Eric The Blue

Books of the Bible: Galatians

Paul's letter to the Galatians: the theme is that of the letter to the Romans, the tone is that of the concluding three chapters of 2 Corinthians.  In other words, "Death to the law, dammit!" The letter combines Paul's chief doctrine with more evidence of something resembling a personality disorder.  You would not say that he is slow to anger.  The converts, whether it be in politics or religion, tend to run a temperature, and casual readers, if there are any, must be relieved that most of these letters are brief.  Dr Johnson said of Edmund Burke that anyone taking shelter with him in a doorway during a rain shower would comprehend before it passed that they were in the presence of genius.  With Paul, you would venture back into the rain before being able to make such a determination.

The letter begins:

Paul an apostle--not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead--and all the brethren who are with me,

To the churches of Galatia:

Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself [etc., etc.] Amen.

The et ceteras are just meant to shorten the formulaic salutation that begins Paul's letters.  What seems noteworthy is that the author's irritation could not here be restrained until the niceties were done. He's Paul, and he speaks for God.  There cannot be a question of mere disagreement.  The salutation complete, the body of the letter commences:

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel--not that there is another gospel . . . .  As we have said before, so now I say again, If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received [from me], let him be accursed.

You see what I mean about preferring to be out in the rain.

The careful reader will be able to make out in the second chapter something about circumcision and a controversy about what the commentators now call "table fellowship,"--that is, who can eat with whom.  The point of this brings us back to the fact, noted previously in connection with the letter to the Romans, that these early Christian communities were made of both Jews and Gentiles, with the result that the place of the Jewish law was somewhat ambiguous.  Did the Gentile Christians need to be circumcised?  Were the Jewish dietary laws in abeyance or not?  That the Galatians had adopted, or were adopting, the wrong answers to these questions is what set Paul off.  The wrong answers were Yes on circumcision and No on table fellowship between Gentiles and Jews.  The Judaizers, in other words, had gained the upper hand in Galatia.  Had they prevailed, Christianity, instead of becoming a world religion, would likely have been relegated to a sect within Judaism that either would or wouldn't have survived. 

But Paul won.  I don't think it's on account of the argument advanced in Galatians, for which the cliché about emitting more heat than light might almost have been invented.  Paul huffs and he puffs but makes almost no sense at all.  Exhibit A would be 3:10, when he's in the midst of ransacking the Old Testament for material with which to bolster his argument:

For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, "Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law, and do them."

The quotation is from Deuteronomy 27:6, where it means exactly what it seems to mean, which is exactly the opposite of what Paul seeks to prove.  I mean to say that this passage, applied to the controversy between Paul and the Judaizers at Galatia, would require that the law be observed, that the Gentiles be circumcised, and that the dietary laws remain in force.  Yet Paul cites it as if the words meant the exact opposite of their plain meaning.  The reconciling commentaries aren't very persuasive but perhaps there are textual problems, such as a missing segment of the argument.  No one really knows. 

Frustrated by the mostly futile effort to comprehend the argument, you might turn to commentaries, which, if they're any good, will likely persuade you that it's worse than you'd thought.  There's a kind of chicken-and-egg problem connected to the question of whether the text seems boring because it makes so little sense, or makes so little sense because the reader is too bored to extract meaning.  I had assumed the latter but the former may actually be more plausible.  Here is the scholar Norman Perrin on the aforementioned section on circumcision in chapter 2:

This passage is extraordinarily difficult to translate, probably because Paul is wrestling with the fact that he actually circumcised Timothy (Acts 16:3), and it is affecting his grammar....

I take this to mean it's hard to translate because it's impossible to understand what the text means.  In a footnote to 4:25, Wayne Meeks, editor of the Norton Critical edition of The Writings of St. Paul, comments:

The text is uncertain, another major group of manuscripts reading "For Sinai is a mountain in Arabia"; copyists have evidently tried to help out Paul's limping allegory by adding notes.

Scanning Meeks's notes, one is struck by the deployment of "baffling" and "puzzling" and "hardly intelligible" and "ambiguous" and "grammatically incomplete" and "logically confusing," in addition to "limping allegory," to describe different portions of the relatively brief letter.  Meeks was professor of religious studies at Yale so you can imagine what troubles await the non-specialist.  I've given it my best so that you can skip Galatians and do a Sudoku. 

Luther had a different opinion. Galatians is second only to Romans in the category of usefulness for his fixed idea, which is forcefully expressed at the conclusion to the third chapter:

Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed.  So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith.  But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.  For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Not sure I understand that either, but, as it sounds bold and free, doesn't involve a tortured analogy, or betray the author's hurt feelings and high self-regard, we may trail off on a high note.  

 

The weather

The official high temperature in Minneapolis today, February 19, was 59°, which broke the old record of 57.  I guess it's going to be like this till at least mid-week, so the climate change deniers will not be talking about the weather for a few days.  A cold winter day proves anthropogenic global warming is a hoax perpetrated by Chinamen but for some reason a few warm ones are just noise.  Nevertheless, facts are facts, and 2016 was the hottest year on record.  The second hottest was 2015.  The third hottest was 2014.  Of the seventeen hottest years on record, sixteen occurred in this century.  Or, to put it another way, the first sixteen years of the 21st century are all among the seventeen hottest on record.

Maybe it has something to do with the burning of fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect! 

The denialists are running low on arguments. John Hinderaker, of the Power Line blog, used to wax eloquent about "global cooling."  I couldn't understand what he was talking about until finally it occurred to me that, if year x was the hottest on record, and year x + 1 only the second hottest, then in his world year x + 1 is characterized by global cooling.  It's sort of like insisting that on the morning after the 57th game DiMaggio was mired in a batting slump.  Hinderaker has been saved from advancing this terrible argument for a few years now, because it's been a few years since the most recent year was not the hottest on record.

I predict that it won't be long now until so-called conservatives--actually, they're not conservative but reckless and irresponsible in the extreme--will switch from insisting that climate change is a hoax to insisting that it's too late to do anything about it.  They're wrong now but there's a chance they'll be right then.

Addendum: So far as I know, Hinderaker has not taken the bet.

Florida

Spent yesterday at Disney World being reminded of the photographs of Diane Arbus.  I think the first time I was standing in line by a basic white guy, 35ish, evidently the father of two young kids, sporting a tee with a picture of an assault rifle and the slogan NEVER AGAIN.

Never again, what?

Anyway, today it was Universal Studios.  Everyone agrees what Bernie Madoff did is a heinous crime but these theme parks seem to be totally legal.

Dr Johnson on marriage

I have a Penguin Classic paperback edition of Samuel Johnson's Collected Essays that I've been forging through at the rate of one or two a day.  According to the blurb on the back cover, Johnson tackles "ethical questions such as the importance of self-knowledge, awareness of mortality, the role of the novel, and, in a lighter vein, marriage . . . ."

In a lighter vein, marriage?  I think I remember, almost exactly ten years ago, Judge Jack Nordby telling Amanda and me, before pronouncing the magic words, that marriage was not to be entered into lightly, and by now she has probably come around to that view herself.  Here is Dr Johnson in Rambler No. 39:

Melanthia came to town upon the death of her father, with a very large fortune, and with the reputation of a much larger; she was therefore followed and caressed by many men of rank, and by some of understanding; but having an insatiable desire of pleasure, she was not at leisure, from the park, the gardens, the theatres, visits, assemblies, and masquerades, to attend seriously to any proposal, but was still impatient for a new flatterer, and neglected marriage as always in her power; till in time her admirers fell away, wearied with expence, disgusted at her folly, or offended by her inconstancy; she heard of concerts to which she was not invited, and was more than once forced to sit still at an assembly, for want of a partner.  In this distress, chance threw in her way Philotryphus, a man vain, glittering, and thoughtless as herself, who had spent a small fortune in equipage and dress, and was shining in the last suit for which his taylor would give him credit.  He had been long endeavouring to retrieve his extravagance by marriage, and therefore soon paid his court to Melanthia, who after some weeks of insensibility saw him at a ball, and was wholly overcome by his performance in a minuet.  They married; but a man cannot always dance, and Philotryphus had no other method of pleasing . . . .

That was in 1750.  Johnson's wife, Tetty, died two years later, and when in 1759 his mother died, he defrayed the funeral expenses by hastily composing and rushing into print The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssnia, in which one of the characters, pretty clearly speaking for the author, declaims:

Such is the common process of marriage.  A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another.  Having little to divert attention, or diversity thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together.  They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty.

The consistent outlook maintained in different circumstances raises questions about Dr Johnson's own marriage, the more so since it occurred when he was penniless and in his mid-20s, to a woman in her mid-40s who came with a dowry of £600.  Tetty was dead before Johnson met Boswell, so she figures in The Life of Johnson (if memory serves) only when, on the anniversaries of her death, her presence in his daily devotion is put forward as further proof of his moral excellence.  Tetty was however regarded with mirth by other of Johnson's friends, who remarked on her size (large) and debated whether her rosy complexion was best explained by her overuse of paint or spirits.  We now know, though not from Boswell, that Johnson's early years in London were marred by extreme privation, including probably homelessness, and it is unclear in what part of this Tetty shared: Johnson seems to have been living as a bachelor.  He never remarried, and is on record as having described second marriages as representing "the triumph of hope over experience." His long flirtation in old age with Mrs Thrale ended badly, though "flirtation" is probably not the word, since it seems she and he were practitioners of something that sounds a lot like S & M. 

The conclusion of the argument is that it's easier to write well than live well. 

 

Trump's probationary period

Susan Sontag, whose endearing efforts to increase her word power I mentioned here, wrote in her essay "What's Happening in America (1966)":

Today's America, with Ronald Reagan the new daddy in California and John Wayne chawing spareribs in the White House, is pretty much the same Yahooland that Mencken was describing.

Sontag lived to see California's daddy move to Pennsylvania Avenue but what would she say about the leader of the free world rising early to tweet insults at the successor host of the reality tv show he had abandoned in order to make America great again?

I don't think I'll ever be obliged to withdraw my low opinion of Trump.  There is wisdom in crowds, and, scrolling about the Web, I see that people I never agree with about anything also hold him in contempt.  Here is David Brooks, house Republican of the New York Times:

[E]ven if Trump’s ideology were not noxious, his incompetence is a threat to all around him. To say that it is amateur hour at the White House is to slander amateurs. The recent executive orders were drafted and signed without any normal agency review or even semicoherent legal advice, filled with elemental errors that any nursery school student would have caught.

It seems that the Trump administration is less a government than a small clique of bloggers and tweeters who are incommunicado with the people who actually help them get things done. Things will get really hairy when the world’s problems are incoming. . . .

[I]t’s becoming increasingly clear that the aroma of bigotry infuses the whole operation, and anybody who aligns too closely will end up sharing in the stench.

Of course Brooks, though conservative, writes for the New York Times, head of "the opposition party," but then, I see here that Michael Warren, writing in the conservative Weekly Standard, quotes from a news article in the Times in order to make the same Keystone Kops argument advanced by Brooks:

This confusion wasn't just happening on the level of the refugees and visa-holders, the law enforcement officers at airports, and for normal people watching the news at home. People at the highest levels of the federal government seemed just as confused. The New York Times has the perfect anecdote to demonstrate this:

As President Trump signed a sweeping executive order on Friday, shutting the borders to refugees and others from seven largely Muslim countries, the secretary of homeland security was on a White House conference call getting his first full briefing on the global shift in policy.

Gen. John F. Kelly, the secretary of homeland security, had dialed in from a Coast Guard plane as he headed back to Washington from Miami. Along with other top officials, he needed guidance from the White House, which had not asked his department for a legal review of the order.

Halfway into the briefing, someone on the call looked up at a television in his office. "The president is signing the executive order that we're discussing," the official said, stunned.

It wasn't just DHS who seemed to have been caught flat-footed by the order. CNN also reported that the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel was not consulted for guidance before the executive order was issued. The result, writes Benjamin Wittes, is that the order is something of a mess, with references to the wrong statutes and legal holes the ACLU is more than happy to drive lawsuits through.

Warren concludes by quoting a Republican congressman to the effect that, in the future, "policy changes should be better coordinated"--an understatement, according to the author.

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney, the effin' Prince of Darkness, said, when asked by Hugh Hewitt about Trump's executive order imposing a travel ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries:

I think this whole notion that somehow we can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we stand for and believe in.  I mean, religious freedom has been a very important part of our history and where we came from.

It seems even a blind pig can sometimes find the trough of truth.  The judge who yesterday blocked the travel ban was appointed to the federal bench by the second President Bush.  A White House statement called the decision "outrageous," but when Dick Cheney and I and a federal judge appointed by W are all on the other side, perhaps the possibility that it's the ban that's outrageous should be considered.  I'm not going to get into the details of the corporate leaders, from GE in the east to the pooh-bahs of Silicon Valley in the west, who have harshly criticized the content of the executive order, without reference to the botched implementation: but it's clear that, in their view, an America contemplating its navel behind a locked door isn't compatible with their business plans. 

Kellyanne Conway, Trump's "senior counsellor" who I trust will be remembered mainly for renaming falsehood "alternative facts," recently was asked in an interview whether Trump hadn't approved the botched Yemen raid while having dinner with Steve Bannon et al.  She opened her mouth to lie, and you could then see her swallow it back before holding her silence, thereby confirming the premise of the question.   I think Bannon is probably the worst of them all.  I don't know if he's a booze-hound, but he has the face of one, all saggy and doughy with little splotches of pink.  I suppose it might count as a kind of excuse if his racial and nationalist phantasms had been conjured while treading liquid inside a bottle.