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?

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.