perfidy

Ephesians is in the new testament. It was a letter from the Apostle Paul to the church in Ephesus, which was in Asia Minor.

Crap! Post updated. Jackson is cunning.

"The devil can cite scripture for his purpose" - Shakespeare

No truer words have ever been written about the Bible. La! One of my favorite subjects... You see, I'm a born-again Christian in a disgustingly liberal costume. I'm not all about that NEW AGE SHIT that Jesus talks about in the NT. I prefer the old, scary, angry God that killed everyone on earth but Noah and his family. My God of the OT is one bad-a** m-fer. **MY** God is a fighting God, who only turns the cheek when he isn't hailing fire and brimstone down and turning people in to salt. (lest you think I'm war-mongering... Let me remind you of this 'let us beat our swords into ploughshares and make war no more' -Psalms, I think, and quite a nice thought)

*sigh* I get crazy about Biblical justifications for things. Like which bible are we talking about here? Septuagint? With or without the Apocrypha? Catholic or KJV? Which version are you reading? You can't tell me you are reading it in a language newer than Latin or Greek, or I'll laugh right in your face... yeah. I love God. I really do, it's just his entourage that pisses me off. They are burly guys in suits that ransack the buffet. You know what I mean?

Derrick Z Jackson may, a few times a year, make a compelling argument for his position. But even then he finds the most caustic manner by which to express it.

Usually though he's just a douchebag.

Mapgirl-- the textuality of the Bible, to use the postmodernist term for it, is one of the most fascinating aspects of the whole deal for me. My wife was a religious studies minor in college, and she got me hooked on the controversies over authorship and timing, the translation difficulties between Aramaic/Hebrew/Latin/Greek/Middle English/what have you. And THEN not to mention the Apocrypha, the strange mind of John of Patmos, etc. etc.

Who gets to say who is right? Who gets to say who is wrong? Personally, I dunno, but I'm not qualified to say anyway.

GL-- you're right: DZJ is a douchebag, which is why I flew into "attack" mode by default. Did you know the Boston Globe has 35 columnists on staff? A stable of writers that large means that the competition to write controversial, shrill pieces is very great, and it shows. The Globe is [em]thisclose[/em] to being a national-class paper, but close ain't enuf.

J
I don't read the Globe much anymore, but I would doubt there's one credible conservative writer on that staff.

As for being a national paper, why bother when the NY Times is your daddy?

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One thing to keep in mind is what the protestant tradition has (for a vareity of reasons) forgotten - that the church created the bible. The Catholic and Orthodox persective on the bible is that while the words in the Bible are holy writ, they are to be interpreted in the light of church teachings, and tradition. There is a 2000 year history of bible interpretation going back to the early church fathers that defines the meaning of the words in the bible. The Protestant idea of everyone being able to interpret the Bible directly is, strictly speaking, heretical.

The Church always considered itself a community, rather than a collection of individuals who coincidently happened to be going in the same direction. The church thought of itself as an organic whole, and that church teachings (reached by consensus through ecumenical councils whose members were believed to be guided by the Holy Spirit) were binding.

B, true enough. But the American religious tradition is founded at its very root in Protestantism. The Puritans rejected intermediaries between individuals and God. This got them into trouble when people like Ann Hutchison, who were not part of the ruling elite, claimed to be buddy-buddy with the big guy.

The Second Great Awakening, which may well be the single most important event in America's social developmen, was first and foremost a flowering of "inner-light" Christianity in which a highly individual relationship with God, and highly idiosyncratic reading of the Bibile, was paramount. Taken to the extreme, you get the Mormons, who rejected the Bible entirely. Less extreme are the hundreds of sects founded at the time, many of whom survive today.

So while your note that the Church and the Orthodox Church have a party line to which to adhere is well taken, it's largely irrelevant in the big picture. Such teachings are a decided minority in the American religious tradition, where individualism, divine revalation, personal prophesy, schism, and a rejection of orthodoxy hold much greater sway.

Buckethead, only 2000 years? Sorry, try longer than that when it comes to the OT that's part of my Christian bible. Talmud scholars and the famous rabbis in the temple were duking it out for longer than that. The word of God is pretty unreliable. That I believe. But it's pretty good for the most part.

Johno, I can't wait to meet your wife. I wish I was a religious studies major. I just have my school latin and greek behind me. I like reading my bible. I think it's an important document. Sometimes, I think it's a silly document. Wooing the Rose of Sharon as an allegory about your soul is a little weird.

You can't guess how many guys in my high school youth group pulled out the quote in the bible about slaves having their ear pierced as a justification for sticking jewelry in their ear...'I'm a slave to Jesus, see? The bible even says so!'

Well, Christianity only goes back 2000 years. You can't have a Christian tradition of bible reading older than that. And really, the final form of the Christian bible wasn't settled until the fourth century or so, so really its only about 1600 years.

I was just throwing that in for perspective. My point wasn't so much that there is a party line, but that you can get some wacky stuff going if you forget that the bible was assembled for a purpose.

As a side note, Islam has a problem I think, in that they can't have a tradition of interpretation in either the Orthodox or Protestant senses because of their view of the direct divinity of the Koran.

Small point of clarification re:

"The Catholic and Orthodox persective on the bible is that while the words in the Bible are holy writ, they are to be interpreted in the light of church teachings, and tradition. There is a 2000 year history of bible interpretation going back to the early church fathers that defines the meaning of the words in the bible. The Protestant idea of everyone being able to interpret the Bible directly is, strictly speaking, heretical."

While strictly true, most people living during this time were illiterate. Further the Bible was in a foreign tongue and literacy in Latin was a crown jewel of the Church. Those rascals who attempted to translate the Bible into the vernacular after the invention of the printing press were burned as heretics. Had the Bible been understandable to the masses, they would have no doubt interpreted scripture as it made sense to them. Humans is just like that.

Guitarpicker:
Excellent point, and one even more deeply rooted in the past.

The Pentateuch can be understood to be part of an oral tradition. In its time and place, the OT has more in common with the Iliad, in terms of form, than with the New Testament.

Consider Everett Fox' translation ("The Schocken Bible"); it's readily available and fascinating.