Religion

Hand-me-down Gospels

By Charles E. Hill

Once there were many Gospels. Then there were just four. Who was it that first suggested Christians should have the four accounts of the life of Jesus attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and only these four, in their Bibles? Scholars often bestow the honor (if it may be called such) on Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons in Gaul, who wrote in the 180s CE. There is certainly no mistaking Irenaeus’ stance on the subject. He claimed that just these four Gospels had been delivered to the church and he rejected all others, naming two of the imposters ­– the Gospel of Judas and ‘the so-called Gospel of Truth’ – by name. But in his selectivity, say many scholars today, Irenaeus was far ahead of his time. Irenaeus’ idea of a limitation on the number of Gospels did not really catch on in the church until much later, and ultimate agreement on the four would be stalled until the fourth century, when it could be backed by governmental force. This has become a familiar account of the rise of the Christian Gospels. But is it true?

A Missionary Imposition (or a rambling sermon on miss/mess/mass and their kin)

By Anatoly Liberman
Probably everybody knows that Christmas, despite one s at the end, is a compound made up of Christ and mass. But few, unless they are word or church historians, have followed the intricate development of the word mass. In the 16^th century, Martin Luther and the theologian Claudius de Sainctes derived mass from Hebrew missah “oblation; sacrifice”; this derivation still has supporters. Their opponents pointed out that such New Testament words as were coined in Hebrew (for instance, messiah and amen) came to Europe from Greek, but the Greek authors of the Christian epoch did not use missah. Closer to our time, opinions were divided over the original meaning of mass: did it designate “service” or (since mass mainly occurred in situations connected with the Eucharist) “feast”? Here mess “dish of food” gave trouble to etymologists. Is it a doublet of mass? And where does mass “a body of matter” (as in massive) come in?

The Greatest Monument of English Prose

By Gordon Campbell
Of the current Oxford World’s Classics, the best Christmas gift this year would be The Bible: Authorized King James Version, which has been skillfully edited with an elegant introduction and really helpful notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett.

The Noun Game – A Simple Grammar Lesson Leads to a Clash of Civilizations

By Dennis Baron

Everybody knows that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. It’s one of those undeniable facts of daily life, a fact we seldom question until we meet up with a case that doesn’t quite fit the way we’re used to viewing things.

That’s exactly what happened to a student in Ohio when his English teacher decided to play the noun game. To the teacher, the noun game seemed a fun way to take the drudgery out of grammar. To the student it forced a metaphysical crisis. To me it shows what happens when cultures clash and children get lost in the tyranny of school. That’s a lot to get from a grammar game.

Religion – Episode 7 – The Oxford Comment

In this two-part series, Michelle and Lauren explore some of the most hot-button issues in religion this past year.

The Cave of Mattathias

In a village near the city of Riminov there was a Hasid whose custom it was to bring newly made oil to Reb Menachem Mendel of Riminov, and the rabbi would light the first candle of Hanukah in his presence. One year the winter was hard, the land covered with snow, and everyone was locked in his home. But when the eve of Hanukah arrived, the Hasid was still planning to deliver the oil. His family pleaded with him not to go, but he was determined, and in the end he set out across the deep snow. That morning he entered the forest that separated his village from Riminov, and the moment he did, it began to snow. The snow fell so fast that it covered every landmark, and when at last it stopped, the Hasid found that he was lost. The whole world was covered with snow.

All hail goddess English?

By Dennis Baron
Global English may be about to go celestial. A political activist in India wants the country’s poorest caste to improve its status by worshipping the English language, and to start off he’s building a temple to Goddess English in the obscure village of Bankagaon, near Lakhimpur Khiri in Uttar Pradesh.

English started on the long path to deification back in the colonial age, and in many former British colonies English has become both an indispensable tool for survival in the modern world and a bitter reminder of the Raj. In 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay recommended to fellow members of the India Council that the British create a system of English-language schools in the colony to train an elite class of civil servants, “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,” who would help the British rule the subcontinent.

After Yemen, what now for al-Qaeda?

2010 Place of the Year

By Alia Brahimi
“The air freight bomb plot should be understood as part of al-Qaeda’s pervasive weakness rather than its strength. The intended targets, either a synagogue in Chicago and/or a UPS plane which would explode over a western city, were chosen as part of the attempt to re-focus al-Qaeda’s violence back towards western targets and pull the jihad away from the brink.”

The Synoptic Problem

By Jen Vafidis, Editorial Assistant
For a week, a Florida pastor’s threat to burn copies of the Koran to mark the most recent anniversary of September 11 had an almost disastrous momentum. Before he eventually acquiesced, Pastor Terry Jones provoked a hot-blooded global response. Protests in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia, not to mention an insinuating statement from Hezbollah, gave off the persistent impression of danger. One of the pastor’s many vocal critics was President Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria, a country plagued with violent in-fighting between Christians and Muslims. In a Facebook post the President condemned Jones’ plans and implored him to be “mindful of the Golden Rule taught by Jesus Christ: Do unto others as you would want others to do unto you.”

Tariq Ramadan & Christopher Hitchens: Is Islam a Religion of Peace?

With the Obama administration in its nascent years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict proving as intractable as ever, relations with Iran reaching a boiling point and the political landscape changing rapidly both in the United States and the Middle East, wrestling with the issue of Islam is more crucial than ever and will be a defining feature of the 21st century. In this video clip, famous atheist and prolific author Christopher Hitchens and the accomplished and controversial scholar Tariq Ramadan debate one of the most pertinent questions of our modern age.

Who is YOUR god? Take the test and find out!

According to surveys, 95% of Americans believe in God. Although it can sometimes feel that the greatest rifts are between believers and non-believers, disputes are more often caused between groups of believers who simply don’t agree about what God is like. In America’s Four Gods: What We Say About God – and What That Says About Us, Paul Froese and Christopher Bader use original survey data, in-depth interviews, and “The God Test” to reveal the four types of god most American’s believe in. Indeed, this is the most comprehensive and illuminating survey of Americans’ religious beliefs ever conducted.

Science, religion, and magic

By Alec Ryrie
My book started out as a bit of fun, trying to tell a rollicking good story. I did that, I hope, but I also ended up somewhere more controversial than I expected: caught in the ongoing crossfire between science and religion. What I realised is that you can’t make sense of their relationship without inviting a third ugly sister to the party: magic.

What is the point of agnosticism?

By Robin Le Poidevin
Do we really need agnosticism nowadays? The inventor of the name ‘agnosticism’, the Victorian evolutionist Thomas Henry Huxley, certainly found it useful to have a word describing his lack of certainty when he was surrounded by those who seemed to have no such doubt. But then he lived in a period of transition.

Beck Plays Prophet – Politics Pervade

By Andrew R. Murphy
There are any number of ways to interpret the [recent] events on the National Mall: the dueling rallies, the competition over the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “dream,” the intertwining of piety, politics, and patriotism. Many of these have already been blogged and commented on ad infinitum. And so first, to the obvious

Celebrating the King James Bible

By Gordon Campbell
Why all the fuss about an old translation of an ancient book? There are two reasons: first, it is the founding text of the British Empire (including breakaway colonies such as the United States), and was carried to every corner of the English-speaking world by migrants and missionaries; second, it matters now, both as a religious text and as the finest embodiment of English prose. Its history in the intervening centuries has been complex. The text has evolved…

Death to Humans! (The Apocalypse Remix)

By Robert M. Geraci
Scientific American recently rocked the Internet with its editors’ piece “Death to Humans! Visions of the Apocalypse in Movies and Literature” but, in doing so, have missed half of the fun. In an article where the sublime (The Matrix) meets the atrocious (The Postman), the chief problem that SciAm’s editors suffer is that, to be honest, they do not know what an apocalypse is.