I can’t specifically say when I first heard a reading from Eccelsiastes, but I do remember it sounding strikingly miserable for the Bible. I guess I might have been around nine or ten. I was not really aware of either the obsolescent meaning of vanity as emptiness, nor of the odd semitic construction of the superlative that passed into English via the KJV. What I do know is that I associated the phrase with Private Frazer from Dad’s Army. In my mind “Vanity of vanities: all is vanity!” segued effortlessly into “We’re all doomed, Captain Mainwaring, doomed I tell you.” Irrespective of the fine details of exegesis, that tone seems to match the rhetorical tradition of quoting Qoheleth, and shows how one’s own reading is a multi-layered and many-influenced thing. Some phrases just don’t seem the same in newer translations, and discovering the Bible’s very own miserable bugger made the wording all the more valued.
I was going to write a blog post today, but I realized I didn’t have anything to say.
Halden attempts to plot ecclesiologies on a simple matrix. I found this a fascinating set of descriptions. What raises a question mark for me, however, is that I know my ecclesiology is high because it is strong, and that the two are interrelated. I wonder if this means that for the others there is a dominant component in the pairings also? Perhaps those who hold to different ecclesiologies could reflect on which their dominant trait is also.
The rather grammatically challenged (what’s wrong with the Vocative?) kratistos Theophilos blog says this about the apocrypha.
The Palestinian Jews rejected the Septuagint because it deviated from the Jewish text. It contained extra books such as the Old Testament Apocrypha which the Jews rejected.
That in the course of the second century Jewish and Christian canons diverged is not in question. But this kind of statement, which my own impressions suggest is far from unusual, begs a number of questions.
- We know the views of early rabbinic Judaism, which may or may not be the same as generic Palestinian Judaism.
- We know comparatively little of the Diaspora canon: though it seems reasonable to associate the Septuagint with Egyptian Judaism, we cannot be sure about the extent of the scripture collections used elsewhere.
- The extent we can speak of the Septuagint as some kind of unified collection of texts is unclear.
- The factors which influence the rabbinic decisions are also unclear, but would seem to be traditional, linguistic and about definition in elation to the Jesus movement.
- Palestinian Jews couldn’t reject an “Old Testament Apocrypha”, since they didn’t have an Old Testament (as opposed to a Bible) nor, therefore, an intertestamental period, and there was no early unified collection of books that could be identified as Apocrypha.
- Apocrypha in its modern sense is really a late term to identify the books that were in the generally accepted Christian canon, but not accepted as scripture by Judaism.
Too many discussions seem to presuppose the clearly defined existence of the Apocrypha in debates about the status of these books. While the books exist, and their canonicity is debated, the sense of them as a collection is a very late development. The whole point is that they are varied books, and what is being debated is whether they belong to the church’s collection.
Tim is rendered virtually speechless by the concept of erasable paper as a new technology. Actually it reminds me of my etch-a-sketch.
Apparently some people think this is a current technology:
- Woman 1: ”What is that little trash can on the screen?”
- Woman 2: ”My son says that is call the ‘recycle bin’. He tells me when I don’t want a Word document anymore and I delete it, it really goes in there.”
- Woman 1: ”Why in the recycle thingy? Can’t you just erase it?”
- Woman 2: ”Oh no, Word wouldn’t work for very long if I did that, I would run out of blank pages.”
- Woman 1: ”Why?”
- Woman 2: ”Because it cleans the words off the pages, then sends the blank sheets back to Word so they can be used again. That’s why it’s called the recycle bin.”
In the OS wars, the question of which is more “intuitive” gets asked a lot. Mac users claim that OS X is clearly more “intuitive” than Windows. My early experience would suggest that “intuitive” is a matter of what you’re used to. Windows seemed quite intuitive to me, and I’m sure that in a couple of weeks OS X will too.
Let me give a couple of examples. And the beauty of this is that eve if I’m wrong, and there is a better and easier way to do what I wanted, it proves my point about intuitiveness.
I wanted to add a graphic of my real signature to my email signature in Mail. I looked everywhere I could think of for an “insert picture” command, and failed miserably. OK, Mac is supposed to be famous for drag and drop, so I tried that and it worked. Different methods, and what you’re used to will be more intuitive. I don’t think either is quicker or easier than the other.
The signature graphic was a different size to what I wanted. How then did I resize it, short of zooming over to Windows and opening it in Photoshop. (NB When I say resize, I mean resize and resample the actual file, not make it look larger or smaller in the document.) The obvious answer, I thought, would be the famed iPhoto. Nope, there may be a way, but of so, I couldn’t find it. Almost by accident, while looking for something else, however, I discovered the option to resize and resample an image in Preview. (Incidentally, Preview is a real gem, and at the heart of some of the “must have” easy working features of the Mac.) Now call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think it’s remotely intuitive to be unable to resize files in a photo editor, but dead easy in an application intended for previewing them.
I have no idea how you could objectively measure “intuitiveness”. Everyone comes with their own habits, experience and preconceptions. The OS wars: when you take the passionate believers out, there’s still no neutral objectivity. Now where I have I heard that before?
A few days ago I waded in on the discussion about the pericope adulterae (John 7:53 – 8:11), suggesting that long and continual lectionary use of this story was what gave it a place in the canon, irrespective of the question of original text. For some who interacted and commented this is clearly an odd position for me to take. In the most recent comment Mike asks me about the long ending to Mark.
The honest answer is that I have no idea, but I think it is for the same reasons: long lectionary usage. Does that mean we have to treat it as part of the gospel? I see no reason why we should. It is clear that the church has long read the passages as scripture. It is equally clear that they are not part of the original text. Why is that a problem? Is it because such a view poses too many problems for the priority of scripture over the church?
Update and Clarification: When I said “part of the gospel” I intended to mean “part of the particular gospel narrative in which they have long been found” – a literary judgement, not a theological one.
… any better than anyone else. (And worse than liberal catholics!)
I’m not sure how I missed news of this news conference, but I don’t recall seeing it discussed. Apologies if I’m going over old ground. This is the most interesting summary:
Fundamentalists, or those who take a literal view of Scripture, do not know more about the Bible than anyone else. In fact, researchers said, it’s readers whose attitudes they described as “critical,” meaning that they see the Bible as the word of God but in need of interpretation, who are over-represented at the highest levels of Biblical literacy. In other words, fundamentalists actually score lower on basic Biblical awareness.
But this observation runs it a close second:
There is no apparent correlation between reading the Bible and any particular political orientation. In other words, it’s not the case that the more someone reads the Bible, the more likely they are to be a political conservative or liberal.
I’d love to see the questions that were actually asked and the methodology employed. If true, however, it may suggest very controversially that not only does “believing the Bible” function as a shibboleth rather than anything else, but that the scriptures may exercise very little power over the biblically literate and illiterate alike. If Bible reading and knowledge has no correlation with political affiliation, that would seem to be suggested.
Well, after all the thinking and waiting; after the first, second and third thoughts, today was the day I went shopping. It’s a 2.66 Ghz 20″ iMac. A big thank you to AT of the Apple Store in Solihull for his help and advice. Over the next few days and weeks I will do the occasional post on getting used to it, and list them on this page.
A few quick and early impressions.
- It is really nice and easy to setup, and it allows me to reclaim some space.
- I wish the @ key was where I expect it to be
- In trying to make the links above I kept wondering why it wasn’t copying the locations. I eventually realised I was hitting Control+C etc instead of Command+C.
- I’ve been delighted how easily my contacts and calendar events transferred simply by syncing my Palm TX.
- It’s been great fun watching Windows install in a VM in the background, while I’ve been working on something else.
- I’ve always thought Windows was good at drag and drop. I’m beginning to discover the Mac is drag and drop on steroids. This will suit my way of working.
Anyway, I must get on with the conversion / file transfer process. But so far I’m saying to myself: “Good move”
A happy blogging birthday to metacatholic. My first post here was May 1st 2007, when I decided to take this blogging lark seriously and move over from some on-off-on desultory attempts on Blogger.
A few boring and nothing much to be proud of stats. In that year I’ve amassed 544 posts (so around one-and-a-half a day), had 61,102 visits, and blotted out 8,462 spam comments.
Many happy returns to me, and a big thank you to all those who I’ve complimented, insulted and otherwise interacted with here or in the comments of their own blogs.
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