Holy Saturday

What a discovery!  You mean this man who is hanging on the cross is a king?  The cross is his throne? The thorns his crown? This shattered body is a kingly body? A naked body, covered with the robes of a king?  Glory overcame the despair of this criminal.  And the king said, "Don't you wait for long.  Today, you and me are going to share paradise."

He was buried and he resurrected.  What does that do?  The death overcame the guilt and the sin and the separation. What does the resurrection do?  My goodness, it delivers!  The last enemy of mankind is death.  It makes men tremble; it makes clever men weep. It is the point of departure, the dead end of the road.  Jesus entered the realm of death: three days in battle down there. And in the grip with that terrible enemy of mankind, he killed death, disarmed it, opened the grave.

Jesus came out of the grave triumphant, glorious.  Do you think he came alone?  Not a bit!  He came with you!  The head came out, and so the limbs came with him.  You are there!  I know you say, "Bishop, I am not that type."  Jesus knows very well he died for that type! The kind of you, with all the things that make you tremble, with all the limitations of the human being.  Jesus took you when he rose from the dead, because when he died, he gripped you.

(Selections from Festo Kivengeri, in his sermon The Triumph of God's Glory)

Oral Traditions Prior to the Gospels

I'm not sure whether anyone has identified much in the way of oral traditions specifically regarding the sayings of Jesus that can be found in non-gospel literature, but I think it's probably a fruitful study.

While detouring a bit from Acts on Sunday, we read some in 1 Corinthians 13, the famous love chapter.  In it, Paul writes

2 [I]f I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

1 Corinthians is usually dated ca. AD 54, well before the gospel of Matthew (generally dated ca. 80–100), in which this famous saying of Jesus is recorded:

For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.

(Mt 17.20, cp Mt 21.21)

I would probably reject the hypothesis that Matthew's story somehow relies on the circulation of the letter of Paul to the Corinthians: the provenance of the letter and its distribution seem unlikely to me to have influenced the writing of the Matthew.

It seems rather more likely that the gospel narrative and Paul's almost off-hand reference are part of a broader oral tradition that undergirded the nascent Christian church.

Acts records another such instance, this time without a corresponding gospel passage, when Luke quotes Paul in his final address to the Ephesian church (probably somewhere around AD 60, maybe AD 61):

In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’

(Acts 20.35)

I think it would be an interesting study to look at these pregospel letters to try to piece together some other examples of oral testimony, and perhaps I'll take that on as a project this year.

Acts and Eyewitnesses

We're back in Acts at church—we move pretty quickly, it seems—and we've lately arrived at the raising of Dorcas, or Tabitha, from the dead:

36 Now there was in Joppa a disciple named Tabitha, which, translated, means Dorcas. She was full of good works and acts of charity. 37 In those days she became ill and died, and when they had washed her, they laid her in an upper room. 38 Since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples, hearing that Peter was there, sent two men to him, urging him, “Please come to us without delay.” 39 So Peter rose and went with them. And when he arrived, they took him to the upper room. All the widows stood beside him weeping and showing tunics and other garments that Dorcas made while she was with them. 40 But Peter put them all outside, and knelt down and prayed; and turning to the body he said, “Tabitha, arise.” And she opened her eyes, and when she saw Peter she sat up.

Of interest to us is that Luke spends a moment in translation here.  Acts is addressed to Theophilus, evidently a Greek-speaker, but the woman's name is Aramaic (Tabitha means "gazelle"). 

By translating (36), Luke gives us some information about his audience, but he also provides a possible indication of eyewitness reportage here: you'll note that when he's quoting Peter (40), he uses the Aramaic name.  This is natural (Peter's native tongue is probably Aramaic, after all), but Luke preserves the quote and the language rather than accommodating Theophilus as he does elsewhere (39).

This sort of casual transition between multiple languages in story-telling is a suggestion that Luke is relating an eye-witness account of the miracle.





As a secondary note, the pastor made another good point here that the passage may also hearken to Mark 5:41, in which Jesus raises the centurion's daughter.  (The Aramaic here is "Talitha, cumi," that is, "Little girl, arise."  The Aramaic here is orthographically quite similar, differing in the English transliteration by a single letter.)

The connection is an interesting one, and perhaps worth exploring.

Emergence

It surprises me that it's been nearly a year since any sort of substantial update here.  The business of life often interrupts, but I had still hoped to write more here.  In the new(-ish) year, I thought perhaps I'd spend a bit of time writing about one of the newer-to-me philosophical topics:  emergence.

Roughly speaking, emergence describes the phenomenon that systems often display novel behaviors that weren't previously observed in the system: the cooperation of its constituent elements produces a wholly new behavior. 

Emergence (at least in some respects) opposes reductionism, which holds that all emergent phenomena can be explained by the forces acting on a systems constituent elements.

Emergence is often described in a sort of scientific chain: biology is an emergent property of chemistry, which is in turn an emergent property of particle physics.  It's humorously illustrated in this Abstruse Goose cartoon:

Perhaps there's a bit of handwaving there at the end, but it captures the idea well enough.

One of the struggles of modern science is what to do about consciousness, a phenomenon that more or less appears to be immaterial. The search for material causes for thought have generally met with little success, though the study of quantum mechanics and emergence has provided a bit of hope for thorough-going materialists.

Consciousness might be an emergent property of the physical universe, while quantum physics may provide a convenient explanation for the mechanics of thought itself—one that classical mechanics has been unable to provide. 

The basic problem with thought is that natural science suggests that for every event, there is a sufficient natural cause.  f = ma, and that's that: thought doesn't enter into this equation.  This may pose no immediate problem, at least until we consider that causality is something of an uninterrupted chain.  Where does thought enter in?

I'm not sure that emergence can really answer that question, neither am I persuaded that quantum uncertainty effectively accounts for free will (unless you're willing to suppose that you and a rock have the same sort of free will).

On the other hand, it is consistent with experience that we effect material changes on the basis of thought, and one wonders perhaps if the physical universe isn't rather an emergent property of the mental.