More false sayings of Jesus

 Two more false sayings  

from Farah See’s commentary on The Gospel of Thomas and Other Sayings of Jesus (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, 2012, p. 228 - from the section “Falsely Attributed” which begins) –

In the following pages are sayings falsely attributed to Jesus. He could not have said them, much as someone might have wished he had. I confine myself to sayings attested to in the fourth century and earlier. Otherwise, to paraphrase the last verse in John’s gospel, the world could not contain all the books I would have to write.

* * * * *

 

The following are from a late second-century Greek manuscript, sometimes called “Three Sayings,” though only two survive. The Greek is poor, but it is clear what it says.

     ma&karioi  u(min  oi(  ptwxoi&, o#ti  eu)rh&sete  plou=ton.
          ou)ai  oi(  plousi&&oi, pa&lnai  oi(  a)pwlolo&i.

     Blessed are the poor, for they shall find riches.

          Woe to the rich, for they are lost already.

     mh\  a)posterei=te  xarh=nai, ou)x  a)mo&sei  toi=v  maqhtai=v  mou=.

     Do not refuse to be glad, for it is unbecoming for my followers.

Commentary

The first of the sayings combines a blessing and a woe from Luke 6 (verses 20 and 24) and creates a play on words. It’s important that the source is Luke, not Matthew. The saying has nothing to do with either the “poor in spirit” or, for example, “the rich in imagination.” The poor will be rich someday. They will have cash in their pockets and assets in the bank. The rich have no someday at all; they’ve had their day already. While the source makes us doubt Jesus said this, he certainly might have said something very like it.

     The second saying - who knows where it comes from? But whoever concocted it clearly had difficulty with the Puritans, Sourpusses, and Sad Sacks in the Body. And why shouldn’t he¹ have? Doesn’t Luke 15:32 say that it is “fitting to be glad,” even “to make merry,” when one that was dead is made alive? To say that the sayings in this section are falsely attributed to Jesus is not to say that they are not true in themselves.

 _______________

 ¹ Or she.

09.22.19

For links to other excerpts from both this and Rantrage Press commentaries (Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Revelation, et al.), click here.

Another farable of Jesop

Jesop as “Gumbo the Elephant Boy”

(before the tragic death of the circus)

an interlude before . . . *

 A farable of Jesop 

“the elephant and the donkey, or mistakes will be made”

An elephant and a donkey agreed to be friends since they both ate straw, and they agreed to live together and share. But as they lived together, the elephant became fatter and fatter and soon consumed more and more of the straw. And the donkey became lighter and lighter until he began to fade away. Indeed, he began to look like straw.

09.18.19

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 * “E.R (part II) when we will discover what happens to the scattered parts of the “Old Assyrian” after his friends gather them up in buckets to carry them to the emergency room. After a time. (Links will be provided.) About Jesop with links to other farables, click here.

 

The Farables (online reproduction of the 1887 edition with an afterword by Ted Riich) is available here.

 

E.R. (part 1)

 E.R. (part 1) 

Among the events leading up to the visit in question. (Taking place “At the Black Whale in Ashkelon” - an English rendering of the song by von Scheffel below.) 

                                          Altassyrisch

               — Victor von Scheffel

Im Schwarzen Walfisch zu Askalon

Da trank ein Mann drei Tag’,

Bis dass er steif wie ein Besenstiel

Am Marmortische lag.

Im Schwarzen Walfisch zu Askalon

Da sprach der Wirt: «Halt an!

Der trinkt von meinem Dattelsaft

Mehr als er zahlen kann.»

Im Schwarzen Walfisch zu Askalon

Da bracht’ der Kellner Schar

In Keilschrift auf sechs Ziegelstein

Dem Gast die Rechnung dar.

Im Schwarzen Walfisch zu Askalon

Da sprach der Gast: «O weh!

Mein bares Geld ging alles drauf

Im Lamm zu Nineveh!»

Im Schwarzen Walfisch zu Askalon

Da schlug die Uhr halb vier,

Da warf der Hausknecht aus Nubierland

Den Fremden vor die Tür.

Im Schwarzen Walfisch zu Askalon

Wird kein Prophet geehrt,

Und der vergnügt dort leben will,

Zahlt bar, was er verzehrt.

R von Scheffel (by Anton von Werner), L Cuneiform (by Anon von Unbekannt)

Old Assyrian

At The Black Whale in Ashkelon,

A man drunk for three days,

Half-dead on a marble table,

Stiff as a broomstick lay.

At The Black Whale in Ashkelon,

The innkeeper, yelled out, “Hey!

He’s drunk more of my date wine

Than he can possibly pay.”

At The Black Whale in Ashkelon,

The wait-staff came in a swarm,

Brought the guest engraved on six tablets

His check in cuneiform.

At The Black Whale in Ashkelon,

The guest said then, “Oh, damn!

I have had cash since Nineveh;

It all went at The Lamb.”

At The Black Whale in Ashkelon,

The clock sounded half-four,

As the bouncer from Nubia threw

The stranger out the door.

At The Black Whale in Ashkelon,

No prophet dare presume.

Who wants to live a snug life there

Will pay cash for what he consumes.

09.16.19

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 * von Scheffel (1826-1886) is known almost entirely for his student drinking songs, collected under the motto, Gaudeamus (Let’s be merry!). It could be worse; he could have been Swinburne. 

The reader's patience is appreciated. Parts II and III are forthcoming. This century! (Links will be provided.)

Punch and Judith

Nahum the Prophet and Johanna of Patmos

 Punch and Judith. 

Some time ago, when I sick, when I couldn’t hardly read or write - or even see - I got this link from Gaspar Stephens. He wanted to know what I thought about it. So he said. But I think he was trying to make me feel better the way people sometimes do when they ask other people, who seem to be scraping bottom, their opinion about something or other. Maybe we want to hear what the person has to say, and maybe we don’t; but we ask because we think somehow it may help them, and we ought to. Help the sad sacks, that is.

     I don’t know if the link is still good, but the central thesis of the Psychology Today essay Pamela B. Paresky, Ph.D., is, as I understand it, this:

How do we - especially how severely do we - punish people that have made mistakes? (The example offered is [conservative] Parkland High School shooting survivor Kyle Kashuv’s acceptance then his rejection by Harvard for racist and anti-Semitic remarks made by (the Jewish) Kashuv, when he was sixteen and for which he had apologized and offered to make amends in whatever way he could.)  In an article in Vox, Zack Beauchamp suggests that those who find the punishment too severe are the “conservatives,” who see racism as a personal failing one can outgrow, whereas those that agree with it lean “liberal or left,” seeing racism as a structural problem and Kashuv as less of “a kid who made youthful mistakes and more like a young man who’s trying to escape responsibility for his actions.”

But, this is not a matter of left and right, Paresky argues. It is an apocalyptic view that cuts across the political divide: “it is not only people on the political right who find it difficult to support” such a harsh punishment. There are many on the left as well. For “it is an apocalyptic view, not a liberal one, that rejects redemption and forgiveness in favor of condemnation and excommunication.” It is an apocalyptic perspective, not a liberal one, that sees the world as needing to be destroyed and replaced rather than improved upon, possibly even perfected. It is an apocalyptic paradigm  that wants to rid itself those it judges irredeemable, especially that seeks “deliverance through ahistorical means; without the help of morally polluted historical figures,” that would, if it could, do “without any of history’s contaminated tools.” Italics mine. Rah retribution. F**k forgiveness.

     Paresky holds up “prophetic culture” as an alternative to apocalyptic, seeking “deliverance through historical persons” working in history, flawed but wanting to do good.

my folder, or one of them

“I don’t know what I think,” I got back to Gaspar at the time. Then I gave it (the link) to Roz, who made a paper copy of the essay and put it in a folder she’d also made for me, “For Later.”

     I looked at the essay again this morning. It seemed to me a good enough explanation of why the pure hate the impure (andnot necessarily vice versa). The problem with apocalypticists is that they are certain that anyone that has the least stain on her record or merest spot on his soul must be completely impure. At the same time, they fail to see any stains on their own records or souls - or, far more commonly, they think of these stains as virtues: they got smudged or blood-spattered in the struggle for Right.

     But I wondered how much of the Prophets Paresky had read, for the essay neglects to say that, on a scale of 1 to 10, the prophets are only slightly less self-righteous than those that are certain - or wish devoutly - that the end is near (9.667’s maybe as opposed 9.944’s).*

     And the rest of us are only slightly less self-righteous than they are.

But I could be wrong. As Roz says sometimes, “We both grew up Presbyterian, what do we know?” Only she knows more now; she was less infected.

09.12.19

_______________

 * I once met an 8.56. He was almost half as kind as the Mr. Rogers character on TV, not to mention almost twice as believable. And he sold cars.

Forbes Field

 Forbes Field after Forbes Field was gone

This is a usual morning. We eat our spare breakfast, toast and coffee; and Roz, having gotten up early to shower, wash and dry her hair, and dress for work, leaves for the day. I won’t see her again until supper time.

      I take the half cup of coffee I haven’t drunk and the half cup left in the pot and pour them over ice, a generous splash of half-and-half, and another teaspoon of sugar into a tall glass - iced coffee. I counteract the effects of the caffeine with a valium. I police the kitchen: scrape our dishes, rinse out the coffee cups, and put them into the dishwasher; I wipe down the table and the counter.

     That’s all the order I have to my morning though I am encouraged to keep all things in order. But what does “things” mean? It’s hard to know: So many expressions intended to be helpful are only vague.

     I try to read. I read the newspaper, I read Nathanael West, and I read and re-read Tristram Shandy and the first sixteen pages of Finnegan’s Wake. I try to write and make only these largely vacuous letters to the ether. At the same time, I am supposed to be staying in the here and now - another piece of good, vague advice. What does it mean? Don’t tumble into the past; don’t stumble into the future; don’t bumble into the mist that surrounds and seems both to shroud and to point the way into madness.

Ken Tekulve pitching to no one :
Forbes Field in the fog under the lights and out of time.

     But all is mist, as the Preacher says: “Mist of mist, all is mist.” You cannot see it and you cannot see through it. And the air is full of its tiny droplets, none the same, each with its own distinctive smell: If you could distinguish the smell, you’d know where that prick of damp came from, the past or future, here or there - whether it blew down from Ohio or up from Georgia; but you can’t distinguish. Soon though you can’t read or write either; in the damp, the pages begin to curl at the corners, then they curl at the edges, finally, the letters begin to sprawl and blur. (It doesn’t matter if you’re reading and writing on paper, or if you’re scanning and typing on a screen.)

Before lunch I am drenched. For lunch, I have a dish of cereal. Sometimes there are bananas or blueberries. Sometimes, in these afternoons of late summer / early fall, there are baseball games on TV.

09.10.19

Bible Friday: the grimmer brother

 The grimmer brother

from Scott Bradwardine’s commentary on Obadiah (in the Incoherent series, Obadiah, Nahum, and Habakkuk by Bradwardine and Krab Drukte published by Rantrage Press, 2019, p. i)* –

INTRODUCTION

“The wages of forgiveness are resentment that can last many lifetimes.” So says the sage, Samba. This may be particularly true between brothers.

     Anyone reading this will know the rough outlines of the Jacob and Esau story,¹ how the conflict between the brothers began in the womb and despite the elder’s best efforts lasted generations.

    The twins begin when Isaac marries Rebekah and takes her “into the tent of Sarah his [dead] mother”; it is “comfort,” he finds, “after his mother’s death.” (He was, after all, 40 years old when he finally married.) Sometime later they (Isaac and Rebekah) had twins, destined according to what Yahweh tells the mother because they are already fighting in her womb - destined to be two nations, divided. Esau is born red; Jacob rides into the world hanging onto his brother’s heel.

     They grow up active and quiet, straightforward and deceitful. Jacob connives to rob Esau of his birthright and blessing, either by trading on his hunger (for a bowl of soup) or pretending to be the older brother when Isaac sends for him to give his fatherly blessing. Rebekah assists, for she loves her younger son more than her older. She cooks goat for game and clothes the smooth-skinned Jacob with the goat’s skin so he’ll feel like Esau under his blind father’s hands.

     When Isaac is not convinced, Jacob ceases to merely deceive and lies directly, “I am Esau, your firstborn. Eat what I have brought you and bless me. Now.” Isaac hesitates, but finally, he is taken in. And, apparently, he has only one blessing to give. For the fond Esau gets only a curse though it is leavened with the promise that he will “break [his brother’s] yoke from his neck” someday.

     Man of action, Esau decides that day he will break his brother’s neck will be the next, but Jacob runs away in the night.

     He stays away as long as he can, but he must come back eventually. That means he must confront his brother, still older, still stronger, still right. But he (Jacob) can send ambassadors: “I’m a rich man now, I could be of use to you. Don’t hurt me.” The ambassadors return with the news that Esau is coming to meet Jacob.

     Then, Jacob can send presents ahead of the meeting - perhaps they will mollify Esau. And he (Jacob) can put a buffer between himself and his brother: he sends his wives and his children ahead while he loiters safely (cowardly) behind.

    But Esau runs straight through it all, straight to his brother. And he forgives him. Esau forgives Jacob; he forgives him all. As a result, Jacob takes up the land of their father Isaac. And Esau goes off to Seir, that is, Edom.

So many years later, when the Babylonians come to take Isaac’s land from Jacob’s descendants, and Esau’s progenies decide to stay home, for what can they do if they throw in with their “brothers”? What will happen to them but that they will be destroyed as well? In any case, won’t “Jacob” weasel his way out as he always has? So Esau chooses expediency; surely Jacob will understand - and forgive!

     Not a chance in hell. And we enter the world of the prophet Obadiah, who has no doubt that for its perfidy, the house of Esau will be punished - decimated! The house of Jacob will become “a fire” and the house of Esau “stubble.” Jacob’s holocaust will consume Esau; not one will survive.

     The Lord says so. What a Guy!

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¹The story of the brothers is found in Genesis 24, 25, 27, 32, and 33.

09.06.19

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 * Links to passages from other Rantrage Press commentaries are here.

Arsenal 2, Tottenham 2, Kristen Lavransdatter 3

 Arsenal 2, Tottenham 2, Kristen Lavransdatter 3 

Sunday morning I went to pick up Uncle Albert for the Arsenal Tottenham match. He’s a long-time Arsenal supporter.

    Had he been to church? I asked. “No,” he said. “How would I get there now if you’re not taking me?”

    “But I am taking you,” I said, “when you let me know you need a ride.

    “I thought Maggie Something was taking you, not the woman in your house but Roz’s friend - that Maggie.” (See here.)

    "She comes when I call,” Uncle Albert says, “but I don’t like calling her.”

    “Why not?”

    He shrugged.

    “Well, call me then,” I said though I didn’t want to. I wanted him to call Maggie.

Uncle Albert with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang

Tottenham jumped out in front against the run of play, which was all Arsenal until Christian Eriksen tipped in a pass from Lamela from Son on a break.

    Through the flat screen, Stanford Bridge glows green as Ireland, but there are no Irishmen on the field. Damn few British. Arsenal starts one German, three Frenchmen, a Brazilian, a Greek, an Albanian from Switzerland, a Bosnian, Uruguayan, an Ivorian, and only one from the UK, Ainsley Maitland-Niles. Tottenham does have three British starters, Harrys Kane and Winks and Danny Rose; otherwise, there is the Frenchman in goal and one more in midfield, two Dutchmen, a Columbian, an Argentinian, a Korean, and a Dane.

    (The Korean) Son and (the Dane) Eriksen, Tottenham’s two best players in Uncle Albert’s and my opinions, were both on their games. Arsenal’s keeper, the usually mediocre Bernd Leno, robbed Son in the 17th minute and Eriksen in the 37th. By now, Tottenham was flying, and Son (again) managed to pick up a foul in the box on Granit Xhaka. Harry Kane put the penalty kick into the side netting. And Arlo White went apeshit. White, otherwise a good announcer, is a tremendous Harry Kane fan. Besotted.

    Arsenal got back into it just before the half. After Tottenham’s keeper, the sometimes brilliant, sometimes dull Hugo Lloris, made a good save on Pepe, Lacazette, playing in the middle of the front line between Pepe and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, pushed one by on a pass from the former. In the 46th minute, so that Arsenal went in at half-time only one down.

    The Gunners started the second half much as they had the first, dominating play. Lloris made another nice save on Guendouzi ten minutes in. Three minutes later Kane hit the inside of the post on a Tottenham counter. How could he miss? Arlo White couldn’t get over it. The post must have moved.

    Lloris made two more good saves on Danny Ceballos, who had replaced Lucas Torreira in the midfield, and on Guendouzi, who shortly slipped Aubameyang through for the tying score.

    And that was it though Arsenal continued to dominate. They scored a third goal, but it was called back because Kolasinac was offside.

    That was it. The game ended in a draw. Arsenal is in 5th place and Tottenham in (God forbid! - but thank him nonetheless) 9th.

* * * * *

At the half, I’d asked Uncle Albert if he’d really met Sigrid Undset. Of course, he hadn’t he said. “I’m not that old,” he said. “A fig-newton of your friend Ball’s imagination,” he said. (See here.)

     The teams were coming out from their locker rooms. “I’ll tell you all the Sigrid Undset, I know after it’s over, Uncle Albert said, from The Cross. That’s the last volume of the three that make up Kristin Lavransdatter.

Uncle Albert has this phenomenal memory for quotations, from the Bible, from French poetry and drama, from American lit from Hawthorne through Twain, from the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, from pretty damn anywhere. Now he was quoting Kristen. It’s the way she is, Kristen, he was saying. This is toward the end but before she leaves on her pilgrimage, he thinks. (I haven’t gotten there. “What pilgrimage?” I say. “Sorry,” he says.) Then: “Kristen is about to turn truly religious, but she’ll never be able to, no matter how much the author needs it for her plot.” Then, he quoted:

Kristin praying on the cover
of her third book.

     “‘Surely she had never asked God for anything except that he should let her have her will. And for the most part, she got it. Now here she was sitting with a contrite heart - not because she had sinned against God but because she was unhappy that she had not been allowed to follow her will all the way to the end.’ Something like that,” Uncle Albert said.

Yesterday, I finally came to the quote. Uncle Albert may be right about the plot, but he was wrong about the quote. It lacked the second negative. Here’s how it reads in my book, Tina Nunally’s translation: “Surely she [Kristin] had never asked God for anything except that he should let her have her will. And every time she had been granted what she asked for - for the most part. Now here she sat with a contrite heart - not because she had sinned against God but because she was unhappy that she had been allowed to follow her [own] will to the road’s end.”

     So, he’s almost dead wrong about the quote, but he might be righter about Kristin than Undset is. I think he’s right about most of us: Surely she/he/you/I have never asked anything except that God would let us have our will. And now as we’re getting a little older, closer to the end, we’re unhappy that God may intervene, we might not get to follow our own way to the end.

     I don't have to belabor the point, gentle reader, launch into a long explanation. You are perceptive. You understand. You know: Damned if we won’t keep trying, in every prayer pointing out to God what he ought to be doing. Pay attention, dammit!

09.04.19