Bible Archives - Page 9 of 11 - Ramblin' with Roger

L is for Lost Books of the Bible

There are stories in these “lost books ” about the gaps in Jesus’ life; the standard Biblical narrative skips from infancy to the story at the temple when he was about 12, then skips again to being baptized by John the Baptiser.

From one of our locally owned-and-operated bookstores, I bought this deeply discounted tome called Lost Books of the Bible, compiled by William Hone, and published in 1926, though my copy was considerably newer than that. One reviewer says the work “marked the beginning of a new era in Biblical scholarship. They are of inestimable value to an understanding of Christianity past and present.” In the preface, Hone writes: “This collection…is published, without prejudice or motive, save that the reader…may be free to enjoy and hold his own opinion of these ancient and beautiful writings.” For instance, in the First Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus, Joseph had sought a midwife, but this proved to be unnecessary.

One current position about these books notes: Are there lost books of the Bible? No there aren’t. “But that hasn’t stopped people from saying there are. The Christian church didn’t establish the Word of God. Instead, the Christian church recognized it.
“My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me,” (John 10:27).
Interesting to me, the books that are part of the Roman Catholic, or Douay–Rheims, Bible are considered apocryphal. I find this to be too bad. The inclusion of the warriors in the Maccabees books makes a better contrast to the non-warrior Savior.

Whereas others claim: Most followers of churches using the King James Bible feel they have the complete book with all the writings used by the first church and the nation of Israel before it. This work presents evidence that this is not true.

My suggestion has always been to read for oneself. There are interesting stories in these “lost books “about the gaps in Jesus’ life; the standard Biblical narrative skips from infancy to the story at the temple when He was about 12, then skips again to being baptized by John the Baptiser. I must say that The Childhood of the Saviour (Infancy Gospel of Thomas) suggests a less than Prince of Peace-like fellow.

But what also interests me is how the Bible that is extant, with the 66 books, was also not always as it now presented. Origen (215) omits the epistles of James and Jude. The inclusion of Hebrews is doubted by a few writers. Cyril (340), the Bishops of the Council of Laodices (364), and Gregory (375) all omit Revelation, though by 390, the Bible “perfectly agrees with ours.” Revelation, it is safe to say, is the most perplexing book of the Bible.

Here’s one video to check out (note the music) and this beginning of a lengthy series. But there’s a lot more out there.

ABC Wednesday – Round 10

D is for Dominion

I’m a “replenish” kind of guy.

When I was growing up, Canada was referred to as a dominion. It achieved that status, rather than as a colony, per the British North America Act of 1867: “Whereas the Provinces of Canada [i.e., Ontario and Quebec], Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick have expressed their Desire to be federally united into One Dominion under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom …shall form and be One Dominion under the Name of Canada; and on and after that Day those Three Provinces shall form and be One Dominion under that Name accordingly…

Title to the Northwest Territories was transferred by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1868, and the Province of Manitoba was the first created out of it, and the first province created by Ottawa instead of London, in 1870.” Other provinces joined after that point, all without need of the permission of the crown.

Apparently, dominion status ended in 1982 “when the British and Canadian parliaments passed parallel acts – the Canada Act, 1982 ([UK] 1982, c.11) in London, and the Constitution Act 1982 in Ottawa. Thereafter, the United Kingdom was formally absolved of any remaining responsibility for, or jurisdiction over, Canada; and Canada became responsible for her own destiny. In a formal ceremony on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, the Queen signed both acts into law on April 17, 1982.”

But in that period between 1867 and 1982, Canada declared war on its own, in 1939. And subsequent to 1982, “the federal government continues to produce publications and educational materials that specify the currency of these official titles.” So I’m still not 100% clear I understand all of this correctly. (The picture, BTW, is from a 1945 Dominion of Canada $50 Eighth Victory Loan War Bond.)

The other reference to dominion I grew up with came from Genesis 1:28 of the Bible: “And God blessed [ Adam and Eve ] and God said unto them, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” (KJV) Some folks seem to focus on the “subdue” part, and find that using up our natural resources is OK, that God has given permission. Others tend to focus on “replenish the earth” and believe that having dominion over the earth means to be a good steward of the earth. When the United Kingdom had dominion over Canada, it meant that it had a responsibility to care for it, not to merely exploit its resources. I’m a “replenish” kind of guy.

ABC Wednesday – Round 10

Helping Those Who Ask For Money

One of the factors about giving out money isn’t whether it’s a legit request; if they’re lying, it’s on them, not me.

Periodically, but especially in November and December, I contemplate my personal policy with regards to those who come up to me and ask me for money. Some folks, including a former pastor of mine, are adamant that one ought not to; there are registered charities for that purpose. I’ve not been comfortable with that absolutist position, though, and I take it on a case-by-case basis.

There was a day this fall, though, where my instincts were just…off. Something had happened at work earlier in the day that frustrated me. When I got off the bus downtown, a guy asked me for money to buy some food. As it turned out, we were right in front of a Subway sub shop. My first instinct was to say, “Hey, why don’t we go in here, and I’ll buy you a sub?” I had the time (it was a Thursday and choir was in an hour) and the means (a $5 sub wouldn’t break me). Moreover, I wouldn’t have to worry that the money was going to be used for another (“inappropriate”) purpose, and, by going into a well-lit restaurant, I would feel relatively safe and secure. But my answer was “no”; and it was as though I was watching myself say that, because it surely couldn’t have been me. It bothered me for DAYS, because my grumpiness had robbed me of the opportunity to do good.

It didn’t help that the lectionary reading a few weeks later was Matthew 25, all that good stuff about seeing the hungry and feeding them.

That wasn’t the only thing that went wrong that day. After that incident, I then went to the library and gave someone what turned out to be bad advice about whether he had time to get a coffee before his computer time came up; I didn’t realize that the computer clocks were 10 minutes fast, and he missed his turn and had to rejoin the queue, so I felt bad about giving such lousy advice. I was so distraught that I didn’t even end up going to choir, but rather ended up calling a few of my friends, none of whom were home.

One of the factors about giving out money isn’t whether it’s a legit request; if they’re lying, it’s on them, not me. It IS about security, though, and I am loath to pull out my wallet in front of strangers, especially at night. I’ve recently started carrying dollar coins – another good use for them – which I can dig out of my pocket, which is also easier.

Do any of you struggle with this?

M is for Martha

Mary sat and listened to Jesus as he talked, but Martha objected to the fact that she was left with all the work.

I always liked the name Martha. Partly, it’s because my first girlfriend was named Martha. I used to serenade her with the song Martha My Dear by the Beatles [LISTEN], from the white album. It was only later I discovered that Martha was Paul McCartney’s English sheepdog.

Martha Dandridge Custis Washington (pictured), of course, was the first First Lady of the United States, though she wasn’t so dubbed at the time. Martha is one of those classic girls’ names that, while extremely popular in the US in the 1880s (#14 in 1882), never lost at least a core of support; it didn’t leave the top 100 until 1966 and was still at #709 in 2010.

I’ve heard the slightly derisive term “being a Martha.” This referred to Luke 10:38-42 when Martha of Bethany and her sister Mary “offered hospitality to their friend Jesus…Mary sat and listened to him as he talked, but Martha objected to the fact that she was left with all the work. Jesus told Martha not to worry about small things, but to concentrate on what was important.” This proved to be a key concept in Christian hospitality; don’t NOT invite someone over, just because your home is not immaculate.

My daughter is fond of a PBS TV program called Martha Speaks, which “is an animated children’s television sitcom based on the 1992 children’s book of the same name by Susan Meddaugh about a talking dog named Martha…who is owned by ten-year-old Helen… When Helen feeds Martha some alphabet soup, the soup travels to her brain instead of her stomach, resulting in her ability to speak. The show focuses on synonyms and vocabulary, with each episode featuring an underlying theme illustrated with keywords.” LISTEN to the opening title theme song, which features these lyrics: “Martha Speaks and speaks and speaks and speaks and…Communicates, enumerates, elucidates, exaggerates, indicates, and explicates, bloviates, and overstates and (pant, pant, pant) hyperventilates!” And here is a video guide to the episodes.

ABC Wednesday – Round 9

A is for Adam and Eve

What bothers me about the literal Creationists is not that they believe what they believe. It’s that a whole pseudoscience that was created around it.

Big fat caveat upfront; I don’t mean to make light of anyone’s faith, I’m just trying to understand.

Someone I know only online, who I suspect wouldn’t consider herself a particularly religious person, decided to read the Bible. She stopped after Genesis 2. She complained that there were two seemingly contradictory Creation stories. In Genesis 1, the creatures came, then the man and the woman. But in Genesis 2, you get the Adam’s rib version, where the man is seemingly created before the creatures, but definitely before the woman. I say “seemingly”, because the NIV version reads at v. 19 “Now the LORD God HAD formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man…”; the “had” suggests the possibility that the animal had already existed and that the man, hanging out in the garden, simply hadn’t seen them.

The problem, I contended, is that the person was reading the stories as history, as science, not allegory. If you read it as history, and Adam and Eve were in fact the first people, what does it mean in terms of their descendants? Who was Cain’s wife, and who were the people he feared might kill him in Genesis 4? That specific issue confounded me when I was a teenager, and was one of the items that indeed shook my faith at the time.

Once I realized it was not a literal history, it became much easier to understand.

This is why I’m quite puzzled by those who have decided to take Genesis 1 verbatim. The earth and all its creatures, including humans, were formed in six days – possible? Sure, in a “God can do anything” way, but not at all likely. And the order of the creation seems to mesh pretty well with the evolutionary cycle we’ve come to understand, albeit considerably longer. The word “day” may not have meant 24 hours; remember, no one wrote this down at the time, but rather learned it from the oral tradition, transcribing it relatively quite recently, in the last millennium Before the Christian Era. This philosophy, I’ve learned, is called progressive creationism.

What bothers me about the literal Creationists is not that they believe what they believe. It’s that a whole pseudoscience that was created around it, of people walking the earth with the dinosaurs only 4000 years ago, and the planet only 10,000, rather than humans being around for 50,000 to 200,000 years, the dinosaurs having been extinct for 65 million years, and the Earth itself being about 4.6 billion years old. How does this narrative conflict with “some vast eternal plan”, quoting Fiddler on the Roof?

I guess I’m saying that I don’t think science and creation are that much at odds. The shoehorning of a literal six-day earth making – that seems to be a lot more work.

Can someone please explain this to me? Oh, and check out this recent Doonesbury strip, which addresses the issue.

ABC Wednesday team – Round 9

Citation to top piece of artwork.