Eric The Blue

Books of the Bible: Acts of the Apostles

Readers of the Acts of the Apostles might keep a good atlas nearby, for it often reads like a travelogue: the adventures of the first Christians, especially Paul, as they travel about the Near East, Asia Minor, and, eventually, to Rome.  If nothing else, you will learn some geography, and maybe amaze your friends at the next trivia night. 

This travel theme, which will be noticed by even so drowsy a reader as I, has attracted the attention of scholars, too.  There are the inevitable questions about historical accuracy.  Did Paul actually go to this place and that one, get thrown into prison here, receive a sympathetic hearing there, etc., etc.?  Textual scholarship, meanwhile, advances the theory that the travel narratives, whatever their historical value, are best understood as a literary device and organizing principle that provides insight into the mind of the author.  Acts, remember, is the second part of Luke-Acts, and the gospel of Luke makes more of the travels of Jesus than do the others.  Most of the second half of Luke--chapters 10 through 19--is made of a rambling travel section introduced by the statement (9:51): "When the days drew near for him to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem."  In Acts, the activity of the apostles begins in and around Jerusalem before their travels take them far and wide.  At a high level, we may say that the movement of Luke-Acts is from Jerusalem to Rome, which is to say, from the capital of the Jewish world to the capital of the Gentile one.  In Luke, Jesus "sets his face" to go to Jerusalem, where he is rejected and crucified.  Acts opens in Jerusalem and ends with Paul in Rome, "preaching the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered." 

I suggested, in discussing Luke, that its evident concern for outsiders and losers is an attractive feature of that gospel.  In the parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, the two pious Jews make a point to pass by on the other side of the road from the seriously injured man, but the despised Samaritan gives assistance.  By the time you come to the end of Acts, this parable, found only in Luke, seems less remarkable and perhaps less attractive, too.  If Christian concern for outcasts may be traced to the author of Luke-Acts, so too may the ugly strain of anti-Semitism in Christendom.  Looking back at Luke from the endpoint of Acts, the parable of the Good Samaritan resembles yet another episode with Jewish villains and a Gentile hero.  It's a leading theme of the work, as impossible to miss as all the traveling.  Indeed, the point of all the traveling is to reinforce the idea that the Christian message was rejected in the Jewish world and accepted by Gentiles.

The conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus--this, the most famous event described in Acts, doesn't seem, from a psychological standpoint, very credible to me.  The arduous intellectual journey described in spiritual autobiographies, most famously in Augustine's Confessions, is absent.  He was a good Jew, an oppressor of the members of this heterodox new sect, but then he heard a voice--"Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"--and, sha-zam, he's Paul, the leading author of the New Testament and, as much as Jesus himself, the founder of Christianity.  How did that happen?  It's not only the conversion that one views, as it were, through a glass, darkly.  While Paul is the most prominent figure in Acts, the reader may feel that he never becomes a vivid character.  It's different in his own writings.

. . . I am carnal, sold under sin.  I do not understand my own actions. . . .  I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.  Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. . . .  Wretched man that I am!  Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Any account of the man who wrote those words from the pen of a contemporary observer is going to be of considerable interest--unless, it turns out, that contemporary observer is the one we in fact have, the author of Luke-Acts, a work in which Paul, notwithstanding a long flow of discourse concerning his activities, remains a shadowy figure.

It doesn't seem likely that creating a vivid character was beyond the powers of the author of Luke-Acts, whose Greek, if we may trust the testimony of scholars, is fluid, graceful, more sophisticated than what prevails in the other synoptic gospels.  The occasional oddity intrudes, such as the aforementioned sentence introducing Jesus's journey to Jerusalem:

When the days drew near for him to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.

This seems a little off, in the same way as, say:

When the sun rose, he set his face and determined to eat a glazed doughnut. 

That is, the phrase "set his face" suggests an approaching ordeal that doesn't fit with flying up to heaven in the seam of a cloud (which is what Jesus does in Acts 1:9).  This sentence has no parallel in Mark and it is fair to say that the author of Mark would never write those words.  His version of the sentence would make more linguistic sense:

When the time drew near for Jesus to be crucified, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.

In Mark, the emphasis is on the crucifixion, which is understood as being redemptive for humankind.  In Luke, the emphasis is on the resurrection, which is viewed as something that God does for the man Jesus.  The evidence for such a conclusion again involves close readings of parallel passages, together with the theory that Mark is a source for Luke.  When in Mark Jesus predicts his passion and resurrection, the recurring verbal phrase is "rise" and "rise again," which, in Luke, slides into the passive voice:

The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.

The Markan source for the above reads:

The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him; and when he is killed, after three days he will rise.

Note that Luke, in addition to suggesting that Jesus might be unable to raise himself, characteristically includes the (Jewish) credentials of those who reject Jesus--Mark's generalized "hands of men" becomes "the elders and chief priests and scribes."  With respect to the crucifixion, Luke consistently avoids indicating that it was more than an act of service.  The Markan phrase "ransom for many" is elided, and Mark 10:45--

For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many

--is rendered by Luke, at 22:27:

For which is the greater, one who sits at table, or one who serves?  Is it not the one who sits at table?  But I am among you as one who serves.

Luke's outlook, we may say, is ethical, not theological.  Jesus, in Luke-Acts, is an ideal man.  The home for the doctrine of the atonement, however, is the gospel of Mark. 

Now, as we shall soon see, it is not hard to know on which side of this divide to place the New Testament's most brilliant author.  Though the order in which the books of the Bible are arranged tends to seduce us into errors of chronology, the "Markan view" was actually invented by Paul, who was also its most accomplished and insistent partisan.  The author of Luke-Acts shows over and over again that he regards with suspicion, if not outright distaste, the Paul-Mark view of things.  This must account to some considerable degree for why Paul, so vigorously present and alive in his own writings, is so vague a character in the Acts of the Apostles--like Barnabas, only with more inches of copy.

Trump. Sinatra

Dick Cheney and Paul Ryan, along with John Kasich, Lindsey Graham, and many other Republicans, have condemned Donald Trump's most recent un-American screed, but I notice that the most viable GOP candidates for president--Cruz, Rubio--are equivocating while, on FB, there is a persistent meme to the effect that Jimmy Carter did it, too. 

The "Carter Defense" of Trump suggests that a religious test for entry into the United States, and Carter's ban on admitting Iranians after Iran took American citizens hostage in 1979, are parallel cases.  But, since Iran is a country and Islam is a religion, they aren't parallel at all.  It's one thing for a president to impose sanctions against a hostile country.  Denying to Iranians the benefits of travel to the US, which would include for example the chance to study at American universities, is, at least arguably, an effective means of exerting pressure on their government.   It's also explicitly permitted by federal law.  But to deny entry to people on account of their religion--well, when Ryan, Cheney, Hillary Clinton and I agree, and you are on the other side, you should reconsider. 

I'm so unaccustomed to concurring with the likes of Ryan and Cheney that it's tempting to allude to the broken clock that is exactly right for two conceptual moments each day.  Probably the best way to make sense of their lapse into reason, however, is to note again that the interests of ambitious Republican politicians diverge from what is in the longer-term interests of the Republican party. The party should moderate its rhetoric, give a rest to the hyperventilating and foamy idiocy, and it's comparatively easy for the Speaker of the House and a retired former vice president to advance that cause by condemning outrageous views.  Similarly for Kasich and Graham, whose presidential campaigns are going nowhere.  But Cruz and Rubio still have a chance of winning the nomination, and are as a result constrained from renouncing what's ridiculous.  (I am assuming they have an inclination to do so, which, especially with regard to Cruz, is likely an unmerited compliment.)  The root problem is that a Republican, to win any intra-party contest, is obliged to win the votes of people who are on leave from reality.  The kooks and crackpots are too big a slice of the electoral pie to abjure. 

Meanwhile, on the centenary of Frank Sinatra's birth, let's give him a call-out for something other than his voice.  Though he possessed some of  Trump's unsavory personal characteristics Sinatra, when it wasn't popular, insisted on performing before integrated audiences with an integrated orchestra and often with such fellow musicians as Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington.  Yesterday morning, on NPR, Scott Simon suggested that one of his finest hours was a performance he gave at a high school in Gary, Indiana, in 1945, when white students were walking out after the school was integrated. 

"The eyes of the nation are watching Gary," Sinatra told the students, according to a review in a Chicago newspaper.  "You have a wonderful war production record.  Don't spoil it by pulling a strike.  Go back to school, kids."  An unusual hush then fell over the audience as he sang "The House I Live In."

Power out

Having spent a few days asserting that the murders at the Planned Parenthood in Colorado had nothing to do with the political/religious views of the twisted fanatic who pulled the trigger, the Republicans talking on my TV have performed a quick pivot and are now asserting that the most recent incident of gun carnage in America has everything to do with the political/religious views of the twisted fanatics who pulled the trigger.  The only thing they're consistent about is that none of the killing has anything to do with the ease with which all the twisted fanatics can go to the store and arm themselves as if they were planning to kill everyone in North Dakota instead of just a few handfuls of Americans at work.

Meanwhile, on another topic, the climate conference in Paris, Power Line philosopher John Hinderaker has been exhibiting a similar dexterity of thought.  His views on climate change seem to be evolving.  In "Global Cooling Alert," a post from February of 2008, he begins:

When Scott [Johnson] and I wrote "The Global Warming Hoax" in 1992 . . . .

In those days, the warming earth was a "hoax" perpetuated on the gullible by a cabal of just about all the world's climate scientists working in concert with other "leftists."  It appears, however, that sometime over the past 20 to 25 years the hoax theory has been supplanted.  Here is Hinderaker last week:

With the latest U.N. confab scheduled to begin in Paris on Monday, global warming hysteria is being hyped by governments around the world. Reality, though, tends to intrude, as it did in Paris just a week or two ago. Between bullets and bombs on one hand, and the theoretical prospect of a one degree increase in average world temperatures on the other, which would bring us closer to the mean over the last 10,000 years, most people don’t hesitate.

Let's just give him a pass for suggesting that we can't, or shouldn't, combat both terrorism and climate change.  Is it possible to detect in the theoretical prospect of of a one degree increase in average world temperatures a grudging acknowledgment that the claim of a hoax was itself something of a hoax?  Sure, he's sloppy about details.  One degree on what scale?  No one would be sounding an alarm if the worst-case scenario was an earth toasted by one extra Fahrenheit degree.  Scientists worry that we are now doomed to going past 2 degrees on the Celsius scale, and we haven't yet begun to take remedial action.  (There are 1.8 Fahrenheit degrees for every 1 degree Celsius.)  The bit about the 10,000 year mean is a red herring on steroids.  The earth back then was not home to more than 7 billion people, I don't know how many millions of them inhabiting coastal cities in danger of being submerged by melting ice and rising seas.  Ten thousand years gets you back roughly to the time that human beings in the Fertile Crescent first developed agriculture.  They might not have done it if beset by mass movements of other human beings seeking a new place to live. 

The problem, I think, is that the question of climate change is grounded in science, and Hinderaker's scientific views are just subsidiaries of his political ones.  In laughably inept fashion, he denies evolution, too.  He would probably deny the atomic theory, and the theory that the earth goes 'round the sun, but for the fact that these cause no trouble for right-wing politics, American-style. 

The advance of science is persuading wingnuts to shift their tactics.  That climate scientists and wild-eyed liberals have been pushing a fraud was never very plausible.  But now it's not even a useful dodge.  The new dodge is variations of, "Well, maybe they're not hoaxers, but they're certainly exaggerators (which is not what I was when I called them 'hoaxers'"). 

Alas, the science of a particular question does not vary according to the volume of voice employed by detractors, even if they're packing.