Transparent English Bible

Originally posted on AW last year it prompted a response from Dr Tabor, accessible here.


Dr James Tabor has released a sample from the forthcoming Transparent English Bible, a longstanding project that dates back to a proposal by Ernest Martin. If you fancy literal translations, this may appeal to you. The first few chapters of Genesis are available as a PDF document.

Tabor expresses his preference for literal translations in a blog entry, even recommending the long-forgotten 1901 ASV, and opting for the 1950s RSV over the NRSV. To each their own.

What you can say is that the proposed TEB is different. With the proliferation of dumbed-down "easy to understand" versions (which distort the not-so-easy-to-understand realities of the manuscripts) this version will certainly stand out. This is a long, long way from the feel-good babblings of the Good News Bible or the CEV.

A couple of "buts". The TEB has reached this stage of development before, with substantial excerpts pre-published online (including the first chapters of Genesis, if memory serves.) For whatever reason the project was then rebooted and the initial work apparently withdrawn.

Second, if an important quality of a good English translation involves being able to be read aloud, then this may be the TEB's Achilles heel. Scripture has only been the object of personal, silent reading in relatively recent times. In synagogue and church the Bible has always been read aloud, reflecting the reality of our largely illiterate forebears. Arguably these books were written to be read aloud rather than pored over by individuals - that's how it was supposed to happen when they were first set down. By this criteria TEB looks shaky. Try rolling this text off the tongue:

These are the bringings-forth of the skies and the land in their being created. In the day of the making of YHVH ELOHIM, land and skies, and no shrub of the field was before that on the land, and no plant of the field had before that sprouted - for YHVH ELOHIM had not made rain on the land, and there was no soil-man to service the soil (2: 4-5)

This may be true to the Hebrew, but it's not the way lucid English works. That said, the Tabor Bible may - assuming it finally reaches completion - fill an important void in the market, perhaps supplanting the simply awful NASB and kindred travesties. It's certainly a project worth following, and I'd wager a thousand percent more worthy than the KJVish Coulter translation, due for release (both Old and New Testaments) very shortly.

Meantime I'll be sticking to the NRSV.

Something different

Paul's journeys on Google Earth...

A Dip in Lake Wobegon

I hooted with laughter over a minor sub-plot in Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon novel Pontoon. A group of twenty-four Danish Lutheran pastors has arrived in town.

They had been sent over by the Danish Lutheran Board because they had signed a profession of doubt - there was a great stir about this in Copenhagen, big newspaper headlines (PRIESTS DENY DIVINITY OF JESUS) - and then the Hellerup 24, as they were known, took a more radical step and denied the Queen's right to be head of the Danish Church, and then all hell broke loose. Agnosticism was acceptable, but not an insult to Queen Margrethe...

The visitors don't endear themselves to their luckless guide, Fred Samuelson, a nervous young Luther Seminary graduate.

"Why is there so little color in America?" cried one. "Is there a fear of color?" "A fear of art and culture, if you ask me," said another.

Fred sat under his tree, trying to shut out their jabbering and then the word "puritanisk" rang out, which he heard before on the bus. Several times. Puritanical. An obsession of theirs. Evidently they'd read The Scarlet Letter once and it summed up America for them...

Being a Lake Wobegon novel, you know the ungracious tourists are going to get their comeuppance, and they most assuredly do in a wild (one could even say colorful) incident which brings together the different threads in the book. A great read, though be warned, it's a tad saucier than the Prairie Home Companion monologues.

That said, I wonder if the alleged Danish sentiment on "puritanisk" doesn't hit the nail right on the head regarding Anglo Christianity in general. In fact, I found myself muttering the word under my breath recently after enduring... well, that's another story.

Which gives me an opening to mention a couple of great Danes (so to speak), Jens Glebe-Moller and Niels Peter Lemche. You can be assured that, if the names are unfamilar, they would be well-known to the fictive Hellerup 24!

But that's a posting - perhaps more than one - for the future.

Nothing New Under the Sun

I am satisfied that the end of the world is at hand. The evidence flows in from every quarter... Soon, very soon, God will arise in his anger and the vine of the earth will be reaped. See! See! - the angel with his sharp sickle is about to take the field! See yonder trembling victims fall before his pestilential breath! ... The heavens grow black with clouds; the sun has veiled himself; the moon, pale and forsaken, hangs in middle air; the hail descends; the seven thunders utter loud their voices; the lightnings send their vivid gleams and sulphurous flames abroad; and the great city of the nations falls to rise no more forever and forever! At this dread moment, look! The clouds have burst asunder; the heavens appear; the great white throne is in sight! Amazement fills the universe with awe! He comes! - He comes! - Behold the Savior comes! - Lift up your heads, ye saints - He comes! He comes! He comes!

The words are those of William Miller before the Great Disappointment of 1844. Quoted in Robert L. Ferm's Piety, Purity, Plenty: Images of Protestantism in America, Fortress Press, 1991, p.48

Today's prophets of the apocalypse, one has to observe, are far less poetic.

Rocks in the Chebar

Dashing the brains of infants onto rocks isn't an activity many of us would associate with "true religion", but the psalmist had no such qualms. Recently I read Diane Purkiss' English Civil War, and those pious Puritans fairly relished the image. The cover of the book (British edition) features a disconcerting piece of period artwork that proves the enduring power of the psalmist's bile. The Puritans - godly spiritual forebears of much that passes for Christianity in the English-speaking world today - look a lot like a 17th century Taliban, and it's hard to take twenty-first century protestations against the violence of Islam all that seriously when it comes from their spiritual descendants.

But what about those Bible passages? After all, there they are, like it or not. How do you take the Bible seriously and yet make sense of the often demonic violence that drips from its pages?

Which is why Jerome Creach's musings on the subject might be worth considering.

Rest of God - the interview

Around the time Rest of God was released in 2005 I had the privilege of interviewing (by email) Henry Sturcke for the former Ambassador Watch website (not to be confused with the more recent blog of that name.)

How did your involvement in the WCG begin?

The Plain Truth found its way to our home in 1962, after my grandmother had been reading it since the mid-fifties. It was a year before I paid it any attention. As a high school sophomore I did a research project on the Common Market, as the European Community was then called, and noticed a cover story on Charles de Gaulle and his opposition to British membership. When Kennedy was assassinated a few weeks later I gathered up all the back issues I could find and immersed myself in them for the next three days. From then on I read regularly, although sometimes I would try to put it aside because of the overwhelmingly negative view of the world. Still, I wanted to attend Ambassador College when I graduated from high school. My father was opposed, and we struck a deal: I should begin at another college, and if I still wanted to go after a year, then I could transfer. His argument was that a basis of comparison would do me good.

I entered Boston University, but continued studying the literature from Ambassador College. In the spring of 1967 I requested and received my first ministerial visit. That summer, I attended my first service, at the Odd Fellows Hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, which seemed appropriately named. My experience was overwhelmingly negative. The sermon was long-winded, illogical, heavily based on current events, treated in a one-sided, ill-informed way. Even more disturbing was the "child rearing" aggressively practiced on some understandably restless children in the row in front of me. It was a long time before I went back for my second service.

If your first impressions were so negative, why did you continue your involvement?

By that time I had bought into the WCG reading of the Bible, history, and current events to a big extent. As a teenager living through the Cuban missile crisis, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, riots in towns and cities near me, and the growing tensions over the Vietnam War, it was easier to believe that the world was coming to an end than that it would continue. The Six-Day-War in 1967 seemed an especially clear confirmation of prophecy.

Particularly convincing for me was the Sabbath question. I had received a conventional religious upbringing (Lutheran, Missouri Synod). As part of preparation for confirmation, I memorized the ten commandments. When I found out that the fourth commandment did not refer to Sunday, that was quite a surprise.

In addition, not all of my impressions from that first service were negative. Through a mix-up, I ended up "fellowshipping" at the home of a family after services (in those days, social contact was discouraged with "new" people, so ordinarily I wouldn't have been invited). Here I experienced the opposite of the harsh, judgmental climate at services: simple, sincere people excited about "the truth" and serious about living the Christian life. That stayed in my mind during the subsequent years.

Finally, in the late winter of 1969 I went through a conversion experience. I re-contacted the local minister, began attending services again, and was baptized after my second week back. The next year I graduated from Boston University with a degree in journalism, applied to Ambassador, and set out for Pasadena in the fall of 1970.

And then it was all smooth sailing after graduation?

Hardly. After graduation in 1973, I was sent to Brussels as a correspondent for the Plain Truth. That summer I met my future wife, Edel Thomsen, who was working in the church's Düsseldorf office between her third and fourth years at Ambassador's Bricket Wood campus. We married after she graduated the next summer. A year after that, we were sent to Washington, D.C. One year later, the church went through a round of budget cuts, and the Plain Truth dropped its correspondents. The local pastor in Washington, Larry Salyer, recommended I be picked up as a ministerial trainee, but all the trainees were cut in the same budget crisis. For the next few months I freelanced in the D.C. area and continued to serve in the local congregation. I was ordained early the next year, and we moved to Montreal. I served in the ministry in Canada for the next four years, pastoring both English- and French-speaking congregations.

The late seventies were turbulent years in the church, and when Mr. Armstrong set out to "put the church back on the track" I came under suspicion of not being tough enough as a pastor. Looking back, it's clear to me that I suffered a classic burn-out. At the time, the church had no systems in place for diagnosing this, nor for supporting a pastor through it. So for the second time, I was laid off by the church. Since ministering was not open to me, I returned to my original profession, journalism, and my home area, metropolitan New York, which was also the center of magazine journalism. For the next two years, I worked as photo editor of a monthly magazine, and continued to serve in the local church area. The pastor there, Jim Jenkins, was independently minded enough to want to form his own judgment about me, for which I will always be grateful. At the time, we had excellent media presence, both in television as well as in the newsstand program, and stacks of new visit requests. Jim lobbied to have me rehired, and finally wore down the skepticism of Church Administration in Pasadena. So in November 1982 I was hired by the church for the third time. In 1987, we were sent to Switzerland to succeed Tom Lapacka in caring for the congregations in Zurich, Basel, and Stuttgart (Germany). At the time, we thought an international assignment of five years or so would be interesting, but we ended up staying.

What led you to first pursue advanced theological studies?

It was self-prescribed therapy for a mid-life crisis. After the turbulent seventies, the eighties were a time of explosive growth in the church, and ministers were working seven-day weeks to keep up. This was fulfilling, but exhausting. I reached a point where I felt I had plateaued, and was looking for something new. The classic mid-life therapies didn't appeal to me--I wasn't interested in getting a sports car, and I was still happy with my wife. On the other hand, I had always regretted that Ambassador did not offer courses in Biblical Hebrew or Greek when I studied there. Of course, a student is always happy for everything that is not required, but as soon as I was in my own pastorate, with the pressure of producing a new sermon every week, I was frustrated by the feeling that I was dependent on translations and secondary literature. I had tried to learn Greek on my own in the late seventies, but that required more self-discipline that I could muster. Now, in Switzerland, our next-door neighbor, a Reformed pastor, suggested I take a Greek course at the university. At first I only planned to take that course, then continue with my life. But I found that reading the New Testament in Greek opened a new world. Some of what I learned, such as the difference between hades and gehenna, was no surprise, of course. But soon it was clear that Mr. Armstrong would have never have insisted on his interpretation of gennao (to him, it referred to begettal only, not birth) if he had taken just one semester of Greek. So I signed up for a Latin course, then Hebrew, then more. This was all in my spare time, I continued pastoring the congregations. To me, it was all good clean fun, and I never suspected it would have consequences. But then as a preparation for Passover 1994 I decided to read Galatians straight through in Greek, without looking at any of the "inspired margins" in the Scofield Bible my grandmother gave me when I was baptized and that I had on my lap throughout AC. I came away from that reading with the uncomfortable feeling that Paul was combating a theology very similar to ours. I didn't know what to make of that, and when the changes came in the church a year later, I was skeptical and resisted them.

If you were skeptical, why did you stay?

After my original skepticism over the changes, I began to understand them, even though I didn't like the way they were being imposed. It is sometimes forgotten that there were two reform movements underway in the mid-nineties. While one group was looking into theological issues, another group, centered around Vic Kubik and Guy Swenson in Church Administration and some of the regional pastors, believed that a pastor who took seriously the fact that we were dealing with God's children would not treat the members the way they had traditionally been treated. I was especially close to this group, and was interested in the early meetings that paved the way, a few months later, for the founding of the United Church of God. One of the tragedies of what happened to the WCG in the nineties is that these two groups had little in common. We needed both reforms. Now it appears, looking from the outside, that even UCG has not consistently applied the insights of the original core who planned it.

At any rate, I understood my role as trying to help as many as possible to cope with the theological challenge that had been issued. At the same time, I had met enough Christians outside the fellowship of the WCG that I wanted to work in the direction of ecumenical opening. Swiss church leaders with whom I was in contact welcomed this, but stressed the importance of my acquiring a recognized theology degree for taking part in ecumenical conversations. So I decided to devote myself full-time to my studies and complete a master's program. This helped solve another problem. It was January 1997, and we still didn't have a budget approved for the year in the German area. I had been the regional pastor for the congregations in the German-speaking area ever since Paul Kieffer resigned in 1995 to go to United; I knew that we would pay in 1997 a total of 15 months salary to two ministers we did not plan to employ in 1998 (one would be transferred back to North America in the summer, one would retire in September). Since the shortfall in our budget was roughly the same as my salary, I decided to lay myself off, with the intention of going back to work for the church after completing my program. In all, that was the third time the church had laid me off. I don't know if that is a record.

You're the author of a German language text, Das Jahr 2000 und das Ende der Welt im Internet. Can you give us a short overview?

After I decided to resign my pastorate, Fritz Stolz, professor of the science of religion in Zurich, approached me with an idea for a project. He was fascinated with the way that end-time groups were spreading panic over the approaching year 2000, yet ironically were using the very technology that was supposed the cause the breakdown of society, computers and the internet, to spread the message. He knew of my background, and thought I would be the logical person to research it. The result was the publication you mention. It was the first internet publication by the theology faculty at the university, and for a number of months generated the largest number of hits of any university website. It is dated now, and will probably go off line at the end of July.

Some time ago you gave a fascinating interview to Rachael Kohn of Australia's ABC on this subject. Can you tell us how that happened and the main message you tried to convey.

As part of my research on end-time groups and the internet I came in contact with the Center of Millennial Studies that Professor Richard Landes had started, interestingly enough, at my alma mater, Boston University. I decided to work up my thoughts on the experience of the WCG in distancing themselves from end-time speculation. It is common for groups to redefine their expectations in the wake of disconfirmation, but I don't know of any others that make a radical break with the very idea of knowing when the end might be. So I thought the experience of the WCG might be worth reporting on. Rachael Kohn was covering the conference for Australian Broadcasting, and lined up interviews with several people. I was one of them. She was particularly interested in drawing out my personal experience of the effect of the changes. I was amused when I finally heard the interview over a year later that she closed the program by asking an expert on religious movements to pontificate on the interview. He said the standard things about how true believers fight to maintain the credibility of their beliefs even after disconfirmation, and that this was obviously an example of that. I don't know how carefully he listened to the interview, since in this case, the ones who wanted to cling to the belief that we had been right all along left and started their own groups, while the ones who saw that we had been very wrong were trying to stay and change the course of the church.

Another outgrowth of the conference was the opportunity to contribute some entries to the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements (Routledge 2000), including one on the WCG. For a while I considered doing further studies on the WCG and other new religious movements, but wasn't sure that I wanted to spend the rest of my life wrapped up in that way of thinking. Meanwhile, Jean Zumstein, professor for New Testament in Zurich, said that my proposed outline for a master's thesis on the Sabbath was really more suited for a dissertation, and offered me the opportunity to write it under his tutelage. As soon as he mentioned it, I knew I wanted to do it; I had an offer from the WCG to return to the US and pastor congregations for them, but was not sure that that was the right next step for me. But now I knew what to do next. In a way, it was a good way to find closure, since the Sabbath question was the key element in convincing me of the truth of Herbert Armstrong's teachings.

The topic of your dissertation, is bound to interest many Sabbatarian Christians, some of whom will be familiar with Samuele Bacchiocchi's From Sabbath to Sunday, or Carson's From Sabbath to Lord's Day. Arguably both are apologetic works. Do you see Encountering the Rest of God as having an apologetic function, and do you have a comment to offer on either book?

One should also mention here the dissertation that Willy Rordorf wrote more than forty years ago. Actually, none of them are primarily apologetic books. All are primarily scholarly inquiries, which are supposed to be dispassionate investigations into a matter. Of course, ever since the "New Hermeneutics" of Gadamer and Ebeling, scholars have been more aware than before that there is no neutral inquiry. Each of us starts with a prior understanding; the best we can hope to do is try to be clear--at least to ourselves--about what that prior understanding is, and consciously bring that position into dialogue with the matter we are investigating. So it is more than a little ironic that each scholar arrived at a conclusion that basically confirmed his own prior theological conviction.

This doesn't disqualify any of the books. Rordorf's is a solid piece of scholarship that is still the last word on the question of Sabbath and Sunday in the writings of the church fathers. Bacchiocchi's work, sadly, suffers from his tendency to minimize evidence that runs contrary to his conclusion. The volume edited by Carson does a good job of summarizing the evidence at the time it was written.

So why invest five years writing a new book on the subject?

Well, a lot has happened in the last few decades in New Testament studies. First, the fact that Jesus was a Jew, and needed to be seen in the context of his time in order to be understood, has been more widely appreciated. It is no longer possible to cite the Sabbath conflicts in the Gospels as clear evidence that he intended to abolish the Sabbath, as had previously been done. Second, work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, which had only recently been discovered when Rordorf began his project, and were still mostly unpublished then, has progressed and has helped us to see the variety with Judaism in Jesus' time. Thirdly, an important reassessment of Paul has led to questions whether he thought that all forms of law observance were incompatible with righteousness by faith. Fourthly, evaluation of the Nag Hammadi finds has led to a broadened view of the diversity in the early Christian movement; one document among them, the Gospel of Thomas, has an interesting saying about the Sabbath that had not been considered in any of the previous books. And fifthly, there is no longer a consensus that by the year 70 Christians and Jews had irrevocably parted ways and afterwards had little to do with each other. All five of these developments have a bearing on the Sabbath question, and meant that the time was ripe for a new book. In fact, I met Rordorf soon after I began my project, and he agreed about the need to handle the topic again: I greatly appreciated his encouragement.

But my primary purpose is not apologetic. I think both extreme proponents of the changes in the WCG, as well as those holding to our previous teachings, will find something to get upset about. It wasn't my aim to get anyone upset; I simply tried to do the best job I could of explaining what I found in the texts. I would hope that the book finds readers who are interested in thinking honestly about the questions, even if they end up disagreeing with me. If I can see that they have tried to understand, rather than just look to pick apart and demolish, then I will be happy.

If you had to briefly summarize the thesis you offer in Encountering the Rest of God, how would you express it?

I came to see that the question is framed incorrectly if it is presented in terms of the alternative Sabbath or Sunday. I do not deal with the question of Sunday, except in passing. Instead, I sought to understand why so many Christians so quickly lessened their allegiance to Sabbath observance, given that it was one of the chief identity markers of the Jewish matrix of the Jesus movement. In many of the texts available to us, it is clear that this did not happen in favor of Sunday observance, but because of their devotion to Jesus. That was their new identity, and that made the question of days much less relevant.

www.tvz.ref.ch is the website of the publisher (the site is in German). www.eisenbrauns.com is the website of the North American distributor.

What are you doing now, and what is your current affiliation with the WCG?

For a while as I was writing, I nurtured the hope that I could somehow be useful to the WCG when I was done. It became clear, however, that the church would continue downsizing for a long time, and had no business adding anyone to their payroll while they were still laying off loyal long-time workers. I applied for some teaching positions in the US, in the hopes that I could do some block seminars for training WCG ministers during the semester breaks. But nothing worked out in that direction. Meanwhile, several friends who were pastors of the Swiss Reformed Church (one of the established churches here, the church of Zwingli, Calvin, and Karl Barth) urged me to consider switching. I took my time with that, doing vacation substitutions in some nearby congregations. Once I decided that this was the next logical step, I approached Joe Tkach to ask the WCG board to approve my holding dual credentials, which was approved. So I am still a credentialed elder of the WCG. I did the standard 13 month training course for new Reformed ministers, but at the end of that time, the Reformed Church did not insist on re-ordaining me, but said that my ordination was renewed and confirmed. That was important for me, since I don't see what I'm doing as a break with my past, but as a natural development.

How do the members of your former congregation see it?

I was gratified to experience a great deal of understanding. Some have had difficulty, which is understandable, given how we long viewed other churches. But the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. Back in 1995, I often said in sermons and private conversations that we might all reach different conclusions about the challenges to our long-held beliefs that had been raised, but that it was important for us to remain in dialogue with one another and to treat one another with respect. I'm happy to say that many people, at least here in Switzerland, seem to have adopted this approach.

Do you have anything you'd like to say about your personal feelings on the current Saturday/Sunday worship issue.

I think that it's important for each person to be convinced in his own mind, and to act on that conviction. I would hope that he or she would be surrounded by others who would respect that decision, and that he or she would respect the decisions that other people make. There is a lot of judging of others among Christians. For some Sunday observers, Sabbath observance alone is evidence that one is not really a Christian, or doesn't stand on grace. At the same time, the feeling is widespread among seventh-day Sabbatarians that they have the "right" day, and that those who don't worship on that day aren't true Christians. I have come to see that this is a theological and historical error that needs to be rejected, not Sabbath observance per se. The important thing is not when we worship, but that we worship.

Rest of God

A review of Encountering the Rest of God: How Jesus Came to Personify the Sabbath, by Henry Sturcke, Theologischer Verlag Zurich, 2005.

Henry Sturcke's Rest of God sets out to explore "the rapid disappearance of the Sabbath as a Christian worship practice", and stands alongside the earlier work of Bacchiocchi (From Sabbath to Sunday) and Carson (From Sabbath to Lord's Day) as an important contribution to the "Sabbath question".

I was exposed to the polemical, persuasive teaching of a fundamentalist, apocalyptic Christian group, the Worldwide Church of God. A core belief involved the command to remember the Sabbath day... I studied at their college, accepted ordination and served in the ministry of the church for over twenty years... The priceless opportunity to write a dissertation offered me the chance to slowly and painstakingly reexamine the question.

Those with shared roots in the WCG may find Sturcke's affirmative use of historical-critical scholarship disconcerting. Unfortunately the Sabbath question was dealt with in a superficial way by earlier church writers. An example occurred in the late 1970s when Garner Ted Armstrong, newly separated from his father's church, visited the Church of God (Seventh Day) headquarters in Denver. Speaking there as a guest preacher he mentioned his tour of the Bible Advocate Press where he had been presented with "a very fine book" on the Sabbath (Bacchiocchi's). He was clearly unfamiliar with it (unlike his hosts) and his later preaching record on this subject indicates that he never did bother to dust it off; a remarkable oversight by a high-profile Sabbatarian apologist.

Sturcke offers a more nuanced argument than some who have gone this way before. (There was little doubt, for example, about the inevitable direction Bacchiocchi's 1977 treatise would take, although the journey he took readers on still held a few surprises.) He deals with the relevant texts in great detail, a mark of good methodology, but not so likely to appeal to the casual reader. This is, after all, an academic text, but perseverance brings some real insights.

After setting the scene with an overview of the work of earlier scholars (particularly Rordorf and Bacchiocchi) and a review of the significance of the Sabbath in the Old Testament and Intertestamental periods, Sturcke examines a series of New Testament texts that bear directly on the subject: Galatians 4, the Grain field pericopes in the Synoptic Gospels (Mark 2, Matthew 12, Luke 6), the Sabbath healing controversies in John, and a passage from Hebrews (4:9). He then focuses on what can be learned from the way the Sabbath is presented in the Epistle of Barnabas (one of the early "Apostolic Fathers") and the Gospel of Thomas.

The section on Galatians 4: 8-11 alone extends over 58 pages. The conclusion reached is that the Galatians are not returning to their previous pagan observances, but, under the influence of a competing Gentile mission, are beginning to observe the days mandated in the Old Testament, and that Paul is drawing a parallel between their previous polytheistic practices and those (equally objectionable) customs they were now beginning to adopt, grounded in the Torah.

The conclusion of the book (chapter 7) presents a very readable summary. Sturcke writes:

The most important general result of this investigation has been the discovery that while on the one hand there was diversity of practice with regard to a seventh-day Sabbath in the early Christian community, the subject had, for most strands of Christianity, lost importance when compared to the role that the Sabbath played in Second Temple Judaism... as a result of the intensive Christological focus of the community. (p.333)

The author then attempts a brief historical reconstruction to account for the rapid disappearance of Sabbatarian worship from the Christian community.

The Sabbath was not rejected in order to form a new identity. The new identity had already been formed by faith in Christ. This led both to a loss of importance of the Sabbath, as well as to its reinterpretation...(p.338)

The study ends with some straight talking:

The results of this investigation have demonstrated that the Sabbatarian position can only be maintained by faulty exegesis and historical ignorance... the Sabbatarian claim must be firmly and decidedly rejected and resisted. The claim that only those who worship on the seventh-day Sabbath are faithful to the biblical pattern is both mistaken and sectarian - a lamentable mixture.(p.343-344)

Sturcke also forcefully rejects the concept of Sunday Sabbatarianism, the idea that the institution along with its obligations has simply been transferred from the seventh day to the first.

The consecration of all of life means that not only the Sabbath, but any time is a time for God, and the believer, to be active in overcoming the forces of darkness.(p.345)

The early Christian movement was characterized by the bursting of boundaries... The boundary between sacred and profane time was transcended. (346)

While the line of argument Sturcke advances contains new elements, the general thesis has a long pedigree. According to the classification system proposed by Willard Swartley (Slavery Sabbath War & Women) Rest of God fits in with the “Lord's Day” position (as against the Sabbath position of Adventists, or the Sabbath-Sunday position of the Puritans). The eight characteristics of this position outlined by Swartley (p.79) are all compatible with Sturcke's presentation, but especially the sixth and eighth:

6. Though Jewish Christians continued to observe the Sabbath, Christian theology, as it developed in the context of the Gentile mission, held Sabbath-keeping to be unnecessary... Jesus, the substance to whom the shadow pointed, has made all days holy.

8. Only in later church history... did Sabbath observance get connected to the Lord's day, producing Sabbath-Sunday observance.

Rest of God will be a valuable addition to the library of anyone seeking an authoritative, comprehensive treatment of the marginalization of Christian Sabbath observance. Those Sabbatarian Christians who require their religious underpinnings to rest on reinforced concrete, however, may find the book challenging.

Even if you finally disagree with Henry Sturcke, you'll certainly find much here to reflect on and to broaden your understanding of both the Sabbath and the earliest years of Christianity. It seems likely that this book will set the agenda for serious discussion of the Sabbath for some time.

Adapted from an earlier review

Gilgamesh

A thousand years before the Bible there was Gilgamesh. It's the oldest story that has come down to us from the earliest years of civilization. What is truly remarkable is that, despite the jarring strangeness of the world of 2750 BCE, it is also a familiar world filled with people very much like ourselves. In fact, that's one of the surprises: the Gilgamesh epic is surprisingly "modern" in the way it portrays its main characters. Students of the Bible are usually captivated by the deluge story, this version predating the one that appears in Genesis, but there is so much more on offer.

I was first introduced to the Gilgamesh Epic by sci-fi writer Robert Silverberg's novel Gilgamesh. In my opinion it's an underrated work, though it's no substitute for the real thing.

The problem with most translations of Gilgamesh is that they're the work of academics, and often fail to catch the sheer power of the original. Which is why Stephen Mitchell's efforts in providing Gilgamesh: A New English Version are so successful, capturing the beauty, poetry, and yes even the raw eroticism of this tale from the beginning of history.

The setting is Uruk, now familiar to us from newspaper and TV reports as blood-soaked Mosul in Iraq. Gilgamesh is the lusty young monarch who teams up with a wild man known as Enkidu to bring down a monster, Humbaba. It's a tale of friendship, sexuality and death. The cast of minor characters include a sacred prostitute, the priestess Shamhat, whose task it is to bring Enkidu to Uruk.

They looked in amazement. The man was huge
and beautiful. Deep in Shamhat's loins
desire stirred. Her breath quickened
as she stared at this primordial being.
"Look," the trapper said, "there he is.
Now use your love-arts...
Stir up his lust when he approaches,
touch him, excite him, take his breath
with your kisses, show him what a woman is."

And then there's Utnapishtim, the original Noah.

On the seventh day,
I brought out a dove and set it free.
The dove flew off, then back to the ship,
because there was no place to land. I waited
then I brought out a swallow and set it free.
The swallow flew off, then flew back to the ship,
because there was no place to land. I waited
then I brought out a raven and set it free.
The raven flew off, and because the water
had receded, it found a branch, it sat there,
it ate, it flew off and didn't return.

Although the Gilgamesh epic is short (easily read in a single sitting, though you'd probably want take it a little more slowly to appreciate its depths) it is without a doubt superb literature, and any thoughtful reader will come away with some fresh insight into the human condition. Long ages before Ecclesiastes, Gilgamesh receives this advice from a tavern keeper.

Humans are born, they live, then they die,
this is the order that the gods have decreed.
But until the end comes, enjoy your life,
spend it in hapiness, not despair.
Savour your food, make each of your days
a delight, bathe and anoint yourself,
wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean,
let music and dancing fill your house,
love the child who holds you by the hand,
and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.
That is the best way for a man to live.


Mitchell's version fairly sings, and is the best way to approach this remarkable tale, a journey to great-walled Uruk and the cedar forests of Lebanon, nearly 5000 years in the past.

Adapted from AW, April 2007

Harold, Jesus and Yahweh

Harold Bloom must be the most quotable literary critic on the Biblical block. In his recent Jesus and Yahweh : The Names Divine he pushes everyone's buttons. Mark Twain would be proud of him.

There are no verifiable facts about Jesus of Nazareth.

Josephus, a superb liar...

[T]he Gnostic sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas ring more authentically to me than the entire range of utterances attributed to him in the Synoptic Gospels and in the very late Gospel of John. There is not a sentence concerning Jesus in the entire New Testament composed by anyone who ever had met the unwilling King of the Jews...

And that's just from the three pages that constitute chapter 1!

Later Bloom describes the New Testament (which he also terms the "Belated Testament") as "the strongest and most successful creative misreading in all of textual history" and "historically the most totally successful makeover ever accomplished."

He doesn't mean that as a compliment!

On Paul: "he is an obsessed crank..."

On Christian theologians in general: "A literary critic must begin by observing that New Testament scholarship manifests a very impoverished notion as to just what literary allusion is or can be."

And: "I find it ironical, nearly two thousand years after St. Paul accused the Jews of being literalizers, that the leading scholars of Christianity are hopeless literalizers."

He also raises some fascinating questions. Why, for example, do the rabbis overlook the "I am who I am" (ehyeh asher ehyeh) text of Exodus 3? This is a hugely significant statement in Christian theology (especially thanks to Augustine), yet it barely raised a rabbinical eyebrow until Maimonides.

The first half of the book especially, on Jesus, is provocative, and perhaps one-eyed, but at the same time a delight, whether ultimately you agree or disagree. The second half is a little more dense, at least for those of us clueless about kabbalah. Not being a huge fan of Shakespeare I also found the references to Hamlet and his kin that occur throughout the book a little tiresome, but on balance this is a very readable book from a literary critic (not a group known for simple prose) and full of insight.

Pestiferous Puritans

This link is to an essay I've written for a 200-level paper on Modern Christianity (although I'm not convinced Puritans are all that modern - but I don't set the questions.)

In any event, I enjoyed the reading, especially Diane Purkiss' The English Civil War, even though it wasn't on the recommended list. As a rule I find English history dreadfully gray and boring, but this was an exception. Go the Royalists!

At the moment the essay is still in draft form, so if you spot any howlers, please email me.

Inspired Forgeries?

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but did imitation take a step too far into outright fraud and forgery in the New Testament?

There certainly were forgers out there. Two documents claiming to come from the Apostle Paul are obvious examples: Third Corinthians and an alleged exchange of letters between Paul and the philosopher Seneca.

These guys could be tricky. A text emerged in the fourth century claiming to be written by the original apostles. Called the Apostolic Constitutions, it brazenly advises its readers to avoid reading books that make false claims to apostolic authorship. Talk about chutzpah!

But what about the documents that made the final cut for the New Testament? There are at least six books claiming to be written by Paul that display the tell-tale marks of being pseudonymous (a scholarly way of saying forgeries.) The suspect letters fall into two groups: the Deutero-Pauline epistles (2 Thessalonians, Colossians and Ephesians), and the Pastorals (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus.)

That means, of the 13 letters attributed to Paul, nearly half are thought to be fabrications. That just leaves us with Romans, Galatians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon and 1 Thessalonians as genuine.

What about Hebrews? It's not by Paul either, but then it doesn't claim to be. Although it was included in the canon on the false assumption that Paul wrote it, it can't be considered a forgery as it makes no pretense to be from Paul (or any other apostle). Church father Origen wrote about the identity of the author: "God only knows." James was a common name at the time, and the letter bearing that name nowhere claims to be by the brother of Jesus; hence not pseudonymous. Revelation is in a similar category: John the apostle? Not likely. The Gospel of John is famously unconcerned with the end of the age, quite unlike the Apocalypse. While it's true that these books made it into the canon largely on wishful thinking about authorship, there's nothing in the way of such extravagent claims within these documents.

But there certainly do seem to be flagrant forgeries in the Pauline corpus. Unfortunately there's more. Chalk up 2 Peter as pseudonymous, along with Jude. Questions need to be asked about 1 Peter as well. The letters of John are also dubious affairs, most scholars optimistically attributing them to a later disciple of John.

Despite the special pleading of latter-day apologists, "forgery was almost universally condemned by ancient authors." The exception was in schools of philosophy where it was considered a bit of an art form to place your thoughts in the mouth of a great teacher of the past.

Bart Ehrman comments: "Many scholars are loath to talk about New Testament "forgeries" because the term seems so loaded and suggestive of ill intent. But... [it] is striking that few scholars object to using the word "forgery" for books, even Christian books, that occur outside the New Testament."

The beginning of wisdom in tackling the scriptures, whether the Old Testament or the New, is honesty. These ancient books are many things, but inflating their value by misrepresentation can serve no useful purpose.

Reposted from AW, July 2007

LXX-rated

It's always puzzled me that conservative Christians get all strident about the Masoretic text of the Old Testament, when it's clear that the New Testament writers wouldn't go near the thing. Instead they used the Septuagint (LXX) almost exclusively.

There are differences between the two, and for a long time it was assumed that the LXX was an inferior product, deviating from the Hebrew original. If so, how come the early church relied on it so completely?

Then along came the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it turns out that the LXX readings do in fact go back to the Hebrew. It seems that there were variant versions of the Hebrew scriptures, one set of which underlie the Masoretic tradition, so beloved of King James fanatics, and another which leads to the LXX.

It's discoveries like these - and the scholarship that flows from them - that forever renders the old-style "Bible helps" of a previous era redundant and misleading. That news doesn't seem to have yet percolated down to the fundamentalist subculture.

Assuming you're not able to read Greek, where would you go to check out the LXX text? There have been translations, but they tend to date back to the nineteenth century, which limits both their readability and their accuracy. Mind you, if you're one of the many Rip Van Winkles who still thinks Strong's is a valuable resource, that probably won't faze you.

If not, then there's good news. Oxford University Press is scheduled to release a new LXX English translation within a few months. Even better news, you can download a pre-publication version here.

Yeah, yeah, I can hear the gainsayers already. Why bother, mythology, yadda yadda. I'm not suggesting it be put to literalist proof-texting uses, or made the object of devotional navel gazing. On the contrary, neither practice seems particularly valuable to me for any Bible version. But it does open up a new window on the historical and literary issues which - and I guess this is my point - preclude the kind of mindlessness that's rife in the splinters, the genetically modified contemporary WCG, and the evangelical community generally.

Jewish folk would also probably be pleased to have ownership of their scriptures - rooted in the Masoretic tradition - back again. The misuse and appropriation of the Tanakh has served to create tension between the two communities for centuries.

The Septuagint is the Bible of the early church, no question. It's "apostolic" in the sense that the New Testament writers quoted it almost exclusively. To paraphrase the song "Gimme that ol' time religion", if it was good enough for Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, how come it's not good enough for fundamentalists? Shouldn't they be dumping their NKJVs and moving across to the new translation?

And if not, why not?

Adapted from AW, October 2007

Hillsong

If you're an Aussie, you already know what Hillsong is. If you're a church-going Kiwi, chances are you do too. Walk into any Christian bookshop in Australia or New Zealand and cruise the music display, Hillsong will leap out at you. Hillsong Music is big business, with an influence that extends well beyond the Assemblies of God, the denomination which Hillsong belongs to. Hillsong is Australia's largest, most successful mega-church, and its TV program is seen in a number of other countries including the US (TBN, Daystar), Canada, New Zealand (TV3 and Shine) and - of all places - Estonia. Even former Prime Minister John Howard has put in an appearance in the pews.

Called People in Glass Houses, Tanya Levin's book on Hillsong had a rough ride before hitting the bookstores. Publisher Allen & Unwin backed off after agreeing to print the book in February 2007. Truth, however, will eventually out, and the book, with a new publisher, has now been reprinted after its first edition sold out. Unfortunately, as there's no American edition, readers in the northern hemisphere might be hard-pressed to find a copy, but an article in the Sydney Morning Herald is a helpful place to find out more.

Levin's book reminds us that religious servitude is no respecter of denominational distinctives. Tithing for example, and the reign of misogyny. Emphasis on “family values” (where do you find that in the ministry of Jesus or Paul, or the New Testament as a whole?) and a jaundiced view of higher education. And glaring, blatant hypocrisy at the apex of the hierarchical food chain.

Hillsong is an Aussie phenomena with strong Kiwi connections. According to Levin, Pastor Brian Houston's dad, also a Pentecostal preacher, moved his family across the ditch when his moral failures became an issue here. A former NZ Prime Minister once remarked that emigrating Kiwi's improved the national IQ scores in both countries. It seems father Frank's flight could well be a case study in support of that notion. The details are there in the book and on the Web. A times it was hard to know whether to laugh out loud or to just groan as Levin recounted her experiences and perceptions.

Meantime I've decided to do a one-person boycott of Gloria Jean's, the cafe franchise owned by Hillsong devotees that apes Starbucks. You can get a better fair-trade-friendly flat white at Esquires – and know that 10% doesn't come off your receipt to fund fundies.

Adapted from two AW entries, November 2007

Reading the Bible

Every so often along comes a book that resets the agenda and signals a weather change in the way people view their world. James Kugel's How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now may be just such a book.

Kugel is an effective writer, and his book is mercifully approachable by the non-specialist. But more than this, he is an intelligent and informed writer, not out to score cheap apologetic points. Kugel writes out of his own struggle with the Bible, as both an Orthodox Jew and a scholar. This is a book that will both challenge and appeal to people of faith and those who have moved away from biblical faith... and those in between.

How to Read the Bible begins with a potted history of the way people down through history have viewed the scriptures - with particular focus on the Old Testament. On the cusp of change we meet a remarkable American Presbyterian called Charles Briggs, convicted of heresy a hundred years ago.

From there Kugel begins a kind of survey of the Hebrew Bible viewed with the twin lenses of received wisdom and dogma on one hand (the "ancient interpreters"), and the fruit of modern biblical scholarship on the other. From the first section on the Creation, Adam and Eve, it's clear this is a journey of discovery even for those old hands who thought they already knew it all. Expect to find a few overturned apple-carts along the way.

For anyone fascinated or conflicted by the Bible (the two reactions aren't mutually exclusive!) this is a brilliant and utterly riveting read.

Reposted from AW, February

Intro

Otagosh is a "baby biblioblog" of sorts. Many of the postings here first appeared on Ambassador Watch, a blog with a specific audience that often finds this kind of material peripheral to their interests. Otagosh is for those who'd rather skip the post-sectarian trauma. In addition to the reposts from AW there'll be some material original to this blog.

FWIW the blogger (modest bow) is an aging undergraduate student in theology at a New Zealand university (Otago) with a background in Lutheranism and the Worldwide Church of God. I confess to a dislike of fundamentalism, Calvinism, Karl Barth and N. T. Wright.

Keeping two blogs current is a bit of a chore, but the goal is to post original material here once a week (not counting any reposts). Thanks for dropping by.