Orthodoxy in the postEhrman world

My father held much respect for Daniel Dennett; and so - still - does Pixy Misa. Dennett has gone to whatever afterlife will have him. Various Christians are now dancing on his grave, anticipating the afterlife as will have them. Personally I couldn't finish Darwin's Dangerous Idea; nowadays the greatest satan is Bart Ehrman. I have read Ehrman... and I am Catholic. How do we request of an Ehrman reader that Catholicism is worth the, er, candle?

Christians have composed multitudinous apologetic against secular text-criticism; mostly it's silly Protestants on this beat, but not all. The smarter Catholics don't fall into the trap of citing Protestants - so some have mooted their own brand. In my day we had The Real Jesus; nowadays we got Brant Pitre.

These serve the purpose of affirming lay Catholics (or Christians generally) that it's been Handled, that Ehrman's been Refuted. Same as Darwin's been Handled, and Refuted ("epicycles"!). Just read this book bro'.

But the skeptic is not a lay Catholic anymore. He is examining the texts and the Tradition. What if he finds that Pitre skirts around the questions the skeptic has? (This isn't opinion - this is fact, that Pitre ducks and dodges.) Also: what if he decides that, yeah, Ehrman's got some problems here and there but that those problems are better solved by Carrier? and/or by Godfrey? This isn't a question about Ehrman, a brilliant man but just a man; it's a question about "2 Peter", whose author was a liar. And about all the dupes - or even poltroons, like Pitre, whom I suspect of knowing better, more quietly than I - who've continued to flout such Church Fathers as used to warn against "2 Peter".

What I'd say to the skeptic is that it's okay to harbour some misgivings about this canon. But: I affirm a greater canon, of saints, which saints include Ignatius and Clement.

As for Dennett, I get the feeling that those smirking about him being in Hell will be suffering a worse fate down there than is Dennett.

The Arma Christi and the Haggada

As Pesach approaches, TheTorah talks Arma-Christi. Davila has supplemented that - so, enough content for a brief post. I doubt the Haggadah as reacting to Christian hoodoo.

I do agree that Christianity assembled a list of Artifacts of the Crucifixion, like the crown of thorns and the cross itself, maybe that lance. These items were all indigenous to Christianity, before the Christendom made magick of them. The now-lost predecessor to John (vv. 3:14+12:34) had already associated the Cross with Moses' staff.

And no-one doubts an effort in Judaism to excise or at least neutralise prooftexts which Christians were using. In Haggadah, Davila notes Exodus 23:20-23 in which an angel of YHWH is at work. Another (failed!) attempt hit the Song of Moses and Miriam wherein YHWH is a "man of war" (protoSamaritan: "hero"). Infamously our "Hebrews" tractate cites Second Ode of Moses / Deuteronomy 32 from the Greek, which the rabbis have since undercut. Also note here if Bull El, son of [the] Most High ('alyun), had made an appearance earlier in that Ode now Deuteronomy 32.

My point is that Judaism also had a magickal tradition, already. Jews already remembered Artifacts - helloooo, the Ark, anyone? Several of these ancient D&D treasuretypes even got into Islamic apocalyptic. The need to nail down and promote a standard version against angel-veneration came with Enoch and Jubilees - long before him whom we name the Christ.

---

TYPEPAD CLEANUP 9/11/2025: In light of John Hobbins' ancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com/ancient_hebrew_poetry/2008/04/elyon-bull-el-a.html page likely going away, I'm just going to rip off the whole thing right here. Hobbins wrote the following, not me. I just want to preserve it.

Most scholars agree that the masoretic text of Deuteronomy 32:8 reflects a theological revision of a more original text reflected in 4QDeut^j and the Septuagint. Biblia Hebraica Quinta 5 and the Oxford Hebrew Bible sample edition concur on this point, but differ on details. Neither considers the possibility that the revision encompassed the first word of 32:9. In this post, I adopt a text-critical proposal advanced by Jan Joosten that restores a reference to “Bull El” in Deut 32:8. The million-dollar question then is: how do Elyon, Bull El, and Yahweh relate to one another in the theology of the original – or more original poem – per Joosten’s reconstruction? The hypothesis Joosten develops sees Yahweh as a rogue desert God, not one of Bull El’s sons at all, and not identifiable with Elyon either.

The apparatuses do not post well. Here is the post as a pdf.

Solicitatio

The most-readable poster at Patheos debunks the trope of fundamental xes'abuse in the Latin Church. To Philip Jenkins, I'd ask why there Isn't A Story.

Now: just because Jenkins is the best of a bad batch doesn't make Jenkins all good. Jenkins calls the reformist Damien nasty names and compares him to QAnon. I say this reflects better on QAnon than it does on Jenkins. Still - Jenkins has a point that Damien is an outlier. "Solicitatio" as they called it tended at adult women, not at nonadult boys.

I've read or at least seen the telly series of three books perhaps-relevant to peccadilli of the Religious: Peter Jennings' Raptor, Kenneth Follett's Pillars of the Earth, and Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose. These three did their research, at least. These agree that the Religious were misfits. Misfits may well include predators; they certainly include the odd Countryman Of Lot. Follett thought the Church should be solicitous of such; Jennings disagreed, casting his net against all the Latin Church. Eco had his own, different problems with said Church. Jenkins would likely dislike Jennings. But - back to misfits.

I suspect the pool of misfits from which the Church could draw for its Religious was rather large in the medial age. The Closet-Cases were swamped by third-sons of villagers and barons, with lame and/or nearsighted people no good for the army (hey - another Jennings book!), with highly intelligent semi-autists. Some monasteries (and convents) might end up dens of Sin but at least those would be monasteries, not interfacing with the villages. The people interfacing with the villages would have been... people a lot more like the villagers.

And when they sinned, they'd be sinning with the villagers like any other villager would be tempted to do, that is with the women.

Not that we're condoning any of that over here in this blog, either. But hey - just resign the frock, sign up as a merchant's secretary, and maybe stick around to be a deacon if you really can't keep those robes shuttered.

I suspect that in a modern age of wide literacy where almost all the middle class is employed at an office, the Closet-Cases actually are too-high a proportion of the true misfits, and the leftover misfits are barely functional enough to resist the McCarricks. This is a recent phenomenon, not seen (nearly as much) in Late Antiquity.

That superhighway again

Late today ScienceDaily linked this knot-theory piece.

I'd thought we'd seen this back in 1997, from Ross and Lo (also pdf). Shane has ... come back. (One might say.) Anyway the old method was, I think, proposing solar-sails to shift one trajectory to the other. Sometimes the manifolds could find routes between us and Jupiter - which is useful for us, but also for the Comet Empire seeking to crash into us. The new "tube map" proposes to find optimal routes faster, using that knot theory. So: you're on a doomed mine on an asteroid and you need off it, to Ceres or wherever. Which is the best wherever, given fuel-reserves? The theory might work on a local computer, not requiring a supercomputer.

BACKDATE AND REWRITE 4/18 7:30 PM: Okay, I've read the thing, Danny Owen and Nicola Baresi. The press release is bad and its author should feel bad, as should ScienceDaily for not choosing a better summary.

We deal here with passageways between L1 and L2, the focal-points of (unstable) halo orbits balanced between bodies in mutual orbit. Their Jacobi Integral is similar. Once launched to that gravitational midpoint which is L1 - we should get to corresponding L2 with minimal thrust.

So: from the Earth, to (almost) the Moon which is "TLL1" - and beyond. TLL2, as the balance-point opposite the Moon from Earth, should be an easy route either to STL1 or STL2. From STL2, on to Venus (or maybe that 5:4 Laplacian); or just directly outward to anywhere. TLL2 itself is a fine shelter to fire off nukey rides to glory. So the postJacobi question is: sussing out the L1 and L2 manifolds to eject from one and inject to th'other.

Owen-Baresi, I think, shouldn't have bothered with Jupiter/Ganymede on account I suspect its L1/L2 are under severe (periodic) pressure from Europa maybe also Io. Anyway: why Ganymede? Jupiter/Callisto which is not in that resonance should make for purer maths. And that orbit interfaces better with the rest of us. Maybe the trajectory had already braked a craft into JGL1, and now's the time to get it into (less-irradiated) JGL2 . . .

Of course this blog would want to talk Sol/Venus. For all the above that counterlunar orbit L3 needs some love, as well.

Stellar magnetic fields

Two newsbits came in last weekend: first, limb darkening - as a means to finetune the surrounding shape of a stellar disc. That's useful for ascertaining starspots and, of course, planetary transits. Also in the news is a measurement of stellar winds from 61 Cygni, 70 Ophiuchi, and epsilon Eridani. These are quite close to us. I think by 61 Cygni and 70 Ophiuchi, binaries both, they mean A.

61 Cygni's stars are both 6.1 Gy old, and about 70%/63% solar mass; 70 Oph at 1.9 Gy and 90%/70%. The stellar wind of each suggests that one or the other is losing mass an order of magnitude as our (stronger) Sun. I much doubt that any of these four be pregiant on the mainsequence. Epsilon Eridani on the other hand is new, like T Cha.

The stars share in common: magnetic field. Strong fields mean mass loss, and may explain 61 Cygni's severe case.

Does being in a binary "juvenate" a star, so it behaves like εEri?

Anyway if we can figure a field from either direct imaging or the wind, we can probably figure other parameters (starquakes are also good for this). Thus improving transit-measurements if any. Or, constraining if a star even has planets or water in HZ.

Carbon-cycle habitability

Master of Orion allowed besides "difficulty" a bounded playfield small / medium / large, which could take on multiple NPC alien-races. The sequel adds the age of the playfield. So, we guess, if it formed in the centre of our Milky Way or if it is a holdout from a dead patch of space like some of those low-gas galaxies. Relevant to all this, from 10 April: carbon-cycle. (Presented by Bristol, but not well.)

Lewis J. Alcott, Craig Walton, Noah J. Planavsky, Oliver Shorttle, and Benjamin J. W. Mills propose, on the assumption of (somehow) photosynthesis being introduced, how the atmosphere became oxygen-rich. They say: not just the spread of alga. During the Boring Billion before land plants, photosynthesis was both two-dimensional, and limited to shallow pools and "brownwater" coast.

So we had oxygen in our early atmosphere - but not much. Plus photosynthesis requires CO₂. The paper, as I read it, proposes rock carbonates as a proxy for atmospheric carbon generally. If free carbon monoxide, say from a volcano, reacts with a silicate, some gets buried and we can dig it out and measure its isotopes. Or the dioxide can get taken by those plants, which eventually die and leave some carbon-nitrogen sludge.

Over time, like a boring billion years, carbon slowly becomes carbonate and also dead plants. More plants grow. The winner as carbon is cycled in and out is - oxygen.

What the paper doesn't constrain is Great Oxidation Event, measured elsewhere 2.4-2.2 Gya. They'd define that G.O.E. as the point at which "oxygen overwhelms [carbon] sinks". But again: not yet breathable to modern mammals, maybe not even to dino/birds. There's just enough O₂ to exist without it all burning.

Bethel as the New Babylon

Neil "Vridar" Godfrey last Friday quoted Israel Finkelstein at length on the literacy-culture of Judah/Samaria. There was one... and then there was not. Literacy had to return to the place. We're just arguing when and how, and to Vridar that's looking Hellenistic.

Our Bible has come to us in recensions drastic enough, between the Samaritans and the Masoretes, that we know that glosses happen. The Samaritans' deviations amount to a radically different text. Modern scholars can, also, "restore" radical texts and don't need to change nearly as much so to do. Here we're looking into Ernst Axel Knauf (2006), on the rôle of the site Bethel in postexilic protoJudaism.

Bethel was excavated and published; its various rubble was catalogued and stored in Pittsburgh. Finkelstein in 2009 returned to Pittsburgh, and found lacunae, scotching the Bethel publication.

Nadav Na’aman (2010a), 180-2 critiqued that "post-mortem" to note that Bethel's famous Temple was not among the initial excavations. Although he'll allow Finkelstein for Bethel's loss of a papyrus/ostracon class, that is what we'd call an educated middle class; we remain wanting for direct evidence of the parchment class. Knauf had suggested to take Nehemiah 7 seriously, that up to a sixth of the population overall was unproductive Temple personnel therefore subsidised from abroad. The locals would have been shut out of the libraries. Especially Bethel heathens from the Jerusalem library.

DOI bros should look up Na’aman (2014) - 10.1179/0334435514z.00000000032. Here he argues for Jacob's Stairway, or Ladder, as a ziggurat. This is a Babylonian import like Ezekiel's Temple (although of course Ezekiel wanted that for Zion). Such suggests - to Na’aman - that postExilic Jews seriously considered Bethel as the new Temple-City, what with Mizpah being inadequate and Zion being accursed. I mean: it's even in the name, "Beth-El" (in Aramaic construct).

Another Na’aman point is that he pronounces the Documentary Hypothesis' funeral, with Schmid as of 2010 hammering the final nails in its coffin. I dunno; I do sometimes see "J", "D", and "P" noted out-an'about, still. I concede, postKnohl/postCarmichael - "P" tends to split into "Holiness" and "P" sections with a lot of redactional futzing. Suffering worst is the "E" source, which is exactly associated with Bethel.

Na’aman in the stead of "E" would see northern tradition contributing to our "Deuteronomic" history. Some of this comes into the Jacob cycle (which is Bethel); some of it into the vignettes in Judges (which is not). Exodus is the most-important northern story, Moses being a northern hero unknown to - say - Isaiah. Isaiah 9:1-6 is aware of the Gideon/Midian story, also in a northern cycle; but Na’aman cites others that this be a hymn to Josiah therefore later than the northern kingdom's existence, and brought to Isaiah's work posthumously.