Author Archives: Kevin P. Edgecomb

Slavonic Pseudepigrapha Project

Andrei Orlov of Marquette University, author of From Apocalypticism to Merkabah Mysticism: Studies in the Slavonic Pseudepigrapha (Brill, 2007), has published an extremely helpful, interesting and well-done website, The Slavonic Pseudepigrapha Project. I’ll give you three guesses as to what it’s about….

He provides numerous bibliographies (from his book), texts, translations, articles, and links to grammars and other resources related to the Slavonic pseudepigrapha. It’s fascinating and well done, and I can’t wait to lose myself in it.

It’ll be particularly interesting also religiously, as, being Eastern Orthdox myself and with Slavonic being one of the Church languages, the ties of these pseudepigrapha to Russian Orthodoxy will no doubt be fascinating to investigate and learn of, as well as any connections to particularly the Bogomil heresy, links to background material on which Andrei provides, indicating something very interesting in store in that regard.

A side project I’ve been interested in starting for some time is investigating the potential relationship of the post-NT apocrypha and pseudepigrapha to various theological controversies in the history of the Church, with the working hypothesis that the various apocrypha and pseudepigrapha were written by either side in order to support a particular position through the convenient validation of pseudepigraphy. This sometimes comes up briefly in discussions on the origins of various individual works, but I have yet to see all such information on all such pseudepigrapha collected into one convenient source for all the Greek, Syriac, Slavic, etc, pseudepigrapha in conjunction with detailed discussions of the theological controversies. It’s a potentially extremely fruitful approach not only for narrowing down the dates of the creation of the works, but also their locations, as many individual theological controversies were in fact quite localized.

In any case, my regards and thanks to Andrei Orlov for his magnificent new website.

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A winter chill

A bitter wind gusts in the face,
skritching leaves along the walk.
Soak-sodden pants whip at the legs
of the dying man who balked
at love and faith throughout his life.
Now with his final gasped breath born,
unknown, unwept, unloved, unmourned,
no child, no friend, no loved wife,
and regretting lost days gone,
but most his waste of time and place,
he falls his way to that clayey home,
bereft entire of both love and grace.

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The Lord is my Shepherd

Here is a collection of some translations of Psalm 23/22 including a couple that are not widely available. In the Hebrew-based count of Psalms it is number 23, but Psalm 22 in the LXX-based count of Psalms.

King James Version
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters:
He restoreth my soul:
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His Name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me;
Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
Thou anointest by head with oil;
my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord fore ever.

Continue reading “The Lord is my Shepherd”

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McDonald’s Biblical Canon

Consider this an explanation of the reason that I’ve yanked a 500+ page book out of my “Currently Reading” slot on the blog, after having read not even 100 pages. The book is Lee Martin McDonald’s The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority (Hendrickson, 2007). I’m just not enjoying this book. In fact I’m finding it hard to read. I blame the editor. Its argumentation is diffuse and meandering. The writing is peppered with infelicities of expression, quizzical solecisms, and astounding propositions.

An example of a quizzical solecism: “These stelae, from around 600 B.C.E. to roughly 300 B.C.E., are quite uniform in style, progressing from one-dimensional to two-dimensional and finally three-dimensional stelae” [pp 39-40]. Now, I suppose he means the artistic depictions on the stelae go from painted (?) to bas relief (?) to sculpture in round (?), but that’s not what he says. A one- or two-dimensional stele is a physical impossibility.

As an example of an astounding proposition:

Along with the Prophets, a body of literature, some of which was written well before 200 B.C.E. and some perhaps even later (e.g., Daniel), circulated widely among the Jews. These writings circulated in Palestine and were later translated from Hebrew into Greek

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Like the sands of their own deserts

The spoilers are come upon all high places through the wilderness. The robbers shall enter into it, &c. [Jeremiah 12.12; 7.22]
The land of Israel has not only been given into the hands of strangers for a prey, and unto the wicked of the earth for a spoil, as foreign nations have successively subjugated and despoiled it; but it has also been the prey of bordering marauders, to whose assaults it has for ages been exposed. “These precautions, on the part of travellers, are above all necessary in the countries exposed to the Arabs, such as Palestine and the whole frontier of the desert.” [Volney’s Travels, vol. ii. p. 417.] “The Arabs are plunderers of the cultivated lands, and robbers on the highroads. —On the slightest alarm the Arabs cut down their (the peasants’) harvests, seize their flocks, &c. The peasants with good cause call them thieves. The Arab makes his incursions against hostile tribes, or seeks plunder in the country or on the highways. He became a robber from greediness, and such is in fact his present character. A plunderer rather than a warrior, the Arab attacks only to despoil.” [Ibid. chap. xxiii.] Such is the systematic spoliation and robbery to which the inhabitants of Palestine have been subjected for ages. Mr Stanley’s testimony may here be added: “In Greece and Italy and Spain, it is the mountainous tract which is beset with banditti—the level country which is safe. In Palestine, on the contrary, the mountain tracts are comparitively secure, though infested by villages of hereditary ruffians here and there; but the plains, with hardly an exception, are more or less dangerous . . . . The Bedouin tribes are the corsairs of the wilderness. Far up in the plains of Philistia and Sharon come the Arabs of the Tîh; deep into the centre of Palestine, into the plain of Esdraelon, especially when the harvest has left the fields clear for pasturage, come the Arabs of the Haurân and of Gilead. But now, like the sands of their own deserts which engulph the monuments of Egypt, no longer defended by a watchful and living population, they have broken in upon the country far and near; and in the total absence of solitary dwelling-places—in the gathering together of all the settled inhabitants into villages, and in the walls which, as at Jerusalem, enclose the cities round, with locked gates and guarded towers—we see the effect of the constant terror which they inspire.” [Stanley, pp. 135, 136.]

Rev Alexander Keith. Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion Derived From the Literal Fulfilment of Prophecy: Particularly As Illustrated by the History of the Jews and by the Discoveries of Recent Travellers. Thirty-Ninth Edition. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1872. Pages 189-190. Emphasis his.

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Biblical Archaeology

Over the past few decades, for a number of reasons “Biblical Archaeology” has fallen out of favor in the academy. One of those reasons, very much a charicature of the best of the field, was the perception that its practitioners were out to “prove the Bible.” Undoubtedly there were secondary and tertiary applications of the findings of Biblical Archaeology, usually tied to confessional interests, which abused the data, indeed claiming them to have proved the Bible correct in various ways.

Here is how G. Ernest Wright, one of the most eminent of the proponents of Biblical Archaeology defined the field in the beginning of his book on the subject:

Biblical archaeology is a special “armchair” variety of general archaeology. The biblical archaeologist may or may not be an excavator himself, but he studies the discoveries of the excavations in order to glean from them every fact that throws a direct, indirect or even diffused light upon the Bible. He must be intelligently concerned with stratigraphy and typology, upon which the methodology of modern archaeology rests and of which more will be said later in this chapter. Yet his chief concern is not with methods or pots or weapons in themselves alone. His central and absorbing interest is the understanding and exposition of the Scriptures.
Biblical Archaeology (Westminster Press, 1962), 17.

Interestingly, Wright describes Biblical Archaeology as a tool of exegesis, yet one rooted in realia rather than literary theory. Nowadays, some modern Biblical critics regard the Biblical texts as wholly fictional, tendentious, and lacking in all connection to realia, so to draw on archaeology for illuminating realia as Wright describes above is, in such perspectives, ludicrous. Such a severe disjunction is, however, generally considered extreme and unwarranted. The Bible is a document originating in the ancient Near East, in a particular territory, and describes various people, places, and events in that territory and others. And while various items of realia, the remains of cities, and so on do indeed support numerous elements of the Biblical narratives, to take those direct and indirect corroborations and illuminations and state that the entire Bible is thereby “proved” in its entirety by them, is likewise unwarranted. Wright also deals with this abuse:

In this perspective the biblical scholar no longer bothers to ask whether archaeology “proves” the Bible. In the sense that the biblical languages, the life and customs of its peoples, its history, and its conceptions are illuminated in innumerable ways by the archaeological discoveries, he knows that such a question is certainly to be answered in the affirmative. No longer does this literature project from the chaos of prehistory “as though it were a monstrous fossil, with no contemporary evidence to demonstrate its authenticity.” Yet the scholar also knows that the primary purpose of biblical archaeology is not to “prove” but to discover. The vast majority of the “finds” neither prove nor disprove; they fill in the background and give the setting for the story. It is unfortunate that this desire to “prove” the Bible has vitiated so many works which are available to the average reader. The evidence has been misused, and the inferences drawn from it are so often misleading, mistaken, or half true. Our ultimate aim must not be “proof,” but truth. We must study the history of the Chosen People in exactly the same way as we do that of any other people, running the risk of destroying the uniqueness of that history. Unless we are willing to run that risk, truth can never be ours.
Biblical Archaeology, 27.

That’s a very enlightening passage, which puts into relief much modern vituperation against Biblical Archaeology, complaints about “Albrightian” approaches, and so on. Wright was well aware, as was Albright, that the data were being misused by some unscrupulous authors in order to “prove the Bible.” To lump Albright, Wright, et alia, and this misuse of Biblical Archaeology together with such misuse is either misinformed or dishonest. Biblical Archaeology itself, properly understood as defined in the first quote above from Wright, is a perfectly legitimate practice. It is, in all actuality, simply archaeology.

On the other hand, since the term “Biblical Archaeology” has become entirely associated with that misuse, from the late twentieth century critical scholarship has been moving away from use of the term. Especially illustrative of this is that the journal The Biblical Archaeologist, published by the organization American Schools of Oriental Research, experienced a name change in 1998 to Near Eastern Archaeology. Largely this was due to the fact that the journal generally comprised articles that had nothing to do with biblical subjects, but the former name’s connotation indeed played a role, as discussions upon the proposition of the name change revealed.

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Tepid to love and impotent to do

O Lord, when Thou didst call me, didst Thou know
     My heart disheartened thro’ and thro’,
     Still hankering after Egypt full in view
Where cucumbers and melons grow?
                                        —’Yea, I knew.’—

But, Lord, when Thou didst choose me, didst Thou know
     How marred I was and withered too,
     Not rose for sweetness nor for virtue rue,
Timid and rash, hasty and slow?
                                        —’Yea, I knew.’—

My Lord, when Thou didst love me, didst Thou know
     How weak my efforts were, how few,
     Tepid to love and impotent to do,
Envious to reap while slack to sow?
                                        —’Yea, I knew.’—

Good Lord, Who knowest what I cannot know,
     And dare not know, my false, my true,
     My new, my old; Good Lord, arise and do
If loving Thou hast known me so.
                                        —’Yea, I knew.’—

Christina Georgina Rossetti
Before 1893

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Temple, Church, Dome

Just last week, Eastern Orthodox Christians commemorated the entrance of Mary (the Theotokos, “God-birther,” the mother of Jesus) into the Jerusalem Temple. If you’re not familiar with this somewhat surprising story, as many western Christians aren’t, then you may read the tale in the Protevangelium of James, which, while it is certainly an apocryphal text and no part of the canon of Scripture, nonetheless it is recognized to contain many of the same traditions held by Orthodox Christians concerning Mary, which traditions are expressed in hymnography and hagiography. One of these is that Joachim and Anna, Mary’s parents, dedicated her to the Jerusalem Temple as a young girl, where she lived in the Holy of Holies (!) and was fed by an angel. Later, she left the Temple and was entrusted to Joseph. The rest of the story will be familiar.

What is important about this set of stories is its impact particularly among Eastern Christians, particularly early ones (note that the Protevangelium of James dates to roughly the middle of the second century, showing these stories took root very early), and most especially those wealthier among them who were responsible for building churches in the Holy Land. It was believed by early Christians that the child Mary literally lived in the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple, however unlikely or impossible this was, and however much we may rather prefer to find this allegorically describing her life of faith, purity, and devotion. This led someone, at some point prior to the late fifth century, to construct a Church of Mary Theotokos on the site of the ancient Jewish Temple, the plan of which is, I suggest, preseved by the current Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

Several lines of evidence support this:
1.) The foundation of an identical Church of Mary Theotokos precisely atop the ruined Samaritan Temple on Mt Gerizim was built by Emperor Zeno in 484 AD. The choice of a Church of Mary Theotokos there would otherwise be odd, as no traditions relate her life to Gerizim or the Samaritan Temple. Yet, if Zeno were simply treating one set of Temple ruins like another, it would make sense to have the two matching ruins covered with two matching shrines. Thus, the church in Jerusalem will likely have been built earlier than his reign (474-491 AD), though named at the very least if not indeed constructed after the Council of Chalcedon, during which “Theotokos” was argued upon and accepted as the proper Christian title for Mary, indicating Jesus was God and not merely Christ/Messiah. So it was probably built (or at least begun) during the very active construction in the time when the former Empress Eudocia was resident in Jerusalem, roughly 441-460 AD. This founding in the later fifth century would explain why it is not mentioned by Egeria and Jerome.
2.) Justinian’s huge and famous “Nea” church was actually named the New Church of Mary Theotokos, requiring there to be an older church of Mary the Theotokos somewhere in the city, while none is specifically mentioned in the records. The most obvious location would be the Temple Mount, with a Church of Mary Theotokos there to commemorate her living there.
3.) All the known various elements of Mary’s life were commemorated by churches, even a stop for a break between Jerusalem and Ain Karem, the recently rediscovered Kathisma church, also octagonal in plan (as was the original eastern end of the Nativity Basilica in Bethlehem built in the fourth century over the traditional site of the birth cave of Jesus, and the fifth-century structure built over the house of Peter in Capernaum). It is highly unlikely that the otherwise precisely located and unused area of the ruined Jerusalem Temple, based upon the tradition of her childhood there, were not similarly commemorated.
4.) Recent and ongoing sifting of the fill from the Temple Mount has brought to light much evidence of an early Byzantine Christian presence on the platform, in contrast to the former belief that the site was abandoned and used as a dump, which tale was mere propaganda found solely in Islamic sources regarding the building of the Dome of the Rock. (While it is true that every church except the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem was destroyed by the Persians in 614, and thus many churches were still in ruins at the point of the Arab invasion in 638, it does not follow that such ruins were of long standing.) The presence of this memorial Church of Mary Theotokos, undoubtedly one of the pilgrim sites in Jerusalem, would account for these materials.
5.) Further evidence is the choice of Quranic verses for the interior of the Dome of the Rock, denying Jesus being the Son of God, which were chosen not randomly, but in reaction to the former dedication of this church to Mary the Theotokos, which was essentially an important statement about the Son Mary bore being God, and not just a man.

In conclusion, it is, I think, beyond doubt that a Church of Mary Theotokos was constructed in about the middle of the fifth century on the Temple Mount over the ruins of the Jerusalem Temple in order to commemorate the Eastern Christian tradition of Mary having grown up in the Temple itself. It may even have been at that point that the stairway and cave beneath the central rock (the former floor of the Holy of Holies) was cut, in order to provide a “luminous cave” as found in various other of the commemorated Holy Land sites (Annunciation in Nazareth, Nativity in Bethlehem, Eleona on Mt Olivet, Anastasis in Jerusalem, etc), though this may even have been done in Crusader times. The plan of the presently standing Dome of the Rock preserves the plan of this ancient church (and perhaps even some of the structural elements as examination of the beams of the Dome of the Rock indicate they are older than they should be) which would have been destroyed by the Persians, along with most other churches in the Holy Land, only a few decades before the Dome itself was constructed. This makes the Dome of the Rock that much more interesting, I think, in addition to being the most beautiful building in Jerusalem.

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