Posts Tagged Rome

Strong Evidence Jesus Was Married Sends the Christian Right into a Tizzy | Alternet

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Opinion, Perspective, Religion on October 7, 2012


 

AlterNet / By Valerie Tarico

Strong Evidence Jesus Was Married Sends the Christian Right into a Tizzy

When a papyrus mentioning Jesus’s wife surfaced, the revelation that he Son of God might be married posed a great challenge to the Church.

October 5, 2012 

 

  Was Jesus married?  The question is ancient—perhaps as old as the question of his divinity. On September 18, at a conference in Rome, Harvard historian Karen L. King, unveiled an ancient scrap of papyrus  with Coptic script in which Jesus refers to his wife.  As they do in such situations, academics began debating whether the scrap was authentic or fraudulent and discussing the features and tests that would incline them one way or the other.  Scholars of religion are interested in two sets of questions.  One set has to do with the papyrus itself:  Who wrote it, when, and why?  Which of the many early Christian traditions might it derive from? Does it inform our understanding of Christian history and if so, how?  The second set of questions has to do with Jesus:  Assuming the existence of a historical Jesus, (some scholars don’t) what are our best hypotheses about who he was and how he lived?  Was he indeed married?  How should such a question affect the priorities of Christians today?

While antiquities scholars await further test results, popular Fox News commentators and conservative Christian clergy went into high gear dismissing the relevance or authenticity of the scrap – or both.  The Vatican called it a fake. They don’t like the idea of a married Jesus, don’t really care what the scholars ultimately conclude, and so have gone straight into damage control mode.  Why?

What is the threat?  Here’s what:  At a symbolic level a Jesus with a human wife would be a polygamist.  Conservative Christianity is scripted around a Jesus who metaphorically is “married” not to some short, illiterate Semitic woman of the first century, but to believers themselves.  Evidence aside, the thought of competition for his affections simply doesn’t sit well.

The Church is the bride of Christ. Since the time of early Jesus worship, Christians have used the language of man and wife to represent the relationship between and Jesus his followers.  For example, in the gospels of Mark and John , Jesus and John the Baptist call Jesus the bridegroom .

Still later, in the wild and apocalyptic book of Revelations, another writer revives the metaphor:

One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” 10 And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God (Revelation 21:9-10).

The Apostle Paul likens the Church to a virgin bride as he exhorts early Christian communities in Corinth and Rome to be faithful:

I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him (2 Cor. 11:2).

Nuns are married to Jesus.  The Catholic tradition takes the pure virgin concept beyond mere metaphor.  Many nuns describe themselves as “married to Jesus” and some even wear wedding rings to symbolize their devotion.  When Oprah did a segment entitled, “Marrying Christ” one mother commented,

My daughter joined the sisters five years ago  . . . .  At her “wedding” we were moved by the change from white to black veil and by the prostration. She is truly married to Jesus Christ and her joy is so evident! I would encourage all parents to welcome the opportunity to allow and even encourage their daughters to explore the life of consecration to Jesus and see if your lives are not transformed as well!

At their commitment ceremonies, nuns take vows of poverty, obedience and chastity, but the vow of chastity can also be thought of as a vow of fidelity.  In times past, some mystics were more explicit than they are today in comparing union with Christ to the peaks of carnal pleasure.   The famous vision of Saint Teresa of Avila offers a graphic example:

I would see beside me, on my left hand, an angel in bodily form … He was not tall, but short, and very beautiful, his face so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest types of angel who seem to be all afire … In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by the intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, nor will one’s soul be content with anything less than God.

Jesus Loves Me.  Given the precedent set in past centuries, it should be no surprise that modern Evangelicals are doing everything they can to channel America’s sex obsession into religious devotion.  The phrase, “falling in love with Jesus” brings up pages of search engine hits.  I am not the first to point out that Christian rock can be almost indistinguishable from the kinds of songs humans croon about and to the objects of their fleshly desire.  Grammy winning band, Jars of Clay, wrote a song entitled, “Love Song for a Savior,” which is exactly that.  The theme of romance with Jesus is so prevalent that a blog called Jesus in Love has pages littered with found art that falls at the intersection of iconography and erotica.  In her monologue, Letting Go of God, Julia Sweeney confesses discovering the pleasures of her own body under the sensitive gaze of the Jesus hanging on the wall beside her bed.

But even setting aside the sublimated (or not so sublimated) sexual energy in the personal savior relationship, Jesus being married just doesn’t work with modern pop theology.  In born again lingo, Jesus loves me wholly, completely, and utterly which means that my love for him in return should be all consuming.  Yes, he loves other people in the same way.  He is God, and he can do that.  But he’s not allowed to love someone else in a different way, a special sexual way that includes desire and physical intimacy and exclusivity– and leaves me out.  That breaks the trance.

Furthermore, since Christians believe in individual immortality, if Jesus had a wife that means she still exists, and it means he likely has kids.  When we think about this, our neural networks activate concepts and memories related to typical nuclear family relationships.  The pattern includes the fact that spousal intimacy is unique.  Also no matter what parents may say, deep down they love their own kids better than anyone else’s.

The dilemma is both psychological and theological.  In times past there may have been variants of Christianity which taught that Jesus was married.  Their other teachings would have been compatible with this notion.  But if so, those versions of Christianity are largely extinct, and the Jesus-concepts that have won out aren’t optimized around a married savior. They are optimized around one who is eternally single–able to make the unconditional, euphoric bond that we yearn for with a perfect lover. In fact, the kinds of Christianity that are growing—evangelical, Pentecostal, “emerging”- – tend to be less cerebral than average and more about this rapturous union. The availability of Jesus may be one key to Christianity’s viral success.

The Messy Evidence. The notion of Jesus having a wife wouldn’t be a threat to rhapsodic, body-swaying, Jesus-loves-me bornagainism if it weren’t so darn persistent.   Frustrated conservative theologians and commentators keep reassuring the world that Jesus was single, and the topic lies in the tomb for three metaphorical days and then gets resurrected.  A few years back the trigger was The Da Vinci Code, wildly entertaining, wildly improbable fiction.  Now it is a historian with a small scrap of papyrus.  Da Vinci may have been silly fun, but some other evidence suggests that if you don’t have a theological or psychological need for Jesus to have been single, the idea of him having a wife is at least worth entertaining.

One kind of evidence comes from Jewish history and culture.  Orthodox Judaism takes very seriously the command to be fruitful and multiply and considers it a prescription not only for the flock but for religious leaders.  In this regard, Judaism stands in stark contrast to Catholic Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism, all of which encourage abstinence as part of spiritual eminence.  Even today, it is unusual for a single Jewish man to earn the title of Rabbi, which Jesus is assigned in gospel stories.  Other than one snapshot at age twelve, the Bible offers no indication of how Jesus spends his time until he emerges as a teacher age thirty. Although marriage isn’t specifically commanded by the Torah or subsequent texts, Jewish history tilts against the likelihood of an unmarried Jesus.

A second kind of evidence comes from early non-canonical Christian writings.  The Gospel of Philip, for example, identifies Mary Magdalene as the companion that Jesus often kissed.  The Gospel of Mary also puts Mary Magdalene in a privileged position.  In it, Peter says, “Sister we know that the Savior loved you more than the rest of women.”  These gospels espouse Gnostic theologies and so were rejected by the ecclesiastical authority of the Roman church. When the Roman version of Christianity finally won out, other Christianities were declared heretical and writings such as these were suppressed or destroyed.  Consequently, few heretical manuscripts remain.  But those that do suggest strong differences between the kind of Christianity that became “catholic,” meaning universal, and some kinds that vanished.

A third kind of evidence lies hidden in the canonical gospels themselves.  For example, in the story of the wedding at Cana, where Jesus turns water into wine, Jesus and his mother Mary engage in behavior that have led some to argue that they were hosting the festivities.  In the book of John, Mary Magdalene weeps outside the tomb in the garden where Jesus has been buried.  As she weeps, he appears to her and asks why she is crying.  She mistakes him for the gardener, but he reveals himself and then warns her not to touch him.  This story, according to at least some symbologists, is a standard script, one that would have been familiar to readers of John’s gospel, and in the mythic template, the woman in the garden is the wife of the God-king.  Today we might expect that if Jesus and Mary Magdalene were spouses then the writer simply would have said so.  But early Christianity was like other mystery religions of the time period, reserving some kinds of knowledge for those on the inside.

The case for a married Jesus may be far from definitive, but the reaction of conservative Christian commentators should give us pause.  It is precisely the same reaction that the arbiters of orthodoxy have had since the beginnings of time:  dismiss competing perspectives; ignore or –when possible — destroy contradictory evidence; denigrate and marginalize dissenters (aka heretics).  It is the same reaction that conservative Christians have had to archaeological and scientific findings that call any of their prized beliefs into question.  Indeed, this reaction—played out through millennia—may explain why so little evidence for a wife of Jesus exists.

 Strong Evidence Jesus Was Married Sends the Christian Right into a Tizzy | Alternet.

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For European Union and the Euro, a Moment of Truth – NYTimes.com

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Banking, Economy, Finance, Government, Politics, Social on November 13, 2011


Even as Governments Act, Time Runs Short for Euro

Kostas Tsironis/Associated Press

In central Athens on Thursday, marchers protested an austerity plan. 

By NICHOLAS KULISH and STEVEN ERLANGER

Published: November 12, 2011 

BERLIN — The window of opportunity to save the euro is rapidly closing, as the sovereign debt crisis erodes the solvency of Europe’s banks and drives up borrowing rates for even once rock-solid countries like France.

 

European Debt Crisis Timeline

Kirill Iordansky/Reuters

The Frankfurt stock exchange on Friday.

Alessia Pierdomenico/Bloomberg News

In Rome on Wednesday, a newspaper ran a front-page article about the impending resignation of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

On Saturday, the crisis swept away its second leader, when Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resigned after 17 years of dominance in Italian politics to the jeers and cheers of crowds in Rome.

Both there and in Greece, jumbled parliaments came together with urgency to install more technocratic governments that are committed to delivering the difficult reforms and austerity measures demanded by theEuropean Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Despite those drastic and tangible steps, though, there is a host of problems that could quickly overwhelm Europe’s progress.

Looming over all the discussions of reform and financing mechanisms is the slowdown in the Continent’s already anemic growth rate, to 0.5 percent in 2012, and even the threat of a double-dip recession, the European Commission said in a forecast for the euro zone last week.

That calls into doubt the adequacy of the euro zone’s latest attempt to placate the markets, the lagging effort to bolster the $605 billion European Financial Stability Facility to $1.4 trillion or to find other funding. The task will become that much harder in a recessionary environment, especially as France’s credibility with investors begins to decline.

“I think we’re in very dangerous territory, and the euro zone has to act soon,” said Simon Tilford, chief economist for the Center for European Reform in London. “There isn’t really a muddle-through option right now. And those who argue that it’s possible for the south and Italy to default or deflate into competitiveness are fanciful and flying in the face of evidence.”

The damage that can result, he said, is potentially severe “to their economies, debt burdens, social and political stability, democratic accountability, and their belief in their European allies and in the European Union itself.”

At the center of it all sits Germany, leading the bloc of Northern European countries, which also includes the Netherlands and Finland, steadfastly maintaining that austerity and fiscal rectitude on the part of the debtors, no matter how painful, represent the only path to resolving the crisis. Any proposals to share the burden with the heavily indebted countries by collectivizing European debt — even though they may have contributed to the prosperity of the northern countries by consuming their exports — are rejected out of hand, largely for fear of a political backlash.

When Germany’s council of independent economic advisers proposed to Chancellor Angela Merkel last week a way to share European debt to protect Italy and Spain, she dismissed the idea as impossible without changes to European Union treaties. She has also opposed any expansion in the European Central Bank’s role in buying up the bonds of the indebted countries, which could hold down interest rates on their debts, let alone allowing the bank to guarantee Italian debt.

But critics say there is no time for the treaty changes Mrs. Merkel is talking about; those could take years to put in place.

“The crisis must be solved right now, and it simply will not wait for these instruments to fix it,” said Bernhard Rapkay, chairman of Germany’s Social Democrats in the European Parliament.

The vulnerability of Italy — the third-largest economy in the euro zone and the fourth-largest debtor nation in the world — brought the crisis into the core of the euro zone. For all the speculation over weaker countries eventually choosing to leave the euro, there is really no euro without Italy, certainly not a euro that can be considered a common European currency.

And if borrowing becomes so expensive for Italy that it is priced out of the markets, which seemed a real possibility last week, there is no so-called wall of money big enough to bail it out or to guarantee its $2.6 trillion debt.

“We’ve entered a make-or-break scenario,” said Thomas Klau, a German who heads the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The present situation with Italy now is sustainable for days, perhaps weeks, but not months. This new chapter either writes the endgame of the euro zone, or it precedes a much bigger leap into political and economic integration than all those made so far.”

With each bout of uncertainty, speculative attacks come closer to the core of the European Union. Greece teeters, Italy wobbles and France begins to tremble. The precariousness of the situation was on full view Thursday when a leading ratings agency, Standard & Poor’s, mistakenly suggested on its Web site that it had downgraded France’s prized AAA rating, prompting a sell-off in French government bonds.

The mistake was quickly corrected and the French, enraged, opened a formal investigation. The episode showed how little margin for error remained even for France, which is already suffering from a drop in industrial production and has watched the gap between its bonds’ rates and those of Germany widen to record levels, an ominous development in this environment.

And it may get worse, with a recession looming. Unless, of course, the crisis has concentrated minds sufficiently, especially in Berlin. One of the first and most effective ways to combat the crisis and the potential downturn, experts say, would be to enable the European Central Bank, or E.C.B., to act as a lender of last resort, or to at least let it print some more money, to try a little inflation as a recipe for growth and debt reduction.

“I understand the German fetish with inflation, but that’s increasingly wearing thin,” said Jan Techau, a German who is the director of Carnegie Europe in Brussels. “The reluctance to use the E.C.B. as the lender of last resort when Italy is solvent is something I don’t understand.”

In part, it is a result of the German economy’s unusual strength throughout the crisis. In the last few years, it has grown stronger — with higher exports, rising employment, an unexpected burst of tax revenue, even a windfall from an accounting error — while others in Europe have struggled.

German trade groups have pressed Mrs. Merkel to do what it takes to save the euro, which has been a boon for exporters, allowing them to sell products in a currency depressed by the troubles of its weaker members. “The German people don’t understand really what’s going on and are really skeptical the measures will be helpful,” said Anton Börner, president of the Federation of German Wholesale, Foreign Trade and Services.

Germany has drawn lines in the sand before over the euro — about the impossibility of a Greek default or the use of the European Central Bank to buy sovereign bonds — and has backtracked when faced with disaster. The impending slowdown is expected to cool German growth as well.

The outlook is not entirely bleak. Upon taking the reins at the European Central Bank this month, Mario Draghi cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point, which may help growth rates. And Germans have lately seemed open to expanding debt guarantees in exchange for the promise of stability.

“The conviction of the seriousness of the crisis has reached a new level, and that is positive,” said Janis A. Emmanouilidis, senior policy analyst at the European Policy Center. “Whenever you hit the wall, you come up with something.”

Either the European Central Bank will have to play a more active role in propping up the most indebted euro-zone nations, or countries will have to commit to a more federal system, with something like a Treasury Department and a real central bank. If not, a breakup of the euro zone, with some countries dropping the currency or being forced to do so, may be inevitable.

These discussions are causing anxiety inside the European Union, especially among the 10 member countries that do not use the euro, who fear a two-speed Europe — the European Union divided into different blocs with different rules — that hurts their interests. Some countries inside the euro zone fear such changes, too, because they will require more rigor and discipline.

The options are politically difficult, said Mr. Klau of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “But the alternative is potentially so devastating that the cost of action, however large, is much smaller than the cost of inaction, because inaction can trigger a chain of events that European leaders will no longer be able to control.”

 For European Union and the Euro, a Moment of Truth – NYTimes.com.

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