Creation

Writing is glorifying the One who created the heavens and the earth - all things visible and invisible. The + signs in the diagram are for the invisible and the visible from black holes to suns to dark matter, from process to end product, the ending we are known as but which we ourselves long to know. See my diagram here.

So Genesis is not a psalm - but I have put it with the psalms. I am looking at this diagram spread out on an 11x17 piece of paper (I hate wasting paper so I am looking at an earlier version).

It is in 8 double columns - these are the obvious divisions of the text. The first five columns end with the familiar refrain - and there was evening and morning, ...

Column 6 is split into two since day 6 is so long being so full of words. Column 8 is the seventh day at the beginning of chapter 2. Notice how verse 4 - these are the accounts of the heavens and the earth when they were created - completes the circle from the first verse.

I have coloured each action of God with a roughly square box - green for create, deep red for speaking, bright yellow for seeing, deep blue for distinguishing, burnished gold for calling, maroon for making, sky blue for putting, fine gold for blessing, red for rest.

In this introductory - you know, if you never got farther than the introduction, you would have much of the whole! In this introductory section to the Hebrew Bible, God introduces himself by his works - they are better than newspaper headlines or a Herodian hotel.

You can learn some Hebrew from this diagram - but let it be for fun - and remember, I might be misleading you.

What does God do? He creates (בָּרָא bara') the heavens and the earth - and more, specifically (follow the blue connector to the green squares) , he created (וַיִּבְרָא vayivra) the great sea monsters - whoever wrote this work knew that whales were important. Create - make - is there a difference? Maybe the created are meant to respond. Ultimately and somewhat centrally in the text - he creates - three times it says that - the human.

Notice how the earth brings forth herbage and stuff and animals and creepy-crawlies and stuff. This is evolution, by the way - but I don't really want to go to that conversation. Some things are a real waste of time and energy. Get over it. How many days did it take? One (in the day that God created.) So if you have trouble with 3 in 1 - do the created order 7 in 1. And then rejoice that 'we count 300, but there is but one and that one ever' (borrowed from George Herbert, Easter).

I have been trying to see the structure of this text more clearly - I am not sure I have yet. The 7 are somewhat obvious. The 10 words - and God said - are also potentially a set of discriminatory markers. And so are the 6+ ki-tov - and it was good. And so are the refrains - and it was so וַיְהִי-כֵן vayehi-ken. Are these like level 1 2 and 3 headings or footings - to invite us into the structure?

It has always struck me that light was first - and it has a whole day. Light is so fundamental, the foundation of information. All that we do is dependent on it. Photons - massless, limiting our knowledge by their finite speed, forming time, yet for eons thought if thought at all to be of infinite speed (Aquinas - book 51 I think - not that I have had time to read Aquinas).

Day 2 - the surface. I deliberately chose a child's word - as if seeing the creation from the earth. The surface - which God made, see also: the two great lights, the beast of the earth after its kind, and the human (though also spoken of as created) - and both these latter are living beings - nephesh נֶפֶשׁ xayah חַיָּה. That's for those who have trouble with the soul of the beast. (Like I have trouble lining up letters to go left and right).

The surface plays a role in days 2, 4, and 5. Day 3 is given to the herbage - and it makes its place again in day 6 as food. There are other patterns, shades of meaning in light and darkness, day and night, morning and evening. The 'goods' (I thought of using goods instead of the rather flat 'work' in chapter 2) - the goods of day 3 - herbage, day 5 - fish, and day 6 - beasts and creepy-crawlies, are repeated in the exhortation to rule that is given to the human - and repeated again in the instruction concerning food. (Busy day).

There is much to say - but enough for now. I do not write commentary - too much like work. I only play.

The seven days

I am working on an image of Genesis 1 - away this weekend so can't read the million posts - but tell me what you think. [Update - a few days later - it is finished.]

The Word of God

My Lord has opened the Book at The Central Message.
- Hey - wait a minute, don't let the pages flap in the breeze.
- O - I see. It is coming back one page to the key question.

Is the Qur'an also the word of God for Christians?

This question occurs in Hans Küng's book Islam, Past, Present, and Future at the end of section B. subsection I.

Some weeks ago, Chris Brady posted a question on the What is central to Christianity. He "intentionally allowed only one answer per vote." I complained that my answer, the person of Jesus, the Bridegroom, was not in the list.

Now what would you prefer: the word of God as book or the word of God as flesh? To me that question arises as a very short precis of the distinction Küng makes in his book (pp 57, 59):

The specific characteristic of Judaism is Israel as God's people and land. The specific characteristic of Christianity is God's Messiah and Son. ... The specific character [of Islam] is that the Qur'an is God's word and book.

I am struck by this thesis because the first encounter I had with Christianity was with those who proclaimed the Bible as book as the Word of God. Eventually, I have concluded that these phrases indicate in Christians more of fear than love. In reading Küng, I can see - as with the recitation of Beowulf that Iyov pointed us to - that the recitation of the Qur'an could indeed be very moving - even if one did not understand a word of it.

I have spent some time in Turkey, so I know the call to prayer of the early morning. Recitation goes beyond the written word for it is embodied.

- what is it that constitutes worship?
- it is not merely a question of understanding a definition of terms.

(That reminds me of the recent Jerusalem-Athens question that April DeConick invited answers to.)

In this first major section, Küng outlines how this living, holy book in Arabic functions for a Muslim:

- as book. (al-kitab) Every believer knows where he is. ... One can unequivocally hold on to what God wills. So nothing can be changed here...
- as one book. ... not a collection ... like the Hebrew Bible... not four different Gospels ... contradict one another in many details ... a single book, handed down by one and the same prophet within 22 years...
- an Arabic book. ... the oldest Arabic prose work ... normative in syntax and morphology
- a living book. ... to be read aloud in public time, qur'an comes from the word qara'a, 'read aloud, recite'. ..
- a holy book. ...The Muslim house of God has no pictures - the calligraphy of the Qur'an is enough. ... in Christian terms, the Qur'an is for Muslims word and sacrament in one... directly the word of God.

Quoting Toufic Fahd (p62) ...

It seems to be the last witness to an old Semitic tradition in which the world of images is combined with reality, where the word evokes the magic of the expression and where the physical is transformed by the metaphysical; a discursive thought which is expanded in statements set side by side, often without grammatical supports, without reference to causality, finality, consistency; ideas which repeat themselves, become entangled, permeate one another in a word-whole of the same textual connection; a harmony of monotonous wealth of sound, wearisome in the long run but often beguiling, soothing, forming itself on the rhythm of breathing and effect of emptiness and abstraction: that is how the Qu'ran appears to the reader who is initiated into the subtleties of the Arabic language and sensitive to the poetic rhythm which the Semitic soul bears through all the incarnations of cultures that it has known now for more than five thousand years.

I first read this as praise - but I see on typing it that it is a kind of back-handed praise. This is only the first section after Küng's historical introduction.

SLM

The same day I received my polyglot Psalms - English, NETS, Hebrew, and LXX, I also received Hans Küng's latest book on Islam. I will have to blog on this eventually. But first I guess I had better read it. I have really read his other two massive books on Judaism and Christianity. I have never regretted any HK book that I have bought. But still, he did not teach me what I have learned - nor did the HJ folks, nor even the Bible by itself. What I have learned in all its grand ambivalence, I have learned by death and resurrection from the interaction of the Infinite with my own wayward heart.

Religion won't generally cut it. Nor will those who profess certainty in their social or theological systems. Nor will those who subscribe to a school or creed that sits flat on a table somewhere.

Today I have added to my blogs one on religion and the public sphere and one on Islam.

Michael Pahl of the stuff of earth has written a story that could have been by Secundus and Prima in their first volume. I like the recognition of the potential for collaboration in the Pauline circle. Imagine and tell the story - that is where truth resides. It does not reside in creed or propositional theology, especially negative propositional anthropology disguised as religious 'truth'.

You would think that people who profess and teach 'Christianity' would actually know something about death and resurrection. So that those who are baptized whether as infants in the faith of the congregation or as adults would actually know that they are baptized into the death of Jesus Christ. I suppose if they only study, they can be forgiven their ignorance.

Story Status

Beloved, I have organized the tables with all the words I am writing so you can find your way around the scriptorium without too much direction from me.

Section	Title	Mark	Luke	Matthew	John	Story	Table
I	PRAEFATIO						1
1	Prologus	1.1	1.1	1.1	1.1	>>	1
	Excursus - Gospel					>>
	Excursus - Jerusalem					>>
6	Genealogia Jesu		3.23	1.2		>>	1

We had placed a bookmark here, for we were not able to return at first. All this happened a long time ago. First we had to pursue the order that Uncle Mark himself chose. And he omitted the Exordium entirely. But time passed. A year later, we returned to look at the texts from another point of view. A year later. For a whole year, these parts of books occupied a dozen tables in the scriptorium. Continual dusting and care, but no progress in this beginning section.

I learned much in that year. It is a dangerous thing to learn from these books. God has much to teach - not all without pain.

It is not that the introduction was of no interest. It shows the depth of tradition in the faith - and as I think on my own growth, it shows suffering, reproach, slavery, the exploitation of one by another, reaching back to Isaiah and Samuel. It contains great psalms that speak of deliverance and that will be sung for ever. It establishes a history linking the Messiah to the Exodus from Egypt. But all these things were out of scope for John Mark in his desire to move immediately into the ministry of Jesus. And all these were not needed for John who writes of the new creation in a strophic imitation of the first six days and a new understanding of the seventh.

But now we have read the Exordium, which we divided into 11 sections on the first table (though I have omitted one which I will return to later). One section, the genealogy, is repeated from the Prefatio. The other 10 present the announcements, the birth and the early years of Jesus.

Section	Title	Mark	Luke	Matthew	John	Story	Table
II	EXORDIUM						1
2	Annuntiatio nativitatis Ioannis		1.5			>>	1
3	Annuntiatio nativitatis Christi		1.26			>>	1
4	Visitatio Mariae		1.39			>>	1
5	Nativitas Ioannis		1.57			>>	1
	Proleptic - Glory					>>
7	Christi nativitas		2.1	1.18		>>	1
8	Natus Adoratur		2.8	2.1		>>	1
9	Circumcisio et praesentatio		2.21			>>	1
	Excursus - A Rite					>>
10	Fuga in Aegyptium et reditus			2.13		>>	1
11	Puer Jesus in Nazareth		2.39	2.22		--	1
12	Puer Jesus in Templo		2.41			>>	1

Section	Title	Mark	Luke	Matthew	John	Story	Table
III	PRAEPARATIO					>>	1
13	Ioannes Baptista praecursor Domini (Autumn 27)	1.2	3.1	3.1	1.19	>>	1
14	Ioannes paenitentiam praedicat		3.7	3.7		>>	1
15	Ioannes interrogantibus respondet		3.10			>>	1
16	Ioannes Christum evangelizat	1.7	3.15	3.11	1.24	>>	1
18	Baptismus Jesu (March 28)	1.9	3.21	3.13	1.29	>>	1
20	Proleptic - Tentatio	1.12	4.1	4.1		>>	1

Section	Title	Mark	Luke	Matthew	John	Story	Table
IV	INITIUM MINISTERII PUBLICI					>>	1
21	Primi discipuli				1.35	>>	1

So we begin the fourth of 18 sections. Here are counts of the number of cuttings we made for each of our authors.

Section	Title	Mark	Luke	Matthew	John
I	PRAEFATIO	1	1	1	1
II	EXORDIUM		9	5
III	PRAEPARATIO	4	8	5	3
IV	INITIUM MINISTERII PUBLICI				9

You can see that Mark and John both omit the Exordium as I noted earlier. Also that John has mostly unique material even though I have placed some of his sections in parallel with the others. Matthew and Luke both have their own special material sometimes in long sections. These may be unique to them or show influence the one on the other or the two on Mark. So Luke has 64 sections in a row that are his. You can see them on tables 7 and 8. Some few of these are unique to Luke, but many have parallels with Matthew and some with Mark. Luke has also the Sermo Domini (table 4) similar to Matthew's Sermo in Monte (table 3), but Matthew's is much longer. All four share the passion, the crucifixion, and the resurrection (tables 10, 11, 12).

V	MINISTERIUM IN GALILAEA	17	17	4	3
VI	SERMO IN MONTE			27
VII	SERMO DOMINI		7
VIII	MINISTERIUM IN GALILAEA	29	18	57	5
IX	PASSIO IMMINET	10	8	15	2
X	ITER IN JERUSALEM		64
XI	INFESTO SCENOPEGIAE JERUSALEM				13
XII	MINISTERIUM IN IUDAEA	8	7	9	7
XIII	ULTIMUM MINISTERIUM IN JERUSALEM	14	11	14	1
XIV	SERMO ESCHATALOGICUS	8	7	7
XV	CONCLUSIO TEMPORIS ANTE PASSIONEM NARRATI		1	5	3
XVI	PASSIO	23	24	25	31
XVII	RESURRECTIO	3	3	3	4
XVIII	EPILOGUS	2	1	1	2
	Totals	118	186	178	86

There are too many in my totals, but remember that the sections are counted twice when they are shared. I have worked out more counts also - for Matthew, Luke and John together share only one section! (Do you know which one?) Matthew, Mark, and Luke in contrast, share 36 of my cuttings. But perhaps I will share more of these at a later time in the story.

Author's Note (2005)

It's fun to browse around in your old notes sometimes. Here is what I found. My "author's note" from the last completed draft of my 49 part mythical musings on first century characters.

Beloved, we have reached the end of our chronicle. When I began to write, not in the fourteenth year of Trajan (111 CE), but in 1994, I thought it might be instructive to flesh out the lives of some minor characters of the first century. Perhaps we know only a name, a city and an action. For example, Phoebe of Cenchrae carried Paul’s letter from Corinth to Rome. How did she come to have such a responsibility? Someone called Rufus has a connection to Rome and to Paul. Is this the son of Simon mentioned by Mark? In the letter to Rome, we meet Tertius, Paul’s amanuensis, and Gaius, Paul’s patron. How did Tertius get his prosaic name? How did the patron Gaius relate to Paul, who was careful to avoid patronage? Is this the Gaius whom Paul baptised? Is it the same Gaius addressed in John’s third letter?

In the course of re-imaging the lives of what E. M. Forester called flat characters, I also imagined some lives in Galilee, Ayala (hart), Mayim (water) and Tsame (longing). David and Claudius remind us of the cure of the centurion’s boy. Samuel is a tender counterfoil to the perceived intensity of a young Saul.

It was a long time before I allowed a major character like John the Evangelist, John the Theologian of Patmos, John called Mark, Saul called Paul, John the Baptist, or Jesus into the book. I thought explicitly of seeing first with peripheral vision. And what could I do with James and Jude, the brothers of Jesus? Were they associated with Qumran? And does Mark who uniquely records the love in the story of the rich young man use this touch as an author’s signature? Is he also the young man in the garden who ran away naked?

Most scholars accept that Paul wrote the bulk of his letters during the time of the emperors Claudius and Nero. Some scholars accept Ephesians and Colossians as from his hand. Most ascribe Hebrews and the Pastorals to later authors. I have allocated these letters to various authors as it suited my agenda. Luther was the first to suggest Prisca for Hebrews. The family conventions in Ephesians and Colossians suggested to me a Greek author familiar with Aristotle, so I chose Phoebe. I left the Pastorals as personal letters from Paul to give him a beloved son named Timothy as Gaius had in Titus Vetti, also called Timothy.

With respect to the gospels, the story suggests neither the two-source theory nor the priority of Mark. Following the work of Alan Millard (Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus), I have assumed that adequate technology was available for a written record earlier than many scholars infer. With respect to the issues related to the calendar, I have taken my dating of the years 28-30 from Robinson’s The Priority of John.

I am convinced that the writers and collectors of the canonical texts wished to communicate to each other and to us something of profound importance and joy for them and for us. So my desire was to find the metaphors they used and point them to the obvious focus – the death of Jesus and their experience of the Spirit of God both before and in the aftermath.

I would not have imagined what I have learned from their words as pointers to things worthy of good report. It has also become clearer and clearer to me that the experience of God’s love as documented in the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings is identical to what the Gentiles discovered from the mission of Paul and the fourfold Gospel. We do not know what each of us finds in this mystery. Poetry, music, art and story have a better chance than definition or policy of pointing us to our necessary engagement.

For the full story - long, sometimes tortuous and in need of an editor see here. Then click on the synopsis where you will find each of the seven parts with their seven sections outlined. Read in any order desired. Of course it is a concentric structure.

First Disciples

Depending on your blogging software, I suppose, a draft will be published as of the day you started it, or as of the day you published it. I started the latest segment of my ongoing story - which will take me 35 years to complete at this rate, 20 days ago. So it is out of sequential order on this blog - maybe I should write offline. Anyway - if interested, you will find it here.

Writing like this in a blog has its disadvantages - mostly incoherence. But writing like this has its advantages - mostly a challenge to coinherence - that coinage is from Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove.