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Ray Hagins Refuted: Arius and the Council of Nicaea

July 11, 2013, 4:02 am
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In my first post on Ray Hagins I covered how the assertions he makes about gods like Horus, Mithras and Krishnahave no basis in reality.  In fact, a number of people offered Hagins cash rewards for any primary texts supporting many of his claims, and he refused to supply any such source.  The truth is Hagins is powerless to supply those sources because they do not exist.  The texts explicitly contradict his claims.


For example, he asserts those three gods were all virgin born: Horus was not born of a virgin.  Plutarch relates the necessity for Isis to fashion Osiris a phallus before she descends on his body and receives 'the seed of Osiris in her womb.'[1] (Who needs Fifty Shades of Grey or pre-teen vampire franchises when you could just read all that saucy Egyptian stuff.) As Yamauchi, Clauss and others show, Mithras is depicted explicitly emerging fully grown from a rock in ancient Roman depictions (curiously reminiscent of 60’s British rock album artwork), and we even have a Latin inscription which spells out the rock birth for us.[2]  As for Krishna, before he was born his parents were imprisoned by his evil uncle Kamsa in an attempt by Kamsa to circumvent a prophecy about Krishna being born and killing him. As a tyrant of decorum, instead of killing his sister Devaki, he murders her first seven children in front of her and her husband as they are born in the prison.  Krishna only survives his birth due to divine assistance.  He was her eighth child as the prophecy itself stated.[3] You can examine a refutation of the rest of Ray’s claims about these gods here.

Perhaps Hagin’s most famous claim is that a letter correspondence attributed to Emperor Hadrian links the early Christians with Egyptian Serapis worship. In  my second post on Hagins, I pointed out the “Serapis letter” is a late forgery. The forged nature of the document is taken as axiomatic among scholars of the Historia Augusta from which it derives.

In this third post we will be examining Hagins’ wacko claims about Arius at the council of Nicaea, and I will propose a challenge to Hagins.  He’s billed himself as an authority to the public so I will address him publicly and email this page to him.

Take a deep breath dear Remythologized reader. Cover your baby's ears; for I am about to present you the holy grail of Nicaeamyths.  All the hundreds before that made you laugh and cry were but mere omens of this crowning achievement of historical negligence.  Blood will shoot out of your eyeballs.  Catatonic visions of Dan Brown rotating his head 360 degrees will seize you. You will wake up in the fetal position in a puddle of drool with your fingernails embedded in a J. N. D. Kelly textbook.  Brace yourself:

Hagins claims Arius’ contention at Nicaea was over Jesus’ historical existence.  That’s right.  He says Jesus was unknown prior to the centuries leading up to Nicaea.

At 30:28 into this “lecture” Hagins says, “Nobody, Origen…none of the historians of the first, second or third century said anything about somebody called Jesus.”

Yes, I’m actually about to type a paragraph refuting this.  I’ll do it for those who follow Hagins and have no footing in Christian history:

Origen wrote extant commentaries on the gospels of John and Matthew and the letter to the Romans; he wrote an apologetic work entitled Against Celsus which cleared up Roman slanders against the historical Jesus; he wrote two books on the resurrection of Jesus. All one needs to do is pull up a text database of his writings like this one and search “Jesus.”  The man “Jesus” appears near 400 times in Origen’s Against Celsus alone.  Heracleon, in 170 wrote a commentary on the Gospel of John.  You can read it here.  That’s to say nothing of all the pre-Nicaean writings like Hermas, Polycarp, Clement of Rome, Ignatius, or the Didache, all of which refer to Jesus by name as a historical individual and none of which hint at a Serapis connection.  Besides that, Romans like Pliny the Younger, Celsus, Lucian, the Jewish historian Josephus and Tacitus mention Jesus, all within 150 years of his life.[4]  The Chester Beatty Papyri and Bodmer papyri contain most of the New Testament dating long before Nicaea.  I’ll stop there.  Claims this inane don’t warrant extended rebuttal.

To top this off Hagins teaches the Christians of the first three centuries were actually worshiping Serapis—that Serapis was made into Jesus at Nicaeaand Arius was privy to the reality that Jesus didn’t exist historically. This is obviously based on Hagins’ flub with assuming the Historia Augusta is genuine, as previously covered. Beyond that, If you’re still incredulous of Hagin’s thesis, you clearly don’t posses the erudition to consider the irrefutable iconographic juxtaposition of Serapis and Jim Caviezel. Let’s pretend to forget Hagins actually makes the equivalent of that argument and proceed to ask some fun questions like good Aristotelians:

Why does Arius in his own writings and arguments at Nicaea appeal to Hebrews and other New Testament texts as authoritative standards if he didn’t believe their claims about the historical Jesus?  You can read all of Arius’ extant writings here. Ray, why did Arius write to Constantineaffirming the existence of the historical Jesus?
 We believe inone God the Father Almighty, and in the Lord Jesus Christ his Son, who was begotten of him before all ages, God the Word through whom all things were made, both things in heaven and on earth; who descended, and became human, and suffered, and rose again, ascended into heaven, and will again come to judge the living and the dead.
At 34:25 Hagins says, “There was one God.  ‘He ain’t got no son’: That was Arius’ argument.”

Virtually every letter we have from Arius affirms God “begat a son.” For example, five years before Nicaeain a letter to the bishop of Alexandriahe wrote:
We acknowledge One God, alone unbegotten…who begat an only-begotten Son before time and the ages, through whom he made both the ages [Heb 1:2] and all that was made.
Pointing to texts in which Arius claims Jesus did not exist as a member of the Trinity in eternity past (the Arian heresy) won’t do, Ray. Why does Arius never once bring up Serapis in any of his writings?

I’m sure all that stuff was covered up by the international Catholic conspiracy, right?

****A public challenge to Ray Hagins*****

Name and cite a single living scholar on earth holding an academic position at any university in the fields of New Testament or Church History who believes the council of Nicaeainvolved suppressing a contention by Arius that Jesus was in anyway associated with Serapis.

Name a single one.
_______________________________________________________________________

Suggested lay-level reading for Rays’ followers interested in what really happened with Arius at Nicaea:  Roger E. Olson, The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 1999).

[1] You can see this with the text reference on page 47 using this online translation of Plutarch’s Moralia.  

In regards to Horus being the “seed of Osiris” see R. O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts (Chippenham: Aris & Phillips, 2004), 125.  Spell 148 reads: “How do you know? He is the god, lord and heir of the Ennead, who made you within the egg. I am Isis, one more spirit-like and august than the gods; the god is within this womb of mine and he is the seed of Osiris.”

[2] This material is provided by Edwin Yamauchi.  See my post on Kersey Graves here.

[3] The birth story of Krishnais related in the Srimad Bhagavatam, canto 10.  You can read it online here.

v. 66-7 of chapter 1 reads, “He [Kamsa] thus in fear of his own death arrested Vasudeva and Devakî, confined them at home in shackles and killed one after the other each of their newborn sons not knowing whether it would be the 'Never-born' Lord or not.” Chapter 2 relates the god’s prayers for Krishnain the womb then 3 describes his birth and escape from the prison guards.

[4] For those interested, the Roman sources are pursued by Habermas in The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the life of Christ (Joplin: College Press, 1996).  There's also R. T. France's The Evidence for Jesus (London: Regent College,1986) and an excellent book explaining why New Testament scholars are universally convinced of Jesus' historical existence is Bart D. Ehrmans' Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, (USA: HarperCollins, 2012).
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Why it Takes a PhD to Understand the Bible: The Holy Spirit and Interpretation

July 14, 2013, 8:17 pm
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[8/19/2013: Due to scads of people misunderstanding this post I have made several modifications and added definitions throughout for clarity.]

Does the Holy Spirit give believers an understanding of what a Biblical author is saying or are we at the groveling mercy of elite academicians to understand God’s word? Do I really need access to the original languages, ancient history, textual-criticism and all that other stuff to understand my Bible?

You’d think the answer would be obvious, right?

In the first hermeneutics course I took in seminary, Daniel P. Fuller’s article “The Holy Spirit’s Role in Biblical Interpretation” was required reading.  Fuller, exegeting 1 Corinthians 2:14, demonstrates beyond doubt a Biblical conclusion which offends most of us.  The implication of his article: Unless you are going to interpret the Bible like the church father Origen, rejecting a historical-grammatical hermeneutic and throwing all caution to the wind, it does take a PhD to understand your Bible.  You are at the mercy of academicians.  The Bible does not claim the Spirit aids the interpreter in the meaning (defined as, “that pattern of meaning the author willed to convey by the words [shareable symbols] he used”).[1] Rather it teaches the Holy Spirit aids us in the significance (defined as “how a reader responds to the meaning of a text”) of the text.[2]  That last sentence was a directly taken from my old class notes so I’m not left field on this one.

When I say it takes a PhD to understand the Bible, I’m not implying you yourself must have one.  I don't have one, nor am I a scholar. I am saying that you must at least have access to individuals that do have a PhD and can explain the text to you before you go running around looking for apache helicopters and brachiosauruses in your King James. What this means is that linguists, historians and textual-critics serve critical roles in the body of Christ, and we are hopelessly dependent on their PhDs to understand Scripture. God has chosen to entrust the ground-level understanding and explanatory dissemination of His scripture to a bunch of ivory-tower nerds. (Having an introverted, or introspective personality doesn't automatically disqualify you from serving in the body of Christ! Crazy, right?)

The reality of all this isn't as controversial as you might think, as James McGrath has retorted to Ken Ham (no, that doesn't mean I endorse everything McGrath has ever written), our utter dependence on scholars to understand the Bible is demonstrated anytime we pick up an English translation. If you really believe all you need is the aid of the Holy Spirit to understand your Bible then you better be able to pick up a Koine Greek text and manipulate God's Spirit like a Mormon seer stone without the aid of scholars. In fact, the meaning of many Bible passages cannot be understood (even when translated) without a surprisingly esoteric knowledge of subjects like Ugaritic, Egyptian, the Dead Sea Scrolls or textual-criticism.

For example, in a text like Ezekiel 1 (and especially in apocalyptic material) knowledge of Babylonian iconography and other symbolism is critical to understanding the passage.  Frankly, some texts in the Bible read like a description of an LSD trip at an ancient Babylonian X-files convention. You need more than your personal penchants to anchor you as you exegete texts like Revelation and Ezekiel.

I once attended a church study group in which we all sat around a room and asked each other with open Bibles what we thought Ezekiel 1 meant.  None of us had commentaries or any other resources, just our Bibles and groping, sanctified opinions.  The Bible study leader had rosy intentions, but frankly, no one learned squat about the meaning of the text that night. We were all radically wrong in our proposed understandings of Ezekiel—and we would have never come to a correct understanding of that text if we had sat and pontificated in that room for a hundred years together with the most holy affections.  We never could have imagined on our own that eyes in ancient iconography and other parts of the Hebrew of Ezekiel were used to refer to stars.  We would never had imagined the carnal points of the Babylonian zodiac are synonymous with the four faces of Ezekiel’s’ cherubim or that the throne depictions are common ANE allusions implying a polemic against Israel’s pagan captors.  Without the aid of scholars with PhDs we were unable to access an understanding of the text that would have been evident to any ancient Israelite in Ezekiel’s Babylonian exiled audience. In fact, any Christian without access to that information will not understand the symbols and other elements of the text as Ezekiel’s original audience would have.  That means every Christian in church history before archaeology in the Middle East became a mature discipline has been doomed to a failure to grasp the fullness of that passage's meaning and its symbols in the same sense as Ezekiel’s original audience did.

That said, we all got glimpses of the significance of the text that night.  We understood the text was at least about God’s glory and kingship, and as Paul expresses in 1 Corinthians 2, it is in that realm that the Holy Spirit does His work and we didn't need degrees to understand.  We were able to embrace, love and submit to the significance of the text because we had Him to aid us.  In that sense we knew the text in a way an unbelieving Semitic expert never could understand apart from God—even though that unbelieving Semitic expert could have outclassed any of us in understanding and explaining the details of what Ezekiel meant.

Our privileged modern access to sources like the Ugaritic texts and Dead Sea Scrolls ensures us that we will come to deeper and in many cases different understandings of certain passages than the Reformers or most anyone else in church history who didn’t have access to those resources.  It’s not John Calvin’s fault or a deficiency of his fidelity to the Holy Spirit that he failed to grasp the meaning of Psalm 74.  He had little way of knowing the Psalm is a parallel with the chaoskampf of Israel’s pagan neighbors, that Genesis was written in a context of cosmic mountain theology, or the full theological gravity of Jesus' claim to one day 'come with the clouds.' We are better able to read the text through the eyes of an ancient Israelite than Augustine, Luther, Calvin or the council of Trent.

Our ability to deeper understand the word of God will either offend or delight us.  When we let Bible study with academic resources take back seat to hermeneutical mysticism and homiletical Lifeway literature, we are setting ourselves over the text, and not honoring God’s decision to reveal his word to a particular people in a particular culture at a particular point in history.  The sad result is that much of the beauty and intensity of scripture is lost due to our historical imperialism and modernistic narcissism.  To be sure, homiletics and mysticism are vital, but they are the result of, and not the source, by which we understand the Bible.

That task, God has primarily entrusted to a bunch of nerds in the body of Christ with PhDs.   

[1] Robert H. Stein, A Basic Guide to Interpreting the Bible [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994], 38.
[2] Ibid., 43.
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Answers in Genesis Responds to my Critique of their Museum

August 17, 2013, 6:17 pm
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I can't deny.  I dig the beard. 
[Edit 8/19/13: I've introduced some clarifications, stylistic changes and minor marked emendations into this post.] 

Answers in Genesis' Ken Ham and Georgia Purdom have posted these two responses to my blog post critiquing their museum.  I encourage everyone to go read their short token replies.

Let me point out nothing in my original blog post was condemnatory of young earth creationism.  In fact, you could still believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago contemporaneously with Larry King and adhere to all the points I outlined.  I haven’t declared my side in the debate. (I prefer to be obnoxious like that.)  In a glorious plot twist, I may very well rip off my mask at any moment and announce I’m actually a young earther. I understand AiG’s passionate response assumes this is a doctrinal throw down, but the reality is this entire discussion is irrelevant to major articles of doctrine, and young earthers can be assured that it's not my angle to disabuse them of their position on the age of the earth.  I find it much more fun to creep you out in the hermeneutics department.

Speaking of creeping my fellow evangelicals out, I've speculated before that young earthers may do better to search for warrant for their "no pre-fall death" position by juxtaposing texts like Enki and Ninhursag (particularly descriptions of the Eden parallel Dilmun) with Isaiah's descriptions of the eschaton. (See the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.) There I go again, speculating about all that boring literary-historical context stuff.

Before we respond to this piece from them, let’s take a moment to recall all the things Ham and Purdom simply have not attempted to address that my blog brings up:

1) Anachronistic Moses They were silent about their display with Moses holding the Ten Commandments in a script which wasn’t adopted by the Jews until the 5th century and dotted with vowel points which were invented in the Middle Ages.  A museum should be interested in avoiding anachronisms in their exhibits like this.

2) Leviathan They have not defended or mentioned their identification of Leviathan as a dinosaur [A reader alerts me Ken Ham protests in a short facebook status here that "dinosaurs were technically not sea creatures." So I will instead be using the term plesiosaur]. This is a claim Ham is famed for.  I can’t emphasize enough how much I’ve seen expressions of this idea articulated in evangelical circles.  Leviathan can’t be a dinosaur plesiosaur because the Psalms tell us he has multiple heads (This portion in Psalm 74 sadly doesn't get much lov'n from them for obvious reasons).  Psalm 74 demands Leviathan is a west Semitic chaos deity because it inserts YHWH into the Babylonian account of creation as a literary polemic. Job tells us he breaths fire. Isaiah tells us he was killed in conjunction with the creation of the world but that he will be killed (i.e. “punished”) again at the eschaton. That notion is contradictory if Isaiah has a member of the animal kingdom in mind.

If that isn’t enough, the Ugaritic texts come right out and inform us he is a chaos deity.  This is the sockdolager and should stop being ignored. (See my Leviathan post for an example of the Ugaritic parallels.)  Answers in Genesis would have discovered this years ago if they more highly valued interpreting the Bible in its historical, particularly Babylonian-exilic, context rather than interpreting it to serve modern scientific polemics.  It’s easily accessible in modern commentaries. As an example, I refer readers to the note on Psalm 74 in the NET Bible.

3) Behemoth They did not touch the subject of Behemoth or the semantic range of the word for “tail” in that passage that I raised.  Again, their desire to interpret the Bible through a scientific lens has superseded their evangelical lip service to interpret the text in its historical context.

4) Isaiah’s Flying Serpents They said nothing defending their comical identification of Isaiah’s flying serpents as pterodactyls.  My post gained readership from professors Michael S. Heiser and James McGrath particularly due to this claim by AiG.  Their failure to respond to my exegesis and exhume their “scientific polemic” exegesis indicates to me the obvious.

5) The Voltaire Sign I noticed in the museum that a sign perpetuates the pulpit legend that Voltaire’s mansion was turned into a Bible printing house after his death.  AiG on their own website warns against believers using this very argument.  I don't care to vaunt this mistake in their faces anymore after this post since everyone makes flubs like this, but it would be nice for them to acknowledge the error, and I do hope they change the sign. While they are at it, it would also be nice on that same sign if they would remove the image of Socrates with the accompanying description implying he rejected the afterlife.  Plato (also an Athenian) in his Phaedo happily presents Socrates as convinced in the afterlife.  Again, not a hill to die on and totally ancillary to my hermeneutical focus, but I offer it as a courtesy to the museum.

That’s roughly half of what I wrote.  Now on to the main headings Purdom (a geneticist) raises in her response to me.

Presuppositions about Dragon Legends

I brought up Adrianne Mayor’s influential dissertation as an object lesson demonstrating why modern dinosaur legends should not be used as a weapon to bolster our exegesis.  You can be an old earther, young earther or secularist and still affirm Mayor’s general thesis that dragon myths are the result of ancient paleontology.  The museum parades these legends as scientific evidence of their exegesis when the reality is the data could comfortably be accommodated by an old earth or even secular perspective.  As I said, “In many cases it is certain that ancient people were offering extinct animal fossils as the origin of mythological creatures.”  Purdom takes umbrage with my tone of certainty:
Notice the phrases, “it is certain,” “mainstream view,” and “extremely powerful and convincing.” But Mayor’s views are based on her ideas about the past (she wasn’t there) and she does not presuppose the Bible as truth. She interprets the evidence of fossil beds and dragon legends in light of her presupposition that man’s ideas about the past—including evolution and millions of years—are true and God’s Word is not.
I wan't conjecturing.  There is high certainty this sort of thing was going on in the ancient world, and it’s no accident these legends sometimes correspond with known fossil beds.  Jason Colavito refers me to the case within Pallene, Crete [Colavito corrects himself: the [K]assandra peninsula], “where the giants lost the war against the gods.”  Colavito informs me, “The story is found in Solinus 9.6-7, with lesser references in Pausanias 1.25.2, Apollodorus 1.6.1, Ptolemy Hephaestion in Photius  Photius, Myriobiblon 190, and about a dozen other sources. In 1994, paleontologists decided to go looking for the site and discovered a giant bed of Pleistocene fossils, mostly mastodons.”  It’s likely these sorts of remains informed the Cyclops myths.

There is no reason this same principal of ancient paleontological interpretation should not be entertained in explaining Scythian griffins, early dragons or even North American legends of the thunderbird, and anyone can review Mayor’s arguments for these identifications in her books.  Dong Zhiming and other Chinese paleontologists have even documented the modern continuation of the practice in traditional Chinese medicine.  Don't tell me it never happened in ancient times because the practice is still going on and is inspiring dragon myths today. I’m illustrating an exegetical point. Dinosaur legends are not a sockdolager demonstrating the accuracy of any one particular interpretation of scripture.  This undermines the museum’s entire dragon argument theme.

The Absolute Beginning

I’m not inclined to care what Purdom or Terry Mortenson have to say in their retort against Holmstedt’s thesis because they, like me, aren’t Semitist. (Am I still a Christian if I describe their response as "fantastically lazy"?) They aren’t trained to interact with the Akkadian, Ge’ez or Old South Arabian parallels Holmstedt cites to illustrate the noun-bound-to-clause structure of that passage indicates an unmarked relative clause, and they have provided no grammatical reason to doubt him. (No, you don't need a PhD in languages to understand the basic outline of his argument. He does a great job explaining it in accessible terms.) They haven’t touched the specifics of the grammar with a ten foot pole.

I’m also not inclined to care what an astrophysicist like Jason Lisle says about the ancient Hebrew grammar, or whatever irrelevant list of scientists Mortenson may produce who believe this or that theory about the age of the universe.  I trust the infallible, inspired word of God (which comes with its own grammatical rules) over the changing, fallible sciences of Ken Ham.  (See what I did there?)

Mortenson pronounces Holmstedt “arrogant” and speculates that his interpretation is driven by the influence of secular institutions by reviewing his institutional history.  [Edit 8/20/13: Holmstedt was amused by Mortenson's personal indictments of him and his teachers and has given a response here.]  Again, not once in any of this quoted response does he attempt to interact with the grammatical particulars of Holmstedt's doctoral thesis which demonstrates Genesis 1.1 should not be taken as an absolute temporal clause.  The author of John didn’t even relate Genesis 1:1 with the definite article!  Neither does the Septuagint he is using.  Why Dr. Mortenson?  Let me emphasize Holmstedt’s analysis has a long history in Biblical grammar and is not an idiomatic or “arrogant” view among experts.  It is the position professed by grammarians like Martin Baasten at the University of Leiden, Mark Smith (possibly the one of the most influential living Semitist in America),  Ellan van Wolde from Radboud University and Michael Heiser, the academic editor of Logos' premier language database Software.  Don’t just throw me a list of people who agree with you.  We can both do that. Please explain exactly which portion of Holmstedt’s grammatical analysis is wrong and why. Anything else is merely a rehearsal of a traditionalist party line.

Mortenson’s quote concludes with an attempt to circumvent grammatical discussion of Gen. 1.1 with this amazing claim:
But, it should also be pointed out that neither Ken Ham nor any other creationist we know would ever say that we can “date the universe [only] with Genesis 1:1.” It is Genesis 1:1–2:3, Genesis 5 and 11, Exodus 20:8–11, and many other relevant verses that lead to the conclusion of a 6,000-year-old universe. But I guess this seminary student and his Hebrew authorities aren’t too interested in reading young-earth creationist literature carefully. (Bolding of verses mine)
NONE of those above texts Mortenson cites describes a creation of the universe or provides grounds for dating the universe.  His dependence on Gen. 1.1 is palpable.  Genesis 1:1-2:3 does not parse whether the earth and sky were made of pre-existent matter. (That’s the whole point of Holmstedt’s expatiation.) You need Gen. 1:1 to be an absolute temporal clause to assert that.  Genesis 5 is a genealogy.  Obviously the existence of the universe and the materials of creation predate Adam and so, it is irrelevant to the age of the universe.  Genesis 11 is the Babel event followed by a genealogy starting with Shem. (How on earth does this text allow us to date the universe, Dr. Mortenson?)  Exodus 20.8-11 states, “…For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”  Again, this text does not tell us if that creation of the heavens and earth was accomplished using preexisting matter (read: preexisting universe).

It’s very possible the formless void of Genesis 1:1-2:3 was preexistent, and we have no way of knowing how long it was there before the creation days.  In fact, our evangelical lip service to interpret the Bible in its historical context would bid us to believe that’s what the author had in mind.  In Enuma Elish it’s obvious the creation of the heavens and earth is accomplished by Marduk using a parallel preexistent watery chaos. I'm not just some evil liberal making that connection because I believe the Bible is on par with Babylonian myth. That cosmological connection is overtly supplied by the exilic author of Psalm 74 himself.

Reconciling the Two Creation Accounts

Nothing Purdom says addresses Heiser’s blogpost. She only links a possible explanation of the “contradiction” between the two creation accounts in Genesis.  I’m fine with that as a competing explanation. Heiser’s point is that it is possible to explain that contradiction in such a way that allows for two creations of man (one outside Eden and the other within Eden).  This is a view neither Heiser or I am married to and which has its own history--being held for example by the Medieval Rabbi Rashi.  Since she doesn’t offer anything which might exegetically disqualify the possibility, I have nothing to give in response.

A Question of Credentials

I made a mistake when I stated in my original post that Ken has only earned a bachelor in science academically and have since corrected the statement. As an aside, Purdom tells us his Australian diploma in teaching "is roughly equivalent with a master’s."  A kind educator based in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia with the same diploma has emailed me and informed me Purdom is incorrect about this "roughly equivalent with a master's" comment. Though, I don't care to belabor the issue since it's not my point. [1]

I hope the substance of my point is not lost.  Ken Ham is not a Biblical scholar.  He is not trained to interpret ancient Jewish literature.  *I'm not saying* he can't interpret the Bible since I make no claim to be a Bible scholar either.  I'm saying anytime he does he must, like me, be quoting Semitic and Ancient Near Eastern scholars or else he will err.  I find it odd and scary we Evangelicals wax eloquently about the need to interpret the Bible in its historical context then turn around and interpret it in our modern scientific context.  That has been my remonstration against the scientist dominated origination from the beginning--it devalues historical context.  It’s alarming such a giant influence in evangelicalism has no formal Bible training. It’s symptomatic of why we’ve ended up with such wacky interpretations and the evangelical desire to demythologize the Bible in a science polemic.


Conclusion

There are a lot of other methodological subjects I could clamor about like their assumption of comprehensive mosaic authorship of the Torah, their inability to accommodate prescientific divine condescension in their doctrine of inerrancy (see my post on evil eye magic) or their dangerous assumption that the Holy Spirit operates to supply believers with the meaning as well as the significance of the text. (See my post "The Holy Spirit and Interpretation" which based on the Daniel P. Fuller article)  However, my message here has been much more simple. Evangelicals must learn to recognize the Ancient Near East as the matrix for Bible interpretation and study.  Not modern science and scientists.

[1] The reader informs me the Australian Qualifications Framework, available here states Ham’s diploma it is a level 5 qualification (p.38).  A Master’s is a level 9 (p. 59). To be regarded as being equivalent to a Graduate Diploma it must level to an 8 qualification (p. 56).

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Back from Hiatus with Groundbreaking Ancient Astronaut Discovery

December 29, 2013, 10:23 pm
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I've been gone for months. Since last I posted, I’ve been married to a ridiculously attractive Irish goddess (Someone call John MacAuthor, miracles are for today!). I've moved, been studying, divining the problems with my home internet and rearticulating a raccoon skeleton.



But I know you guys don't want excuses. You want to read about significant contributions to the scholarship of ancient history. What I'm going to present to you today is a real game changer for the ancient astronaut crowd. This may finally be the final word in the debate. I present to you the Marduk relief from Nineveh:

  

In the lower line rendition you can clearly see what is a modern wrist watch on Marduk's left arm:

Come on History Channel, write me a contract.
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Lexical Crimes: Does the Word “Abomination” only refer to ritual wrongs?

January 2, 2014, 6:15 am
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I was recently shown this below clip from a documentary entitled, For the Bible Tells Me So:



There’s a lake of ink that could be spilled in reviewing the specific arguments made in this clip, but in this series I’ve narrowed my focus to the specific claim made at 1:40-2:00 by Laurence C. Keene. I’m frankly astonished the reverend is able to gaze shamelessly into a camera and make the following statement in regards to Leviticus 18:22:
"When the term abomination is used in the Hebrew Bible, it is always used to address a ritual wrong. It never is used to refer to something innately immoral.”
 Is the Hebrew word “abomination” in Leviticus 18:22 “always used to address a ritual wrong,” and is it true that it is “never used to refer to something innately immoral”? The answer is no. Dr. Keene has apparently never looked the term up in a concordance. The term translated “abomination” in Leviticus 18:22 is towebah (תּוֹעֵבָה).  By way of example, consider how this same word is used in Proverbs 6:16-19 (NASB):
There are six things which the LORD hates, Yes, seven which are an abomination (תֹּועֲבַ֥ת) to Him: Haughty eyes, a lying tongue, And hands that shed innocent blood, A heart that devises wicked plans, Feet that run rapidly to evil, A false witness who utters lies, And one who spreads strife among brothers
None of the sins in this list smack of ritual associations. They are all innately immoral. The term towebah had the elasticity to circumscribe sins which are not ritually associated. To say it never does is incorrect.
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Lexical Crimes: America’s Three Favorite Bible Verses

January 5, 2014, 11:23 pm
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It’s hard not to become dulled by an American church which seems to think Sunday school ought to be eternal and the Bible to be studied only with the hermeneutic one would bring to a self-help book.  Probably the only defense is to constantly attempt to view the text through fresh eyes.  And so, in a healthy spirit of iconoclasm, here undoubtedly are the three Bible passages most Americans have built the majority of their folk theology on—often chanted as if they are polyvalent mystic incantations from some forgotten, inscrutable origin.  The cliché ways in which they are pillaged and vaunted in public discourse may be enough to make you want to slam your head repeatedly against a Bruce Metzger textbook, but let’s attempt to reclaim their beauty by ignoring the traditions obscuring them.

Welcome to a systematic theology of the average American (Yes, I’m aware there are only three verses here.  What’s your point?):

Jesus and the woman caught in adultery (John 7:58-8:11)

We can start with the panacea of anyone writhing to be freed from condemnation (or, too cowardly to condemn evil—my usual personal vice).  Perhaps you have appealed to it--perhaps your pastor has preached from it.  The reality is this passage is not scripture.  Next to the “long ending of Mark,” this story is the largest textual variant in the New Testament (known as the pericope adulterae.) To put it bluntly, the author of John’s gospel never said it.  The earliest Greek manuscript in which it appears is Codex Bezae in the 5th century.  Look it up in your conservative modern Bible, and you will find it placed in brackets with a footnote stating this.  The passage is likely a later conflation of two extra-biblical floating traditions with speculative historical value.  Daniel B. Wallace (director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts) has touched on its history here.

John 3:16

It’s unfortunate this verse has been frozen in a 17thcentury Anglican version.  To begin, the term “only begotten son” is an obsolete translation.  It was assumed by the authors of the KJV that the Greek term translated “only begotten” (Greek: monogenes) was derived from the two words mono (“one”) and gennao (“beget”).  Modern scholarship has now shown the second term actually derives from the root genos, meaning “kind.”  In other words, “God’s only begotten son” is a misleading translation.  It should be rendered something closer to “God’s one of a kind son” or God’s “unique son” as the ISV has it.  Piotr Blumczynski from the University of Wroclaw has a paper on this which can be accessed here.  This translational distinction is valuable primarily because it removes any needless connotation that Jesus was brought into existence at some point in the past.  (No surprise, the Jehovah’s Witness official church website has yet to get the memo on the Greek grammar.)  The Semitist Michael S. Heiser has mentioned how this understanding of monogenesis is vividly illustrated in other New Testament passages.  One example in Hebrews 11:17 calls Isaac Abraham’s monogenes even though Ishmael was fathered prior to Isaac making Isaac emphatically not his “only begotten” son.  The term refers then to uniqueness with no connotation to temporal begetting.

Second, as a corn-fed Bible-belt-a-nite according to the flesh, I get a laugh out of the mountains of theology we import upon the word “whooooooosoever” in this passage.  Since Calvinism is all anyone at my Seminary ever wants to talk about, I’m not terribly giddy to kick the horse.  But I would appreciate it if this passage would stop being pillaged for something the original language doesn’t address.  The King James translation “whosoever” is a harmonization of the Greek pas ho pisteuon.Literally, it means, “…every one believing…”  It is therefore silent in answering the question of whether or not every human being has the moral ability to believe.  It simply asserts that the ones that do will have life eternal.  Let’s stop clamoring on this sentimental passage to support a universal atonement.  There are plenty of better places one would argue that doctrine from.

“Judge not” (Matthew 7:1-3)

The favorite New Testament verse of every human being who has never picked up and read the New Testament--It’s too bad no one was around to set Paul straight with this verse when he commanded Timothy to expose sinners publicly (1 Timothy 5.20), or when he advised his Galatian opponents to go castrate themselves (5:12).

Also, isn’t it a little odd that Jesus commands us immediately afterwards to judge whether certain men are dogs or swine (7:6)? Also, does anyone care that Jesus, in John 7:24, commands judgment? “Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly.”

Surely Jesus was rendering judgment himself when he called the Pharisees all those nasty names,
“woe to you…hypocrites! Woe to you hypocrites!...you…child of hell…blind guides…blind fools…You blind men!...You blind Pharisees…whitewashed tombs…dead bones…and...lawless…You serpents, you brood of vipers… (Matt. 23).

Perhaps we haven’t been quoting “judge not” it its proper context.  Here’s the passage (ESV):

“Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. 3 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

Here’s a wild suggestion, considering Jesus tells us to remove the log from our eye in order that we may remove the speck from our brother’s, I submit Jesus in this passage is addressing hypocritical judgment.  Jesus’ command presupposes that we would help our brother remove the speck from his eye, but only after we have examined ourselves so that we may not be hypocrites.  Obviously, within Christian soteriology this is only fathomable through the Holy Spirit, but it is absurd to pretend this passage totally forbids us from judging or condemning the evil acts of others. (Sorry, Pope Francis.)  That doesn’t explain the command of verse 5, or comport with the rest of scripture…



...or Amos’ calling rich Samarian women cows, I’ll wager (4:1).
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Phil Valentine Debunked

February 14, 2014, 1:57 pm
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Due to my online critiques of Ray Hagins, Sara Suten Seti and Ashra Kwesi, I’ve been asked for years to write a critique of the highly popular speaker Phil Valentine.  Since Valentine’s online lectures average three-to-four hours, I’m not giddy to address every claim he has ever made, but I’m happy to refute a few high points for his followers. (Thanks to Sami for the push I needed.)

Here’s my thesis: Phil Valentine is a severely horrific source for history.  To substantiate that claim, following is a funny list of examples demonstrating the type of historical howlers one regularly encounters in his lectures. Valentine’s historical claims will be written in red.  My responses are written under them in black.






From his lecture “Vampires of Consciousness” available here on youtube:
















06:00-08:20
“Here are some of the books that were deleted from the Bible…You are still using the texts that came out of the Roman church under Constantine and the council of Nicaea…They are,…the gospel of the Nativity of Mary, the history of Joseph the carpenter,…the Gospel of Judas Iscariot,…the Gospel of Barnabas, the gospel of the Essenes,…the Hymn of Jupiter of Clementius,…the book of Avodah Zarah...”

Ah, Niceae! The dues ex machina of all church history conspiracy theories!  Did Constantine form the Biblical canon at Nicaea?  No.  None of our primary texts regarding Nicaea (for example, we have all proceeding 20 canons) deals with the canon of scripture.  David Dungan (University of Tennessee) has written a standard survey on the political context of canonization.  In his book Constantine’s Bible: Politics and the Making of the New Testament he never mentions any notion that the canon was discussed at Nicaea. (Though, I will not have my readers thinking Constantine had no influence on the development of the canon since the 50 copies of the New Testament he commissioned had a standardizing effect among the wide populace.)

Quoting James R. White (Grand Canyon University):
 “The Council of Nicea did not take up the issue of the canon of Scripture. In fact, only regional councils touched on this issue (Hippo in 393, Carthage in 397) until much later. The New Testament canon developed in the consciousness of the church over time, just as the Old Testament canon did.”
Now, let’s look at the above seven books Valentine says were “deleted from the Bible”:

1)      The Nativity of Mary(De Nativitate Marae) dates to the 9th-10thcenturies—the literary product of a long development of multiple tradition streams.[1]  How did the early church delete a book from the canon of scripture that wasn’t composed until the Middle Ages?
2)      The history of Joseph the Carpenter Wasn’t written until the 6th or 7thcenturies.[2]
3)      The Gospel of Judas 1) Uses the canonical gospels as a source and is therefore derivative from them, not a competing source.  It dates to the second-half of the second century. 2) There is no way Judas wrote this book as it claims he did. 3) The book was written in a completely different context than the canonical gospels by Gnostics.  Irenaeus claims it was used by a group called the Cainites (named after Cain).  I’d suggest Valentine reads this discussion of Judas herewritten by the director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.
4)      The Gospel of Barnabasis a “hotch-potch of Christian Jewish, and Muslim materials” and originates in the 14th century.  It was first composed in Italian.[3]
5)      The Gospel of the Essenes (or Essene Gospel of Peace) was a 20th century hoax by Bordeaux Szekely.[4]  Heath food spiritualists have kept this twaddle alive on the internet in order to argue the Essenes (and Jesus) were vegetarian.  For any of you Szekelyites out there that have wandered to this page, read the following carefully:

1) Jesus was not an Essene. Gary Habermas lists 21 disconnects between Jesus’ and the Qumran communities’ beliefs.[5]

2) Repeat after me, “The Essenes were NOT vegetarians!”  Here’s an explanation from an archaeological survey of Qumran:
“The animal bones deposited in or under potsherds and pots outside the buildings at Qumran apparently represent the remains of communal meals at which meat was consumed.  Because the sectarians considered these meals to be a substitute for participation in the sacrifices in the Jerusalem temple, they disposed of the remains of the animals they consumed in a manner analogous to those sacrificed in the temple.”[6]
6)      The Avodah Zarah is a tractate in the Talmud.  It dates to the third century AD.   That’s too late for consideration in the New Testament canon.  Besides, why would Christians incorporate Christ denying rabbinic commentaries into their scriptures?  Why single out a single tractate of the Talmud instead of the whole corpus?  My guess is it just sounded really cool and mystical to talk about the secret, suppressed “book of Avodah ZAAARRAAHHH.”

7)      The Hymn of Jupiterwas written by Cleanthes, the stoic disciple of Zeno.  Mr. Valentine, why ought a 3rdcentury BC hymn to Jupiter by a stoic philosopher be included in the canon of scripture?  I’d sure be interested in your answer.  Maybe it’s because Paul possiblyis quoting this text in Acts 17:
…[God] is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.
 Try to wrap your mind around Valentine’s logic here: Paul quotes to the Athenians one of their polytheistic philosophers as he attempts to discredit their worldview.  Therefore, that polytheistic philosopher ought to be canonized as Christian scripture.


Excuse me while I go stab myself with a fork.

8)      The Gospel of Thomasis certainly one of the most relevant on the list to Valentine’s argument.  So why didn’t the early church include it in the canon?  1) It doesn’t date to the first century like the four Gospels, but to the middle-second century. 2)  It wasn’t written by an apostle like it claims to have been. 3) It contains Gnostic-like teachings which contradict our earliest sources on Jesus.

Napoleon and his troops blew the nose off the sphinx for racial reasons.

Frederic Louis Norden in his book Voyage d’Egypte et de Nubierecorded this image of the noseless Sphinx in 1738.  It was published in 1755--sixteen years before Napoleon was born.



















25:00 Valentine wishes to establish some quotes about the early church to show early Christianity was a conspiracy.  He provides us with this quote allegedly from Lactantius: "Among those who seek power and gain from religion there will never be wanting an inclination to forge and lie for it."

Following is a quotation from this website.
This statement was allegedly made by Lactantius, a 4th century apologist. However the quote is usually cited as coming from an 18th century second-hand source: "Quoted by C. Middleton, Misc. Works of Conyers Middleton, D.D., vol. 3, p. 51 (1752)" In other words, this hearsay quote is never cited from an original work of Lactantius nor could I find it when I looked for it.
Valentine then quotes Gregory of Nazanzius: “A little jargon is all that is necessary to impose on the people. The less they comprehend, the more they admire."
Gregory of Nazanzius, a 4th century church father and bishop of Caesarea, supposedly made this confession in a letter to Saint Jerome. Yet once again, this statement is not found in any work of Gregory but is cited from another second-hand 18th century source: "Quoted by C. Volney, The Ruins, p. 177 (1872)."[7] 
31:17 Valentine claims Johann Lorenz Mosheim in his work Church History volume 1 page 198 writes, “It was held by the church, that it was not only lawful, but even praiseworthy, to deceive, and even to use the expedient of a lie, in order to advance the cause of truth and piety.”

What Johann Lorenz Mosheim actually said:

Mosheim will go on to blame this idea of a “noble” lie as the moral justification some Christians took in writing apocryphal books.  This is why the early church’s long and acrimonious development of the canon is a good thing--as opposed to Valentine who would have any and everything included in the canon from the Gospel of Judas to modern forgeries.

Valentine is surely parroting the mystic Hilton Hotema (The Secret of Regeneration)published in1963, (pg. 77).  All the quotations he gives, their sources, order and translations (including the term "pious fraud") comes from Hotema.  To give you an idea of the type of scholarship Valentine is investing in, here is how Amazon describes the book:

35:35: “There is no Jesus Christ, never was no Jesus Christ, and I say that with all knowledge…”

This internet claim is a personal pet-peeve of mine.  Here’s a challenge for readers and Valentine.  Name and cite a single living scholar on earth holding an academic position at any university in the fields of New Testament or Church History who believes Jesus didn’t exist.  Name a single one.  The closest I’ve ever found is the notorious Bob Price who (recently, unless I missed it when I checked a couple years ago) got a Religion and Philosophy position at Johnnie Coleman Seminary (don’t bother searching for information on it online.  Best I could find is that it’s somewhere in Florida and has a grand total of 7 likes on Facebook).

Bart D. Ehrman is perhaps the most famous American New Testament scholar for his popular books challenging the Christian faith.  He has his PhD from Princeton and is James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina University at Chapel Hill.  He has written a book explaining in layman’s terms the reasons virtually every scholar on earth invested in historical Jesus studies knows Jesus existed.  If you think I’m exaggerating on this point, you can view this collection of statements by historians and New Testament scholars I’ve compiled here on the issue.  Quoting Asbury New Testament professor Craig S. Keener:
“Contrary to some circles on the Internet, very few scholars doubt that Jesus existed, preached and led a movement. Scholars' confidence has nothing to do with theology but much to do with historiographic common sense. What movement would make up a recent leader, executed by a Roman governor for treason, and then declare, "We're his followers"? If they wanted to commit suicide, there were simpler ways to do it.”
Here’s another quote Valentine produces in this section from our alien seeding, mystic friend Hilton (pg 77):
“It mightily affects me, to see how many there were in the earliest times of the church, who considered it as a capital exploit, to lend to heavenly truth the help of their own inventions, in order that the new doctrine (of Christianity) might be more readily allowed by the wise among the gentiles.  These officious lies, they were wont to say, were devised for a good end”

Hilton says he got this from Robert Taylor. Taylor’s Diegesis(pg. 44) says he got this from Nathaniel Lardner (vol. 4) who got this from a Latin translation of Isaac de Casaubon.  If you pull up a digital archive of Lardner’s works  and search the first four lines of this above quote you will find it doesn’t exist.  Likewise, there is no way to find any part of this quote connected with Casaubon (in English or the Latin Taylor gives).  For example. (Notice, not one of these hits is able to produce a primary source.)  Considering we don’t know the original context of this quote or who actually said it, we have no way of verifying its context (or, if the inserted key phrase “(of Christianity)” belongs).  This quote is worthless unless Valentine can supply the source. Good luck with that.

39:10 Valentine says, “Paul admits to lying and deceiving for the sake of Christ.  Let’s turn to 2 Corinthians 12:16, 'But be that as it may, I did not burden you myself; nevertheless, crafty fellow that I am, I took you in by deceit.'”

Paul, of course, is being sarcastic in his contentions with the “super-apostles.” Calvin J. Roetzel (The Letters of Paul: Conversations in Context[8]) states, “Here we see Pauline sarcasm at its best…”  That’s obvious in this verse to anyone who can merely pick up an English translation of 2 Corinthians and read the context.  Sarcasm is classic Paul (sorry if that steps on the toes of some illiterate Christians).

1:15:10 “The hindu Krishna mean ‘the anointed’…Mithras of Persia was also known as the Christ, Heru, or Horus was also known as the Christ, Bel Minor was known as the Christ, Iao was known as the Christ, Adoni was known as the Christ”

None of this is true.  It’s all taken from a 19th century esotericist Kersey Graves.  I’ve refuted all this here.  So far as I’m aware, my critique of Graves remains the most exhaustive on the web.  Though, the popular atheist historian Richard Carrier has also spanked the book.

1:18:42 “The life story of Jesus the Christ of the four gospels was not invented and written until four generations after the death of Paul. That is the only explanation that can be offered for the fact that Paul makes absolutely no references to the teaching and miracles of Jesus the Christ of the four gospels.”

Let’s take on the crazy one step at a time.  Were the gospels written four generations after Paul?  Assume Paul died in 67 as standard Pauline chronology suggests, and very generously assume for the sake of argument that 30 years amounts to “a generation.”  That would mean the four gospels weren’t written until AD 187.  I am aware of no New Testament scholar on the planet, no matter how antagonistic to faith, who wouldn’t laugh at Valentine for claiming this.  John was the last gospel written, about thirty-five to sixty-five years after Jesus’ death.  We have papyrus fragments of John dating before AD 187 (for example, P52). Heracleon wrote a commentary of John before that date.  Also, we could cite all the early church fathers who quote from the gospels in their writings.  Justin Martyr, for example, quotes especially from Matthew and from Mark and Luke, calling them the “Memoirs of the Apostles.”[9]  Josephus’ Testimonium Flavianumdescribing Jesus was written in the first century. (Modern textual-criticism has reconstructed the originals of that passage.)[10]  In addition, Roman references to Jesus like Tacitus’ Annals date well before 187.  It is not true Jesus’ life story “was not invented” until four generations after Paul.  That’s silly.

Second, it’s true Paul doesn’t give us a sizable amount of biographical information on Jesus (Paul is writing earlier than the gospels), but to say Paul is completely oblivious of the life of Jesus is unchecked exaggeration.  Paul tells us in Galatians 1.18-20 that he met personally with James the brother of Jesus and in 1 Corinthians 11.23-6 for example, he quotes Jesus’ words from the Lord’s Supper, mentioning His betrayal that night and Jesus’ actions at the table.

1:21:00 “There is no proof Paul himself actually lived.”

Here’s a challenge: Name and cite single living scholar on earth holding an academic position in New Testament, Classics or History who believes Paul didn’t exist.  No such position exists.  Not even among the most radical mythicists like Bob Price and Richard Carrier. Paul’s letters like Galatians and Corinthians contain personal intimations which reflect upon Paul’s personal ministry when he was with those churches.  We only have letters like Corinthians because the churches they are addressed to preserved and circulated the text.  If a Paul’s intimations (for example, Paul naming off his friends in the church or his references to past conflicts between him and the churches like the “evil eye” episode with the Galatians) are fabricated by a forger then the church receiving these letters would recognize they never met this guy Paul and letters like Galatians and Corinthians wouldn’t exist because they wouldn’t have been preserved and circulated.

1:30:00 “Mary Magdalene was [Jesus’] wife…the only role that Mary Magdalene could have been playing was one of Jesus’ wife.”

Here’s a 50 minute lecture by a Semitic professor explaining why this is not the case.   Here’s an article also touching on the topic by Birger A. Pearson from the University of California.

The Following is taken from his lecture "Metaphysics of the Bible"Available here.





1:10:00 "They took the name Moses from the Babylonian word misis or mises and they took it directly” from the Egyptian name Ramesses.

Moses results from a Greek transliteration of the Egyptian Mose.  I think I’ll go with the explanation of the etymology offered by the peer reviewed Journal of Near Eastern Studies rather than Valentine.[11]

1:11:50-1:14:00 While expounding Gnosticism, he claims Matthew was taken from the name Pro(metheus). “There was no such person as Mathew ever existed.” He claims Matthew comes from “ma” as in Marine” and “theus” as in God.

Matthew was a common name in first century Palestine.  I’ve read half-a-dozen first and second century ossuary inscriptions bearing the name.  Books XI through XX of Josephus’ antiquities (which are first century Jewish histories covering the first year of Cyrus to Florus) use the name 15 times.  It derives from the Hebrew mattath(gift) and yah (Yahweh).   Prometheus derives from the Greek pro (before) and methos (learn).  No international Catholic conspiracy needed.

In the same section he states Christians took the book of Matthew from Marcion.

Earlier, I quoted Valentine saying the “four gospels were not invented and written until four generations after the death of Paul.”  Marcion died around 160.  This is a contradiction unless we are taking “one generation” to be 23 years. (The average first-century Jewish lifespan by the way was 40.)  Funny thing about this claim is that Marcion held the gospel of Matthew in contempt.  He only accepted the Gospel of Luke and Paul’s writings—with all their Old Testament references excised. If we are to believe Marcion wrote Matthew why is Matthew full of quotations and theology from the Old Testament that Marcion hated?  Also, we have quotations by the early church fathers from Matthew that date before Marcion was born.  It’s textually impossible for Marcion to be Matthew’s source.

1:21:05. The name Abraham was taken from the name Brahma.  Just bring the 'A' at the end of the name and put it before 'B' and you get the name "Abrahm."

Abraham derives from the Hebrew abh (father) and raham (something close to multitude).  Brahma is Sanskrit.  I’m not aware its etymology is known.  Sanskrit is Indo-Aryan, Hebrew is West Semitic.

1:30:00. The Moses story was stolen from the Sargon exposure motif.

The following is a quote from the Semitist Michael S.Heiser:
“Note this comment from Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts Anthology[12].‘The legend concerning the birth of Sargon of Agade is available in two incomplete Neo-Assyrian copies (A and B) and in a Neo-Babylonian fragment (C).’ 
The Neo-Assyrian period covers the 8th and part of the 7th centuries BC. The Neo-Babylonian period is later, encompassing the 7th and 6th centuries BC. This would mean that, even by higher critical standards, who would have the Moses birth account as written by J or E (or an amalgam of JE), the biblical story is EARLIER, at least with respect to the literary evidence that actually exists. J and E are dated to the 10th and 9th centuries BC, respectively, by most source critics.”
2:39:00 He challenges any pastors listening, “prove to me anybody in that Bible lived, and I’ll come work for you.” Clapping is then heard in the classroom.

Ok.  How about this list of 50 people in the Bible whose existence has been confirmed archaeologically produced by Lawrence Mykytiuk at Purdue University?

2:27:00 “Sol-om-on was three specific names for the sun.” He continues with long, silly systems of numerological equations based on the modern word Solomon in order to end up with a Jewish menorah symbol.  The claim is this was all originated by the Egyptians and stolen by the Jews.


I’ve heard this claim many times before in Masonic and other esoteric works (Manley P. Hall was fond of it).  It’s completely bogus.  Biggest problem is the word Solomon is a later Greek transliteration of the Hebrew original. The word is used in the Bible and would have been used by Hebrew speaker as Shlomoh (שְׁלֹמֹה).  The name Shlomoh derives from the same Hebrew root as Shalom and means “peace” .   It has nothing to do with the sun, nor does it in anyway correspond with the Hebrew word for sun.  The four consonants spelling Shlomoh (Shin, Lamed, Mem, Hey) cannot give you any form of the menorah Valentine has on the board (since they comprise an even number).   Additionally, the old esoteric doctrine that Sol-Om-On comprises three different words for sun can’t be true since no possible division of the original Shlomoh will even yield three individual syllables possessing vowels.

Conclusion:

It will be obvious to those who have read this far that Phil Valentine is a terrible source for history.  His standard of scholarship is so egregious it ought to be ignored for actual academic sources.  I hope Valentine’s followers will be encouraged by this to start demanding credible scholarship from their leaders, and that they will reconsider thinking maturely about the historical Jesus and his claims.

Endnotes:1)      Elliott, J K. "Libri de nativitate Mariae, v 2: libellus de nativitate Sanctae Mariae: textus et commentarius." Novum Testamentum 42, no. 1 (January 1, 2000): 98. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed February 13, 2014). 
2)      Ehrman, Bart and Plese, Zlatko. The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (Oxford: New York, 2011), 158. 
3)      Joosten, Jan. 2010. "The date and provenance of the Gospel of Barnabas."Journal Of Theological Studies 61, 200-215. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed February 13, 2014). 
4)      Ladd, John D., Commentary on the Book of Enoch: Commentary and Paraphrase. (Xulonpress, 2008), VIIff.  
5)      The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life ofChrist (College Press: USA, 1996), 78-9. 
6)      “Archaeological Evidence for Communal Meals at Qumran” in Jodi Magness’ The Archeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls: (Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and related Literature) (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2003), 121. 
7)      Ibid., TheDivineEvidence.com 
8)      (Westminster: Louisville 1998), 93. 
9)      (Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, (USA: HarperCollins, 2012). 21-5. 
10)   See, Alice Whealey, “The Testimonium Falvianum in Syriac and Arabic” Cambridge University Press , 2008: http://khazarzar.skeptik.net/books/whealey2.pdf 
11)   J. Gwyn Griffiths, “The Egyptian Derivation of the Name Moses,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies , Vol. 12, No. 4 (Oct., 1953), pp. 225-231. 
12) The Ancient Near East an Anthology of Texts and Pictures. ( ed. James Bennett Pritchard;Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 119.”

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Lexical Crimes: Tattoos and Leviticus 19:28

February 16, 2014, 4:02 pm
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I recently came across two articles on Leviticus 19.28.  One from Gilad Gevaryahu in the Jewish BibleQuarterly and the other by John Huehnergard and Harold Liebowitz in Vetus Testamentum.  For those who aren’t familiar, there is a long standing translational difficulty in this passage:

 וְשֶׂ֣רֶט לָנֶ֗פֶשׁ לֹ֤א תִתְּנוּ֙ בִּבְשַׂרְכֶ֔ם וּכְתֹ֣בֶת קַֽעֲקַ֔עלֹ֥א תִתְּנ֖וּ בָּכֶ֑ם אֲנִ֖י יְהוָֽה 
You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor imprint any marks (ketovet ka’aka) on you; I am the Lord (JPS)

How should the words ketovet ka’aka be translated?  Most English translations opt for the rendering “tattoo” (e.x. NIV, NLT, ESV, NASB, HCSB, NET).  The problem is the word ka’aka is a hapax legomena-- meaning this is the only place in the entire Bible in which it appears.  We can’t go anywhere else in the Bible to define it. What’s our warrant then for opting for the translation “tattoo” as opposed to other proposed readings such as “branding” (branding of slaves is commonly attested in the ancient context of the Bible).  Gevaryahu appeals to the strong attestation of the “tattoo” reading in Jewish post-Biblical interpretation. (i.e. the Mishnah, Rashi, Rambam, Onkelos, Neofiti, the Peshitta and Septuagint.)

It seems then the majority English translation “tattoo” is favorable from the available evidence.

What then is the context of the tattooing that’s going on in this prohibition?  Should Christian parents recite this passage to their teen who insists on having “YOLO” eternally etched into their wrist?  Is that backwards Yeshua tattoo your youth minister has on his leg Levitacally kosher?

The first part of this verse clearly implies a mortuary context.  That is, gashing one’s body in mourning for the dead.  It seems natural to therefore interpret the following “katovet ka’aka” in a mortuary context.  This is where things get difficult.  We have plenty of evidence from the ancient Near East of gashing oneself in mourning (as when El mourns over the death of Baal), but Huehnergard and Liebowitz could find no evidence from the surrounding cultures of Israel that tattooing was ever practiced in mourning. It appears the two laws in this verse don’t therefore link in context.  That wouldn’t be uncommon.  Often, passages like Lev. 19.3 will join two laws with no contextual relation between each other.

If the tattooing prohibition is not a reference to the dead what is its context?  It’s likely slavery.  It was common in ancient Mesopotamia to tattoo the name of a god or master on a slave.  It’s proposed the Israelite prohibition against tattooing was a declaration of the Exodus event.  It was a sign that Israel was free as a people (likely from the gods and associated government of Egypt).

What can we say then?  Tattooing in the Biblical period was highly associated with slavery (often to a foreign god).  Since that association doesn’t exist in our cultural environment (and the theological messaging in abstaining from tattooing is therefore lost) a Christian or Jew wanting a tattoo could appeal to our cultural disconnect in order to legitimize their decision.


For those of you with a penchant for foreign language tattoos, I’ll leave you with this admonition: Probably one of the most satisfying joys of learning the original languages of the Bible is being able to appreciate the majority of Hebrew tattoos which are spelled wrong, backwards or worse.  Please be careful you don’t end up the next victim on the bad Hebrew tattoo website.

Gevaryahu, Gilad J. 2010. "KETOVET KA'AKA (LEVITICUS 19:28): TATTOOING OR BRANDING?" Jewish Bible Quarterly. 38 (1).

Huehnergard J., and Liebowitz H. 2013. "The biblical prohibition against tattooing*". Vetus Testamentum. 63 (1): 59-77.

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The Bodies of God and the Jewish Trinity

February 21, 2014, 4:09 pm
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I’m excited to direct readers to a wonderful resource offered by the Foundation for Jewish Studies.  Benjamin D. Sommer, professor of Bible and Ancient Semitic languages at the Jewish Theological Seminary, has delivered four lectures (each of which several hours long) teaching his book The Bodies of God in the World of Ancient Israel to a Jewish audience.  Having completed all the lectures over the last few days on my car commutes, I can say they are fascinating. (Sommer’s book was a favorite of mine having found it in the library several years ago.)  You can download all the lectures for free here.

Now, why should Christians care about Sommer’s book and these lectures on a subject as weird (or creepy, rather) sounding as “the bodies of God”?  I’ll provide you with this quote from Sommer starting at 35 minutes into the last lecture to give you an idea:
“When the New testament talks about Jesus as being some sort of small scale human manifestation of God, that really sounds to Jews so utterly pagan, but what I’m suggesting is perhaps the radical idea for us Jews--that in fact, it’s not so pagan…We Jews have always tended to sort of make fun of the Trinity…[that Christians] aren’t real monotheists like we Jews are or like the Muslims are, but I think what we have been seeing from what I’ve been saying for the past couple of days [is] the idea of the Trinity…[is] actually an old ancient Near Eastern idea…that can also function in a monotheistic context, as it does I think in the J and the E texts and some of the other texts we were looking at.  In fact, to say that three is one—hey! The Kabbalah is going to go even further than that! They say ten is one. The Zohar [and] Sefer Ha-Bahir, they say ten is one. Actually when you get to Lorena Kabbalah there’s the idea that within each of the ten sefirot has ten sefirot within it so that we’ve got a hundred…We [Jews] are taking this [divine fluidity] reasoning much, much farther than the Christians did.  One of the more radical conclusions that I came to, much to my own surprise when I was writing this book--and this is not at all what I had intended to do because in various ways that we could discuss if you’re interested--I’m actually rather uncomfortable with my own conclusion here, but as a scholar I gotta to call em as I see em—one of the conclusions that I came to…is that we Jews have no theological objection to the doctrine to the Trinity…The Trinity is an old Ancient Near Eastern idea that shows up in the Tanakh and in a different way shows up in Jewish mysticism as well”

As a disclaimer, I don’t accept some of his source critical presuppositions throughout the lectures.  (He thinks there is disagreement in the Biblical sources about God’s embodiment.) But the value of Sommer’s thesis for apologetic contexts and understanding ancient Israelite religion is tremendous.  I’ll also use this as an excuse to point readers to Michael Heiser’s work on pre-Christian divine plurality here.
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Ishtar ≠ Easter: Stop Getting your History from Internet Memes Richard Dawkins

May 19, 2014, 11:00 am
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The source of my annoyance today: The Richard Dawkins Foundation Facebook page.  Here’s a meme I wouldn’t mind if I never saw again.  (Thank’s Richard for exposing it to over 75,000 people and contributing to its being shared by 195,000.)


First, let’s review why this piece of puerility has zero correspondence with historical reality. Second, I have a brief sermon to those in the Hebrew Roots movement who most often spread this nonsense:

1)  Is the name Ishtar pronounced Easter?  No.  Here are the vocalizations of the goddess collected from the primary texts within the Brill Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible:

If Easter isn’t a Semitic word what is its etymology?  The answer is Proto-Germanic (if you buy Bede’s highly problematic explanation) or more likely Latin. (Sorry if that bores you.)

2) Are bunnies and eggs symbols of Ishtar?  Nope.  Her primary symbol in the iconography is Venus.  When I recently visited the Oriental Institute, I photographed this image of a lion representing the goddess from the Ishtar Gate.


The lion is one of her most commonly associated symbols from the third-millennium onwards.  The two objects in her hands in the meme are probably a symbol of a ruler and a rope—ANE icons of sovereignty.  There is also a famous Gilgamesh passage that associates her lovers with lions, steeds, a certain variegated bird, and shepherds.  I have never seen an image or text which associates her with bunnies or eggs.  Those symbols have different historical origins.  As a side note, I suppose one could argue the “grass of life” utilized to revive Ishtar’s corpse in the underworld by the fly-like kurgarru and kalaturrumight be an etiological candidate for that plastic Easter grass that stops up your vacuum cleaner belt…Perhaps this could be a good thesis for Acharya S.’ next book. (Just make sure I get credit for first thinking of it.)

3) Was Easter a pagan holiday that was Christianized?  The reality is much more boring.  Easter was a development out of the Jewish Passover festival.  To be sure, pagan and secular elements were added, but these were prior additions to the existing holiday and not the origin of the holiday as Gene Vieth of Patrick Henry College mentions here.

The meme claims that Constantine (*groan* Why does Constantine always have to be the deus ex machina of every Christian conspiracy theory?) invented Easter as a Christian holiday.  This is idiotic considering the Roman bishop Victor was already riling up arguments over the two diverging dates of Easter in the late 2nd century (cf. Eusebius, Church History 5.23.3).  How exactly did Constantine invent Easter if Christians were already arguing about its proper celebration date over a century before he was born?

A word to the Hebrew roots movement:

Does it really make sense to argue that Christians should not make use of symbols with pagan origins or associations when Christians are either: a) totally unaware of a symbol’s history, or b) using the symbol with no pagan (or completely different) intentions?  My problem with the Hebrew roots movement is that the standard of purity it uses to beat up Christian holidays and symbols cannot even be applied to the Bible.  I’ll give you some examples:

John uses a snake as a symbol for Jesus (John 3:14); it is well known that many of the Biblical proverbs have Egyptian origins and influences (If you don’t believe this you simply haven’t ever picked up an academic commentary on Proverbs.); psalm 104 is very reminiscent of an earlier hymn to Aten; psalm 29 seems to be modeled after Baal texts (for example); both Jesus and YHWH are given the Baal’s deity title “cloud-rider” in both testaments. (Here’s an M.A. Thesis on this); or consider that the book of Revelation is crawling with Greco-Roman astrology. (Ever read Revelation 12?)

What examples like these show is that symbols are not magically evil.  John uses a snake to represent Jesus and it’s totally kosher in his mind.  We talk about Jesus “riding on the clouds” and it’s not an issue that this was a title that originally belonged to Baal.  The history of a symbol or its uses in pagan contexts doesn’t make it evil or unusable by Christians, it’s the intention behind the symbol that makes it good or bad.
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Christian Universalism Refuted

May 19, 2014, 1:39 pm
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Some of the universal salvation arguments put forward by scholars like Talbott and “MacDonald” (Robin Parry) are quite clever at dodging opposing proof texts.  It's not hard to see how people find their arguments so winsome.

You’re probably thinking, “But what about all those passages that speak of hell as eternal?”  Talbott and Parry would simply retort that they believe hell is eternal in a sense.  They believe that given an eternity everyone in hell would eventually come to regret their rebellion and wish for reconciliation with God.

Since God is love, isn’t it safe to assume He will grant repentant believers in hell their reconciliation? My answer is no and my reason is based in part on a weird text which almost always gets ignored.

Maybe the weirdest argument against Universalism in exegetical history:

An Egyptian deity with iconographic affinities with some the divinities
in Biblical apocalyptic texts
We need not speculate about how God might react in a situation in which a sinner in hell entreats God for forgiveness because the Bible itself records a case in which the ashamed enemies of God in hell entreat God’s forgiveness.

II Peter 2.1-10 and (Peter’s source) Jude 5-7 endorse the story from 1 Enoch about God’s imprisonment of angelic beings who slept with the daughters of men.  Jude quotes and mentions the book of Enoch by name in v.14.  I will not elaborate all the reasons these texts can only be faithfully interpreted as references to the Enoch event but will name two. [1]

Realizing that Peter has this worldview in mind explains one text that evangelicals are usually creeped out by and obfuscate: 1 Peter 3:14-22.  This passage pictures Jesus descending to the spirits in prison and preaching their defeat.  Peter is using a direct allusion to 1 Enoch in which the Watchers were imprisoned in the underword (ταρταρώσας.)

The author of Enoch gives a first person account of a visit he paid to these beings and how they were crying out for forgiveness.[2] Enoch records their petition to be released from their anguish and brings it before God. God emphatically denies it. Starting in chapter 14, Enoch goes and preaches to the Watchers their eternal defeat and imprisonment.[3]

It doesn't matter that I am quoting a non-inspired text.  It's obvious from Peter’s other mentions of the Enoch event in conjunction with the flood, the destruction of Sodom, and the rescue of Lot that he considers this idea in Enoch to be historical (II Peter 2:4-9).

The assumed historicity of these events is demanded because Peter lists them in defense of his argument in 2:3 that God’s “condemnation of wickedness is not idle.” Peter relates the story of Enoch’s preaching to the spirits imprisoned with Jesus’ resurrection and how, by being raised, Jesus was declaring also the defeat and eternal imprisonment of God’s enemies. 

So there exists divine beings condemned to eternal torment for their sins. They have entreated God for forgiveness and God has denied their request.  When Jesus defeated death, He (figuratively or literally) was declaring to them their eternal imprisonment in a like manner.

It is unwarranted to assume that God will simply free people from hell if they come to desire forgiveness.  In the only Biblical case in which we can observe God’s attitude in this exact situation, Peter implies He will not.  Notice Enoch’s absolute statements that their torment will be eternal and unending; that is the way ancient Jews parsed things.

Jude reflects his source Enoch when he speaks of their “eternal chains” (v.4).  Second-Temple Jews apparently didn’t have some mental allegiance blocking them from these types of affirmations about God.  The author is emphatic in his connection of this to the unsaved:  “Just as was true of those angels who did not keep their position…They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire.” (Jude 1:7)

_______________________________________________________________________

1) a) The Greek word translated “hell” in II Peter is not the expected Hades but the anomalous ταρταρώσας.  In almost every case this word appears it is in reference to the Greek myths about the fall of the Titians.  Jews used this special term which discussing the Watchers because they noticed its parallels with the Titan giants (for example, Josephus Ant. 1.73).  Peter has certainly borrowed his use of the word ταρταρώσας from Enoch.

b) In Jude 6-7 we know for grammatical reasons that Jude is ascribing sexual sin to the angels (note also, his mentioning of this in the context of Noah). The antecedent of τούτοις (masculine) should not be taken as “cites” πόλεις (feminine) in that passage because it would imply gender confusion.

2) 1 Enoch 13:3-6:
Then I went and spoke to them all together, and they were all afraid, and fear and trembling seized them. And they besought me to draw up a petition for them that they might find forgiveness, and to read their petition in the presence of the Lord of heaven. For from thenceforward they could not speak (with Him) nor lift up their eyes to heaven for shame of their sins for which they had been condemned.

3)   (v. 4-5)

I wrote out your petition, and in my vision it appeared thus, that your petition will not be granted unto you throughout all the days of eternity, and that judgment has been finally passed upon you: yea (your petition) will not be granted unto you. And from henceforth you shall not ascend into heaven unto all eternity.
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Why Ray Hagin’s PhD is Probably Bogus

July 5, 2014, 6:18 pm
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I’ve written several critiques of Ray Hagins online.  You can read these here, here and here.  Hagins has no CV online that I’ve ever been able to find.  The most exhaustive academic bio I can find on him is from this website which states:
Dr. Hagins has attended and completed studies in various academic institutions such as: Montclair State University, Northeastern Bible College, Lighthouse Christian College and Trinity Theological Seminary and holds a doctorate (C.C.D.) in counseling and a Ph.D. with an emphasis in Cognitive Psychology.
Let me state first that I have personally emailed Hagins in the past asking him where he obtained this doctorate and what his dissertation title was.  He has never responded.  Why would a person list every undergraduate institution they have attended (including unaccredited ones like Trinity) and fail to mention the most important data on where they obtained their PhD?  Also, isn't it mighty odd Hagins nitpicks every college he has attended here but mysteriously omits anything about where he received his M.A. or what the title was?  Given Hagin’s refusal to give the information and the quality of his research abilities I’m convinced at best he obtained a “PhD” from a diploma mill.  By paying enough money to a diploma mill a person’s cat or dog can become a PhD. This is why people who have actually endured the grueling terrors that are a real University doctorate program are certain and proud to list the institution they obtained it from in their academic bios.

But what about this ambiguous statement: “and holds a doctorate (C.C.D.) in counseling”?  Why does Hagins go from listing all these institution to identifying one by an abbreviation (if indeed it is an institution since I am aware of no academic title by that abbreviation) and what does he mean by “holds a doctorate” from this place or in this subject?  The only place I can find that might fit on Google is the Community College of Denver, but their website tells us “CCD does not offer master's or doctorate programs.”  We don’t know what Hagins is talking about when he says he has a doctorate from C.C.D.  That is probably intentional on his part.

A public challenge to Ray Hagins:

1)      What is the name of the institution(s) that awarded you your M.A. and PhD?
2)      Who was this program supervised by?
3)      What was the title of your dissertation?


If he can answer these questions and demonstrate that his doctorate isn’t bogus (and I’m sending this page to him on 7/5/14 so no answer is an answer), I will take this post down and replace it with a public apology.  Until then, we have every reason to doubt his legitimacy: His research is egregious; he refuses to state where he acquired his doctorate from (when he lists other institutions he attended), and he has refused to respond to my questions asking where he acquired it.  Ray claims publicly to be an authority, so I'm issuing him this public challenge.
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New Dissertation on Dawkins and Abiogenesis

July 24, 2014, 4:42 pm
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I work a grave shift security job with cargo pilots.   A few weeks ago, one from my school shared with me that he had finally finished his doctoral dissertation.  It’s entitled The non-ending search for a pre-DNA replicator: Richard Dawkins and the problem of abiogenesis. Dr. Fryar surveys the history of how Dawkins has grappled with the initial emergence of life throughout his career.  In short, biologists have no explanation for how life initially arose.  There is an astronomical gap of complexity which must be crossed in that first step, and no naturalistic model to date can account for this mysterious organization.  The dissertation is a fascinating read and can be accessed online here. 
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The Unseen Realm Review

January 25, 2015, 2:20 am
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I keep a journal of interesting things I encounter in my studies.  Sometimes these lead to drawings.  In this post, I've included a few of these over the years that were inspired by Heiser’s books, especially the draft of The Unseen Realm.

An attempt to render Lucifer using
Biblical period iconography and texts.
Heiser believes the Biblical authors
 considered Satan a serpentine seraph.  
As a full-time Baptist Bible college student, I’m assigned to read evangelical books and theologies constantly.  Most of them are extremely hackneyed.  It seems the evangelical “genre” is marked by the assumption that just because a book 1) is about God, and 2) says true things, that it should be slopped into a market already way over-glutted with mediocrity.  I’m probably overreacting because I’ve been compelled to wade through the mire for four years, but I’d describe the situation as holding God hostage in order to justify the endless publishing of unoriginal repetitions of Sunday school level theology and all-round poor writing.

I promised myself I wouldn’t name any particular authors as examples in that last paragraph.  It was hard.

Michael Heiser’s upcoming book The Unseen Realm: Rediscovering the Supernatural Worldview of theBible is important.  Extremely important.  It's a shame it is being released into an ocean of "felt-needs" mediocrity, but it's my hope Seminary professors and church leaders will realize the explosive potential it contains for an evangelical renaissance in how we approach the Bible. I'm not exaggerating with this article's title. Heiser’s work has had more theological impact on my life than any other Biblical scholar, and when I read the draft to the Unseen Realm back in 2012 I couldn’t help but share its ideas with everyone who would listen and still haven’t ceased.  He’s largely responsible for my interests in Biblical languages (and incidentally, now my online Aramaic professor).


Heiser has argued Ezekiel 1's symbolism
probably refers to Babylonian astrology.
Unfortunately, Heiser isn’t a mega church pastor, self-help shaman or “‘merica prophecies” eisegete like most of the authors topping Lifeway’s listed sales last year.  He is an ancient linguist.  When you pick up The Unseen Realm you will be reading the culmination of the career of a man who has poured decades into studying and teaching Egyptian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Greek, Phoenician, Hebrew and other crusty languages.  He has engaged in the heights of secular Biblical scholarship (usually to give it a needed spanking) and has come out on the other side remaining faithful to Christ and the inspiration of scripture.  Much of the books’ content is his doctoral dissertation explained in laymen’s terms and everything you encounter within it has weathered the rigors of academic peer-review.

As regards the content of the book (and I emphasize I only read the draft Heiser shared years ago), if you've heard of Historical theology, Systematic theology and Biblical theology, in a way The Unseen Realm can be considered a Biblical theology of the weird (or perhaps, creepy).  Heiser makes a point to go to the strange stuff your pastor avoids in the Bible to show how wonderful and paradigm shifting those texts are, and his engaging writing style is designed for the average person in the pew.

The book traces an obfuscated cosmic battle through the centuries of Biblical history and ancient literature that involves a unique class of divine beings.  Behind the purpose of Eden as a meeting place for the gods, the uncanny serpent in the garden, Babble, Joshua’s extermination of Canaanite bloodlines, giant clans, Christ’s transfiguration and Armageddon, there is a titanic cord of theology that has been lost to modern believers that would have been obvious to the Biblical authors.  Because of our failure to grasp Israel's monotheistic pantheon and relationship with the supernatural, colossal meanings behind these texts have been lost to us.  Heiser’s interpretations are not new, but a regression into the minds of the ancients, and although the journey takes you down strange roads, you will come out on the other side even stronger established in orthodox faith.

Heiser's book shows Eden was considered the mountain meeting place
of Israel's monotheistic pantheon.  Ancient ziggurat temples like
Babble represented the attempt to artificially create a meeting place
with the gods.
The book was originally entitled The Myth that is True after a Tolkien quote. Much to my lament, I presume Heiser’s publishers are smart enough to know having the word “Myth” in the title of a Christian book under any circumstance is publishing suicide. I’ve always felt a sort of paradoxical contempt for mythical authors like Tolkien, Homer or Hearn.  I found their ancient worlds of myth aroused in me the deepest yearning a human being can feel and, in effect, contempt for this mundane world--the tangle of emotions the German language terms Sehnsucht.

Heiser peers beyond the numinous veil. You will ascend ancient desert temple steps and read forgotten histories in stone that will transport you back to Eden, exploring it as if for the first time; You will sojourn among the residents of Sheol; You will stand in the eclectic celestial assembly of those who witnessed the earth’s creation; You will meet Jews before Christ who believed in a Trinity, and open neglected 2,000 year old scrolls hidden in desert caves that speak of an ancient battle between the divine Watchers and God’s people—tracing its giant bloodlines through Biblical history.

Ancient Near Eastern iconographic elements relevant to Ezekiel 1.  
This is the stuff of myth.  It is no less grand than anything to come from the pen of a Homer or Tolkien, and yet, it is the reality Heiser's book offers.  It connects the yearning Sehnsucht we all have to something in reality.  Along the way, assumptions you have about the degree of relevance for extra-biblical texts in interpreting the Bible will likely be shattered and even familiar texts will become exhilaratingly new as you read them through ancient eyes.  The church will also receive from it a well-needed dose of what genuine scholarship actually looks like.  I'm reminded of a friend who also read the draft and commented that it renovated his fascination for the Bible and deepened his worship of God.  I'm excited to see the waves this book is going to make in the church.

You can check out the table of contents here.



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Salon.com's Remarkably Stupid Historical Jesus Article

March 2, 2015, 8:02 am
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A Muslim friend showed me this  viral article about Jesus by Valerie Tarico entitled, “9 Things You Think You Know about Jesus that are Probably Wrong.”

In this post, I don't care about convincing anyone to be a conservative evangelical.  I’m mostly here to spank Salon for playing with the loaded gun of history like a 7 year old in a 3:00 AM government ad. Weather permitting, we may even cut a line or two about the importance of integrity in media.

No Historical Jesus scholar, ultra-liberal to conservative could read through the article without laughing, yet, it has blackened social media like an oil spill.  I'm also ticked these Da Vinci Code myths are eternally being slayed only to reincarnate for sequels like a mummy in a Brandon Fraser franchise.

The screenshots of Tarico's claims are followed by responses:

It would be sooo unusual if Jesus was celibate, he must have married:







Tarico’s source is a psychologist who wrote a Huffington piece. He gives no sources for his claim.  Bart D. Ehrman, the most famous American New Testament historian alive (and probably the most disliked by evangelical believers), ain't amused with this position:


Bart Ehrman: "Yes, my house does contain
many leather bound books and
smells of rich mahogany."
Sometimes it is argued—for example, in The Da Vinci Code—that Jesus must have been married... [T]his claim, as plausible as it sounds, is in fact wrong. We do know of Jewish men in the first century who were single and celibate. Strikingly, they are men who shared a religious perspective similar to that of the historical Jesus… The like-minded Essenes before Jesus and the like-minded Paul after him—all of them apocalyptic Jewish men—lived life as single and celibate. It is not at all implausible that Jesus did as well.  [1]

Ehrman also points out that Jesus taught there would be no marriage in the kingdom of heaven and regularly implied that we should seek to model the kingdom on earth: “On these grounds, my best guess as a historian is that Jesus was single and celibate.”[2]

I’m not just picking the view of one idiomatic scholar.  Anthony Le Donne has recently written the most significant study on the possibility of a Mrs. Jesus in the English language and concluded the same thing as Ehrman:  Jesus probably wasn’t married...Sorry if that's boring.


The gay Jesus tease:

No Salon article containing the word "Jesus" could exist without also containing the word "gay" at least once.  It's just one of those laws of nature. Since I’ve said Jesus likely wasn’t married, I’ll provide two reasons why it is utterly unlikely Jesus was gay:

1) Every source we have has him declaring the Hebrew Bible authoritative and it was the Hebrew Bible that every second-Temple Jewish text that makes a judgment on homosexuality was informed by when they monolithically pronounce homosexuality sinful. (That was a long sentence.) Second-Temple Jewish writings take a “univocal stance against homosexual conduct.”[3] Jesus never brings the specific subject up in the gospels for the same reason I rarely go around teaching people pedophilia is wrong in my 21stcentury American context.  It wasn’t a matter of moral controversy for the Jewish context of his ministry.

2) Galatians is an undisputed Pauline in which Paul swears he hung out with Peter fifteen days in Jerusalem and with Jesus’ brother James. Later, him and the muchachos (including John) met to bust theological kneecaps at the Jerusalem council. Weird his friends forgot to forward him the memo about Jesus being the only member of Judea’s rainbow initiative--especially since homo-sex had him constantly fighting off a room full of angry wet cats in his Corinth church plant. 

The Gospel of Philip *sigh*:

Ah! Yes! Those boring four Gospels composed within the 1st century with earlier independent sources and Aramaic allusions are pronounced by Tarico to be a hopeless historical mess.  "Only a set of hunches and traditions." Who cares about them anyways? Your grandmother? The kids want explosions!

But fear not reader! You need a gospel more spiritually auuuthentic--like those Sanskrit tattoos Angelina Jolie has.  And preferably one allegedly suppressed by a male Catholic conspiracy. The uber-sexy 3rdcentury, spiritually abstruse, Gnostic Gospel of Phillip--written by someone with no historical contact with Jesus or his followers--has donned his tights and will deliver the Historical Jesus to us like a damsel in his rippling biceps; This Jesus has a Hollywood crush on, get this, Mary Magdalene (who I assure you was a pale, redhead fox).  Is there no end to the sexiness of this formulaic forbidden-love movie pitch?

Unfortunately, reality is much more boring.  The big name New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg writes, “Philip is dependent primarily on Matthew’s Gospel for his information about Jesus...he reveals next to nothing about the pre-Synoptic stages of the Gospel tradition.” [4]

I should point out, the Philip manuscript doesn’t read Jesus used to kiss Mary "on her mouth." That reading must be supplied by the imagination because there is a physical hole in the manuscript.[5] We can’t be certain the original read “kiss her on her mouth” unless we discover more textual-critical evidence.  Tarico is aware of this complicating factor but has omitted the detail in this article.

We as modern readers immediately associate the kissing in this text with sex, but there are good reasons to believe Philip’s ancient audience wouldn’t. Christian kissing has a long history in the early church and Philip has an entire mystical interpretation of it that is applied to all the disciples.[6]

In Ehrman's opinion, “When Jesus kisses Mary, then, it is not a prelude to sex. It is a symbolic statement that she received the revelation of truth that he conveyed to his disciples.”

A wedding? 

Tarico's evidence from the canonical gospels that Jesus and Mary were hitched is exegetical voodoo. These are literally “clues” we must “decode.”  She holds a seance with the dead ghost of the Da Vinci Code then channels its moldy words into pixels so it can haunt a fresh audience again. She speculates John 2’s report of a wedding is actually Jesus’ wedding to Mary.  If this is true can someone please explain to me why Jesus had to be “invited” (ἐκλήθη) to his own wedding (2:2)?  Also, who goes immediately to stay with momma after their wedding ceremony (2:12)? And why is Mary always distinguished from the other Marys in the gospels by the fact that she was from Magdala?  Why didn’t the gospel writers just say Jesus’ wife (or at least the ancient Greek equivalent for Boo Thang?)  I’m sure it’s all just part of the international Catholic misogynistic conspiracy.

Jesus' Celestial Posse:



Odd Tarico thinks it’s an open case whether Jesus had 12 disciples.  I specifically recall the specialist in Christian origins John Dickson at Macquarie University listing the 12 disciples as a point most historians agree on during an interview.  Professor of New Testament Scott McKnight confirms, “that Jesus associated himself especially with twelve of his followers is a datum firmly established by good arguments across a broad spectrum of modern Jesus studies.”[8] In 1994 J. P. Meier concluded in the Journal of Biblical literature: “When one draws together the arguments...one position emerges as clearly the more probable: the circle of the Twelve did exist during Jesus’ public ministry.[9]

Tarico's anachronistic astrological claims:

The gospels imply Jesus was making a theological statement about renewing the twelve tribes of Israel.  Why does Tarico think this is astrology and not history? If you follow her link for this source it takes you to an interview on her blog by a Dr. Tony Nugent.  In that interview Nugent includes the twelve tribes of Israel and 12 disciples in a list of things that “have their roots in [the]…twelve signs of the zodiac…”

This thesis is impossible because the zodiac wasn’t reduced into the twelve constellations until the 5th century BC by the Babylonians.[10]  The twelve tribes of Israel are reported far earlier.  Secular dating of the Genesis sources have the twelve tribes mentioned earlier than the ninth century BC.[11]  It's tremendously anachronistic to say allusions to the number twelve in the Hebrew Bible are taken from the zodiac.

 Off topic, but believe it or not, it’s actually true that the origin of eggs being sold by the dozen goes back to astrology.

Actually, no. It’s not.  I lied.

Hunches shrouded in the fog of history?


Tarico’s attitude is that our historical grasp of Jesus is the epistemological equivalent of chasing a greased, ghost pig naked in a skating rink. (I'm bad with metaphors lately.)  Every time we extend our noetic clutches, the greasy, ectoplasmal sow of history flits through our grapples leaving us with little more than a haze of hunches. (That was an elegant sentence.  I think I'll make it into one of those cursive, sidebar-quote things.)  In reality, it's extremely popular for scholars to date the history-bursting creed in 1 Corinthians 15 to the mid-to-late 30’s. Just to be obnoxious I'll plunder 13 big-name examples from Habermas' doctoral dissertation.

I'm told lists like this bore readers, but it's full of German umlaut dots that are supposed to impress you.

Oscar Cullmann (University of Paris); Reginald Fuller (Virginia Seminary); Pannenberg (University of Munich); Wilckens (Berlin Theological College); Hengel (University Tübingen); Marxsen (Westfälische Wilhelms University); Conzelmann (University of Göttingen);Hans-Ruedi Weber; A.M. Hunter (University Aberdeen, Scotland) Raymond E. Brown (Union Theological Seminary); Norman Perrin (University Chicago); George E. Ladd (Fuller Theological); Neufeld (‎University of Waterloo).

We have a written record of a crucified, risen, messianic figure who was believed to have appeared to great numbers after his death within less than a decade after his execution.  Ehrman’s book on Jesus’ Existence illustrates how the synoptic sources can be grounded in sufficiently early Aramaic culture.  The celebrated scholar Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses argues the gospel sources link us with eyewitness testimony.  There are huge doubts about certain elements and logions of Jesus’ career, and I’m not interested in regurgitating the banal apologetics party lines here.

Nevertheless, Tarico’s position ain't reflective of modern Historical Jesus studies. Michael Bird, who has written a survey of the state and direction of the current situation, writes: “The dominant view today seems to be that we can know pretty well what Jesus was out to accomplish, that we can know a lot about what he said and that those two things make sense within the world of first-century Judaism.”[12]  Craig Evan’s assessment of our current place in historical Jesus studies concludes the same, “the persistent trend in recent years is to see the Gospels as essentially reliable.” 

Jesus...If He Even Existed:

You know that hopeless frustration you get when a creationist tells you there isn’t a shred of evidence for evolution?  Now you know how New Testament scholars feel when your friends parrot the idea that Jesus may not have even existed.


This is not something the field considers itself uncertain of.  Thanks to the ubiquity of this internet myth, I happen to have several dozen quotes by New Testament scholars on hand refuting it.  I’ve narrowed them down to seven for brevity:

William Lane Craig who did his dissertation in historical Jesus studies under the celebrity German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg states:“[The position that Jesus never existed ]…this is a position which is so extreme that to call it marginal would be an understatement.  It doesn’t even appear on the map of contemporary New Testament scholarship.”[13]

Before he went on to write his book explaining why we know Jesus existed, Bart Ehrman once said in interview, “I don’t think there is any serious historian who doubts the existence of Jesus...we have more evidence for Jesus than we have for almost anybody from his time period.”[14]

Paul Maier professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan states in interview: “Anyone who uses that argument [that Jesus never existed] is simply flaunting his ignorance. I hate to say it but it’s about that bad.”[15]

Gary Habermas who I reference because his dissertation surveyed the positions of critical historical Jesus scholars among a variety of topics states, “With very, very, few exceptions virtually no scholar doubts or denies that Jesus existed.”[16]

Graeme Clarke Senior Lecturer at the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Western Australia has been quoted stating, “Frankly, I know of no ancient historian who would ever twinge with doubt about the existence of Jesus Christ. The documentary evidence is simply overwhelming.”[17]

John Dickson Senior Research Fellow with the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University has become so annoyed with this claim that he wrote:
[It] is simply wrong to refer to "many professional historians" who doubt the existence of Jesus… To repeat a challenge I've put out on social media several times before, I will eat a page of my Bible if someone can find me just one full Professor of Ancient History, Classics, or New Testament in an accredited university somewhere in the world (there are thousands of names to choose from) who thinks Jesus never lived. I don't deny that there are substantial questions that could be raised about the Christian faith, but the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth isn't one of them.[18]
Head of New Testament Studies at the Swedish University of Gothenburg Gunnar Samuelsson writes:
I see no reason to doubt that Jesus existed. In comparison to other ancient individuals he is well represented by the ancient sources.[19]
(Someone is going to get mad after reading the above quotes and ask why I haven't even mentioned Carrier and Price.  So there, I mentioned them.)

I'm tempted to continue my tantrum over the link in the article that leads to Tarico’s website.  It claims most scholars hold certain positions that most scholars emphatically reject. For example, Tarico says the gospel story about the women at the tomb is believed by most scholars to be a mythological fiction based in earlier myths.  In reality, this element of the gospel sources is considered one of our most reliable according to Gary Habermas who surveyed more than 1,400 scholarly publications on the historical Jesus in German, French and English. (The testimony of women was so repudiated in the first century that this embarrassing element in the sources wouldn't have been contrived by Christians.) [20] Modern scholars don't interpret the mystery religions into the gospels because there was little footing for them in 1st century Judea unlike Alexandrian Judaism.

Conclusion:

 Some of Tarico’s points in her click-bait article are generally accurate.[21]  Despite these, the article contains so much historical puerility and so many allusions idiomatic to sensationalist conspiracy writers that I would rather it not be read at all. I'm aware my words have been harsh, but I deem them appropriate considering Tarico's ideas have been spotlighted by Salon, Huffington and Alternet.  I'd like to think Salon and Alternet would update corrections to this article they are "proud to feature."

Update: Salon.com and Alternet made no significant corrections to the article (7/15/2015)


[1] Ehrman, Peter, Paul & Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend (USA: Oxford University Press, 2006), 249-50.
[2] Ibid., 250-1.
[3] See chapter two and three of Robert A. J. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Text and Hermeneutics Nashville: Abington Press, 2001).
[4] Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 2 ed. (USA: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 270.
[5] Paul, Foster, The Apocryphal Gospels: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009),47.
[6]  For example, Ehrman (Peter, Paul & Mary, 216.) cites this earlier passage from Philip for contextual consideration:
It is from being promised to the heavenly place that man receives nourishment.
[Gap in the manuscript] him from the mouth. And had the word gone out from
that place it would be nourished from the mouth and it would become perfect.
For it is by a kiss that the perfect conceive and give birth. For this reason we also
kiss one another. We receive conception from the grace that is in one another.
[7] Ehrman 215.
[8] McKnight, "Jesus and the Twelve," Bible.org. https://bible.org/article/jesus-and-twelve.
[9] Meier, J. P. "The Circle of the Twelve : Did It Exist during Jesus' Public Ministry?." Journal Of Biblical Literature 116, no. 4 (1997): 635-672. New Testament Abstracts, EBSCOhost (accessed March 1, 2015).
[10] Ulla Koch-Westenholz, Mesopotamian Astrology: An Introduction to Babylonian and Assyrian Celestial Divination(Museum Tusculanum Press:Coppenhagen,1995), 163.

The most significant innovation was perhaps the zodiac, the division of
the ecliptic into twelve equal parts or signs. It replaced the earlier series
of 17 constellations on the "Path of the Moon." The zodiac
was first used in Babylonian astronomy in the fifth century B.C.

[11]  Ronald Hendel, The Book of Genesis: Composition, Reception and Interpretation, ed. Evans et. al. (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 80.
[12] Bird, “Shouldn’t Evangelicals Participate in the ‘Third Quest for the Historical Jesus’?”
Themelios 29.2 (Spring 2004): 5-14.
[13] The following quotes are taken from a video and audio compilation “Do Historians Believe Jesus Existed.” YouTube video, 6:05. Dec 27, 2010.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP15Pc2Lljc
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] John Dickson, “I’ll Eat a Page from my Bible if Jesus didn’t Exist,” The Drum (blog). ABC.net.au. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-17/dickson-ill-eat-a-page-from-my-bible-if-jesus-didnt-exist/5820620
[19] Samuelsson. "Questions and Answers." Exegetics.org. http://www.exegetics.org/Q_and_A.html.
[20] Habermas, “Resurrection Research from 1975 to the Present: What are Critical Scholars Saying?” Gary Habermas.com. http://www.garyhabermas.com/articles/J_Study_Historical_Jesus_3-2_2005/J_Study_Historical_Jesus_3-2_2005.htm.
[21] Eg. We know from osteological reconstructions what early Judeans looked like; textual data on crucifixion is complex and ambiguous; the gospel writers sought typological parallels between Jesus and other Hebrew figures; the passage about the woman caught in adultery is in fact the late conflation of two traditions.
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Seven Headed Plesiosaurs and Hebrew Grammar

March 2, 2015, 11:02 am
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I’ve shown in several posts like this why Leviathan is a supernatural west-Semitic chaos deity and can’t be a plesiosaur. Recent conversation with my Hebrew professor on some of the Semitic sources has got the subject in the back of my mind again. One issue I still get challenged on is my assertion the Hebrew grammar of Psalm 74 says that Leviathan has multiple heads like the Hydra of Greek myth.  (In Ancient Near Eastern drawings and texts Leviathan is characteristically depicted with seven.)  Exhibit A is a screen shot of some misinformed comments made on Ken Ham’s Facebook in response to some of my old writings:



Psalm 74:14 reads:

אַתָּ֣ה רִ֭צַּצְתָּ רָאשֵׁ֣י לִוְיָתָ֑ן תִּתְּנֶ֥נּוּ מַ֝אֲכָ֗ל לְעָ֣ם לְצִיִּֽים

“You crushed the heads of Leviathan.  You gave him for food to the people of the coast.”

In the construct package ראשי לויתןthe term ראשappears in the plural state in conjunction with the singular noun לויתן.  This type of sere-yod plural noun construction to a following singular noun is extremely common in the Bible.  If you have taken a semester of Hebrew, you hardly need to be told this.*  If not, a very close grammatical phenomenon is visually apparent in a text like Micah 3.9: שִׁמְעוּ-נָא זֹאת, רָאשֵׁי בֵּית יַעֲקֹב.  Notice, the plural “heads” is joined by the same construct ending to the singular “house of Jacob.”   The laws of the grammar God’s words were inspired in demand that Leviathan has multiple heads in Psalm 74. 

Can we stop throwing millions of dollars into museums and speakers based on bad Hebrew grammar?

And stop speculating the physiological logistics of dinosaurs fire-breathing?

And stop singing songs like this:

http://youtu.be/GdCrPkuAoag

Glad I got that out of my system one last time.


* For example, Russell T. Fuller, Invitation to Biblical Hebrew: A Beginning Grammar, (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2006), 61-7.
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Learn Aramaic Online Free

June 7, 2015, 5:48 am
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Link to the Aramaic course

This article by a best-selling memory researcher I found several months ago is the most beneficial I've ever read on language study, and less than two months after applying it my Hebrew vocabulary has increased by over 1,000 words.  (You can watch a video of my progress speaking modern Hebrew here.)

Joshua Foer, the author of Moonwalking with Einstein, found he would be spending the summer in the Congo with a tribe of pygmies and endeavored to learn their native language in a couple of months before his trip.  To accomplish this he consulted the world memory Grandmaster Ed Cooke.  Cooke, who himself has an MA in cognitive science from Paris Descartes University, shared with Foer his new free online learning company called Memrise that he co-founded with a Princeton neuroscientist.

Using the app for two and a half months Foer locked 1,100 African words into his long term memory. On average, he only spent four minutes at a time on the app during down time at his job. The total combined time it took him to memorize his 1,100 word dictionary was 22 hours. I’ve experienced very similar results with Hebrew.

By using weird (in this case a little creepy) and comical
visualizations, I've created the Aramaic memory course to help lock
vocabulary into your mind.  Here the the word for strength, 'Chaiyl'
is associated with high heels.  Users can contribute their own
memory tricks.
Users create memory courses in any subject, especially languages.  Everything on the website undergoes aggressive empirical testing to optimize memory.  Small variables on the site are changed and honed regularly to discover what variations contribute to learning.  For example, Foer mentions that it was discovered people learn 0.5% better when flash cards are in one font as opposed to another and that Memrise’s servers discovered averages for how well people tend to learn given the hour of the day.

The website also takes advantage of well-known studies on spaced repetition.  When you want to memorize something, there are well-documented optimal time intervals for reviewing it just before the memory slips from your mind.  Memrise's algorithms keep track of how well you are doing on each word and informs you of the optimal time for reinforcing each memory.

The most valuable feature of the site is its community database of memory devices.  When you take a course you can flip through a pile of memory tricks that other users have created for each word.  The memory devices that get the most votes ascend to the top of the pile.  The ones I've created for this course are informed by the mnemonic methods advocated by leading memory experts in international competitions and by the majority of polyglots.

I’m currently studying Aramaic with Mike Heiser’s online institute (can't more highly recommend it, by the way) so I rummaged around in Memrises' Aramaic courses and found none of them satisfying. (Apparently, Aramaic isn’t hot with the kids.)  I created this course over several months for my personal benefit and in the hopes that it may help some educators and students.
Some more examples of mnemonics from the course



The primary aim of the course is to give you the vocabulary fundamentals to access 90% of the texts in the Aramaic portions of the Hebrew Bible.  Every word has a pronunciation audio and phrase translations are utilized to help get you reading. You can log into Memrise immediately if you already have a facebook.  The course is titled "Aramaic Frequent Vocab w/Audio and Mems (Van Pelt)."

There's also a free Memrise smartphone app that I tend to do most of my studying on.  The app is great because it will give you non-invasive notifications whenever it is the optimal time to refresh your memories.  It also has replaced my meaningless impulse to constantly waste time on social media.  Below is a screen shot of what the app environment looks like.  The course covers 17 chapters.

Happy studying!


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How Fact and Opinion Worksheets Corrupt Children: Plato Flunks Common Core

July 1, 2015, 4:55 pm
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I'm uncaging the philosopher in me to let him prance around a bit.  I promise to tranq him in the neck and shove him back in his cage to return to the serious business of writing on something terribly importantly serious like Babylonian entrail extispicy for you dismal theology and history majors that usually read this blog.

What are “Fact and Opinion” worksheets?
If Plato, Socrates or Aristotle took these tests, they'd flunk. De facto, they’re epistemological catechisms enforced by the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core. They usually teach a street variety of positivism, a philosophy declared dead by philosophers since the late 1970s.  

What’s positivism?
The drill sheets affirm positivism to the extent that they assume the self-refuting claim that only those things accessible to mathematics and the five senses (i.e. science) can be known.  I say this is self-refuting because such a claim cannot itself be verified by the five senses or mathematics. You will never meet a living professional philosopher who holds the view.

A. J. Ayer, who I’m informed was the Ivan Drago of positivism, reflected after its funeral, "I suppose the most important [defect]...was that nearly all of it was false." And, amusingly, if sociologists like the Jewish-German Edmund Husserl in his Crisis of European Sciences are correct, the philosophy, particularly an extreme form called scientism, happened to coincide with a certain early 1940s German political movement (bit more on that towards the end).

Ok, I’ll humor your dystopian sci-fi plot since you contributed the word extispicy to my vocabulary, but how exactly do these worksheets plunge a soul sucking iron proboscis into the minds of our children?

Students are given worksheets rowed with statements and are asked if those statements are matters of fact or opinion.  A top website, from which I will be drawing my examples, clarifies:
“…I teach students that a fact is any statement that can be proven: ‘there are 10,000 feet in a mile.’ Even though this is incorrect, I teach students that this is still a fact…define a fact as any statement that can be proven true or false…”
In other words, the truth content of the following examples is irrelevant.  Following are categories that educators are teaching yield no knowledge in any way constituting proof or fact—namely, art, human purpose,morality and beauty. (Basically, everything that really matters.)

Art

OPINION: “Popular music today is not as good as it was in the past.”

The answer key informs us sentences of this nature, regardless of truth content, belong to the realm of opinion—that some music cannot in fact be deemed better that other music or, if we were to cite other examples like “The huger games will be a great movie,” that the quality of all art is subjective opinion.  Have the authors really ever considered what this means?

You may not have a personal taste for a band like the Bloodhound Gang and such immortal hit lyrics as “You and me baby ain’t noth’ but mammals So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel,” but according to this view, one cannot dare assert the lyrics of Keats, Homer or Solomon are in any objective (read: real) sense better than these.  Since music cannot be put in a beaker, you cannot assert the knuckle-dragging superstition that the soaring eternal stillness of John Tavner’s Funeral Canticle is in any real sense better in its aesthetics and artistic content than the stochastic, vomiting of Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrete.


My mind drifts to an account of Rudolf Otto during a stay in Morocco:

It is Sabbath.  You find yourself in a grimy small apartment within the ancient city, sacred night falling.  In the street outside you hear the lifting of uncanny, ancient tongues, cantillating in style resembling Islamic chant.  The voices heave and soar, weaving into a pulsing chaos.  It is impossible to distinguish individual words.  Building, like the desperation of Tiamat writhing in her final moments.  Then, in a supernova of terror, the babble crashes into explosive unity: “Qadosh! Qadosh! Qadosh! Adonai ztevaot; melo col ha’arezt kevodo!” (Holy! Holy! Holy! Is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!)

Immediately, you are obliterated into nothing.  If all the mountains of the earth were to consume you, they could not hide your feeling of nakedness, and your terror is not of the common iron-blood sort.  No, it is that rare feeling of creeping flesh that most of us primarily will know from hearing a good ghost story. In this moment your mind holds communion of understanding with those who speak of the gods haunting these antique desert lands, and you have understood Isaiah who cried out “Woe to me! I am undone!”

Thanks for that mawkish theological reverie Ben, but how exactly can a thing like music be objective?

I agree there is room for subjectivity to art, but truth is objective, and does not music aim to teach truth to our guts and chests?  If this is the case for even some music then there must be music that conveys truth accurately and some that does so poorly or lies about truth all together. To this extent, the quality of music and other art is objective.

If it is true all people listen to music from some desire to become unified with the things the music is about, and if music is philosophy felt, and philosophy the pursuit of success—the department of education would have us be unified with all things indiscriminately, since success also is blacklisted as an epistemological phantasm.

Success
OPINION: “The more money someone has the more successful they are.”

We are informed judgments of success like this cannot be proven true or false.  Other examples are easy to find.  The American Library Association tells us the statement, “People should be able to watch as much TV as they want,” is only opinion. But then, this demands that there is no provable chief purpose or end to man by which the actions of his life may be compared in order to call one life objectively more successful or better lived than another.

I work at an airport.  Once my coworker who has five children made the mistake of mentioning to a cargo pilot that she has lots of kids.  The pilot responded by telling her, “That was a stupid choice.  I chose not to have kids, and now I’m a millionaire.” What would you say to this man?  The authors of these worksheets could not take an opinion in the matter.  If they did, their own drill sheets would cry out against them.  They can offer no proof he is less or more successful for aiming his life at acquiring comfort and toys rather than laboring over children because success for them is a standard we each must create subjectively.

Not only does this doctrine declare war against all religions (since religions exist to inform us what truly successful living is), will not the educational ouroboros turn and devour itself?  Why do we send children to school or have them read about Harriet Tubman if there is not some objective standard of greatness we believe they are obligated to strive for? Why should youth steeped in Latin be deemed more successful than youth steeped in Family Guy reruns? (I assure you the latter will be more sociable.) If the aim of government is to promote a successful society, what will become of the society which repudiates the possibility of knowing facts about what success is?

Morality

OPINION: “Drug dealers belong in prison.”
OPINION: “Cursing in school is inappropriate behavior.”
OPINION: “It is worth sacrificing some personal liberties to protect our country from terrorism”

Dr. McBrayer has already spanked these worksheet authors here for teaching children there are no moral facts.  I fear it’s condescending to the reader’s intelligence to elaborate what happens when a nation accepts the idea that there are no knowable laws above men’s laws. It is no coincidence that the Nazis appealed to legal positivism (specifically John Austin’s Command Theory) throughout the Nuremberg trials.  If there exists no universal moral law above men’s laws by which to compare men’s laws then there is no such thing as just law or unjust law, and law can never be said to have improved.  There is only the capricious Athenian mob ladling hemlock-punch into dixy cups for the MLKs, Antigones and Nelson Mandelas it doesn’t like.

Beauty

OPINION: “The Hudson River is the most beautiful river in New York.”(source)
OPINION: “The ugliest sea creature is the manatee”
OPINION: “Popular music today is not as good as it was in the past.”
OPINION: “The most beautiful state…[is] Missouri.”(source)

“In my young days,” confessed one Sung critic, “I praised the master whose pictures I liked, but as my judgment matured I praised myself for liking what the masters had chosen to have me like.”[1] 

Until modern times, most men treated beauty as if it were something objective.  When I say “objective” I mean that beauty was, for them, located outside of the mind in reality.  It was possible for our emotional reactions to be proper or improper when beholding beauty, and it was possible for us to be right or wrong about what was beautiful [2].  Plato and Plotinus believed beauty existed in the realm of the Forms; a thing was beautiful to the degree that it mimicked this ultimate and perfect standard. Augustine asks whether “things are beautiful because they give pleasure, or give pleasure because they are beautiful.”  He argues the second to be true [3]. For him beauty was ontologically grounded in God: “This is the unchangeable truth which is the law of all the arts…"[4]

On this view of reality, beauty was a target at which we aimed.  We could make bad shots and good shots because the bull’s-eye was the standard.  It is this understanding of beauty that drove Polykleitos to sculpt his ‘Canon’ of the ideal masculine form, and seems the impetus of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man [5]. It was the reason Coleridge could agree with a tourist who called a waterfall sublime while being upset with the other who misidentified it as something closer to “pretty,"[6] and it is the reason I once witnessed a boy spanked by his parents for looking out at the Grand Canyon at sunset and retorting, “It’s just a big stupid hole in the ground!”  Much of our philosophically impoverished education system will have none of this.  It largely trains children to parrot their catechism, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Lewis, who indicted the educators of his day for also teaching beauty is relative, also believed it is the very subtlety of these sorts of exercises which are dangerous:
“The very power of [textbook authors] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake.  It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.”
Ah, invoking a guy who wrote overrated unicorn books.  Why are you throwing a tantrum over the idea beauty is in the eye of the beholder?

When I say “This sequoia forest is beautiful” I am not merely saying something about my subjective emotional state. In fact, the creation of my subjective emotional state itself is founded in my belief that the sequoia forest really is beautiful.  But the Common Core’s metaphysic teaches us the object our emotional state is grounded in is a delusion.  It is as when you believe a ghost is in the room with you and so, it produces the appropriate emotion of terror.  Once you have investigated to discover your belief in the ghost was a delusion, nothing demands your reaction of fear.  You cannot remove the heart and expect blood to keep pumping.  The forest really is not beautiful, and so, when I feel a thing is beautiful that feeling does not correspond with reality; the feeling is a crock! It has lied about what is there in reality.  We have a word for that which only exist “in the eye of the beholder” but not objectively in reality: Hallucination.

Conclusion (from a guy who hates writing conclusions):

These worksheets are, of course, gnomic of a larger problem: Our society, and so, our educational system, largely believes and propagates the idea there is no world beyond Plato’s cave. If art, human purpose,morality and beauty are matters of the heart, then society maniacally stands over us chanting “Kali ma! Kali ma!” as she rummages around in our chest cavity.  But your classroom doesn’t need to be a 1980s-Hollywood human sacrifice scene.  With just a toothpick of philosophy even your children can vanquish the majority of the world’s armies of lobotomized empiricist zombies and their slings and arrows of stupid party lines about opinions being armpits everyone is entitled to and beauty being a delusion in the eye of the beholder.

But most importantly…..

*pulls dart out of neck*

*plop*



[1] Quoted by Kakuzo Okakura, “Art Appreciation” in The Book of Tea.
[2] See Lewis, The Abolition of Man: or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 25.  See also, Crispin Sartwell, “Beauty.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014), [on-line], accessed 7 April 2014, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/.

[3] Augustine, Earlier Writings, ed. J.H. Burleigh (New York: WJK Publishing, 1953), 255.
[4] Ibid., 254.
[5] Note on Vitruvian and canon sculpture
[6] This story is preserved originally in Dorothy Wordsworth, Recollection of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803. ed. J. C. Shairp, (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1874), 37.  My interpretation (and translation of the original term “beautiful” to “pretty” for clarification derives from Lewis, Ibid., 14ff.
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How Biblical Worship is like Hearing a Good Ghost Story - Part 1

August 17, 2015, 2:37 pm
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  The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall first published
in 1936
What is the Worship-Dread Paradox?

Imagine you were a duckling raised your whole life without ever being allowed to see a body of water larger than a little drinking cup.  Imagine drinking then rolling around in the remaining teaspoons of water.  You occasionally look at your webbed feet and are struck by their strangeness. Also, you feel a deep but unknown longing for something beyond your ducky matrix.

There’s a colossal mystery of religion.  It’s not a mystery because it’s difficult to understand since most cultures and people in history have assumed it's a thing natural to humanity and self-evident.  It’s mysterious in the sense that our modern prejudices have hidden it from us, making us like the caged duck. 

The mystery is this: Certainly the Biblical authors felt love towards their God, but their experience of God was accompanied by other, seemingly contradictory emotions—terror and dread.

The Biblical Examples:

Jacob, arising from his night vision of celestial immortals calls the 'house of God' (נורא) ‘dreadful’; Moses ‘hid his face’ in fear before the ineffable desert flame; Ezekiel, at the shore of the Kebar, sees the wheels and cherubim star-sprayed with eyes and describes their height as 'frightful.'


Grab a modern translation of the Psalms and you'll see the translators themselves are often guilty of trying to protect you from the worship-dread paradox:  In Psalm 47, the translators tell us God is “awesome” or “wonderful” in his sanctuary. Awesome is an ok translation in its fossilized etymology, but not in its evolved modern connotation (expressed in such specimen phrases as, “That selfie was awesome”).  The real meaning of the term in passages like Psalm 47 is ‘terrible’ (ירא), signifying fear.

The Psalmists constantly praise God as ‘terrible’ (יהוה עליון נורא).

The paradox isn't just in those weird, Israelite-y Old Testament passages either. (Ok, so the New Testament is actually no less weird or Jewish, but I'm trying to work the "all things to all people" angle here.) John, witnessing the Lord on his throne writes, “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, ‘Fear not.’”(--That's white Evangelical approved, post-Alexander, straight up New Covenant stuff!)


The Bible Slaps Down our Expectations

Why is it that men who were giants in their affection for God did not, as our contemporary music wants them to, dance, shout, or sing “I’m H-A-P-P-Y” in God’s immediate presence? Did the author of Revelation believe the gospel? Then why was he terrified of Jesus? Why was his reaction before the enthroned Christ practically the opposite of what we would have told him it should have been? The secret to unraveling this curiosity, I believe, can be discovered by taking a field trip to a haunted house for the night.

How Ghost Stories Solve the Paradox

I'm not here to discuss a Biblical view of ghosts.  If you want that here's the best series you'll ever read on the subject by a Biblical languages expert. (Turns out it's more complicated than your Sunday school teacher made it seem.) I'm interested strictly in the feelings ghost stories give us as a thought experiment.

Imagine your spouse has died.  In keeping with the grand, odd thing that is the western mortuary tradition, everyone lowers (let's go with 'her') expensive lacquer casket into the ground and heads back to the church for potato salad. You find yourself returning home, and soon, in your bed, alone.  Waking at 2:00 AM, with the smoke of dreams hanging in your mind, you leave the room for a glass of water. 

Returning to your bedroom, slowly, you open the door. But there, in the black window you see a flicker of pale contrast. Your eyes adjusting now, it is a hanging form, with hair falling and white-washed eyes spying languidly through the glass at the bed she has joined you in for so many years.  Slowly, the misty specter pivots her wan face towards the doorway—towards you.

Now, it cannot be doubted that you loved your wife and still do, as when Odysseus tried pitifully to hug the phantasmal shade of his dead mother. But, despite whatever pleasant feelings of affection this event would spark in you, what you would most heavily feel in this moment is fear (and maybe a moistness in your knickers).  Fear, but of a very strange sort.

Imagine you had returned to the room and found a silverback gorilla on your bed waving a loaded automatic assault rifle in the air instead of the ghost. You would experience what we will call natural fear.  Natural fear is the most common sort of fear.  It is that familiar concatenation of feeling which has as its object physical harm—like hearing a snake’s rattle, the half-second before you realize you are having a car wreck, or turning on the television and seeing Donald Trump's face. 



C. S. Lewis, who I'm shamelessly plundering here, observed that if anything is certain, it is that the fear of the spirit was something distinct from natural fear. “For, no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost will [physically] do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost[!]”—a being from the non-human realm.[1]


What is Creeping-Flesh Fear?

Your “fear” of a ghost is not of the natural sort, but of the creeping-flesh sort. Eliphaz’s description in Job of this dreadful awe is quaintly familiar despite having journeyed to us across thousands of years from an alien culture in a desert tongue:
“In thoughts from the vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling . . . a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up (תסמר שערת בשרי).”
The truly curious thing is that these two distinct emotions of natural and creeping-flesh fear are not elaborations of the other in anyway.  That this is certain, your own experience will assure you.  Imagine you had stepped into your bedroom and found ten silverback gorillas dancing wildly with loaded assault rifles on your bed. (If you wish, multiply the terror even further by imagining they're all wearing Donald Trump masks.) Would your natural fear have gained or lost a single centimeter towards inspiring the goosebumps and awe-full dread of witnessing the ghost? Rudolf Otto, the creative German thinker and early explorer of religion  expressed it this way:

The distinction between such a ‘dread’ and natural fear is not simply one of degree and intensity.  The awe or ‘dread’ may indeed be so overwhelmingly great that it seems to penetrate to the very marrow, making the man’s hair bristle and his limbs quake.  But it may also steal upon him almost unobserved as the gentlest of agitations, a mere fleeting shadow passing across his mood. It has therefore nothing to do with intensity, and no natural fear passes over into it merely by being intensified.[2]

Though, both may occasionally be excited at the same time in your mind, the two principal objects which excite the two fears repel like oil and water.  The first has as its object physical danger, the second is produced only as a reaction to the perceived haunting of someone from a spiritual address.

I'm Actually Going Somewhere with this, really

No, I'm not saying that feeling a ghost is equivalent to feeling God. I'm saying feeling God stands in relation to feeling the ghost something like the feeling of a lake stands in relation to the duck's feeling its little drinking cup.

Encountering a mere ghost-spirit is terrifying simply because it is from the non-human realm, consider then that whatever religion is, it is agreed to involve the encountering of great spirits from that realm.

I’m implying that once you have grasped the ghost you are at the fringes of the temple veil whose dark passage leads into the uncanny emotion haunting and unifying all religions.  Its object is the Numinous, that lurking of divinity which invokes a trinity of terror, mystery and fascination.

Examples of the Paradox among the Gods of Ancient Religions

Anyone who is acquainted with the world’s religions will know that the awe inspired by the Numinous extends to those worshiped spirits. The “separateness” or “otherness” of these beings is retained in the iridescence of the original etymology of the Hebrew word we translate as holy, קדוש. They are that category of beings circumscribed by the ancient Hebrew word elohim.[3]

“Do not be afraid!” is often the obligatory introduction to an angel’s appearing before a mortal, and Lewis cites the feeling in its higher expression in Malory's tale of the holy grail--Galahad’s trembling when “[mortal] flesh began to behold the spiritual things”; we encounter it plainly in Virgil’s palace of Latinus, described as, “awful (horrendum) with woods and sanctity (religione) of elder days,” and a Geek fragment tells of the earth, sea, and mountains shaking beneath the “dread eye of their Master” [4].

The Asaro Mudmen dress as forest spirits and prowl their
boarders at night. By doing this, they convince their
neighboring enemies never to invade their land.
If one is interested in anthropological curiosities, it is the type of fear which the Asaro Mudmen of New Guinea have learned to channel against their enemies, and I am also reminded in Hindu literature of Arjuna standing before the terrible transfigured Krishna. We are told Arjuna begged him to return to his common form and “was overwhelmed with wonder, and every hair was raised on end.”


Musical Examples

I know of several examples of this feeling expressed in music. I’ve clipped two here into sound bites.  The first is from an album entitled Mystery of the Yeti.  The artists who created it were Hindu influenced mystics with strong penchants for hallucinogenic drugs.  As misguided as their approach was, we shouldn't be too proud to sympathize with what they were pursuing.

In the album, they tell of a legend that the Yeti is a numinous god accessible through trance then paint a divine encounter with the being through sound.  The second example is from the first track in Shai Linne’s album The Attributes of God.  After being read one of Moses’s encounters with God, one drifts to imagining the desert and a foreboding holy presence:


(If you know of other examples of the Numinous in music please share them in the comments.)

Conclusion

So, we have a distinct and unique category of feeling that corresponds with the supernatural.  This feeling is something different from natural fear and appears in most ancient religions and especially the Bible.  One might say that the world's religions are attempts to interface with this emotion in its higher form.

This is just where the fun begins.  In part 2 we'll see why the mere existence of this feeling is a powerful philosophical argument that the divine exists.  We will respond to the mainstream naturalistic explanation of religion and asks where the heck this emotion has gone within contemporary Evangelicalism(!).  If weather permits we may even share an angel story or two and saunter around in some Mayan temples.


[1] TheProblem of Pain: How Human Suffering Raises Almost Intolerable Intellectual Problems (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 17.
[2] The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 16
[3] Contrary to what is often said, the word elohim did not just refer to a god in Biblical literature.  There are five beings which are called Elohim in scripture: angels, demons, the disembodied human dead, the 70 sons of God and YHWH, the God of Israel.  Dr. Heiser has pointed out that what all these beings share in common is that they belong to the non-human realm.  An Elohim then is simply any being which has a spiritual address. http://www.thedivinecouncil.com/What%20is%20an%20Elohim.pdf
[4] Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 18-19.

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How Biblical Worship is like Hearing a Good Ghost Story - Part 2

August 22, 2015, 5:20 pm
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Part 1 here

Line drawings depicting various ancient Near Eastern divine beings.















A Strange Encounter

A woman approached him sheepishly after he delivered his talk in a church in Seattle. She asked if she could speak with him in private about something bizarre she had seen during the talk. Hesitantly, she reported that for half an hour she had clearly seen three angels surrounding him as he spoke--one to his left, one at his right and one of larger stature behind him.

J. P. Moreland, the professional philosopher who happened to be involved with my Biola program, reports this experience occurring to him in October of 2004.  He had flown in to speak for a weekend retreat at a noncharismatic traditional church:
"When she left, I asked four or five people, including the pastor, to tell me about the woman, and to a person they said she was probably the most spiritually mature woman in the congregation.  Still, I was skeptical of her claim, but I retained her testimony in my heart."[1]
Moreland returned the next few days back to his home in southern California and says he never mentioned this event to anyone. Fast-forward eleven months later in 2005. While praying on his bed one night over burdens in his life, Moreland asked God if He would send the three angels back, requesting that he might be shown them in order to be comforted.  It was the first time he had ever prayed such a thing.  He told no one about this prayer request, but within a few days he received the shock of his life:
"I received an e-mail (which I kept) from a philosophy graduate student named Mark who was taking a metaphysics class with me that semester.  Mark began saying that he had wanted to share something with me for a few days, but he wanted to process it with two or three other graduate students before he did. 
It turns out that a few days earlier during one of my lectures, he had seen three angels standing in the room (one on each side, a taller one behind me) for five to ten minutes before they disappeared!  I asked Mark to come to my office, and a few days later we talked further...[H]e began by saying that he would never want to say anything to me that he wasn't sure of, and he knew that the angels were next to me in the room and not in his head.  In fact, he gave me a sketch he had drawn from his angle of perception in the class, a sketch of me and the angels (which I kept)."[2]
When he was asked if Mark could have known about his previous angel encounter, Moreland responded that "there was no way this guy [Mark] could have known anything about that."[3]

Numinous Fear

If the spiritual visitors in this story managed to get any sort of emotional rise out of you, it was likely as sort of goosebumps awe. In part 1, we saw that human beings possess a strange, dreadful awe of the Numinous.

For example, If you saw a ghost, you would feel fear and dread.  Like C. S. Lewis observed, that fear would not be grounded in natural, physical danger, since no one is primarily scared of what a ghost is going to do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost!  We also saw that this creeping flesh or Numinous fear feeling can be found in heightened expression in all religions since religion involves the worship of great spirits.

Why the Mere Existence of Numinous Fear is an Argument For the Supernatural

C. S. Lewis, himself a huge fan of Rudolf Otto, explained why this emotion is so special:
This Numinous [fear] is [not] already contained in the idea of the dangerous…[and no] perception of danger or any dislike of the wounds and death which it may entail could give the slightest conception of ghostly dread or numinous awe to an intelligence which did not already understand them.  When man passes from physical fear to dread and awe, he makes a sheer jump, and apprehends something which could never be given, as danger is, by the physical facts and logical deductions from them.[4]
Because the feeling of creeping-flesh fear does not arise from an aversion to physical danger, it’s inexplicable within a purely mechanistic scheme how man should have ever come to possess it—that is, how we should have ever come to be capable of a fear, the object of which, cannot be an elaboration of physical reality or physical preservation.

Most materialistic accounts of numinous dread thoughtlessly attempt to smuggle awe into the idea of physical danger; they presuppose what they are claiming to explain.  Scientist presuppose that fear of gods, angels and the dead is grounded in physical preservation, but if you consult your experience you know that physical attention to your body would not be your primary concern if you had encountered such a being. In that way, it is in a totally other dimension from an encounter with a lion, your boss or a rise in prices.

Unless we are to conclude Numinous dread is a freak emotional capacity in man which has managed to develop despite having no correspondence with the facts of reality, it seems inescapable that the religious mind of man has veins drawing life from something lurking beyond the natural, and it is the very fact that you are even capable of this emotion which whispers of at least one thing engraved in us which metaphysical materialism never can satisfy by definition.

I'm taking a lighthearted jab here at philosophers like Alain de Botton.  It seems their attempts to create a "religious atheism," as clever as they may be, will always fail to satisfy at least one universal and powerful dimension of human expression.

The "Man-Creates-God-in-his-Image" Objection:

If what I have observed so far lands in the ballpark of truth then we can infer from it that there is a very common belief held about the nature and origin of religion which seems false.  Xenophanes is famous for his saying that if oxen could paint, they would depict their gods as oxen.  

Response:

Surely, it is true that man is often compelled to depict his gods with human characteristics simply because human beings are the highest expression of personality that we may look to as a reference in nature. But, in the sense that the statement implies humans created the gods, and later God, merely from a desire to project what was familiar to us, Xenophanes’s claim seems false. The gods do not emerge from the familiar but the Strange.

Probably the majority of gods in history are described, as intentionally uncanny (strange or mysterious in an unsettling way) to express this. I named examples in the last post, but it is worth considering more. In Hinduism this uncanniness is conveyed through the multiplying of heads, arms, strange colors, fascinating eyes, tongues and grafted animal parts.  Again, look at Arjuna’s encounter with the transfigured Krishna. The flavor may remind you of John's vision of Jesus in Revelation 1:14-17:

"Your great form of many mouths and eyes, oh great-armed one, of many arms, thighs and feet, of many bellies, terrible with many tusks—seeing it the worlds are shaken, and I too…seeing you my inner self is shaken, and I find no steadiness or peace…Oh Visnu,...of awful form, homage to you.” (source)

Some early explorers mistook the Meso-American gods as Indian in origin. They abound in ghastly skeletal chthonic deities, fantastically spliced animals with shadowy human visages.  The fascinating gaze of the serpent enchants heavily here and it is curiously difficult to find a culture in the world where serpents are not referenced in expressing the uncanny. 
Israelite seraph seals:  Benjamin Sommer points
out that number 273, shown with two serpents
 flanking the symbol for God, states it belonged to
Ashna in King Ahaz's court.  "It is inconceivable
that Isaiah and Ashna did not know each other."

In Egyptian religion our torch light flickers again on fantastic animal-headed deities cloaked in esoteric hieroglyphs; in Israelite religion we see the snake-bodied Seraphim and the four-headed Cherubim.  The Biblical authors usually appeal to anthropomorphic theophanies when describing visions of their God, but we are assured no man may behold His true glory and live.

Credit: מוזיאון ישראל ירושלים these 9,000 year old masks discovered in
Israel are the oldest in the world.  It is speculated they represent
spirits of the dead.
In the Ancient Near East we encounter the fish-man Dagan, the world's oldest masks--ten eerie faces exhumed from the Judean desert, the winged bull-men of Babylon and multiform deities star-sprayed in eyes.


I have read within Lafcadio Hearn’s accounts of old Japan that the Far East is no exception, but excels in pervasiveness of strangeness with its ancient gods, goblins and ghosts.

Though many citations in Greek literature would support a numinous experience, if the Greek, Norse or Roman gods were, for the most part, merely familiar projections of man, then they seem exceptions in the history of religions; but even this seems unlikely.  Otto argued that whenever the Greek gods became all too human in their familiarity belief in them waned, creating a vacuum quickly filled by the exotic deities of the East and Egypt in which Numinous strangeness was more palpable.[5]

Perhaps the domestication of the Greek pantheon was not the height of religious achievement it is classically interpreted to be, but the very indication of Greece’s waning religious vitality.

Conclusion: The Numinous and us

It appears to me this Numinous dread I have been describing is hidden from (or by) American Evangelicalism.  Gene Veith at Pathos agrees, and I strongly suspect this is obvious to others.  We have comparably little art or music, worship or interpretation which expresses it. I can even remember one of my first theology professors marking down one of my papers once for stating that the fear of God is something one ought to continue feeling post-justification.

Do you think, like the Greek pantheon, our angels are too Victorian, our demons too vestigial, our seraphim and the seventy בני האלהים (i.e. sons of God) too obscured from their Israelite origins? Do you suppose we demythologized our God too much when we were domesticating Him?
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[1] This story is recounted by Moreland in his co-authored book In Search of a Confident Faith: Overcoming Barriers to Trusting in God (USA: InterVarsity, 2008), 155-6.
[2] Ibid., 156.
[3] Taken from this interview with Moreland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nguSz-ByEZI
[4] Lewis, The Problem of Pain: How Human Suffering Raises Almost Intolerable Intellectual Problems (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 20.
[5] Quoted by Todd A. Gooch, The Numinous and Modernity: An Interpretation of Rudolf Otto’s Philosophy of Religion (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 116.
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