Thursday, April 30, 2020

Anti-abortion, not pro-life

When I first encountered the "pro-life" / "pro-choice" debate first hand, was "in college".

(State-side; so we do not say "at uni". Although, technically, this institution of higher-learning did bill itself as a university. But anyway.)

I met up with the pro-choicers first. They were insistent that they were, in fact, pro-choice and that their opponents were against choice. Abortion's opponents, they claimed, were humbugs. The latter owned no principle for human life, as witness their support of war and the death-penalty. Abortion opponents cannot even be said to be religious: the words using religion to take away choice rattled off pro-choice tongues like a printing-press. Instead upon them the pro-choicers imputed patriarchal motives, and also a motive that extramarital sex was a sin and deserved punishment. I add that this view of the pro-life side was the default assumption of the WASPy/Hebraic family which raised me.

Later I hung with the pro-lifers. Their most dedicated adherents were Catholic and female. They had no truck with putative male superiority; in their ranks they claimed Susan Anthony, feminist. I could not see in these women the caricature the pro-choicers had pinned upon them. These pro-lifers knew the pro-choice side better than the reverse. War and the death-penalty could be accommodated in the pro-life framework; every rule has its exceptiones probantes. This made it easier, at the time, to break with my upbringing to side with Life.

That was before SARS 2 / COVID 19.

We are now being treated to a Republican base insistent on "opening the economy NOW". The economy is, in fact, still open; just not as open as it was last year. A lot of what Republican voters say is rhetoric. Sometimes though a Republican pundit will let slip that a few innocent lives, a few myriads of such lives, are expendable.

A MUNUS-Catholic would call herself pro-life and might even mean it. I cannot say this for the Pass The Open The Economy Bill Now Bill supporters. So, why do they oppose abortion, if they don't care about life?

I regret we have to go back to the pro-choicers. I have to concede that some of them must have known a different sort of pro-lifer than the sort standing before our Lord's Table.

That segment of the "pro life" side are supporters of patriarchy if they are seeking a family, or in sticking it to "the roasties" if they are /r9k/ *cels. Demographically many of these are men, but not all of them. The position isn't pro-life and it's certainly not pro-choice; but it can be argued on "neo-reactionary" principle. Which principle this blog doesn't dismiss... but then, this blog prefers not to dress up a position as something it isn't.

OR, 8/9: We cannot rule out a proxy for critarchy generally, erupting after Brown vs. the Board of Education.

And if you are a neo-reactionary who just doesn't GAF, I suggest that you think to why you adopted so harsh a position. I'm guessing it is because you hoped it would protect lives and safeguard your people's legacy. So, let's do that.

It is all a hard pill to swallow; but this pill is ruddy in hue, so must be choked down. As Jeremiah and the Didache wrote, we are for the way of life - or we are for death.

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Upload #195: what we are promised

"The Rebel's Wind" has some finetuning of Ibn Khayyat's chronicle. "Clarity" brings a couple more 68>42 links; one of them strong.

Also I had to fix "Days of Allâh" on account of the conclusion no longer reflecting the 25>45 and, now, 27>45 links. That would be an emergency change. There's 45>32 in there too... this means, that project should be in Throne of Glass. As noted, this change was forced on me, so I cannot claim the project as finished.

This part of this upload I do appreciate is "Provision is from God". Sura 51's links to suwar 25, 27, and 37 were always Problematic with capital P; it disliked the set. It thought much more highly of 11 and 28. I now think it also approves sura 26; and sura 45. (So I've updated "Fire From The Mountain" with a 45>52.) But most of all, I have caught it thumbing a Divine nose at sura 21.

Madrassa.

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Exorcism

Late Antiquity was a demon haunted world and its texts are full of supernatural horror. As Gabriele Boccaccini noted, this came from the Achaemenid Iraq into the greater Semitic Near East; in Judaism, by way of the Enoch tradition. The Dead Sea Scrolls were Enochian, and demon haunted. Christianity is generally considered Enochian, at least by contrast with her sibling Judaism in the mainstream rabbinate.

Jonathan Burke proposes that the Apostolic Christianity of the two early pseudoClements and the Didache was NOT so haunted. Burke notes the "Shepherd" by Hermas as speaking of demons like a psychiatrist would speak of a mentally-ill man's Issues.

Burke raises an exception in Barnabas, which didn't edit the Two Ways dualism in the way the Didache did. He notes Ignatius as believing in the Satan, but not so much in his diabolical gund. I think Burke'd count Justin as leader in the postApostolic Patristics: this one believed that demons might inhabit pagan idols, against 2 Clement. I expect Justin got that from the Gospel of Mark, full of exorcisms, speaking for the community 'roundabout apostle Peter.

First off, these saints knew antichrists enow among men. Only when times were better would the temptation of those times be a problem for the pious, more than the problem of being cat food in the arena. Hierarchy Of Needs, dear fellow.

Also the Patrists, if that's a word, were hooked into urban literacy (like protoIslam later). Apologists like Quadratus - I would include, Aristides and pseudoJustin - made appeal to Greek rationalism; which (by then) granted little space for daimones.

Generally, Christianity inherited Enochian daemonlogy and, of those Christians, most didn't want it. Only when demon-riddled Gospels entered the mainstream, did Christians start to (re)accept it, particularly among the Greeks.

This has implications for the Markan / Petrine sect. Maybe it really was a Galilean village movement. I wonder if the Syriac Gospel which Ignatius quoted had a supernatural element as well.

BACKDATE 4/30

Monday, April 27, 2020

Levänluhta

Fimbulwinter is the Norse term for that apocalyptic three-year winter. For their side, here is the consensus as of the last Christmas Eve. I don’t believe the consensus has changed much [on a personal note, I approve the term “year without the Sun”, which I’ve been using since reading David Keys in 2000]. The Norse identify an ensuing “century of silence”. This reminds me of how Iranian nationalists describe the fall of the Sasanians. Except that where Iran went dark 600-800 AD the Norse suffered 540-640.

We can now talk of Finland. We're not told about Finnish (or Sami, or Eësti) mythology or folklore, as we are for Norse. We're hearing instead about the Sami population as their buried remains report to us, from before the Finns pushed them north.

The University of Helsinki sketches out human bones at Late Antique Levänluhta, at the bend of the Bothnia coast. Turtle Island has a map, from the original. Finland has (famously) many lakes, but fewer at the western edge.

Levänluhta’s inhabitants as of 535 AD, before it all went wrong, were genetic Sami – “Lapp”, to the Norse. The study aims to reconstruct their diet. The study finds fragmentation: some in life ate food from the mainland, others seafood from Bothnia. The lake-district to the east emptied out nearly entirely. But those left behind still came to the local lake … to bury their dead.

One question is whether this lake is what modern Sami call sáiva, likely *sāvjë in those earlier days. The Sami believed these were portals to the next world.

The Finns proper, meanwhile, hail from Estonia. Estonia also collapsed at this time; just like Gene and Högom in (Germannic) Sweden across the bay. If anything the Sami position grew stronger in the late 500s; archeologists call this heyday the "Merovingian" era, maybe because of Frankish imports.

The first Finns in Finland crossed Liekovesi / Kokemäenjoki after 700 AD. These lacked the Sami connexion to Levänluhta’s lake so did not bury their dead here.

Sunday, April 26, 2020

Upload #194: blowing on

"The Rebel's Wind" is new and it was short, so I've been improving that. I even dared reconstruct the source text.

I threw in some more minor changes elsewhere. I found a solid 21>70, which argument I used over a year ago for 21>42 but for whatever reason I neglected for 70; so that's in "The Muṣallûn" now. I also went over sura 72. "Reformer from Pharaoh's Family" now has a 72>40; "Jinn" a 23>72. Both tentative.

Madrassa.

Saturday, April 25, 2020

Neander menopause

To continue the already-continued Nean/Denis comment: Jessica Saraceni offers additional comments, from the Max Planck Institute.

That Neanders clotted better than Africans is of interest, given the cold Eurasian weather, because cold weather already reduces bloodflow. Seems like additional stroke risk for little gain - not to mention, Corona vulnerability.

One might assume that the Eurasians were getting into scrapes more often than were the Africans... but Eurasia didn't have rival tribes (deduced from these communities' DNA), and their animals are dumber than Africa's.

Usually these things cluster in the X chromosome, like the haemophilia. Although here too I cannot see why easier menstruation should matter more in Eurasia than in Africa.

Maybe that much was for childbirth. The men were MILF hunters. That would track from the lower mating prospects.

Friday, April 24, 2020

Upload #193: windchime

I've sketched out sura 83 in "Balance Restored", which further helps "May the Rocks Become Dust" on sura 77. I also found (finally!) a 35 > 50 link, so that's in "Q".

I'm still scratching my head on sura 69. "Blasting the Caliph" now brings in what I was saying last November about 'Uthman's sultanate. On the other hand, I am currently unable to decide the order between suras 54 and 69.

To this end I took a detour into that windstorm of the late 20s/640s - if indeed there was one. I trace this to a Maronite source we no longer have directly. It has come to us (probably) via Theophilus the astrologer of Edessa. So, "The Sinners at Caesarea" must reopen whether Theophilus was a Maroni himself. Spoiler: I don't need to answer that... for the 100s/720s. For the middle first / seventh century however, I'm pretty sure now that he was, or that his own source was. It's good news for those of y'all who bought The Arabs and Their Qur'an, because its case (partly) rested on the middle seventh century Syriac source being Maronite, so skipping the good work Constantine IV was doing. This project is "The Rebel's Wind".

Madrassa.

Thursday, April 23, 2020

A check

If we’re flying or floating – or driving – we need to maintain what we’re running in. Let’s start with flying. Here’s Qantas in 2016, on the fleet they fly.

Line maintenance happens regularly; basically just dipstick tests (and if we never land the ’plane, we might do without wheels entirely). Ye olde B check be for olde modells, replaced by a “heavy maintenance” schedule as needed. For a (very) long flying craft, “line maintenance” can perhaps be done in-flight; heavy maintenance and checks C and beyond will, still, be done in hangars. For C, Qantas talks about every 18 months to two years depending on type of aircraft.

Now: back to our gas planet, Venus. I'd been talking Boeing turbofans as the baseline engine to keep heavy flights aloft (short of the ramjet). These use fuel, so need to refuel. Let us here assume, instead, a battery-powered propeller. Currently such offers less thrust and lift, but should keep aloft for longer. It still needs to rest now and again.

Qantas’ C schedule aligns nicely with Venus’ real year, the 584 day E/V synodic period. I’ve already mooted a floating warehouse, for a scrapyard; mechanics' shops can work just as well for healthy craft needing a turn-off and tune-up. As for line-maintenance: that should be done in-flight, and Venus can even be where the process gets tested.

That leaves the A check. Qantas, for the B[oeing-]737 craft, will park that ’plane every 8-10 weeks: changing filters, lubing hydraulics (I had to look up how to spell that…), and inspecting all the emergency equipment. I’m running the turbine on solar-panels and batteries, so I'd check these too. Under current tech, high-power batteries are solid-state and, therefore, degrade over time. That’s like, what, ten doodz to swarm the ’plane for five hours.

I agree that the filters are a problem; even 70 km above the surface. This particular planet is Venus, quite volcanic and with corrosive gasses even on a good day. Let’s agree on starting the A schedule no less than twenty days, 480 flight hours.

Still: as Qantas describes the A check, that could be done in-flight, too. Spaceflight is all about fixing floaty things.

Those ten guys will harpoon over during the daylight hours, and when the warehouse is nigh. The normal crew and passenger-manifest 'poon elsewhere, not to get underfoot ('though the captain and chief mechanic might stay. . .). Balloons are brought to keep the thing afloat, for the phase when the engine needs turned off.

The pots of winter

This morning I got a few notes about the University of York, finding different cuisines in the hunter-gatherers of Baltic Europe. They found this via pottery. I think pottery and cuisine-types are design-patterns, so count as language; but I'll let that slide for now. The Yorkies note that hunter-gatherers don’t normally do ceramics. Which makes this interesting.

And that’s true… for the PALAEO-lithic. Here, though, the span is the 4000s BC… Neolithic. By this era plenty of ceramic-using farmers had made their homes not far to the south, in the Balkans. Germany too. And Britain.

This to me looks like Black Robe; if you’ve seen that, and you owe it to yourself to see that. Hurons and Mohawks along (what the French call) the Saint Lawrence were a hunter society, at a time when Massachusetts Bay was rife with farming villages. But even the hunters had regular “camps” – which were like Roman castrae, fenced off with wooden stakes. Each “tribe” had its territory wherein to hunker down and defend the women.

In that light, the “hunter gatherers” could make pottery – cheap, quick pottery – and use it over however-long they were going to stay in that territory. When the weather got better and they didn’t need the palisade anymore, they just discarded the pots to return to nomadism.

SOURCE 12/27/22: Caspian, 5000s BC.

As cruel as it sounds

Ace of Spades HQ is today the Kingdom Of Denial, and what would such an empire be without a vizier Joseph: Cruel as this may sound, 60,000 deaths - if that number can even be trusted - cannot, does not and never will justify destroying the lives of 331,000,000 citizens... So, this sentiment.

The lockdown is not, of course, destroying the lives of 331 million. Some of our new shut-ins are even better off, not having to deal with peers who bully them. Others have simply shifted. So here we go again, raking HBDchick's Twitter to present a more-or-less seamless case for not ignoring the obvious.

I agree some lives have been harmed by the lockdown, yes; many of which lives had existing social comorbidities. I feel comfortable using the term "social comorbidity" to this sect of "conservatism", which has waved off sixty thousand deaths (assuredly more than that - and didn't it used to be five hundred deaths?) and hasn't even mentioned the permanent maiming of hundreds of thousands more.

Going a few months without employment is terrible. Dying of Corona is also terrible. The case-fatality alone is trimming eleven years off peoples' lives. Covid is trimming years off survivors' lives too, given the horror-movie effects of this disease (here is how the virus acts). On cost / benefit of going Sweden, versus continuing the efforts to fight this thing: here is University of WY on the maths. Also to be noted is that many states which did the lockdown, including mine (if a little late), are doing better now.

As for where we go from here, this paper suggests 'intermittent lockdown'. Also, mass testing (I don't give a damn if you call me a 'fascist', I haven't been a libertarian in over a decade).

What is NOT on the table is denying the problem, nor in shifting to an anti-life stance such as a conservative would never apply to frightened pregnant women thinking "my life is destroyed".

Fortunately for the cause of life, most Americans agree with me, even most Rightists, and they won't be convinced otherwise at this rate.

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Denisova in Iceland

Here's a deeper study into that 2% of Neander stretches in European genomes; specifically, Iceland: doi 10.1038/s41586-020-2225-9. The claim is that "only" 84.5% of that 2% is true Neander; more, that it might not be all Vindija but could be part Altai. [UPDATE 4/24: still predominant Vindija.] And a 3% of the 2% is Denisovan.

Iceland, like Sardinia, hasn't changed much in the last thousand years. But also like Sardinia this snapshot is of a mixed population. Sardinia turned out about half old European Neolithic and half Punic/Berber. Iceland, although Norse-speaking, is half Irish by race.

My current thought is that the Norse population took on some introgression from Finland before hitting up Ireland and Iceland. The Finns, by Year Zero AD, were a steppe population. The Finns may have had some of their Neander input later, from Altai. And that input could have mixed with Denisova Cave.

BACKDATE 4/23

DONOVAN:

that ydna K2 entered Central Asia from Iran/Pakistan, then travelled clockwise around the Himalayas, into South Asia and then back to Central Asia. This was the only way I could make sense of the distribution and relationships of the K2 haplogroups and associate Q & R with [Ancient North Eurasia]. The problem (until now) was that it predicted a non-zero Denisovan contribution to Europeans…

As with Neander populations being split between Vindija and Altai; "Denisova" is split between that Sibir cave proper and their brethren down the Sundaland. To sort out these patterns we need to decide which archaic genome is which. And we need to look at non-Apache Native Americans. Is the ANE steppe - Mal'ta - the same urheimat as the FinnoUgrics'? The former is Q & R, like the Amerinds and me (respectively). The Finns are N3. That already implies a Pleistocene split.

Also I'd quite like more coverage of old Sardinia, the Iceland of the Mediterranean, to see if they've got the same Denisovan signal as Iceland got. They shouldn't be ANE at all.

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

The Dialogue of the Saviour as secondary gospel-in-progress

The Dialogue of the Saviour exists in a rather mutilated Coptic fragment at Nag Hammadi. As "of the Saviour" it is a composite, from other material that considers Jesus the "Lord" or the "Son". It reserves "Son of Man" for its apocalyptic discourses. Here's Emmel's translation.

The Dialogue's view of our Earth is as a hell, prison of "the archons". For all that the present text may represent a composite (like the Ascension...), it seems consistent on this much. Also consistent is that, of the Twelve Disciples, Jesus doesn't talk to the four Galileans from the Synoptics. The three interlocutors who matter are Mary, Judas [Thomas, one assumes] and Matthew.

Modern scholars deem Jesus' discourses here as primitive, pre-Johannine. I dispute that. The Dialogue recommends a form of "praise" which looks to me like a replacement for the Lord's Prayer in Luke, Matthew, and the Didache. When the disciples ask about the mustard seed, this looks like Matthew 17:20 or maybe the parable / similitude Mark 4:30–32. What is "born of truth", against born of woman, looks like 1 John 4 (John 18 too). The lamp of the body is the mind reflects Matthew 6:22–23, where the lamp is the eye.

The Dialogue's Mary cites Thus with respect to 'the wickedness of each day,' and 'the laborer is worthy of his food,' and 'the disciple resembles his teacher.'. The wickedness of each day looks like a nod to Matthew 6:34. The workman is worthy of his meat, is Matthew 10:10 against 1 Timothy 5:18 / Luke 10:7. A disciple is not above the teacher, and everyone fully trained will be like his teacher is Luke 6:40; a parallel is Matthew 10:24 A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. John 13 (then 15) develops that No servant is greater than his master. Note, in the latter, the total mutual ignorance between the Dialogue and the Johannine tradition.

As for such moral precepts as one finds in James and Aristides: the Dialogue doesn't care, unless they can be used for mysticism.

We could talk of "the Oral Tradition" or "Q" (I don't think John used Matthew), but we're here for the Dialogue. I suspect, for that author, some harmony of the canon Synoptic gospels. Matthew being most important.

The Dialogue looks like a sketch, based on Matthew, what John was to complete for its own sources. Except that John became a full gospel of its own.

For internet quarantine: Ace of Spades edition

Sorry about the 'ronaposting. But.

A pattern among wishful-thinkers is to find, and tout, outliers; and ignoring such studies as show a contrary opinion. In this case, that "contrarian" opinion - that is, the correct opinion - is that this virus be deadly to some, long-term deleterious to many, and contagious to all.

Recently a study came out of Stanford. Ace posted "50 to 85 Times as Many People May Have Been Exposed to Coronavirus Than Who Have Tested Positive for It, Indicating That the Chinese Flu is Far Less Deadly Than Models Suggest". (Don't fret about the "flu" bit; Ace knows and he knows his audience knows it's a corona.) It turns out that this study is a bad joke, to the extent apologies are being demanded.

There exist ways to support our defence against this plague without being a Leftist. In fact, I'd argue that there are many such ways: stopping immigration is certainly one. Also, commentary supporting Medicare For All simply doesn't mesh with a unionised nursing staff (which I do support). Imagine during the next plague if the nurses strike. Mind you, first Right sites need to build a reputation for non-foolish content...

We learnt in 2008 that Ace's site goes stupid when times are tough. In mid October 2008, the economy got into a tailspin; after that, Obama looked likely to beat McCain and (more to the point) Palin. As a result Ace and his co-bloggers went grasping at straws to stop this Leftist from taking over. 23 October 2008, a post came out on blogspot, "Great Moments in Election-Year Blogging", to summarise the paranoia; though you'll have to wayback that one to read it. I was hoping the pattern wouldn't still hold, twelve years later.

Here's a tip for fellow Rightists or "Right-adjacent" commenters: if the "consensus" looks useful to the globalist Left only, like "global warming", it may well be political bullshit. But if the consensus concerns a visible danger to the whole human race, and its political repercussions require a rethink from both sides, like - I dunno - a transmissible plague - then, take the consensus seriously. And watch out for the hoaxers in one study appearing in sequelîs.

I flat don't have the time or energy to rebut every broken study that might get floated on any given site. One study (like Epstein's) will be quashed in three days, but by that point the linker site will latch onto some other one. Now that we know the pattern at Ace's particular site, we know to avoid that for the duration. . . Like The Plague.

In the meantime, whilst we're awaiting that apology from Ace : the same holds, physical distancing, testing, contact tracing. Steve Sailer, hardly a Leftist, recommends pulse oximeters. If you question the lockdowns (Doherty offers sympathy - and I'm not disputing that), you'd best be supporting those alternatives.

If however your take is to deny the problem, then prepare for nurse counterprotests and for a complete lack of sympathy on my part. If you want to call that Stasi, then call me "Karen".

UPDATE 5/15 - oh yeah, Ace was fucking had.

Monday, April 20, 2020

The delay in plant life

Cyanobacteria - "blue green algae" - does photosynthesis. But when did these become chloroplasts, enabling plants?

Eliane Evanovich Jr. and Joao Farias Guerreiro Sr. offer an answer: 1342 Mya, on the other end 3225 million years after the solar-system formed.

You can see that this "Late Mesoproterozoic" is already well into the Earth's lifespan. Plants are only, what, twice as old as the Ediacaran fauna. The Earth might not have had much of a dynamo, and the sun was colder; but we already had a moon, and this part of space wasn't being hit by meteors so much.

Evanovich and Guerreiro say that a chloroplast needs zinc and molybdenum. Earth had oceans by then, but not the zinc or the moly'. Last May, the University of Münster reported that the molybdenum in our upper mantle came from the outer solar system. But I don't hear that it got here so recently. The Münstermen were thinking Theia, which is known to have come at us from an outer orbit - although that study was less clear on how far out.

So I guess some volcanoes churned it back up and into the oceans, with the zinc.

Aristides

During the Antonine Era, Christians attracted the notice of Roman authors like Pliny, Tacitus, and Suetonius. The Roman authorities asked the Christians what they believed and why their beliefs should be tolerated. In western Anatolia, those beliefs were NOT tolerated; but elsewhere matters went a little better. Two Christians, Aristides and Quadratus, composed apologetics for this audience.

Quadratus didn't survive. But Aristides did: in a Syriac translation and, abridged, in a story about India (of all places).

Aristides took a tactic of pulling down other gods, rather than promote his own. He presents Christianity as a sect of Israel, which had moved into Egypt and received a Torah. This much was the default consensus of the Pagan Near East, between Ptolemy of Mendes and the second-century Bible. Christianity, for him, is a scriptural faith (ch. 2, 15). Among its writings, in ch. 2, is "the gospel"; a code of conduct is laid out ch. 15. The "gospel" is a creed, as follows:

The Christians, then, trace the beginning of their religion from Jesus the Messiah; and he is named the Son of God Most High. And it is said that God came down from heaven, and from a Hebrew virgin assumed and clothed himself with flesh; and the Son of God lived in a daughter of man. This is taught in the gospel, as it is called, which a short time ago was preached among them; and you also if you will read therein, may perceive the power which belongs to it. This Jesus, then, was born of the race of the Hebrews; and he had twelve disciples in order that the purpose of his incarnation might in time be accomplished. But he himself was pierced by the Jews, and he died and was buried; and they say that after three days he rose and ascended to heaven. Thereupon these twelve disciples went forth throughout the known parts of the world, and kept showing his greatness with all modesty and uprightness. And hence also those of the present day who believe that preaching are called Christians

This shares much with other creeds: Jesus was buried, and ascended. The Virgin Birth sounds like Matthew with a hint of John 1 and Philippians 2. The twelve disciples going out to preach to "the known parts of the world" sounds like Matthew's Great Commission.

Although... no tomb (we are sorely missing the Greek here!). And the ascension sounds immediate, without the appearances to the disciples. That Jesus was "pierced" is a Psalm 22 touch, wholly alien to Paul and to the Synoptic gospels, which all preach Christ crucified, only; the Johannine-Ignatian nails and that spear are inserted by Romans and not Jews. "After three days" is the sign of Jonah and, I think, not in our canon gospels either, where Jesus rises on the third day or even the next.

As to the code of conduct, this much is Decalogue - or even sura 17:

For they know and trust in God, the Creator of heaven and of earth, in whom and from whom are all things, to whom there is no other god as companion, from whom they received commandments which they engraved upon their minds and observe in hope and expectation of the world which is to come. Wherefore they do not commit adultery nor fornication, nor bear false witness, nor embezzle what is held in pledge, nor covet what is not theirs. They honour father and mother, and show kindness to those near to them; and whenever they are judges, they judge uprightly.

This blends into such morals as are more sectarian. The Golden Rule: whatsoever they would not that others should do unto them, they do not to others; The Luke / Matthew Sermon: And their oppressors they appease (lit: comfort) and make them their friends; they do good to their enemies. The Johannine Commandment is here they love one another; as is Mark, they call them brethren without distinction... ; for they do not call them brethren after the flesh, but brethren after the spirit and in God. Some of these actions derive from the precepts of their Messiah.

Paul's nuance in 1 Corinthians is rejected: and of the food which is consecrated to idols they do not eat, for they are pure. This is like the Clementine Homilies and the Quran, again.

Such codes of conduct look like the Didache or like the Two-Ways list in Barnabas. Examples from Jesus' life are absent. Which is not to dismiss that a narrative Gospel might lie behind some of this.

Sunday, April 19, 2020

The Isaiah tradition as Matthew prologue

Twelve months back I looked at Warren Campbell 2018, on an Isaiah apocryphon, the "Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah" (MAI). Campbell deemed it a conscious "pre-quel" to Matthew. He observes that Justin knew Isaiah's fate as a type for Christ, in Trypho 120, whether from this text directly or not.

This text as it survives is mostly stable, excepting 11:2-22 which is fluid. Internally it looks like a composite. The biography of Isaiah - his Passion, in fact - runs ch. 1-5 excepting 3:13-4:22, a "testament of Hezekías" (=Hezeqiah; we do own the Greek for that). Then follows from ch.6 a heavenly vision, like Enoch's. UPDATE 1/26/22: We return to the hacksaw at the five-chapter base, elsewhere.

Andrew K Helmbold, "Gnostic Elements in the “Ascension of Isaiah", New Testament Studies 18.2 (1972), 222f. had offered other intertext: here, in that "Vision" section.

Whoso composed this section, concluded Helmbold, was a gnostic. The author's scripture included Thomas 37. The Vision mostly agreed with the Apocryphon of John. Also implicated: "On The Creation Of The World" and the Hymn of the Pearl. The haeresiologists saw these motifs with Basilides and the Ophites. [INTERJECT 4/1/23: Acts of John?] Presumably the final editor was, like the Nag Hammadi monks, at least gnosis-curious.

Helmbold does not see this stuff drifting into chapters 1-5 ... excepting the Hezekías interpolation. That interpolation, as luck would have it, appears in the Amherst papyrus. Since Hezekías refers to the Vision, that papyrus witnesses to the whole text at least to 11:1. Campbell doesn't see that interpolation as owning any independent life of its own, instead citing scholarship that it parallels Jewish legend. The editor, then, composed that.

As for the Matthean material Campbell finds, they exist in all three or four segments: Hezekías, chapters 1-5, chapters 6-10, and 11:2-15. 11:2-15 isn't attested outside Ethiopic, and Hezekías is likely the last composed.

Excepting those regions, the only Vision parallel to Matthew is 9:17, on people who "ascend" with Christ on the third day. Campbell's table marks that as "Matthew only"; the discussion claims it has to do with the Resurrection Of The Saints. But maybe it has to do with the Gospel Of Peter. If we're dealing with Christian gnosticism, then I agree it all postdates Matthew; but this part of the "Ascension" seems not to relate to Matthew's somatic resurrection, but to something mystical - note the absent tomb. As pre-Paul doctrine goes, this agrees with 1 Corinthians' creed (with a burial) against Philippians'.

I note that Justin was unaware of the visionary lore here. Campbell doesn't see a direct quote but if not from this text, it is difficult to see to what other text.

Still, I don't see the bulk of chapters 1-5 (excepting Hezekías) going out by itself. If this OT pseudepigraph were not composed for the Vision, it would have gone out as the first book in a collection. Matthew's Gospel would have naturally followed - that, or some exegetical expansion (Justin was famously fond of such). Then, perhaps, other Matthew-like martyr material: 1 Peter would be natural, or Ignatius' letter to Rome. I'm thinking something like those codices at Nag Hammadi, or like Jacobowici's Syriac collection with "Asenath" in it. I am definitely looking at fraught western Anatolia.

Mark is not John's fanfiction

Fan-fiction is an intertext. Star Wars comics had stories address narrative discrepancies - the fabled Kessel Run, we all remember. There's such a thing as ANTIfan fiction, as well - like Psychohistorical Crisis. Among the children of Israel, Biblical fan-fiction is "Midrash". We have this in Christendom as well.

In John are "anomalies" crossing John 19-20. For one example Mary sees the empty tomb, then reports to Peter "we" saw it. (Thus Francis Watson in "A Gospel of the Eleven".) One can imagine, out of John, a story of Mary bringing in other women to check out her story, and then going to the men.

We don't see these defects in the Gospel Kata-Markon and the "Epistle of the Apostles". Nor do we see midrash upon them. These authors present the rolling stone and and Mary's chaperones, or omit all of it. The EA may involve itself in harmony, as it treated Peter in between Matthew and John 1-20. In Powell's theory, Mark dislikes John; Powell would perhaps argue that Mark aims to fix that narrative, and replace it.

My concern: why should Mark have to? That the Kata-Joannes has discrepancies at all suggests its authors and editors (clumsily) had skipped or censored details along its way to us. Powell finds the intertext in controversy over Peter. These are not John's points of narrative editorial work.

I see in Mark and John 1-20 no hint of direct dependence between them. Mark might still be "The Second Gospel" but John in this form isn't the first, either.

Paul's letter to the Judaeans

Synoptic problems abound in ancient anonymous literature. Through a triangulation process, one can figure the common source. John Dominic Crossan did this for the Passion.

Some Gospels' sources extend to the burial, Peter's knowledge of the resurrection, and lastly the appearance of Jesus which - they insist - was "somatic".

I keep harping on this, but also shared is The Problem Of Peter, who denied Christ and now asserts himself as leader. Evan Powell must be correct that both John 1-20 and Mark 1-16+John 21 react to that - differently. John presents Peter as a satanic, Judas-like failure; Mark defends Peter from exactly that.

John, for his part, has narrative gaps. These include the never-sealed tomb and that one female witness telling Peter about other witnesses with her. These gaps don't implicate Peter; they don't refute Mark. So John and Mark must relate to an earlier source.

Moving to the aftermath, Mark drops off at 16:8 and leaves John 20 to report on Jesus' visit to the disciples. Luke, here, joins in. Ignatius' letter to Smyrna (I don't care if it's authentic) quotes a third source.

John has more gaps here. But so does Luke. Luke has Peter taking the lead, John asserting it. Then Jesus appears to the disciples - in both cases, omitting Peter by name. Only Ignatius, quoting that noncanonic gospel, presents a coherent pericope. This involves those with Peter.

That first postResurrection tradition, which Mark does not quote - per Powell, Mark wrote John 21 instead - was, like John 21, pro-Petrine. It was not the shared antiPetrine source behind Mark and John.

There's no reason the AntiPetrine Gospel must include a post-Resurrection apparition... nor an empty tomb [UPDATE 5/6 and if it did have one, like John had one, someone must race Peter to it]. As a polemic it might even not have been in narrative form; it might have been a quick epistle to various churches condemning Peter. I think, though, it did so in Christian terms such that its community did assume a Resurrection. At the least it had to address the creed behind 1 Corinthians 15 in the early 50s AD. It would present Peter's experience as asomatic in that case. Like the Secret Book.

Did Paul write this? I don't detect that Paul disliked ol' Rocky himself; Paul mainly worried about James. Maybe this was a later extremist.

No sulfites please

Last month I read about some enterprising soul making moonshine out of CO2. It being early spring, and under the initial stages of quarantine, my thoughts turned to Venus. Venus' challenge is - the surface is dry, and alcohols need hydrogen. On 31 March, I mused about swapping expensive water for some other compound. We could dissolve that in CO2 as liquid, which is after all supposed to be a solvent.

Venus would provide sulfuric acid or - better - hydrogen sulfide. 2 CO2 + 3 H2S could yield C2H5OH. From that, I expect the three sulfur ions and three oxygen would recombine to various sulfur oxides.

Actually various CO2 / H2S mixes should yield all manner of alcohols and glycols.

H2S is in no danger of freezing at 250 K; that part of the diagram is like a near-vertical wall. The alcohol, also, shouldn't freeze - nor should sulphuric acid, if that's made (we're planning on that breaking up again). If water is created in that mix, that will freeze out eventually, but ... water / alcohol mixes stay wet in your freezer (I'm told vodka freezes at 246 K). I expect the same of trace water in 250 K CO2 alongside the booze we're trying to make.

Anyway if I've got the mix right, at the end I should have a tipple that Contains Sulfites. I figure Üllo.

On 3 April I questioned the saturation-point of H2S gas dissolved in pure liquid CO2. That is: can we ever get a CO2:H2S ratio of 2:3. May have to add extra solvent just to submerge the stink gas. Again, I don't recommend sulphuric acid. Extra water, neither; I worry it might react with the hydrogen-sulfide to make acids and free hydrogen. So, like Thror's Ring, it needs booze to make booze.

... and then last night, I had a bad feeling about C2H5SH. I looked it up and - yea, it exists. It's the mercaptan ethyl. Not the most toxic of chemicals, compared to other sulphur compounds; but also not something we want to ingest.

I declare this project beyond my abilities as a chemist, and will recommend using water on Venus to make this sort of alcohol. Or just fermenting sugars from the farm bubbles.

Saturday, April 18, 2020

Epistula Apostolorum as a secondary

Francis Watson in "A Gospel of the Eleven", co-ed. Sarah Parkhouse, Connecting Gospels: Beyond the Canonical/non-canonical Divide, brings another witness to the Resurrection and what happened next: the Epistle of the Apostles. Let's evaluate that.

The EA is, unlike Mark, known to be late. The EA knows at least three of our gospels. (Luke is the least-used, per Watson 205-6. Watson thinks the EA treats Luke as secondary but, like for Papias, I'd not rule out the independent "L" tradition.) Given the intertext, this allows that the EA is running a harmony like Tatian and/or the commentary-tradition leading to Justin. If Mark wasn't aware of John's spottiness, and if EA accepted Mark too; EA would take Mark as pretext to drop this doubt.

The EA's Post-Resurrection parallels that in John 20 and Luke 24. Here Jesus appears, to the women at the very tomb no less (take that, Mark!). The risen Lord aims to deny that he is now a ghost, an "asomatic daemon" as (deutero?-)Ignatius would put it. Jesus then meets the former disciples daring them to touch him and find out. Canonically, only Thomas will take him up on that, earning him the title "Doubter".

But if we're to believe Ignatius, the Christians in Smyrna assumed that at least "those with Peter" could vouch for Jesus' corporeality as well. Ignatius even brings a written Gospel in support - albeit, as Jerome pointed out, one uncanonical later.

The EA was a west Anatolian document (pdf), and - depending on its date - may have been Smyrna's scripture for the Resurrection.

The EA, as it happens, has Peter (himself!) touching Jesus' nail marks (p. 202). The nails represent a shared Ignatian / Johannine detail; Peter touching their trace is not such a detail (and John 20 won't even place Peter there).

As to why the EA brings Peter to join in Thomas' skepticism: this presents a medium for the Fisherman between Matthew's exaltation and John 20's excommunication. All the disciples are equal, now. What I don't necessarily see is space for Luke, who'd omitted the nails and the touching. Luke in the latter sports a gap like John's: people think Jesus is with Peter, then Jesus meets with "the disciples" except, presumably, Judas and omits Peter by name too.

Instead I suspect that the Epistula Apostolorum resorted to that Syriac Gospel also in use at Smyrna, which had both nails and touching, in association with Peter. The EA's main gospels were Matthew and John. (As noted above Mark is had only through Matthew.) What applies to Luke also applies to the Syriac Gospel: I concede the EA knew them, but it held them equally - in third place, to supply additional detail. If Smyrna had the EA, Ignatius did them one better by quoting one of its sources.

Friday, April 17, 2020

Upload #192: shooting the elephant

I think sura 105's parallels are from liberal paraphrase of the Qurân's Sodom stories - without Lot. New (short) project - "Sodom's Elephant". So that sura is another late one.

Madrassa.

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Upload #191: what is hidden and revealed

I found where Geyer had laid out sura 78's strophic structure so, "Concern for the Kingdom" has that now.

The main reason for this: I hadn't looked at sura 67's thirty verses this season. Given all the attention recently paid to the suwar around it, I figured it was about time I took another run through this one. I couldn't find sura 67 citing much more than I'd already found for it, but I did catch it using earlier suwar in the same way as did another sura: specifically, #13. This is as how my House of War caught sura 22 following #14's path. So: "Building the Seven Heavens". "Test of Man" also has a 13>76, for all that matters.

Madrassa.

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

When Paul was a heretic

The Westar Institute, associated with the Jesus Seminar, hosts Jason Beduhn's "The Contested Authority of Paul" from Forum 8.2 (Fall 2019), 109-32. (UPDATE 3/10/22: PDF of pp. 74-167 used to be at www.westarinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Forum-82.pdf but not now.)

Westar being Westar, a skeptical view of all first- and second-century literature is adopted throughout. For Ignatius, Beduhn follows 19th century Cureton in restricting his canon to Romans, Polycarp, and Ephesians. (Thus eliminating my favourite, Smyrnaeans 1-7.) 1 Clement is left to the second century, as is James. And of course there is no question of accepting the Pastorals or 2 Peter at face value.

However we would date these, Beduhn is at his best explaining how each text depends upon Paul. 1 Clement cites 1 Corinthians (and Romans) to... Corinth. Likewise - Beduhn says - Ignatius writing to Ephesus, although not citing Paul's own "Ephesians", does refer to Paul's other letters. This is done to please the locals who care about Paul even where others don't. Apostolic Fathers, the Acts of Paul, 2 Peter, and the Pastorals don't engage Paul's theology; they just raise him up as a saint, like how our Christians promote Jefferson and Madison as Bible-thumpers. UPDATE 3/10/22: Well: so Beduhn. Acts of Paul might actually engage 1 Timothy in light of Paul's sexual egalitarianism. At issue is 1 Timothy which, in its own turn, revives the gender-roles of Corinth; exactly against Paul (and against Marcion; unsure where's Montanus here).

Beduhn is also correct to suspect "Pauline" language as common property. Paul may have seeded the community with such language, now cant; but equally he could have been so seeded earlier. What to make of "inherit the kingdom of God", for instance. That is a Psalm 37 adaptation which any post-Crucifixion Torah-reader could have stumbled upon by himself. The freakin' Koran adapted this.

We do know one early Christian who approved Paul: Marcion.

That's the point where early Christians start noticing Paul for his own sake. The Pseudo Clementine literature is notorious. But also James' letter is antiPauline. Beduhn reckons much antiPauline literature, including James, as reaction to Marcion. (Beduhn further cites Luedemann, "Opposition to Paul", 155–68 for Hegesippus overturning 1 Corinthians 2:9 although Hegesippus is more likely a Pastoral Pauline attacking misuse of the logion.) And much antiMarcionite literature has simply disappeared over the centuries. Probably because it too scoffed at Paul.

I think, though, that Ignatius takes Paul's theology more seriously than Beduhn lets on. Ignatius inherited Paul's view of martyrdom as imitatio christi, and on church unity as a Divine gift. Ignatius also adapted Paul's distinction between flesh and spirit: for Ignatius, they are at odds, and salvation involves overcoming that distinction. See here Richard I Pervo, The Making of Paul, 137-8.

(And now I'm wondering what Papias made of the man.)

If Paul's letters before Ignatius circulated in a minority sect of Christendom, that would at least explain how the Colossians-"Ephesians" group acquired its monopoly over the official collection. The Pastorals had more trouble entering that canon, like Paul's Acts. Marcion's own edition of that collection (he calls "Ephesians", "Laodicaeans") sports prologues which nearly became canon themselves, and still survive.

BACKDATE 4/18

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

He appeared to them

Nishant Xavier over on OnePeterFive brings Josephus, the infamous 'Testimonium Flavianum'. Unlike most, he brings in the Patristic witness to same: Eusebius and Jerome among others. So, let's see where the TF stands in scholarship today.

I found "a note" in Italian, by fellow Guiseppe, Petrantoni. Some have argued that the TF depends on Luke. The fulfilment of prophecy is a Luke (and Justin) theme of the postResurrection appearances; not Ignatian. Petrantoni's philology notes that, for Michael the Syrian, Jesus "is seen" by his disciples. It's all phainein: ḥzy and ẓhr, for Semites. But as always, things happen in the passive voice:

it is one thing to say that Christ "appeared [aor. ἐφάνη from φαίνω, perf. ẓahara l-]", it is quite another to say that he did himself "was seen [Syr. etḥazey]" by his disciples, since the sensory experience is absolutely different. In the first case, the agent, Christ, seems to embody a vision, it is the same that presents itself in the presence of others; in the second, however, all verbal meaning is shifted to the disciples who they have the material experience of seeing, verifying, the presence of Christ among them since they are manifested as apparition, vision.

Petrantoni thinks Agapius' Arabic witness may translate Theophilus of Edessa Callirrhoë which Michael, later, twists. Petrantoni goes on that Theophilus' language is precise, in parallel with Matthew 1:20 and 2:13 on visions; and not on cameos in the flesh. For Josephus this was that bodiless daemon whom all three Christian narratives exist to deny. Theophilus, then, said ḥzy in the perfect. Given that Theophilus was wholly orthodox: this is what the man had read in his own base Syriac from Josephus, against interest.

That apparitional - dare I say, asomatic - reading rules out Luke and anything like Luke (John and Ignatius, the Epistula Apostulorum...). This follows more the 1 Cor 15 creed. Atkins notes in Doubt of the Apostles that the Prophets as superior over physical witness is common to second-century Christian apologetic, like Justin in the first Apology - although Justin will cite Luke's physical resurrection to Trypho. Petrantoni instead finds ἐφάνη in Mark 16:9.

Petrantoni thinks a docetist in the community of Mark's "Longer Ending" interpolated Josephus. An early Pauline would also be acceptable.

I think, though, to the degree docetists were the sort of Christians most integrated with Gentile society, whom Greek Christians like Ignatius had to confront (UPDATE 3/25/22 maybe not Luke yet); that these were the sources Josephus had in Rome. Also: didn't Josephus do his own Aramaic? at least for the War - Syriac exists for book VI, at minimum. Suppose the Syriac came from a preChristian Aramaic version - loose in Iraq mayhap. As Erasmus found of the Johannine Comma, any interpolation in some text of language A rarely would enter B's copies.

PESHITTA 7/14: consider Mark 14:64 in the normative Nestorian tradition. Jesus here asks, metḥazé, against the Greek phainetai which as mentioned should be ẓahara or maybe even a cognate of Arabic sh-b-h. No clue what the Paul of Tella / Ḥarqlean NT had here; nor am I privy to the Old Syriac much less Palaestinian. Anyhoo. This translation (which does not translate our Greek) has Jesus shift the experience to the observer.

Monday, April 13, 2020

The first Palestinians

In 1909, Shimon Moyal born in Jaffa but living in Egypt attempted An Arabic-Zionist Talmud. Moyal's project was to present "the Talmud" as a nationalist and Zionist text, and at the same time as congenial to Christians and Muslims.

"The Talmud" here would be the Iraqi text, not the Palestinian. That Iraqi Talmud was not Zionist, except incidentally. It came out of a diaspora community seeing itself as "Bavli" - the neo-exiles in a neo-Aramaic neo-Babylon. It was however nationalist. Katzenelson would understand.

Moyal was inspired, if you will, by Arabs who were spreading about that this Talmud saw goyim as something like semi-feral domestic beasts. Plus ça change. This fear was greatest in places like Jaffa which noticed a Zionist tendency among Jews outside Palestine. Some of which Jews were, like Moyal, Palestinian by birth.

Inasmuch as the Iraqis were free of a Christian state, the Jews there circa AD 500 had let some slanders against Jesus bar Maryam into their Talmud. There is also the occasional comment about the people the Jews lived around, some good, some... not so much. You can go to Unz for Israel Shamir's critiques of the worst of the worst, among several others'.

But I am not here to judge The Jews; especially not those of Late Antiquity, which era made monsters of everyone. (I believe the Jews are past that.) I am here to bear witness to what Palestinians circa 1900 might have heard about the Jews. If these modern polemics were around then, Palestinians would have worried about what a nativist and supremacist cult might do if put in charge over their home province. The Ottomans might have been multicultural in the 1700s; they were going Turk and Islamic by 1900. If non-Turks were to take over Palestine, these Farangi would not have the same pro-Muslim bias as the Turk had held. And they might prefer Jews over Arabs.

Some Muslims and Arabophones have not got past Late Antiquity, for whatever reason.

That, then, was the Palestinian Muslim project in 1900: to rally the non-Muslim Arabophones. They already had their common enemy.

BACKDATE 4/14

Sunday, April 12, 2020

He is risen indeed

It doesn't feel like it on this frozen morn, especially to us in the Catholic tradition; but today we commemorate the bodily resurrection of our Lord Jesus. [I suppose for our Greek brethren, it feels even less like a Palm Sunday.]

That our Lord came to Earth, died, and rose again forms the core of any good Neolithic belief-system. Christianity is no different. Mark's Gospel cuts out before it gets this far (unless you count John 21 as the rest of Mark 16); and Matthew's Gospel... well, let's not get into that. I wish here to bring in three witnesses to the same event: Luke, John 20, and... Ignatius.

We've considered Ignatius earlier as one who may or may not have read the Gospel of Matthew. It turns out that Ignatius had a parallel to Luke as well. In his letter to Smyrna, Ignatius argues for the physical resurrection - instead of just asserting it, as 2 John v. 7. Ignatius knows his physical resurrection from "the Gospel", which may or may not be a written text.

"To the Smyrnaeans" is a written text. It writes of events under Pontius Pilate and Herod the tetrarch, in its incipit. And here is what is written for chapter 3:

When, for instance, He came to those who were with Peter, He said to them, Lay hold, handle Me, and see that I am not an incorporeal spirit [Gk. daimonion asomaton]. And immediately they touched Him, and believed, being convinced both by His flesh and spirit [Gk. pneuma]. For this cause also they despised death, and were found its conquerors. And after his resurrection He ate and drank with them, as being possessed of flesh, although spiritually He was united to the Father.

Ignatius is assured that you also hold the same opinions, in Smyrna.

Usually this account is considered as from Luke. Luke knows the younger Herod as tetrarch where Mark thinks he is king. John 1-20 (characteristically) implies that Peter did not deserve a visit from Jesus; this visit happens also-implicitly Luke 24:34-6 (explicitly Matthew, and John 21). Jesus' challenge for all to touch his body is Luke 24:39, where in John 20:27 this is to Thomas only. That Jesus ate with the soon-to-be-apostles is Luke 24:41 (and John 21:15). [UPDATE 10 Sept. 2022] And Luke's whole point was the migration of the Divine pneuma from Jerusalem to Rome, at some violence to the Pauline Canon.

Ignatius has a few details not in Luke. We can start with daimonion asomaton, a non-Lukan term ... and non-Ignatian except for this letter. Ignatius doesn't mention the fulfilment of prophecy (nor the Ascension) as Luke does - or as will Justin in Apology 50 and in Trypho 53 (+63, for the Ascension). Only in Ignatius and, for Thomas alone, in John do Jesus' disciples take the man up on his offer to touch him. Also, by pneuma, Ignatius can mean "spirit"; but to convince the disciples corporeally, more likely is that they had felt Jesus' literal breath - a detail in John 20. In no Gospel narrative does post-resurrection Jesus drink, but Peter recollects as much in retrospect Acts 10:41 (> Justin Trypho 51).

One can, therefore, argue equally that Ignatius relies here upon a tradition from which John and Luke both drew. Pier F Beatrice in 2006 (doi 10.1163/156853606777065323) argued that Ignatius was quoting a "Gospel according to the Hebrews" - from an early translation from its original Aramaic. Jerome would later re-translate the whole thing into Greek and Latin but, it seems, did not have these copied.

ONE MORE 5/2 - I wonder also if Matthew had some knowledge of this event. In Matthew 28:8 Jesus tells the women to inform the disciples. In v. 9, he met "them" - the women again, or the disciples? - to tell them, "tell my brothers to meet me in Galilee". There, v. 17, they pay him homage "but some doubted". This doubting isn't detailed. So: intertextual strain. Mark 16 and John 21 cannot account for this. It's either Luke or that other source mentioned here.

Saturday, April 11, 2020

Upload #190: a lamp

Several trans-72 suwar have turned out to be late. In that light I've updated "Remember the Reminder" on sura 81, for a strong 26>81 link.

I noticed some flags around sura 78 as well. But where sura 74 drifts between 71 and 25; I think this one is squarely between suras 71 and 13. Yet another anti-Yazîd candidate for House of War. "A Concern for the Kingdom".

UPDATE 4/12 - Huh, forgot "May The Rocks Become Dust" on sura 77, which had claimed this one knew sura 78. That's the wrong way 'round. Fixing it makes that tiny project, tinier. Also relevant here I added a 18>78 link to "Concern".

Madrassa.

Friday, April 10, 2020

Crete

The Greek myths were presented to Rome via the Classical Culture - Ionian and Attic. As such, they share the bias of Ionia and Athens. Arcadia and Cyprus, to a point.

From a Balkan viewpoint, Crete is the world turned upside-down. In the north, summer and winter have the connotations we know in North America. In Crete, "winter" is the good season, with pomegranates, and flowering plants including the narcissus.

Old European Culture proposes an ancient war between Crete and the Greeks, which Crete - at first - won. (Until they didn't.) Athens remembered how Minos abducted mainlanders for the labyrinth.

Another myth was the abduction of Persephone. O.E.C. notes that the Persephone myth is full of Cretan imagery.

Seen from outside, Crete stole fertility from the Balkans like Minos stole young men. Crete's true king was the Lord Of Hell - he was Hades.

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Discordance

I am trying not to make this blog yet another virus blog. I am not an epidemiologist or microbiologist, nor even a hobbyist in those fields. I like to imagine I've been pretty good lately at discussing other topics. But if other non-specialists are to opine on this topic then I'll put in a marker.

Specifically I need to address the Rightist commentary, usually best summarised over at Ace of Spades. Ace was on-point about the virus... until yesterday. His shift has allowed his "cob-loggers" likewise to call for the lifting of the lockdown.

[I am aware that overall the Right, Ace's audience, aren't as concerned nor as affected by this disease as are the Left. The American Right is caricatured as rural and white, which isn't wholly fair; but it does have its core in lightly-populated regions, by contrast with New York City. And for the past generation the Right and the Left in this country have diverged at an identitarian level - we are discordant. Before any Leftists get on their high horse about "X-ism" or "Y-phobia", look to yourselves about whether you have ever uttered "this is not who we are". My point here is: Ace and most of his cob-loggers are urbanites, and northeast at that. So they're in the same plague boat as the Left.]

Ace is still on-point that we need a plan for when the lockdown is lifted. The later we wait, the less skilled the, what, third of the country unemployed becomes. We don't want to become the paranoid Counterpart mirror-world, nor chaotic modern Libya.

Further - with all respect to Csefalvay - Ace discussed the models' relationship with current Social Distancing!, yesterday. Those models already take SD!!1 into account. Yes, we're beating those models. (Although Csefalvay is right to slap Chris Hayes around.) Where the models may fall down on the other side is that we're undercounting COVID deaths.

In the meantime, Gregory Cochran was more right earlier. He endorses that the IHME models are too rosy. Maybe the US (outside the worst-hit cities) isn't a total disaster area ... yet. How about we keep it that way?

Ben Winegard, observing Singapore's failure, says we need a vaccine. Here is the current status on those.

Dating the ceramic age

After, they say, two decades of hope, our nanotech is good enough to date clay pots. At least, if the pots had stored organic fluids. Those fluids seep into the clay's pores, which we can now get at.

So far tested is a Neolithic pot from a London suburb, at 3600 BC. Not long after the first Farmers projected 4000 BC... very roughly.

Pots, themselves, follow a pattern to an extent they are symbolic - they represent a language. Here is how we can finetune the arrival of Bell Beakers.

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

The coup against Jacob

During the 800s BC, some Israelite based in Samaria composed a romance concerning the career of local patriarch Joseph. Joseph, the favoured of Jacob and brother of Judah and Benjamin, was handed over to servitude in Egypt. Doing well there, Joseph was able to turn the tables on his wicked brothers and absentee father. Joseph begat Ephraim and Manasseh, patriarchs of the two major clans of the Samaria region.

The Documentary-Theorists propose that someone commissioned an "Elohist" among others to bring all the ancient pre-Exodus legends into an early edition of our Bible's kernel. Its "Genesis" became a national epic for ALL Israel. (Most credit Josiah of Judah with this collection. Guillaume Durocher claims Jews under the Ptolemies. Note that Durocher's focus starts with the Law - the latter part of Exodus on - where I focus on Genesis.) The romance particular to Joseph enjoyed further retellings on its own, such as in Joseph and Aseneth and in sura 12 of our Qurân.

A commenter at Durocher's article points me to Philippe Bohstrom at Haaretz. Bohstrom mentions that one Ya'qûb - Jacob - was emitting hieroglyphic scarabs over the whole region from Nubia to Haifa, 1700 BC. We own no less than 27 of these. Bohstrom argues that the Hyksos took over from Ya'qûb. The island Thera, they say, went off around 1600 BC or somewhat later; the Pharaohs, known to us as "The New Kingdom", followed that.

In the 800s BC by the Joseph story, Ephraim and Manasseh, who supplied Samaria with her kings, declared themselves a unity; which unity arrogated to itself primacy over the other Israelid clans, not least the southern Benjamin and Judah. By 900 BC, an illiterate people should not remember Jacob or Joseph. Samarian scribes could however know of the Ya'qûb scarabs: available for Egyptian scribes to read out to interested parties, and noted as pre-Pharaonic. So perhaps the whole story is Samarian propaganda, cooked up from such fragments.

Or, maybe the Samarians knew more. I was not aware of a difference between Ya'qûb and the Hyksos. Bohstrom proposes such a difference; the Joseph story is all about that difference.

If Bohstrom holds, then the Joseph romance reflects a change in dynasty internal to the Retenu régime over Egypt and Canaan.

Arabia Deserta

Here's a release about a climate prehistory of Arabia.

Arabia used to be savannah, with lakes. 6200-6000 BC, the place got so dry that the locals switched to herding. Further droughts struck 5500-5200 and 4500-4300 BC; these led to the herds moving to the coast and the interior concentrating more on trade. Over 3900-3300 BC, the southwestern peninsula dried out to such an extent those locals were done with the place, and migrated to the Gulf Coast and Oman.

After circa 3000 BC, we get linguistic evidence. Semitic is west of the upper Euphrates, and paraSemitics like Akkadian to the east and downstream. At the Euphrates and Tigris delta to the Gulf, is Sumerian. Elamite east of that, probably. On the other side of the Red Sea across from Yemen: Cushitic, generally considered related to Semitic. Tho' this last is inferred from loanwords in Ethiopian Semitic, as reconstructed 800 BC.

According to this paper, the Arabians of that time didn't venture south. That agrees firstly with the divergence between Cushitic and Semitic being (much) wider than a post-6200 migration should allow, and with the lack of para/pre Semitic loans in the Cushitic languages. Secondly with Cushitic's loans being otherwise East African as far as we know.

Most assume that the Elamites got to the Near East from what's now Iran. I wonder if the Arabians at this time were the ancestors of the Sumerians.

Tuesday, April 7, 2020

The misplaced stone

"Proof of the Resurrection" is common to the more aggressive form of Christian apologetic. I got into it with some such apologists in the late 1990s, back when such apologetic was prevalent here. But these propagandists haven't given up: from 2016, here's Youtuber Cross Examined. That Tuber's strategery was to raise up a straw aggressive atheist, whose arguments may be knocked down with a clear conscience.

I am not an atheist. I am, as it happens, a Christian in Augustine's tradition. As such a Christian, I prefer that our arguments be cogent. Cross Examined owns a narrative about that Empty Tomb. So let's bring in his witnesses.

We are independently sure of a burial tradition; Paul quotes it in a creed. My question here is on how secure was the burial. Those witnesses are four, presently, since we lack the endings of Berlin 11740 and(/or?) of Egerton. And we agree to reject the Gospel of Peter so-called; and Epistula Apostolorum.

(Papias tended to rely on Mark for a general narrative; if he disliked Mark's narrative frame, the burial story wouldn't be affected since - where else ya gonna tell it. Also Papias owned a Judas tradition in common with Luke - and not with Matthew / Ignatius; and some of our Lord's sayings now in John.)

John 19:38-42 details Joseph of Arimathea, a believer in what Mark would call "God's Kingdom" - that is: of Jesus' message. Joseph, on the Day Of Preparation before "the Sabbath" (which may be Friday, or may be the day before Passover), laid Jesus' body to rest in an unused tomb. Mark 15:42-7 says about the same. In John 20:1 / Mark 16:3-4, Mary Magdalene (perhaps with others) went to the tomb expecting to see a sealing rock there; and she did see such a rock, but off to a side. Mary, needless to say, could not have moved such a boulder herself nor with a whole flock of females. Mary duly reported back to Peter and to other disciples, ignorant of these events, that the stone had been "removed" and (in John 20:2) we don’t know where they have put him. Neither Gospel mentions a guard at the tomb. Neither does Luke, following Mark.

John adds to ch. 19 Nicodemus, in chiasm with the first part of that gospel; he adds also that Joseph was a Believer in secret. Mark for his part adds instead Mary and "Umm Joses" as observers (like Luke 23:55), anticipating the expectation 16:3. Then, Mark 16 fills out the Johannine "we": that accompanying Mary to the tomb were "Umm Jaqob" and Salome (Luke 24:10 will name Mary, Umm Jaqob, and Joanna, in retrospect). But these are quibbles. What concerns me here is Mark 15:42-7, that someone did roll the stone over that tomb in the first place: Joseph of Arimathea.

John - who, remember, puts two men at the site - does not record that they had moved the rock. On the other extreme is Matthew 27:62-6, setting a guard over that rock; and 28:11-15, explaining why the guards said nothing. (If Goodacre's thesis that Luke knew Matthew holds, Matthew 27:62-6 + 28:11-15 imply a later addition to this text. Also see what Justin had heard from the Jews in Trypho 108, not perhaps yet in his Gospel.)

Perhaps this very discrepancy informed the Jews in (pseudo)Matthew's time: if the stone had never been placed there, and if there was no guard, and if there were no disinterested witnesses . . .

Luke's party on the Resurrection

Justin Martyr wrote two Apologys and the Dialogue with Trypho. Another work is ascribed: On The Resurrection. Philip Schaff's 1910 encyclopaedia, which Wikipedia plagiarises, records acceptance of the former and doubt on Resurrection.

In external witness, some Palestinian monk compiled a "Sacra Parallela" under the Marwânids. This "SP" circulated in Melkite circles, surviving Yazîd II's iconoclasm - and also bypassing the Greeks'. The Byzantines later took hold of a copy, the Greek world apparently already lacking a copy of On The Resurrection on its own. One copy is Parisinus Graecus 923: heavily illuminated. So the move to Constantinople likely happened in the 800s, with the lifting of iconoclasm.

Here is a translation. As I read this, the essay is an apologetic on Christianity's behalf against humanist Greeks and also against Christ-curious Greeks who see "the Resurrection" as "spiritual" - as symbolic. Its scriptures are Mark and Luke, and Acts 1:9. That Jesus returned from the grave is demonstrated ch. 9 from an extensive paraphrase of the Emmaus episode in Luke 24. (And not, or at least not solely, from Ignatius' parallel tradition.)

I detect Johannine theology, such as John 1 proclaiming Christ as the Logos, which Justin's first Apology shares. I also detect a parallel to 2 John 7 in its insistence that the Son came in the flesh, although that parallel would work better with Smyrnaeans. Likewise, the nails are in Ignatius Smyrnaeans 1, Justin Trypho 97, and John: Justin cites the nails from the Psalm, and Ignatius outside his quote from the Gospel. Luke does not note the nails.

But excepting where the anecdote parallels Ignatius, I nowhere see John's narrative. I also see no Matthew. The real Justin knew Matthew and Luke and Mark, independently and through a commentary-tradition which conflated these. (Justin may, further, have owned a cheat-sheet of Jesus' logia: like "Thomas" but orthodox. Such florilegia came out of the commentaries.)

Conclusion: Justin did not write On The Resurrection.

But equally, this one cannot belong to those who kept all four Gospels, as did Irenaeus and the Byzantines. As it quotes Isaiah and Genesis, I cannot see Marcion's hand in it. Further, as it quotes older Jewish standardised texts, its parallels with Luke's Gospel-and-Acts aren't from the ahadith even in such more-or-less accepted collections as Papias. The Greeks would have dismissed such as hearsay. These parallels are quotes from Luke's corpus as we have it today.

This essay is early, preceding Justin and even Marcion. Justin would have accepted the essay's standpoint that Christ is the Logos incarnate.

2 John ends with a promise to visit the Chosen Lady, and to say more. Those comments are currently not extant; 2 John is what our canon has collected. One can imagine that a Ready Defence of v. 7 would be the main topic of discussion. One can further imagine that such notes became a brief in the defence of the physical risen Christ; otherwise, why even bother copying 2 John, without a full argument to back it up.

2 John, I think, exists to introduce and promote John's Gospel. On The Resurrection, for a Greek philosophical audience, means to promote Luke's.

The gospel according to Ignatius

It was long noted that Ignatius parallels the New Testament at many points, including such sayings of Jesus as now are recorded in the Gospels. It was agreed that Ignatius knew a Pauline collection including Colossians. (The essay we now know as "Ephesians", Ignatius never cited in his own letter to Ephesus; he cited that only to his peer Polycarp. He nowhere cites 2 Thessalonians or the Pastorals.)

It further was agreed he knew Luke 24. It was also agreed that Ignatius knew Matthew . . . or, perhaps NOT. Let's look at the Matthew parallels first.

In 1966 J. Smit Sibinga got "Ignatius and Matthew" published in Novum Testamentum 8(2/4), 263f. That's doi 10.2307/1559995 to you. Scholars dismissed this for four decades (cf. Charles Hill's 2005 dismissal n. 41); only in 2006 do I find Pier F Beatrice taking it seriously.

2 Clement and Justin Martyr quote Jesus from Synoptic Gospels, from apocryphal sources, and from what Papias might call "Cyriac Expositions"; I grew up thinking these were Tatian-like harmonies, intended to replace earlier Gospels, but they were more like to be Muqâtilesque tafâsir. Other Church Fathers quote a Gospel directly. Sibinga points out that we know how Matthew touched at least one of his sources, namely Mark; and that Matthew's touches are not in Ignatius' Matthew parallels. Nor does Papias transmit such Matthean narrative-context as we see in adaptations like POxy 840.

Sibinga instead implicates a cloud of Jesus sayings and anecdotes from which Ignatius and Matthew drew independently. I should further add that the letter to the Trallians traces Jesus' Davidic lineage thus: who was descended from David, and was also of Mary. I'd think that a Lucan Christian would make clearer "from David through Mary". More common is some variant of (for instance the letter to the Ephesians): conceived in the womb by Mary, of the seed of David. That's literally Greek "sperm". 'Tis a man thing. This is what we get in Matthew and especially Paul's Romans 1:3.

If Ignatius knew post-Resurrection accounts, then he knew a Passion also. If Mark, such would set Ignatius on the same level as Matthew... and of Papias.

CORRECTION 5/23/21: Ignatius' genealogy is Pauline which means para-Matthean. Luke is ruled out.

Monday, April 6, 2020

Immortality of the soul

Robespierre, like Hitler and like Jefferson, was a Deist - a postChristian. Among the concessions made to Christianity was the immortality of the soul.

The soul isn't immortal in this our cosmos (obviously). But our cosmos is finite in this section of observable spacetime and, even if it lasts eternal, will always be countable. Whatever you think of Tapscott (I find him an egotist), Christianity at large has a point in positing the soul's immortality. That must mean: the soul's migration beyond this cosmos. For orthodox Christians, Jesus's return to life on earth is a sign of that. (In Docetic interpretations like post-Nisâ Islam, Jesus has not returned thus removing His example from consideration.)

In the crawling chaos without, elements of our consciousness already exist. So all possibilities of our future exist. That is what uncountability means. But these soul-fragments exist in chaos; they exist in hell. After we die, that final snapshot of our personality picks up where it left off.

The Interloper's famous promise is that we shall be "as gods". This is, as are the most diabolical statements, factual, but incomplete. We shall be (or are already; time has no meaning there) weak intelligences in a powerful plasma. I do not trust that I can withstand the fires of this gehenna, as YHWH did.

For us there is but one hope. It happens that God created a free-willed universe. To turn a phrase: from a chaos by Lovecraft, with love has God crafted. Since God loves, He loves the best of what has arisen in His creation. He will wish to protect us from chaos - whilst we inhabit this garden, and beyond it in His presence.

Many if not most of human religions have understood this at a basic level. Their aim is to explain this by some myth or other. The dying and resurrected god is the best such myth, a gift from the Neolithics. And Christianity offers the best balance of which I know.

Rousseau's incoherent religion

Guyénot proposes that Robespierre is Rousseau's heir - and not Voltaire's. In theology, there shines no daylight between the two French Rs and such English thinkers as Locke. (Locke differed only in how to enact this theology into politics.)

For Rousseau:

The dogmas of civil religion ought to be few, simple, and exactly worded, without explanation or commentary. The existence of a mighty, intelligent and beneficent Divinity, possessed of foresight and providence, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws: these are its positive dogmas. Its negative dogmas I confine to one, intolerance, which is a part of the cults we have rejected.

By "intolerance" Rousseau meant the dogma extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, common to Catholics and Calvinists.

I cannot figure to what extent someone who rejected, say, the soul's immortality could be tolerated in a Rousseau régime. The Enragé anti-theists saw correctly that they lived outside Robespierre's dispensation.

Every religion must set up an Ecclesia of some bounds. If you don't accept a state's theology, you must go find a new state, or else unseat the state you got. If you deny the Church, you must found a new one (good luck with that).

To deny extra Ecclesiam nulla salus is humbug. If some thinker claims to deny it, he lies. If some state founds itself on that principle, it has no legitimacy. As Vox Day implies, Robespierre's national theology could lead nowhere but to national damnation.

Maximilien Robespierre as retroactive scapegoat

Laurent Guyénot offers a summary of Maximilien Robespierre's theology. Meanwhile he revises the common understanding of 1794 in France.

Robespierre was a key thinker of la Révolution. Guyénot - who is French, which I am not - argues that, nonetheless, Robespierre did not approve the actions for which la Révolution is infamous: the anti-theism and (the full extent of) the mass murders.

The historian can test that. When Robespierre was unseated 31 July 1794, did the coup against the public figure end the public Terror? His immediate successor, as it happens, was Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne - whom Guyénot does not name. This one had been a direct agitator for the Terror. If you haven't heard of JNBV, partly that's because his reign lasted only through August. The next one up was Merlin de Douai, by all accounts a decent sort, who ushered in le Directoire which attempted a restoration of the rule of law. The coup, then, did nothing to end the Terror.

That flawed Robespierre was killed, and so abruptly, where the truly evil JNBV was exiled implies a political murder on the part of JNBV. Over July 1794 JNBV feared that Robespierre might indeed push la Révolution into something other than tyranny - which de Douai, barely more than a month later, would do in truth. Robespierre then, however, was ill and not in direct contact with la Révolution. This weakened Robespierre and allowed more forceful personalities to wrest power.

De Douai was too decent to kill JNBV - and for that, his Directoire needed some means to kill JNBV's career. As Justinian II had proven and as Napoleon would prove, you don't exile Caesar.

Since Guyénot omits JNBV, and since JNBV had only a month to say whatever he was going to say anyway, we do not learn from Guyénot how August 1794 remembered Robespierre. I can, however, take a good guess at le Directoire. This nouvelle régime accepted Robespierre's execution as to make the man a scapegoat for all the evils of la Révolution which it replaced. Napoleon, who usurped le Directoire, admitted as much. By calumniating Robespierre, le Directoire cut down potential support for the true villains starting with JNBV over in Guyana.

Le Directoire made of Robespierre a cautionary tale. Mary Shelley or a Jew would say, he was killed by his own golem. This meme had the powerful rhetorical value of being true.

UPDATE 8/12: On finishing Simon Schama: JNBV was on Robespierre's Right. He was a Girondin holdover. JNBV and his Directoire successors presided, instead, over chaos between Jacobin diehards (now out in the hinterland) and an ever-fumbling Paris.

Schama paints Robespierre instead as a (failed) philosophe. Schama implicates him in that tyrannical 22 Prairial law although he's aware that Robespierre was not in good health at the time. But after the fact Robespierre certainly used the law, being increasingly paranoid, toward the end. Killing Danton was a mistake.

Sunday, April 5, 2020

CFR

CFR stands for Case Fatality Ratio, or maybe Rate. The denominator would be the proportion who we know got the disease, and are done with it. One way or another.

The number of cases should not be considered for CFR… at all. Many of those are ongoing. These, we do not know how will all end up. We use CFR alongside total cases to guess those still-living cases' outcome.

Here is how maximum CFR should be calculated: deaths / (full recovery + deaths). I say “maximum” because the “full recovery” variable is a minimum - here, because some "asymptomatics" are caught early, so may be presymptomatics. But some are lucky and go through it all just fine. I'm assuming that the statistics aren't lying about the deaths.

Once you're in the ICU, from what I understand, you're in trouble. That CFR is 30% going in, 70% on mechanical respiration. And that's not counting the morbidities that the machine adds to your account when you "survive". Our job is to stay out of the ICU.

Also, we need frequent and free testing. That requires different leadership than what we got in Trumpestan, and in all its little statelets passive-aggressively letting this play out. As far as different leaders, we'll see what alternatives we get.

UPDATE 5/15: Infection Fatality was 1% in April and prior. CFR is therefore greater than that - and that's where morbidity kicks in. A hospital stay [as of April] would boost this to 30%. But maybe this is better now.

Upload #189: deus lo volt

The suwar 74, 76, and 81 end similarly. My projects dealing with these - "Mantle", "The Test of Man", and "Reminder" - had got into a tangle as a result.

Fortunately, I'd already suspected each component of this trio as somewhat late. Here, the shared text happened to depend on sura 18. My next task was to sort out whatever other parallels are in each. For these, "Promised Egypt" now proposes 80>10; "Blasting the Caliph", 73:1-19>69. With these, and with what I'd already argued about sura 18, I was clear to stick suras 73 and 80 into the distant past of all 74, 76, and 81. That cleared the field: sura 74 before the other two.

I was wondering in "Mantle" about some parallels with sura 45 which, now, involve 25 too. It turned out behind all these parallels' bases were 14 and 54, respectively... and sura 25 looks to be quoting the sura 74 form of it. In the process, sura 45 evinced that selfsame sura 14 parallel. "Mantle" has sura 74, then, as another House Of War era text, like suras 34 and 67 (but not sura 45). "Days of Allah" has a tightened argument for that in sura 45.

Speaking of "Days of Allah", I also needed to untangle sura 45 from its parallels in suras 23 and 43. So "The Ararat Tax" and "Defending Jesus" argue for their use of sura 45.

Meanwhile "Provision" has changed mainly that sura 51 doesn't actually name Isaac. So it's not "Ishaq" there. May as well upload that whilst I'm about it.

Madrassa.

Saturday, April 4, 2020

Hard sweep

With a tip o' the beret to HBDChick: Souilmi et al., "Ancient human genomes reveal a hidden history of strong selection in Eurasia".

This paper pinpoints 57 suspect parts of the European genome(s), which diverge most sharply from the African baseline. After populations entered Europe, and after Sundalander men took charge: the Aurignacian "Cro Magnons" faced the European winters. Many parts of the pre-33kBC genome underwent "sweeps" - and of these parts, many align with genes common to "circumpolar" mammals. The Magdalenians, soon to be Solutreans and finally Western (and Eastern) Hunter Gatherers, were the Aurignacians' descendents.

As for the nature of the Aurignacian sweeps: over-represented with genes encoding proteins acting at the cell membrane, including the enriched pathway specific to cell-surface interactions itself (Focal Adhesion). This is potentially important as cell surface proteins coordinate appropriate cellular responses to extracellular information, including potential stressors. "Extracellular information" would include germs. What sort of germ in a hunting-and-gathering society? I expect from small game, birds, and gathered shellfish. Coronaviri and influenzas would be among those bugs from the flying game. Since these tribes weren't as inbred as were the Neanders, those airbourne bugs would then spread throughout the populations.

The paper notes that after 28kBC those sweeps get harder to identify - it notes by contrast the agricultural and pastoral adaptations of the Meso/Neolithic. Also this paper doesn't say what happened with the Gravettians between A. and M. [UPDATE 5/5/22 -but this does!] I understand the G. people were more Moroccan and Spaniard by origin. Their genome got swept the old fashioned way, I assume when the winters got worse again. The Solutrean toolkit was likewise southern by origin, but by then those southerners were Magdalenians.

After 28kBC I take it that the Solutrean toolkit and the domestication of the dog gave more range to hunters, Magdalenian so better-suited for the Ice Age. Some of the old cold-adapt genes didn't matter as much for better-clothed Solutreans so they attenuated over time.