The Bible and Public Schools

                The author talks about how Texas passed the House Bill 1287 inserted into the Texas Education code a provision allowing districts to offer elective courses on the Bible’s Hebrew Scripture and New Testament. When it comes to teaching the bible to public schools , what should be considered is pushing off the Christian religion to poor public-school children, what about offending non-believers who reject the Bible and any form of religious morals, should they also have to sit through a bible class. Many people who do believe religion should be taught in public often argue that they have freedom of speech as stated in the first Amendment  at the same time doesn’t First Amendment of Constitution against promoting religion in any government entity.

I believe that it should be an option to the students, the ones who want to take it should and the ones who don’t can opt out and take another option as a part of a required curriculum. I grew up a catholic, but I don’t think that the public school is no place for me or any other Christian to try and impose my formula for prayer on children who don’t even share it. There is a fine line between religion and state issued, religion should not go into government funded education. More controversy would present if religion was permitted, many public school teachers don’t really know a lot about other religions beside their own.

                Public schools are supposed to be a place where all religions are welcomed but if people who don’t want to be outspoken about their beliefs are forced to, then this will only cause conflict. Religion should be for home and church, not for the public school system.

Bible and politics

After reading the articles I find myself think, about presidential elections in America, especially the more recent ones (2000 onwards), does anyone (especially the youth) catch the Bible rhetoric. The US culture wars have heightened the use of biblical phrases. I feel like in America in order for presidential candidates and presidents to resonate with the people, they need to be biblically literate. (Excluding for Donald Trump who is defying this.)

Coming from Tanzania, which that is 50% Muslim 46% Christian and 4%other religions, presidential candidates never quote Bible/Quran verse in public, as they fear losing voters who do not believe in the religion they have quoted the scripture from. Government leaders don’t base their judgment on a specific religion. Unlike America where President Jimmy Carter who got a lot of heat for trying to separate the church from the state, and try to make his judgement not religiously based citing Bible verse.

Another thing I noted after reading a Washington Post[1] article about the pitfall of politicians citing Bible verses was that most of the presidential candidates quoted the Bible in there presidential announcement, for me I thought this was interesting, cause as a person from a different part of the world, we perceive America as a very liberal country, “is not really Christian country”. Even while reading the journals I found myself doubting that these presidents actually read the Bible, I found myself wondering whether they practiced the bible lines before a speech or someone wrote down there speech for them.

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[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/12/02/if-a-2016-candidate-is-citing-a-bible-verse-theres-a-good-chance-its-not-quite-right/

Genesis Parody  

The Stowaway was a very interesting article it gave a unique outlook on the tale of the Noah’s ark, it is told from a point of view of an outspoken woodworm, that sneaks into the ship, the story definitely defies the traditional telling of the classic flood story. What I thought while reading this article was here we go another story about Noah, however Noah is portrayed very different from the Noah stories in Genesis. In his rewritten story noah has 4 kids different from the story in Genesis where he had 3 kids.

This parody of Genesis, the author dissembles the original story of Genesis, the ark was boat a ship but a whole flotilla,also was Noah a good man?No he was not. Furthermore the calm and logical approach of the narrator makes the story believable, to an extent that the person reading does not question the credibility of the story. Think about it even before we readers find out who the narrator is, it is obvious that he exists outside the course of events and so there it appears to be no reason for his depiction of what is happening to be unbiased.

One thing pointed out by the New York Times review article I read was that we could readily assume that Barnes chose a woodworm as a narrator of the story because he wanted to show how easily we are manipulated into believing that something is objective. To further extend this what the person from the New York Times was trying is we tend to forget that history is a story being told, there is always some perspective and it’s always someone’s recollection of how a certain event had happened.

Women Being Submissive

         From the reading of enticed by Eden, made me think of the idea of prince charming, growing up as a girl and watching all these Cinderella and sleeping beauty movies , it really does intercept the idea of one day your price charming is going to come and you will get married and live happily ever after. This is what Hollywood/Walt Disney installs on women from a young age. Looking back now to Cinderella now that I am a grown woman and can think more straight, marriage was viewed as a sense of security and escape from one’s family. The idea that a bunch of single women attended and mingled with the prince in a grand ball,  shows that the man can do anything he wants with all the single girls until he meets his future princess. On the other hand women should patiently wait for their prince.

         It’s similar with Elisabeth Elliot idea of what a woman should be and do, where she agrees that women should be submissive to women, and should follow the man and Genesis approves this. I definitely do not agree with this, I think in scripture, every creature is called to submit to God, usually in different ways. Church members submit to faithful pastors, children are to submit to parents, we all submit to the governing authorities.  The Bible does state wives are called to their husbands, but I don’t think that is the point, too often in our culture, women are pressured to submit to men a category. This is why women’s value in the society we live in is often defined as sexual attractiveness and availability.

             That’s why so many girls and women are destroyed by a patriarchy that demands the dignity and glory of what it means to be a women. I think that both husband and wife to submit to each other, this means being faithful and no one else. Let’s take an example Eve’s submission to the Serpent’s word meant she refused to submit to God’s.

Is Christianity still strong in America? 

                    From readings you clearly see how America was built under a very strong influence of Christian religion, the fact that European immigrants traveled all the way to North America so they could have the freedom to practice their religion, and how this then led to a high demand of the King James Bible from Europe to North America, clearly shows that extent of how strong their faith in Christianity was.

                 However when you look at America now, one wonders what happened to Christianity in America? What happened to the normal way of thinking that God came first? One article on the New York Times I read a while back, suggested that America is simply Europe on a 50-year delay, most churches will be museums before your grandchild reaches adulthood. I believe this to be true, because even the people who proclaim themselves as Christians have little in terms of lifestyle and conduct to distinguish a Christian from and a non-Christian.

                   Furthermore we live in a world where the word “Christian” means a million different things to a million different people. Therefore, an individual claiming to be Christian can be misinterprets as being Homophobic, Conservative, Anti-Science and sexist, even though these descriptions may be completely inaccurate. At the same time some Christian groups reinforce negative perception through campaigns lobbying, public comments and actions, making it harder to break down the preconceived stereotyped that the media continues to associate with Jesus. Thus preconceived notions of what a Christian is, is probably one of the reasons Christianity in America is failing.

One question to leave y’all with is do you think the decline in Christianity is a good thing or not?

Translator Martyr 

After reading The King James Bible After 400 Years and Reform and Reaction n Henrican English.  I learnt how we got the King James Bible. I thought it was interesting how all this bibles were made by people like Tyndale, who decided to risk their lives to translate the Bible and allow the English speaking people, to actually understand what they are reading.

First  thing I thought about while reading, was should Tyndale and Wycliffe who were murdered for translating the Bible, be consider as martyr, and from further research Tyndale is considered a martyr by the Christians, and became known as the Father of the Protestant Bible.

On the other hand Wycliffe died of natural causes, the religious authority did not cut ties with him, and take him to court to be sentenced. As they were afraid of the public opinion, people loved Wycliffe and he was also very famous internationally. However 30 years after he died a council of the religious authority decided to take revenge on him by banning all his book and burning his dead buried body. This act of them burning his remains, was seen as a form of martyrdom.

I feel like every translator knows that they are interpreters, as there is no translation without interpretation. And so Bible translators are like teachers in a sense as they are interpreting to us texts in the Bible, that us English speakers would not have understood if it was in Hebrew or Greek. Furthermore in James 3:1 states” not many of you should become teachers, because teachers will face a more severe judgment”. And this is exactly what happened to these translators, they face “sever Judgement” not from God but from man.

 Apocrypha

In the Medieval Canon by Frans van Liere, I felt like I learnt more about the Old Testament Apocrypha, as we have done more of the NT apocrypha. The Hebrew Bible which is dived into three groups of books, the five books of Torah, the Prophets and the Writings. All the scholars agree that there five books of the Torah but they come to disagree on volumes of the Prophets and the Writings. I thought the Christian church father Jerome was interesting the way he made the number of books as twenty two, and made it similar to the alphabets letters in the Hebrew bible. However he excluded/ refused to include the “apocrypha books”.

Later on Jerome Hebrew Bible Canon did become the Catholic Hebrew bible, however later on the catholic church did accept/consider these apocrypha books as scripture and so leads me to question whether these OT apocrypha were inspired or not.

This is what brings about division among the different Christians religion- Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant. Apocrypha that Catholic OT canon includes are Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, I and II Maccabees plus sections of Esther and Daniel which are absent from the other Christian OT. Whereas the Jews and the Protestant don’t believe apocrypha are not inspired as they were not fund in the Aleppo Codex.

Furthermore the fact that in the NT Jesus does not mention any of the OT apocrypha provides proof to some scholars and Christian religion that Apocrypha were not inspired. Now again, these books were written by God-fearing Jews—not Catholics nor Protestants. And they were written before Christ, so its authors did not have a chance to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior.

The Apocryphal books do not share many of the characteristics of the Canonical books: they are not prophetic, there is no supernatural confirmation of any of the apocryphal writers' works, there is no predictive prophecy, there is no new Messianic truth revealed, they are not cited as authoritative by any prophetic book written after them.

I also think that one thing that is influencing other Christian and Jewish religions from acknowledging the OT Apocrypha is because they think it’s Catholic, they don’t want to taint their theology with the view of Rome. However these “apocrypha” were not written by Catholics, for Catholics nor did the authors set to expand the Catholic doctrine.

Apocrypha provides us with books like Books like 1 Maccabees acquaint us with the history that branded the idea of the kingdom of God on the hearts and minds of first century Jews. 4 Ezra, which is in some versions of the Apocrypha) helps us to interpret the book of Revelation. It too talks about weird creatures coming out of the sea. In short, these books help us to situate the NT in its own context.

NT Apocrypha as Counter Canon

This article by Annette Yoshiko explores the topic of  Para biblical literature in biblical studies through focus on New Testament Apocrypha. What I though was interesting about this article was the idea that the NT Apocrypha is a counter canon. That is defined by Hennecke and Schnemmelcher as writings that have not been received into the canon (but should be part of the Canon) and which form the point of view of Form Criticism further develop and mould the kinds of style created and received in the NT.

                As I said from my previous blog post I do think that these NT apocrypha (e.g. The Gospel of Mary, The Gospel of Thomas, Infancy Gospel of Thomas etc.) should be considered in the Bible or at least by Christian leaders of different churches. Furthermore if these books don’t get the chance to get in the Bible, because “the canon is closed”, if it is possible for the Christian leaders to accept these (some) books as part of the Christianity apostolicity or historicity. That would give opportunity for Christians to read/learn other different stories of Jesus and tales of what his apostles did after he died.

                In the article Annette states in page 415 that the scholars (Whiston, Toland and Hone) operate under the shared assumption that such Para biblical writings are either “late” forgeries……or potential sources for exposing he suppressed truth……” I still don’t think there is anything wrong by considering some of these Apocrypha, as some of the books that are in the NT  Bible are also considered as fraudulent. Additionally let’s say if we consider to put the infancy Gospel of Thomas, even though it claims not to be written by Thomas, there a bunch of letters from Paul in the NT that are considered as Pseudography.

 This Gospel also gives us an inside story of Jesus’s childhood. Something that is not talked about in most of the Gospels found in the NT Bible. Even though Jesus is not portrayed as the best child, (you would think he would be) he comes off as obnoxious, selfish seems to do miraculous or dangerous acts out of impulse. In the bible, the Jesus we read about does not act impulsively or on a whim, he has reasoning behind his actions. This could be the reason the church would not consider it as part of the Canon. However as Jesus is growing he changes for the better. The Gospel also shows that Jesus could read, good argument for scholars who say he could not read.

Overall, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas does show Jesus as full of knowledge and power, but also shows him as immature and mischievous. Jesus did have childish aspects in him that made him seem very imperfect, however, there are signs and miracles that Jesus performed that shows that he would most likely mature and evolve into the Jesus that is in the ancient scriptures.

This Gospel is just an example of the many other parable writings, which even though are claimed to be written by the authors, are very interesting, and “could result in the recovery of dynamic trajectories and connection that shaped the worlds of late antiquity and the Middle Ages” (425)

Canon and Scripture

              From the reading of the Constantine Bible by Dungan, there so many things that I thought were interesting, I liked how he clearly mentioned and discussed how the Canon and the scripture have very different meanings. He makes a very good point when he says the Cannon does not cover the same ground as the scripture. This made me ask myself the question of what the differences between Cannon and Scripture, from my point of view I think scripture is just a series of writing that are written for people a specific religious background and the community that is reading the has given their justification stamp. Scripture as we said in class has is authoritative.

           Canon from my point of view is the aspect of the process of communication which involved the selection and ordering of a collection of Israel’s scriptures in order to construct a range of enduring witnesses. And eventually make a bible. Therefore with that being said this brings about the question of whether the difference between Canon and Scripture is one is authority given by God (Scripture) and the other is the decision made by the church on what belongs in the bible (Canon).

          When I go back to think about Canon and Scripture, I read an article by Matt Slick “What is Canon”. In this article the author wonders how these old communities came up with the idea of Scripture or Cannon .It does seems obsolete impose a “Canon” (which is a closed list of book in ancient Israel especially if books were migrating between masses (like Daniel between the Prophets and the Writings).  Equally extreme is to believe that “scripture” has no relationship with the constraining aspect of “canon,” as if to think “scripture” meant a free-flowing stream of religious books that moved (and continue to move) in and out of authoritative status depending on the whim of the community.

                 In the book Dungan insists that canon should not be confused with scripture, as if these terms were synonymous if the terms were simply synonymous. Dungan explains, “As we shall see, a canon results when someone seeks to impose a strict boundary and a smaller a subset of writings or teachings within the larger, slowly evolving.” “Canonization” not a gradual process of collection debate, and consensus-building but the decisive final moment of a process when the canonical boundaries are fixed.

Are the right books in the Bible?

Eusebius category for biblical writings that are accepted, rejected and undisputed, made me think on whether the right books that are in the bible and who chose these specific books and why. Canon means a list of authoritative texts used in a church to teach doctrine, with that in mind it begs to ask questions like what process did early Christians use to identify which books should be included in the NT canons. An article published by Sean McDowell (https://www.idisciple.org/post/how-do-we-know-the-bible-includes-the-right-books), talks about how early Christians believed the NT books held authority from God since they were inspired. However we have come to learn that half of these books in NT that hey considered inspired by God, were actually Pseudography (or fraudulent) written by some other person pretending to be one of the disciples. So should these book be removed from the bible?

An article by Grace Communion International talks about criteria’s that early church used to accept and reject these Scriptures one of them was: 1) antiquity and apostolic-whether a book had been written by an apostle. And so if as the author of the rise and fall and the bible, states that some of the books were written by people who did not even see the event occur, but were told by others(e.g. Jesus reading the to the community). Furthermore I feel the Bible is a very powerful book, that influences a lot of countries and cultures, and this cultures tend to live their life by the Bible. With that being said if there are writings that are disputed by some but not others, (like the second letter of Peter) in the Bible, I feel it’s best to remove these books (even though that will not happen) in the NT Bible, because there is no 100% certainty that writings are holy or authoritative. I am just saying this should be done so as to avoid leading the followers of the bible in a different direction.

Solar Calendr and the elevation of Bible figures

 From the reading of Rewriting Scripture in the second Temple, we are analyzing two books, the book of Jubilees and the Genesis Apocrypha. One of the things that stood out for me was that the book of Jubilee the advocating of a solar calendar based on days and months rather than on the Jewish, lunar –based calendar, from an article I read “Can we rely on the Hebrew Calendar” it talks about how the Hebrew calendar is not what was revealed from God, it is the product of long historical development, and that the Jewish calendar differs from the calendar God gave to Moses, and it purely an assumption that God authorized the Hebrew calendar. And so the solar- based calendar better represents the 49 years and a better understanding of the prophecy, thus the book of Jubilees was attempting to show how the solar calendar better fits the biblical account of time and prophecy.

                From my point of view I see that the book of Jubilees has a trend of constant praising some of the characters in the bible and hiding some of the negative attributes of these characters. This could be that the writer was trying to emphasize to the readers, that these characters where righteous, and if they committed anything wrong it was a specific purpose. A couple of example like the one with Levi and his brother taking revenge over the rape of their sister Dinah, and it even goes further than the Genesis to justify his action of taking revenge but stating she was only 12 ,and the writer(Moses) also approves it (even though the bible is against taking revenge). The fact that it mentions Levi’s descendants were chosen to priesthood show that his actions were right and he will not be punished. Another example is the Noah story where he offers a sacrifice after the flooding, in genesis it is written as just a normal sacrifice, however in the book of Jubilee it is written as an atoned sacrifice, the sacrifice is considered to have been provided on behalf of the sins of the people for the need of more redemption. And so Noah’s sacrifice is more glorified in the book of Jubilees than Genesis.

This is all in the essence to prove to the readers that these bible figures lived by the word of God, never did anything against him and did everything to please him. However as the Sidine Crawford states this book was made by using the basis of the Pentateuch books of Genesis and Exodus, and was meant to stand beside the Torah, that could be the reasoning behind the emphasis on how good these people mentioned in the bible were, to insist to the other readers that whatever the Pentateuch says is the truth.

Importance of the Bible

For the first part of how the Bible became Holy the author Michael Satlow, he talks about the origins of the Old Testament that gave me a good reminder of the information of the historical biblical texts we learnt for the Old Testament class. He argues that Jesus “had very limited knowledge of Scripture” (6). Furthermore its interesting to see that he also struggled reading the whole bible provided he has written a book based on the Bible. The Bible that we know and learn in terms of scope and authority, is not how it was originally used like in the beginning. The Christians and the Jews made the Bible very different than what it was intended to be, and I am guessing that’s how he sets up the title of the book, How the Bible Became Holy.

The bible was not very important during the biblical period. The biblical writings were done by literate people, who were from the educated class. They could have stored most of the writings that made in the Bible, in temple archives and only made them public after the Babylonian captivity thus forming the cannon of the Torah. The story of Ezra reading “the scroll of the Torah of Moses” to the Jerusalem people in pubic (Nehemiah 8) is the Bible’s own illustration of the Torah in the 5^th Century BC. Thus we should not really expect the writings in the bible especially the Torah to have much of an impact before this time.

I feel like we tend to profess a certain belief, and we are usually backed with writings, which are useful to the powerful (a good example is the argument against gay marriage saying it’s not acceptable in the Bible), however Michael Satlow with this book has made me wonder whether we are in a sort of criticism and analysis era of writing about the bible.