The coup against Jacob

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arabia Deserta

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

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

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

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

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

The misplaced stone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luke's party on the Resurrection

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: Justin did not write On The Resurrection.

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

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

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

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

The gospel according to Ignatius

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immortality of the soul

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rousseau's incoherent religion

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

For Rousseau:

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

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

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

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

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