CHRISTIANITIES

Caption: It started here but took a lot of twists and turns. Photo courtesy of wikipedia.

One of the things that is most striking and interesting about early Christianity is its diversity. Often we tend to think of "the early church" as a unified body, but that was far from the case.

Many New Testament writings attest to controversies within Christian communities within the first century (keep in mind though that the canon of the New Testament was not finally set until almost 350 years after the crucifixion of Jesus).

The writings of Paul, the earliest surviving Christian documents, attest to tensions between Paul, Peter and James, as well as others farther removed from the historical person of Jesus.

That diversity grew in the second century and was only definitely closed when the orthodox or catholic tendency received imperial support in the 4th century and unorthodox versions were suppressed or driven underground.

The version that won out, and to which El Cabrero belongs, may not have been the earliest or most popular in many places.

Not surprisingly, many controversies centered around the person of Jesus. To start with, peasants in Galilee who responded to Jesus' ministry there may have continued that tradition with little knowledge of or contact with the later church.

For some communities, such as those that circulated the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, Jesus was primarily a wisdom teacher.

Christians known as Ebionites continued to observe Jewish law and regarded Jesus as a man who was "adopted" by God. At another extreme were the Docetists who believed that Jesus was a divine being who only seemed to suffer (the term Docetism is derived from the Greek word meaning "to seem").

Followers of the second century leader Marcion believed that the God of the Hebrew Bible was a lesser deity and not the loving father proclaimed by Jesus.

Some people classify Docetism and Marcionism as early forms of a much larger gnostic movement, which has Christian and non-Christian forms. Gnostics tended to regard the material world as evil and claimed to offer a path to liberation for a small spiritual elite.

The whole field of studying diverse Christian traditions exploded with the discovery of several gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945.

It makes you wonder what else is still out there somewhere.

NATURAL LAWS? Does nature have laws or just habits? Here's an interesting item on this scientific controversy.

UNIONS AND CLIMATE CHANGE. A growing number of people in the labor movement are taking the climate change issue seriously. Here's a post from the AFLCIO blog about the recent climate conference in Bali.

HELL HOLES AND HOOEY. Here's a good reality check on the state of WV's legal system. The Chamber of Whatever and allies continually issue reports about the abominable state of our courts but the data isn't there to back them up. Perhaps they will only be happy when workers and citizens no longer have access to the legal system. Thanks to the WV uber blog Lincoln Walks at Midnight for posting this.

URGENT DINOSAUR UPDATE. They found another one. This time it's a huge meat eater from the Republic of Niger:

The new species is one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs ever to have lived. Carcharodontosaurus iguidensis was probably 13-14 metres long, making it taller than a double-decker bus. It had a skull about 1.75 metres long and its teeth were the size of bananas.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FISH AND WHISTLE

Caption: Seamus McGoogle has a tragic sense of life.

El Cabrero has been musing on optimism and pessimism lately. It has occurred to me that I know some pretty miserable people who consider themselves to be optimists.

I tend to be pessimistic at times about the Big Picture by virtue of temperament and persuasion but otherwise am pretty content. I'm even optimistic about small things. The universe as a whole may be tending towards entropy but not all parts of it are at any given moment.

Camus once said that while he was pessimistic about human destiny, he was optimistic about people.

Let me explain the pessimistic part first. While I don't think the universe is out to get us, it probably won't go out of its way to cut us any slack. In the human world, bad things happen to good people and vice versa all the time. The distribution of wealth, power, and prestige seems to me to have more to do with randomness than with merit. As the writer of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes put it:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. (9:11)

Another prophet, Leonard Cohen, put it this way:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

(Parenthetically, the next verse of the song pretty well sums up life under the Bush administration:

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died)

Then there's the whole Buddhist thing about the noble truth of suffering. That tradition speaks of six major kinds of suffering that can happen to everyone: birth/becoming, death/dying, sickness, aging and the loss of abilities, having what you don't want and wanting what you don't have. That's a pretty good list.

Many religions teach that all this will be straightened out farther along. That would be nice, but it's beyond the view of the naked eye.

Not that I'm complaining or anything. All this doesn't mean we can't win sometimes--it makes it sweeter when we do. And even though we can't fix everything, we can fix a lot.

Nietzsche spoke about "Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems."

That works for me.

THE LAST WORD on President Bush's CHIP veto goes to Jon Stewart.

AN ENDANGERED SPECIES. The US invasion of Iraq and subsequent events is threatening the survival of what may be the world's last remaining authentic Gnostic sect, the Mandeans. Gnosticism was once a powerful movement within early Christianity and had pagan and Jewish varieties. Here's an interesting op-ed on the subject.

DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL. At first I thought this was a joke, but it looks like for a time some folks at the Air Force considered the development of a bomb that would lead to rampant homosexual activity. It even won an "award" of sorts. The possibilities of snark are overwhelming to me at this point, so I'll just pass.

FACTOIDS DEPARTMENT. According to The Week Magazine

The salary of Gen. David Petraeus, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, works out to $493 a day. Senior managers of Blackwater, a private contractor paid by the U.S. government to provide security in Iraq, make $1,075 a day.

and

More than three times as many blacks live in prison cells than in college dorms, according to a new Census Bureau report. For Latinos, the ration is 2.7 inmates for every dorm dweller. Twice as many whites live in college housing as in prison.

PUT UP OR... E.J. Dionne's newest column asks "Would conservatives and Republicans support the war in Iraq if they had to pay for it?" Speaking of which, I actually got something useful out of a George Will column, to wit this Adam Smith quote:

Were the expense of war to be defrayed always by a revenue raised within the year...wars would in general be more speedily concluded, and less wantonly undertaken.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GOSPEL OF THOMAS: GREATEST HITS, VOL I

Caption: Jesus said, "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: From me all has come forth, and to me all has reached. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there." Gospel of Thomas, 77

The guiding thread through this week's Goat Rope has been a series of musings on the apochrypal Gospel of Thomas, along with links and rants about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries.

By way of conclusion, El Cabrero is catholic and orthodox enough to be OK with the decision of the church fathers to exclude Thomas from the New Testament canon.

But it does deserve a wider reading. If nothing else, Thomas provides another example of how very diverse early Christian communities were. And finally, it's good to let the some of the sayings of Jesus in Thomas challenge the reader.

Here's the official Goat Rope selection of Thomas' Greatest Hits:

Jesus said, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will rule over all." (2)

"Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. For there is nothing hidden that won't be revealed." (5)

"Fortunate is the person who has worked hard and has found life." (58)

Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you will kill you." (70)

They said to him, "Tell us who you are so that we may believe in you."

He said to them, "You examine the face of heaven and earth, but you have not come to know the one who is in your presence, and you do not know how to examine this moment."

The Jesus of this gospel always seems to push the listener/reader back to the present moment, which may not be a bad place to start.

Speaking of the present,

BOTTOM FEEDERS. Business Week has a great special report in the May 21 issue about how many businesses are squeezing more profits from the working poor. Sample quote:

In recent years, a range of businesses have made financing more readily available to even the riskiest of borrowers. Greater access to credit has put cars, computers, credit cards, and even homes within reach for many more of the working poor. But this remaking of the marketplace for low-income consumers has a dark side: Innovative and zealous firms have lured unsophisticated shoppers by the hundreds of thousands into a thicket of debt from which many never emerge.

Federal Reserve data show that in relative terms, that debt is getting more expensive. In 1989 households earning $30,000 or less a year paid an average annual interest rate on auto loans that was 16.8% higher than what households earning more than $90,000 a year paid. By 2004 the discrepancy had soared to 56.1%. Roughly the same thing happened with mortgage loans: a leap from a 6.4% gap to one of 25.5%. "It's not only that the poor are paying more; the poor are paying a lot more," says Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

MARINES AGAINST TORTURE. Here's a post from West Virginia Blue about two retired Marine generals speaking out against the Bush administration's policy of torture.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW

Caption: From the Gospel of Thomas, "If two make peace with each other in a single house, they will say to the mountain, 'Move from here!' and it will move."

In addition to rants about current events, this week's Goat Rope is a series of musings on the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries.

If you're familiar with the New Testament gospels and read Thomas, many of the sayings in it will seem fairly familiar and consistent with the picture of Jesus that emerges from Matthew, Mark and Luke.

Other parts will probably seem really strange. And then there are some that are kind of in the middle; they sound like something Jesus might have said or close anyway. This may be because parts of Thomas were assembled very early, possibly before the other gospels, while other parts represent the later theological elaborations of some early Christian community.

As an example of the familiar, verse 94 has Jesus say "One who seeks will find; for [one who] knocks it will be opened."

Then there are passages from Thomas that don't appear in the canonical gospels but could be authentic sayings of Jesus (or at least are similar to what he might have said). For example, in the other gospels, Jesus says "No man can serve two masters." Thomas also has "A person cannot mount two horses or bend two bows" (47). The cryptic command to "Be passersby" (42) could work with the canonical sayings where Jesus sends his followers on the road.

This kind of sounds like Jesus:

"If two make peace with each other in a single house, they will say to the mountain, 'Move from here!' and it will move." (48)

as does this:

"Love your brother like your soul, protect that person like the pupil of your eye."

Some scholars think that some of the following brief parables, one of which was quoted here yesterday, could go back the the historical Jesus:

96 Jesus [said], The Father's kingdom is like [a] woman. She took a little leaven, [hid] it in dough, and made it into large loaves of bread. Anyone here with two ears had better listen!

97 Jesus said, The [Father's] imperial rule is like a woman who was carrying a [jar] full of meal. While she was walking along [a] distant road, the handle of the jar broke and the meal spilled behind her [along] the road. She didn't know it; she hadn't noticed a problem. When she reached her house, she put the jar down and discovered that it was empty.

And then there are the truly strange parts, which lean towards gnosticism and are probably of later origin. Here's an odd one:

Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples, "These nursing babies are like those who enter the (Father's) domain."

They said to him, "Then shall we enter the (Father's) domain as babies?"

Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the (Father's) domain]." (22)

In these verses, salvation is seen less as moving forward to some consummation than as moving back to the origin. When asked how the end will be, Jesus replies:

Have you discovered the beginning, then, so that you are seeking the end? For where the beginning is, the end will be. Fortunate is the on who stands at the beginning: That one will know the end and will not taste death. (18)

And finally, there are some parts of Thomas that just make you think, whatever their origin may be. El Cabrero's selection of Thomas' Greatest Hits will run tomorrow.

But now, back to today's salt mines...

HEALTH CARE. It should come as a shock to no one that two recent studies of health care by the Commonwealth Fund finds the US bringing up the rear among developed countries in the quality of its health care system. Karen Davis, president of the group, noted that “The United States stands out as the only nation in these studies that does not ensure access to health care through universal coverage and promotion of a ‘medical home’ for patients."

POWER POPULISTS VS LOSER LIBERALS. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research frequently points out that progressives or "loser liberals" often lose the struggle over ideas by accepting the idea that they want to use the government to redistribute market outcomes whereas conservatives want to rely on the market. "Power populists," by contrast

doesn’t accept the basic government/market distinction that loser liberalism treats as its starting point. The power populists see government policy as determining who wins and loses in the market place.

Both sides use government. The real difference between progressives and economic conservatives is that the latter use government to distribute money upward while the former want to use it to help middle and low income people. Check out his ebook The Conservative Nanny State.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THY KINGDOM WHEN?

Caption: These guys found the grain that was spilled. Will we?

The guiding thread through this week's Goat Rope, in addition to rants on current events, is a discussion of the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of Jesus' sayings that didn't make it into the New Testament.

If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries.

In the first three canonical gospels, Jesus' public ministry begins, after his baptism by John and a period of temptation in the wilderness, with the proclamation that the Kingdom or Reign (Greek: basileia) of God was at hand.

People have rassled over what that meant pretty much since then. Most often, the Kingdom was viewed as the decisive intervention of God and the end of history, which would include judgment of the living and the dead followed by God's glorious reign over the elect.

But there are elements of the tradition in which the Kingdom was seen as beginning in and through the actions of Jesus and his followers (such as "the Kingdom of God is within [or 'among'] you" in Luke 17:21). In other words the kingdom may not have been viewed exclusively as a future state: it might have been a verb or a program to be enacted.

What would that look like?

It's right there: Jesus and his followers would go from peasant community to peasant community in Galilee. Wherever they went, people would gather and share what food they had in a climate of equality. The sick would be healed, unclean spirits cast out, sins would be pronounced forgiven, outcasts would be included in the life of the community. And the good news of the Kingdom--compassion, solidarity, and counter-cultural wisdom--would be proclaimed.

The Gospel of Thomas goes even farther. The Kingdom is always already here if we could only see it:

Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the (Father's) imperial rule is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the (Father's) imperial rule is inside you and outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty." (3)

and

His disciples said to him, "When will the rest for the dead take place, and when will the new world come?"

He said to them, "What you are looking forward to has come, but you don't know it."(51)

and

His disciples said to him, "When will the (Father's) imperial rule come?"

"It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Look, here!' or 'Look, there!' Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it." (113)

In a parable found only in Thomas that may be authentic, the Kingdom is spilled all over the place:

Jesus said, The [Father's] imperial rule is like a woman who was carrying a [jar] full of meal. While she was walking along [a] distant road, the handle of the jar broke and the meal spilled behind her [along] the road. She didn't know it; she hadn't noticed a problem. When she reached her house, she put the jar down and discovered that it was empty. (97)

In other words, it's not where she thought it was but is spilled out all along the way. Now that's something to think about. Maybe we ought to pay a little more attention.

Meanwhile back at the ranch...

CONTRADICTIONS OF FREE TRADE. James Surowiecki has a good item in the May 14 New Yorker about how the US is using "free trade" negotiations to push for excessive protections for intellectual property at the expense of the needs of developing countries. He notes the contradiction that the US has often been unwilling to "impose" US labor standards on developing countries but is more than willing to impose harsher standards when this benefits major corporations: "Free-trade agreements that export our own restrictive I.P. laws may make the world safe for Pfizer, Microsoft, and Disney, but they don’t deserve the name free trade."

LAYOFFS. The same author has interesting things to say about the economic effects of layoffs in the April 30th issue. Short version: CEOs often resort to mass layoffs when times are hard but there is some evidence that they can do more harm than good to the long term performance of the corporation that resorts to them.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A TREASUE IN A JAR, AND MUNDANE MATTERS

Caption: This man is digging for lost gospels.

In 1945, a library of early and mostly unknown Christian writings was discovered near Nag Hammadi in Egypt by a peasant named Mohammed Ali. One of the texts discovered was a Coptic version of the Gospel of Thomas, a fairly early collection of sayings attributed to Jesus.

Many of the Nag Hammadi texts were Gnostic in viewpoint. Gnosticism is kind of a catch all term for diverse teachings that combined Judeo-Christian elements with Hellenistic forms of mystical beliefs that were eventually considered heretical by the the orthodox or catholic church.

The writings were buried in a sealed jar, which probably meant that monks from a nearby monastery intended to hide them after church father Athanasius and others condemned their use in the 4th century. Their discovery, and others that followed, have driven home the point that early Christianity was by no means monolithic.

The Gospel of Thomas, which was probably originally written in Greek, seems to contain elements from different periods. It is a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus that claim to have been compiled by Didymus Judas Thomas. There is no birth, passion, or resurrection story, nor are there accounts of miracles. Jesus is depicted primarily as a wise teacher.

Scholars debate the date of its writing but it may largely have been written around the same time as the other gospels. Parts of it may have even been assembled earlier than the others. Debates also rage on whether it is an independent source of Jesus' sayings or whether it relied on the other gospels and/or their sources (I think it's the former, for what it's worth).

Most of the sayings in Thomas are similar to and often simpler than those found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It may even contain a few authentic sayings of Jesus that are found only there. Other sayings seem to be of later, semi-gnostic origin. Here's a good discussion from the Virtual Religion Network. And here's the gospel itself.

In any case, an encounter with the sayings of Thomas is challenging and thought provoking. Buy as Scarlett O'Hara so aptly said, "I'll think about that tomorrow."

Now back to some contemporary items.

BAD DAY FOR MASSEY. Massey Energy stock took a dive as news of its legal troubles spread. Here's Bloomberg:

Shares of Massey Energy Co., the fourth-largest U.S. coal producer, had their biggest drop since July after an analyst said a federal water-pollution lawsuit may lead to $2 billion in fines.

The shares slid $2.73, or 9 percent, to $27.60 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The decline was the biggest for Richmond, Virginia-based Massey since July 28. Before today, the stock had jumped 31 percent this year.

The U.S. filed a civil lawsuit against Massey accusing the company of 4,633 violations of the Clean Water Act over the past six years, Credit Suisse analyst David Gagliano said today in a note to clients. Based on 69,000 days of non-compliance, Massey could face $2 billion in fines, he said.

There's more to that story if you click the link. And here's AP's take on it. El Cabrero is overcome with grief. Not.

BUSINESS WEEK ON PRIVATIZATION. El Cabrero has gotten behind in his magazines. Here's a good item from the May 7 Business Week about the next round of privatization. Investors are looking with longing at our roads, bridges, and other infrastructure and the public stands to lose big.

MR. PEABODY'S COAL TRAIN. The same issue has this on Peabody Coal CEO Gregory Boyce. Peabody also happens to be the target of a campaign aimed at winning workers the right to organize unions without intimidation. The same company is said to be considering selling its WV operations.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED