"Jesus's wife" - a hoax

[John F]

At least that's the latest word from the battlefront.

How the 'Jesus' Wife' Hoax Fell Apart
Jerry Pattengale
May 1, 2014

In September 2012, Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King announced the discovery of a Coptic (ancient Egyptian) gospel text on a papyrus fragment that contained the phrase "Jesus said to them, 'My wife . . .' " The world took notice. The possibility that Jesus was married would prompt a radical reconsideration of the New Testament and biblical scholarship.

Yet now it appears almost certain that the Jesus-was-married story line was divorced from reality. On April 24, Christian Askeland—a Coptic specialist at Indiana Wesleyan University and my colleague at the Green Scholars Initiative—revealed that the "Gospel of Jesus' Wife," as the fragment is known, was a match for a papyrus fragment that is clearly a forgery.

Almost from the moment Ms. King made her announcement two years ago, critics attacked the Gospel of Jesus' Wife as a forgery. One line of criticism said that the fragment had been sloppily reworked from a 2002 online PDF of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas and even repeated a typographical error.

But Ms. King had defenders. The Harvard Theological Review recently published a group of articles that attest to the papyrus's authenticity. Although the scholars involved signed nondisclosure agreements preventing them from sharing the data with the wider scholarly community, the New York Times NYT -1.40% was given access to the studies ahead of publication. The newspaper summarized the findings last month, saying "the ink and papyrus are very likely ancient, and not a modern forgery." The article prompted a tide of similar pieces, appearing shortly before Easter, asserting that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife was genuine.
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Then last week the story began to crumble faster than an ancient papyrus exposed in the windy Sudan. Mr. Askeland found, among the online links that Harvard used as part of its publicity push, images of another fragment, of the Gospel of John, that turned out to share many similarities—including the handwriting, ink and writing instrument used—with the "wife" fragment. The Gospel of John text, he discovered, had been directly copied from a 1924 publication.

"Two factors immediately indicated that this was a forgery," Mr. Askeland tells me. "First, the fragment shared the same line breaks as the 1924 publication. Second, the fragment contained a peculiar dialect of Coptic called Lycopolitan, which fell out of use during or before the sixth century." Ms. King had done two radiometric tests, he noted, and "concluded that the papyrus plants used for this fragment had been harvested in the seventh to ninth centuries." In other words, the fragment that came from the same material as the "Jesus' wife" fragment was written in a dialect that didn't exist when the papyrus it appears on was made.

Mark Goodacre, a New Testament professor and Coptic expert at Duke University, wrote on his NT Blog on April 25 about the Gospel of John discovery: "It is beyond reasonable doubt that this is a fake, and this conclusion means that the Jesus' Wife Fragment is a fake too." Alin Suciu, a research associate at the University of Hamburg and a Coptic manuscript specialist, wrote online on April 26: "Given that the evidence of the forgery is now overwhelming, I consider the polemic surrounding the Gospel of Jesus' Wife papyrus over."

Having evaluated the evidence, many specialists in ancient manuscripts and Christian origins think Karen King and the Harvard Divinity School were the victims of an elaborate ruse. Scholars had assumed that radiometric tests would return an early date (at least in antiquity), because the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment had been cut from a genuinely ancient piece of material. Likewise, those familiar with papyri had identified the ink used as soot-based—preferred by forgers because the Raman spectroscopy tests used to test for age would be inconclusive.

It is perhaps understandable that Ms. King would have been taken in when an anonymous owner presented her with some papyrus fragments for research. What is harder to understand was the rush by the media and others to embrace the idea that Jesus had a wife and that Christian beliefs have been mistaken for centuries. No evidence for Jesus having been married exists in any of the thousands of orthodox biblical writings dating to antiquity. You would have thought Thomas Aquinas might have mentioned it. But this episode is not totally without merit. It will provide a valuable case study for research classes long after we're gone and the biblical texts remain.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1 ... 0828090438

[SONNET CLV]

Having evaluated the evidence, many specialists in ancient manuscripts and Christian origins think Karen King and the Harvard Divinity School were the victims of an elaborate ruse.

An elaborate ruse? Really?

Where have I heard that before?

Do the names John, Paul, Mark, and Ringo ... er I mean Luke ring a bell?

[jbuck919]

Having evaluated the evidence, many specialists in ancient manuscripts and Christian origins think Karen King and the Harvard Divinity School were the victims of an elaborate ruse.

An elaborate ruse? Really?

Where have I heard that before?

Do the names John, Paul, Mark, and Ringo ... er I mean Luke ring a bell?

LOL. You beat me to it. This is the Easter season, and I have to endure week after week of the classic readings about the Resurrection. Today was Christ on the road to Emmaus. They are so alluring, in many cases so well written, that it is easy to see why people in the continuous tradition are seduced by them even after 20 centuries. But nothing can disguise the fact that if you believe that a man arose from the dead, you are in the deepest depths of religious ignorance and have no business pointing the finger at the Koran, the Book of Mormon, etc., let alone The "Jesus's wife" fragment.

[karlhenning]

... But nothing can disguise the fact that if you believe that a man arose from the dead, you are in the deepest depths of religious ignorance ....

I see.

Pace e bene,
~k.

[jbuck919]

... But nothing can disguise the fact that if you believe that a man arose from the dead, you are in the deepest depths of religious ignorance ....

I see.

Pace e bene,
~k.

Karl, you have known for a long time that we will always differ on this matter, and that I am not the only church musician in the world who is at the same time a non-believer and a serious lover of both the tradition and the community. Modern mainline protestantism is a powerful positive force in American society at more than one level, and I will gladly keep my convictions to myself and even go so far as to lead a double life to remain a part of it. But nothing can change the fact that stories which to any modern critically thinking person are incredible and impossible boil down to "Don't believe everything you're told, because people tell lies all the time." A 2000-year old fabrication has no more credibility than Joseph Smith claiming he found the Book of Mormon on buried plates and translated it with magic implements. In fact, we owe Smith a debt of gratitude for showing us how some of the gospel stories must have originated.

[John F]

But if you're a Christian, that's exactly what you must believe. It's the deepest depth of Christianity itself, part of the creed that's central to the Roman Catholic mass, and Protestants don't protest against it. Nor is it impossible or illogical if God is indeed omnipotent as the creed says, meaning there's nothing He can't do. Where's the objection to His having raised His son from the dead, as Jesus is said to have done with Lazarus, and as everyone who ever lived is to be raised for the Last Judgment, according to prophecy? Reject this and you reject Christianity as a religion.

That's no problem for me, as I don't accept Christianity, and jbuck919 says something like that too. But just because of that, I don't dismiss all who believe in it, or who have believed it, as ipso facto ignorant. Of course there are ignorant ways to believe, as there are ignorant ways to do just about anything not requiring actual skill. But that's not a valid objection to the belief itself.

Is it incredible or impossible that there is an omnipotent God behind the curtain? It's never been proved there isn't and it can't be proved, which is why quite a few scientists - modern critically thinking persons if any of us are - have been believers and do not see it as a contradiction. So I wouldn't argue one way or the other. After all, it might be our ignorance that is showing.

[karlhenning]

Is it incredible or impossible that there is an omnipotent God behind the curtain? It's never been proved there isn't and it can't be proved, which is why quite a few scientists - modern critically thinking persons if any of us are - have been believers and do not see it as a contradiction. So I wouldn't argue one way or the other. After all, it might be our ignorance that is showing.

Thank you.

... But nothing can change the fact that stories which to any modern critically thinking person are incredible and impossible boil down to "Don't believe everything you're told, because people tell lies all the time."

John, yes, I’ve long known we differ on the matter, and that is fine. Your encapsulation immediately above is tendentiously harsh. I do not object to the harshness, knowing better than to take it at all personally.

And your dismissal of anyone who believes that Christ arose from the dead (and your elision of the Orthodoxy of Christ’s dual Nature is significant) is in the deepest depths of religious ignorance is scornfully harsh. Nor here do I object to the harshness, knowing better than to take it at all personally.

And after all, I know what high artistic and human regard you have for Bach, who is down in these depths with me, I suppose.

Pace e bene,
~k.

[SONNET CLV]

Of course there are ignorant ways to believe, as there are ignorant ways to do just about anything ...
Is it incredible or impossible that there is an omnipotent God behind the curtain? It's never been proved there isn't and it can't be proved, which is why quite a few scientists - modern critically thinking persons if any of us are - have been believers and do not see it as a contradiction. So I wouldn't argue one way or the other.

Though I have little patience for believing in the "gospels", I contend these books (and much else of the Bible) are well composed literary works, ranking with the best of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. Indeed, genius lurks between the lines of Genesis, Job, the Psalms ... and much of the New Testament. Creative genius. Such minds have succeeded well in creating God in the image of man.

But when one is aware of the vastness of our universe (both the largenesses and the smallnesses involved) and considers that such apparently sprang out of nothingness (a concept which we will probably never fully understand due to the basic laws of physics itself), it is not impossible to conceive of some God behind it all. Some truly magnificent God, one of unfathomable intellect and powers. But certainly not the same deity who orders the slaughter of 42 children by she-bears because the children made fun of a bald-headed prophet (2 Kings 2:23-24). May anyone who believes such nonsense be visited upon by those same she-bears, or stoned to death. (For if we are to believe Leviticus 20:27: "A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them." -- It seems to me that "believers" are those who hold to a "familiar spirit" and that their priests and ministers, who possess such powers as to change wine to blood or to intercede with the deity or to foretell destinies of those who sin, qualify as "wizards" -- such folks are to be stoned to death!)

Can the same Deity that created quantum mechanics, atoms, molecules, DNA, the cosmos ... be the God of the Bible? Hey, Moby Dick is a wonderfully conceived, wrathful creature, but I wouldn't think of worshipping him.

If I left Matthew out of my prior post ("John, Paul, Mark, and ... Luke") perhaps it is out of respect for J.S. Bach. After all, Matthew wrote the text for Bach's greatest masterpiece. If anything is worth worshipping, I suppose it could be that.

To confirm, many of us non-believers (or, perhaps better, us non-nonsense-believers) still hold "sacred" (in an especially humanistic manner) many of the ideas espoused in the so-called sacred texts, and in the music, art, and poetry that has been generated by ancient religious convictions. There need never have been a Noah's Flood in order for us to enjoy the latest Russell Crowe film, anymore than there need ever have been an actual Hamlet in order for us to enjoy the Shakespeare play. (I recall Harold Bloom asserting that if one wants to worship a literary character, Hamlet is a much better choice than Yahweh.)

Pax et bonum.

[John F]

If there's an omnipotent God who does as He pleases, without having to justify it to us - and the book of Job makes this unmistakably clear, chapters 38-41 - then sure, He could "order the slaughter of 42 children by she-bears because the children made fun of a bald-headed prophet," and anything else imaginable or unimaginable, whether or not we understand or like it. This is not subject to logical argument, let alone scientific proof; it either is or it isn't.

Pace e gioia.

[karlhenning]

Can the same Deity that created quantum mechanics, atoms, molecules, DNA, the cosmos ... be the God of the Bible?

I am guessing that you are not actually interested in discussing the question.

Certainly, given the tone of the thread, the respectful opposition (here in this thread, "those in the depths of religious ignorance") can expect scant respect.

Pace e gioia. :)

Nice!

Pace e bene,
~k.

[jbuck919]

But if you're a Christian, that's exactly what you must believe.

Trust me, there are dissembling Christians all over the place, and have been for a very long time. Some of them were major theologians (Paul Tillich for one). The key factor in modern mainstream Christian life is the fellowship. It makes no sense, it is completely illogical, it violates every consistency that someone like Christopher Hitchens would favor, but we would not have these essential communities of support without the religious trappings which still tie everyone together. And since the trappings themselves can carry with them considerable elements of beauty and are in their modern form innocuous, it does present a scenario which one cannot be blamed for not resisting even with a certain carriage of intellectual refusal.

Is it incredible or impossible that there is an omnipotent God behind the curtain? It's never been proved there isn't and it can't be proved, which is why quite a few scientists - modern critically thinking persons if any of us are - have been believers and do not see it as a contradiction. So I wouldn't argue one way or the other. After all, it might be our ignorance that is showing.

John, for gosh sake, how can you as a professed life non-believer ask that? Of course science is inconsistent with belief in a creator. It is an inoffensive contradiction only to the extent that we don't know everything yet. We also don't know how life formed out of non-living matter (surely the greatest scientific challenge of our time), but it obviously did, and attributing it to a spark from heaven is completely arbitrary. Most modern scientists are in fact confirmed atheists, and I wouldn't use any historical figures as counter-examples. Newton, one of the half-dozen greatest scientists of all time, pursued alchemy with great enthusiasm in his later life. Kepler, and I'll give him credit for at least knowing that what he was doing was nonsense, routinely produced horoscopes. At the breathtaking risk of contradicting some very famous and great minds, the universe did not require creation. It's just there, and could not not be there.

I don't want anyone to think that I found loss of faith an easy process. It came to me only in my senior year in college, and was deeply painful. I would have done anything to find an intellectually acceptable way of reversing it. But if I must present a more complex picture to the outside world, to mine own self I must be true.

[barney]

Poor old Francis Collins (human genome project) or Alvin Plantinga (philosopher), wrapped up in their ignorance and stupidity.

We're lucky we have you to put us right, jbuck. And Dawkins and Grayling and Krauss etc, whose astounding ignorance of theology and philosophy they dismiss with "it's not worth bothering about". Every group has its fringe nutters - I'm appalled to think there is the slightest link between the Tea Party and myself, and I'm not sure there is, since I can't recognise their Christianity - but the snide self-righteous arrogance of the fundamentalist atheists, the self-proclaimed "brights", is a huge hindrance to their message.

Here's an interesting statistic. More than 6 million Australians declined to identify with religion in the last Australian Census, some 30 per cent. Not all were agnostics, many had their own reasons, just as many of those who answered Christian are probably cultural Christians at best. But of those 6 million only 59,000 called themselves atheists, about half the number who said they were Jedi knights. Examining your own post might help you understand why.

[barney]

Further to the above, one of the things that amuses me is that scientism is the last holdout of logical positivism, an intellectually incoherent position that was thoroughly discredited by the 1950s - the idea that we can only claim as true things that have been empirically verified. This foundational principle itself could not be empirically verified. Everyone ditched it, except the Dawkins/Krauss crowd, whose terminal disdain for anything outside science means they are incapable of the not very difficult philosophical work involved. That strikes me as wilful, culpable ignorance akin to sticking one's fingers in one's ears and saying lalalala very loudly. Perhaps ignorance is in the eye of the beholder.

[jbuck919]

We're lucky we have you to put us right, jbuck.

I can't tell from your posts whether you are being sarcastic or not. Around here I have to deal with this at the level of relatives who assume that they will be reunited with their families in heaven after death. Of course I don't try to talk them out of the comfort of that belief--that would be monstrous, and I'm basically a nice guy, incapable of militant atheism and unwilling even to express it outside the context of a highly educated and sophisticated community such as we have here.

Speaking of family deaths, my late mother was as strange a heterodox case as I have ever encountered. She typically believed in a creator God who answered prayers, and said them every day, even in the nursing home. (This was the only place I ever caught her saying them out loud, and she was praying that God would make her a better person, which I suppose is what she had said needlessly for 80 years or more.) She was also churched (in various denominations according to what was convenient) when she had a social context for attending church, but abandoned it when she started to live alone after her divorce from my father. (The only two times she attended church after moving to Stony Creek were when I took her on visits, ironically to the church where I am now the organist.) She also never went to Sunday Mass with us when I was a boy, because Sunday morning was the only time she could have the house to herself. (My father is a primary Catholic boy, but even he abandoned the faith decades ago.) But mainly, my mother had no belief in an afterlife. Her naive opinion, which IMO corresponds with the truth, was that we only live on in the hearts of the people who survive us, and that it is our moral obligation to make sure that this is a good memory. For that reason, my very religious Christian mother (in her own way) got cremation and a simple burial of the ashes according to her own often-expressed wish, with no ceremony at all, even though I could have sent her out in silk and satin with bells and smells because of my church connections.

[Tarantella]

nius thI've just read this thread to my husband as he was enjoying breakfast. He's impressed and so am I!! And it reminds me of why I contribute to CMG in the first place. All comments have validity in this discussion and the beauty of it is the lack of personal attack - especially in light of its delicate subject matter. I loved JohnB's observation that the universe may have existed all along - and may not have never existed. And I was moved by his comments about the 'struggle' with belief. Many of us can identify with that and his was an honest and somewhat intimate admission.

Hitchens had a gelid heart, from my reading of him in his own memoirs. He liked attention and longed for the kind of notoriety one receives from debunking religion. And it wasn't his only 'target'. His last television interviews reveal the posturing of an insecure agent provocateur and sometimes these were just embarrassing to witness.

This got me thinking about the role of the emotions in religion and whether or not that painful biblical story of Christ's suffering and death isn't, in its final analysis, providing a continuous powerful metaphor for human beings and their own lives. Self-sacrifice, suffering and kindness are part of the human condition, and self-sacrifice and kindness are both worthy and noble human qualities that few too many people practice in our hedonistic age. Trans-substantiation is a benign symbol of community, in my humble opinion. The act of sharing and wanting to emulate a Christ is, for some, a potent impulse. The ultimate role model.

As Sonnet so eloquently put it, the act of writing itself created a God in man's own image. Was this also an act of narcissism and hubris on the part of those very human creators?

And, of course, the elephant in the religion room is no less a gean JS Bach.

[SONNET CLV]

Can the same Deity that created quantum mechanics, atoms, molecules, DNA, the cosmos ... be the God of the Bible?

I am guessing that you are not actually interested in discussing the question.

Frankly, I have long subscribed to a definition of God presented by Buddha:

God both is and is not, neither is nor is not.

According to that definition, those who don't believe in a god are as valid as those who do.

And the definition has to be sound if one defines God as "unlimited", and I suspect if you ask the average believer "Does God have any limitations?" the answer you'll get is a positive "No."

Yet, these same folks generally insist that God must exist, thus limiting him to existence. In order for God to truly be unlimited, and thus possessed of ultimate power, he must be able to not exist with the same force as to exist. Only a God not limited to existence, a God who can also not exist, can be truly unlimited.

And that is Buddha's god. It's also my god (at least half of the definition) and the God of evangelicals (the other half of the definition). So the evangelicals' god and my non-existent god are equally valid, one could argue.

There remains the issue of -- does the Universe need a god? Could the Universe itself be god? It apparently created itself out of nothingness and it created us. Who needs heaven when we have the cosmos, and a consciousness to appreciate it?

The idea of a Heaven that lasts forever proves especially provocative, or provoking. I'm not sure most folks who believe their souls will "live forever in Heaven" or somewhere else have any real idea of how long forever is. Forever certainly outpaces the time period of our universe's existence. Forever is simply a very long long time.

As a youngster I pondered the matter in a catechism class. It led to the first time I was dismissed from the class. The Sister who conducted the lesson was telling us about Heaven and how our souls will reside there forever with God, and that once there we will know all the answers for we will be like God and possess limitless knowledge. Of course I had to ask: "So, Sister, when I go to Heaven, I will know everything?" And Sister said: "Yes, my son, you will have the answer to all the mysteries." "So," I continued, "how long before I go mad?" Sister was affronted. "What did you say?" "I said, if I know everything the moment I get into Heaven, how long will it be before I go mad, for surely there will be no reason to discuss anything with anyone, for I will already know all the answers, and I will have met everyone and know everything about them, and I will have read every book and heard every piece of music and know the names of every single animal even those that don't have names, and ..." At which point Sister got rather upset, very unlike a Sister I thought. She said, "If you continue speaking in that manner, you might end up in Hell." "Hell?" I questioned. "And what will happen to me in Hell, Sister?" Sister said: "In Hell you will suffer great pains from the eternal fires, and you will be unable to know anything since you won't be with God." "So," I said, "in Hell I won't know anything and I will be in great pain -- so, how long before I go mad?" It was at that point that Sister threw me out of the class.

I didn't even get a chance to ask her "If God is everywhere, like you said he was Sister, then God must also be in Hell. Right? And if God is in Hell then Hell must be like Heaven since God is there. Or is Hell a place where God is not, and so were you wrong, Sister, when you told us that God is everywhere?"

When I finally did get a chance to ask that question, it led to my second time being thrown out of catechism class.

pace e quiete

[jbuck919]

And, of course, the elephant in the religion room is no less a genius than JS Bach.

Bach's embarrassing pietism is hugely problematic, but as I have posted before, we wouldn't need this board if every great composer had been a follow-through atheist, because there would be no music to talk about. Beethoven was also heterodox, to say the least, but one has to navigate somehow around the manic and gratuitous expression of "über Sternenzelt muss ein lieber Vater wohnen." Truly atheist composer such as Brahms, Verdi, and at the risk of mentioning him in the same sentence Fauré, still could not have happened without the surround of the believing Christian world. It is a great contradiction, and another reason to respect credal Christianity, as long as it is consistent with humanism, which historically is asking a lot but has been at least possible for several centuries..

[Tarantella]

And, of course, the elephant in the religion room is no less a genius than JS Bach.

Bach's embarrassing pietism is hugely problematic, but as I have posted before, we wouldn't need this board if every great composer had been a follow-through atheist, because there would be no music to talk about. Beethoven was also heterodox, to say the least, but one has to navigate somehow around the manic and gratuitous expression of "über Sternenzelt muss ein lieber Vater wohnen." Truly atheist composer such as Brahms, Verdi, and at the risk of mentioning him in the same sentence Fauré, still could not have happened without the surround of the believing Christian world. It is a great contradiction, and another reason to respect credal Christianity, as long as it is consistent with humanism, which historically is asking a lot but has been at least possible for several centuries..

I submit that religion wasn't the only area where Beethoven held unorthodox opinions. He was capable of "three seasons in a day" and very changeable on a range of things - not least his relationships with people.

[piston]

One question that has been seriously testing my faith, this year, is why Jesus was taken down from the cross to begin with? Was he so special, to Roman authority, especially the brutal Pilate, to deserve a different faith than all those who were sacrificed on the cross: stay there, bleed to death, and rot to pieces? Especially if he was so provocative and controversial to Roman authority, why would they have accepted to give him a decent burial place?! Were they touched by his "beauty" in death? Who, exactly, obtained this exceptional permission from Roman leaders? Anybody knows?

It was an invariable practice of the Romans to leave the condemned on the cross. It does not help my faith that this story of resurrection is so much associated with the "mystical and subjective" Paul and not with the "physical and objective" twelve apostles.

So, how and in response to whose powerful influence was Jesus's body taken off the cross and given a decent burial place?

[Chalkperson]

One question that has been seriously testing my faith, this year, is why Jesus was taken down from the cross to begin with? Was he so special, to Roman authority, especially the brutal Pilate, to deserve a different faith than all those who were sacrificed on the cross: stay there, bleed to death, and rot to pieces? Especially if he was so provocative and controversial to Roman authority, why would they have accepted to give him a decent burial place?! Were they touched by his "beauty" in death? Who, exactly, obtained this exceptional permission from Roman leaders? Anybody knows?

It was an invariable practice of the Romans to leave the condemned on the cross. It does not help my faith that this story of resurrection is so much associated with the "mystical and subjective" Paul and not with the "physical and objective" twelve apostles.

So, how and in response to whose powerful influence was Jesus's body taken off the cross and given a decent burial place?

I always assumed he was helped to die reasonably quickly and then taken down because of his status as King of the Jews, and if the Roman's did not do it his supporters might and then there would be hell to pay.

Not that i'm in any way religious, but if I was Pilate that's what I would have done...

I was in Morocco in 1987, near Warzazat, David Bowie was playing Pontius Pilate for Marty Scorsese...

[lennygoran]

Around here I have to deal with this at the level of relatives who assume that they will be reunited with their families in heaven after death.

Well what about me-I have to go to the seder dinners and listen to talk about the parting of the Red Sea--it's a good thing they serve chopped liver! Regards, Len [agnostic]

[Tarantella]

Around here I have to deal with this at the level of relatives who assume that they will be reunited with their families in heaven after death.

Well what about me-I have to go to the seder dinners and listen to talk about the parting of the Red Sea--it's a good thing they serve chopped liver! Regards, Len [agnostic]

What about Moses having to spend time with a "talking Bush"? Last time somebody did that there was hell to pay!!!

But on the question raised by Piston of the burial status of Christ; it is easy to forget that Christ was provocative to the Romans, and a distinct threat. A colleague of mine in teaching - a hugely funny one - once commented upon the Roman belief in many gods; they were a pantheist culture. She used to say, "All of a sudden a man came along and said to them, effectively, 'stop believing everything you believe about your gods; it isn't true; there's just me and m'Dad"!! I think it would be an understatement to suggest this didn't go over well!

I'm not meaning to be facetious here - merely pointing out the existential threat Christ must have posed to the Romans.

[jbuck919]

One question that has been seriously testing my faith, this year, is why Jesus was taken down from the cross to begin with? Was he so special, to Roman authority, especially the brutal Pilate, to deserve a different faith than all those who were sacrificed on the cross: stay there, bleed to death, and rot to pieces? Especially if he was so provocative and controversial to Roman authority, why would they have accepted to give him a decent burial place?! Were they touched by his "beauty" in death? Who, exactly, obtained this exceptional permission from Roman leaders? Anybody knows?

It was an invariable practice of the Romans to leave the condemned on the cross. It does not help my faith that this story of resurrection is so much associated with the "mystical and subjective" Paul and not with the "physical and objective" twelve apostles.

So, how and in response to whose powerful influence was Jesus's body taken off the cross and given a decent burial place?

I always assumed he was helped to die reasonably quickly and then taken down because of his status as King of the Jews, and if the Roman's did not do it his supporters might and then there would be hell to pay.

You're both slightly wrong. It is clear from every account that Jesus was treated as a common criminal, his offense being incitement, of which he was clearly guilty. His claim to be king of the Jews was treated entirely sarcastically by his uncaring and brutish executioners. The fact that the Romans crucified every third person who looked at them askance except for the ones they beheaded keeps Jesus from being very special in this regard.

The Romans had several motivations for removing a body ASAP from the cross, the primary one being that they wanted to get home, and couldn't leave their post with a living being hanging there who might still be rescued. That's why they broke the legs or shoved a lance through the heart. Crucifixion is ultimately a death by asphyxiation, when the person hanging can no longer push himself up to breathe. If you break the legs and prevent pushing up, you hasten the death. The second motivation, related to the first, was pure mercy. Even those hard-bitten Roman soldiers knew when they were looking at somebody who had hung in unspeakable agony for hours. No normal person could ever deal with that to the point of the ultimate outcome, which might have taken days. Finally, they would not keep a corpse on the cross for obvious reasons. They needed the standard for the next prisoner, and it doesn't take modern science to know that you have to dispose of a corpse for sanitary reasons.

Clearly, Jesus died early on the cross, after hanging for only three hours, for what reason we cannot know, but there is a rule in textual criticism of the Gospels that if there is no motivation to make up a story that is not flattering to the faith, then it is probably true. (The last words from the cross, in contrast, are probably all fabrications with the possible exception of "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?") The Romans didn't have to break Jesus's legs to hasten death, but they did lance his heart to make sure he really was dead.

[John F]

But if you're a Christian, that's exactly what you must believe.

Trust me, there are dissembling Christians all over the place, and have been for a very long time.

Then they aren't really Christians, are they? Christianity is defined not only by its history but by an irreducible core of beliefs and teachings. Those who disbelieve may be good people, indeed better people than those who believe, but in what way are they truly Christians?

Is it incredible or impossible that there is an omnipotent God behind the curtain? It's never been proved there isn't and it can't be proved, which is why quite a few scientists - modern critically thinking persons if any of us are - have been believers and do not see it as a contradiction. So I wouldn't argue one way or the other. After all, it might be our ignorance that is showing.

John, for gosh sake, how can you as a professed life non-believer ask that?

First I typed an I, then I typed an s, then a space, then another i... Let's skip the rhetorical questions and focus on real ones.

I know everything you go on to say, but I don't consider that you have answered me. As soon as one posits an omnipotent supreme being, then the whole nature of reality changes, including science. We watch a performance of "Hamlet" and see a world that is consistent in itself and with what we perceive in the world around us, but though in that sense it is realistic, it is not actually real. We then watch a performance of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," and "Hamlet" becomes even more realistic because Stoppard's title characters are just like people we know, yet they are caught up in the action of "Hamlet" as if it were really going on right now. But of course it isn't reality, it's a fiction. Shakespeare and Stoppard are the omnipotent creators of the worlds within their plays. What if we, like Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are acting out our lives within a world that didn't create itself (the scientific view) but was created, down to the last detail and scientific law, by some agency outside itself? A world in which, for example, tossing a coin, any coin, always comes up heads?

You may see in this a variant of the Chinese philosopher's meditation on his dream that he was a butterfly, and on waking did not know whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is a man. Another way of putting it is solipsism. Our entire experience of what we call and believe to be reality is dependent on the brain. What if all that exists is that brain, and everything we see or touch or sense does not really exist out there but is the creation of our - my - own brain?

That's how I can ask the question you complain about. My personal answer is that there is no divine Shakespeare or Stoppard behind the world around me, that what appears to be real actually is real, and I'm persuaded that science is the best way humans have yet devised for understanding the world. I certainly don't want to associate myself with the kind of people who prattle about Creation Science. But as an open-minded if definitely amateur philosopher, with no stake in this because I'm not a scientist myself, I must concede that I could be wrong, and there is no way to prove I'm right without assuming axioms that decide the question even before we begin the discussion, or debate, or whatever.

I don't know whether you would consider this an intellectually acceptable way of reversing your loss of faith. No, I take it back, I'm sure you wouldn't. But if there's an intellectually definitive way to refute solipsism as a view of the world and oneself, or more specifically a view of the world that includes an omnipotent God and all that entails, I don't know it.

[piston]

One question that has been seriously testing my faith, this year, is why Jesus was taken down from the cross to begin with? Was he so special, to Roman authority, especially the brutal Pilate, to deserve a different faith than all those who were sacrificed on the cross: stay there, bleed to death, and rot to pieces? Especially if he was so provocative and controversial to Roman authority, why would they have accepted to give him a decent burial place?! Were they touched by his "beauty" in death? Who, exactly, obtained this exceptional permission from Roman leaders? Anybody knows?

It was an invariable practice of the Romans to leave the condemned on the cross. It does not help my faith that this story of resurrection is so much associated with the "mystical and subjective" Paul and not with the "physical and objective" twelve apostles.

So, how and in response to whose powerful influence was Jesus's body taken off the cross and given a decent burial place?

I always assumed he was helped to die reasonably quickly and then taken down because of his status as King of the Jews, and if the Roman's did not do it his supporters might and then there would be hell to pay.

You're both slightly wrong. It is clear from every account that Jesus was treated as a common criminal, his offense being incitement, of which he was clearly guilty. His claim to be king of the Jews was treated entirely sarcastically by his uncaring and brutish executioners. The fact that the Romans crucified every third person who looked at them askance except for the ones they beheaded keeps Jesus from being very special in this regard.

The Romans had several motivations for removing a body ASAP from the cross, the primary one being that they wanted to get home, and couldn't leave their post with a living being hanging there who might still be rescued. That's why they broke the legs or shoved a lance through the heart. Crucifixion is ultimately a death by asphyxiation, when the person hanging can no longer push himself up to breathe. If you break the legs and prevent pushing up, you hasten the death. The second motivation, related to the first, was pure mercy. Even those hard-bitten Roman soldiers knew when they were looking at somebody who had hung in unspeakable agony for hours. No normal person could ever deal with that to the point of the ultimate outcome, which might have taken days. Finally, they would not keep a corpse on the cross for obvious reasons. They needed the standard for the next prisoner, and it doesn't take modern science to know that you have to dispose of a corpse for sanitary reasons.

Clearly, Jesus died early on the cross, after hanging for only three hours, for what reason we cannot know, but there is a rule in textual criticism of the Gospels that if there is no motivation to make up a story that is not flattering to the faith, then it is probably true. (The last words from the cross, in contrast, are probably all fabrications with the possible exception of "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?") The Romans didn't have to break Jesus's legs to hasten death, but they did lance his heart to make sure he really was dead.

From what I read on wiki ("Roman crucifixion"), death by asphyxiation is the theory of a single author, one Barbet. The interesting archaeological fact about the remains of thousands of crucified criminals and dissidents is that only one such artifact was ever unearthed, in 1968, a research result which gives credence to the notion that Romans left the corpses on the cross where they served as food for predators. The written record itself, from Jewish historian Josephus, refers to some crucified individuals surviving for such a remarkably long time as to provide a reason for removing them and attempting to bring them back to health. Obviously not the case of Jesus. What are your sources, John?

[lennygoran]

[quote="Tarantella"

What about Moses having to spend time with a "talking Bush"? Last time somebody did that there was hell to pay!!![/quote]

Sue well why do you think I spend so much time in the garden--we've planted so many bushes over the years I don't know who to talk to first--and there has been hell to pay-it's called weeding. The crab grass coming up now is worse than the 10 Passover plagues.

[lennygoran]

Clearly, Jesus died early on the cross, after hanging for only three hours, for what reason we cannot know,

Those Roman guards wanted that shroud-what an investment--they realized the tourist money that would some day bring in! Regards, Len

[lennygoran]

But if there's an intellectually definitive way to refute solipsism as a view of the world and oneself, or more specifically a view of the world that includes an omnipotent God and all that entails, I don't know it.

Agree with you on God but one thing I'm convinced of--science tells me there's no such thing as the resurrection. Regards, Len [agnostic]

[John F]

But if there's an intellectually definitive way to refute solipsism as a view of the world and oneself, or more specifically a view of the world that includes an omnipotent God and all that entails, I don't know it.

Agree with you on God but one thing I'm convinced of--science tells me there's no such thing as the resurrection. Regards, Len [agnostic]

My point is that there may be more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in science.

[karlhenning]

Agree with you on God but one thing I'm convinced of--science tells me there's no such thing as the resurrection. Regards, Len [agnostic]

Agree with you, Len, but one thing I'm convinced of — science tells me that science is always learning things, which the science of 50 years ago knew nothing of.

That is, there's no way that can happen, because Science tells me so, is at some level a bit of a dodge.

Just wish to note that as long as everyone here is okay with John's "depth of religious ignorance" sneer, this thread reinforces the point that we all agree, every man jack of us, that bigotry is an irredeemably contemptible trait; except that some of us feel that bigotry is 100% kosher when the object of your bigotry is people of faith.

And the shame is, some of you are totally cool with that.

Cheers,
~Karl

[karlhenning]

God both is and is not, neither is nor is not.

According to that definition, those who don't believe in a god are as valid as those who do.

I have no quarrel with that.

And, if you endorse that definition, you should have no quarrel with the neighbor who believes in God. Nor should you have a stake in tendentiously reading the Hebrew Scriptures.

Or do I fail to understand the definition?

Pace e bene,
~Karl

[John F]

as long as everyone here is okay with John's "depth of religious ignorance" sneer, this thread reinforces the point that we all agree, every man jack of us, that bigotry is an irredeemably contemptible trait; except that some of us feel that bigotry is 100% kosher when the object of your bigotry is people of faith

Has anyone here but SONNET CLV actually agreed as you say? I don't see it. The absence of comments one way or the other doesn't mean assent, as you take it to; nobody asked for a poll. And I've just argued at length against jbuck919 assertion about "depth of religious ignorance." If you want to make a personal issue of it, of course you can (and you have), but it never struck me that way, and I'm sure John didn't intend it to be taken personally by you or anyone else in this forum. Your calling him a bigot, however, even without directly naming him, was intended, wasn't it? At least that's how it struck me.

As for bigotry, does it really apply to anyone with strongly held beliefs or opinions on topics such as religion or race? I've always taken it to refer to irrational derogatory beliefs, and though jbuck919's view of religion is certainly derogatory, I don't see that it's irrational.

[lennygoran]

My point is that there may be more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in science.

Yes agree--I've been watching some of the new Cosmos series and Neil Tyson constantly acknowledges this which is exactly why scientific principles have to be pushed more and more forward to explore all this--there's so much still unknown--religion must never be allowed to interfere. Regards, Len

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_ ... me_Odyssey

[John F]

You don't agree, because you believe that everything is knowable if we do enough science, and I've just questioned that. Science only applies to hypotheses that are capable of being refuted by the use of scientific method. But just because a hypothesis can't be refuted doesn't mean it's wrong - to the contrary, some would say - only that it's not scientific.

[karlhenning]

Has anyone here but SONNET CLV actually agreed as you say? I don't see it. The absence of comments one way or the other doesn't mean assent.

Fair enough.

Pace e bene,
~Karl

[karlhenning]

Although, you know . . . say I was in a group of four friends, one of whom makes a snide comment about (random example) Indians. Obviously there are considerations of when to say something, and how to say it, so that it communicates something; still, if none of us remaining three say anything, that fourth is going to feel reinforced in his bigotry. In this case, the silence is not assent, but is not entirely innocent, either, perhaps.

Then, too, this is the Internet; and when someone elects not to hear something, no person else can compel the hearing.

Pace e bene,
~Karl

[lennygoran]

You don't agree, because you believe that everything is knowable if we do enough science, and I've just questioned that.

Maybe there are other things but one has to make choices--science has led the way imo-if there's anything else which could be out there so be it but my money is on science! Regards, Len

[piston]

I like Helmut Koester's approach to the story of Jesus Christ, an older Harvard Divinity School scholar. As we know, this story was originally based on oral traditions because the first life stories of Jesus were only written one full generation after his death. The oral traditions, themselves, were probably not narratives of his life but bits of stories, perhaps hymns that served to bind together, to build the faith, and to create spiritual order in the first Christian communities. Paul's First Corinthians is still not about Jesus' life and reflects what this early Christian community most needed to remember twenty years after the crucifixion:

Paul himself, remember, doesn't write a gospel. He actually doesn't tell us much about the life of Jesus at all. He never once mentions a miracle story. He tells us nothing about the birth. He never tells us anything about teaching in parables or any of those other typical features of the gospel tradition of Jesus. What Paul does tell us about is the death, and he does so in a form that indicates that he's actually reciting a well-known body of material. So when he tells us, "I received and I handed on to you," he's referring to his preaching, but he's also telling us that what he preaches, that is the material that he delivers, is actually developed through the oral tradition itself.

Oral traditions are invariably "presentist" in that they have to be relevant to listeners' contemporary needs. Accordingly, the "Passion story" of a wise man in the form of God rising from the dead, visiting his disciples, living in spirit within this early community is what Paul reported on, but, incidentally, without any mention of an empty tomb.

Now here's what he tells us, he says that Jesus died, was buried, was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, he relates it to prophecy. Then he says, "Jesus appeared". He doesn't tell us about the empty tomb. There's no reference to that part of the story at all. Instead he tells us Jesus appeared, first to Peter and then the twelve, next to 500 people, some of whom had already died by the time Paul heard the story.

Koester argues that:"the first oral tradition is not an attempt to remember exactly what happened, but is rather a return into the symbols of the tradition that could explain an event." Symbols that served to explain an event in the devastating wake of the death of a spiritual leader. A very old hymn, recorded by Paul, spoke of Jesus as one "who was in the form of God who humiliated himself and was obedient even to death on the cross, and was therefore raised high up by God."

So oral tradition develops as the community looks for a recreation of memory in community life. The same thing also happens to the words of Jesus as they are remembered, because the words of Jesus are not remembered in order to record Jesus' wonderful preaching, but they are remembered in order to find in the words of Jesus wisdom for the ordering of the life of the new community.

This study is entirely consistent with what we know about oral traditions, including the fact that a narrative of an individual's whole life only comes later and only consists of some fragments of these oral traditions.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... /oral.html

[jbuck919]

I've lost track of who said what to whom in this now extensive thread, but let me make it clear that I don't believe science can explain everything given enough time, and I don't think most scientists would claim that it can. To make such a claim would itself be unscientific. I do hold out hope that before I die we will understand the origin of life, which does not seem to me to be beyond our abilities given everything else we've figured out, but there are meta-cognitive unknowables imposed by the limits of what humans are capable of conceiving in their brains. Still, it is remarkable how much we have been able to encompass since the development of modern science--far more, surely, than we needed to know to survive as a species after we evolved. We are both too smart and not smart enough.

No, my problem is allowing for the possibility of a God filling in the gaps, so to speak. That's fallacious thinking with a very unhappy history. God or gods have historically been used to explain everything people did not understand, which makes theistic explanations of what we still don't understand extremely suspect. What we don't know, we just don't know. There is no need to posit and then invoke a deity because we cannot and do not know everything, and it's not terribly flattering to the species that this has been the almost universal way we have addressed our contingent and evanescent existence. I'm willing to allow that atheism is a luxury given the need of people to find hope and meaning out of the calamity of so short life.

There is a famous story about the great mathematician LaPlace, who wrote one of the great scientific cosmologies. Napoleon asked him why he never mentioned God in it. His response was "Sire, I had no need for that hypothesis." Napoleon's disingenuous tongue-in-cheek response, "Ah but that hypothesis explains so much" is just more grist for the atheist's mill.

[John F]

my problem is allowing for the possibility of a God filling in the gaps, so to speak

Though others may think that, it's not what I had in mind when saying that an omnipotent God remains an intellectual or philosophical possibility. Such a God, able to do whatever He chooses, could certainly create a universe that's consistent with what we call science, the laws of nature, and to create in us the ability to discover those laws without the aid of prophecy or divine revelation. I haven't said that this did happen, only that it could have happened, and that to dismiss the possibility is not justified by human reason, including science itself.

There remains, of course, the Bible. An omnipotent God could indeed have inspired it, but without warranting that everything in it is a true revelation of His activities and purposes. Why wouldn't it be? It could be another test of human development, our discovery of its untruths and courage to admit them being a complement to our discovery of the actual laws of nature.

Do I believe any of this actually happened? No, and probably nobody else does either. Christians would have a problem with God knowingly inspiring an untruthful holy book; non-Christians, with there being an omnipotent God at all. But show me how it couldn't possibly have happened.

[John F]

Although, you know . . . say I was in a group of four friends, one of whom makes a snide comment about (random example) Indians. Obviously there are considerations of when to say something, and how to say it, so that it communicates something; still, if none of us remaining three say anything, that fourth is going to feel reinforced in his bigotry. In this case, the silence is not assent, but is not entirely innocent, either, perhaps.

Speaking only for myself, I have not commented on the phrase you objected to because I was sure John did not mean it to apply directly and personally to you, and was surprised when you took offense. That said, I too can be sensitive to what I take as personal insults, so I can't blame you or say you were wrong. That said, perhaps you'll understand that your claim that silence amounts to bigotry does not sit well with me; though I was silent, I am not a bigot. If you can take a general comment to apply to you personally, why shouldn't I?

[jbuck919]

my problem is allowing for the possibility of a God filling in the gaps, so to speak

Though others may think that, it's not what I had in mind when saying that an omnipotent God remains an intellectual or philosophical possibility.

I know what you had in mind, John. I don't find much of philosophy to be that far removed from religion, being speculative in nature and owing much of its power to the ancient notion that the man who could make the most compelling if non-evidence-based argument must be the one who is closest to the truth. On that basis we should all be worshipful Christians, since the sophistical argumentation of the epistles in the New Testament is often so seductive. Socrates, who made an argument for an afterlife that is pure sophistry, was as full of baloney as any later philosophical or religious thinker. "There are more things in heaven and earth..." is a line from a work of literature that also assumes that one of those things is ghosts communicating from the dead.

[John F]

"There are more things in heaven and earth..." is a line from a work of literature that also assumes that one of those things is ghosts communicating from the dead.

It's also an allusion to my example of Shakespeare (and Stoppard) as omnipotent creators of worlds in which they determine what happens - including the existence of ghosts.

[jbuck919]

"There are more things in heaven and earth..." is a line from a work of literature that also assumes that one of those things is ghosts communicating from the dead.

It's also an allusion to my example of Shakespeare (and Stoppard) as omnipotent creators of worlds in which they determine what happens - including the existence of ghosts.

John B to Shakespeare and considering same for Stoppard: Ego te absolvo in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.

[lennygoran]

Ego te absolvo in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.

Sure ruin the whole thread for me with this incomprehensible foreign language statement. Regards, Len

[John F]

If you're actually serious:

https://translate.google.com/

[jbuck919]

Ego te absolvo in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.

Sure ruin the whole thread for me with this incomprehensible foreign language statement. Regards, Len

I'm sorry, Len. This is the classic Latin formula with which the priest absolves the penitent, or did when all of this stuff was done in Latin. My point was that Shakespeare should be forgiven everything, including summoning up ghosts as he does in four plays even though he surely did not believe in them himself, while at the same time he does not really need my absolution.

As an aside, in Measure for Measure, the Duke disguised as a monk says something hugely sacrilegious, almost blasphemous, that goes by so fast that one might not notice. Speaking of Mariana, a woman whose virtue has actually been compromised, he says "I have confessed her, and I know her virtue." Impersonating a priest to the extent of performing a sacramental act is a deadly sin, yet the Duke is quite the noble hero of the story.

Oh yeah, the translation. "I absolve you [of your sins], in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." Said by every priest on the other side of the confessional for many centuries.

[Tarantella]

And how many times have I heard those very words!! When I was a small child in a Catholic school I had to go to confession. Each week I had to wrack my brain to summon up a "sin" and I lived in fear that the priest would remember the one from the week before!! Such are the workings of the 9 year old brain. My 'repertoire' of sins was limited to the usual suspects of what I now regard as no sins at all. My sisters and I laughed heartily and amused ourselves, throwing around sins which we could alternately 'confess' each week. As I grew older I became emboldened by cheeky girlfriends and would "confess" fabrications like, "I let a boy put his hand on my breasts" for a dare! Hilarity ensued afterwards.

Mea culpa; mea maxima culpa (or, as we used to say in Australia, 'me a cowboy; me a Mexican cowboy'!)

Meanwhile, my second sister had a vivid imagination and spent many sleepless nights worried about being tortured by stretching on "the rack" because she was a Catholic and "the Communists" were going to get her. Seriously, we were 'taught' this tripe. I used to laugh and create dissent but my conforming sister imbibed this stuff in deadly earnest. Even in those early years she was already a fan of gothic fiction!!

[jbuck919]

Mea culpa; mea maxima culpa (or, as we used to say in Australia, 'me a cowboy; me a Mexican cowboy'!)

I'm going to overlook that and decide that I still like Australians. Of course, Americans are responsible for "ominous Nabisco" (Dominus vobiscum).

Meanwhile, my second sister had a vivid imagination and spent many sleepless nights worried about being tortured by stretching on "the rack" because she was a Catholic and "the Communists" were going to get her. Seriously, we were 'taught' this tripe. I used to laugh and create dissent but my conforming sister imbibed this stuff in deadly earnest. Even in those early years she was already a fan of gothic fiction!!

I'm sorry that your sister took it personally, but the anti-Communism of the Catholic Church is mainly to its credit. One of my great difficulties with my own non-belief is what happened in the only countries where it was official.

Personal confession to the level of particulars is an awful aspect of Catholicism. It has no primary role in Christianity, having arisen as a practice of Irish monks in the Middle Ages. I can't think of a redeeming word to say about it. You can bet that John Kennedy, who pro forma even as President was driven to some church on a regular basis to fulfill a technical obligation, never told a priest "This week, father, I f__ed three women who were not my wife while I completely neglected the glamorous woman I'm lucky enough to be married to." Nobody but a fool ever confessed criminally serious or personally embarrassing sin, Hitchcock's "I Confess" notwithstanding. Instead they admit that they ate meat on Good Friday and feel themselves absolved from all their more serious offenses with a penance of saying three Hail Marys.

"I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me."

[Tarantella]

"I Confess" is an interesting case in point. Hitchcock had significant hang-ups about Catholicism and it's amazing just how much there is of it in his films, one way or another. Joseph McBride writes fairly sympathetically about it in his excellent Hitchcock biography, while Donald Spoto follows the prurient line painting Hitchcock as a disturbed pervert. A real Roshomon experience!!

To what extent Catholicism can be 'blamed' for Hitchcock's pecadilloes we will never know, but it had a powerful ability to hurt people very seriously. My sister was merely a child when she experienced her nightmares about Communism and "the rack". I couldn't forgive this, even then. A child with a very fertile imagination was particularly at risk.

And yet, I've met the most intelligent, liberal-minded, humorous, beer-drinking and fun-loving priests (one of whom was moved away from the parish because he was 'troublesome'!) and I enjoyed long and complex discussions with one or two long after I'd deserted the church. One used to come to my place regularly to discuss Mozart - back in the 1990's - on a Wednesday, when he knew I'd have cakes and good coffee!! During one such conversation Veritatis Splendor came up. I asked him what he thought of this and he smiled and said, "A hard ask"!!

Nowadays I feel the same way you do about the Church - its rituals and community. Especially Austrian style!