The Talmud versus the MT

What we call "Judaism" is associated with a Biblical text which descends from the pre-Revolt era. This text supplied all translations of the Middle Ages except for the Greeks', and a few Greek-based translations like the Sahidic and some Syriac. Tradition claims the Masoretes, for this. It was the primary source for the Qaraiya sect of the Jews.

Mainline Jews, famously, use besides their Bible (which is MT) another text: "The Talmud" - specifically, that of Babylonia. This is a difficult text to pin down. It might not have been intended as a final compilation, although it has become one.

The Talmud is aware of the MT but perhaps only as the default Bible. A Karaite would refuse Ben Sira out of hand; the Talmud cites it, and arguably treats it with more respect than (say) Clement was treating "The Gospel Of Thomas". The Talmud is aware of variants in the accepted canon as well, usually ascribed to those pesty Septuagints (in east-Aramaic?) but TheTorah.com cannot rule out old Tanakh scrolls from the Seleucid era. Variants lingered in the Rabbinic tradition even after the Talmud.

It may be that the MT attracted errors which later copyists had to ratchet back - which could end up canonising some errors, rather than fixing them. Similar has happened to the Peshitta which is why Syriac scholars are looking into the earliest Arabic translations.

The Peshitta is, mind, a Christian translation - or has become one. Naturally Jews desired their own Arabic translations. Saadya Gaon created a quick-n'-dirty translation using some Jewish Aramaic lore, which strikes me as creating a Jewish Arabic Peshitta himself. Naturally the Karaites hated it, so redid their own Bible from Ebrea Sola - if I may.

The Cyzicene History

Speaking as a Dyothelete, 'tis nice to see work composed to support the Chalcedon decisions of AD 453. Such is the history of Cyzicus composed a few decades after that. We now have a modern translation and (mostly) commentary. Karl Dahm is reviewing it.

The history's proem seems to note Zeno, chief wimp of Constantinople AD 475-90. He'll be succeeded AD 491 by Anastasius who will outright overturn Chalcedon. The anonymous Cyzicene wrote to "update" prior historians' work to support Chalcedon more firmly, against the Monophysite threats which Zeno was allowing to fester and which will erupt under Anastasius.

Chief of those prior historians was Gelasius of Caesarea. In fact the confusion between the two led some of our late-antique historians to ascribe this latter one to the phantom "Gelasius of Cyzicus". We still don't know who our boy was - except that he lived in Cyzicus, on the south Marmaran coast west of Nicaea.

That this historian tampered with the text is unfortunate, thus forcing us back on other sources for the immediate postNicene era when the Empire was Eunomian. Possibly why Anastasius felt free to dismiss such savants as ahistorical liars and why our historians have mostly dismissed it too.

Pirenne in the Rhineland

A few years ago I linked to this meme on Roman coinage versus late-Antique coinage. O'Neill, he don' like it but the Damascene casbah can't be rocked. Couldn't from Europe and North-Africa, anyway. Instead, the centre of traffic shifted to the Rhineland.

On that topic, Berber S. van der Meulen-van der Veen since wrote a book about Germania Secunda. Craig Davis, one of the best of Bryn Mawr's crew, is reviewing it. The thesis is that this frontier wasn't invaded as such; it was always porous so always involved a negotiation between the Roman army out there (not all of them Italian) and the locals, whom we'd recognise as German since at least the rampage of Germanicus. (I remain unsure where Arminius' Cherusci sat, on this division.)

I could add that, in turn, the Romans retained "embassies" - fully armed - deep beyond the Rhine. As long as they weren't overstepping like Varus overstepped, the Germans tolerated this presence.

This Austrasian borderland got wealthy and powerful enough it could fuel rival Emperors long before Childeric AD 463 "governed" on behalf of... well, it wasn't Majorian. I had to look it up: Libius Severus or "Severus III". Pretty much Ricimer, then. Anyway if Domitian II could be laughed off, Constantine III and Macsen Wledig could not.

This suggests that some "barbarian invasions" might have been viewed, by the barbarians themselves, as Avitus viewed himself: a Roman provincial rebellion then expanding its territory at the expense of other dubiously-Roman "governors" - read, fellow warlords. How well was Ricimer speaking Latin?

BACKDATE 3/20

Not-𝔊967

I learnt about 𝔊967 last week. This is a version of Ezekiel which did not make the Hexapla. Its (Greek) basis had meanwhile made its way into Latin - in the "Wirceburg" parchment copied in the fifth century but assuredly translated before Jerome, who rejected it. (That parchment was subsequently written over, which palimpsest got sent to Wirceburg.) The subset of Biblical scholars who care about Ezekiel (who aren't many) need to deal with it. Tracy McKenzie is dealing with it. It doesn't have Ez 36:23bβ–38.

Even before this (rare) 𝔊967 text was found in these two languages, scholars had noted its minus Ez 36:23bβ–38 as being... different, in our Greek. In 1903 Thackeray called it out as "Theodotionic" - which means late. Was anyone aware of this passage when the rest of Ezekiel was being translated? Johann Lust thought not.

Some scholars think Lust went too far. Absent the minus, which is "plus" in our canon, Ez 36:16–23bα remains as abnormally short for an oracle. Also the full Ez 36 is extant in Masada, along with other MT-like Biblical text.

McKenzie's main argument is a commentary upon MT / Theo Ez 36:23bβ–38. This uses the water-shedding of Numbers 19:13,20 (zrq; usually the Bible would have the shedding be of blood); along with other Ezekielian tropes. She backs up Lust inasmuch the passage be late. Then the question turns to what comes after v. 23bα, if not bβ+.

𝔊967 follows Ez 36:16–23bα immediately with 38:1. McKenzie notes this means the defilement of Israel may be cleansed only by Gog and Magog, whom Lord God YHWH is summoning upon the defilers. The dry-bones of our Ez 37 must await the end of our 38-39. Interestingly McKenzie doesn't like that, either. She follows "Tooman 2010" here, that Ez 38-39 is a floating oracle like so many PseudoEzekiels in Qumran. In that case Ez 37 is where it should be. The (in)famous Ez 40-48 block, by our count, would then follow Ez 37 directly, its own self.

The bibliography fails us for Tooman; I suspect McKenzie refers here to Gog of Magog. Not everybody approves the extremity of Tooman's late date, but even Tooman's harshest critic (pdf) agrees Ez 38-39 were/was fathered upon the prophet by someone else.

A more nagging problem is that we don't own any ur-text. We have 𝔊967 which smells like an apocalyptic rant; and we have our MT (and Jerome, and Peshitta et al.), which like McKenzie would dismiss the apocalypse... but they still have 38-39 too. Why not just refuse 'em? Jeremiah LXX merrily refused a lot of MT additions until the end. On the other-side to this day the Jews refuse the Greeks' Daniel (as they should), as well as Tobit (ditto).

Barbie's world

"Insurrection Barbie" a couple weeks back posted a (long) comment calling out, sigh, Russian Interference. The claim is that Orthodox circles close to Putin have been running an op against American Evangelicals, with the aim to pull them away from the Jews as a people and Israel as a nation-state. This piece has bubbled up to Rafael "Ted" Cruz which kind-of makes it personal, inasmuch as I helped secure his nomination in my state in 2016.

Much of I.B.'s essay (or rant, or screed perhaps) reads like Scott Hahn and Ben Wiker poisoning the well against the Higher Critics. I.B. also distrusts the Higher Critics. As before happened to the elder generation of late-mediaeval Catholics; this younger generation of Protestants has received content critiquing the now-Protestant reading of our shared (Christian) scripture. Leaving this, they swapped one foundation for another;—emdash— in I.B.'s words. That other foundation would be patristic Christianity: either in Orthodox form, or in the form of some of the spicier Catholics like pope Pius X.

To the extent I.B. wants to talk theology - and I say this as a Zionist - she should know that evangelical sola scriptura failed because it was malum in se. Hahn has been derided as "the American Pope" exactly because he heads up a traditionalist wing; he too couldn't refute what the critics were saying in the AD 1200s, so had to cowrite a (long) book with that creationist clown Wiker to attack the critics. This tack is not going to work better for I.B. when anybody can drop in on an Ehrman vid online or, worse, Tovia Singer. And if you don't like Ehrman (or Singer), we Zionists are really going to dislike what's coming from the likes of Vridar and Richard Carrier.

If sola scriptura be no basis, luckily other base-eeze exist. One might even be muscular Singerite Judaism. Now, these Scriptures have problems too. So... come Orthodoxy, whose foundations build from Clement of Rome (or of Syracuse, whatever), and (later) Mark and Ignatius.

In Orthodox teaching, or at least the old Chalcedonian formulae as restrict Orthodoxy to the filioque and pope Martin's Lateran synod, we do have a distinction between the Church and the State, in Martin's days protected by the Empire (Constans II... based outta Syracuse, again). The state however must work in harmony with the Church. IB calls this "integralism", anyway a straw version of this which she credits to Vermeule, Ahmari, Deneen (and to Pappin whoever that is). Deneen shouldn't count and Ahmari is just some dude saying things on the Internet. Vermeule might be serious. Even here I get the impression I.B. relies upon Jason Blakely: Integralism seeks to subordinate temporal power to spiritual power — or, more specifically, the modern state to the Catholic Church. If true, that would indeed entail a resurfacing of Constans' monothelete heresy. But I.B. is writing a polemic, as was Blakely. The purpose is to paint traditionalists like Deneen with Vermeule on the way to run both of them off polite society.

I repeat: I support the preservation of the Jewish state upon the Jewish heartland. But I don't do this from the evangelical standpoint, because that standpoint is rotten and was falling apart even before various tradbros picked up on dubious Catholic teachings (honestly, Hahn wasn't even helping). Overall I do not believe that I must take I.B.'s standpoint. Christians can find (and have found) other arguments. If I.B. wants us to go back to John Hagee sermons, she may succeed in running us off... but many of us may simply conclude that there is nothing for us in any Jewish / Christian alliance.

GRIFTER 7:20 PM MST: I.B. is Irina Pavchinskaya-Cedano. Disbarred from Illinois; and although, you know, blue-state Bar associations generally suck, in this case the disbarment happened because she did a felony.

The intragalactic hegira

A theory was mooted that our sun came from 10000 ly closer coreward than it is now. I wasn't aware of the theory - and it seems not all those aware really thought much of it, because it ran against some dynamical constraints. Maybe not though.

The notion is, so I take it, that our rarified arm of the Milky Way doesn't cook up many highish-metallicity G stars on-up, on its own. Alpha-Centauri aside, mostly around here we got K and M. But there survive "twins", other 4.6Gy stars of more-or-less the same composition headed in the same general orbit. They only go as heavy as F of course because anything more would have red-gianted by now, like Sirius B.

The range chosen was 1000 ly / 300 pc, a reasonable-enough allowance for drift over five billion years. Usually mooted around here are HD 162826 (110 ly, Herculi) and more-so HD 186302 (184, Pavo). They found 6594 "twins" in toto.

Daisuke Taniguchi's team recently calculates the effect to which the central bar of this galaxy might lever smaller stars (than the bar) onto higher orbits. Close to home this might also have affected the higher planetary orbits, from Jupiter to beyond.

Two Temples

Lisbeth Fried discusses two temple plans: one Near Eastern, one Greek. In the Near East, a temple is where the god makes his real home on Earth. This is somewhat the theory behind the Christian martyrion, or merthyr in Welsh. Most Greeks, instead, understood the gods to live in Olympus. Men communicated with those gods via altars in the open. It follows up this piece.

Fried sees the Deuteronomy-based literature and the Holiness Code, and Priestly literature generally, to be classically Near Eastern. If there wasn't a Temple, at least there could be a tent with the Ark set up in the place of glory. This is the tabernacle.

Fried distinguishes between the Deuteronomic / Holiness view; and 1-6 Ezra. Fried thinks 1-6 Ezra / 1 Esdras was Hellenistic. Ezra 3:6 has that Zerubbabel on return to Zion built an altar but did not (re)build the Temple. Supposedly Zerubbabel was a Babylonian who should have just got to building.

I've already asked if the Greek way - permanent altars, with temples as afterthought - be (east)IndoEuropean. Although this might exclude the Persian (and Avestan) respect for fire thus refusal of holocaust.

Either way, it's postExilic. Fried points out the innumerable tales in our Torah where some patriarch sets up an altar and not a temple. These are typically allotted to "J", or maybe sometimes "E". Most would say that this was a means for the Temple societies of king Josiah and certain stray northerners to claim the land but not yet the temples, which temples were inaugurated by the post-Torah kingdoms. Fried thinks that the means which the Torah chooses to lay this claim, be Greek like Ezra (or at least not Semitic).

I get the impression that Arabs, also, preferred the outdoor altar - at first. But then our records cluster around Nabataea, and surrounding Safa and Hisma (once Moab and Edom). The Nabat was quite Hellenised, by the time those Arabs' ancestors trickled through aforementioned Moab and Edom. Not for them, the reactionary record-keeping of the Jews and Samaritans.

The Athribis surge

Davila reports: 3000 more ostraca are found in the upper Nile city Athribis.

Not to be confused with the Delta city, this Athribis is in the Sohag region, which came to host a monastery complex. It is very close to Akhmim which has its own monastic tradition. It hosted its own dialect of Coptic, related to Sahidic.

The ostraca now number the highest collection in Egypt. Most of them are, naturally, Egyptian. I don't know exactly how they estimate 60-75% Demotic though, as compared with the 15-30% Greek. We know why there's Greek here: Ptolemy VII Euergetes ("Benefactor" in Latin) did a lot of work on the temples, as the family must, as known from Rosetta. Some demotic might be hard to distinguish from Arabic; some Greek is assuredly hard to distinguish from Coptic. Because Arabic and Coptic do round it all out, along with some hieratic and hieroglyphic. Also some of these are writing exercises: what's the difference between a Coptic "A" and an alpha?

Most valuable may be the scraps of hymnody, assuredly part of the writing exercises, or maybe just crib sheets (lol).

KBo 18.151 again

Last July, we brought an Old Hittite tablet, KBo 18.151. Most documents in Hattus(as) and Sapinuwa got written in "Nesili", the Anatolian language of old Kanesh. Hattusa and Sapinuwa, however, were not founded by the men of Kanesh. They occupied a nonAnatolian space - and the Hittites knew it, calling that language "Hattili". But Anatolians lived there too, whose language ended up taking on more Hattili than their descendents believed they should.

A lot of that was because of the history. The first kings of Hattusa were booted out, during the Thera era. On the glorious procession of the later kings back through the Lion Gate, they seem less-interested in local colour. Less Hattic; more Luwian and Hurrian.

Petra Goedegebuure has a followup. In her view KBo 18.151 is a draft. The king - Hattusili I - had asked a wise woman for divinations. The wise woman dictated her response. The draft was in poor Nesili. So a better edition (perhaps in proper dialect) was made for the king. We own only this draft. Goedegebuure is mostly using Soysal's work from the 2000s.

This new article argues for a Hattic case-system, suffixing. It's not just Indo-European, or that Anatolian sister-branch; Etruscan did this too. There are also genders. It is just that the genders differ, between Hattili and Nesili. Goedegebuure argues that KBo 18.151 - drafted in ostensible Nesili - is behaving too much like Hattili here.

Goedegebuure thinks the wise woman was a Nesili-as-a-second-language speaker. Alternatively, this draft was a team effort: the woman spoke her native Hattic whence her translator did a patchwork job, their scribe basically transliterating. The scribe then went home and fixed it up (this is the edition we don't got).

Back to the Mesolithic

For Mardin / Tur Abdin: the 10000s-8000s BC. Scholars slot these millennia into the Mesolithic-now-called-Epipaleolithic, and beyond. In Turkish, since this language has displaced the native Syriac, the complex is "Şika Rika". We don't know what the locals then spoke, maybe Hurri.

The Şika Rika culture, or cultures, number about twenty nearby villages. Cities wouldn't be a thing until later. Their existence looks to start with Younger Dryas 10900 BC, which they outlasted past 9600 BC. Their tools were flint and whatever pottery they had was aceramic. Among this pottery were stone pestles; some mortars were carved from the bedrock directly.

This means the culture made porridge, maybe even tortilla. It also means they were sedentary, at least seasonally, when cereals could be gathered. This is all too early for millet and I don't think they were farming, as such; plucking local barleycorn seems likely (and avoiding rye, that weed). Herding goat be possible.

For reference, Göbekli Tepe sprouts up ~9500 BC after the Earth warmed back up. This is what kicks off the Neolithic.

For the Younger Dryas epoch, though... might we be seeing the term "Mesolithic" return to grace? One (reasonable) argument for knocking it off was that we simply didn't have the data for that timespan leading to the Neolithic agriculture. Now, we might.

The New Jerusalem

Since the DJD deigned publish Aramaic content from Qumrân 2001 and 2009, over the last couple decades scholars have gathered a genre. This genre gathers "Aramaic Levi" and "Tobit". Among these texts as did not escape Qumrân is the "New Jerusalem".

People like to say that the Aramaic literature is not "sectarian". This holds for this literature's relationship with the Damascus Document, the Temple Scroll and the Community Rule - sectarian, all. More-correct would be to assert the Aramaic content for its own sect. These were Levides (not just "Levites"!), making the case for their Divine vocation as an inbred priestly caste. It is just that this sect invited other Jews to join them - in the laity; the Qumran sect had given up on wider Jewry.

Yesterday I brought Predo for Babylonian Jewry's dismissal of the Levi case, who rallied around Ezekiel. But Ezekiel's book got interpolated, to except the Zadok clan (or "exempt" maybe). "New Jerusalem" hits Ezekiel's beats on the new Temple. Admittedly the Aramaic text is in fragments, but I don't know that it mentions Zadok.

It may be that the Levi tribe wrote this text to steal from Ezekiel's own case. If it were revealed to, oh, Noah or to Levi himself; the Levites / Levists could turn around to accuse Ezekiel of conducting the plagiary.

Thus saith the Lord

Since we've mooted ol' Zeke, Dr Lenny Predo for TheTorah reports on the controversy over the Levites. Ezekiel relayed a command כֹּה אָמַר יְ־הוָה: the Levites had failed. They should not hold any priestly authority upon the return of the Temple.

Readers of Torah will be perplexed to hear this, on account Levi were the great stalwarts, the Phineas Priests avant-la-lettre, at the Sinai. On the other hand... Sigmund Freud himself has noted that the Levites were no Semites, but Egyptians; circumcision notwithstanding. Ezekiel 44 takes a hard stance against goys administering the Temple. Even if they claim to be of Israel, their blood remains bny-nkr.

Ezekiel used the Holiness Code now in Leviticus 17-26; Ezekiel was also a Deuteronomist in his view of history (which to me makes sense; the HC was Deuteronomist itself). Although Ezekiel may have read all of these texts; these texts may not have (yet) been assembled into one Torah, in which case Ezekiel was resisting that assemblage. Nathan MacDonald is writing that Ez 44 takes time to trash our Isaiah 56 as well; again, all "Isaiah" might be open to him, but Ezekiel refuses their assemblage.

Somewhere around here, Predo brings Ez 44:15-16. This exempts the Zadok clan from the Lord's ban against the Levite tribe. The Dead Sea Scrolls do not extend to chapter 44 - except when they quote it. Papyrus 𝔊967 is a Greek translation of a different edition which we'll get to; for now Ez 41-8, with which we deal, remains uncontested in extant text.

As a Zadokite, the famous Damascus Document cites Ez 44:15. I think this may be the first external reference to our Ez 44.

The Levites clearly survived the Exile and felt no real desire to canonise Ezekiel. The Maccabees, aiming to usurp the priesthood from them toward their own (Hasmonaean) family, had more motive to raise Ezekiel's profile. I wonder if, however, some Levites pondered the utility of appealing to the cheap-seats in a play for primacy within that priesthood, against the Hasmonaeans. Ezekiel with these verses' interpolation could serve.

Charles Cutler Torrey a century ago suggested that our Ezekiel is just that: a post-Maccabean production to lay claim to the Temple. For Torrey, our "Ezekiel" adapted an earlier Ezekielian apocryphon, which we no longer own.

I dunno. The rabbis used to warn against studying Ezekiel too hard until we got to our forties. (Kind of like how Catholics warn about John's Revelation.) Ez 44:15-16 does look sus tho'.

Chabad, and stuff

Chabad, which means "Chariot" in Ezekiel, has been coming under some scrutiny. Some would see it as something of a gurdwara for Jews, which Semitic subgroup would include me by their own law. We may ignore Tucker Carlson; I am unsure we may ignore Vrillium.

These guys came out of mediaeval messianism, and feel alien to me. But if, like me, you prefer ℭ𝔥𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔫𝔱𝔲𝔪; the two of us may have to step back and ponder if Christianity itself is some outgrowth - of Roman-era messianism. Suppose a parallel Europe had embraced, oh, the Mandaeans. If you were some basic Episcopalian or megachurch evangelical dropped into that world; would you fare better than a Chabadnik would?

I feel somewhat bad for my brethren-by-blood, as compared against the Catholics (or Orthodox). My brethren-in-faith haven't changed all THAT much since Ignatius of Antioch, architecture aside. When some holy man (or woman!) shows up, we tend either to recognise him(/her) as a saint or to kick it out, like Mani. Jews have followed some supreme weirdos, like Shabtai Svi.

The Valediction defended

In 2022 when I first heard of Shapira's Valediction of Moses, I didn't want to touch it. Back then, Na'ama Pat-El was defending her touch of it. The battle was hashed on Academia.edu; I take it that this be Pat-El's last word.

Pat-El is a serious scholar, whom we cannot dismiss as some crank blogger... not that we have many of those around here.

Perhaps Idan Dershowitz has saved Shapira's personal integrity. That just pushes the crime anterior to Shapira himself; he may have been duped. Along similar lines: his "Valediction" might be false, whoever did it; but Benjamin Suchard the wrong scholar to make that judgement.

Likewise where Jeffery Stackert argues that the "Valediction" comes from the Pentateuch more-or-less as the 72 found it in Alexandria, or even protoMT; Friedburg and Hoppe are lately pointing to the Valediction's "Midianite episode" as pulling from Numbers 25's source and not from that chapter in our text.

Ex-Presidencies

Against Matt Mehan, Yglesias yesterday about 6 PM UTC: Most ex-presidents are either old (Reagan, Eisenhower) or unpopular (W, GHW Bush, Carter, Nixon, LBJ) or both (Biden) but it’s normal for a young and popular ex-president (Clinton) to stay in the mix.

I'd add here Carter (especially) but even Nixon stayed in the mix. Nixon didn't much defend himself over Watergate as I recall; but he absolutely defended his decision to prop up South Vietnam. He was kind of a Pournelle in that regard. In retrospect, I suggest Nixon should have hit Watergate, harder; it might have given some pause to the later excesses of Obama and Biden.

Really the model for the ex-presidency is Carter. I used to argue for Clinton 1993-4 as Carter's third term. After the loss of Congress we couldn't say that anymore as Clinton shifted Right (to save his Party; but I don't need to ramble on past-1995). But Carter was constantly injecting himself and continued to do so after 1995, most-egregiously over "Palestine".

Should linguists drop in on exorcisms?

With due apologies for titling a post with a question, which I rarely approve for others; here's Shawn Ryan's interview with Fr. Chad Ripperger. Father Chad is a local boy, up here (Casper-to-Denver) where the oxygen is 5/6. The bishop of Tulsa chartered? ordained? this priest to exorcise demons.

Father Chad is also a Trump guy. On the minus side, Chad has run up against Trent Horn who questions whether these demons are, like, real even if they don't approve this Administration. "Extraordinary claims" and all that. There's also the anti-evolution stuff.

We are here for the claim that one of the demons spoke a 1500 BC form of "Phoenician". Chad got this from some kid who wasn't even much for high-school. So how would such a one know Canaanite from before Amarna? I can think of a few "shibboleths" - no a>o shift, no ha- article (or, it's still han-), Aramaic-like 'abd connotation...

Recordings of post-Thera Canaanite would be a true gift for the Northwest Semitic linguists. I am not being facetious:

I believe that this poor kid was going schizophrenic and, as they do, look up Secret Knowledge. If he's smart, which I concede is rare for schizophrenics (as opposed to us autists); he might be reading old prayers in Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramaic and Akkadian. The human brain might make interconnexions. Intuitively, the young brain is plastic for that.

To be remembered, language isn't a cipher. Language is used for daily interaction with peers. Language is not supposed to be hard for the in-group, and we have a pleasantly large dataset for Bronze Age Semitics what with the Ugaritic archive.

Professional linguists tend not to be overly-impressionable sixteen year olds anymore (David Stuart aside). Perhaps the pros should listen in. It might even give these kids some help.

Four Heavens

David Stuart the Mayanist has a book out, The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya. American Scholar has hosted Ilan Stavans' review. Nature since has posted Andrew Robinson's, but since it is not open access I'm not linking it.

Personally I had a problem with Dr Stuart turning his classmates out for Obama in 2008; which I saw in light of minority populations in central America not least the Chorti of western Honduras. I didn't think Obama would be good for them. I didn't think Stuart was good for our discourse (also see, McGaugh's "Triton Station" 2020 - or, indeed, Nature itself). But hey. For Stuart it's been eighteen years.

By this book Stuart has stepped forth as Michael Coe's heir. Although as Stavans points out, Stuart doesn't touch sociology - or, more worryingly, the economy. Coe, revising a 1966 text, initially started with material culture, since he simply could not then read the elites' words.

For sociology, I must be more lenient than Stavans. It might be that Stuart is not the man to do it.

I am unsure what Stavans wants from terms like "race" in a Maya context. One can imagine a local response to foreign leadership. The Maya endured a lot of that, starting with Striking-Owl from that land of reeds which Aztecs will name the "Teotihuacan". Some of Palenque's ahauob were Yucatec, from its north. Later classic-Maya kings are also western and depicted in foreign trappings, of course not then Teotihuacano. The true Maya in the north are, later, famously depicted like Toltecs. And as they all sometimes bore foreign lords, the classic- and postclassic-Maya all had neighbours, starting with Maya cousins whose languages may or may not be depicted in the hieroglyphs. We would love to know how the Chorti understood closely-related Tzeltal, or the more distant Mam up the hills. Or, for Copan, the Honduran Lenca, or what happened to the Xinca after the Ilopango eruption. Can foreigners be depicted as slaves?

Sex relations (we're not just talking the bedroom) might also be of interest. We have a real literature on that for Assyrians, Greeks, Hittites, Romans... Chinese, arguably the Aztecs if only via Gary Jennings. Can such an essay be written for the Maya? Hittites and Muslims have given us law-codes. The Spanish related one for the Aztecs. I don't know we have that for the Maya.

I'll throw in, the animal kingdom, as well. They raised dogs and rabbits, and tamed monkeys, and respected the jaguar; the owl, perhaps, was held in honour more elsewhere.

Such might have to come to us via the myths. Again, though, I am unsure to what extent we have those myths. It is like reconstructing the old Arabic creation-myth from graffiti-references, architecture and statuary. A "Popol Vuh" exists; but I see this as a reaction to the classic myths, like the Quran is to the (then mostly-Syriac) Bibles. Or, heavens, like our Bible reacts to... itself, and to the Canaanites before it.

Noah as the new Adam

Just this morning, a Lutheran posted about the Noah story. He points out (he's hardly the first) that Genesis 7-8 is a de-creation, along the lines of Genesis 1. What I didn't know is the further parallel of Genesis 9 with Genesis Two - the gan-'Eden.

For the Christian, or - I'll argue - the Jew: Noah follows Adam's footsteps in a way history repeats itself as farce. Noah barely has agency; the mover of the story is the Elohim of Heaven. When Noah is left to himself, he plants a vineyard - shadow of Eden - and gets drunk. Our youtuber points out that Noah isn't the hero. Someone like that was the hero of parallel Flood tales all over the Near East, but Genesis refuses to present Noah as him.

If there has to be a hero, he isn't onstage. James of Edessa would have it that the final editor of Genesis set up these stories on purpose, as failed Dispensations. Coming up is the Exodus. In the Haggadah interpretation, God is once more the mover of events, leaving Aaron and Miriam and even Moses as flawed implementors of His will. So: who'd read that sorry litany, if it weren't to end in a successful Dispensation?

The Deuteronomic History might say the hero were Moses, the Torah he divulged to the people, and the king Josiah who made it law. The Samaritans would say the hero was the spirit of YHWH in the Tabernacle, someday the Temple; Essenes and Sadducees agree, all differing on where exactly He resides. Somewhere around here was the righteous Messiah, and you know who Christians need that to be.

That Genesis 1+2 does parallel Genesis (6-)8+9 has Implications for the Documentary Hypothesis. TheTorah is saying Noah was the hero... of Genesis Two, as his vineyard redeems the land from the curse set upon Adam (and Eve). Noah's part in the Flood myth came later.

The counter-coup

Eli Lake: Mossedegh had dissolved the Majles, replaced the army leadership and Supreme Court and closed newspapers by the time the Shah used his constitutional authority to fire him.

The first Parthava Shah, Reza Khan, served under Ahmad Qajar, whom the parliament - which we'll agree to spell "Majles" - had installed over his father. The Qajars were Turks; Khans are also usually Turks, but Reza claimed to be Pahlavi. Someone would have to test that Y chromosome. Anyway as it happens, Khan did the coup - in 1921. This vacated the throne, although the Qajars lingered on, until 1923 when Ahmad gave up and left the empire. The Majles then installed Reza as shah, 1925; as he remained until 1944, when he died and Iran got the Shah we 1970s kids know and love, Mohammed Reza.

I know that it may be bad form to bring Greek standards into an Iranian context. Luckily for you, readers; bad form is exactly what we do here. Mohammed Mosaddegh (sorry, I'm insisting on this spelling) was a tyrannos. This, as opposed to a dictator; we can argue the legality of Reza's rule, but at least the Majles formalised his term, in retrospect, in 1925. For Mosaddegh, there was no Majles. He was simply the commander-in-chief of his own pet army. As well as the supreme Judge. And the arbiter of information.

The only in-house centre of power left as could reinstate any norms at all was the institution of the shah. Off-house, I'll admit, we Brits didn't want Mosaddegh either and who was in charge of the north in 1952-3... well, after March, that's actually a good question, and whoever wanted to be in charge had some motive for a quick victory abroad.

The shah did the only thing he could do, and the Brits were right to support him. This does not excuse how the shah chose to run Iran until the 1970s. But it can't have been worse than arbitrary rule by a tyrant and the likely Soviet invasion to follow.

Baetica's shifting economy

The south of Spain got reconquista'd, and the Catholic conquerors found it a vast plantation economy. There was a lot of wealth in Granada allowing its emirs to import Moroccans to defend it. That wealth came from olives: before natural gas and petroleum, nights were lit by olive oil. Also some ranching; their vaquero literally means "cowboy" as certain Puerto Ricans had to (re)learn over here. Right now we're talking olives.

With tariffs in the news, the old Baetica might not be able to offload their product so well. But Baetica (and before it, Tarshish) has something else: sunlight. The climate is quite East Texan in that regard, although the sheer timespan of its agro-mono-culture might not make its soil as good.

So some landowners are making the switch from olives, to solar-panels (and maybe batteries).

Some people care. They ... shouldn't. That's what Baetica has always been.

BACKDATE 3/3

TANSTAAFL

I am unsure where else than Christianity we hear this:

It's a free gift!

All you have to do is -

The rest may be safely ignored. The Christian has already revealed himself to be peddling snake-oil. Anything that comes after this wastes time.

If it's a free metaphysical gift, then - either it's not real, or - I've got the gift already and I don't have to thank you for it. I don't have to do or think anything. But this line of apologetics is never honest. Anyway, although we're done here, allow me to talk past the sale. Heaven knows the Christian who's already lost the argument will near-invariably switch tactics.

One such is to assert that our life was that gift - so simple honour demands we pay it back somehow, in gratitude ("faith") if nothing else. That assumes we're enjoying life.

More respect may be given to such as argue that the gift however costly should be accepted - and paid for - because of the alternative. This was Blaise Pascal's take. It has some vindication from Cantor (and, they tell me, Dedekind).

But paid to whom? Some Jew on a stick? Or maybe with Richard Carrier and 2 Enoch we assume the act of redemption happened on Mars' Lagrangian haloes (or so I count Fifth Heaven). There's the rub, isn't it?

Anyway, don't take the tack of fREe GiFt. It is not an honest tack so you'll sail to hell on it.

Stop the presses: Vox Day launders lies again

Beale links Neon Revolt, not imagining that Candace Owens has made herself odious all on her own.

Grok thinks the memo is realsies but Columbia University rates Grok poorly. The source is Matt Wallace, somewhere down the Charles Johnson level of credibility (pick a CJ; F. or C.). Some crypto saar confessed to the memo yesterday evening.

I'm not - or I hope I'm not - one to throw out "demonic"; that's how very bad things happen. I might allow it for Tucker Carlson who has admitted to a demonic violation himself (so: take it up with him). I am also unsure of words ending "-path" on account I am not a licenced pathologist. I instead use terms like "opportunist" or "liar". I don't know if I've used "conscienceless" yet.

I find Neon Revolt and Beale to lack conscience. Beale doesn't need the money; he just posts what he posts because he enjoys watching people scramble around to refute his lies. One suspects Tucker Carlson is in it for the money, which goes double for Milo "Nero".

Candace Owens has a husband, but any woman does hope for an independent revenue-stream in case something happens at home. I have, of course, taken no money to call shenanigans on her opportunism. Conscienceless, at that.

The good news is that Laura Loomer and others might be able to dip into the revenue-stream... of the liars. It is unfortunately difficult to come after Beale's clearinghouse; like Mark Tapscott, he doesn't lie, he links to lies and lets you come to your own conclusions (which better be the lies' conclusions).

Jews for the ish malhama

In Exodus, the Song at the Sea anthropomorphed G-d. On visiting /pol/ yesterday: I find that this Song is a proof text for Christians now. Or at least it serves "goys" as a text showing up legacy-Judaism for not being as monotheist as Jews claim it to be - which is why Rabbi Tobias Singer doesn't like it.

Here, I'll lay the case that the Rabbi should buck up... and be a man.

The Song is very old, linguistically. Later literature shows this, textually, as well. A while ago I summed up Emmanuel Tov's textual scuffing; what follows, pulls that content up here, in case anyone missed it.

In the MT, and presumably in the mouths of Miriam and Moses themselves, YHWH is a man of war (ish malhama). Elsewhere Psalm 24 prefers to hail YHWH a gabur malhama. That reading backwashed into the Samaritan Pentateuch, despite that sect not accepting the Psalter. GBR is also in the Aramaic Targum and the Syriac, here as emphatic: the gêvra, the ganbura (w-QRBTN' for the song and the psalm both which is, yes, Biblical Aramaic). I find the "גבור המלחמה" also-also in the apocalyptic War Scroll although the text is a bit corrupt here.

Tov flags Targum's "Samaritan" switch from "man" to "jabbâr" unusual inasmuch as Targum prefers MT; personally I disagree, and consider the Samaritan as inlining midrash into the text itself, as Targum did perhaps-independently. Psalm 24 exists to bind the Psalter's first book (Ps. 3-41), and may be read as an update or even critique to the Song at the Sea. The wordshift to gbr seems also to have afflicted Arab apocalyptic and the Palaestinian tradition.

Anyway. As Ash Maiz points out, ish only means a "man". David tells Solomon (in CBH) to be an ish. Not to be a master or a lord or (lol) a husband; just to be the least of what you are made of. Take care of your business.

It is exactly because ish can only mean "man" that so many pietists referring to The Song have attempted to change the ish in it. As Maiz also points out, none of this is even necessary. Christians don't even bother referring to it much; and - you know why? Because it is a poem. It's just some dudes and young girls singing a song.

Really at stake for Jews (if not for Samaritans) isn't G-d's transcendence, which cannot be harmed by this harmless song. The Jews' Psalter is chock-full of para-pagan imagery, yea even unto CBH. At stake is whether Miriam and Moses and Aaron, supposedly superior to that sinner David, could sing this song.

But - even then; all Israel is on their way to Sinai where they are about to - okay, spoiler-alert. Suffice that their innocent song here might foreshadow their fuller misunderstanding, at that Mount. Maiz could have mentioned this too. I find of interest that Maiz didn't.

Rather: Singer could have mentioned it (a lotta that goin' round). I called yesterday's match 2-0, for Maiz. This one gotta be a 0-0 draw; if Singer had kept it at that, I doubt Maiz even would have touched this one.

Shirk in Judaism

Ash Maiz and R. Tobias Singer, title-fight! The issue here is the extent to which Christianity violates tawhid. Singer proposes, to a Muslim, that Jews don't. It's important to Jews that Muslims don't see Jews as mushriks; on account that, for Muslims, G-d Himself has accused Jews for as much in sura 9.

Maiz points out that Jews do in fact venerate saints. (So have most Muslims, historically. Speaking as an ex-Algerian.) And not just at the Tomb of Rachel or the Tomb of Abraham (or the tomb of 'Alî Reza); but at the Tomb of Schneerson. Visitors leave written notes for this Rabbi. Maiz further points out, whether it's to exonerate these pilgrims or no, that Jews had been doing this since the "first century" which to Maiz means A.D. (Maiz is a converso, like me).

The Jewish attack on shirk by contrast might be more recent. Their term as vocalised is שִׁתּוּף so shitûph in Aramaised Hebrew. I do not find it to predate the commentaries on the Babylonian Talmud; so it looks to postdate [Madinan] Islam, likely 'Abd al-Malik. That Talmud extends into the Islamic era, and was not much adhered until then (probably because it wasn't fixed). Even so שִׁתּוּף does not exist in the text, or at least is not explained.

None of this is to condemn nor to condone sura 9, which I'll leave to others, others as might still think sura 9 is worth defending or opposing. This is to point out that (1) Judaism calls upon Saints for intercession and (2) Judaism's שִׁתּוּף against others is opportunistic and not core to that faith. 2-0 to Maiz.

How Michael Licona can save himself

Revisionist antitheologian Dr Richard Carrier almost restrains himself from ranting about Trump long enough to review some Christian apologists. At bat were Michael Licona and Jonathan Sheffield (reversing Carrier's title), against Bart Ehrman perhaps a para-apologist in Carrier's sight.

Carrier is getting too old to put up with debates much, but he's been at the podia long-enough he can effectively rate others'. Here, Carrier rates the trio Sheffield > Ehrman > Licona. Since Licona needs the help most, let's help him. I share the spirit of Sheffield, as a theist (Nestorian-Christian specifically) willing to hear out the skeptics. However amateurishly in my case.

First, an aside: on Mark's Aramaic. May I suggest - to Carrier, not to Licona - that Mark using targum hardly implies Mark's distance from Peter's ambit. This more implies the opposite, that Peter's people were steeped in the Aramaic culture from Hebron to Damascus (we needn't go further north; Edessa comes later). Hence why contemporaries called him Kepha (Aramaic), and not ho Petros (Greek) until 1 Clement and Mark. Not that it much matters to anyone anymore.

Licona went wrong in that Mark talked more about Peter than "the others". This opened Licona to Carrier's observation that nuh-uh, Matthew was. Licona could - instead - concede Marcan Priority. From this basis Mark would be talking about Peter more than Mark's contemporaries and sources. These would include Paul's letters, which is why Paul's doctrines even show up. One can also bring Evan Powell that some lore against Peter was floating around. This wasn't 1 Clement which is proPeter. I submit it wasn't Paul who was generally amiable to "Cephas"; e.g. Paul says nothing about Peter abandoning Christ at the Passion, as Paul might as he is hotly debating Peter's party and defending his own apostolate. So... who was it? I'd suggest, the Beloved Disciple had put something out - which Carrier is here and there hinting. If we don't like Powell's proposal of John 1-20, Carrier might have to accept *Lazarus its source. Or even some scurrilous Life Of Peter we do not anymore own (think, George of Resh'ayna's take[down] on Maximus).

If Licona had held that stance - that Mark is defending Peter to a Pauline community, against the Beloved Community (John? Lazarus?) - Mark does not have to be taking Peter's direct dictation. Mark can be writing after Peter's death, on the frame of the antiPetrine lore. The late Peter has enough surviving friends who can fill in details here and there; and, of course, Mark has Paul's letters. From the position of Mark as Peter's literary advocate, a Papias can spin that into "amanuensis" (scribe, for us Latins). But Licona doesn't have to.

All this assumes Licona is not tied to an episcopal anvil like, oh, Pitre and Hahn.

Jacob Edessene's dispensationalism

Jacob, or James, was Miaphysite (or, "Jacobite") bishop of Edessa-Callirrhoë AD 684-7 - although he'd call it AG 995-8. He then retired to monasteries, first Tel 'Adda. There he dared define Christianity. Michael Penn has translated what remains of the definition.

Reasonably Penn pins this project in reaction to 'Abd al-Malik's supremacism, perhaps preparing for a debate. Jacob would stay in that abbey until AD 698; Ibn al-Ash'ath hadn't yet proclaimed his "nasirate".

The most striking part of this definition is its dispensationalism. In Jacob's thought, Christianity was practiced by Adam and Eve to the extent they were following God's Command. Christ was known to the Prophets, if they didn't know exactly how He'd show up. Christ's age is the sixth age. Outsiders may observe here sura 3's claim, that Christ was rather the culmination of Prophecy - for the Jews; not otherwise to distract from Allâh.

If God was holding back His epiphany in Christ's form, one can ask Jacob to what degree free-will can exist. I take it that his epistle on the qadar, as summarised Michael Cook, would follow this up.

Faliscan Spain

In a former life I suggested an aspect of Spanish, and of Italian dialect, to be Old Latin. The conjecture was that duenos > *buenos > bueno > buono. Spain got the bueno stage, mid-second-century; Rome got as far as bonu, restoring the -s perhaps-artificially because they had Greeks about. Hey, a Dominican blogger liked it over on his blog . . .

Today, let's discuss the famous f > h.

Ferdinand becomes Fernando in several Iberian postLatin dialects. In Castilian, the man is Hernan or Hernando. Similarly what should be filho is hijo. I'd been under the impression this was late. It has to be annoying to the Portuguese which makes some explanation why they are not part of Spain to-day.

But maybe it's not late. Faliscan has hileo. Some northern Italians have reported this shift in their dialects as well. Sicilians might have the excuse of Spanish occupation but I don't think this ever happened in the north; those guys had to deal with the French instead, whose Romance dialects as far as I know have no such shift.

Also northwest[-of-the-peninsula] Italy endured a Gaulish incursion. The late Republic had to call this place Cisalpine Gaul (Caesar being busy on the transAlps). I don't find anything like hileo in any Gaulish.

Propose here that Romanised Faliscans were recruited to settle Spain. Additional waves of Romans, who weren't Faliscan, came later and got to Lusitania and our Galicia.

The Dark Ages are not selection-bias

A kerfuffle has broken out on X upon Crémieux' memetic chart of what the Louvre displays to tourists. tl;dr it's Greek, with a bit of Roman and then a stark dropoff. The High Middle Ages get displayed again and then modernity.

That arrogant "History For Atheists" guy pipes in, such that the Cruel Sardaukar must spank him. Bryan Ward-Perkins, you'd think, should have been read aloud to the man, perhaps with hand-puppets. Now apparently O'Neill finds his buttcheeks insufficiently-rouged: this quaint “dark ages” designation by that insufferable data bro clownboy.

A descendant of Niall might feel that his family back in Eire weathered this storm fine. I can imagine an Arab saying similar - or, later, a Damascene. For the rest of us, Rome's collapse was a disaster. And not just the West: the Greek world contracted (only surviving after re-"Roman"ising) and today Iranians too will, if asked, or not asked, tell you of "two centuries of darkness".

The rot had already started, as the Sardaukar details. One interesting point is how Justinian was able to dislodge the Vandals with a smaller force. Some of that is Belisarios' skill. Some of that is because, economically, the middle class - including soldiers - could push for higher wages in the wake of Yersinia. We might believe an incremental improvement in military efficiency and a healthier soldiery. We do not see any such improvement in art. And certainly not in the sciences: a lot of Greeks and Syrians were retreating to flat-earth theory (Latins, being stubborn, stayed round-earth mostly). There's no way that theory helped out with naval tech or its knock-on, trade.

With fewer men and worse maps, the Arabs became more important as intermediaries, because they didn't need maps where they lived. That's where Henri Pirenne might jump in.

Now: where selection-bias might be cogent, is in the choice of Greek/Gaulish wares over principate-Roman in the Louvre. The French are, historically, taught to be descendates of the Gauls so their muséa may prefer that era. Also possible is that Julius Caesar trashed the place so hard it somewhat suffered its own mini Dark Age. Although here I am unsure. If I were running this museum I might play up the western "Roman empires".

Emic, etic

I'd shuffled "emic" and "etic" into the bin with the pseudo-scholarly ramblings of Foucault and Derrida. Now that these days I'm less hostile to Foucault, Prof. Davila suggests to us we revisit emic and etic, on the Palestine issue.

Since my focus as a Justinianist is deep into the Roman era, I just use "Palaestina" for the region. "Tertia", out where the Arabs are at.

At base, this is why I restrict "AD" to mediaeval ℭ𝔥𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔫𝔱𝔲𝔪. Not only do Muslims and Maya not acknowledge our Dominus - the Christians weren't acknowledging His calendar, either. They used the Seleucid count. "AD" is, thus: etic. "AG" for the Seleucids is emic, as is "AH" (albeit also rather etic before 'Abd al-Malik's Caliphate) and the year-of-the-colony if we're talking preIslamic Araby.

On the flip side, etic language is why Erik Larson's publisher "Crown" is demonic, and why Larson should self-publish if he has a shred of honor left in him. They know what they did.

I'm not really here to please anybody, and I suspect neither is Davila - which is why I follow his blog.

BACKDATE 2/21

When China dethroned Allâh

The Shang worshipped the celestial deity 帝, pronounced Têks at the time they tell me (Mandarin di). Mongols, Turks, and probably ancestral Huns will call Him "Tengri". Then the Chinese killed Him.

Specifically: the Zhou were the deicides. In 1046 BC they overthrew the Shang and demoted their Yin rulers. The Zhou came up with a new ideology, of "Heaven": 天. This is a Whig understanding, that the emperor be emperor because he's got the Mandate. Maybe you got a better idea on how to emperor. You - and what army?

Various movements in Chinese history have raised such armies. A couple centuries ago, Jesus' little brother raised one (doubtless pulling from nonsense like this). Thing is... none of these armies have defeated Heaven.

Evangelists must ponder this upon the tree of woe.

The evolution of Oriental monasticism

Contemporary with Babay the Great at Bet-Abe, was Shubḥalmaran. In 2004, David Lane published his work, starting with The Book of Gifts. We are learning that Babay presided over a revolution in Eastern monasticism. Shubḥalmaran wasn't in it.

It was under Babay, that the Eastern monks adopted Evagrius the Pontic. Jerome himself (letter 133) had attacked this Evagrius; but I suppose later readers figured that Jerome attacks everybody so who-cares. A more pointed condemnation occurred under Justinian's synod AD 553 if you want to count that. Latin ℭ𝔥𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔫𝔱𝔲𝔪 will know Evagrius for listing the Se7en; well, eight, but we Latins merge sadness with wider acedia.

Among Babay's students was one Ishoʿyahb - Ishoʿyahb III. One of his first preserved epistles is Babay's eulogy. They were, then, in the same party. The present Paradise came from that catholicate. But not all east-Syrians agreed with Ishoʿyahb; and some dissidents may have looked askance at Babay as well. These dissidents are those who preserved Shubḥalmaran, and pieces of what became the Paradise.

Those scraps were collected at Sinai, whence M20N. The monks and nuns at Sinai would not consider themselves "Nestorians". Nonetheless they did keep these Oriental books... as, in the Orient, mah boi Jerome was translated.

Shubḥalmaran is in Ishoʿdnaḥ's book, and he contributed to the AD 612 debate. Otherwise - we're learning - Shubḥalmaran was a holdout of the old-school, from the days of Aphraates. Possibly how come Babay was NOT invited to the debate.

It may be that anti-Evagrian dissidents gathered under Shimʿon. After various synods, like that in Dirin, healed that schism; it may be that diehards fled west and bent the knee to us Melkites and Catholics.

Bird poo kingdom

Among the polities the Inca took over were the Chincha. The reason the Inca wanted that site was guano, which is not a Spanish word; here from seabird.

The paper claims the Moche already knew of this resource, which fertilised - what else - maize. Around AD 1250 the Chincha start using bird imagery on their pots. Possibly the birds' pots; DNA analysis might pick it up.

I do not find noted in this paper, the Huari. Perhaps because the Chincha were too far south, better contemporaries with the Tiahuanaco.

Around AD 1400, the Inca came knocking and annexed this kingdom. This is about when the Inca spread fame of the "Lunahuaná", that is the guano people - north of the Chincha. The paper reports that the Spaniards will observe that the Chincha lord ranked among the high notables in the Inca retinue.

The extreme Monophysitism of the Cave of Treasures

I've noted a couple times here Cave of Treasures. This was a Monophysite document... at first. By PseudoMethodius' time, Singar had a copy; Singar before it was Yezidi "Sinjar" was a Monophysite stronghold, like Mar Mattai and others too-close to Nineveh for Isho'yahb III's liking. PseudoMethodius although a Miaphysite himself did not push the issue, contrast his elder John bar Penkaye a decade earlier. Sergey Minov about a decade ago did a study; this came out of his thesis, so underpins his 2020 publication of said thesis.

First, a critique: one piece of evidence Dr Minov brings is the Bet Hale disputation. This is, since formal publication, considered an 'Abbasid-era text. It is too late for consideration in this argument. Now, on to happier content.

Minov relates that Singar at its founding hosted Monophysite exiles from Justin I. The Cave raises many Iranian tropes, not least the name "Peroz" for the wise men. Minov ponders if she hosted this book's very scriptorium.

But as it was copied in the Syriac Orient, Minov finds that the Cave suffered some intrusions, which went against its Monophysitism. In this time 'Abd al-Malik was weighing the scale for Monophysitism, going so far as to prevent the Church of the East from seating a "catholicos" pope. It may however be that Singar had access to the altered version as well. Some evidence that the Cave had trickled outside the boundary is John bar Penkaye, who used a parallel Jubal tradition. At any rate Singar dared use the Cave in an appeal to Melkites and even to Latins, two-qnômë stalwarts since Constantine IV.

This text assumes a cult of Christ's tunic. Minov sees this in Palaestinian / Jordanian churches over the later half of AD 400s.

The Cave proffers a legend of Solomon building Baalbek, which Baalbek's own touristry-department wasn't claiming as of AD 502. But we'll see it in pseudo(?)Zecharia of Mytilene. John of Ephesus is late enough I suspect he knew the Cave (Minov assumes Zuqnîn's several editors didn't interpolate the legend). That's a legend as could only come from a westerner.

Minov raises how Mono- is this text's physitism. Eutychian, that's how; or, so its critics following the councils of Ephesus rated it. (Later they will be called "Julianist", which as Minov points out is unfair to Julian.) The Cave didn't think Christ was circumcised in the flesh(!). Of course this note dropped out of the Eastern revisions but not fully, as by editorial-fatigue references slipped through later on. These "Phantasists" remained an embarrassment to Miaphysites in the early 500s, when Philoxenus of Mabbug/Manbij pens a rant against them. Minov uses that to date the original around that time. He might also have said around that city.

I do however think Minov is pushing the edge as he dates it around AD 600. I'd pin it much earlier, perhaps in Justinian's later years when - they say - he was leaning toward Eutychian "aphthartodocetism".

The Syriac archive concerning Abgar and Christ

As long as we are discussing 2021's fragments of ancient religious literature, Andrew Gabriel Roth would float the Christian tradition of the Abgars of Callirrhoë. We've discussed the hash Rabbûla made of it; Roth here has unhashed it. Unfortunately it is still hashed.

So Roth would further recommend we journey back still further, to Eusebius' history. Eusebius in chapter 1.13 claims to have translated from the Syriac. The Syriac which Roth is here editing has preserved a lot more than Eusebius related. However: what is in our Syriac has anachronisms, like "Palaestina"; no Jew was using this name before Hadrian's rampage (and they still dislike it). Also our Syriac is more hostile to the Jews than [even] Eusebius. By Eusebius' time a lot of Melito was extant and other divisive work. In 1 Clement's time, this antipathy was more muted. One example is that where in our Syriac, Abgar fret that the Jews wish to crucify Jesus; for Eusebius Abgar worried only of more-general "injury".

One might argue that Eusebius is muting the antipathy simply to make it match better with the Gospels' "historic" setting. That is: the evangelists did a fiction; Eusebius is following their line. Eusebius knew as well was we do that the Jews had no authority to perform a crucifixion under Pilate's nose. However: in some Gospel readings and particularly in the sermons, the Jews actually do crucify Christ, anachronism be damned, as it were. That makes weaker the argument that Eusebius - in his own day - would invent or alter this text to have Abgar be less antisemitic, as Eusebius in fact portrays. More likely is that louts like Rabbûla "improved" it.

And Rabbûla owned the library in Abgar's city. So whatever Eusebius read from there, did not survive the theocracy.

Juliana and Origen

[INJECT: I apologise for the hiccup in Blogspot like 8-11 AM MST. I don't know what happened; I don't believe I was HAX0RD. Might be a DNS problem at Google.]

We're doubling-up today. I wish to discuss a source for the Paradise here Palladius' vol. 1.

Budge 1.45 talks one sancta Juliana, of Caesarea-in-Cappadocia. Juliana transmitted from Symmachus the "expositor" (= translator), a collection of... these things.

Straightaway this supports Jerome and Eusebius that Symmachus was Christian, against Epiphanius.

On checking, the author of that Juliana anecdote seems to correct her: that the collection was in Origen's handwriting a little later (Origen had made enemies in his home Alexandria, whence he'd fled AD ~230). But we might posit a harmony: Origen 'an Symmachus. Origen had done the same for the Hexapla.

Chapter 1.34 itself concerns the time of Athanasius who only really gets going from AD ~320, laying the antiArius case before Nicaea. That chapter is here at 1.34 discussing a 20 year old virgin, nameless, who hid Athanasius from "Constantine the Less". Constantine II's full reign AD 337-40 is possible; the editor Budge prefers however Constantius II, who ruled the East earlier. She is 70 at the time of writing, and still won't divulge her name - suggesting the imperium of Valens, which seems (to me) early, for Palladius. Whoever was the author, he thereby makes the case for Juliana as this virgin's predecessor in True Faith.

As to the content of that collection, there is no way a man of Valens' imperium had met Juliana in the AD 240s. I note that 1.46 moves from Cappadocia to Galatia. So (pseudo?)Palladius is, I think, roaming the Anatolian hinterland looking for rare books and stories AD 360s.

I suggest, behind 1.35-46, Origen's abridgement of Symmachus geared toward holy women of lower Egypt, which Juliana - a holy woman elsewhere - commissioned. The Paradise collects much content about holy women, mostly virgins, from 1.34f; in here, besides the oral account commencing it, is lore interpolated from Hippolytus of Rome; but most is later and Egyptian.

The Paradise of the Monastic Fathers

Not to be confused with the Cave of Treasures is the Paradise. The latter will do a fine job doing the confusionment for you. One step toward lightening that confusion is Adrian Pertea's job.

Paradise is the title ʿEnānīšōʿ dropped upon his edition, under the Caliphate; this seems to be what Budge edited. ʿEnānīšōʿ's base text was called Sayings of the Elders, before him. ʿEnānīšōʿ worked at, where else, Bēt-ʿĀbē.

The Sayings of the Elders as a title really only refers to the fourth - which may be the first collection. The first two parts, ascribed to Palladius, are lives of said elder saints; so is the third, which is mah boi Jerome's. I expect Palladius aimed to introduce it all with some clue as to who these guys even were. I don't blame ʿEnānīšōʿ for renaming it. As to why Jerome is here... maybe Palladius injected it and then prefaced it with saints he couldn't find in Jerome.

This divers grouping spread from Egypt to Syria where copies were made, without much reference to other copies, accumulating sayings from later saints somewhat-independently of one another. So the core text is, as noted, a mess. Bedjan and then Budge made editions of manuscripts those two liked. As usual for Budge, he jumped ahead of more-careful scholars... but also as usual for Budge, those more-careful scholars weren't doing their job at the time.

Hence, the mess. Although as a mess, the collection is diachronic. It spans centuries. Some of the later "bad" editions might hold lore deep into late-antiquity, like Anastasius of Sinai. The parallel which Pertea brings is the Pratum Spirituale, which also has deep additions, in its case a somewhat-famous (ie. Hoyland) Georgian edition as might witness to Islam.

Fraktur (sigh)

If you read German literature from the early 1800s, or German scholarship, you'll run into the Fraktur font. The first edition of Nöldeke's Geschichte is in this. Luckily its readers don't have to bother much with that edition no more because he and Schwally revised it into standard Roman. Subsequently-if-belatedly Behn has in 2013 translated all of it. Less-luckily the Hamasa got translated into this font too back-when, which nobody's since updated.

What I didn't know, is that it's a Nazi font now, according to Evan Gorelick. Like... uh. What? It is simply a bad font, mostly illegible to nonGermans. This opinion I share with no less than the Austrian himself - who banned it in 1941 upon taking a panEuropean empire.

Hooray, we can all agree on something! - which is that Gorelick watches too many "Loony Tunes" cartoons on Youtube. Seriously, the cartoonists should have known better too by wartime; but they were running an antiGerman campaign at home, which weird font was just too easy to pass up.

Before Yu

The Shang, and probably Erlitou before them, were Chinese. The Shu probably weren't. Somewhere downstream of Shu was Shijiahe on the Yangtze. This civilisation collapsed 1900s BC.

Jin Liao leads a quintet looking at rainfall "4.6–3.5 kyr BP". At the 4.2 mark, started "disturbances". 3.95–3.84, they got what France got in the early AD 1300s: rain, and mortalité. They couldn't drain the rain so left the plain.

Sturtian news, II

I hadn't looked in on the Cryogene in the last couple years; let's try again.

Last October they were looking at "ooids", laminated pearls but without the oyster. Each layer has data, like tree-rings (or indeed like pearls I guess). Back then, they were looking at "organic" carbon, the carbon in living tissue; even if it's plankton or paramecial tissue, as one might expect before the Ediacaran from 635 Mya on. They didn't find much. So it wasn't plants locking up the carbon from 717 Mya on (this is oft-rounded to 720).

Recently other scientists were looking at the climate patterns - at least during the Sturtian patch 717–660 Mya, from Garvellach. Now they know: climate was happening. A lot of that ice melted 660 Mya, so... yeah. Before the next cold snap, which they call Marinoan (650–635 Mya).

The article hints that Garvellach snapshots a mere 3 ky span, in this 57000 ky Sturtian; but... it's something. Maybe they can finetune more exactly when the sample was laid down, like with ooids.

They can say definitively, during the Sturtian at some point anyway, that some water did peep out from time to time, like 15%... of the ocean. The land at the time is assumed also covered in the white stuff (and quite dead), although Antarctican summer vacationers may ponder Dry Valleys.

You can't be pope all the time

Theodor Herzl accused Pius X of this utterance:

Noi non possiamo favorire questo movimento. Non potremo impedire agli ebrei di andare a Gerusalemme, ma non possiamo mai favorirlo. La terra di Gerusalemme se non era sempre santa, è stata santificata per la vita di Jesu Cristo (sic). Io come capo della chiesa non posso dirle altra cosa. Gli Ebrei non hanno riconosciuto nostro Signore, perciò non possiamo riconoscere il popolo ebreo.

An excerpt can also be had here. The Vicar of Christ goes on to promise that if Herzl's crew do show up in Palestine, he'll have priests ready to baptise them. But I don't care about that. If a crew of Tamils propose to show up, the pope should have priests ready to baptise them as well - or he's no pope.

Of more concern is that Giuseppe Sarto here assumes that popoli exist for anyone else but, it seems - for Jews. Joseph was born a Venetian / Dalmatian. He might or might not have accepted Venice's ontological separation from Italia. But I am sure that once crowned Bishop in Roma that this man could understand the difference between an Italian and a Frenchman, or either from a Pole. A successor to Pope Saint Martin should understand that nations exist in the flesh but come together under Christ Jesus. Has Jerusalem no bishop in communion with Martin? Pius' defenders might want to look this up.

Denying that a Jewish people exist, and dismissing them as ebreo... seems Pharaonic.

It may be that Herzl misremembered or misrepresented. If not, it may be that Fr. Sarto had slipped off the cathedra and blurted Venetian words as a mortal Venetian might. I suspect, the latter. But that is a debate for Pius' defenders; or for his Church.

Noam Chumpsky

New Yorkers have called their boy "Donald Chump" since at least the MAD parody of Gremlins 2. He's now getting grumblings of "pdf protector" due to his Jeffrey Epstein / Ghislaine Maxwell canoodling up to 2003, when - they say - Trump kicked him and (I assume) her out of his Florida properties. Now we hear that in 2006, Trump ratted Epstein out.

Well, maybe [h/t Carrier, who unfortunately is also laundering Raskin]. We might fault Trump as "Chump" at least for not noticing until 2003. MAD was generally good in the 1980s-90s; I bought it whenever I saw it on the rack. But. We are here for the Chomsky chumps.

Apparently the 2008 court was so lenient that nobody knew about it until Cernovich got the files unsealed. So claims Valeria Chomsky, on Noam's behalf. The Chomskys were canoodling with the Epstein/Maxwell crew in and after 2015. Chris Hedges gives a f-u to that. [COUNTERPOINT 2/16: Compact.]

I should point out here that I believe Valeria - inasmuch as that she speaks for Noam. She is the Ghislaine to Noam-as-Jeffery. You don't hang out with a creep for this long unless you are a creep yourself; so I learnt from all the "muh pdf" commenters plaguing X and 4chan.

And boy-oh-boy did Noam ever put out some disgusting content over his too-many years roaming this Earth. Let's float up here, those Khmer Rouge apologetics. Noam always was a weasel too, as when he subsequently denied ever running cover for those maniacs (I got yo' pdf right here).

So maybe let's not pay attention to the Chumpskys at all.

Archaic poetry in a classical time

In Qumran, the Yahad deemed Habakkuk 1-2 only as worthy of tafsirpesher, famously; despite that all traditions, including the Greek, relate three chapters. In 2021, one Joshua Bryan Henson submitted a PhD thesis on all three chapters. He concluded that the same author composed all of it. Excepting the poems in Habakkuk 3 which are ... older, not younger. So those are cited by the author, which is how they survive.

The language of Habbakuk is, overall, classical "CBH": think, the prosaic frame of MT Deuteronomy and Judges-through-Reigns - once corrected. Theodore Hiebert argued Habakkuk's poetic inclusiones are by contrast archaic "ABH". Henson agrees, on assumption for ABH of this corpus: Gen 49, Exod 15:1–18, Num 23:7–10, 23:18–24, 24:3–9, 24:16–19, Deut 32:1–43 and 33:1–29, Judg 5:1–30, 1 Sam 2:1–10, 2 Sam 22:2–51=Ps 18 and Ps 68. Not any of the Prophets, even Amos or Hosea.

...and not Ps[alm] 78. For Henson, this is a CBH composition affecting ABH style. One imagines such might hold of certain other preëxilic Psalms beside 18 and 68. This blog has endorsed Esther as a late production aping CBH; Henson rolls this into "LBH". So as you see Henson does not distinguish between the Temple cant of core "LBH" from other stuff which just happens to fall at the same time. Since Henson nails Habakkuk as CBH, I assume he takes its "Babylon" as Babylon.

By the way this shows that Psalm 78's composer in the CBH era, presumably ~700 BC, owned a library of ABH work. That library, says Henson, would have included the two poems now in Habbakuk 3. Habbakuk himself of course would have done his work after all that, the Hebrew scriptoria now being under Babylonian control.

Freebird!

A Cath/Orth history buff "Blasphemer1054" wants to know why Jews like Eric Weinstein like to pose giving The Finger to the Arch. Glad you asked! here is some torah for you, no shekels required.

Titus princeps and his dad Vespasian in that office - and before - both did some fine things for Rome and for her subjects. Both are role models for leaders. Titus in his Imperial capacity can especially be praised for his response to Vesuvius. Even Jews appreciate the good they did; Josephus got himself into the Flavius gens, partly because he'd disavowed the nuts who dragged the Revolt longer than it needed to run. Some call Josephus a traitor; most - I think - are (now) willing to hear him out. We can let bygones-be-bygones even for the looting, as I am sure Stacy McGaugh will agree.

Where we part ways with Flavius Titus Caesar is how he raised ... That Arch. Yeah: we screwed up, we lost. The man didn't have to teabag us a decade later. That's how revolts get fomented for the future; as our historians should know by now. So, to Eric: if you need another finger, I have two to spare.

Also I do not denounce the Talmud. Whilst we're at it.

The Buddha comes to Berenice

Romans at Berenice did more than just play with the monkey; they had Indian people there too.

I can fault the editors for letting slip about this "Roman" port named after the Macedonian queens and founded in the 200s BC. It's Greek, morons. Although, yes; imports from the Satavahana would indeed correlate with this port's Roman era.

With that date in mind, also posted to the Roman era is the Vrishni religion now (and certainly then) filed under Hinduism. This is northern India specifically, not Dravidian. Which interests me because usually it's south India that traded this sea, at least on the receiving-end. Of interest to the authors this stele ... isn't an import. It was carved in local plaster.

Also certainly northern are the Buddhas here; at least one is of Gandhara. This is late-antique, probably in the time of the Constantii Eunomian emperors but possibly Julian. That workshop mostly did Isis eidola. I see no ::eff::ing way this is fifth-century with Theodosius' men breathing down everyone's necks.

The article marks as most important - and I agree - the bilingual Sanskrit / Greek stele 9 September 248. (Year six of Philip.)

Phrenology doesn't work

The black hole of the Yucatan yielded up a "Naia" skeleton; Discovery Future discusses it.

Naia was a woman, and had the pelvic birth-pitting to prove it; with, unluckily, the pelvic fragility which helped kill her, when she spelunked into a lower cavern. Her head looked like the Kennewick Man's: more Ainu, or European. Luckily for our sciences, modern scientody has recourse to DNA. Since, well, woman there's no Y-DNA so we can't say much of her paternal ancestry.

We can say instead for her mitochondrial D lineage. This is all over South America mostly today. So nobody is calling her a "Solutrean".

At least, I hope nobody is. Beachy Head woman, for those keeping track, was deemed African by phrenology. She was not. On the other hand they did have some Yoruba or Mende DNA in Updown; this girl (whose own mtDNA was European) was probably brought to protoEngland by the Meroving Franks (which is why you don't see me buttmad over mulatta puppettrice too-tall in mediaeval-static Knight of the Seven Kingdoms).

The overall message has to be: don't use skull shapes as a proxy for race or ancestry.

Uranus, blasted

More news from 34 Tauri: the 1986 readings came during a flare. I see Uranus in the news, I, uh, click.

King George III's kawkab at 20 AU was highly radioactive when Voyager zipped past the bulleye 1986. The survey planned for the polar reading they got. Off the charts suggests they got what the Russians that year might measure as 3.6 Roentgen/hour. Since then in 2019 we've seen what flares can do to Earth's Van Allens.

I'd just apply inverse-square to get 1/400 the incoming energy. But that is a lot for a region so naturally cold.

The paper is "Solving the mystery of the electron radiation belt at Uranus: Leveraging knowledge of Earth’s radiation belts in a re-examination of Voyager 2 observations", Geophysical Research Letters per the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) although only with DOI, not link. Keeping in mind that Sci-Hub at .ru doesn't have everything and that Anna's Archive is likely going offline / darkweb.

BACKDATE 2/8

Zuqnîn after Palmer

Philip Wood, whom we've met here before on the Church of the East, has content on the Church of the West. This is a draught from 2011, or earlier; it's been edited and published since. I missed this at the time, and the final version seems hard to get to online. It may or may not affect my work - or/nor Andrew Palmer's. This is "PseudoDionysius" compiled at Zuqnîn.

"PseudoDionysius" tends to be applied to the earlier volumes, which plagiarise John of Ephesus. "Zuqnîn" is what Palmer called the seventh-century in the Syrian chronicles' excerpt, up to AD 715ish / AG 1026ish. Wood was arguing the content after Palmer left off.

A chronicle existed up to 731 / 1042. Wood calls it "A". From what Palmer relays of it, it is rife with errors such that I doubt anyone went back to fix it. (I have found little utility in it.)

This "A" was then copied and revised in 748, to add content starting 718: to chronicle "the Third Fitna" (I think the Muslims' word fitna is borrowed here). If this sounds like what John Ben-Penkâyë was doing for his near-apocalypse of the Second: yeah, we do get "antichrist" memes here. John was an autistic nutcase and an antisemite... which traits "B" shares. The 'Abbâsids were coming from the east and "B" didn't like it. Which was all the Jews' fault of course, as Barbara Roggema, who might not be autistic, lately may attest.

Hither, then, the 'Abbâsids came. So we have a Phase C 742-751; and a D, 749-763.

This is (for me) a lot of "phases" to keep the track thereof. The Zuqnîn MS is, itself, an autograph. How did we get so many editors before this MS? What happened to the earlier chronicles? Did no-one drop by the monastery and copy them?

Perhaps C is a separate smaller chronicle (Palmer relates some of these) and the D guy was also the B guy, splicing the C content into the longer work. That would render suspect the earlier content from 718-763. Why would D care about Marwân as much? This content should also be earlier, like C. Also I didn't see the "distaste for Jews" in A that Wood sees in B. When a charlatan exploits the Jews in the earlier decades, Zuqnîn laments this.

So I don't think "A" and "B" were the same. I think "A" had the core, and that other people wrote their own thing, although if they were all at the monastery they at least owned the "A" basis. The "D" guy brought the "B" Marwân lore and the "C" chaos into the "A" frame. The Marwân lore came from Arabs and the "C" stuff might have been brought from some other Syrian monastery.

BACKDATE 2/6

Zapotec

Last month we got reports of a Zapotec tomb. I was holding off but it is news now so, let's get into whatever I can tell of it.

This tomb has glyphs. They are not just pictographs [em-dash] they are blocky and stylised, like the Maya. The entry is flagged with a stone owl, like we see in the prolog to Raiders; owls were heralds of Xibalbá. The glyphs are, they say, calendrical; they don't report on when-exactly, but the claim is contemporary with the Maya after the AD 536 disaster. Of course they say "CE" but I deem that fair (Christians weren't even using "AD" much, then).

The term "Zapotec" is foisted upon them from the Mexicans. Today they call themselves Bën-za. Their civilisation at this time is best known for the White Mountain site, Monte Albán. This was contemporary with the similarly-exonymed Teotihuacan; that site had a Bën-za quarter, as also a Maya quarter. This tomb may have been cut toward the declining decades of both.

The Zapotec language, something like "Diidxazá", is related to Mixtec and more-distantly to Otomi, around the Teotihuacan region today. Jennings was fond of this language. I expect since the classical Chorti "Maya" were calling Teotihuacan something like "the place of reeds", that so did the Bën-za.

BACKDATE 2/6

Blat in Perú

Matt Stoller has a must-read on how we in the West got from winning the Cold War to creating a late-Soviet superstate based in Little Saint James. Stoller calls it "blat", due to Epstein himself being some sort of Memelite or Königbergian like, in all likelihood, my great-grandmother. Same with the Maxwells.

I wonder if we should trace this to the Americas however. Hernando de Soto in Perú was reporting on the "informal" economy in the 1980s there. You wouldn't call this country Marxist; I hold fair to tag their system Left-Wing Apartheid. South Africans were bitterly saying of their own nation it was capitalism for whites and Jews, socialism for Boers and fascism for blecks.

Listening to Epstein tee off on "goys", that's how he saw the entire planet. And why not? That's how the entire planet was behaving around him.

There were young women, and some females better classed as girls; but that was just for special. Mostly Epstein finessed conflicts-of-interest between others, on the Q.T. Every deal then became a blackmail possibility, even without it being sexy, if nothing else because all those who didn't get that special deal would certainly be angered - and either go to the courts, or find other means of vengeance.

Back to de Soto, his brief for making informal networks legal and formal got a lot of rave reviews, including from Bill Clinton. What we should have read more-carefully in de Soto's book, which got into English in 2002, is that some people like the networks staying informal. Stoller uses the word "Governance" - I think, deliberately pulling the G out of E.S.G., corporate social responsibility, corpocracy whatever you like to call it. Governance requires not just the public face of Davos.

Hedge

The Hedge Knight is on telly as Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. I am here more concerned with its sequel, which we stand maybe a 65% chance of getting to watch next: The Sworn Sword. Specifically whether such a thing as a knight-errant existed, rather than "big guy shows up to tourney with armour".

The name is sus, as a mix of Saxon and Norman. Wiki wants me to think it is a creature of romance, like the Japanese ronin. I am unsure. If it be a trope, why is it seen across the globe wherever feudal societies crop up?

The Sworn Sword somewhat illustrates how a knight might end up errant, sleeping in hedges. Feudal lords come into border-disputes. They might reach a deal; that is somewhat the plot of this novella. Sometimes however they fall to blows; and a baron loses his lands, title, even life... but not his men.

Those knights might not have a baron anymore but they still have a king, often the same king as the other lord has. Those now-landless knights are still not traitors; or, if perhaps they were, the king might figure these men are worth some clemency, since they maintained their honour, of a sort, and the king cannot waste good men.

This is how bandits happen of course. Here we may defer to Weis' Daughter of the Empire: knights without portfolio will gladly hire under a lord, or in Weis' case a lady, who promises to restore to them their purpose. For Weis these knights formed a band, and were on their way to banditry - before the lady Acoma rescued them.

But perhaps some knights might hold to their vows ("sigma", Beale might say) to refuse that dubious company.

BACKDATE 2/4.

rOygbiv

They say that if you live long enough, you will see the bodies of your enemies float past you down-river. I don't know that I have much seen this in my life. But it does sometimes turn out you see an evil person sent up that river. Like Sonya Jaquez Lewis.

Coloradans know what Lewis helped make of their state. Less known, perhaps, is how she lied and how she forced others to affirm her lie, namely her "marriage" to a woman. The laws of nature and of G-d meant nothing to this state's SJL. And if the laws of man and of woman told her otherwise, she'd just change them.

But she couldn't change all of them.

Vox Popoli is a Hitlerist site

Richard Carrier argues that "Christian Nationalism" means NSDAP. To be more precise: NSDAP as ex-Catholic Hitler envisioned it post-Beer-Hall is a natural outgrowth of political Lutheranism.

The Catholics have a vision of the state as well: the pan-Christian "Christendom", backed up in dogma with the paraNestorian filioque. Obviously this vision conflicts with Luther's. As a result, Lutherans as of AD 1925 used the Catholic word "Christentum" to mock it.

When you look at Theodore Beale's site with the "voxday" URL, you often read the term "Churchian" and "Churchianity". These are Christian institutions which, in Beale's mind, are unfit for purpose. The Venn containing the "Churchianity" and "Christentum" circles is one circle.

I don't think Beale can (or should bother) argue with Carrier's finding. What he might argue is whether the NSDAP was in fact too tolerant, as to make it a poor vehicle for Christian Nationalism. Until the Long Knives the NSDAP was something of a coalition, from Röhm's brief for sodomía to Himmler's mysticism. Neither are particularly easy to count as Christian.

Beale also can't complain about Carrier's arrogant style and willingness to throw names about like PZ Myers at his worst. I might so complain.