to this day. Later Jews were sure they had intermarried and thus bore tainted blood. The Samaritans also accepted only the five books of Moses as Scriptures and rejected Jerusalem and its Temple as the Holy City.

As it transpired, Judah was miraculously spared of much of this but Assyria itself collapsed shortly after, having failed to suppress Babylon. In 586 BC, Jerusalem fell to Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and much of the populace of Judah was likewise carried off to Babylon. Most importantly, the Temple was destroyed and the Shekinah (the presence of God) dispersed. The arc of the covenant with the tablet of ten commandments also disappeared. The people, in this case, were able to maintain continuity and when Cyrus the Great overthrew Babylon, he permitted them to return to their ancestral homeland in 539 BC, although they remained under his, very pagan, dominion and the Temple and the Shekinah were lost. God was no longer with them.

The decree involved seems not to have been activated until the mid-fifth century BC. Led by Ezra and Nehemiah, the people rebuilt a poor substitute for the Temple but found it still lacked the Shekinah, They understood all this as evidence that God had not yet forgiven them of the sins that had occasioned their exile. After all, they remained under pagan dominion and there was a yet no sign of the return of a king and the kingdom.

Then arose Alexander the Great who created a vast empire. Egypt and all of Israel comprised only a small part of it but, when it was split up on the death Alexander, Israel became the share of Alexander’s General Seleucus and Egypt went to General Ptolemy. Succeeding Seleucus IV in 175 BC, Antiochus IV Epiphanes became the pariah of the Jews. Enemies called him Epimanes (the mad), behind his back, naturally. His greatest offense was the desecration of the Temple in Jerusalem by dedicating it to Zeus and offering pagan sacrifices on the altar in 168 BC. This directly caused the Maccabean revolt and, in 142 BC, Simon Maccabee, though not a descendant of King David, became the first Jewish ruler in over four hundred years. He cleansed and restored the Temple under the leadership of his brother Judas, an action that is celebrated at Hanukkah.

Simon made an alliance with Rome and assumed the role of High Priest as well as king. Later rulers fell to infighting and the alliance with Rome meant both sides appeal to Rome. As you might expect, Rome took over and in 63 BC Pompey the Great captured Jerusalem and made Judea a client state.

In 37 BC, Rome appointed Herod the Great, a man of Arab and Edomite descent (although raised as a Jew), as King of Judea with a Roman appointed procurator to keep an eye on him. At the time of Jesus, Herod’s son Herod Antipas was King of Galilee and Perea and Pontius Pilate was the “governor” (prefect, probably not procurator) of Judea. To establish his Jewish identity, and hence his claim to the throne, Herod began to rebuild the Temple, a project that was approaching its end at this time.

Under the circumstances, the Jewish people wanted once more to control their own land. They expected a Messiah who would be descended from King David and would defeat their pagan overlords, both Herod and Pilate. He would also bring the Shekinah, back to the Temple. The prophets said to expect their king to come riding on a colt, the foal of a donkey^* and so Judas Maccabee had ridden a donkey into Jerusalem to the waving of palm branches (1 Mac. 13:51), rejoicing in his victory over the Seleucids.

Jesus now entered the scene, healing and casting out demons and generally looking like the Messiah foretold by the prophets. He was a son of David so he gathered a sizable following. The authorities, ever alert to threats to their suzerainty, kept a nervous eye on him. Then, he raised his friend Lazarus from the dead. This was in Bethany, about two miles over the Mount of Olives from Jerusalem. Word of the miracle reached the city and the authorities on the Temple Mount in nothing flat. With the Passover crowd already arriving, the authorities went into panic mode, deciding Jesus had to be killed immediately, if not sooner, and Lazarus too for good measure.

Well aware of all this and determined to control his ministry, Jesus proceeded with great caution. On Sunday of Passover week, in the morning he sent two disciples from Bethany a short distance toward Jerusalem to Bethphage. He told them they would find a donkey colt with its mother both tied up there. They were to bring the colt to Jesus. If anyone asked what they were doing, they were to say that, “the Lord needs him” and they would be allowed to take him. They did as instructed and found things worked out as Jesus had said they would. The presence of Jesus at Bethany was certainly well known, in fact, by now all Jerusalem was alive with that information so everyone knew who “the Lord” was.

While the two disciples were leading the colt back toward Bethany, Jesus had set out for Jerusalem accompanied by some of those who had come out to Bethany to mourn the death of Lazarus and now meant to return in joyful celebration. Since Jesus was obviously the Messiah in triumph, they just knew he was going to be acclaimed the king, overthrowing Rome and the Temple authorities.

They took the caravan route from Jericho to Jerusalem which the two disciples had used and may have met them soon after they took charge of the colt. It was a rough track over rocky terrain but a much used and fairly broad road that had them soon out of sight of Bethany. When they then encountered the two disciples with the colt about the same time, a great and excited crowd arrived from Jerusalem.

What now amount to a goodly mob got Jesus meekly settled on the colt and they all set out for the city with shouted Hosannas (“save now”) and waved palm fronds. They sang more hymns and psalms and swept over the ridge of the Mount of Olives with the south-eastern edge of the city in view. The Temple was still hidden by the shoulder of the ridge.

As they went along they began to strip leaves from passing palms, waving them and singing hymns. Some strewed their cloaks on the road before him. Had they been red this would have been red carpet treatment but probably none of them were red. This was the coronation day of the new king of Israel and the crowd pulled out all the stops.

A little further on, Mount Zion came in sight with the Temple and Herod’s palace on the supposed old site of David’s palace. And here came David’s replacement, how fitting! They could now see the Kedron Valley below them with the city rising on the other side almost suddenly from its depths. The crowd became ecstatic, chanting Psalm 118 fervently, expecting those in Jerusalem to join in response on their approach.

Everyone, including the disciples, was excitedly expecting the coronation of the new king and the establishment of the kingdom of God, including their own doubtless glorious roles in it. They had been hearing Jesus say disquieting stuff about going to Jerusalem to die. They had hoped and prayed it wasn’t true and it seemed their prayers had been answered. Jesus had obviously given up on all that and was now openly declaring himself king of Israel. They loudly praised God, saying “Blessed is the King coming in the name of the Lord; peace in heaven and glory in the highest places.”

Well, almost everyone. There were some very quiet, watchful men in the crowd, spies of the authorities. They were there to discover opportunities to kill Jesus. Pharisees were also watching, as usual and, again as usual, they had objections. They said, “Master, reprove your disciples Make them shut up.” In reply, Jesus said to them, “Let me tell you, if they should fall silent, these rocks along the road would cry out in their place.” The man was hopeless and headed for trouble; there was no point in correcting him. Nothing but disaster lay ahead.

Jesus was proceeding according to plan. He was indeed the true king of Israel but not the king they wanted or hoped for. He had to make this statement and fulfill the prophecies but he was far from happy. He knew what lay ahead. He knew this action would bring about his death. In a way, that’s what it was all about. But even that would be misunderstood. Overthrowing the rulers would just be more of the same sin that got them exiled, it would not save them but plunge them into greater retribution and tribulation.

Seeing the city, God’s Holy City, across the valley, he began to weep and cried out, “If only you had known the way to peace. But it is still hidden to you so the time will come when your enemies will raise up encircling walls and dash you and your children to the ground. They will leave no stone on another because you never recognized God’s visitation.”

The coronation procession continued and entered the city. The entire city was astir with some asking. “Who is he?” and others answering, “It is Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee.” They proceeded to the Temple but the actiont was pro forma. Jesus only looked around the Temple precincts carefully. But, evening was coming on and back to Bethany he took the disciples. They were doubtless wondering what had happened to the king and his kingdom

Thus, the challenge had been issued, the coronation proclaimed. Events would move quickly now. Sorrow and joy lay ahead.

* Zec.: 9:9 “...Lo your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt the foal of a donkey.”

As I have phrased it, the question is admittedly designed to evoke St. Augustine’s term “original sin.” As he developed it, the original sin of Adam and Eve devolved upon all their descendants basically by genetic descent. We all, he supposed, have inherited the guilt and consequences of that original sin. Thus, the title question, by implication, poses a number of questions about Augustine’s view of the matter.

Augustine of course had his own personal experience of sin and his observations of sin in others as a background for his understanding. Beyond that, he could look to the experience and wisdom of others but his most authoritative source on the subject were the Scriptures and he made great use of them. The two passages most effective for his purposes were Psalms 51:5 and 1 Cor. 15:22. In that order the passages say: “Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.” and “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” What Romans 5:12-21 says, and I will quote some of it later, is similar but it also provides an expanded and more nuanced discourse that does not support Augustine. I characterize it as a disease theory of sin.

As to the Psalm, it has long been identified as one written by King David after the Prophet Nathan had chastised him for his sin with Bathsheba. It is a poetic outpouring of David’s remorse, perhaps a bit hyperbolic and is thus not an especially solid “proof text.” Nor does the 1 Corinthians passage support Augustine well. The connection between Adam and any one of us may or may not be genetic but none of us are genetically descended from Jesus. Thus, it is a mistake to suppose Paul’s argument relies on genetic, physical descent. Paul’s style of argument here is not dependent on descent and does not constitute a causal account of either being a sinner or of being a redeemed sinner. I will say more on this shortly.

As to descent from Adam, Genesis seems to connect Israel to Adam genetically through Seth but the rest of us are not necessarily genetically connected at all. If you think I’m wrong, please tell me more about the relatives and descendants of Cain. Since he surely did not marry his sister, from whom was his wife descended?

I may be descended from those who gave Cain a wife but yet have no specified genetic connection to Adam and Eve. Who knows that the same is not true of you? I’m a sinner nonetheless. What about you? Surely no Scriptural statement is more strongly verified by human experience than this: “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23).

The conclusion must be then that Augustine’s idea of original sin is, strictly speaking, false. Sin is not inherited in a genetic sense from Adam and Eve. The Roman Catholic Church, which properly rates St. Augustine among its great saints, recognizes this. No less an expert than my Microsoft Copilot sums it thus, “the Catholic Church teaches that personal guilt is never inherited, and Christ offers freedom from these patterns.” A few minutes googling confirms Copilot. Sad to say, the error persists mostly among Protestants.

Hold on, you say. In giving out the ten commandments, God told the children of Israel, “I am a jealous god, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation to those who reject me.” An interesting move but keep on going with the passage, “but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments” (Exodus 20: 5, 6). Punishing out to the third or fourth generation sounds like inherited guilt. It is not as severe as Augustine’s all but infinite string of inherited sin implied by original sin but maybe one can salvage something for Augustine here.

It may be news to you, actually I hope it is, that “generational sin” and “generational curses” are buzz words among some in the religious scene today. These have been particularly associated with what is often called the inner healing movement. The claim is that all sorts of faults and sins can be passed from generation to generation just by virtue of descent. Punishment for the “sins of the fathers” can extend for generations in a bloodline. Certainly Jesus can break the chain although often it is also claimed that this additionally requires special revelations and cleansing ceremonies performed under the guidance of a particular expert in such matters. Maybe if we let go of Augustine’s chain to infinity and just retain the first four links or so we can, to a degree, salvage Augustine’s original sin. After all, no one denies that the consequences of sin can impact future generations.

To complicate matters, those expounding such views call the “science” of epigenetics in for support. On this point I have help from E. Janet Warren’s recent article on these topics and what I say now will be somewhat of a report on what she has to say.^* Warren poses several questions. 1. Can sin be inherited? 2. Is there such a thing as generational sin? 3. Can science inform answers to these prior questions?

There is actually a definitional question first, what is sin? The early chapters of Genesis imply it is disobedience of God’s instructions and will. Furthermore, it suggest sin attacks the order God has built into creation and, most particularly, attempts to supplant God within that order. But we are created as social creatures within a social and communal structure so our individual behavior has consequences that impinge on others within our family and community. They potentially extend to the whole world.

Warren summarizes sin as

… complex and systemic, intertwined with culture and with evil spiritual forces. The Triune God is primarily concerned with his love relationship with his people; he forgives to the “thousandth” generation, emphasizes grace, and commands us to love him in return as well as our neighbors. These positive concepts are far more often discussed than “generational sin.” However, God has created the world such that actions have consequences – he does not need to punish people but can rely on natural moral order. The Bible emphasizes individual responsibility for sin and its restitution.

A comment is in order here on her argument. By speaking of relying “on natural moral order,” Warren fails to deflect the involvement of God in punishment since that natural order is his creation and therefore his choice and responsibility.

St. Paul adds complications in the Romans passage referred to above. Rom. 5:11-19 tells us,

It was through one man that sin entered the world, and through sin death, and thus death pervaded the whole human race, in as much as all men have sinned. For sin was already in the world before there was law, though in the absence of law no reckoning is kept of sin…. It follows then that as the issue of one misdeed was condemnation for all men, so the issue of one just act is acquittal and life for all men, For as through the disobedience of one man the many were made sinners, so through the obedience of one man the many will be made righteous.

I hope you have followed that. Paul uses a style of argument unfamiliar to us. It is argument “from the lesser to the greater” that was well recognized by both Jewish and Gentile audiences. He is basically saying what Adam damaged Jesus has fixed.

Jews of the day often thought Adam to have been of enormous size (perhaps filling the earth) and that he introduced sin into the world so all his descendants must shared his sin. Thus, they believed in something like Augustine’s original sin. It is easy to see how Augustine understood it that way.

Paul is here trying to counter that and it is ironic that Augustine took the side Paul was trying to counter.. Paul’s thinking seems more along the lines of sin as a contact disease that has infected (and infested) us all because we are necessarily part of the human race, in contact with other humans. Sin is then a 100% communicable disease, everyone will “catch” it. Adam’s sin (and why is Eve never included here?) was let sin lose among us almost exactly like Pandora loosed many evils on the world by opening the box gifted to her husband by Zeus. Ironically, Pandora means something like “all gifts.”

Paul has a much stronger sense of the commonality of us all than we do but there is no element of common descent involved. The crucial point is almost hidden in the aside, “in as much as all men have sinned.” It is a matter of personal choice and at some time we have all made the wrong one. The law here is the Mosaic law and Paul states that sin was only recognizable as such once the Mosaic law became available.

Returning then to Warren’s three questions. The answer to the first is that sin cannot be inherited like blue eyes (which did not exist ten thousand years ago). Questioned explicitly about the man blind from birth, Jesus said his blindness was not because his parents sinned. (John 9:3).

The second question, on generational sin, deserves further examination. Most of us have known several generations of our families. I myself have seen and spoken with six generations and can name names back at least three more. We all then can scan the lives of several generations. We need not be able to track traces of horrible sins through the generations to realize that our actions can impact our descendants for at least a few generations. Thus, the phrase “generational sin” is immediately confirmed by our experience.

If that were the extent of it there would be no more to say. Even in a time when corporate and communal responsibility was a very serious factor in assessing responsibility, individual responsibility was the determining factor. Deut. 24:16 instructed that “parents shall not be put to death for their children, nor shall children be put to death for their parents, only for their own crimes may persons be put to death.” Additionally, when question about punishment, Jeremiah said (Jer. 16: 11,12) that

… It is because your ancestors have forsaken me, says the Lord, and have gone among other gods and have served and worshiped them, and have forsaken me and not kept my law; and because you have behaved worse than your ancestors, for here you are, every one of you, following your stubborn evil will, refusing to listen to me.

The New Testament is quite clear on the importance of individual choice. See Rom. 2:6 and 2 Cor. 5:10. Peter makes the particularly interesting observation that through the sacrifice of Jesus, believers are “ransomed from their futile ways inherited from [their] ancestors.”

What about the third question about science then? Isn’t psychoanalysis all about how early trauma impacts later life? Doesn’t epigenetics show that trauma can leave genetic marker that alter gene expression? All true enough but these are really elaborations of what is already admitted. Sin has consequences that can impact those around us and that particular impacts those closest to us. It may helpful here to point out that in criminology, epigenetics discoveries are still considered insufficient to warrant revisions of criminal law. Epigenetic studies so far have only demonstrated effects in animals. If and how any of it can be extended to humans is unknown. Results in animal studies frequently prove misleading or even such plain wrong applied to humans. Human behavior is so complex it is at least likely that epigenetic effects in humans will be overwhelmed by other factors, a signal too weak to ever be detected. So much for claims of support from science.

* E. Janet Warren, “Generational Sin” and Epigenetics, PERSPECTIVES on Science and Christian Faith, vol. 78, No. 1, pp.38-49

If you look online, you can find a dozen more of the best known paintings of the Last Supper and they all fit the above description. Surely thirteen painters can’t be wrong. What the thirteen paintings really tell you is how the various painters ate their meals. They painted projections of the customs of their own cultures, not representations of the customs of Jesus’ day. They tell us nothing of what the Last Supper actually looked like.

Is it important to know more exactly what it was like? I don’t know but, since the Last Supper makes three appearances in the Gospels and is partially repeated more than weekly world-wide, knowing more about it may contribute to our appreciation of it. After all, communion actions alone are mentioned nearly one hundred times in the New Testament.

Reading any document is always an exercise in understanding what someone else is trying to tell us. The more remote from us and our experience that someone is, the more challenging the task will be. The two thousand years and cultural differences between us and New Testament places and times means we need all the help we can get.

With that as a defense and explanation, let’s turn to the difficult task of recreating that night in an “upper room” of a house in Jerusalem on the evening we would call April 2 in 33 AD. By the Jewish calendar, it was Nisan 13 becoming Nisan 14 when the daylight ended that evening.

The term “upper room” itself is a case in point. The Luke 22:12 description basically tells us it was a large chamber above ground. The implication is that it is not a ground floor room that would have a dirt or stone flooring. Luke adds it was “spread out” or “furnished” but gives no further elaboration. Mark 14:15 says it was “furnished and ready.” All this could amount to anything from having mats or rushes spread on its floor to having having some modest amount of furniture.

Remember as well, Luke says in Acts 1:13, 14 that , after the Ascension, the disciples, women and brothers of Jesus returned to the upper room and remained there in constant prayer. Use of the definite article implies it was the same large room as for the Last Supper. It therefore had to have the capacity to hold at least two dozen people. In fact, reading between the lines, it seems to have been the headquarters of the Jesus crew beyond the end of Nisan, perhaps into Pentecost. Again, reading between the lines, and please don’t quote me on this, it may have been a house owned by the father of John Mark.

Being an above ground chamber does not necessarily correspond directly to our ideas of a second story. At the time, most houses in Israel were single story with roofs made with wooden beams covered with mud and branches. Such roofs required frequent maintenance with easy access. Depending on the terrain, terraced houses might be built with covered access that could be used as guest rooms. If the roof was sufficiently strong, second stories were built. I cannot go beyond that in specifying what the upper room would have been like.

Arrangements in the room surely fitted one of two patterns current in Israel at the time. The least likely of these has been pretty much the dominant view for some time now. We might call it the Roman model although it was also very Greek, perhaps originally so. It is also called the triclinium style because it involved eating while reclining on three couches (cline is Greek for bed) arranged in a U shape. While eating, one reclined on the assigned couch. Slaves or servants had access to distribute food and drink to all eaters from the space inside the U. Musicians might also occupy the space. The eaters’ heads were thus orient toward that inner space with the feet more or less towards the outside. The approved style was to lie on the left side and arm and eat with the right hand.

Even in Rome, this fashion was very much an upper class thing and, as such, featured in colloquia. A colloquium now is a (more or less) decorous meeting of scholars but in Greco-Roman culture it almost always a drunken orgy which might well end up with the participates spilling onto and rampaging in the night streets searching out victims to rape: women, girls, boys or any slaves so unfortunate as to catch their attention. The Greco-Roman culture was more vile then most of us have any idea. In the Judea of Jesus’ time, the upper class was appropriating the dining style of the ruling Romans. The most offensive aspects were not typically copied but nonetheless they were known and associated in the common mind with the Judean elites, just one more reason to despise them.

The style also included a number of features that leave archaeological traces so we know from excavations in Herodian palaces in Israel that the palaces had major dining rooms well suited to triclinia dining. Not only were the room physical layouts characteristic but the decoration of the walls, ceilings and floors with frescoes and mosaics too were characteristics of this style. The presence of individual eating utensils likewise indicate that the Roman style was in use. Each guest had plates, bowls and a cup. Forks did not exist but as to spoons and knives these were BYOS gatherings (S standing for “stuff’). It may not be obvious to you, but all this was possible only to the upper crust.

If only the wealthy could afford triclinium dining what did poor people do? Well, they had very few pots, pans, bowls and utensils. They had essentially no individual dishes and they surely had no dining room or dining table with chairs. If your house had only the usual single room with a stove or oven and no furniture, you sat on the floor mats or reeds, ate food from a common pot or platter and probably drank watered wine from a communal cup. Your hands might be your only implements or perhaps you used pieces of bread as aids to eating. If you had the good fortune to have built your house over or near a well, hand washing afterwards at least did not require long distance travel. Water would be brought into the house in a basin for washing. Doubtless most eating in Israel tended toward this communal style although there were likely those with more pots, dishes and cutlery than others.

Wooden cups and spoons may have been more common than they are now in archaeological surveys because it readily decays but wood was not generally kosher so a wooden ‘holy grail” was unlikely as was a clay ceramic grail. Only cups carved from soft limestone were permitted so the grail has to have been a soft limestone (i.e., chalk) cup. Naturally, all the putative grails of the Middle Ages were far to fine to be the real grail Jesus used. A number of workshops dedicated to handcarving or lathe production of such vessels are well documented from first century Israel so they were in high demand at the time.

If you’re set on making your church practice authentic Lord’s Suppers, you now know what to insist on. I’m joking! Please don’t create a church rumpus over the type of cup! But think about the reality a minute. Chalk has low tensile strength thus forcing the cup walls to be relatively thick and, trust me, chalk cannot be highly polished so the cup surface was not very smooth. I’d much rather drink from a glass or ceramic cup (even a plastic cup) than a chalk one, wouldn’t you?

Speaking of the holy grail brings us back to the main topic. What was the Last Supper like? And, I’ve already give you part of the answer, Jesus passed around a chalk cup with wine (perhaps a somewhat watered red wine) in it. As long as we’re on the topic of the institution of the Eucharist (aka. The Lord’s Supper, the Lord’s Table or Holy Communion), what was the bread like? That’s an easy one. It was Passover bread so it had to be unleavened bread to commemorate the hasty flight from Egypt and the mighty act of God in passing over those with blood of a lamb sprinkled on their doorposts. So it was matzah bread. Matzo bread is a crispy modern version with long shelf life that conveniently comes now in gluten free varieties. The widely used communion wafers are likewise modern forms of unleavened bread. Reading again between the lines, Jesus broke one loaf up and handed pieces around to eat.

Once everyone was assembled in the upper room and eating, Jesus remarked that one of them would betray him. At this point, Matthew and Mark indicate he said that, whoever it was, was already dipping in the dish with him. This may refer to dipping bread or meat into the bitter herbs of the Passover meal. In triclinium eating, each diner would likely have had an individual bowl of these herbs. In any case, bowls could not readily be shared around a U of couches so who was dipping in a dish with Jesus would have been obvious and the reported questioning would not have arisen. That would seem to eliminate the triclinium style dining.

Complicating matters however, Luke says the hand of the betrayer was on the table with Jesus and John says that he [John] was “reclining” at the table against Jesus so Peter beckoned him and asked who it was. [John] leaned back and queried Jesus (probably in a whisper). Jesus answered that it would be the one with whom he “dipped the sop.” Jesus then “dipped the sop” and gave it to Judas Iscariot and told him to do quickly what he had to do. No one at the table knew what it was he was to do. I underline table in these passages because the word does not actually appear in the Greek text.

Thus, the first two Gospels may imply communal eating whereas the second two Gospels may suggest a table as if it was a shared among the guests. A common table was a likely furnishing of neither tricilium dining nor communal dining. Neither John’s nor Luke’s account actually uses the word for table so the word is interpolated by various translators because of the appearance of the word for reclining. Painters are not the only ones who project their own ideas into their work. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus then does use the word table when he assures the disciples they will “eat and drink at my table in my kingdom …” This is the same word John uses speaking of bankers (counting) tables. Perhaps my claim there were just two styles of dining is too simple. But there is more in the text to consider.

The three Synoptic Gospels recount the Lord’s Supper although, for whatever reason, John’s does not. However, John’s is the only Gospel to describe the washing of the disciple’s feet by Jesus. Of course, John had no particular interest in helping us visualize this scene but we can try reading between the lines here. He tells us Jesus got up, laid aside his outer robe, wrapped a towel about his waist, poured water in a basin and washed the disciples feet. This may seem unhelpful; getting up had to be done in any dining style. However, washing feet would have been much easier in triclinium dining than in communal dining. That, of course, does not eliminate the communal style as a possibility. On the other hand, passing a single cup around in the instituting of the Lord’s Supper seems to strongly imply communal dining. Also, Jesus broke the bread then passed it around in an act of communal eating.

Generally, Galileans leaned strongly toward communal style eating and much against the elitist triclinium style. Communal style then has to be regarded as the more likely style of the Last Supper. Jesus and the disciples hardly had the funds or the inclination for renting a triclinium room, had one even been available. Still, the triclinium style cannot be definitively excluded. In all events, eating at a table and being seated on chairs or benches is almost certainly wrong for the Last Supper. Well, it may be wrong, but I’m going to hang on to granma’s antimacassar.

An additional factor is that three influential Iranian Ayatollahs have now issued fatwas declaring jihad against the US and Israel. That is, essentially all Shia Moslems have now been order to fight an endless war to the death with the US and Israel. Such orders can never be abrogated, they cannot be walked back.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not predicting failure of Epic Fury but that the strength of fanatical resistance will be high, reminiscent of the level of Japanese resistance in WWII. No, don’t murmur “72 virgins.” The promise of 72 (or 70) houris in the fourth heaven for martyrs may still inspire some but historically it has motivated comparatively few. To raise armies to conquer Medina and Mecca, Muhammed found he had to up the ante from projected promises of later pleasures in heaven to a jihad justification to rape, pillage, plunder and murder here on Earth right now. Immediate reward now was vastly more compelling than a delayed, possible reward later. That one had to die to get to the later reward probably was also a factor.

But jihad was not allowed against the Ummah, just against any and all infidels. The IFGC has, indeed, been murdering fellow Iranians but presumably they salve their defective consciences the way Christians have also done; “they aren’t really Moslems (Christians)”.

However, rape, plunder, pillage and murder is most ineffective against air attacks when you have no air resources. The choice between laying down your arms and martyrdom right now focuses even the most fanatical mind. Many IRGC members may chose life over immediate martyrdom. I very much hope and pray there will be few martyrs.

It has likely not escaped your notice that the Iranians are Shia Moslems. In particular, almost all of them are Twelvers. When Muhammed died he carelessly left no designated successor. Yes, Moslems may say Jesus did the same but that utterly misreads the New Testament and the history of the church. The history of Islam, on the other hand, is a history of chaos, envy and ambition occasioned into actual, outright war over possession of the succession. The Sunni/Shia split occurred in and was entirely a creature of this war of succession.

The Sunnis “won” the war in that, by general agreement, the succession went to Abu-Bakr, one of Muhammed’s numerous fathers-in-law and his best and longest companion. He became the first caliph. The Shias rejected general agreement as a criterion. They believed the caliphate should go to a (male) descendant of Muhammed. Unfortunately for them, there was no such person.

Astonishingly, Sunnis and Shias substantially disagree even on something as basic as who counts as a natural child of Muhammed. By Sunni count, Muhammed produced from all his thirteen wives, just four daughters all of whom died in their twenties. Three sons died as infants. His daughter Fatima, by Twelver count his only natural child, produced Muhammed’s sole grandchild, a daughter who married Ali, a cousin of Muhammed. Thus, the Shias per force chose Ali as caliph. Ali was assassinated and his second son Husayn was killed in the Battle of Karbala. Thus, Shia and Sunni have always disagreed on who was the true caliph.

Most Shia are Twelvers, believing the last and twelfth of the true caliphs (Imams) has been hidden in occultation (divine preservation) since the death of the eleventh Imam, Hasan al-Askari in 874 AD. Please don’t expect me to explain that. I have no idea how the Mahdi has managed to stay alive and hidden for some 1160 years. Of course, none of this appears in the Qur’an. The Hadiths of the Shia naturally elaborate this in disagreement with those Hadiths accepted by Sunnis.

That brief excursion into Islamic history sets up the current situation which is dominated then by Twelver eschatology. Within this worldview, the eleventh Imam, Hasan al-Askari, had a son, Muhammed ibn Hasan al-Askari al-Mahdi. He is the Twelfth true Imam. Note “the Mahdi” ends the name. Within this view, the Mahdi (the guided one) and the Twelfth Imam are identical. The hidden Imam has been guiding Islam since 874 AD through intermediary Imams.

Incidentally, Imams wearing black turbans claim descent from Muhammed. All others wear white turbans. The Mahdi must be a descendant of Muhammed so look for a Black turban. At the moment, what remains of the Iranian leadership appears to be a white turban lot. However, on recently visiting our closest mosque, I immediately spotted the black turban of the local Imam so there is no dearth of prospects. This also means our local Moslems, under the fatwas, are obligated to kill you and me.

Twelver eschatology is now in play although there are differences between versions. For example, in Islamic eschatology there are various signs of the imminence of the arrival of the Mahdi. As I write these lines (3/3/26), one such sign has just transpired, a blood red Moon this morning. The phrase is a very ancient and consistent description of a full lunar eclipse. Solar eclipses can also be expected before the unveiling of the hidden Imam. Eclipses during Ramadan are particularly significant. Ramadan this year lasts until 3/19/26 so Twelvers must see here resounding confirmation that the Mahdi will soon appear and defeat the US and Israel. It remains to be seen how long that confidence will last. It is deeply embedded in Iranian Shia beliefs and, so far, no events count against it. Indeed, all events act to reinforce it.

The different versions of Hadiths naturally yield differing versions of what the coming of the Mahdi will be like and what he will accomplish. There is general agreement on a few items. The Mahdi (the guided one) will be a descendant of Muhammed who is, of course, guided by Allah. He will come out of the east supported by eastern peoples at a time of great injustice and he will make restoration, fight the Dajjal and lead the Ummah. He will rule for seven years, or maybe thirteen years, and then die. He is accompanied by the second coming of Isa (Jesus) who kills the Dajjal and lives for forty years. Jesus follows the Mahdi around, staying behind him and praying for him (just so you realize he is inferior to the Mahda). No, I don’t know why Jesus will outlive the Mahdi.

Many Sunnis reject the idea of the Mahdi; it is not a particular popular or important concept in Sunni theology. It is a strong feature of Shia eschatology.

All this may sound innocuous, even laughable, but, in practice, it tends to be quite violent and even oppressive. You will not be surprised to learn that there have been quite a number of putative Mahdis over the years. The Imam (Ayatollah) ruling the regime in Iran is, of course, the current stand-in for the Mahdi.

An important and fairly recent example of a putative mahdi is Muhammed Ahmad bin Abdullah bin Fahal (1845 to 1885), the “Mahdi” of Sudan famed for the capture of Khartoum from General Charles “Chinese” Gordon and who thereby wrested the Sudan from Ottoman control.

His family were actually Sufi Moslems, a mystical Islamic sect distinct from both Sunnis and Shais. He became a Sufi Sheikh, built a mosque and became quite popular. Unfortunately, his popularity caused a rift between him and his mentor. The rift became entangled with a local political struggle in the course of which Muhammed inherited leadership of a Sufi faction that had been led by Sheikh al-Qurashi, a Sufi cleric who had been asserting the imminent arrival of the Mahdi.

In this chaotic context, Muhammed proclaimed himself the Mahdi. His putative task was to make way for the second coming of Jesus. He had been so appointed, he claimed, by a convocation of all the prophets from Adam to Muhammed. Perhaps you missed that meeting but then you are not a mystical Sufi Sheikh. He also pointed out that the V shaped gap in his teeth showed he was the Mahdi. He additionally claimed it all started with a vision like those of Muhammed.

Religious experts rejected his claims, particularly those connected to the Ottoman Empire which then ruled Egypt and the Sudan. They pointed out that the Mahdi was supposed to come to fight and defeat great corruption and hatred in a time of an oppressive government and that did not fit the current happy status of the Sudan. Hoping to buy him off with a state pension, the governor of Khartoum sent him a letter with the offer. As befitted the incorruptible (and sinless) Mahdi, Muhammed replied, “He who does not believe me will be purified by the sword.”

A small force was then sent to arrest him but was repulsed with 60% casualties in what is now called the Battle of Aba (1881). Muhammed himself was a casualty, wounded in the right shoulder but only twelve of his army were killed. The victory confirmed his status to many and his following grew. The British termed his ecstatic and unrestrained followers “dervishes.” He and his army then moved about in Sudan, accumulating followers and, in violation of Islamic law, enslaving fellow Moslems if they would not support him.

The Egyptians found all this alarming and ordered an army to Kordofan under Hicks Pasha (Colonel William Hicks) who was instructed to crush the rebellion. In 1883, with 8,000 men (plus 2,000 camp-followers), Hicks headed to the Kordofanian capital, El-Obeid, but they were ambushed and almost utterly destroyed with fewer than 300 men surviving. According to the cook, Hicks was the last to die.

After a few more efforts at suppressing the rebellion, the British decided to abandon the Sudan and made Major General Charles “Chinese” Gordon the Governor-General of the Sudan. He was ordered to organize the withdrawal from Khartoum and arrived there in early 1884. Gordon was famous for his role leading the Ever Victorious Army of the Emperor of China in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion.

British support forces had some successes but the most noted event was the Battle of Tamai in March of 1884 where forces under General Sir Gerald Graham defeated the “Fuzzy Wuzzies.” However, the Fuzzy Wuzzies temporarily broke a British square, an action that hugely impressed Rudyard Kipling who had good reason to know. The square formation could create continuous and murderous musket fire in all directions at a rate of about a volley every 8 seconds. Thus, breaking a British square required insane courage and vast numbers of men willing (and likely) to die.

What happened next is puzzling. Gordon, an evangelical Christian mystic, decided to defend, rather than withdraw from, Khartoum. He managed to hang on for a year but was eventually defeated and killed at the end of January, 1885. The Mahdi stuck his head in a tree where, he said, all could see it, children could stone it and hawks circle above it.

By the end of 1885, the Mahdi controlled all Sudan with a few exceptions but also by then, he was dead of typhus. His reign of perhaps 3 years compares poorly with the 7 or 13 years expected for the Mahdi. If Jesus returned during those 3 years it could only have been in some sort of occultation. It seems Muhammed Ahmad mistook a nightmare for a vision. For many, of course, he himself was a nightmare. I have no good estimates of how many thousand lives were lost in the rebellion but it was surely many. But Sudan gained independence through it and he is at times credited with creating the Umma political party in Sudan.

Not counting the mullahs of Iran, there is a much tamer Mahdi claimant today. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908) discovered he had been appointed to be both the Messiah and the Mahdi, thereby, he claimed, fulfilling Jewish, Christian and Moslem eschatological hopes. He viewed his movement, the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light, as a reformation of Islam, a return to earliest Islamic belief and practice. The movement is thus meant to be an Islamic renaissance with intent to expand Islam by missionary practice, like Christianity. Since his death the sect has been led by a succession of caliphs, most recently Abdullah Hasem Aba Al-Sadiq.

The twelvers of Iran expect nothing so mild of the Mahdi. Their penchant for revenge through terror will be an ongoing problem. On the other hand, there are also numerous reports of Iranians becoming Christians. As to relief from oppression, if the Mahdi appears, will he side with or against the regime? Will he oppose oppression or the infidels? Scylla or Charybdis? I would worry about it but then I don’t believe in the Mahdi.

Genesis 2: 10–14 tells us that, “A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that borders all the land of Havilah… The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that borders all the land of Cush … the third and fourth are the Tigris and the Euphrates.”

Commenting on this information I said, “The Tigris and Euphrates rivers arise in eastern Turkey. Gen. 10:29 places Havilah in Arabia and Cush usually refers to Upper Egypt but the Pishon and Gihon rivers are unidentified. Describing these rivers as bordering all of a land creates non-existent islands. It is best to understand the all here as a bit of overstatement. There is no one river as the source of the four rivers but ancient sources were often not well informed on the sources of rivers.”¹

In the first place, I understood “flows out of Eden” to mean Eden was at or near the source of the rivers which then, downstream, split into four rivers. So Eden would have been upstream of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (and the Pishon and Gihon). That would place Eden in some very rough and mountainous areas of modern Turkey. Accordingly, I was looking for four convergent rivers in middle to western Turkey where there are none.

But what if the “flows out” in the phrase simply means the four rivers merge to produce a single river flowing through Eden to water it? From inside of Eden, the rivers would have to be described as being out of Eden. If that is the meaning, then Eden would have to be downstream of the Tigris and Euphrates, located somewhere near the Persian Gulf. In fact, the Tigris and Euphrates do merge into the Shatt al-Arab river before flowing into the Persian Gulf but only one river, the Karun, joins them. Yes, that’s true now but what about then? Unfortunately, we don’t know when then was.

The climate may well have been different then and that would mean the shoreline of the Persian Gulf might have been different then. Even more significantly, rivers could have been different and maybe even have been then existent although they are no longer.

For a start on the topic, archaeological and geological studies unearth evidence of what past climate has been like. Sea levels, in particular, have fluctuated significantly. Over the last 10 million years the Earth has averaged about 10 significant fluctuations on the order tens of meters. Since the Persian Gulf is relatively shallow, its western shoreline was greatly altered by these changes (the eastern shore is mountainous with many cliffs). That is to say, at times it has moved considerably towards the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates and then at other times greatly receded from it. So the site of Eden must now be under the water of the Persian Gulf.

Another important climate feature is rainfall. Scientists from the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science at the University of Miami (Florida), using a remote sensing vehicle at a mile depth in the Red Sea Gulf of Aqaba, have retrieved sediment cores from a deep brine pool. The density and overall chemistry of such pools means the sediment layers at its bottom have been largely free of disturbance since they formed. Thus, the sediment cores present the researchers with a stable and reliable record of rainfall on Arabia over the last two thousand years. The cores show that, two thousand years ago, Arabia was much wetter. In fact, it was a savannah much like today’s African savannahs with a fair amount of vegetation, grasses with scattered trees and shrubs. The fluctuations they see from the cores probably are just a sample of what has been going on in Arabia for many thousands of year.

Looking further back for about ten million years, climate cooling created deserts in many tropical and subtropical areas worldwide, the current Sahara Desert and Arabian Desert among them. Given its geographic location, Arabia thereby became a sort of switch on both human and particularly large mammal movement and migration. The switch was off then on, depending on the vagaries of the climate. This erratic switch probably set up the more isolated ecologies of Africa today with many endemic species cut off from Eurasian species. Note that the “out of Africa” migration of humans occurred in this era, about two million years ago. All this created the “fertile crescent” and turned the land near the Mediterranean Sea into the crossroads of trade and travel it has been now for thousands of years. Fossils of large animals, stone tools and deposits of calcium carbonate (stalactites and stalagmites) in caves in Arabia are all uncommon but nonetheless constitute evidence that there were periods in which humidity in the area was quite high.

We do not, as a general rule, make a mental connection between the current space age with its attendant satellites and questions of the weather of ancient lands but they do connect. Landsat satellites are now so widely available that Google searches of “landsat” can scarcely be made to avoid flooding the reader with floods of access to photographs and maps generated by them. In more than thirty years ago, Farouk Al-Baz, a geologist at Boston University, was examining radar image of Arabia taken by NASA’s Endeavor space shuttle and he noticed the fossil traces of a river in Arabia called the Wadi al-Batin. Wadi is the Arabic word for a dry creek or riverbed and this wadi is enormous, 3 miles wide in places. It has now been dry for 3,500 to 2,000 years and, since 1911, has actually formed the boundary between Iraq and Kuwait. Al-Baz traced the wadi through the current Persian Gulf shoreline somewhat west of the Shatt al-Arab which is the river formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

Taking the Wadi al-Batin as the fossil bed of the Pishon in Genesis implies that Eden was south and perhaps east of the present Persian Gulf northwestern boundary. That is, the site of ancient Eden must lie under the current Gulf. It also implies that the Garden of Eden dates back several thousand years at the least, hardly a surprise but nonetheless a nice confirmation.

If the Wadi al-Batin is indeed the bed of the ancient Pishon River, where is the Gihon? I’m glad you asked. We have a good candidate. The Karun River still runs about 545 miles from the Zagros Mountains of Iran to the Shatt al-Arab and thence into the Gulf. It enters the Shatt al-Arab upstream of the shores of the Gulf and is thus visible and accessible even today.

If these identifications make any sense, we need to check the rest of the remarks in Genesis against what we can additionally discover about these rivers. Taking the Tigris and Euphrates as they stand, in no need of confirmation, what more are we told of the Pishon and the Gihon Rivers? The etymology of the names apparently is unproductive. Oh, there has been plenty of scholarly comment and discussion of word origins but nothing of any real substance has as yet emerged.

Taking the Genesis 10:29 identification of Havilah as “Arabia” makes some sense since the Wadi al-Batin does rather surround Kuwait and pretty much borders all of it in the sense that the remainder of the borders of Kuwait are provide by the Persian Gulf. The clinker here is that Kuwait does not constitute anything like all of what we today call Arabia.

Havilah is also said to have good gold, bdellium and onyx stone. In case you have never encountered it, bdellium is an old name for resin from Commiphora genus trees. The reference here is probably to Commiphora gileadensis which was endemic to Arabia. The species name results from confusion with the balm of Gilead which is actually a quite different plant and much more rare. Commiphora gileadensis has a fragrant smell and was substituted for myrrh (from Commiphora myrrha) in perfumes but, like myrrh, it was also used in incense. The plant prefers arid to semi-arid conditions and can grow in poor soils. Gold and onyx deposits are far too common and wide-spread to help in further identification of Havilah.

What we hear of Gihon is that it borders all the land of Cush. In the Bible the name usually refers to Upper Egypt but that is associated with the Nile River and the Nile makes no sense here. The Karun River might make sense as the southeastern border of the Land of Kish at some time. Confusion and mistranslation of the name may be an explanation but one must honestly confess that Cush and Gihon cannot be identified with any great certainty. In my judgment, the Karun River is a strong candidate as the Gihon simply on the basis of geography. It’s in the right place and, so far as we know, it has been actively there for a very long time. If we have any sort of decent handle on the general area for Eden, the Karun should be in the picture and hard to miss. I have no idea how to get from Gihon to Karun etymologically but I think the two names designate the same river. I cannot account for Cush and I cannot see how it can possibly be entirely bordered by a single river, whatever its name may be. Call it a translation problem or a transmission problem or whatever linguistic quirk you like, I make no suggestion.

Thus, we have not reached a certain conclusion on the four rivers of Genesis 2 but certain conclusions are never really likely so we are perennially in the situation of accepting the most plausible explanation. My judgment again is that the four rivers are fairly securely identified. Eden then must be placed somewhere under the Persian Gulf. That implies we should look for a time when the upper Gulf was dry land. Unfortunately, scientific work on the topic is scant to non-existent. With the variability of the shoreline and rain fall in the area there have probably been quite a few years in the last two million or so that humans have walked the Earth that might answer for it but there is a serious dearth of geologic and archaeological information on ancient shorelines of the Gulf. In any event, sedimentation from the inflow of the rivers into the Persian Gulf will have already deeply buried any hope of tracing Eden.

¹ John A. Cramer, Your Choice of World: Cramer, John: 9781365660399: Amazon.com: Books

To make this argument, I will use what I call inadvertent evidence. This is distinct from overt evidence. They both are closely related to the literary distinction between subtext and text. Overt evidence is given by a witness with clear awareness of giving evidence. When a Gospel states that Jesus fed five thousand or cast out a demon from a man, we have overt evidence that Jesus did exactly that. The statement of a witness is overt evidence that the event to which the witness testifies did indeed occur. Of course, it is not conclusive evidence. The witness might be lying or mistaken. The failings of overt evidence are so familiar I will not rehearse them.

Inadvertent evidence becomes evidence almost accidentally. It is given where and in such a way that there is no reason to suppose the source has, at that point, any intention of bearing witness. Because of this lack of intentionality, inadvertent evidence is not subject to attack as devised or constructed. It may, of course, still be accused of being confused or mistaken but, even here, it is always quite possible that the attack itself is confused or mistaken. Thus, inadvertent evidence is very powerful stuff compared with overt evidence.

Most of the inadvertent evidence in the Gospels relates to the motivations of the characters in the stories. Stated simply, most of the behavior and reactions of the people we meet in the gospels cannot be understood if we deny they thought Jesus was performing signs and miracles.

The force of my argument then derives from the extent to which my claim can be demonstrated. The more cases I can adduce, the better substantiated my argument will be and the more obvious it will become that the greater part of the Gospels makes no sense without miracles. Ideally then, I should go through the Gospels story by story to make my case. That would be a considerable task; I would be writing a book rather than an article.

Instead I will rely on you, my readers, once prepared for the task, to extend my argument on your own. I prefer this approach because letting readers teach themselves is by far the most effective and, in the long run, the most persuasive form of argument. Accordingly, I will present a limited number of examples which I think of as teaching tools showing readers how to read the Gospels with this argument and issue in mind.

The Kingdom of Heaven has Overtaken You

Matt. 12:22-37 tells of a man both blind and dumb. His friends brought him to Jesus, telling him the man was “possessed.” Jesus cured him, restoring to him both sight and speech. Matthew says the bystanders were amazed and wondered among themselves, “Can this be the son of David?” That is, they wondered if Jesus was the long expected Messiah.

Word of this quickly reached the Pharisees who spread the message about that “It is only by Beelzebub prince of devils that this man drives out devils.”

Jesus knew very well what they were saying and he responded, “A kingdom divided against itself falls apart and no town or household divided against itself can persist. So, if Satan is casting out Satan, Satan is divided against himself so how can his kingdom persist? If I cast out devils by Beelzebub by whom do your own people drive devils out? Your own people then refute your argument.” The point Jesus was making here is the inconsistency of explanation taking the cases together.

He further and more alarmingly argued, “But, if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God then it is certain that the kingdom of God has overtaken you.”

There is more to this passage but what I have quoted makes my point. The passage and the argumentation is incomprehensible if the people did not think Jesus was healing people and exorcising demons. In fact, the implied assembly of people itself would not be there without the attraction which Jesus provided. Absent the miracle; absent the story.

The nineteenth century German Higher Criticism and the later Form Criticism of Rudolph Bultmann jettisoned “the supernatural” from the Gospels. Then, surprise, surprise, they had to undertake the quest for the historical Jesus because they had thrown Jesus out with the supernatural. A classic example of throwing out the baby with the bath water. The quest of course found nothing because what they called “the supernatural” permeates the Gospels and is, in fact basic to it, they had no text left by which to reveal Jesus.

The Sign of Jonah

As long as we’re in Matthew we can just keep going starting now at Matt. 12:38. The doctors of the law and the Pharisees then tried a different tack. “Master,” they said, “Show us a sign.” They were asking for a marvel as if they would believe in him if he did one in front of them, throwing in a little flattery as a distraction. What they really wanted was evidence they could use to convict Jesus of being a false prophet; a capital offense. Note though their expectation that he could, and perhaps would, perform a miracle for them.

Jesus recognized the trap and replied, “It is a wicked and godless generation that asks for a sign. The only sign they will be given is that of Jonah. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the sea-monster for three days and nights, in the same way the Son of Man will be in the bowels of the earth for three days and nights.”

So he answered them seemingly positively but with a future sign they could not immediately use against him. Probably some of them recognized the Son of Man as designating Jesus. Once again, the discourse recorded here presupposes that Jesus could do or might do “signs.” Take away that assumption and the story is a baseless fabric that leaves not a wrack behind.

Jesus in Nazareth

Now look ahead a few verses to Matt. 13:53-58. This passage is one of the very few that tell us about the family of Jesus. Here, Jesus goes home to Nazareth and teaches in their synagogue, where he had grown up. The people know him and Matthew describes them as amazed. They asked themselves, “Where does he get this wisdom from and these miraculous powers? Isn’t he just the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother Mary, his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas? Aren’t his sisters living here among us? So where did he get all this from?” They were, of course, inadvertently acknowledging that Jesus didn’t “get it” from them.

Knowing Jesus from childhood, the contrast was too great for them to encompass. They preferred to believe what they always had and to refuse to accept evidence that pointed to a different reality.

Jesus sadly remarked, “A prophet will always be held in honor, except in his home town and his own family.”

Matthew observed that “he did not work many miracles there: such was their want of faith.” Once again, the story is driven by the miracles Jesus was doing although it also introduces the additional issue of his extraordinary wisdom as a teacher. Without this background of the growing reputation of Jesus, the behavior of the people could not have occurred; there would be no story here to tell.

Herod Antipas

Of the behavior of his family there is more to tell but, for the moment, I will continue with the next tale in Matthew (Matt.14:1-2), the behavior of Herod (Antipas), the ruler of Galilee. Herod apparently got news of the activities of Jesus shortly after Herodias had trapped him into executing John the Baptist. For that story, read on in Matt. 14.

“This is John the Baptist,” Herod said to his court. “John has been raised back to life and so he now has miraculous powers working in him.”

Antipas never acted against Jesus but during the trials of Jesus, Pontius Pilate, who ruled Judea and Jerusalem, sent Jesus over to Herod Antipas who was in Jerusalem at the time for Passover. Herod had long wanted to see Jesus and Pilate, knowing this and trying to heal a personal breach, used Jesus as a peace offering to Herod. When Jesus would not perform (signs or miracles) for Herod, the disappointed king let his retainers mock Jesus and robe him in purple. Possibly he feared to incur more trouble by beating or killing “John” a second time, Herod then sent Jesus the short distance back to Pilate. Note that the miracles of Jesus provide the sense and energy of Herod’s behavior with Jesus. Herod certainly thought Jesus could do signs and wonders and feared he might even do more.

The Family and the Church

I’m sure you can see now how to extend the argument but the most powerful extension of all is in regard to the final attitudes of the family of Jesus and to the existence of the church.

Jesus never lost touch with his family as brief mentions throughout the Gospels imply although the Gospels describe his brothers as unbelieving, they make appearances to do things like asking Jesus to accompany them to Jerusalem for festival.

The Resurrection changed unbelief to belief. We find his brothers with Mary and the women and the disciples in the upper room after the Resurrection appearances of Jesus, all in prayer for guidance on next steps. Later the brothers are reported as taking on missionary efforts for the church and, of course, James (the Just), who was apparently the next oldest in the family, became the leader of the entire church. Later church fathers call him the Bishop of Jerusalem. The hinge or pivot of all this is the Resurrection, perhaps not a miracle done by Jesus but certainly powerful inadvertent evidence that the Resurrection really happened.

In fact, the existence of the church itself is inexplicable without the Resurrection. That is, the existence of the church itself is inadvertent evidence of the Gospel miracles. For that reason I call the church a fossil of the Resurrection. It is concrete, present day evidence of something that really happened thousands of years ago. In fact, without the Resurrection, there would not be any Gospels to read. There would have been no good news to celebrate and pass on. The existence of the New Testament is a fossil of the Resurrection, evidence it really happened.

Just a note of caution and clarification as I close. I say we have powerful inadvertent evidence that the Resurrection really happened. That is not to say we have proof. Like the word impossible, I think it best to exclude the word proof from our vocabulary. Excepting only the world of pure mathematics (and perhaps not even then) both words claim more than human intelligence can honestly claim. Hey! I told you at the outset I am well trained in skepticism. I think proof and impossible should not be in the vocabulary any scholar.