Month: June 2009
A Fairly Silly Biblioblog
Why are we taught in Sunday school that Jesus raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead?
It has always seemed completely obvious to me that she was in a coma — because Jesus said so! You would think that being endowed with divine knowledge he would know better than the townspeople…
In an extremely unscientific search of the internets, I keep coming across sermons that say as an aside “well, she may just have been in a coma, but that doesn’t detract from the miracle, because she was as good as dead”.
Why the defensiveness? It’s not as if the NT is lacking in resurrections. Why do we in effect call Christ a liar in order to boost his supernatural powers? Why isn’t coma-girl the default interpretation?
Ooh, Biblioblogging!
What with all this biblioblogging going around maybe I’ll do a few posts in an exegetical vein.
First off, I’ve been meaning to get into the Church Fathers, an aspect of my theological education that has been sorely neglected in favour of Arabic and statistical machine translation. So I found a more or less readable translation of I Clement — my Greek is far too rusty for a lunchtime read.
My impression: “be nice.” I like the bit about the Phoenix, though.
Two Birds with One Stone
I just stumbled across the blog of Peter Kirk, who knows his stuff when it comes to Biblical languages. There’s been a bit of an uptick in the Evangelical blogosphere discussion of gendered language in Scripture and liturgy, and Mr. Kirk offers a wonderful suggestion, sure to make explode the heads of both patriarchists and prescriptivists alike:
Perhaps, if I put my tongue in my cheek a little, the best solution is to call the Holy Spirit “theyâ€. For some this will be understood as a singular “theyâ€. But, to those who might object to the singular “they†or insist that it carries nuances of plurality, I point out the ancient Christian tradition of the sevenfold Spirit, based on Isaiah 11:2 and repeated references in Revelation (1:4, 3:1, 4:5, 5:6) to the seven Spirits of God. So there should be no objection to using an apparently plural pronoun to refer to them.