Hezeqiah's cage

Those hoping to make a movie out of The Rescue of Jerusalem now have more grist: Slab 28 of Sennacherib's throneroom. This is a cartoon vision of the king's investing of a city... somewhere. It shares the architectural style of Lachish. Also here are images (or icons) of plants: tîn, khamr and rummân, which Arab poets know as south-Lebanese delicacies. (But not olives?)

Stephen Compton believes that the reliefs tell a story of Sennacherib's mostly-victorious march through that region - all of them, including the Lachish relief, which is very famous to "Biblical Archaeologists". Lachish' fall is handled in an antechamber, thus leading up to events in the throne room. That room by the way was a truly imperial production, like 17 x 7 squares on a D&D map. Largest room in the Iron Age, they say; as perhaps it should be. Since the plants are not destroyed, nor the walls, this is where the campaign ended: the seige of Jerusalem.

The cartoon has a stylised beardo waving a rectangular placard, presumably the Judah royal banner. Unfortunately the paint peeled off the rectangle so we don't know what the banner looked like. Also the beardo isn't much detailed. He is surely Hezeqiah himself but the XKCD stick-figure himof (if that's a word).

Compton further is tracking down the city which Assyrians called "Ushu". This may be Joshua's חֹסָה, MT-vocalised Hosa... except that the Greek translation has "Jasiph" here. Qumran raises no help past Joshua 17. The "Apocryphon" doesn't note it either. But whatever was "Ushu" (we may ignore Joshua) it was a mountainous bastion near Tyre. Compton plausibly sites it at one "Alexandroschene".

Anaphora

Greek ana- had something of the same valence as Latin re-. The former really means "up" and the latter, "back". But it can also mean "again". Greek palin- is supposed to have that meaning but it seems koine used ana a lot, as seen in the Johannine Gospel anothen. This is why it got so annoying to translate Hebrews' "anastaurism". Today we're looking at Christian anaphora.

That's repetition. Easter attendants will know "This Is The Night"; also extant are several "Negro" spiritual classics. In the Greek East, they still own anaphorai of John Chrysostom.

The Romanians are now comparing John's anaphora with Basil's... and with Theodore's. Theodore, of Mopsuestia, is considered a heretic today because, uh, he kind of was. But he was one of John's closest confidants until John's death AD 407. 'Tis possible John's successors among the Orthodox dialed back some of Theodore's special flourishes. 'Tis impossible Nestorius got involved becau HERESY *BLAM* *BLAM*.

What seems most likely, to Benedict Vesa, is that the basic anaphora was already extant for these two men to learn it in Antioch. John took it to Constantinople, as Patriarch; Theodore remained around Antioch, preaching to Syrians. Maybe developing some of those ideas which made him so detested in the Ephesian Councils.

As to who came up with the baseline, that looks like Diodore of Tarsus. This one was ordained AD 360ish; didn't object to the Council of Theodosius Constantinople; passed away AD 390. The baseline looks explicitly Trinitarian, with a focus on Christ's saving sacrifice; but without comment on Christ's physis. It looks to me like a statement against the Eunomians who might not believe in a proper Trinity, or anyway could be painted suchways by an opponent.

Qapla', Jeremiah!

Michael Shepherd has a backtranslation of the Greek Jeremiah into Hebrew. In TC, Matthew B. Quintana presents a "review article".

A review article is more than a review. Think less Roger Ebert; think more Theodor Nöldeke on Schulthess, or Maria Conterno on Hoyland. They're really articles of their own. Also as Nöldeke can attest, they're not necessarily hitpieces; nobody blamed Schulthess that his sources misled him on Umayya the poet.

Unfortunately in Shepherd's case, Quintana argues the man overstepped. And Quintana seems to be right: we are not ready for a backtranslation of Jeremiah In The Original Klingon, from its nonoriginal Greek.

A collection of articles relating Greek-Jeremiah to Ezekiel and 2 Isaiah would have got the same job done. Backtranslation, frankly, is for the popular market, as was done for 1 Maccabees.

PBS serves up the blue pill

PBS would refute Vox Day, and others, on the concept of the α. PBS is arguing that this figure and his dynamic exist only among wolves cooped in a mid twentieth-century zoo. Out in the wild, a wolf pack is a family. Its α is, then, literal dad. His "patriarchy" becomes matricentric the moment bestgirldoggy becomes the mater. A pack may extend protection over some useful adoptees; we might consider Winterfell in early A Game of Thrones. Hierarchy in the Starks' domus is familial, and in extension reciprocal.

Where hierarchy is based on force and submission, as was seen in that zoo, that is prison dynamic. You're not stuck there with your (criminal) peers because you want to be there.

Vox Day and much of 4chan have grown out of seeing "Chad" - the Alpha - as a bully, however. Most agree that Chad is just Chad, enjoying life. Chad is going to get married and start a pack of his own. Which makes PBS' argument a straw one.

Or just wrong. Schools and workplaces, too often, are in fact run like prisons. So where the alpha-as-dominus is natural, as in Antoninus Pius' world; many of us are trapped in Domitian's twisted Dominate. The α caricature is reality for such. Note how Alpha discourse tracks in popularity with the 2014-24 reign of Equity.

PBS cannot call this reality a "lie". PBS mistakes "is" with "ought". I doubt this is an accident - in which case, who's lying?

Who were the Emishi?

I am pondering "Japan": not as an archipelago of land, but as zones of sea.

The southern Japanese islands, and the south half of Honshu, is Yayoi/Jomon. This is where Nipponese was ancestrally spoken; "Yamato" is a term sometimes used. Also wider Japonic south to Okinawa...

...and part of Korea. When Japonic was purged off of Korea remains a question, I believe. Clearly Korea was the Yayoi homeland, even Kofun. Once "Cipan-guo" was its own empire, its interests in the peninsula conflicted with the Tang interests; which the Tang won. What I don't know is if those Japanese interests were a colony, or local holdouts who naturally kept ties over the strait. I expect, the latter (I have my eye on Gaya). So there's one zone: the Korea-Honshu sea zone.

Ainu when first noted (by Russians!) was spoken along north Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kurils. That's another sea zone.

Last March, I was considering the Matsumae holding in south Hokkaido. Now: the Matsumae considered themselves full Japanese. They spoke that language, were the Yayoi/Jomon mix, bowed to the Emperor, all-o'-that. By then they knew of Ainu north of them and that they were different. So even in the nineteenth century (as we term it), when all Japanese claimed the same culture, those up in that north island weren't integrated into the tax system. This Matsumae autonomy could be possible only by geography, and the technology at the time. I think we have here an intervening sea zone: between southern Hokkaido, and northern Honshu. If the shogun had trouble controlling this far with eighteenth-century tech; how well could the emperor control it with eighth-century tech?

In the Middle Ages, before the Matsumae, south Hokkaido and north Honshu were controlled by "Emishi". The old (south) Japanese - the Yamato - considered them like the Chinese or the Russians considered tatars. Like barbarians.

I don't think the Emishi were Ainu. I think the Yamato-Japanese at the time had boats and could meet some Ainu, up north; so saw, likewise, that the Emishi didn't behave like the Ainu, anymore than either of them behaved like Koreans or Chinese. You would think, otherwise, that the Japanese should have lumped the Emishi with the Ainu together - at that time, not now.

So what language did the Emishi speak? What was their culture other than "fighting the Yamato"? Maybe the Emishi were the indigenes of Honshu, before the Kofun came. Maybe what we call "Japanese" is the old Gaya language. In this case the Emishi were simply crushed between the new Japanese empire, and the Ainu of north Hokkaido.

Iceland's people before they were founded on

A couple weeks ago I was alerted to Kurt H. Kjær et al., "Environmental DNA Reveals Reykjavík’s Human and Ecological History". I didn't know what to make of this account at the time. Icelanders today focus on Ingolfr Arnarson, the jarl who came in the AD 870s and made a self-sufficient nation of the place. But Kjær's crew is saying it had been settled for a few generations prior already.

I was pretty sure some Irish monks had found "Thule" and settled hermitages there. But even a hermit expects guests, or else - in Christianity anyway - he has failed The Great Commission. Iceland, if known (I think it was known) was hardly worth the visit, especially after the Roman Optimum of the Antonines. So visitable "Thule" out northwest, after the Romans tightened their metaphysical belts, might mean the Føroyar. Or even closer home, like the Hebrides. Also, hermits don't breed.

Geoff is alerting us, among his geographic focus, of a nonhermit named [Hrafna-]Flóki. Flóki was there in the 840s. In fact, he'd even named the place. His settlement was going great guns in the summer but he'd failed to prepare for a winter without grass, so: there went the livestock. As Geoff points out, hay is for horses... in winter. After barely getting through all that, Flóki went home to Scandinavia and reported this place was an ice land not worth the bother.

Kjær, it seems, is rounding that out: that Flóki's people nonetheless stayed when their worthless coward of a leader went back. So when Ingolfr came, he found some folk awaiting him. In this case he didn't make himself their king because... he couldn't. But at least he didn't press the issue and, since they figured out they weren't getting looted, the people were doubtless glad to have trade restarted and to meet new people.

He set up the Thing, the "parliament" as Normans term it, simply to formalise the self-government already there, because hey, international relations require something to make deals wit'.

Nick Reiner enforces equity

Obama's second Presidential election went against a wealthy man born to a whites-only sect, to which that man's father - also once a Governor - also belonged. Obama won, and I don't see where anyone-serious questions that #winning. Obama's Administration then decided we had too many white men in prestigious fields.

Robert Reiner, meanwhile, had devoted his life to spreading just about that same gospel to the masses. Obama may hold him partly responsible at least for his earlier victory (against McCain, but really against née-Heath Palin).

It happens that one such prestige field, in Obamaworld, is entertainment. Could Reiner justify his position in that field? If not now; then for how long before the Wokening?

Rob Reiner has now been retired from that field. Those mourning him should instead celebrate.

The prodigal

On a day we must relearn how so many Christian parables fail Torah, let's talk The Prodigal Son. In the Gospels we know, this anecdote exists in one of the four: canon Luke. Maybe not even that.

The basis is a beloved son of the landlord, who then goes out to fritter his inheritance. In Luke's sources, the landlord is God and the son is Christ. But note! that, for this parable, I used an indefinite for the singular. Here we read of plural sons - two, for the narrative purity.

The tale wasn't in Marcion's Luke. Once more we confront inter-Lukan variance across MSS. We are somewhat used to this, with Bezae and others.

Marcion was happy to tell of God's mercy and desire to regather His sheep, relating similar immediately prior. Hence why the story got tacked where it did, where other attempted additions like the Adulterix ended up floating elsewhere. As to its content, I suggest there's more to The Prodigal than God's mercy. I suggest this story had a more-particular object in mind.

In this particular, I ponder if we are looking at Peter. Peter is the locus for many Gospel tales, as the favoured disciple who betrays his trust. The decision of John 1-20 was to give up on Peter - it shifts to the Beloved (we'll get back to him), to be associated with the Blessed Mother (because mommy). But we know from Paul that Peter did not lose his station, so, you know, John did not win his war. The Johannines would find John 21 foisted upon his very Gospel.

The proPetrine faction, which is Mark's and Matthew's faction, knew Peter wasn't done wit'. But despite reciting much Petrine apologetic, they missed this one. I've noted last month that defending Peter wasn't Luke's focus; Luke's focus is to defend all the Disciples, whom Luke is setting up to receive the Spirit. This parable leaves the jealous other son(s) outside the feast.

I suspect Marcion was right inasmuch as the story wasn't in Luke, although his opponent Tertullian knew it - from somewhere. The story was a tradition spread among Peter's defenders. It may even defend against the Gospel of John itself. Marcion - or his followers - continued to resist the story because, as we all must know, Marcion is all about Paul, and his followers hardened that position even unto Peter's expense (thus downplaying Acts).

Victor Davis Hanson lost his war

Victor Davis Hanson, or "VDH" as he's known, is a longtime contributor, directly or not, to the Instapundit / pjMedia side of "conservatism". Bret Devereaux is, over the past weeks, taking him down. And taking some of his fellow neocons like Kagan with him although I am not entirely against Kagan, pace Vox Day.

Devereaux claims to keep politics out of his takedown - to which I call shens. What I can report is that VDH is at heart a Jeffersonian: a believer in the pastoral Small Farmer. Of course Jefferson himself was hardly a small farmer; he was a Virginian aristocrat. Jefferson's ideal wasn't his life... and that ideal didn't ever really exist.

Classical Greece didn't scale to Virginia anyhow. What Greeks had instead was what Soviets call the kulak. Greece had enough of these to support forces of kitted-infantrymen, bearers of ὅπλον. The polis (city-state) guaranteed to the landowners they'd not be subjected to populism - they'd call it "democracy" - as long as they agreed to use their resources to defend the politic interest. This wasn't so different to how it went with the Franks and their chivalry.

VDH based his military-history analysis on a British strain which goes back, as does so much interwar Brittery, to the nineteenth-century Prussians. And Devereaux gives to the Prussians their due: they studied the craft, they mastered the craft (for nineteenth-century tech), and as historians they used the available evidence as best they could. But 400 BC wasn't 1872 AD. (1914 AD wouldn't be 1872 either BUT ANYWAY.)

Devereaux accepts that the Shield Wall existed in antiquity. The Romans designed their shields for "Tortoise" closed-formation; we all saw the Vikings do the same in Last Kingdom. The hoplites, plural hoplitai, also could form shield-wall. But that was more a thing in the grind-out battles of the 300s BC, and beyond. To be a hoplite was mostly just to be a well-kitted infantryman and those fought in whatever formation the battle required.

Although Frankish-style noble ideals existed in Greece, especially in the Homeric era; the late-Frankish - the properly French - Tournament, or Xōchiyāōyōtl, is not translatable into classical Greek. This system was of planned near-mock battles, where the losers were captured, maybe ransomed. This did not exist in classical Greece.

In place of The Western Way of War, Devereaux would revive Snodgrass.

Victor Davis Hanson's "Western Way" is not Western

Bret Devereaux has Comments on Victor Davis Hanson, mispelt "Hansen". Devereaux notes Hanson's debt to scholarship of the Teutons circa-AD-1900. They were - yes - racists. Devereaux therefrom insinuates.

VDH's Western Way of War goes more to the Tournament: of the High Middle Ages, crossing linguistic bounds... and, further, a feature of Nahua-speaking Mesoamerica. The Tournament did exist and seems to be transoceanic without regard to race.

May as well ponder why Devereaux himself is now endorsed by Vox Day.

An antiArian church-history of Alexandria

Alessandro Bossi promised in 2011 an edition of a Ge'ez/Latin synopsis. He and Alberto Camplani published this in 2016.

I am coming into this a bit "cold". I only just found out Camplani's avertissiment. I gather at the time this was going to be Bossi's baby but that Camplani provided so much help that Bossi - graciously! - provided cowriter credit. It seems a real tangle to me, so - well done to both o' youse... as Italian-Americans might say.

The synopsis, they say, extends to the end of the fourth century AD which in local terms would be about the start of the second c. anno Diocletiani (~384). That's Theodosius I, nailing down the Nicene Creed in Constantinople. So the "Miaphysitism" shouldn't much be in play, yet. It seems the (false) saint Cyril sent a copy to Rome where it got Latinised. It also circulated in its native Greek and in west-Syriac, and straight from Greek to the Ethiopians got it. Rarely - the latter got it without the medium of Arabic, nor it seems even of any Coptic.

Camplani also brings Timothy Aelurus, who wrote about the 400s AD more than about the 300s. But Caplani argues this later guy drew much imagery from our 300s AD history. There's also a [Sahid-]Coptic history up to Aelurus, itself translated from Greek (after that Greek had already sailed up to Ethiopia) and now fragmentary. That last is what's in the (in)famous Chronicle of the Patriarchs.

Is the history (thus reconstrued) any... good? - it seems not. It gave rise to the conflation of Arius the disciple of Melitius the Lycopolitan - who plagued the Nile - and Arius the haeresiarch. Thence, to Sozumen; and to many, many histories to come including, sigh, Gonick's cartoons.

This history is, however, the best game in town for events after Peter I's death, or "martyrdom" if you're a Copt. This goes on from Nicaea to the forgotten Council of Serdica, which Constans of Rome convened in AD 343 to bridge the East. This Council is today agreed as a failure. This history, closer to events, deems Serdica as a valiant defence of the Orthodox against such Eunomians as, well, that other emperor, Constantius II. Also of interest: no monks. Monks assuredly existed but had no clout in Alexandria as of The First Century Of Diocletian's Martyrs. They'll show up in that later Coptic history.

The canonisation of Ibn Hisham

CIRA hosts Jay Smith. This parallels Ibn Warraq on how we can't trust Guillaume's Sira, on account it translates Ibn Hishâm. Smith digs deeper to find that "Ibn Hisham" here was that edited by Heinrich Ferdinand Wüstenfeld in the 1800s. Wüstenfeld might not have had all the best MSS.

Fuat Sezgin has since produced a Maghrebi recension, in 1967. So... compare and contrast?

The Malikis - interestingly, predominant in Maghreb - rate his source Ibn Ishâq as a liar. So it interests me to see how the Sezgin edition handles Maliki critique. Ibn Ishâq might represent Sufyân al-Thawrî and al-Awzaî, that Umayyad dark-matter behind the classical madhâhib.

Wâqidî was ashamed to use Ibn Ishâq too. Wâqidî actually was a liar, refusing to acknowledge his debt to that man; Ibn Sa'd's Tabaqât is from him.

Modern scholarship doesn't... much care. It has generally endorsed Wüstenfeld > Guillaume. Scholars pull up Tabarî next to him for the synopsis, and where they agree they call out "Ibn Ishâq!" and deem it good-enough, for that one. As Maghâzî goes they can also turn to Ma'mar bin Râshid.

Before Wüstenfeld, I am unsure how many Muslims cared about Ibn Hishâm. A lot of them were illiterate, remember. They just got the kiddie version from the local imam. The imam - mediaevally - had summaries from the likes of post-post-Malikites such as Ibn Kathîr. Ibn Hishâm was copied, but not too well, as I noted; Tabarî himself only resurfaced in the 1800s. Ditto Ma'mar (through 'Abd al-Razzâq).

Also I don't know how much traxion Ibn Ishâq gained among the Shî'a. All the people taking hadith from him, however honestly, roamed about the Sunnites.

To sum up, Smith is overstating the problems with the English-language Sîra. It is a close-enough approximation to consensus among Sunnis.

Planetary cores

The Core aside, we can't actually get a ship to burrow into our Earth's inner core; and we can't do it for Uranus either. (Maybe your mom's. ... sorry) So today ScienceDaily offers content for terrestrials-with-magnetics, and for ice giants. Although some of this stuff has been knocking about for awhile.

I'm interested in why Earth gets a core with magic ionic carbon, protecting us (and LEO) from cosmic and solar radiation; but Venus our sister does not. At least Mars has the excuse there's only a tenth the mass such that its core is more predictable... and ineffectual.

As for the "Ice Giants" - that, I was a little more prepared-for. Those "mini neptunes" in other systems are solid rock, or molten rock, with obscurant clouds. There's probably a lot of queer-state liquid silicates below the supercritical ice in actual-Neptune.

We'd like more missions out there, but we'll unfortunately not get them for some time.

Joe Atwill, our new Constantine

I'd alluded to Joseph Atwill early this month, from a summary reaction by Laurent Guyénot. I'd noted that I hadn't read any Atwill so was holding my fire. "Yesterday", "Joe" raised a post at, uh, Unz.

What Atwill provides here (if not elsewhere) of use to Constantinian historians (I consider myself a postJustinian historian, centuries later) is the knowledge that Constantine I tied his house with that of the Flavians. We've seen the Severans like Caracalla tie themselves with the Antonines. All the emperors were we-wuzzers of some stripe or other. Guyénot is aware of some of this, but downplays it. Atwill argues to lean harder into it.

I do wonder if Atwill is wasting time on this one though. What Constantine says two centuries too late isn't much better than what Guyénot or Atwill might say sixteen centuries (or more) too late. Atwill is sounding like Andrew Wilson. Tip for debaters: when your opponent has scored small points, even points on a foul: don't run out the clock. 'Abd Qays could have told y'all that it doesn't much help to unscore those points.

What matters more for Atwill is this: Constantine choose the bizarre pseudo-Judaism because he knew that its scripture had been designed to cryptically worship Caesar. I dispute Constantine could know that, even if true. What Constantine could know, is the canon NT text: of the gospel ascribed to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. There, many reputable scholars - not me, not Atwill, not Guyénot - agree that the Luke-Acts project exists as a biography (if the word can apply) of the Holy Spirit: until its descent upon Rome. For Constantine at Milan, Luke-Acts served perfectly.

(And then Constantine moved to Byzantium and, a Eusebian might suppose, brought the Spirit thither.)

Where I'm running into obstacles is that I don't think Luke-Acts ... worked. I think Luke-Acts ended in Marcion. Atwill should expect the second-century Emperors, Flavian or Antonine, implicated in Marcion or at least in Luke. But I don't see that: not in contemporary histories, which are still good up to Cassius Dio and maybe even Herodian; and not in the Church writings, which start getting good in the late second-century AD. We do have Josephus, who seems to align with Luke and (Atwill argues) John. But we own four gospels - and that's just in the canon. Luke finished, at best, in third place (behind Mark and probably Matthew, I'd add Peter). Also we have the Revelation at Patmos which is no proRoman text.

The Christian Church is not something an Emperor can much control. The Constantines made some effort, and they may even have believed that the Flavians had endorsed Luke-Acts, confusing that with the other way 'round; but the Constantines' Christendom descended into Arius' Eunomianism and down to failure. Maybe Theodosius I?

UPDATE 12/11

Alexandrinus is Alexandrine

This blog has assumed codex A/02, for "Alexandrinus" (like B/03 is for Ватиканус) to be, in fact, Alexandrine. One hiccup was A's Gospel foursome which proved less Sinaitic/Vaticanic, than Byzantine - like, KJV-style. I've been seeing hints in the past four years the codex might actually be Ephesian, and brought to Egypt under some Byzantine deal.

Although not impossible... I was never seeing how likely the Ephesian theory be. Constantinople worried about an attack from the Muslims. Why not just send the thing to Rome, where the Muslims weren't? or to, I dunno... Vienna. So I hadn't poasted.

Brett Nongbri might be offkilter on the B / 𝔓⁷⁵ side, but now he's been reporting on the A/02: Mina Monier. Monier is the real deal on MSS scholarship.

The argument is that A/02 was kept by Copts. It then went to the Melkites: I am unsure why, but it may be that Melkites were Graeco/Arabs in a land where Copts were Aegypto/Arabs, who were (then) seeing Greek as the thirdplace loser. Coptic enjoyed a surgence in the AD 700s, when Greek was stuck in Anatolia, embargoed from Islamic supremacy, and associated with an iconoclasm Copts didn't want. After the 700s, the Greeks started doing rather better, but now they were an existential enemy to Islam. As far as Copts went, meanwhile, their decline started in earnest I think around the 1000s. But after that they'd probably be better off with Latin than with Greek.

Monier points to all the "paratext" in the codex, the scribblings which the readers stuck on the pages over the generations. Which show Coptic and Egyptian Melkite culture, none of it west-Anatolian.

BACKDATE 12/11

Jehu, ben Omri

The last book of Reigns describes the fall of Jezebel's kingdom to Jehu. The book (famously) has no chariot in this race so treats everyone horribly; it treats the queen mother as a virago and Jehu as an upstart, which he was. But how upstart? What did Jehu call himself?

In the ancient world, which is not so different from our world, nobles tended to be related to the King. Later, Darius on taking over Iran will tout himself as an "Achaemenid" cousin to dear Cyrus II.

Back to Jehu, the Bible gives some genealogy: son of Jehoshaphat son of Nimshi, no Omri in sight. But when the Assyrians demanded tribute they got it from the "Son Of Omri". This is usually considered a mistake. The assumption of any erreur is that the errateur didn't much care. However late last month, we were reminded that the Assyrians did care - if they were dealing with a man of little repute, they'd say so for the insult. Hazael to them was "son of nobody".

This suggests that Nimshi may have been a son of Omri shunted aside in the succession; equally (perhaps more) likely, an Omride daughter or granddaughter might have entered that line. Ahab would have kept this branch around in the court, in case Jezebel wasn't providing sons. Jezebel was not the sort of queen who would permit other girls into Ahab's chambers; and indeed, nobody calls Jehu "ben Ahab". But outside Ahab: this woman had all motive to distrust Omri's clan.

BACKDATE 12/11

The spread of the weekly Sabbath

In the last Seleucid year, 2 Kanun, I was pondering the Seven Day Week. This exists in tension with the lunar month, which is not 28 days. A strict seven day week would force the Sabbaths out of sync with the month. Ganzel and Safford the prior September (I didn't know) had presented the evidences. Nice to have it for free.

The world of 1-4 Reigns may have been monthly. I haven't looked into it. Anyway after that: the Exile happened. So that's what we're discussing today.

Elephantine, it seems, had a seven day week reserving one day for rest, sbt. That doesn't mean "seven", sb'; although I imagine wordplay at work. "Elishavath" - "my God is rest" - seems a better word than "my God is seven (אֱלִישֶׁבַע)". The Babylonians preferred four days a month, usually seven day divisions but at least once eight. The Ganzel-Safford use that to introduce the paper's main argument, which is the Iraqi-Jewish name "Shabbataya". This is surely the origin of messiah Shabtai and could well be the true origin to our Ἐλισάβετ.

For the paper, Shabbataya came to the Jews under the Achaemenids. Not Cyrus; the paper goes with "mid-fifth century BCE". The name appears with Darius I and beyond, so the authors may mean sixth when people started taking that name. It's with Darius that the Elephantine settlement gets Persian protection, given how said settlement was surrounded by angry Egyptians. Nobody is called "Šapattāya" which, to Ganzel-Safford, means it wasn't a name for Babylonians. This is the Jewish Shabbat, not the Iraqi Šapatta.

It has long been argued that Genesis One appropriates Babylonian tropes, for a nonBabylonian mythos. Here we may have motive: to force the week, no matter what month it was. This seems a nod more to Egypt, once Egypt and Iraq were united in this empire.

As a side-note, all this should interest Yonatan Adler: as evidence for Genesis One's spread among international Jewry (if I may). It's not all the kosher codes, which as Adler notes was likely just for (Egypt-influenced) priests at the time. But the week was incumbent upon Creation. Ezra, Nehemiah, and all of them might be able to enforce their writ upon Jerusalem, but their influence abroad would have to be through persuasion. Genesis One's stentorious prose is nothing if not effective rhetoric.

Bring back the sun!

As opposed to the sensationalism of impact-theory, better evidence exists for a cooling 2910 BC. This is associated with a one-time ritual in Denmark. The locals (Celtic or German) buried some rocks... etched with solar patterns. They didn't do it before and they wouldn't do it later.

So Rune Iversen et al., from the beginning of this year. I didn't know about it until flagged by Razib's X.

The cooling is rated on par with the 43 BC winter. In the past five years, that scholarship has withstood; the dimming is now rated worse than even Tambura. Iversen's scholarship looks like that will probably hold, as well.

Kennett III

James Kennett is still pushing press releases through Santa Barbara. I'd thought his Hammam stuff already got debunkled. Leading to serious questions about the Dryas event. I guess we gotta do this biannually.

I am by no means an anti-catastrophist; everyone knows those Dryas spores and pollen didn't come out of nowhere. But the causes of catastrophe need more care than is given.

Need I mention that Avraham Loeb is now near-univerally dismissed as a crank given his stupidities about the 3I/Atlas comet. Kennett looks like he's headed down that same road. I feel bad for his co-authors.

The Indian monkey trade

Excavations continue at Berenice, that Nullarbor of Egypt. These days the Aussies are struggling to supply what they hope will become a spaceport. In Roman days, the struggle was to supply a stopover and naval-station halfway down the Red Sea. They'd tried taking the moister Arabian side; it didn't work.

Anyway: the local troops got bored and wanted company. Some of them figured a barrel of monkeys would be fun. Or piglets; omnivores, basically, who might live on scraps.

These monkeys were Indian, it seems: rhesus and bonnet. Barbary monkeys indigenous to Africa also existed but they weren't here (those could be found at Pompeii though!).

Although the monkeys were well loved - they had human-tier burials, and given kittens and piglets as playmates - they didn't eat well. India simply offers more resources than the freakin' eastern Sahara.

Guyénot hits mythicism

Laurent Guyénot, returning from his thorough spanking on chronology-denial, is back; this time confronting a sect of denier. These deniers include Earl Doherty, no longer alive to continue his case; and Richard Carrier, much cited on this here blog lately. Did Jesus Exist? - asks M. Guyénot.

Guyénot may be loopy, but he does at least assemble facts - however he might sort them. He's amenable to the counter-denialism: against Pauline authorship of the mainline Epistles (you know the ones: the big four plus 1 Thess plus Philippians). Luckily he's not dying on that hill. He's steelmanning Carrier to allow that Paul did write those six, plus or minus certain couplets. Guyénot is showing more respect to Carrier than are Ehrman and O'Neill, which is already earning for him some points in my ledger.

If Jesus existed on Earth, the mythicists say; why does Paul, and we can throw in 1 Clement and Hebrews and even 1 Peter, say so little about Jesus on Earth. Guyénot counters that the past is another country. The "classical" - specifically Hellenistic - mind envisioned that several elden gods were human heroes who'd been raised to Divinity by their followers. Philosophers had already applied this theory to Dionysus and Zalmoxis by the reign of Augustus; Augustus himself was deifying his uncle Gaius Julius Caesar. Tiberius would, I think, do the same for Augustus. And these philosophers and emperors weren't ... wrong: it had been a tradition of the Hittites to say that their best kings had become gods in death. And what of Egypt?

Guyénot brings up Mark's Gospel, which a mythicist would agree was well-versed in the Pauline literature and likely 1 Peter too. It promotes a Christology: adoptionism. The Nativity is assumed - namely Paul's; Mark supplies the name of the woman from whom Jesus was born. So the mythicists claim. Guyénot thinks Mark might be relying on a side-tradition, also. Guyénot brings Charlemagne's vita, which is full of cods, allowing that Mark might also be full of cods, but nobody (except maybe Guyénot a decade ago... sorry) thinks Charlemagne didn't exist just because some goof wrote a bad bio of him. I could bring here John Malalas, the Historia Augusta, and Moses Khorenatsi, who also wrote terrible histories, but we don't deny the overall sweep of Late Antiquity for their sakes.

(Guyénot goes on to Atwill, which I'll ignore for this post, on account I haven't read him like I've read Carrier.)

Deification of mortals is, I think, a fair argument. Where it falters is that, for Charlemagne, and for that matter for all the Late Antique victims of Malalas and his ilk, we own side-sources. Charlemagne had contemporary attestation among the Popes in Italy, whom he didn't entirely approve, so must endure their more jaundiced view of his reign and adventures. I think some of the Anglo Saxons saw what he was about, as well; and the Byzantines, who were clambering out of their eighth-century slump at the time. Certainly Malalas can be checked against other Greek and Syriac chroniclers, and we've long recommended comparing the HA to John the Deacon's epitome of Victor, not to mention Herodian and Ammianus. Ubi sunt such side-evidence for Christ? - and don't tell Carrier "Tacitus and Pliny!"; he'll retort they're as late as the Gospels.

Anyway, overall, I'm glad Guyénot is making the effort. He might consider a stronger effort.

The binding of a story

For whatever reason TheTorah.com is running the table on "the Akedah" lately - which indie gamers might know as the Binding of Isaac. A professor with a career all over the greater Germania holding the improbable name "Christoph Levin" is discussing its intertext, hoping to garner how the tale was coagulated. I think something be missing.

In 1997/8ish I stumbled onto an account that suspected the story was composed, at first, for offering one's first born to the Temple. In old Canaan that was often for sacrifice. Carthage - Tyre's colony - famously was big on this. In fact it may have been so big on this that the colony ended up not Tyrian at all: genetics and personal names show Barqi Graeco-Berbers (like Hannibal), or various Sardinians and Sicels, or their own hinterland Libyco-Berbers. Back to Abraham, the story has Abraham and Isaac go up the mount and only Abraham return.

Meanwhile... where's Sarah? Genesis doesn't have her dying until after this event. Most Christians and Muslims hold Sarah as a type for Mary; Jews don't. In fact Genesis=Bereshit Rabba in some recensions has Sarah dying of a broken heart. Not so in the Gospel of John!

So if Levin is opening the Akedah to deeper excavation: verse 22:19 in blue is indeed a deep text, "zeroth" composition or first revision. But the black verses where ram is swapped in for Isaac have to come later and should not be black.

How Richard Carrier defeated Andrew Wilson

To read Richard Carrier, he faced Andrew Wilson's side of alt-right at Wilson's best and still made him his bitch. Rhetorically speaking.

Carrier might not be the best source; some fellow atheists find him hard to suffer, like Tim O'Neill who cooked up a whole blog for atheists like him. To read Carrier himself, we get a hint why people dislike Carrier personally: the man needled Wilson, to waste time on a definition, namely of "fascism". A quick aside from Wilson to the effect "this is not a fascist movement and I'll thank you not to insult us" should do. To Carrier's thought, Wilson-ism might even be worse than secular fascism, so Carrier could have stuck with that, as Carrier in fact did with most of his arguments.

Trolling the opponent may well get you a win on points. It certainly unveils where the opponent is a bad face for the movement, and might even suggest why the movement attracts bratty autists into authoritarianism.

Although if we were shown why it is bad to let Wilson lead us, I feel more comfortable that Carrier not be leading us either.

A wolf taming example

We're sometimes told to distinguish "domestication" (e.g. cat) versus "taming" (cheetah). So maybe that's going on in a Baltic island 3000 BC. Presently the dog is tame and domestic, housebroken or at least kennelbroken; from a wolf ancestor. Last I heard, that ancestor was a Eurasian red wolf no longer seen today. We did not domesticate, nor tame, the - say - jackal.

Sometimes wild wolves are tamed from cubs and will accept a human caretaker into their pack. But they are not dogs and remain not easy to handle. Some dog breeds have been made as half-wolf hybrids (like in Alpha); this process also happened in our deep past with special breeds like, I think, the husky. In reverse America (at least) has some wolves with coyote and feral dog introgression as well.

Anyway: the Baltic protoGermanics (I suspect) were able to coëxist with some local (grey) wolves. I don't know how far these canicated lupines were domestic... and, in fairness, "domicile" might be itself fungible to a near-Arctic population of likely seminomadic shellfish-gatherers.

I ponder if we may extrapolate. Consider any pygmy wolf from any island or isolated valley - not in fringe Denmark, but in the Indonesia (or Ingushetia, wherever). As noted you can't bat a wolf's nose with a newspaper, nor with an empty softwoven reed basket in the old days. But you can so assert your alpha status against a smaller animal, like a fox. As the thus-tamed fox can be domesticated in a few vulpine generations, a pygmy wolf should be.

BACKDATE 11/30

Luke credited Stephen for Hebrews

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

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

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

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

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

So I daresay Carrier is vindicated.

What's an illegal order?

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

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

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

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

How the devil seduced Schacht

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

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

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

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

Why not rain fire on them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Georgian Bible

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

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

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

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

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

Neolithic apocalypto

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

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

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

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

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

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

34 Tauri

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

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

I don't know why the Seventh Planet be most-visible when it sails through Taurus, of all zodiacal/elliptic constellations. Darker over there? UPDATE 12/1: Retrograde. So it slipped out and slipped back in again.

Isaiah's poetic successor

Samuel Koser is calling shens on Isaiah 40-55's date. Davila points out that the "Classical Biblical Hebrew" / "Late Biblical Hebrew" distinction relies on a short dataset: the Hebrew Bible literally fits into one Book, and the various Judaean ostraca wouldn't add much of an appendix. Koser illustrates how, with a few Psalms here and a few Proverbs there, we can get wildly different vocabulary in each bucket.

Mind, if you'd been reading this my blog: you'd know that. We should be sequestering Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah into their own dialect bucket, which is indeed late, but doesn't define all the Hebrew spoken then. Esther - sharing a late basis - gets flagged as making deliberate reference to the elder language. Same for Daniel.

In 2 Isaiah's case, reference is made to Jeremiah MT 31 and to Isaiah 28. The crosspollinations to Hezeqiah's time (חזק), that earlier great deliverance from Mesopotamian tyranny, assuredly inspired late-Persian copyists to keep the two Isaiahs together (and away from the Prophet of Lament).

Given the intertext, we should hardly be surprised to hear 2 Isaiah's narrator sing in the same prophetic register as his predecessors. Our man really did want to be the second Isaiah. As far as I'm concerned he's earned it.

As for Koser, arguing for 2 Isaiah's place before the exile is wrongheaded. A better tack for his argument is as a "Steel Man" for 2 Isaiah apologists, to explain how certain old arguments have been too facile. Overall they were still right, though.

Zork on MIT

I ain't got much, but I can at least link Zork. That's the 1-3 series, which some nerds did in the late 1970s and then sold, via their "Infocom" brand. Until Infocom fell down went boom. Lately the present holders of the property are Microsoft which property they've now released to some sort of public domain, here MIT's.

Go click the link to see the peregrinations of Infocom's intellectual-property, if you care. I'm not sure I care. Reason? It's just the Z-machine. We've had interactive-fiction on the Z-machine, by hobbyists for free, since the middle 1990s. I was unaware anybody was enforcing that copyright. Could they enforce it?

Microsoft do retain a hold on Zork's lore, like the Flathead history and the Borphee / Pheebor alluvial plain. Which is fine. I hope Microsoft can use it, to put out a game as good as Zork Grand Inquisitor was good. Do so with my blessing and please take my money.

But rights to the code, legally, seems like a dead-letter to me. Probably to Microsoft too since said code's been on github since 2019 (before MS bought the rights). This was 1970s code, overtaken by events in the 1990s. Just an artifact of computer history.

Kiss n' capture

I promise this is not an Olivia Nuzzi poast. There's enough of that spreading around. The whole Internet needs penicillin.

No: this is about Pluto and Charon (pronounced like the French: consonants Hebrew-defective שרן, vowels Greek Χάρων). The theory is that Pluto/Charon formed like Terra/Luna. Except: slower.

That suggests that we don't have a Theia situation where the impactor was simply obliterated, with the larger body's crust forming the moon. Instead, protoPluto and protoCharon maintained their integrity: they were always (mostly) just Pluto and Charon.

I take it that they model this because both bodies are alike. A hard impact would suggest Pluto got smacked by a comet. Instead, these are two bodies on the same basic orbit, which by Kepler-Newton is a very slow orbit, compared to inyalowda.

Evangelical subtext

Ian Mills is bringing the term ὑπόθεσις back to light. The literal Latin would be sub-positio; hence why "supposition" is a near-literal, if not entirely semantic, translation of what we call a "hypóthesis". In the Hellenistic-to-Roman era, Greek-speakers independently of the Latins developed the ὑπόθεσις rather to mean more like a "subtext".

Mills points to the Gospels. They clearly share a subtext, or at least the synoptic trio do. Christians came to claim that the synoptics further shared subtext with John, and with Paul; digging into what they might share as a common theology, which has become the Creed. Having picked on these bases, of the Passion and Resurrection, such writings as did not affirm that basis were ruled out. Thus, the Gospel of Thomas and more-so the Valentinians were claimed to come from an alien hypothesis. Mills sees Irenaeus as the pioneer and Epiphanius as its best interpreter.

Durie would assuredly agree, considering this stuff so much voodoo. One might even see Durie as Epiphanius' heir, this time against Islam.

BACKDATE 11/21

The day of Mordekai

"Mordekai", or Mordhekhai with Aramaic aspiration, is noted in Ezra-Nehemiah. To him was held a festival in Alexandria. Aaron Koller wrote a book about how this festival inspired the book Esther over in the Babylonian-Susan oriental side of Diaspora. Jacob Wright reviewed it, and now I'm finding out about the review.

Esther is assuredly a postMaccabean production if only because its Jews are following "laws" - on their own, and not enforced by their priests. Because out in the boonies, Esther is unaware of priests. Boonie Jews of old like in Elephantine island at Aswan were attending religious services, but not following day-to-day laws outside the sacrifice. The friction in Elephantine came about due to the Jewish priests' sacrifice of taboo (to Egyptians) rams. Esther inhabited a different world than Elephantine.

Esther's book is famously absent from Qumran, in a way the other book-length absence - Nehemiah - is not. The Christian movement... is a little more questionable. Jesus Himself ignored the story, as did the Apostles. The Evangelists however may have reacted to it: in the John/Salome cycle, which perhaps predates their work. Salome is the anti-Esther.

One tidbit I didn't know is that the Genesis Apocryphon may be reacting to Esther, too. That would mean Qumran was aware of the story. They simply didn't want it: compare, Judith, or 3 Maccabees, or even Kiddushin 66. But you know who did want it: the Iraqis, and they're the Jews (Kiddushin 66 notwithstanding) who compiled Talmud for us.

Koller/Wright are saying that Esther should be viewed as a latter Torah. The Torah imposed the Babylonian week upon the old lunar sabbaths, and built an Exodus story around Pascha. Likewise, Esther imposed an Arabian-nights, or anyway Elymaean-nights, tale upon the Day of Mordecai.

BACKDATE 11/21

Family 13/Ferrar

I stumbled onto James Stapp's site and found this on William Ferrar's grouping, specifically John 8:44. This is Ferrar's finding that manuscript 13 = BNF 50 gr is also like MS 69 and others. That's the group which sticks Byzantine "John 7:53-8:11" into Luke instead. The group is now subdivided: MS 13 heads up group a, and 69 b.

The earlier survivors of this family (b anyway) cluster around AD 1052, associated with the Greek-speaking church in Calabria and maybe Syracuse. The region was claimed as part of the Rhomania, based in Constantinople, although the Normans were coming to push them out of their last Italian foothold, rather toehold. So what gives with the non-receptus shifting of the pericopa adulterae?

Ferrar thought that this was not a reference text - "The Bible" - so much as a liturgical one. Old lectionaries had circulated, in this case Byzantine ones perhaps from the reign of Constans II. These readings entered this text. After Constans' murder and the Eastern "Roman Empire" retreat to Constantinople, said Empire full of Greeks wasn't much able to dislodge this archetype, and/or didn't care enough. Then when the Normans took Calabria and Sicily, the once-obscure book got loose. High Mediaeval scholars deemed it of interest; Erasmus, for one, knew MS 69. Hence copies all over the Med: from the Escorial to Mount Athos.

Back to Stapp's John 8:44, he finds its omission of "tou patros" be deliberate. It would feed an antiMarcion agenda; the phrase also is absent from Bohairic, a Nile-delta Coptic which became the liturgical language in the High Middle Ages. My thought, however, is that nobody should care to fight Marcion on the ground of John which gospel the Marcionites didn't accept. The same Demiurge/Christ division is found in Gnosticism, and here we do find use of John. Such a battle can be had in Egypt.

BACKDATE 11/23

Breaking the skin

This year's TC journal is out. Apart from the nitpicks of a MS-sorting nature, is a standout: Psalm 22:17, or 21:17 wherever MT Psalm 10 be considered the continuation of Psalm 9. Bestial enemies have beset the narrator. Then something happens to his hands and feet.

One difference between standard prose and rhetoric, especially poetic rhetoric, is nuance. Seth Postell reports that earlier translators have failed to reach consensus. That is because they were translators. Suppose, however, the verse had a reception-history? How was this verse read entails, who was reading it - besides Christians. Why did its Jewish reciters read it so?

Some argued that lions dismember their prey, so instinctually the prey draws in its extremities. So either the narrator is protecting his hands and feet, or else the beasts are attacking them. Both work in context. Postell can at least rule out piercing or even binding.

T Corona-Borealis update

Last year I was all agog over the blazing 80-year star T Corona-Borealis. I actually thought Johnny Kepler'd seen it, blurring out the real star in that region. Well not so far this year; nothing's happened.

Bradley Schaefer says that it won't spark a Type 1a. Still: it's supposed to be gathering mass, so maybe, uh, next year. Like Texans fans say annually about the Super Bowl.

BACKDATE 11/21

Green energy mitigation

In LiberaWorld, all you have to do to demonstrate you are a Good Person is to talk about "Green" or something ending -ibble, usually "renewibble". In ConservaWorld, you just grunt "boondoggle". Some of the smarter of the latter point out that solar panels degrade leaving a lot of toxic waste, and that windmill blades can't be recycled either - and, also, julienne the birds. Since Planet of the Humans the former should at least not be talking about "biofuel" (= wood).

Add to the above, the Green Ibbles are competing with improved ash-capture from coal and general improvements in nuclear fission.

Everyone benefits from better energy storage and efficiencies. But those are being drunk up by AI farms these days. So energy production remains necessary.

Over on LinkedIn, although I might not have the links, some of the Green Ibbles have taken to heart some of the naysayers.

Bad solar panels are being reused for less-efficient local purposes, like powering a lightbulb in a bus shelter and/or serving as a roof. Meanwhile work is being done to make windmill blades more visible to birds, like painting some of them to different colours. Or there's the idea not to spread the blades over wide areas. Blades can also be more biodegradeable.

The panel-to-shelter idea seems like cope. I like the windmill ideas though. They still won't scale and remain vulnerable to ice, but at least their pollution / kill rate will be lower.

BACKDATE 11/20

Von Neumann, the Einstein of computers

The Vox Day / Ron Unz side of the 'web likes to discredit Albert Einstein by pointing out that he'd stood on some shoulders. I always felt this was misguided. Now Erik Hoel is pointing to, perhaps, a more deserving target: John von Neumann.

Von Neumann was an also-ran in my 1980s-90s education. The Curies, Bohr, Rutherford, and of course Newton and Einstein get the top billing. Turing and maybe Dijkstra, for computer nerds. It's recently we've been hearing of von Neumann again. Maybe in the same way we've been reviving Hamilton's quaternion: because computers are just so much more important to us today.

Hoel seems to endorse The Man From The Future, in an otherwise-skeptical summary, so I'll take that as the book worth reading on JvN. A book I suspect I'd read first is Hoel's own proposal on aristocratic tutoring. With the caveat that TGGP and others have had comments deleted by Hoel; so, Hoel might not be getting the input he needs from his reviewers.

In Flanders Fields is not in the Armistice spirit

"We are the dead", says John McCrae; arrogating to himself their stilled voice. It gets worse from there: Take up our quarrel with the foe: ... If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep.

So we're to fight forever, then? or to fight until ... when exactly? Assuredly once the Hun is gone from Flanders, but then what? What are your conditions for peace, dead man?

It was a 1915 poem, and it shows.

Let's not revisit the Armistice

Since national-socialism is in the news again lately, thanks to Nick Fuentes and those who are taking him seriously for their own reasons, I've been alerted to Europa: The Last Battle. This is a NSDAP answer to Frank Capra. And it has pushback, from one "Consistent_Score_602" over on Reddit.

I'll lay out my cards that I sympathise more with CS602 than with her(?) target. I've been reading Liaquat Ahamed (2009); he's pointed out the bankers didn't want the First World War, including the Jewish bankers. There was in 1914 a transnational economy. Jews are supposed to thrive in that state of affairs. On the flipside, beyond some technicalities I'll get to [UPDATE 11/25] in coming weeks...

I was unimpressed with CS602's comment on what started that War Of The World in the first place. Germany declared war on Russia, yes. Did she have to? Russia had already ordered a mobilisation. That might not hit Germany. But Russia was certainly going to hit Hungary, and that would have been a disaster. There were plenty of moves Germany could have made at least to keep the French off; I mentioned last year how bad von Moltke's plan was unfit for 1914. But the war was primed to happen anyway. Moderns are overall forgetting how far war mania was spreading around the Continent, even if THE JEWS didn't want it. Among the gentiles who did want it, it wasn't just the Germans.

On Bolshevik-cum-Soviet leadership not being Jewish, that might have been true in the 1910s but by 1920s, the promise of emancipation and the Russian civil war (White Terror, for us) drove many Jews off their lands in Poland and Ukraine into the Bolshevik-controlled cities. There, they were recruited. The Holodomor aside; we can talk of the Gulag. There we must ask after Genrikh Yagoda (opportunist, who should have known better). ctrl-F "Yagoda" ... nothing.

The documentary Europa further talks the vile state of Weimar-era Berlin. CS602 poopooes its claim of hundreds of thousands of children trafficked in Berlin, on account that would sum to the entire child population of the city. Would it, though? Ahamed cites 100,000 prostitutes of any age (and sex) in Berlin at any given time, probably sharing a source with Europa. Such children don't stay children, nor always survive to escape childhood. We are talking about a decade for the process. And it might not be Berlin alone. Also if we are in a conversation about numbers, uhhh....

As to German prosperity, the review correctly points out that NSDAP Germany was not as prosperous as was 1920s America - nor 1930s (the now-greatly-depressed Americans having already bought all those cars, and garages; and chickens, and chicken-pots). But, uh. Who was? I don't think you compare the Germans to the Americans at the time. You compare the Germans to the French, or to the British or to those luxuriating under the socialist paradise eastward.

CS602 claims 700000 rural Germans leaving the farm and swarming the city. Sigh, numbers again. Either way: that process was happening anyway with the introduction of the tractor. It was happening in the American rural South; Germany was if anything catching up. Certainly Russia was.

These are nits, because they don't much affect the thrust. In fact I may even have improved the argument, inasmuch as I am not seeing THE JEWS being for the 1914 war, nor for the 1917-18 phases of the Russian Revolution, nor for the collapse of the German lines on the Western front.

However. Liaquat Ahamed does lay out a case for transnational money doing better from the 1923 inflation in Germany; and I do see Jewish recruits into the early Soviet system causing a lot of damage. (Ekaterina Jung has implicated more the Latvians, but that's neither here nor there.)

As to the Nazi punks in the 1930s, they were genuinely crooked and leeches upon the German economy, such as it was. We agree on that much.

Denisova 25

This preprint came out some weeks ago, but is worth noting now: A high-coverage genome from a 200,000-year-old Denisovan by Stéphane Peyrégne among others.

We have lots of material from that cave; Peyrégne-et-al.'re now up to #25, apparently. We can now add that to the six others (or, eight; but #11 and the best-preserved #3 were hybrids). Which are all a lot younger; in fact, they replaced the sort of Denisovan this #25 was.

D#25's ancestors had mixed with Neanders (who'd diverged much earlier). Then, as noted, his - this was a male - descendents left the region before the other seven got there. Did D#25 contribute to later populations?

Mostly what this super-ancient molar is giving us, is a triangulation of the Denisovan tree. Such that, confirmed is that the Denisovan contribution to Melanesia differs entirely from that to East Asians today.

BACKDATE 11/15

No, Noah did not store tablets in Sippar

Zimbir was an important city in Sumeria, which parasemitic Akkadians later elided to our familiar Sippar. The Sippar sun-temple archive has "renown"... today. Because it is a library; we like lie berries here. Saddam's archaeologists dug this one up in 1986. Unfortunately it got looted thanks to George Bush II and the locals who used him as an excuse. But some of it might be coming back, or got photographed before the lootage.

The late news comes from Enrique Jiménez and Anmar Abdulillah Fadhil. This is a hymn to Marduk, oft-copied, but fragmented - or so the article argues. It seems that AI was used to gather the fragments, as to associate them all to the same hymn.

It's been neglected. Not only was the text scattered in fragments, they also date to the 7th century and even later. This is the Neo Babylonian era, or perhaps Terminal Babylonian - mostly the Persian or even Greek/Parthian era called "Hellenistic". I don't know if the hymn was ever sung at the courts of, say, Hammurabi.

Since the archives at Sippar were for the sun god, that Marduk is here praised suggests Babylon's influence. Indeed from vv. 25 on, the hymn shifts subject: a god is praising Marduk; I expect at Sippar's sun temple that would be the sun, Shamash. And vv. 100f praises Babylon, then the Babylonians. And-and, some of the reconstruction pulls from Babylonian texts as well. By Nabu-Kadrusr's time, the Babylonians were draping the glory of Eridu upon themselves. They also nodded to the ancient stele, which the authors associate with that of Hammurabi.

So I agree: a work of late Babylonian propaganda, disseminated throughout all the lower-Mesopotamian scribal schools.

But what the actual hell is this nonsense: One of the key goals of the LMU-Baghdad collaboration is to decipher hundreds of cuneiform tablets from the renowned Sippar Library and ensure their preservation. According to legend, Noah concealed these tablets there before the flood. I do not find any reference to some legend of Noah in Jiménez-Fadhil. Also stupid is this which is claiming the tablets are Middle Bronze Age which they are not.

BACKDATE 11/12

Grokipedia fails the most basic test

On this sad day of James Watson's death; we must discuss those who refuse his life's work. Which was biology - and genetics, which Watson helped invent as a field.

Scientody, if you don't like the word "science", concerns models of the physical world which models may be tested. You may or may not ever have liked Milgrom's modification of Newton, but it proposed to be testable. And it got tested, and proven wrong. It was still science.

This is not the case for "intelligent design" which is why ID got thrown out of a Dover court. It was always a philosophic stance, coming out of Near Eastern societies' need to enforce a common cultural frame of reference. Later the Greeks eavesdropped upon some of these conversations such that we got David Sedley's classic book on the their "Creationism"(s).

Grokipedia has failed to understand this. It's picked up whatever its AI has picked up. I suspect: from American Right sources. Like when Microsoft's Tay got fed inputs from 4chan.

This bodes ill for Grokipedia elsewhere.

On attending Shabbos dinners

Evan Myers is being strugglesessioned because he won't attend Shabbos (=Sabbath, for KJV).

First up, if a Jew is going to complain about a Gentile not attending a Jewish ritual; said Jew must then explain why they cannot sit in upon an Orthodox Sunday Mass. "Idolatry!", the Jew will respond. Which is fair enough! Jews as Jews do not, can not, recognise Jesus bar Miriam as Christ. In fact, some edgelords among them consider him a momzer boiling submerged in a nasty substance in Hell. And you know, they're right: per CS Lewis himself, if Jesus was wrong, that's the afterlife he deserves. I can accept that those who do not believe what we believe are not going to want to partake in the rituals in which we partake. (We at least agree upon the Saracens.)

How can a German participate in a ritual based in an ancestral exodus from a land they never knew? The German might not always have been German (geneticists are now saying the culture came from the Bottenviken) but such assuredly were never Canaani. And this assumes Evan is not an Ó Meidhir, nor a Cymraeg - they've never not been Irish or Welsh, respectively. The ritual is simply not theirs.

Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica I-II, q.103, a.4 agreed; this entered the Canon Law too (1917) #1258. I recall the Letters of James of Edessa preaching against attendance as well; although not in our confessional tradition, Jacob's statements of praxis represent the Late Antique baseline of transconfessional relations.

I will here disclose that I could accept an invitation to a Sabbath. But... I am a good part Jewish. Saint Paul has granted dispensation to my kinfolk who are Christian. So I cannot speak for Myers.

Overall, Myers' decision lies within his own conscience. It should be assumed to be in good faith.

Co-redemption: a Nestorian take

Return To Tradition points to Cardinal Victor Fernández, who no longer wants CoRedemptrix as one of the Marian titles. RTT considers this an insult to Our Lady. I consider that over-emotive. But we can look at the semantics around the title.

A paper can have one main author and several co-authors; usually this can be seen if the main author is out of alphabetic order. But it also can just have a gaggle of co-authors. OnePeterFive were earlier punting on the argument; now seem to be bringing past authorities.

In the Catholic (and, more so perhaps, the Orthodox) perception, we don't say that Jesus was a CoRedemptor. The focus remains upon Christ. As to why bring up Mary here: that's because she shared some of Christ's suffering.

... on the other hand, Judas wept too, in Matthew's Gospel. As did Peter, excepting in the Johannine tradition. Maybe the women who prepared his body for burial.

1 Peter argued, yes, for Christian grief and mourning to be taken on par with Christ's suffering. I have long promoted 1 Peter as essential for our canon (as opposed to, say, 2 Peter); I have prayed the Stations. But I do not see where any Apostolic text would extend that to Christ's death - and resurrection. Am I a co-redeemer for praying the Stations? subhânalmasîkh

And Saint Paul, that great apostle of the Resurrection, quoter of that hymn on the Incarnation for the Philippians, author of the "born of woman" creed - didn't bother with Mary's postpartum role.

Fernández sucks for several other reasons, some of which go to Mary's One Job as a woman. But once Mary had done that job, she became as any other female saint - or, really, as a male one, like Joseph.

Coredemptrix she is not. Fernández deserves credit for laying down the obvious.

Delayed Huronian

Cyanobacteria, they say, contributed to the Oxidation - but didn't trigger it. The former spread before the latter. Dilan M. Ratnayake, Ryoji Tanaka, Eizo Nakamura proposed (August) a model as to why: urea and nickel.

Urea has nitrogen and dissolves in low-pressure water, which nitrogen doesn't (N₂ dissolves in high pressure, hence the Bends). But urea seems to get too high a concentration with nickel about. Also not good for plants. I guess?

Anyway eventually the nickel dropped off and the urea got to a decent level, allowing the cyanobacteria to bloom. Oxygen ran riot, the temperature plummeted, on with Huronian.

Iliad #10

Robin Lane Fox wrote a large book about The Iliad which wrote off the tenth chapter of that book, called "Doloneia". The rest of Fox' book dealt with the Iliad without it. Whatever conversations Fox was engaging with wider Homerian scholarship elsewhere, here we cannot blame Fox: Fox was delivering the consensus scholarship of AD~2020.

But maybe the Doloneia isn't a bust. Maybe it is merely corrupted. Christos Tsagalis is making that argument - and Andromache Karanika is agreeing. (Kind of a Dorian or Arcadian last name... shouldn't she be "Andromacha"?)

The deal is that this tenth chapter mirrors the ninth. As, we suppose, an insertion would - or a chapter composed after that one and before the next one. Tsagalis, apparently, is pointing out elements of this Doloneia as do not mirror the ninth, and are further absent from those afterchapters.

Homerists will know "wergon" as the common euphemism for bloody work of swords. This chapter plots a μέγα wἔργον of Greek assassins against Hector over there on the Troy side. - rather, it was supposed to plot so. Somehow, in the retelling, the "work" became nerfed to a ... spying mission. This retelling involved Rhesus of Thrace (whom the Greeks kill) and his horses. Consolation prize!

Or maybe all that Rhesus stuff didn't belong in The Iliad and was stuffed into this tenth chapter. So the book and its reviewer argue.

When the Imamis had three books

In 2022, Amin Ehteshámi got "The Four Books of Shiʿi Hadith: From Inception to Consolidation" published. Sort of the Shiʿ complement to Jonathan Brown's work on the canonisation of Bukhari and Muslim.

In the Middle Ages, the Shiʿa had three books. In the late 800s/1400s Ibn Abī Jumhūr found a copy of Kulayni's Kafi and promoted that as the fourth. Barqi had a Mahasin before Kulayni, but Ibn Abī Jumhūr didn't rate it; most likely, he couldn't find a full copy. We still can't.

It may be that the Kafi wasn't easy to find either. In fact: none of them were. Shiʿites didn't always have secure scriptoria over the centuries, like the Sunnis enjoyed. A lot of these scholars complain about that; other scholars give up and advise jurists, if you can find one of these three (later, four) then you can go ahead and use that book to run your court. We may suppose that's how the Buyids had muddled by in Iraq.

I take it that when the Safavids took Iran - which had Qom and Mashhad - the Shiʿa could copy those books again. That's more the 1000s/1600s I think.

Colavito gets mean again

I fully accept that gates exist as need keeping, and Jason Colavito is an effective keeper of the gates. Except when he isn't; and he has a bad habit of falling upon college-basement tropes ("homophobia!", being common on his blog). So here he is with a mean spirited review, of Manvir Singh. At least Colavito's being honest... this time.

The drive to find a common source of Western languages and mythologies, is a Western drive. Which is natural to Westerners - you'd think. But somehow it's a problematic when Westerners do it; and The New Yorker needs to mention it. Because Whiteness.

The fun part is that Singh doesn't engage in any of the pseudohistory that spawned from this drive... and isn't even Western. He's probably one of those Baltoslav offshoots given his name. Actually given Singh's name you'd think Colavito would be more interested in how he's bucking the Out Of India theories.

Toward an orthodox king of Britain

To continue Charles Coulombe's musings on how Catholics should recognise the Saxe-Coburgs:

Charles Coulombe lists some GermanEnglish monarchs who may have converted to Catholicism on their deathbed. Charles II springs to mind but he may always have been a closet case, like Sepharad-born minister Ben Disraeli the Marrano; anyway Coulomb is concerned with postStuarts. Coulomb claims Victoria wavered - but, truly wavered; she didn't take the leap, nor was she holding to the santa fé in private like the former Charles.

Her son Edward VII however might have taken that leap. Additional speculation swirls around George V.

The above stated, our Charles III - reports Coulombe - had his chrism blessed in Orthodoxy. That is not the same as Catholicism; but Orthodoxy is taken seriously in OnePeterFive, where we consider Anglicanism a LARP, which it is.

It may be that Charles and Prince William are tacking toward the Antiochene communion. They'll still not be Catholics, but they'll at least not be a joke.

The Jacobites no longer exist

With due respect to Curtis Yarvin over the late 2000s, the Stuart claim on the English throne is the Norman claim: conditional on its loyalty to the Altar and on some credible ability to assume the Throne. For us said Altar, since Charles II's (probable) cryptoCatholicism and of course James II's overt Catholicism, is Saint Peter's. OnePeterFive ain't the best Catholic site at present but on this much, Charles Coulombe seems to know what he's on about.

In 1766, Pope Clement XIII recognised, on the death of James III, George III as King. There remained outside Britain a Jacobite Pretender; but, in 1807, that one up and died. The line can go through females among Stuarts same as for Saxe-Coburgs like Georgie over here. I mean, heck; Queen Anne was a Stuart, just an unlucky one (and Protestant). To this day, via various female Pretenders, the Stuarts may boast a male - in the House of Wittelsbach. Problem: this one is trying to marry another man. That blasphemes a Sacrament before the Altar therefore blasphemes the Altar itself.

Yorks also survive. Simon Michael Abney-Hastings Earl Loudoun is living an 'umble life downunder, and is a Catholic to boot. Coulombe isn't concerned with them.

Sample Size Compensation

The Fatima apparition spawned a heresy against the Dormition, unfortunately rife in the Western Church which - ironically - had earlier raised the Dormition to canon. (Its consecration of nonCatholic Russia is further an insult to the Orthodoxy of Russia, but I don't care about that, except inasmuch as it has erected yet another barrier to the reunification of the bishops.) Now Richard Hanania is explaining why it didn't happen.

What's lately happened is that Scott Alexander has been arguing for that apparition. Why? I dunno. Attention probably. It may take an attention-hound to fight an attention-hound.

Hanania is arguing similar to the "Big Data Fallacy", which he acknowledges, but says is different. What we skeptics notice in Biblical apologetics is how the apologists point to the fat stack of Byzantine bibles and cite it as proof of a Majority-Text. Well, no; it just points to the history of Christian takeovers of the scriptoria. To get to the text you have to go to the 100s and 200s AD, not the 600s. Fatima is actually different since the mass apparition is claimed to 70000 at the same time. So, more like the appearance of Christ noted by Paul, which "Saint" Luke perverted into the Spirit at Pentecost / Simchat-Torah.

Note how in "Pentecost" too we can see how an original mass apparition can be recast as something else and then canonised...

What Hanania is saying is that the peer pressure will be stronger in a crowd of 70000 from the same families, than in a small group of about a dozen. Also, the "Skeptics!!1" in the crowd told everyone they were skeptics BEFORE but now, after the fact: BELIEVE, BABY. They did not evince a paper trail of skepticism before the event.

Given the trajectory of the Papacy since the Fatima apparition, it may well be that it was at Fatima that the devil entered the congregation.

The myconid conquest

Two articles on the emergence of life before animals. Continent Nuna of the Boring Billion 1800-800 Mya is surveyed. The life on land, from 1400-900 Mya, spanning Nuna's breakup, would be fungi.

Earth had surface oxygen by then; thanks to the algae and cyano, but their home was water. The plants could make no foothold on land. Until fungi allowed for symbiosis with lichen.

Lichen isn't preserved well; but we have a few additional tools from genomics of fungi and plants today. They're talking about horizonal gene transfer, like when retroviri burrow into animal genomes. These events can be used as before/after date-markers. And then, I guess, related to what events we can know about, like the timeline of a supercontinent connecting all the shoreland.

When Christ nearly died

Checking back in on Richard Carrier, we can sum up three theses. 1. Six of Saint Paul's letters are indeed Paul's. 1. Besides those six: 1 Clement and Hebrews also come from the first century. 3. Papias was kind of a moron.

Ignatius of Antioch by contrast was no moron. But, you know... neither was Paul. So why does Ignatius' Christology look so much like Antiochene Orthodoxy today, and so little like Paul?

That - says Carrier, rather said it in 2017 - is because Christianity suffered a terminal-Permian blow. Among the gentiles Pliny the Younger couldn't find many acting Christians in Bithynia, which is northern Anatolia not too far from whither Paul was sending these letters or even his successors, like whoever did Colossians on his behalf. With a collapse in Christian membership, became possible for men like Ignatius to promote an alternative Christianity based on the Gospels; or, at least, whatever Gospels that Ignatius could find. (I suspect he had the Gospel of Peter, rather than something good like Mark.)

BACKDATE 10/29