Luke credited Stephen for Hebrews

I've been alerted to connexions between Luke and the Epistolary Homily to the Hebrews, like Adamczewski's hyperlink-commentary. In that spirit Ross Carruthers argues to read Stephen's speech in Luke's Acts 7, in particular, alongside Hebrews' warning to wavering Judaeo-Christians in the Church.

I do not find where one can download the Carruthers dissertation all at once. The link goes to a popup which the Australian site will take down at untimely moments. So, every chapter or so, I had to note the pagenumber, refresh the page, and manually return.

Carruthers focuses on the historically important Hebrews 5:11-6:8, a warning to the reader. His thesis relies on heretofore-neglected Noel Weeks, “Admonition and Error in Hebrews”, WTJ 39 (1976), 72-80. Important here is 5:12 tína-interrogative over tiná, the former as translated in Latin; and that "anastaurise" means not staurised twice, but just the emphatic staurism - that is crucifixion (consider "nailed up" v "nailed"). In addition, all other warnings in this tract refer to Torah example. Thus, the passage is also not an instruction to the reader, but another reference to the past: a type/pattern of Israel at Sinai.

Likewise Stephen's sermon to his Jewish persecutors. The next question Adamczewski would float is, in which direction the dependence. Richard Carrier has been assuming that Hebrews is first-century and Luke's stuff, second-. Carruthers does not venture this question, only pointing out that Acts is our only "historic" record of Hebrews' controversy. Which record, Luke doesn't attach to any correspondence. I suspect Carruthers allows to Luke more credence than Luke deserves.

So I'll venture this. Luke is (well-)known to cite our New Testament putting its comments into the Apostles' lips. John is made to quote 1 John, Paul quotes his own letters, and so on. Mind, Luke is also prone to cross-pollination: he has Peter cite the works of Paul, likely to elide the ambiguous relationship the two held in life. As to Stephen: even if Luke does have him reach into Hebrews, the author himself might not have been known to Luke. The name "becrowned race winner" tends to be applied to martyrs in early Christian homiletic. Carruthers himself ponders if Barnabas actually wrote the thing with Stephen being the schlemiel caught spreading it.

So I daresay Carrier is vindicated.

What's an illegal order?

Some "ex" CIA and retired military, including a currently-serving Senator who remains under UCMJ, recently posted an impartial commentary on whether to follow a manifestly illegal order. In short: you can't. That Senator can't, either.

Jim Hoft's site argues that this statement is a (passive-aggressive) leadup toward a "color revolution" - public disorder leading to legal but extraConstitutional régime-change. It might even come from antifa itself: the "Lawyers' Guild". The best counter would be to provide a specific example of an illegal order from this Administration, but the politicians in question don't gonna answer questions from their opponents, so refuse to answer.

I submit that an order to delete data in wartime (as opposed to: classifying it) would be illegal. I further consider deadly and/or debilitating diseases to be a wartime situation. (This blog suggests to formalise it by Constitutional Amendment: to set declarations of disease-emergency under the Senate; but that hasn't yet happened.)

In that light, the decision to delete vaccine data was illegal. The HHS and GAO decision to back up what their Secretary, Kennedy, ordered deleted was correct. Admittedly they did this secretly, but they may not have had a choice.

How the devil seduced Schacht

I saw my comment on Europa and its discontents was getting long, so I'll poast a sidebit on Horace-Greeley / Hjalmar Schacht, on whether he was a Nazi or not. The rebuttal/review claims "Schact" (sic) was exactly that. Wikipedia says no. My answer is coming to a Maybe.

On looking into Liaquat Ahamed, Schacht was a first class jerk. But for awhile he was Our Jerk. He (a Dane) did not set out as an ultranationalist; Ahamed names one whom Schacht edged out. Schacht was a staunch ally of Streseman, the Chancellor of the 1920s; he became wildly popular when he killed the 1923 inflation without any beer hall antics.

Schacht was however a man of middling ethics and lower morals. He tried to start some socially-democratty parties but they didn't take off, mostly because nobody trusted this bastard. Then in one of those late-1920s attempts to get out from under the Reparations, Schacht put Danzig on the table. Streseman wanted many concessions from the Allies, but even he knew that retaking Versailles land was not (then) on the table. If nothing else - him and what army?

Schacht did wrangle a few tidbits, but at the cost of angering literally everybody.

Why not rain fire on them?

Going through Stapp's blog of variants, cometh a cluster around Luke 9:54 then 55-6. This is where James and John axe Jesus to pull fire from heaven upon a recalcitrant town. The KJV adds "as Elijah did" to v. 54, and injects "For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them" between vv. 55 and 56. Also KJV includes the Red Letter logion "you know not of what spirit you are" in v. 55.

Stapp supports KJV on Christ's words, but would footnote the other two. I think he's right... for Luke. Luke makes a to-do of the Spirit, even concocting the Pentecost story with that; the old creed, 1 Corinthians 15, had that it was Christ. So Christ talking gnomically of "spirit" in life fits Luke's thought well. But it also would make the anecdote difficult to readers.

Enter Stapp's homilists. They would relate the Apostles-to-be as like Elijah; and make clear why Jesus as secret-Christ on Earth was not (yet). The homilists were working from the para-Acts understanding of the great miracles of the first Saints, like in Hegesippus and in Mark 16:15-18, when Christ Himself perhaps was not known as present on Earth pre-Crucifixion. At the same time, the homilists must contend against the Infancy Gospel of Thomas which had Christ decidedly on Earth, putting opponents to death.

But I have another thought. The whole anecdote is (canonically) hapax to Luke and to those quoting from that Gospel. Luke like Hegesippus wants a unified Apostolate, which Luke would imbue with the Spirit; so there's no real motive to name names for disciples axin' stuupid queschins. But Luke had sources: Mark, ultimately, and probably Matthew too, who each did have disciples just-axin' (and getting slapped for it). Why not more?

Extant is Oxy 4009, which has bled into some Lukan MSS and fed the ancient homily "2 Clement". Also extant is Oxy 5575 which came to Justin. A pro-Petrine Gospel would support an anecdote as to make John and James more foolish.

Luke supplied the "spirit" comment, per Stapp. "Peter" would have had a wholly different comment. "For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them" will do. If so, that variant now in KJV is a harmony.

The Georgian Bible

The present Kartuli version of the Bible - the textus receptus of the Georgian Kingdom - comes to us after the revisions of one Saint George the Hagiorite. We Catholics appreciate him for putting in a good word for us when the anathemata were flying about in AD 1054. Georgians appreciate that he asserted to the Antiochenes that Georgians shouldn't be subject to Antioch, nor to Constantinople for that matter.

This saint is a big deal in the culture as well, since it may well be due to him that the Kartuli of Iberia / Tblisi persisted as the church language, against the coastal Laz/Mingrel. Laz in particular strikes me as something that should have been more prominent in the 600s and 700s.

Anyway, Ibero-Georgian spread to Trebizond. When the region looked like it was going to be OTTOMANED, some priests in the Panagia Chrysokephalos Church hid some boxes in plaster. The church became the Victory Mosque and there it stood until last March. When an earthquake cracked the wall.

In these boxes are the four Gospels - in Greek and in "Georgian" certainly Iberian. The synoptics are Byzantine (yawn); but John is family-1, Lake Group. That's one of the groups as transpose the Adultera pericope, in this case after John 21 (itself probably a transpose).

As to the classical Georgian, one possibility is that it precedes Saint George, translating instead a nonByzantine text. Which might, again, be a lectionary text for John.

Neolithic apocalypto

As long as we're going back to 2019 content on this blog; let's check back in on Herxheim. This was notable for a massacre of non-Herxheimers. It wasn't alone.

Central Europe in the Neolithic, when no bronze was known, was united in the Linear Banded Ceramic culture, abbreviated "LBK" because they're Mitteleuropans; therefore, the LBK language. Pottery itself was a fairly new product at the time. This LBK was trundling along fine until the last century of the 5000s BC. This span, by the way, is amenable to dendro' should any logs survive (in peat?) and anyone think to do it - a Miyake had flared 5259 BC, not implicated in the collapse of course but certainly in range of a solid log cabin.

In 5075 BC the town at Vráble set up a citadel within itself. Normally this would hint at an aristocracy organising itself for layers of defence. One kink in this town-plan is that the town was divided into sectors some of which had different customs from the others. This may imply migration from other towns or even from the hunter-gatherer groups, who'd been hustled north of the LBK band when it formed, but weren't dead yet.

A generation later came the beheadings. We haven't found the heads. That is an annoyance since heads usually come with teeth and inner-ear-bones, which we've been using to extract DNA. Enough can be known that these were, in fact, mass executions and not just an ancient cumulative gravesite, nor even the mass grave one might get from a plague. Yersinia, I think, will come to Europe millennia later, with the Cucuteni before the IndoEuropeans, IndoEuropeans also not yet bothering with that Europe place just like they weren't yet in India.

This all reminds me of the Classic Maya. As aristocracies form, not everybody gets to be a high status polygamist. Wars commence. The losers die. Seeing what happens to losers nearby, smarter people in nearer cities figure they might be more comfortable further away. Maybe they go to another town. Now the second town's old guard has Diversity.

Further notable: the ox drawn plow won't arrive until the 4000s BC. This may have spurred a second wave of minor urbanism, including the Cucuteni in the Balkans but not just them; with higher Gini, and the mouse. Achenheim (also infamous) is middle 4000s BC.

34 Tauri

This is probably how Uranus was first spotted in the sky in the first place: when it's in opposition, shining as we are in the way between it and our shared Sun, so closest. But that happens annually. We're hearing about it now because Uranus is in Taurus... again.

In 1690, Flamsteed marked it as "34 Tauri". Every 84 years, it returns to Taurus. It is in Taurus, it seems, it is most visible. In 1775ish it should have been visible there again; Pierre-Charles Le Monnier saw it 1750 through 1769 but didn't connect it to old 34 Tauri (interestingly, by then returning to Tauri). William Herschel, it seems, took the measurements of the thing 1781 - on its way out of its 1690 position - and noticed it looked more like a comet than a star.

I don't know why the Seventh Planet be most-visible when it sails through Taurus, of all zodiacal/elliptic constellations. Darker over there?