St. Paul: New and Improved

Another book which shows too that Paul wrote about the equality of women in the church is by John T. Bristow and I think it is called What Paul Really Wrote About Women. Great book that looks at the original Greek and Hebrew translations of what he wrote and which letters are authentic too.

Rex Weyler's excellent book, published in 2008 called The Jesus Sayings is also excellent and also addresses this as well as a lot of other fascinating issues. A real page turner and very good.

Did you see the two letters to the New York Times Book Review editor yesterday, one from Harvey Cox, the other from another professor of divinity, criticizing the stoooopid review of Karen Armstrong's latest book?

The review missed the point of her scholarship entirely, and Cox and the other man pointed out that readers of scripture for centuries understood it to be symbolic. It's only in the past few centuries that anyone pretends/thinks the Hebrew scriptures, the gospels, and the epistles are meant to be taken literally and were actually written by the authors assigned to them.

The priests of today are too lazy/chicken/ignorant to instruct parishioners in scripture scholarship. Easier to talk about abortion.

I recently received a copy of this excellent book, and certainly squirmed while required to read in Mexico at the daily and Sunday Masses passages from the dubious letter to the Romans upon which Luther and Calvin built their churches, declaring we have no need for acts such as loving our enemy or healing the sick, but simply believing.

I prefer to return to the recent readings from the authentic Saint James, whom Luther ejected from his biblical canon, and who declares faith without acts is dead, and that even the devil believes, and trembles, and that the wisdom from above is peaceful, gentle and friendly (i.e. nonviolent).

We must all read this important book.

Yes, yes, yes. Because it's vitally important to the faith of the individual believer that he be up-to-date on the latest trends in gleefully snobby heterodoxy.

How ever are we to disenchant those poor rubes of their notions of a literal God, and get them to embrace sophisticated know-it-all-ism, if they aren't up to speed with the latest incarnation, not only of the "historical Jesus," but the historical Peters and Pauls, too?

Borg and Crossan demonstrate many things, but most notably that a scholar can't get money and fame and the attention of their peers for saying what other scholars have said before; only for saying something sufficiently new and "daring." For there is no such thing as bad publicity, and it is dull for an expert to say that something generally thought to be true for two thousand years is, in the end, merely true. One doesn't get tenure THAT way!

This is why Shakespeare was a pseudonym and Napoleon was a closeted homosexual and Jesus was diddling John, and David, Jonathan. It is why Paul's "thorn" was habitual masturbation, and the real meaning of the gospel was Marxism. There is a new crop of these theses each year, and they mostly demonstrate that the Bible is, for some folk, less of a love letter from God, and more of a Rorschach blot.

When a man touches Crossan's sportcoat and is healed of cancer, when a movement for canonization is touting Borg's biography of heroic self-denial, [i]then[/i] will I begin to be convinced that these theories are vital for the spiritual maturity and sanctification of the plumber in the third pew.

Until then? Please. When the average Catholic can quote even five verses from the traditional Pauline corpus off the top of his head, and say why they're personally meaningful, the Church and the world will get far more mileage out of it, than were they all able to recite Crossan and Borg's entire tiresome retread.

Maybe we should just get rid of the epistles that weren't supposedly written by Paul. Tearing books out of the Bible would definitely make things on liberals in the Church.

Marcion is always with us, except that those who follow his method these days shred the Pauline corpus into authentic and "deutero-Pauline," with the aim of discarding the latter. From Sr. Fiedler's squib, this latest tome seems to rehash a lot of the same shopworn hypotheses.

While both Borg and Crossan are far, far beyond the mainstream of biblical scholarship (Crossan originally postulated that Jesus' body was eaten by dogs, and Borg denies any physical component to the Resurrection, I happily concede that the former is by all accounts a gentleman willing to engage orthodox opposition. Crossan is more concerned with placating fellow scholarly radicals. For example, he discarded his "the dog ate it" argument on that part of the Resurrection (he still firmly denies Jesus actually rose) when challenged by a feminist scholar, who argued that Crossan's hypothesis devalued the women who met the Resurrected Lord.

Oh, and even in the "authentic" canon, we see Paul "upholding" slavery by returning a slave to his master--Philemon. Paul was undoubtedly a revolutionary--his letters contain counter-imperial proclamations of Jesus, and only Jesus--as Lord, but the radical egalitarian hypothesis is anachronism, pure and simple.

Actually, I'm not a doctor. Since your signature suggests you may not be a native speaker of English, the D and R are called "initials," which abbreviate my first two names to their first--"initial"--letters. In English, Doctor is abbreviated "Dr." not "DR".

And my point that Onesimus was returned to slavery stands unrebutted. Paul enjoined them both to remember Christian love and brotherhood in that relationship, to be sure, but--in an "authentic" letter, no less--he did not object to the slavery system. Which, it must be emphasized, was much different from America's more hideous version.

Really, you should be careful not to misstate the scriptures that way. Same thing with your gross dismissal of Romans, where Paul reminds the reader that we will be judged on our works right there in Chapter 2. The fact Luther, Calvin and others misinterpreted Romans does not detract from its profound beauty as the Queen of Epistles.

Perhaps this stems from, as I noted above, a lack of complete familiarity and comfort with the English language. I hope you will be open to revising your assessments as you become more familiar with the language.