You bomb Japan?

Midway ref in title; pretty nice movie, should be available cheap. Anyway. On to Hitchens and indeed to Vox Day. The claim: those two bombs intended for Germany but held over for Japan were redundant for Japan as well.

Japan had extended an armistice offer. It was pretty-well known in Japan that they'd lost the war. The next question remained how they'd lose it. In Japan, some preferred to lose "honourably". Vox Day as usual picks one article and pretends that covers his whole argument. Those of us who aren't in his cult - and he is running a cult - might dredge up the memory that the US thought that the bombs would be necessary on account the US was, like, reading Japan's mail. That includes diplomatic communication, not just military-commands. I don't see where Japan's feelers for an armistice appear in that mail.

Okay, maybe Japan had dug in its heels exactly because the US (which, again, was winning) rejected its most-generous initial offer. They'd dug those heels in pretty hard as the Kyoujou Incident illustrates. Again: the US was reading Japan's mail. The US figured that demonstrations were needed. The chemical firebombs presented an impressive demonstration but they clearly hadn't worked.

Ultimately, I think we need to consider what "surrender" can mean. Take 1918. 11 November was an armistice, not a surrender. In theory Germany's government (whatever it was - we'll get to this) could have ramped up the war again. In the 1950s the Korean War will "end" in an armistice and, we all know the Kims. If that's what 1945 Japan was asking for, then who-knows. Japan keeps its Emperor, and its army; nobody in its armed-forces gets called for their crimes (731 anyone?); all the other Asians excepting Taiwan and maybe some Koreans are furious at the Allies and ponder an antiWestern alliance.

Then there's various shades of conditional-surrender. A fairly heavy shade of surrender is the deal which MacArthur accepted. Japan keeps its Emperor but must accept a Constitution as brings its army under heel, which army is now a "Defence Force" (yeah yeah the US claims its War Department is a "Defense" Department, but the Japs don't fib like Yanks do).

Unconditional surrender is what the Germans had to do - twice. First time, their government had collapsed between armistice and treaty, as did the governments of any potential allies (Hungary, Austria, the Ottomans) such that the emissaries could mount no arguments at Versailles excepting moral arguments (good luck with those against Clemenceau) and the spectre of Communism (more credible). The second time: the German and Axis armies were pretty-well extirpated once Schiklgruber and Goebbels checked out. Forcing unconditionality upon Japan meant facing a postKyoujou fanatical guerrilla in Japan's mountains. Oh, and Stalin in all Korea, probably Hokkaido next. But now we're just repeating the midwit wisdom.

Remember: the midwit wisdom is the midwit wisdom because, within the fringes, it's the correct wisdom. When the fringes turn out correct, they get into the history books and they become the midwits. But that's rare when it happens.

Oppenheimer's discontents

Let's collect critiques of Oppenheimer because why not.

Hindutva, in between runs of chasing young Christian girls around the Manipur hills, have panted that this one is BLASPHEMY. Wall Street Journal cites Doniger against them, which rates "Advanced" in the troll scale.

The counterStalinists would have us take Oppenheimer's own Communist leanings more seriously. Bruce Bawer (a homosexual whose Stealing Jesus was, shall we say, counterChristianist) points to General Pavel Sudoplatov's 1994 (so postSoviet) memoir, which implicated Oppenheimer as a spy. The Venona transcripts verify that Stalin's Politburo at least knew who Oppenheimer was, granting to him the dubious honour of a codename. Oppenheimer also kept Earl Browder briefed - that's the president of the CPUSA which outfit was by the 1940s entirely Stalin's asset in the USA. These are mostly ahadith which seem fairly vague on details, Opje not being a practical engineer himself; contrast (say) Fuchs. But Opje could assuredly read reports, hence his management position.

Lastly there's the antiwar Right headed up by Peter Hitchens. Sometimes this stance can be incoherent. On the one hand the USA is rife with Stalin's men. On the other hand the USA remains antiCommunist enough to drop unnecessary bombs (the movie has wit enough to remember that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen because the nonnuclear firebombings had already erased Japan's better cities); because the bombs were making a point to the USSR now holding Sakhalin. So... were these bombs a... status-report? Maybe we can get around this by allowing for Truman, no Marxist himself, once in the Oval Office as the "great man" who called these two shots.

Whether the bombs were necessary for this particular war, must await another post. That question has no bearing upon Oppenheimer this movie. Although point-taken that Oppenheimer's own Kremlin ties (not just those of his associates) needed more weight attached to them. [UPDATE 8/16: yeah, he rode with Dzhugashvili.]

Oppenheimer might compare to Sound of Freedom. Also a true story except for parts that aren't. Also a fine movie.

That hideous book

A few years ago I read CS Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet (to which I objected) and Perelandra (which I approved). Approved, also, was "The Inner Ring". I started but failed to finish That Hideous Strength, titled from a Spell from Lyndsay's pompous and otherwise-illegible epic.

The storyline juxtaposes the collapse of a marriage between a careerist and a visionary, with the man's career shown - through the visions - as in service of the Dark Powers. Unfortunately it then separates these protagonists physically for most of the book's span. CS Lewis at the time did not understand married life; his writings idealised it.

What Lewis understood better (at this stage) was feminine domination. The White Witch here is ("the") Fairy Hardcastle, one of the better-realised characters in this book. Another well-realised character is a, er... bear. And not a Talking Bear.

That Hideous Strength cast something of a shadow in dystopian and Christian literature. "George Orwell" reviewed it; it likely inspired 1984. A Wrinkle in Time wears this one more on its sleeve, in Camazotz; whose Institute, Co-Ordinated its Experiments with more success thus bringing that world fully under the Black Thing. Lately there's John Dies At The End. THS, I concede, hasn't finished teaching us moderns about the risks of transhumanism. Or, as Wall Street Journal would have it lately, about the Project State.

We might also ponder how the N.I.C.E. medicalises the criminal-justice system. We're told of how Japan has more psychiatric capacity than the US has, thus Ending Homelessness. Lewis reminds that if you are convicted of a crime in Britain, you go to British prison for six years where, if you've more-or-less behaved yourself, you get out. If you're deemed incompetent, only a doctor can let you out... and your doctor is paid to keep you in. The WSJ's Review section, for its part, reminds that once upon a time the West would take people away for mental disorders like homosexuality. I suppose today we'd do it to "homophobes". Was Michel Foucault as wrong as the Right pretends he is?

But hey - the book is Hideous necessarily if it is to portray a hideous conspiracy to deliver a hideous future. What, possibly, brought Professor Tolkien to reject this one, and inspired a more serious critique by Orwell, is the ending, which is ridiculous. You know how Prof. T. was able to illustrate, at the mountainbrink of Doom, Eucatastrophe, and how evil cannot understand Good? Lewis calls upon the angels to wrap things up. Which might, I think, work well-enough - arguably the climax of the Silmarillion is when Eärendil returns the last light of the Trees to Valinor - except that Lewis bungles how the summoning happens, involving near-pagan spirits of the classical planets. (Uranus and Neptune care little, in Lewis' sight, for the affairs of inyalowdas.)

FrontPage is a subversive site

Danusha Goska, like Horowitz, used to be a Leftist and now professes antiLeftism. She wrote something on Horowitz' site. At issue is if she can be a conservative Catholic and a feminist. Or a Catholic at all, and her sort of feminist.

As a rule, those women who insist that women can be priests will insist that women can be bishops as well, and then they will insist women can take wives of their own. There is no male or female in Christ Jesus, we know; therefore - they ask - why should male or female exist on Earth.

This necessity of a church-assembly to be a male-led space is what the Corinthians knew by instinct, which - yes - Paul denied; and in support of which contra Paul someone later, lacking the Corinthians' own letter, thought strongly enough about that he (maybe even she) forged 1 Timothy, in Paul's name. Goska is right about this much, that the compilers of the New Testament canon were either dupes or in on the scam. She's also right to note a deep, deep Problematic in Christian tradition, that we have suffered fraud within the Church as without.

CS Lewis didn't take the Higher Criticism seriously (it would make hash of his rhetoric lately named "trilemma") but even with 1 Timothy, 1 Corinthians and Galatians still exist in Paul's name. Paul was a spiritual transhumanist, if not an organisational one. And Paul had followers. I am finishing up Lewis' book as I type this; a Christian parson is a key antagonist in the story, in league with the transhuman progressives.

Goska reminds us that FrontPage is a humanist project, founded as it was by a Jewish secularist. For all that FrontPage anathematises the threscia of Islam, FrontPage remains not a Christian project. When the Friday people are done, it will move against the Sunday people. Indeed it already has.

Let's retire the patriarchy

Just today the Turtle posted a pretty good précis of Secher's article on Gurgy les Noisats dans l'Yonne. The Turtle slightly spoilt the effect by his title, Patriarchy in Europe.

The Parisian (perhaps, Lutetian) basin had monumental burials by 4700-4300 BC... at Passy. At Gurgy, au contraire, was a cemetary for the middle-classes, over a hundred bodies so-far exhumed. Luckily 94 of them had enough for DNA tests. The men mostly G2a2b2a1a2-Z38302 stayed put; the women were imported, and there weren't half-siblings.

I assume the word "bastard" if a Norman French word was not a Norman French invention; but what bastards existed in these preNorman centuries were interred elsewhere than at Gurgy. Possibly some were thrown out to the literal wolves. More-often, more-metaphorically so: foisted upon their mothers who then wandered elsewhere. The ideal of the community is monogamy and not even remarriage, at least not during a man's most-productive years.

This is patrilocalitas but I am loath to call this a patriarchía. A severe patriarch will have sons by other women: legitimate sons from second wives, or fitzes from the servants, or both. Gurgy was not The Handmaid's Tale.

We are reminded that Gurgy is the middle-class gravesite so without the polygyny we might see in, say, Neolithic Ireland; Passy might yield a more "alpha male" society.

The helical nonengine

Tsiolkovsky based his famous equation on the assumption of Newton's Third Law, that mass and velocity have no relation to each other. What does his equation look like for Einstein's Special Relativity?

I hadn't yet asked myself that question. I don't think we're even ready for that question. Alien Legacy et M. Bussard promised à nous ramjets, to use the wispy local-fluff hydrogen for propellant. Centauri-Dreams keeps talking solar-wind. But nobody's rescued Bussard since the first time I poasted this, and out in interstellar space we don't get much solar power anymore. I've been concentrating on thrust (as of now 320 tons / 450 bar) and ISP.

So: a few years ago David Burns (presumably his real name) proposed the helical engine. The claim here is that, once you get to relativistic speed, you can leverage the mass increase to increase the speed more. In fact after a certain speed, Burns would dispense with propellant entirely. So what's he doing - riding gravitational waves?

Four years on - contrast Musk - all Burns has got us is hype. There's a distinct odour of EMDrive here.

We must forgive the Jews

The Evangelical Textual Criticism blog lately tried to defend biblical-inerrancy, those poor dears. But through the whataboutism we do at least get Dirk Jongkind, dealing with some commonly-flagged variants. Among these is Luke 23:34a.

It's my thought that Luke was late and tendentious. Luke might overall even be ripping off Hegesippus, or at least that one's James tradition. (Saint James has his feast-day today.) This to me, however, suggests that the verse is authentic, at least inasmuch as Luke himself (or herself) is the one who planted these words into Jesus' mouth. If I am to bolster Jongkind.

But then comes the question... how come Luke's tradents removed these words?

Jongkind argues for a theologic solution: Luke intended to portray Christ as Leviticus 4-5's sin-offering, with a nod to Galatians. Christ is Luke's Ox of God (and not, as John, the Lamb). Luke will go on to cast Peter (Acts 3:17) and Stephen (Acts 7:60) similarly. Also Farrer and Goodacre might suggest that, here, Luke is lifting Matthew's insistence that Jews own the bloodguilt of Christ forever. If the Jews ever did claim Jesus' blood, hereby Christ lifts that guilt from them near-immediately.

I have rechecked and do not find where Marcion or Tertullian objected to this comment in Luke 23:34ab; instead they bicker over the casting of lots 34c. Marcion rejected Matthew wholesale so should have been fine with this earlier verselet abrogating Matthew. Tertullian and his Claromontaine Apostolikon weren't particularly antiJewish so, likewise, wouldn't mind this bit of Luke. Washington (W) and Vatican (B) agree to omit it, along with Sahidic and the Sinai-Syriac. Bezae, which is Evangel-/Acts-only, omits it too - I think; it's asterisked as "D*". Looks like Alexandrine adoption of an already-extant minus.

The absence of forgiveness would agree with Donatist thought... except that Donatists should also object to the subordinationist Christology in the Alexandrine corpus, for instance over the Johannine Comma, which the Alexandrine text also omitted but the Western church included (early). As aimed specifically at Jews, copyists aware of the discrepancy would interpret this minus a harmonisation against the Jews. Bezae is notorious for both harmonisation and for antiJudaism elsewhere, beyond the call of Marcionite duty (Bezae accepts 23:34c by the way). The minus further downplays Luke's soteriology inasmuch as this contradicts John's.

Overall I think Jongkind has a point. His point is ineptus for his stance, here on Inerrancy.

The priest-king of Edessa Callirrhoë

Edessa Callirrhoë could take some pride in being among the first kingdoms to embrace Christ. In the AD fifth century, a monk by name Rabbula decided that they'd embraced Him wrong. Gaddis takes up much of a chapter detailing this Semitic Savonarola.

We know Rabbula from a Vita composed by a successor, who intended this text to contrast that one's career to Ibas who had overturned Rabbula's reforms. Ibas is blamed for taking bribes for enacting his "reactionary" agenda. Ibas meanwhile was also an Antiochene, for which "Nestorianism" the second Ephesus will condemn him.

As Gaddis reads Rabbula's conduct, he finds little to commend. Gaddis feels like Rabbula ran Edessa like it was a monastery, not a town with actual humans in it; and an Egyptian hermitage at that, not like the more-eirenic Syrian establishments. Rabbula is compared to Moses, in his later years as Israel's Divinely-appointed totalitarian. The writ of Empire no longer stretched into that city's government. Rabbula - perhaps knowing his origins - further bound the local monks to his episcopacy; so, really, the canons of the Greek Church didn't stretch into there either.

The world hereby got a taste of Monotheletism, if anyone had a tongue to taste it. (Gaddis' subtitle is "The ideal bishop".) Not only did Rabbula see no "wall" between church and state, for him there was no distinction. If you had a problem with Rabbula's regime, you had a problem with G-d.

Soon enough, Cyril's monks would take the streets of Ephesus in advance of that Synod. The Empire had to post guards at Nestorius' gate just to keep him physically safe. (Which protection, Cyril used as pretext to declare Nestorius the Empire's patsy.) Some three decades after Chalcedon, Cyrus II would finish Rabbula's work in the name of Theotokos; the emperor Zeno could do nothing.

Outside filioque there is no salvation, from our own fallible nature.

The Kubrickian biography

My favourite biopic may well be Control inasmuch as, although you spend time with the main character - here Ian Curtis - the movie shows the man's character by showing what the man did. I, Tonya falls in this category, easily the best Margot Robbie movie.

(I like Ed Wood too but that's more Burton screwing around than any real homage to that "director". Armond White is right about The Social Network, that it's on-par with stupid celebrity pictures... I'll get to this.)

So: Oppenheimer. I saw it Thursday. I wouldn't put it anywhere near Social Network; Armond White is a National Review guy and that rag is nowhere near as insightful nor as bold as, say, Counter-Currents.

I don't much respect that nepot J[unior]-Podhoretz either, and respect Driscoll less. I think here, though, Podhoretz gets it.

To do a biopic properly, you need to present the time-and-place as a major supporting character. You also need to show the main character's effect on those who care for him (or her). And you need to show the effect of the character's work. Control did brilliantly at juxtaposing Curtis' bleak lyrics and spastic stage-presence, against his wife's reaction to these, and not just to Curtis' personal coldness leading to infidelity.

Oppenheimer, I think, sticks the landing.

Vesta's war on Earth

They tell us in meteor school that - besides the usual litter of S-, C-, and metallic asteroids/meteorites - we also get stuff knocked here from other planets. This stuff doesn't contain the chondrules of the usual rubblepiles; thus, are "achondrite", from something that differentiated before knockoff. Suspects include the Moon obviously; Mars has furnished a few more, [UPDATE 7/25 and even Earth has coughed up some stuff as has come back]. But another exporter of meteors our-way is/was Vesta.

And not Venus. Which is another question I'd like answered someday; when Venus gets hit it gets hit hard. But maybe Venus' atmo and gravity together have prevented rocks from launching their way out into Earth-intersection. Anyway we're here for Vesta.

Vesta is perhaps the true missing planet; Ceres being a Centaur having drifted here after-the-fact. Vesta is differentiated like a planet. But it since got whacked Venus-hard by other rocks, so it's not a spher[oid] anymore (Ceres is still mostly spherical). The mass liberated from Vesta's crust and mantle had to go somewhere. Much of it still floats in a Vestal group of asteroids, which includes some interlopers of their own, but is mostly of a similar type, dubbed the V-type. A bit of S, a bit metallic; dependent on how far down the initial whack had whicken.

So: why do we get any V down here? Answer: some of those V's had been blown into a 3:1 or 4:1 resonance with... Jupiter. That's a Kirkwood. These will get pulled more-and-more eccentric; and they don't get pulled very far up/down for inclination. By harsh luck Earth is 11.8:1 to Jupiter so a 3:1 to Jupiter is near 4:1 to us.

It gets more fun when you see that some of these elongated V's are... large. 10 km range. They've caused some craters here already.

Northern Chile is for lovers

I saw this hype yesterday on the Andean altiplano: that it gets comparable flux as Venus L4 gets. That is: 1.6 times what Earth L4 gets (2,177 v 1,360). NASA reports that Venus gets 2,600 for 1.9 times but hey; Altiplano still gets a lot, and maybe it reaches that 1.9 range at noon.

Irradiance is not temperature. It's cold in the Altiplano, colder than present Denver. That's because at 4 km up it's higher than the Mile High City, so gets less air (ozone especially) for a shield or a redistributor.

I learnt here that this flux changes on the planets; and not just by "derrr day/night". On Earth first the Southern Hemisphere matches eccentricity with tilt; which stacking of daylight hours with proximity I could have guessed if I'd thought about it. Altiplano summer should own the true Earth temperature at perihelion, as Mauna Kea summer might own its temperature at aphelion. But I didn't see those factors multiplying flux 1.6 times.

The key here is cloudcover. Clouds don't just shade; over the Altiplano, they reflect too.

The flux, then, is all coming down upon the same patch. Compare Venus' "habitable" layer: those clouds are all beneath, offering some attenuated flux from below which won't stack as much upon the flux from the bare Sun. Altiplano lives under the magnifying-glass.

Now, why am I commenting on this now; why do I care. I didn't care at first (the hype annoyed me) - but then, on my way to Oppenheimer, I started thinking that Altiplano would be a fine place to test gadgets expected for Venus. Such gadgets would be better still for Hohmann taxis between Venus and Earth where the insolation would range from Venus' to Earth's. They would also work for the aforementioned flux-from-beneath if we're floating Venerean balloons.

My main worry at present is solar-panels, which degrade in high British "temperatures". Is temperature an atmospheric temperature; or is it due to too much sunlight? Given that the decadence was noted near sealevel pressures I suspect the former. But that's why we test.

Flywheel

Yesterday Reynolds and PopSci relayed Greater Earth Lunar Power Station (GE_⊕-LPS). I am unsure of the naming; the station is at TLL1.

TLL1 is competing with solar-power, which power isn't always on over the Moon. It competes further with thorium (being nearside), assuming we're all happy with some nation owning a nearside lunar base with U-233. If we're talking TLL2 that's a uranium opportunity. More seriously: batteries are gittin'-gud implying the loonies might not care if the sun isn't always up. Casey Handmer thought last year that nearside might even take power beamed from Earth.

The ending of the article is pretty lame, THE CASE FOR SPACE BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE. Funding-justification.

To shift materiel between the Moon and its TLL1 or L2 is a simple matter of energy: from the Moon a massdriver could do it, or a weak aluminium-oxygen rocket either way (once L1 and/or L2 get the Al+O). At least L1 has been considered harmful for direct massdriving since the 1970s. Instead, these madlads want that space elevator from Sinus Medii.

The Anti-Wellhausen

Moving on to Rabbi Joseph Hertz: it may be exactly because he was London-based, that he was permitted to deliver the apologetic he'd delivered. Where CS Lewis' Abolition denies Islamic teachings from his "Tao"; Hertz before him allowed nothing good in Christendom (pace Claude Montefiore). Based!

The good rabbi was even more based against homosexuality, deemed an error of the Greeks. Chevy Chase lookalike Dr. Rabbi Harvey Meirovich finds this stance so unfortunate that Meirovich digs around for English contemporaries to contrast him with.

Judaism has on occasion raised up some obscurantists. Hertz, by contrast, allowed input from contemporary philology. Among his arguments for Torah antiquity is Torah pulling from Egyptian terms, and of course the names which Freud(!) had found among the b'nai Levi.

Meirovich sees Hertz as a Maimonideian. For my part I see the legacy of David Ganz, an early rabbinical-trained opponent of Copernicus. I recall Ganz' quote We, the holy congregation of Israel, will not put our trust in history books produced by authors who are not from the children of Israel in Mitchell First's Jewish History in Conflict; I recall Ganz's support of the book "Daniel". But... ten years since reading that, I don't think Ganz was in life nearly as bigoted as this quote suggested.

Hertz intended to contradict Julius Wellhausen inasmuch as Wellhausen argued that Torah was a later assemblage. Wellhausen might counter that his schema was about... assemblage, which bakes-in that the assemblers worked from a library of text, some of which text might be early indeed.

Hertz is on firmer ground that Wellhausen had blithely accepted Christian propaganda - Protestant in particular - that priesthood is a degradation of prophecy; and indeed that Wellhausen had added to the propaganda. I'd hope that since Israel Knohl's work on the Holiness Code and its round of redaction, Christians might allow that the Temple's model of priesthood is not necessarily inimical to eunomía. Nor can we splash the blood of the Tabernacle upon the Rabbinate.

In his fundamentalism, Hertz might be more Protestant than he lets on. Much weight is placed on the Torah / Chumash as being a simple record of how it really was, plausible because ineptus. This reflects Tertullian, and foreshadows Joshua MacDowell. Hertz also follows the Chronicler in resolving the Exodus 12:8–9 / Deuteronomy 16:7 contradiction on whether the paschal lamb be roasted (צלי) or boiled (בשל). Boil it in fire!

Hertz saw Jews as a Divinely chosen people, granted a propensity to the ethical life at the cellular level. This was in tension with Hertz' view that Jews be an example to other nations in their ethical living. A Christian would agree that Jews' job is exactly that, which is why Emperor Theodosius offered them a citizenship which citizenship, if second-class, was at least superior to the deal which his imperium was offering to pagans. You know - them Greek homos? Hertz' racial angle also seems, er, based.

Chos-en-ness seems further in tension with Hertz' assertion that Christians have nothing to teach Jews in return. Christian ethics and exegesis, Lewis would suggest, illuminate the Tao by which learnéd Jews like Hertz (and Prager) take their ethics. Christians had already taught Jews; in recent times (if too recent for my liking), not to trade slaves.

The Jewish mosque

TheTorah.com recently posted a capsule summary of London chief-rabbi Joseph Hertz, the Dennis Prager of his times. Hertz commented on something called the חומש. This חומש might be anglicised the Fifthery; Hertz as an Ashkenaz in a somewhat Teutonic somewhat Protestant nation transliterated it accordingly "Chumash". I've been copies here and there around the bookstores but, like so much else post-9-Ab, I never had much of a handle on what this was. About time I looked it up, nu?

So: lectionary, at least the basis for lections like pesikta. It's in codex form where an actual Torah is/are in scroll format. The pentateuchal readings are supplemented with "Haftorot" (Hertz again), which are selections from the Prophets.

Haftorot are cantillated - the reader does tajwîd. Various theories exist as to when this started. It is noted in at least the Bavli Talmud, which I concede was still a w.i.p. up to Sa'd's entry into the Sasanian Babylonia, but also in the Tosefta which seems late-antique. I will guess, based on the Christian practice of memra, and on the aforementioned Arabic tajwîd, that the Talmud and Tosefta witness that cantillations were common and that their beginnings are lost to time.

I'll go further. The psalms were chanted from the get-go. Many Prophets are transparently poetic and certainly survived from Isaiah's time primarily in that oral format. How better, than by cantillation, in religious services.

The Temples weren't in control over this; Samaritans - possibly being first-on-the-draw in rebuilding Gerizim - excluded anything Judaean or anything that might deny a Temple at all. The Samaritans as far as we know have rejected the Prophets, even northern prophets. Possibility exists that some locals owned their own recensions of, say, Hosea and Asaph; but if they did, their priestly hierarchy didn't care about them much, since those texts were lost with much else that was lost, and said priesthood never bothered to find them again (that "Joshua" sefer is about as far as it goes).

The cantors from Prophets would instead find their natural allies among itinerant priests in tabernacles. Some editor of Numbers recalled that when the Ark moved, a war-ritual was intoned; its Tabernacle was a military threat. Tabernacle had ties to Egypt, no less (cf. Hertz, in fact). These religious groups might even have designed the "wanderings in the desert" narratives to oppose temples; their Mesopotamian lords tolerated Shechem precisely because its Samaritans had settled a temple.

The mosque and the recitation of Prophetic tajwîd represents Arabic tabernaclism. Either a revival, or else a longstanding practice of the exiled fringe.

Reflect

On topic of mitigation, last September a reflective surface was mooted.

I'm not much of a warmist but I do like efficiency, and I dislike the heat-islands which make up our major cities. Even warmists should consider what a hash these islands make of our climate models.

I was actually pondering this material for solar-sails but then the high from whatever I was smoking wore off and I read the article. The material is for structures; sails are nanomaterials supporting small packages.

What it would help for, is near-solar massive objects we're trying to store volatiles on. Objects like Atira, assuming it still has volatiles (or we bring 'em). Later it will aid that reflective ring around Venus.

Miraculous curses

Gaddis brings up how various holy men, their hagiographers anyway, demonstrated their holiness by miracle. Some examples of these miracles might illustrate their nature.

The archaeretic Arius died through a wracking dysentery. A holy fire destroyed the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople, as John Chrysostom and his enemies staged a riot. Palmyra, after refusing Alexander's band of mendicants, suffered a three year drought.

The Eunomians called foul and blamed their bishop's miserable death upon poison. John's detractors blamed John for the fire.

Then there are the monks, to whom Theodosius ascribed "many crimes". As to Palmyra: I must wonder if any record of actual drought can be found in Alexander's time. Such cities in the Syrian desert depended upon manmade canals and cisterns, as much as upon God.

Alleluia! What a civilisation you got there; may our Lord continue to bless it. Can we get an ay-men?

Comet chase

Pondering near-solar asteroids, I expressed doubt that Atira be worth the delta-V, nor that any other asteroid down here could keep hydrates (like water) tightly enough to be replaced by proton-catching. Then I remembered that episode in The Ark where the titular vessel drains a comet.

What the inner-belters would need (besides luck) is a mirror as can be unpacked or unrolled, to shade the comet as to keep it from boiling off as such so-visibly do. This would double as a sail, slowing it down as it approaches and angling it out as it exits - limiting its semimajor and perihelion (respectively).

The delta-V can be shaved off that bit more if we have a planet from which to borrow momentum. Venus or Earth.

To spray some chilly volatiles over this speculation, comets range in size. If we can see a comet easily (like Halley's) that is several km in radius. I assume many many times more of them will max out with 100m-radius / single cubic megameter volume. Also: the smaller they are, and (again) the more time they spend near the Sun, the less water / methane / ammonia they'll keep.

The good news: what's left is mostly charcoal and that sooty mix has CHON bound up within it.

MATHS 10/15: Burning the Bergin sootball. From 1353 kg: 50×5×2 m of pure water, 100×100×10 m of nitrogen, and, er, lots of carbon-dioxide and sulfur-dioxide. So the water will be pretty sour. MOAR MAFFS 10/26: I'd find these in 1700 kg/m³ C-types so - 0.8 m³ should do it.

Donatus before Maximus

Two African churchmen made their shared name, Donatus, a curse in Christendom. The former held his "Church of the Martyrs" separate from Constantine's church. There was another one who led up a splinter faction, among what we'd call "Berbers". Constantine's church, which Eunomian church became the Vandal church, lumped those factions together and called them "Donatists" like... well, like we Catholics call the Eunomian church "Arians".

As I continue to read Gaddis: I feel like the first Donatus might have gone either way with Nestorius, but would have thoroughly approved Maximus. Maximus might prefer to disavow both, but I am wracking my brain to figure how he could.

We'll start with the hegemon over the Latin West at the time, Constantine. Constantine was still legally a Roman, a "pagan" as some call them. The Augustus who'd appointed him over the West was Diocletian; and his forerunner was - I'll submit - Aurelian, a monotheist under whose God all gods depend. In a Christian matrix, Constantine fell in with Arius: that this supreme God was the source of all Truth and Order, with the Holy Spirit flowing through - well, through whatever. Including through Jesus why not; but perhaps not always, inasmuch as the Son was assumed not present at (for instance) Sinai. I expect Mark Durie would consider Eunomianism an Aurelianist voodoo.

Constantine professed not to care about theology. Eunomia was the Imperial watchword, righteous Law; from the Father. Constantine as Emperor did, however, need to sus-out property-rights. Who owned what physical building?

Enter Donatus, fresh off Diocletian's vicious Roman persecution. He got out of prison only to find a number of apostate bishops and priests now begging for their sees and parishes back. This wasn't uncommon under Constantine; Melitius had a similar problem, similarly Novatian. Donatus felt that he had done his time and deserved to get back the church properties as were his. A particular sore-point was a fellow bishop Caecilian; who might not actually have been an apostate, but hadn't gone to gaol himself and then had "forgiven" a number of priests who'd kissed the Eagle. Caecilian meanwhile refused "Martyr" status from certain of the more-excitable birds against the Roman window. Gaddis draws several parallels between Caecilian and Augustine (and with the Roman Bishop at the time, one Melchiades / Miltiades now sainted).

We're not told if Donatus cared about theology either. Even Ambrose put out some clunkers, so I'm told. Donatus' complaint went more to investiture: the church can forgive, arguably must forgive; but to reinstall a bishop takes more than what it takes to readmit a layman. That cathedral belongs to - whom, again?

The old Catholic Encyclopedia seems fair on the dispute, overall siding with Augustine as you'd expect elsewhere. But now I wonder. I wonder if Donatus could sniff out, from Constantine's meddling, that the Church would not be redeemed through Empire just by nominally taking over an Empire. Donatus' question "what has Empire to do with the Church" is one that has always resonated, at least for us Latins. (Monotheletes will proffer an easy answer, depending on whether they're in power: quite literally, "all" or "nothing".)

I must note that Donatus started out, at least, trusting Empire; he went to the courts against Caecilian, with the (reasonable) proviso that his jurors be peers outside Africa which coastline was then rife with proImperial opportunists. Constantine actually agreed to try this case with impartial judges. But these found against Donatus. Donatus' partisans might say that we wuz robd. Hard to say, without a firm timeline.

I am also uncertain if any formal "Donatists" got into Nicaea; I know Donatus sat the Council out, leaving Caecilian to represent Africa. But Donatus' party put some important points on that board. Which makes me think that Donatus was, indeed, an unsung participant in Theodosian / Chalcedonian dyophysitism, more Nicene than Nicaea.

Mostly what has cost Donatus his crown of sainthood is what his followers - including another Donatus - made of his works and arguments. As Donatus couldn't take the L; too many Donatists, upon seeing Theodosius reject the Eunomian formula, wouldn't take the W. They resorted to terrorism; like the future Awza'i, they denied from the state its monopoly on violence.

The third dispensation

Our bulletin every now and again posts capsule biographies of our Saints. Last Mass we were alerted of one Bonaventure whose day is ... tomorrow. This one was a Franciscan who had - we're told - cleared up a heresy within the Franciscan Order itself. Why would this need to be done?

Gaddis reminds his readers (a bit ahead of his Late-Antique skis) that Francis had gone off to Egypt during the AD 1219 Damietta Crusade; and, when that failed, Francis went to the Sultan al-Kamil al-Ayyubi, to preach his Gospel. I must ask if this Gospel was the Gospel.

The heresy within Franciscanism, which Bonaventure combatted, held that the Old Testament was the rule of the Father, that the New Testament was the rule of the Son; and that a future age would come under the Spirit. Under John's Paraclete, if that time still be mortal time. This theory tracks with Dispensationalism - I am unsure that we Catholics have a problem with Dispensationalism as such, on account we do accept that the Israelite Law was a "dim looking-glass" for Christ, and we do look forward to Christ's return in glory in an age when various "religions" won't apply as we know them.

Except: for us, the next and last age will be ruled by the Son too at the Father's right hand. To the extent the Church Triumphant be a "third dispensation", it is not special to the Spirit; the Spirit flows from both the Son and the Father, in Old Testament times as in New, and as now. As for the Paraclete: that's been with us since Pentecost, at Rome if we follow the Spirit's passage in Luke (and by 1219, Constantinople couldn't much argue for it anymore).

In Ayyubi-era Sunni Islam, by contrast, there does exist a qada al-muminin. The dispensation of Belief is here, by Ibn Ishaq's reading, that promised Paraclete; Muslims argue that Luke lied. The Quran and the sunna of Muhammad serve to guide in this dunya.

Once again, not all our Church Fathers are Church Doctors; and all our Saints were humans and did not always see through the dark glass, with sufficient vision. Harry Turtledove (a Byzantinist) among his alternate timelines suggested that - were it not for the Umayyads' Quran - Muhammad might be remembered as founder of a Christian desert order. If not for Bonaventure, Francis today might be remembered only in Sufism.

The world can wait

This being the summer reading-season I've picked up Michael Gaddis' There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ, concerning religious violence (by Christians) in Late Antiquity (and not just in the Rhomanía). I am halfway through it.

For Barsauma (whom we've met, on a different level), Gaddis should I think be updated.

Gaddis' main points (heh) will likely stand. What used to be blog.jim called the "holiness-spiral" is real. Razib Khan refers a lot to Gaddis' book so - yeah.

Gaddis published this in 2003 and this hardcover is the book I got (at a usedbook shoppe). Gaddis did it through UC Berkeley which I find, personally, fascinating. Apparently some Californians quietly agree, on account there's a paperback edition as of 2015. When I was in Berkeley in 2005 the place had "World Can't Wait" / "By All Means Necessary" posters everywhere, basically urging Direct Action against that horrible horrible right wing right winger George W Bush.

In retrospect perhaps BAMN wasn't a fight worth fighting, on either side; as Roger Pearse a couple years ago figured for the Donatist-Catholic schism. Which schism features highly in Gaddis' work.

I am mainly impressed that Berkeley allowed this slyly anti#woke text through their editors, undercover of being an antichristian text. It may be that's the only way to get anti#woke into scholarly publication.

Halo prequels

A year and change ago some lads on 4chan[nel] were talking Halo books. I wasn't up for a book stuffed with spoilers but some prequels made the list, most notably Nylund's Fall of Reach. There's also Evolutions. It's been ten months but at last, maybe a fortnight ago, I found several such books, used. I got Contact Harvest and The Cole Protocol.

These two were reviewed by Rev. Garrick Sinclair Beckett at the Lutheran Column, here and here respectively. Beckett, I posit, reviewed them in the order in which they should be read. Contact Harvest is the prequel inasmuch as it details first-contact at the planet Harvest (hence the name). But - and here you'll find me disagreeing with a Lutheran, however characteristic of this blog - it's not as good. And thematically I got more out of The Cole Protocol.

CH's problem is that its narrative frames a lore-dump ("so THAT's how it happened!"). Its author Joseph Staten was actually a major writer for the first two games, but hadn't written a novel yet. It's not that "it shows"; Staten proves himself a competent novelist, and I'd happily buy a later book of his. It's just that to give life to a lore-dump / backstory-script, requires a great novelist, if it can be done at all.

TCP by contrast deals with one of the outlier worlds - now a system, on account the Covenant has just got through turning its human-inhabited world into a lavaball. Tobias "Dirt" Buckell here wasn't putting lore into text; he was mopping up the first game's plotholes, sort of doing a fanfic. The main plothole here: how do Covenant races react to the most unCovenantal decision in Covenant history, here that humans aren't to be converted like (say) Kig-Yar and Unggoy, but to be exterminated. Buckell proposes that the implementation of this eternal-doctrine went in stages, that at least the Kig-Yar might make side-deals.

Both books were worth my time. TCP is a 4/5 over CH's 3/5.

Asteroidal RoI

Jensen’s article had “ROI” as quickndirty diameter / deltaV. I detect a tension between this “ROI” and how easily we colonise an asteroid; between sections 2 and 3…

The reason Section 2 RoI for that R part is sheer bulk is that volume is radius-cubed (times-pi/4), not diameter. For that I part - well, Jensen assumes a mining-camp, not a Janhunen shuttle. So where Janhunen can just massdrive stuff off the Moon and not even a lot of mass of stuff, Jensen requires internally generated propulsion: in short, Tsiolkovsky. The reason deltaV swamps its competion is that Tsiolkovsky proved its energy cost exponential. The RoI equation needs to be r³e^-δv. Atira's not looking so good anymore is it?

Looking at the 6-8 realm, this makes 175706 / 1996 FG3 look relatively even better and Bennu (which didn't make the list) that much worse... but. f(R)/f(dV) further disregards mass, therefore density. This affects ease of digging, ease of spinning; and the deltaV is entirely Earthbased, so there’s little on incoming solar energy aka "flux". (Volume, at least, might imply water-supply, a big help to R against I assuming the same flux.) And we got nothing on whether the mass' orbit is useful or if we’d rather dismantle the whole place, to move elsewhere.

If the rubblepile is housing wetwork, such as miners, then Bennu (which radius he marks 263 m mean) marks the minimum space to live in. That mass (as a C type) is 73.3e+9 kg. Jensen’s article proposes Atira as more-massive than Bennu in a convenient orbit averaging between Venus and Earth. This got me researching if Bennulikes exist down there as well. It turns out – they do! As of now Wiki presents to me three rocks 580-590 m diameter. In order of semimajor: Venus, then Atira; then…

• 2023 EL
• (613676) 2006 WE₄
• 2020 HA10

Atira remains queen of these 0.72-0.82 semimajors. Besides the three hot Bennulikes, nothing between Venus/Atira and Cruithne/Earth exceeds half the size of Jensen’s minimum. So let’s look at these particular three which make Jensen’s cut.

For more economical comparison against Atira: for each of the three the delta-V is lower, and the hollowing-out is faster, and the spinning-up is cheaper.

First: being small has its perks, as momentum goes, more so close to the Sun. This can be done quicker for Bennulikes down here; even if Atira runs closer on average, Atira as nine times more massive is nine times slower to shift. If they start small they might not even need propellant.

Less happily I expect all three hot Bennulikes not to protect their volatiles as well as does Atira. These three will be (even) drier. But: protons come from the aforementioned solar-wind. Can their colonists trap the water, hydrazine, methane as they expose oxides, nitrates, carbonates in the rock…? Can the sails, also, be designed to catch protons?

And these three planetoids can work with the Atira-to-Venus project. If someone is hoping to get Atira into a Cruithnelike 1:1 Venus-resonant orbit then, whilst Atira is kicking materiel to Earth, it might as well kick materiel to 2023 EL on up. As noted Atira has gravity so will be getting massdrivers. For Bennulikes honestly a slingshot or a catapult would do for getting ingots off before raising sail.

The plunder and salvation of Atira

I'm continuing my thoughts on Atira. I said we didn't want it. We want parts of it. And by "we" as my readers can imagine I am considering mainly Venus. [OR 8/23: the lunar north. But we're starting with Venus.]

First let's look at Atira / Venus, at mutual inclination 22.22342°. Atira and Venus will, periodically, come within, what, 0.0178 AU on the shared plane. Venus' Hill is a million km; 0.0066 AU.

Next: Newton, that mean sonufab!tch. Atira has gravity; it's even got a "moon". Getting stuff off its Hill will require some action-reaction, even if we use sails to take the materiel the rest of the way. To sum up: a mass-driver is coming to Atira. Energy, at least, is cheap down here. Atira's orbit shall be adjusted accordingly.

Where the mass-driving of Atira's bits-n'-pieces be going all the way to Earth, the rest of its 0.7411 AU can, I think, get pulled to Venus' 0.723332 AU. The 1:1 resonant Cruithnelike is what our system does not want. Instead, we aim for a high Venus orbit or the Venus Equilaterals or why not all three. (On the other side should the mass-driving be going inbound, toward Venus, that can raise the remainder's perihelion and semimajor both: for one or more of Hop David's Earth/Venus Hohmann Cyclers. But - read on.)

However we do it, Venus and Earth, and maybe beyond, should be draining Atira to its barest rock. Atira will never take the masses of human colonists and infrastructure which Jensen proposes -

- at least, not as Atira. I expect Atira will be serving EarthLuna first until the three remaining chunks of rock get into those Venus-friendly orbits, at which point they become our system's central stations. What goes for Atira goes for the whole Atira class of wandering rocks between 0.73-1.0 AU; split up between our two planets' orbits.

We don't need nor want Atira

I wanted to revisit David Jensen's 65-page opus on asteroid colonisation. I was thinking Bennu; Jensen's mostly talking 163693 Atira. A Pawnee name sometimes pointed, I think unnecessarily, "Atíra".

Apparently - per Jensen - Ateeeera offers more resources for the delta-V expended to get there. It's one of the larger ones; and it's "S", for "Stoney". Its 1.87 g/cm³ density although higher than the 1.19 of rubbley Bennu is still lower than, say, Eros'. Just from volume considerations Atira's more likely to own appreciable hydrous stuff under the regolith. Enough to support a colony, if additional water gets imported and adequately-recycled.

I do however have a few animadversions, which I'll proffer here . . .

That 16.7 delta-V, from Earth, isn't a joke; compare Ryugu 6.76. I don't know that Jensen has porkchopped how to get here but its semimajor is 0.7411 AU just outside Venus' 0.723332 AU. It's eccentric, out to 0.9798 AU; but that's still going far outside Earth's reach given 25.618° inclination (Hill Spheres, man; they're a pain). And it does get close to the Sun, such that I am unclear it has (anymore) such volatiles sufficient to Colony-Jensen requirements.

At that inclination it is difficult to imagine what longterm use Atira would be for the rest of our solarsystem. A difficulty which I'll get to, "tomorrow" evening. UPDATE 7/12 Then there's Jensen's whole "RoI" thing. UPDATE 8/23: Ol' Boom-Boom? ...anyone?

BACKDATE 7/10

Claromontanus and To The Hebrews

Erik de Boer in 2014 commented upon "Tertullian on “Barnabas’ Letter to the Hebrews” in De pudicitia 20.1-5", bringing additional evidence. Among his evidence is speculation upon "western" bilingual Codex Claromontanus D/06.

D/06 is, presently, a Paul-ter. It is often abbreviated D^p against D^ea/05 which is the very-different Bezae. Apparently Claromont was designed a D^pcr: it promised in a table-of-contents a "Barnabas" to come after Jude just prior to the Revelation. At first Claromont didn't extend to Hebrews either (leaving aside "Barnabas"); later someone stuck a late translation of Hebrews at the end of the D/06 Pauline corpus. Claromont in both editions contrasts with "Alexandrine" Vaticanus which put Hebrews in pride-of-place at the forefront of the second Pauline scroll (somewhat undercutting, meanwhile, that claim that this text-type was Eunomian).

Our Barnabas is longer than Hebrews. The Claromont codex lacks the room for Barnabas; Hebrews would fit.

I must quibble: our Barnabas appends a lengthy coda upon the Two Ways. This coda is absent from the Latin copy "St Petersburg, Q.v.I.39". (Another truncation, Vaticanus graecus 859, postpends a broken Polycarp; a simple mistake, likely far postdating Claromont.) Claromont may have included the St Petersburg truncation in, indeed, Latin. Also our Barnabas where a New Testament does include it, like Sinaiticus, tends to come at the end.

But if I may buttress de Boer: Tertullian shares readings with Claromont elsewhere. Given that a predecessor to Claromont was Tertullian's Bible in Latin (for Paul), it requires less pleading to allow that this urtext listed Hebrews by Barnabas' name than to assume it had some short version of our Barnabas; Tertullian being unaware of any "Barnabas" as was not Hebrews.

Lunar pitchblende

I was aware of some thorium on the nearside of the Moon; a couple days ago we heard from the farside. There's a +10K hotspot, directly opposite us.

This extra ten degrees Celsius/Kelvin is considered from a batholith: an upwelling of granite, not basalt. Basically it's a big but now dead volcanic core.

The claim is Granites are nearly absent in the Solar System outside of Earth. On that much, I call shens. Like Earth, Mars has volcanoes and even (once) had a hydrosphere; sure enough, it's of little effort to find articles about granites over there. Venus has plenty of igneous rocks which should include granites, although nobody's landing there for awhile. As for Mercury, mayyybe we should await BepiColombo before we make sweeping comments about what rocks it does or does not own.

Luna is however closer to us. Also the pitchblende in this granite looks like it's excellently placed to generate energy where it can't be beamed from Earth (however inefficiently). Want that plutonium Orion Drive where Earthlings can't see it? Here is where you mine the fuel and launch the rocket. With much fewer pulses needed; maybe even less critical-mass (antiprotons can be harvested from Earth orbit).

The usual warnings against radiation apply but, it's the Moon; it's already irradiated. UPDATE 7/20 Even here we might just raise everything to a shipyard at TLL2, by space-elevator.

Gilgamesh in the western Aramaea

Nili Samet has compiled the parallels between Gilgamesh and Ecclesiastes-Qohelet. Samet believes that the parallels, now, have accumulated such a mass that something can be said of what version of Gilgamesh, the Teacher might have read.

Samet points out that, where Ezekiel was contemporary in time and place with Babylonian architecture and literature; the same cannot be said for Qohelet, which is fully (if idiosyncratically) Hebrew and second-Temple. I would myself compare Qohelet more with Daniel: Maccabean in both its Hebrew and Old-Greek forms, but only after pulling much lore from the post-Chaldaean Two Rivers. Samet in an aside compares the P content in Torah, whose babylonica trends closer to Berossus than to what is had from the cuneiform standard.

Samet notes further (in footnotes) that cuneiform abroad was never so standard once it got out to, say, Hattusas.

I'd say Berossus has the slight Problematic that he was passing his traditions to Greeks. Russ Gmirkin might ponder that all the tradents in Hellenistic times have altered the Gilgamesh text toward Greek. Indeed Aelian was aware of a Greek tradition, calling Gilgamesh "Gilgamos". Perhaps this is that version which has entered Ecclesiastes. Jeff Cooley had ventured into this Iraqi marsh; which you might want to read alongside Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Matthew L. Bowen, and Ryan Dahle (pdf, 182f.).

One difference: Berossus - for the Flood - preferred the Ziusudra ("Sisythrus") of the Sumerian version over the various Babylonian-version heroes, including over the Flood as quoted by Gilgamesh famously meeting an "Utnapishtim". Qohelet by contrast, where he tracks with Gilgamesh proper, is closer to the Babylonian.

We can rule out Berossus (the shadowy man or his Greek-ascribed tradition generally) as an intermediary for Qohelet. I am already fairly-sure Qohelet had little to do with the Priests in Jerusalem, be they Tabernacle or Temple. In fairness to Gmirkin I don't think that man, himself, refers to Qohelet much.

Thoughts on Everspace

Everspace is a roguelike space-arcade from (literal) Hamburgers, led by Michael Schade and Christian Lohr under the "Rockfish" imprint. They didn't have much capital to create the game they wanted, so went early-access. The Star Citizen jokes wore out after the two 'burgers slapped it out of early-access, at which point I bought it.

...for an earlier machine. That one couldn't handle the framerates when I was, say, inside one of those polygon-rich abandoned crates. So I gave up on this game, still mired in sector-two, after being killed like sixty-five times. You'll be aware that I'd got a newer machine but this was not a better machine until recently.

Anyway: I've been enjoying the game since last June. I've got to further sectors, got introduced to some more of the lore; there are some events which still jank my screen but these are fewer now.

Everspace proper has a DLC, "Encounters"; and - lately - a sequel. So the game is popular.

One thing I notice after playing for awhile, both in getting-gud and getting more upgrades, is that I'll be getting through higher sectors so playing... longer. Runs through earlier sectors get a bit same-ey.

There's an artifact which allows to skip that first sector. This effectively makes a game a bit more difficult on account, although the first scene in sector-two will give you more fuel, you won't start with any other loot you might have got back there. A lot of artifacts have a give-and-take thing going on.

The experience changes with the Encounters DLC. The universe feels more crowded, at least the midsectors do, as you meet more characters with their own little sidequests. Kind of like how Starflight 2 presented a different experience than the lonely Starflight.

Is E1+E a better gaming experience than E1 alone...? If it unbalances the game, then it's a pay-to-win scam and we hate those. If it introduces lore you want for this game, it's a Zaeed scam. I can report at least that Encounters does not do this to us.

Still - I'm going with, "not at first". At first, you'll be going through the sectors, learning the lore, finding the new perils in the original game. But: as you keep going through sectors 1-4 over and over again, or maybe just 2-4: the mainline gets kind of boring. The Encounters DLC gives reasons to play through those sectors again; you might be doing something new this time.

Also this DLC is cheap now.

Get the Interceptor into Sector 7 and then put Encounters into the play, is my advice.

Gravitational-wave news

Over the past few days a series of articles have come out about gravitational waves with, perhaps, some way to resolve Hubble Tension. The Baghistan used to post about that tension quite a lot but, we've given up, since it didn't look as if our current instruments and basic constraints were up for it. By extension it's difficult to sus out that "Lambda + Cold Dark Matter" thing.

We are now - at last - able to detect the gravitational wave background. Also, the first quasars happened when time itself was going five times slower.

Does any of this help? I don't know. But I get the feeling it will help.

Happy boomer day

Today is the day Murrka's boomers go onto the Internet and tell stories about how big they used to boom, back in the good old days, wearing their XXXL-sized "America Love It Or Leave It" shirts.

Even now some sell and, presumably, buy dead-terrist boom-booms, featuring Bin Laden but also Arafat, Qaddafi, and Saddam. The Reagan Years! Nothing a boomer likes as much as 1980s nostalgia. Excepting the fun electoric music with the staccato fake English accents; they'll be singing sweet home Alabama instead. Maybe Kid Rock; you know, to relate.

Booming up your 43 year old daughters is all part of the experience. Freedom, freedom, freedom. (Oy.)

Then, hopefully, they get to the terlit fast enough to do a boom boom there; and wonder how come their kids aren't calling them as much anymore.

A sanguine affair

One countersemitic argument is that Judaism is blood-obsessed. The Torah differs - and not just the website.

In olden times was wedged a crack between Deuteronomy and most of the Prophets; against Ezekiel and the Priests. The Holiness passages, I guess, would be some later attempt to bridge this chasma.

Rabbinic Judaism effectively downplays the Torah as we have it. This opens up space for text as was dissonant with the Temple (early Jeremiah) and/or exists without one (Psalm 137, perhaps late Jeremiah). Certainly anything in the Tanakh as came from the north could be used, where they rejected or at least opposed their own temples (the Elijah-Elisha cycle, Asaph's psalms, Hosea).

By contrast Christianity accepts the Priests, to the point Luke has Mary as a child of the then-incomplete Temple. Cerinthus perhaps had argued that Jesus was the Temple. In our orthodoxy, even for Nestorius, we don't say this; we say Mary became the true Temple - better, the Tabernacle - and her womb the Ark, in which God Himself took up lodging. [UPDATE 9/4: No, Scott Hahn was not making this up. Read Hippolytus.] A Dalton still might accuse Christians of inheriting barbarism, but we actual Christians assert we know better.

As usual I seem to be coming across the mutual incompatibility of rabbinic and Christian claims about the Scriptures... but not, necessarily, the superiority of one over the other.

Where Christ used Psalm 110, and where he didn't

I'm on chapter 12 now. I got a bit sidetracked on account of today being cloudy, occasionally rainy, Sunday, and hot. So couldn't leave the house, so ended up napping 10 AM - 12:30 PM.

On Pitre's assumption that Mark is Peter's memoir (which assumption I share) the Christian exegesis of Psalm 110 is mooted. I remember this from [pseudo-]Barnabas. Also from Anon To The Hebrews which Pitre concedes is nonPauline so might be late, perhaps even Barnabas-contemporary; in fact Tertullian ascribed Hebrews to exactly Barnabas (being unaware of the other one).

The orthodox Christian reading of Psalm 110 (and of Melchizedek) is that - having accepted this Psalm - it proves the existence of a Messiah who is not the son of David, or at least not only that. Christians in the Hebrews / Barnabas generation, which was likely post-9-Av, were fond of this one.

My concern, against Pitre, is that Barnabas was aware of a Jesus biography. Might have been oral; might have been written - I don't know. Mark's gospel is possible; that Christ shall be seen at God's right hand is a Psalm 110 flourish which Pitre #11 sets in Mark 14:55-64.

What is not possible, for Barnabas, nor for that matter for Hebrews, is that Jesus cited this Psalm for his own Christology. Barnabas like Hebrews and like Mark himself nowhere ascribed this particular reading of the Psalm to Christ. These three were all aware that Christ had come to Earth, done deeds, and said sayings; Mark wrote a whole book about all that. They were also all aware of Psalm 110's relevance. Why not this bit of Christology, a tafsir bi'l-masihi if you will?

Cerinthus objected to higher Christologies on adoptionist terms, hence why his sect held to Mark to the other evangelists' exclusion. But even Cerinthus was stuck with Mark's pronouncements of some part of Christ's divinity. If Cerinthus had been aware of (say) Barnabas it is unlikely he'd have objected.

Mark may or may not have been aware of Barnabas, or of Hebrews. I find plausible Mark agreed with that exegesis of Psalm 110 now seen Mt 22:41-6/Lk 20:41-4. But I find equally plausible that nobody was aware that Christ himself had cited the argument. Until Matthew stuck it there.

Pitre's book is full of stuff like this, on assumption of Matthew as an eyewitness (if secondary to Peter); to bolster the highest Christology. Pitre does this even where he doesn't need to. By doing this, Pitre is undercutting his own credibility and, thereby, the credibility of the Gospel. I find this to be unnecessary and, honestly, tragic.

Parallel lives

My post earlier won't offer much news to regular readers here; I've been on the Evan Powell case for some decades now. I am thoroughly convinced of the external and internal evidence that "Mark" presents the defence of Peter to a then-skeptical Christian community and that no reason exists to doubt that some man called Mark (maybe "Johanan Marcus") assembled this defence.

Whether or not Marcus Johanan had this from Peter himself or from his posthumous defenders against (principally) the Johannines, isn't my concern. I'm concerned now with the parallel accounts of Mark in Papias, with those of Matthew in Papias. Frankly Matthew is concerning, here.

Pitre - who I stress was writing for the Imprimatur - kicks a long punt in his seventh chapter, The Dating of the Gospels. This handles the Synoptic Problem. Pitre throws up his hands except to dismiss "Q", the missing source between Luke and Matthew, with Mark being the nonmissing source. Pitre considers Goodacre (and Farrer) to have convinced him - but of what, is difficult to sus out. I am guessing, at least that Luke used Matthew and Mark.

In an earlier chapter, Pitre flags the Gospel of Matthew's note that Matthew-the-disciple was a tax-collector. Matthew would, then, be literate. Elsewhere Pitre considers that Zebedee the father of James and John was not just a fisherman but someone more like "Joe The Plumber", one who hired a fleet, so with his sons as apprentices and, presumably, provided with primary education. (Why hire an accountant like Matthew over there if your kids will do it after school.)

The point to all this: Pitre offers a theory that Matthew learnt from Christ Himself and wrote stuff down, before - one assumes - Mark came into the scene after the AD 30s and, also, learnt from Peter writing Peter's stuff down. Matthew wasn't there during the various scenes where Peter (and usually James and John) were talking to Jesus in private; so Matthew got that information from Peter directly.

The first problem with that theory is the critical finding which the Imprimatur cannot allow: that our Mark and Matthew each develop a source which is basically just Mark. We'd have to assume that urMark is Peter's dictation. Papias does not allow this; Papias says that Mark took this dictation.

Papias also insists that Matthew had taken his notes in Hebrew. Sure: this is northern Judaea we're (mostly) talking about; "Hebrews" there and then intermingled a lot of Aramaic. Still. None of this Semitica is Greek, and "Matthew" as we have it is a Greek gospel.

By contrast with Papias' account of Mark, which as a work done for Peter's sake fits that text; Papias' account of Matthew looks nothing like what we have of Matthew, which is at base just Mark in Greek with bonus (Greek) content, if anything in better Greek.

I do not believe that Pitre can have it both ways. I do not think that Pitre can tout the Patristic support for Mark whilst dismissing the same support against Matthew.

A stronger case for Mark

Last Saturday I drove up to Saint Malo / Saint Catherine way up the hills north of Allenspark. This morning I went back up there, with my hat this time. I'd learnt my lesson, that tree canopy shifts and doesn't protect the scalp. Anyway. This time I bought a book, Brant Pitre's The Case For Jesus. I've read seven chapters, with a less-fried head.

I am unsure how far Pitre's apologetic tract counts as a work of scholarship. The giftshop charged me five dollars. Five dollars is what the Farooq masjid in west Houston had charged for Ahmad Salamah's book on Sunni and Shia - in 2003 or '4. Also Pitre's Case bears Imprimatur - which, I've learnt, is real episcopal jargon, that the bishops approve it (another bishop, the irrepressible Robert Barron, gets the afterword). I get the impression that the Church like the Saudis print stuff like this at cost and unload it in giftshops.

Despite his restrictions, Pitre has adequately presented The Case For Saint Mark As Evangelist. If we ignore this book's commentary on Matthew, Luke, and John - oh, we'll get to them, believe that - it sets out some basic rules from which we can decide between an anonymous book and a nonanomymous book, and therefrom nonanomymous and pseudonymous. Pitre might even have undersold Mark.

Pitre's example is To The Hebrews, and his first point-of-departure is the manuscript tradition. Now, the MSS record for Mark (at least) is famously as poor as that for Thomas, until the third century AD. Mark's first MS attestation is in scraps before it gets regularly bound into multigospel codices and lections. But wherever we see a header for Marc/k-an text, the header is always "The Gospel kata Mark" or just plain kata Markon. Similar for Latin, and for Sahidic ("Coptic", for Pitre) and the two Aramaics when we get them. Nobody, except the harmonists and maybe Luke, quotes from Mark without saying "this is from Mark".

By contrast, To The Hebrews shows up in MSS anonymously, sometimes even as "anonymous"; sometimes ascribed to Paul (as the later Patristics) and sometimes to Timothy (rare in Patristics!). [OH RIGHT 7/8: Plus to Barnabas, for Tertullian and maybe D/06; but I fully understand if Pitre doesn't want to talk about those neanderthals.]

Pitre argues that even if the Markan MSS are third-fourth century, at least some MSS should stick asterisks by the Markos/Marcus attribution. Nobody does. Every mufassir upon Mark since Irenaeus has assumed Papias and attaches Papias' thoughts on the Markan gospel, to that text which we now consider as the Markan text.

Papias' account of Mark is devoid of context, coming to Eusebius and to us through the filters of Irenaeus and (likely) Pierius. Pitre, I would complain to him, should have noted that we cannot buy a book of Papias like we can of, say, Eusebius - who himself had not commissioned a copy of Papias. This complaint is not however fatal to Pitre.

The reason for that is that Papias' description of Mark, as the amanuensis of Shim'on Mar Kepha, fits Mark's text well. Pitre doesn't say it, but Evan Powell will: Mark admits Peter's failings to put the best possible light upon them. Powell found that in comparison against John 1-20, Mark's Gospel becomes Peter's apologia. Powell went on to retach "John 21" for Mark's conclusion.

I don't know how far Pitre could follow Powell, in a book with episcopal Imprimatur. Pitre takes our John 21 at its word that the "beloved disciple" wrote it. Of interest is that Powell argued that John 1-20 was authentic to John the disciple-then-apostle; although, again, I'm not getting into that here.