US Protestantism vs St Paul as a hotbed of anti-government rebelliousness

I find it "interesting" to see the number of Protestant churches, largely non-denominational, independent churches in a generally Baptist, or more broadly, Anabaptist conservative evangelical background, rebelling against the government on coronavirus issues.

I'm not talking about general minimalizing of the severity of the virus or anything like that.

Rather, I'm talking about the ministers of such churches continuing to hold services, and in many cases, without multiple smaller-size services, in direct defiance of government proclamations.

It's halfway tempting to compare them to Paul's man of lawlessness in 2 Thessalonians:

2 Thessalonians 2:3-10 New International Version (NIV) 

3 Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness[a] is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. 4 He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.
5 Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things? 6 And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. 7 For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. 8 And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming. 9 The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, 10 and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.

Actually, "Paul" should probably be in scare quotes; the majority of modern scholarship considers this pseudepigraphal, albeit with lack of consensus on when it actually was written.

Note that I said "halfway" tempting. I don't think this idea is all wet.

Certainly, the actual Paul, in one of his legitimate letters, would be highly concerned.

I am thinking of his famous "submit to the governing authorities in Romans 13.

13 Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. 2 Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. 3 For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. 4 For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. 5 Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience. 

6 This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. 7 Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor. 

That nails it.

That said, that passage has been ignored by U.S. Protestants since 1775 or before.

Ordainted Presbyterian minister John Witherspoon was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Boston's Old North Church, driven by hotheads such as Sam Adams, was a ground zero of rebelliousness.

And, Romans 13 is crystal clear. No exceptions.

Paul's thought, as well as framework, are derived from the Stoic diatribe. Epictetus, for example, would have no problem agreeing with this.

Let's not forget the background of much American Protestantism.

Congregationalists were Puritans and Separatists who had rebelled against the Church of England and the ruling monarch, to lesser or greater degrees, respectively. Baptists, starting with the likes of Roger Williams, then rebelled against those Puritans and Separatists. Presbyterians had rebelled against their Stuart monarchs in Scotland when, like Mary, they remained Catholic, or when, like the Stuarts from James VI on, when he became James I in London as well, tilted Church of England and pushed for a similar Church of Scotland.

On the flip side, Methodists and Lutherans have generally accepted state authority more readily.

Catholics and Orthodox very much so, as shown by their pronouncements.

Of course, the latter four are all more hierarchical.

But Romans 13 is still clear. Period.

And, if there are ministers the likes of Jim Bakker peddling magic cures?

2 Thessalonians 2:9 I think has that covered.

RIP Penderecki

Dammit, Krzysztof Penderecki is dead. Here's the basic story; not using NYT's because of subscription stuff, etc.

The Guardian has a good in-depth analysis of his music in general, and specifically, on both sides of his "great divide." (See below.)

What else to play but the Polish Requiem to start? Yes, that's because I came to Penderecki many years ago straight through classical music and not through music scores. I've long been a "collector" of requiems, and his caught my ear.



I'm not a big movies buff. I've never seen "The Shining." That said, per this obit, he complained that Stanley Kubrick committed "harakiri" on his music. His music was also used in "The Exorcist."

And, David Lynch used an unedited extended section of "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" in "Twin Peaks: The Return."



He was definitely an avant-garde composer of sorts. At the same time, he irritated many fans when he moved from atonal compositions, as heard in many earlier works like Threnody, to a more tonal style, like in the Requiem and later symphonies.

Personally, I like music from various places and points in his career on both sides of the divide.

A great later, tonal piece? His Cello Concerto No. 2.



It has a fair degree of the darkness often associated with Penderecki, but it's a more tonal work.

Certainly more tonal than Cello Concerto No. 1.



Read some of the comments!

Finally, his first large-scale work, showing his creativity from the start, including its use of the B-A-C-H musical theme, is his St. Luke's Passion.



This was the first work of his I heard after the Polish Requiem.

Per the Guardian piece linked above, he had both good and not-so-good music on both sides of the atonality/tonality divide. I've not really listened to any of his 21st-century stuff, but I don't think I've missed a lot, per the piece.

Very insightful at times, but I might rank him just a skoosh below Lutoslawski among the modern Polish composers. Although I'm not sure about that. And, like with many composers, their best — or a challenge to find their best — often results in a look at chamber music, in my opinion.

Overall, of classical musicians within the last 75 years (cuts out Rachmaninoff and puts Bartok and Schoenberg, dying in 1945, just in), I'd probably rank him about No. 6-7 on my list, based on mix of personal preference and my attemptedly unbiased assessment of musical skill as composter.

Stravinsky and Shostakovich are 1 and 2.

With Rachmaninoff cut out (he's more modernistic in some ways than some lay snobs think, and many experts appreciate him more now than at his death), I would place Hindemith third. If Bartok is in, he's No. 4, possibly. He's definitely in the top 10.)

Schoenberg would be in my top 10 as a "gotta be there" on musical skills. Not a favorite of mine. He was great for opening the doors of serialism. Second-gen serialists, both Berg and Webern as his second Vienna school disciples, and even more, composers with no direct lineage to him, took serialism into tempos and more, with new creativity and new flexibility.

Ernst Krenek, speaking of those, might come after Hindemith and Bartok, or maybe just a big further back. Elliott Carter would be in this vicinity. Penderecki is in the same neighborhood. Alf Schnittke might be half a step ahead. Karol Szymanowski is in this same neighborhood. Ligeti is a half-step, or more, further back.

Richard Strauss lived long enough to be considered, but I've never been a great fan of his, and much of his later work seemed like scholocky padded farces. Sibelius wasn't quite so bad, perhaps, but he's pretty much the same overall.

Ralph Vaughn Williams? Blech.

Max Regar? Too bad he didn't live longer.

Within post WWI, and post WWII, music, I prefer music that has at least some elements of atonality, and that may have some elements of serialism in its broad sense, but that is not wedded to 12-tone-row ideas.

My entire Penderecki collection on YouTube is here.

Stereotypes: Christianity is "orthodoxy" vs Judaism is "orthopraxis"

Two weeks ago, I blogged about my personal academic connection to the forged Dead Sea Scrolls.

Baruch Spinoza: Jew or not a Jew?

The next day, I got to thinking about the claim that Christianity, out of all the world's religions, focuses on "orthodoxy," or right belief of doctrines and dogmas, vs. other religions that focus on "orthopraxis," or right actions. Supposedly, this is in part because Protestant Christanity especially rejects "works righteousness."

But, is this really true?

The real Dead Sea Scrolls, especially the 30 percent or so that are Qumran community documents and weren't known of in other form before 1946, say otherwise. Expulsions from the community.

Per John J. Collins, the Essenes or whomever we call them, separated from other Jews of their time over observances of ritual Torah points, calendrical observances and more. This is spelled out in the 4QMMT scroll. This is doctrine or dogma, not praxis. Remember that the pope and the patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other in 1054 CE in part over whether or not the other used the "filoque" in the Nicene Creed.

The Qumran expulsions also fall under orthodoxy not orthopraxis because, in my interpretation, calendrical observances affect things like observances of festivals like Passover. From there, discussion spills into whether wrong observance makes the whole event nugatory or not, per the old Catholic phrase "ex opere operato." And, when you use multiple Latin words, and use them about interpretation of religious acts, even if it is an act itself, you're still moving toward orthodoxy and out of straight-up orthopraxis.

Qumran's ethico-ontological dualism, as expressed in places like the War Scroll, appears to be more clearly Zoroastrian-bent than what Orthodox Judaism holds today. Given that such beliefs underscored belief in the observance of purity rituals at Qumran, that's orthodoxy.

Or, if you're a Karaite vs Rabbinic Jews, the status of the Talmud? Dogma.

Remember that Baruch Spinoza was not only excommunicated, if one will, but even suffered an Orthodox Judaism version of an Amish "shunning," the Jewish "herem" (yes, that's cognate to the word "harem" from Arabic "haram") over matters of orthodoxy, not orthopraxis.

And, it's not just Judaism. Look at Islam. The Shi'a / Sunni split? The issue of succession to Muhammad is orthodoxy, not orthopraxis. I'd argue the same for the splits between the Seveners and the Twelvers within Shi'a, or the four major schools within Sunni.

And, that's having initially ignored that the "recitation," the head of the Five Pillars of Islam, "there is no god but Allah," is clearly doxy, not praxis.

And, if I looked closely enough at Eastern religions, I could find some "-doxy" there, too.

Jesus mythicist deck-stacking

It's easy to pontificate against a Bart Ehrman's approach to establishing the likelihood of the Jesus of history actually existing by establishing that different sources about him exist.

But that's exactly what Tom Dykstra does when pretending not to take sides between Ehrman and Thomas Brodie.

No, we don't have "Q." But we do have the Gospel of Thomas. But Dykstra nowhere mentions that.

We have John as a witness independent of the Synoptics. But Dykstra nowhere mentions him.

Given that Dykstra makes these claims, or lies by omission, in an academic paper, he seems pretty silly. And Dykstra in other writings has indicated he's mythicist-friendly.

Radical freedom, road trip style

I saw the RV pictured above across the highway from my apartment complex a couple of weeks ago.

I'm not old by any means, but, the earliest version of Uncle Sam's finish line is less than a decade away. In the back of my mind, I still have hope for some mix of ongoing freelance and/or half-time or better contract work, while working in more travel and maybe some National Park Service volunteer work in between.

The idea being that I would have enough money saved up to junk the apartment life entirely for several years and snowbird and roam.

Details of the above beastie?

Yeah, the owner says it has new gaskets and just 53,000 miles on a vehicle that's $2,995.

OTOH, that's a 1980s RV, probably built on a Suburban body with an extended back end. It's got the gas-hog GM 454 engine, and the automatic tranny is probably just three-on-a-tree. (It was unlocked, and looking inside, in addition to most of the interior definitely looking 1983, I saw no overdrive button or lever, or any other indication it was beyond the normal 1980s automatic transmission.)

I would love something smaller, like the RVs you can get built on a full-sized van chassis. Two weeks after seeing that, I saw one of those on a Dodge body (not for sale, being used, with the owner younger than me) parked at the Wally behind me.

I presume that's running either their current 6.1 liter (366) or an older 5.7 liter (350) engine. Better gas mileage there. And shorter.

Ideally, I'd love something like that, with a hybrid drivetrain, and as much of the stove, fridge and other amenities powered off electricity as much as possible. Avoid the hassles of a newbie like me with propane tanks.

Then, instead of towing a car (or a Jeep), put a rack in back, where I could park a bike, an e-bike, or one of those three-wheel hybrid drive motorcycles or large scooters. That would take care of my travel needs while parked. Something that could easily and safely do 45mph, to get around on all city streets and within state or national parks, and relatively easily and safely do 55 to navigate non-freeway highways, maybe.

All still just thoughts at this time.

But yes, per Sartre, thoughts of personal radical freedom. I'm not using it exactly the way he does, but yes, in his spirit.

Of course, thoughts remain just thoughts until put into action.

That said, besides Sartre, reading three Chuck Bowden books — a Festschrift for him, if one will, by fellow Western (not novels, Western-iana) writers, the Charles Bowden Reader, and his Red Caddy set of essays on Ed Abbey — have made me cogitate on this more.

Radical freedom. It's just a pair of words for knowing I have nothing left to lose.

And, with the spread of coronavirus worries and half the country on, or threatening to be on, semi-lockdown, radical freedom is a siren song.

Of course, the empiricist part of the philosopher me says: It wouldn't be very radical freedom if you got stuck somewhere and ran out of supplies. Or maybe that's the philosophical (and psychological) pessimist part of me.

My personal academic tie to the Dead Sea Scrolls forgery story

The world of biblical scholarship was hit yesterday by confirmation that a set of 16 alleged Dead Sea Scrolls fragments at The Museum of the Bible, owned by Hobby Lobby prez Steve Green, are forgeries.

And crude ones at that.

Ancient leather. Yeah, it's ancient, but leather, not parchment.

Modern ink.

Some were purchased from William Kando, son of the primary discoverer, or at least the primary peddler, I should say, of the actual scrolls. Others may trace back to him indirectly. The independent researchers hired by the museum in 2017 to investigate believe, but aren't sure, that all the forgeries were created by the same person or persons.

I've mentioned it elsewhere as the "BAR effect."

That's as in Biblical Archaeology Review, which promoted Holy Land-itis among evangelical Christians and has long run a thriving display advertising service for antiquities, as well as running puff pieces on things like the fraudulent James Ossuary.

I have a personal tie to this, not the forgery itself, but the investigation. I know the Jeff Kloha mentioned in the piece.

Yes, per the link to Museum of the Bible chief staff, he's Jeffrey Kloha today. But I went to seminary with Jeff Kloha. And, per his picture, he's aged better than I have.

First thought is not about the forgery but about how did Kloha get to this position? He looked ensconced at Concordia Seminary and certainly comfortable there. I didn't even know he had left. Frankly, I had him fingered as a candidate for seminary president in the future. (He had started there in 1999, I believe, as an associate professor and then became provost a few years ago.)

On the other hand, already back then, Kloha was argumentative (he'd be arguing with me over this piece, now, for sure), and, to the degree I can recall across the decades, politically pretty conservative as well, though not as much so as classmate and later (and still) seminary professor David Lewis. I can see him as seeing this as an opportunity in other ways. (I also wonder how much he and Lewie talked when Kloha had the opportunity come up three years ago.)

When we were at Concordia a "few" years ago as fellow M.Div. program students, he and I both concentrated on what's known as exegetical theology — the study of individual biblical books, their formation and related issues. I started a petition drive for a class in textual criticism, which, shockingly, a theoretically academically strong seminary with doctoral degrees, not a fly-by-night Bible college, didn't have one of. Jeff was one of the first people I approached to sign, he did, and we got the class, taught by Jim Voelz, who, even more than Kloha today, probably, looked for the bits of wiggle room he could find within conservative Lutheranism. (He was big on oral transmission ideas, following on Albert Lord's work, and encouraged us in his class to see Stanley Fish at Washington University, back when Fish was just starting to hit the really big time. That said, he ignored the limitations of oral transmission theory on non-poetic works and also rejected Markan priority theory on the Synoptic Gospels. But I digress. A bit.)

Eventually, I read enough critical theology, accepted most findings, and did intellectual judo on my conservative Lutheranism. Following in the general track of James Voelz, our prof in that class, Kloha found the small bits of wiggle room he could within conservative Lutheranism and its confined school of biblical interpretation, shared with many other conservative Protestants, or so I presume, and went his way.

Update: That said, speaking loosely from some personal conversation with a good friend, also from those days, I think that even the bits of wiggle room he had found were too much for too many in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. He as provost along with the Seminary president were put on denominational hierarchy leashes on hiring decisions and more. So he bailed. Can't blame him. From the outside, I've been seeing the LCMS move more and more from conservativism to outright fundamentalism, like has happened with the conservative Presbyterian offshoot that left the PCUSA.

(Update to this update: Semi-wingnut LCMS jefe Matt Harrison is now facing a big legal [and ethical] imbroglio over the closure of Concordia University Portland.

Had I not been in a state of some sort of chronic low-grade depression once I made my "commitment," I might have followed the path of a Bart Ehrman, but that didn't happen. This all relates to my story of how I became an atheist, which starts here with part 1.

Anyway, I want to comment on a couple of Kloha's comments at the story, as they're comments that come from him making his choice within the Missouri Synod Lutheranism world. They're comments and observations with which I disagree.

Basically, this is the biggie:

“The Dead Sea Scrolls are inarguably the most important biblical discovery of the last century,” Kloha says. “That pushed our knowledge of the biblical text back one thousand years from what was available at the time, and showed some variety—but especially the consistency—of the tradition of the Hebrew Bible.”

This is a mix of not true and narrow construal of the scrolls.

First, on the textual side, the Dead Sea Scrolls confirmed that major Septuagint variants from the Masoretic Texas in the order and content of Jeremiah, a number of Septuagint modest-moderate variants in Joshua, Judges and First and Second Samuel and a few in the Torah, especially Exodus all had old Hebrew-original support. And, in a few cases, we found the DSS disagreeing with both the Masoretes and the LXX.

 

Beyond that, Kloha has an unrevealed "anchor" within his "consistency" claim. As a fundamentalist Lutheran, he believes that (with a few asterisked verses like his own death) Moses large wrote the Torah circa 1200 BCE, or circa 1,200 years before Qumran. So, "hey look at how authentic Moses is!" The reality, of course, is that the Torah only reached its final form under Ezra, and if you take a late, 400 BCE date for him, you've whacked two-thirds of Kloha's timespan away.

 

That said, the greater variants in books like the Former Prophets shows their lesser relevance to early Judaism or proto-Judaism. And, why not? They're mainly about rulership, irrelevant to Jews again until 164 BCE.

 

Continuing ...

Within the Wikipedia entry, I note it quotes the Oxford Companion to Archaelogy:

While some of the Qumran biblical manuscripts are nearly identical to the Masoretic, or traditional, Hebrew text of the Old Testament, some manuscripts of the books of Exodus and Samuel found in Cave Four exhibit dramatic differences in both language and content. In their astonishing range of textual variants, the Qumran biblical discoveries have prompted scholars to reconsider the once-accepted theories of the development of the modern biblical text from only three manuscript families: of the Masoretic text, of the Hebrew original of the Septuagint, and of the Samaritan Pentateuch. It is now becoming increasingly clear that the Old Testament scripture was extremely fluid until its canonization around A.D. 100.

Sadly, overall, Wiki's entry is very, very uneven. In this same section, it has Presbyterian scholar Millar Burrows and conservative evangelical Gleason Archer wrongly agreeing with Kloha's take. (But of course!) And, Wiki's own introductory paragraph makes the same claim. (Even worse, elsewhere in the entry, Wiki called BAR founder and antiquities-monger Hershel Shanks a scholar, as in a biblical scholar. He's not. He's a lawyer by training, and not a constitutional law scholar or any other type of legal scholar that I know of. I made an edit, and in my explanation, told Wiki not to reverse it.)

Did any of these variants have Yahweh called Satan or Judah called Edom? No.

But, within those books that form, in the Hebrew canon, the "Former Prophets," which includes First and Second Kings, they showed a number of discrepancies in details of alleged pre-kingly Israelite history. Such variations support critical scholarship's questioning of biblical historicity and to some degree, within that, support Copenhagen School-type radical questioning. And, they also show that broader textual fluidity that, in turn, would point to larger doctrinal and sectarian fluidity.

That leads me onward.

Outside of textual criticism? Here, Kloha is engaged in "framing," and a framing of the issue that's different than mine. (His comment about "Hebrew tradition" is referring to textual tradition, not the larger theological tradition, but that's where I'm headed next.) Framing is what he was doing earlier with his unspoken stance on who wrote what when.

The typical blue-haired lady pearl-clutcher in an upper Midwest conservative Lutheran congregation, just as much as the chic pearl-flaunter at whatever megachurch in Oklahoma City the Greens attend, probably think the Dead Sea Scrolls is all biblical stuff.

And, of course, it's not. And, of course, Kloha knows that.

And, when we talk about the totality of the DSS and the totality of the Hebrew Bible, and what the Scrolls are believed to show about the sectarians who are believed to have lived at Qumran, it's a different story.

Approximately 60 percent of the DSS is non-biblical scrolls, first. Of that, half is from what was not canonized for Jews, but was already known elsewhere. Some of this entered the Catholic and Orthodox Christian bibles as "deuterocanonical" material; the majority, though, is apocalyptic material like 1 and 2 Enoch. The other half of the non-biblical material, or 30 percent of the whole, was brand new, though. And it's this material that refutes Kloha's framing.

The Community Rule, the War Scroll, the Damascus Document (a DSS but discovered before the 1946 dam-breaker), the Son of God text and other documents show that Judaism at the turn of the eras was far, far more sectarian than previously believed, first of all. That, in turn, presents the rise of Christianity as one version of Jewish sectarianism in a new light. (Some elements of the Nag Hammadi corpus present the rise of Mandeanism, a sectarian competitor based on a non-Christian interpretation of John the Baptizer, in a similarly new light, and even more, shed light on Christian Gnosticism.) And, per the Oxford Companion comment, these other materials at Qumran were not just written before 100 CE, many were written before the change of eras and some may well have been written before 100 BCE.

And, tying that back to Kloha's comment? Certainly from a Christian-only perspective, rather than Judeo-Christian, the DSS are NOT "inarguably the most important biblical discovery of the last century," depending on what exactly one means by that phrase.
• First, Gnostic gospels like those at Nag Hammadi were Gospels for Gnostics, even if there never was an organized Gnostic church to declare a Gnostic canon.
• Second, similar holds true for second-generation and third-generation Gnostic Christian writings. Between points one and two, The Apocryphon of James, Apocryphon of Paul, Gospel of Truth, The Thunder Perfect Mind, and Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter are all major Gnostic works. Having nearly complete to complete copies of them allows modern scholarship to no longer have to read them through a lens of "orthodox" Christian church fathers. It also allows for improved dating of them, putting estimates on several of them at pre-200. 
• Third, as a New Testament scholar and exegete, he knows the discovery of the full Gospel of Thomas at Nag Hammadi was huge. (It gave underpinning to a theoretical "Q" source as part of a two-source theory of the synoptic gospels. [Side note: Twentieth-century proponents of a two-gospel theory of the synoptics claiming that independent writing was in part because of Deuteronomy 19:15's call for "two or three witnesses," I find laughable. Side note two: Independent transmission theorists' claims that the three synoptics really don't look that similar on closer inspection I find almost as laughable.])
• Fourth, which is itself a framing issue, Kloha doesn't mention that for reasons related in part to the formation of the state of Israel, only Christians (or lapsed ones) but no Jews were on the initial Qumran scholars group. Read this long and interesting interview of John J. Collins for more.
But conservative scholars can't spin Nag Hammadi. So, all you can do is try to lessen it. (Or, slam it as "heresy.") I know this is a strong reaction, seemingly, to what he's saying. But, I know Jeff Kloha's mind from decades ago, and there's a lot of vinegar behind that "inarguably." When connected with the "especially the consistency" claim about the Jewish Tanakh/Christian Old Testament, it can't go unchallenged by me. In other words, while LCMS wingnuts challenged even the relatively small wiggle room within historical-grammatical exegetical ideas, versus a flat-out "god revealed it," at the same time, I think Kloha, if that wiggle room wasn't challenged, was comfortable staying within it.

Besides questioning Kloha, on the provenance of these faked scrolls, I find this by Emanuel Tov simply laughable:

I will not say that there are no unauthentic fragments among the MOB fragments, but in my view, their inauthenticity as a whole has still not been proven beyond doubt. This doubt is due to the fact that similar testing has not been done on undisputed Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts in order to provide a base line for comparison, including the fragments from the Judean Desert sites that are later than Qumran. The report expects us to conclude that abnormalities abound without demonstrating what is normal.

First, the burden-shifting attempt is laughable.

Second, all major authentic DSS have had radiocarbon dating and he knows that.

Third, per his background, Tov is FAR from a disinterested observer.

I also am simply incredulous that as big a DSS scholar as James Charlesworth ever even halfway signed off on these scrolls' authenticity. This isn't quite as bad as Hugh Trevor-Roper and the Hitler diaries, but it's not that far off, in my opinion.

Update: A new blog post by me, discussing the details of Augean stable-cleansing work that Kloha faces, and wondering if he's fully up to speed on the Greens' history of ill-gotten booty.

Update to that, July 27, 2021: With the DOJ getting a court ruling today that Hobby Lobby must forfeit the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, sounds like Jeff Kloha has more Cleanup on Aisle 6 to do. Details? The tablet was shipped to the US in 2003 by Jordanian Antiquities Authority, without proper paperwork but with the claim it was found in miscellaneous rubble in 1981. In reality, like much other stuff the Green family got its mitts on, it was apparently looted from Iraq. There is no honor among thieves, and we'll see how much remorse there is. (I'll primarily update off that first update link.)

Beware the Ides of March and Indo-European cognates

March 15, 2,063 years ago in 44 BCE (there was no 0 BCE and no 0 CE, so when counting from one era to the other, you have to subtract a year) Julius Caesar was murdered in the Roman Senate chambers by Brutus, Cassius and others

Why?

Supposedly, after twice turning down an offer to be named king (anathema in the Roman Republic since its founding, likely some few but not too many years after 509 BCE), he was going to be made the offer a third time, and accept. He had already been named perpetual dictator, going beyond the original Republican idea for a temporary emergency leader.

Shakespearean witch warnings to beware the Ides of March aside, as well as his wife's supposed fear, this is of course reality. And given the reality of Caesar's wife, it appears that both the plot, and the expectation that Caesar would again be offered, and would accept, the title were real as well.

So, what was this title?

Rex it was in Caesar's Latin. Derived cognates include rey in Spanish and roi in French.

Cognates from other Indo-European languages and language groups include raja or similar in Indian languages and shah or similar (picture raja losing the initial syllable, not uncommon if it started with a liquid consonant) in Iranian languages. It's rí in Irish and rígh in Scots Gaelic. (However, it's brenin or mrenin in Welsh. However, that could be related to the Latin regnum, which is of course related to rex.)

BUT!

The linguistic tail doesn't end there.

German knows no such kingly title. Rather, it's koenig there. Kong or similar in the Scandinavian languages.

But, the word is still there in German. Did Hitler not talk of a Third Reich, following that of the Hollenzollerns and the Holy Roman Empire? Indeed he did, and the word is cognate with our old friend rex.

What if we step further east? It's król in Polish, kralj in Slovenian and similar in other Slavic languages. It's karalius in Lithuanian, paralleling the Slavic. (Note the Finnish composer Sibelius' "Karelia Suite." I'm not sure if the name of the territory derives from the Balto-Slavic root or not.)

But, that in turn seems connected to a similar word in English, and its cognates in German and Scandinavian languages.

That would be "earl." That, in turn is, yes, related to the name Karl, from the old German karal, which in turn gave the old English ceorl, which was simply the base level of freeman in medieval England. (The German freiherr is the English "baron," but is literalistically "free lord.")

So, so far, we have cognate words, but a reordering of ranks.

Back to Germany's three empires.

The Romance languages borrowed from Latin imperium or similar for both "empire" and "emperor" while the Germanic languages all did takeoffs on the actual name of our would-be king for the word "emperor." Kaiser. etc.

The Slavic, and Baltic, languages follow the Germanic on on the same two words and differentiation of roots for "empire" and "emperor." Tsar. Etc. (Tsars after, IIRC, Peter the Great actually emphasized the Russian equivalent of imperator more than tsar.

Something that is quite different, at least among Indo-European languages with which I have a modicum of familiarity?

Greek.

There, it's βασιλέας for "king." Modern Greek has αυτοκράτορας for "emperor." But the Byzantines maintained Roman tradition.

Anyway, βασιλέας migrated north. Think of the common Russian name "Vasily." But, as an actual cognate word? Can't think of one in any Indo-European language to the west or north. Nor can I think of any cognates with the Welsh, though it also lists, on Google Translate, words like rhí and riau, obviously cognate with the many others above.

As for one other tragically great actual, not would-be, king of Shakespeare, Caesar was not Thane of Tibur. As for Macbeth's pre-kingly status, though Macbeth was in Scotland, he was, like most kings, a lowland Scot. Middle English, and pre-Norman Viking invasions, had affected Scots language. Thegn, in Old English, was a low-level knight-type person. Think "Sir" in modern British English. Or huskarl in Old Norse, where that Karl from Germanic names and Slavic regency pops back up! (So do witches, but, even within language groupings within the Indo-European family, the etymology on words for those creatures is all over the map.)

As for Caesar's last words? Shakespeare took huge poetic license. Suetonius and Plutarch both have him saying nothing, though Suetonius says that others claimed he said, in Greek, και συ τεκνoν?, which is "you too, child?" in English, to Brutus. (Brutus was just 15 years younger and not Caesar's spawn.)

In any case, he died as neither rex, nor imperator, nor, other than by personal name, as Caesar. 

Bonus etymology: If you're wondering about the word "ides," go here.

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Update, March 16, 2023: Caesar was indeed killed for wanting to be proclaimed rex. But, it wasn't just his idea. This piece from JSTOR notes that Antony, among others, thought that he needed to be proclaimed king before battling the Parthians, among other things. I don't follow Antony's reasoning; Pompey had defeated kings in the eastern Mediterranean, already. But, it's a good read for the timing of Caesar's assassination and other motives the plotters had.

There is no "theology of the Bible"

Unfortunately, both conservative AND liberal Christians think there is.

This is a follow-up of my post two weeks ago about Elizabeth Warren being ignorant about both philosophy and theology with an out-of-context quote of "whatever you have done to the least of these" from Matthew 25.

The fundies and conservative evangelicals are way wrong on this, of course, trying to mine the Tanakh for proof texts about Jesus. Of course, that's only 1, 925 years old, as the guy who wrote Matthew, most likely in the early 90s CE, was doing it.

But, liberal Christians haven't always abandoned that. And, in claiming that, say, "god is love" is the theology of the bible? They ignore the Yahweh who ordered holocausts, the Yahweh whose love for his own allegedly chosen people was conditional, and more.

Beyond that, "love" or "peace"?

Yes, both Isaiah and Micah say "Beat your swords into plowshares." (Micah probably wrote first.)

But Joel 3:10 says "Beat your plowshares into swords." And also reverses the second half of the Isaiah-Micah line, to "Beat your pruning hooks into spears."

Joel 3 in general talks about Yahweh restoring the fortunes of Israel, and that his people need to gird for war for their part in that. Micah 4, seemingly referenced by Isaiah 2, is a "latter days" passage. (I don't use "end times," let alone "apocalyptic," as those have Xn overtones.)

Now, at this point, both conservative and liberal Christians, despite my holocaust comments above, will probably still try to claim there is a theology of the bible.

There isn't. Back to Matthew 25. Doing good works appears to be the key to being a sheep or a goat. But Paul, in Romans 3:23, says "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of god," backgrounding his fudged through Greek quote of Habakkuk two chapters earlier and in Galatians that "the righteous will live by faith." (The better translation is of Habakkuk 2:4 that "the righteous shall live by his faithfulness," that is, to use Christian doctrine terminology while still rejecting an overarching theology of the bible, that Habakkuk is talking about sanctification, not justification.)