I Predict. . .

Ok, having slept on it, I'm ready to do a little prognostication on the subject of the previous post, namely:

What are the foreseeable results of the clash between civilisations known as the Cartoon Conundrum?

1. Free Speech is on its way out. This process which began when (closed-ended) Government Censorship in time of War was replaced by (open-ended) Government Censorship during time of Conflict (War itself having been defined away by the United Nations, but conflict having never having ceased during, and despite, the existence of that August Body). This event will only serve to hasten the process. The new paradigm, however, will be in every way touted as better and freer than the old. Sic semper tyrannus.

2. The Danish Flag is on its way out. Ironically, Danes were proverbial for their vicious and unsparing predation of the coasts of Northern Europe prior to their acceptance of Christianity as a state religion (still in effect), and the Cross as the national emblem on their flag (still in effect).

Disestablishing the Danish Lutheran Church would be like eliminating a major welfare program: it would put a lot of powerful people out of work, and offend more than it placated. So I don't see that happening as an inevitable result of this conflict, although given their relative growth rates of the two populations, within a decade or two there will be more people each week in Denmark attending mosques than churches.

But changing the flag is much easier; a simple vote of the Legislature, if not vetoed by the Executive, should suffice to effect a removal of the Crusader emblem from the national flag. The order may even come down from a superior court of the European Union. I expect this change to take effect about as soon as the last Danish veteran of WWII is positioned above his grave draped in the flag under which he once fought.

The Cartoon Conundrum--time for the Tenth Crusade?

The forces of Radical Islam have unleashed a new Intifada upon the civilized world. Interestingly enough, few of the Islamists who have rioted over the cartoons supposedly depicting Mohammed have even seen any of the artwork. It was enough for them to be told that it existed, and that its existence necessitated a renewed jihad against infidels everywhere.

Western (read: Non-totalitarian) governments are caught in a conundrum. They can't ban the art, because to deny the right of an artist to make a non-inflammatory depiction of a historical figure solely because someone will thereby become offended, even violently so, is inconsistent with any remaining notion of Free Speech. On the other hand, accustomed to being able to slap Christians in jail for Hate Crimes just because they publicly opposed a Gay Parade, these governments are frustrated at their inability to placate Radical Islam with toothless apologies and repeated calls for tolerance.

It is starting to dawn on some people, perhaps, what was painfully obvious to Catholics from Europe who attempted to make pilgrimages to the Holy Land around the turn of the 12 century: Muslims and anti-Muslims cannot practice their respective faiths in the same place and at the same time. That first realization launched, over the course of the next two centuries, a full nine different Crusades, which each managed to, however temporarily, dislodge the Muslim foe guarding the Christian holy sites against the entry of pilgrims. These came to an end when the Turks finally overran the Kingdom of Jerusalem for the last time, and, taking the battle back to the enemy as it were, began closing in on Constantinople. For the next few centuries Christendom was in a pitched battle for survival which did not come to an end militarily until the vanquished Ottoman Empire was partitioned by the winners of World War One.

Unable to meet the foe in pitched battle, Jihad has now gone global, with major victories in New York, Madrid, and London. The aim is the same now as it always was: to bring the infidel nations of the world into subjection to Islam.

Islamists have thrown down a mighty gauntlet to the governments of the Free World, saying essentially what the original Messengers of the Prophet said to the three emperors of Christendom: "Submit to Islam, or die!"
The emperors refused, and their empires all fell to the scimitar, leaving only small remnant populations behind to forever live as an oppressed minorities in a vast Muslim empire: the Copts in Egypt, the Assyrians in Syria and points westward, and the Armenians and Serbians in what had been the Ottoman Empire. Only on the Greek and Iberian peninsulas did the majority non-Muslim population endure through the centuries of Muslim occupation--and to this day these are the only two countries in existence to have shrugged off their Muslim oppressors once and for all.

The Global War on [Islamist] Terror has taken on a very broad front.
So far, the only response to this latest offensive has been diplomacy. I don't know what our governments ultimately plan to do about this, but it's looking to me very much like the lead-up to the Battle of Senlac Hill. The regime change that was brought about that day has endured to this, nearly a millennium later.

Eructation and Ecrutation

The word is from Latin eructatio, from eructare, from e-, "out" + ructare, "to belch."

I came across this word on a web forum as a component of the phrase, "Male Bovine Eructation." In other words, "Bull Burp". Having raised bulls, I'm aware that they are not so much known for their burping (a process by which they bring forth cud for further processing), as for what they bring forth from their other end.

Obviously this word was pulled out of the dictionary in order to create a softer euphemism than the similarly coined "Male Bovine Excrement;" Bull Cud, to put it vulgarly. I suggest a slightly more fitting euphemism, which I must admit to coining myself: Male Bovine Ecrutation.

Ecrutation (from the Latin crudus "crude") becomes 'crud' by folk etymology.
The euphemized vulgar equivalent of the full phrase would be "Bull Crud".

Crud also emerges from the foremost extremity of the bull, but like the cud, is also ingested for reprocessing. That's crude.

The "Original Language" of The Hebrew Scriptures

I'm working on a journal article that examines the historic sound shifts in languages and the implications on ancient genealogies. More on that anon, but for now I'll examine the implications for the concept of the "original languages of scripture."

Leaving aside the New Testament, for which manuscript evidence is overwhelming, I focus here on the Old Testament, known as the Hebrew Scriptures. Our oldest copies of the entire OT date to the 10th century or so, meaning that they are many centuries removed from the time Hebrew was last used as a living language. The Dead Sea Scrolls evince a different script, but essentially the same vocabulary from a millennium earlier. Although some books (such as Job) do contain some words that are considered more archaic then what is in other books, nevertheless the 39 (officially 22) books of the OT--excepting the few Aramaic quotations, phrases, and names--are all in the language we now call Biblical Hebrew.

Is this possible? Can a series of books put into writing over a period of several thousand years all be in the same language?

The rationalistic answer is clearly No. All living languages change, and the Hebrew spoken by Ezra must have differed markedly  from the Hebrew spoken by Abraham. So different, in fact, that they would today be considered totally different languages, akin to the difference between the modern languages spoken by Abraham's descendants--the Jews and Arabs.

But what if the OT was written in a classical Hebrew that originated with Moses? No, even classical languages change. Latin evolved even after it ceased to be a spoken language, going through Late Latin and Medieval Latin stages, until we now have the Latin that forms the base for the International Scientific Vocabulary. Take Arabic, for instance. The Qur'an was put in writing some 1400 years ago, and is still the basis for written Arabic. Yet nowhere in the Qur'an will one find the common Arabic word for language: lughah (from the Latin lingua, 'tongue'). This, along with other classical Arabic words that form important primitive roots in that language (like jins, from genus), is a word imported from Latin some two millennia ago. The original (Koranic) word lisan is not used in written Arabic any more than is its English counterpart tongue, except as the name of a body part. So languages continue to change in little ways, even if their original religious form is kept intact.

This is the sort of change we should find as we read the Hebrew Scriptures from Genesis and Job down through Chronicles and Nehemiah. But it isn't there. The implication is that Biblical Hebrew is NOT the original language of much of the OT. Some earlier form of or ancestor to Hebrew was, and of it now no trace remains. All we have left is a translation.

UPDATE July 2012:
The Scriptures themselves give hints at how language usage evolved over the centuries. Here are a few:

- "Shibboleth" had lost some of its aspiration by Judges chapter 12.
- "Seer" was falling out of use by 1 Samuel chapter  9.
- Some Hebrew words are only found in Chronicles, where they had replaced older words in parallel passages of Samuel and Kings.

Internal Evidence for The Pericope Adulterae

Zähler
This blog is, of course, about whatever interests me. My three favorite subjects, when closely examined, all have a common theme: Resurrecting the past. They are Genealogy, Ancient History, and Ancient Manuscripts. I haven't written on Genealogy here, and perhaps never will; My postings on that subject will be found in other forums. I've touched on Ancient History, and will no doubt go back to it; but today's blog is on Ancient Manuscripts.

I have come to this interest rather late in life, having not studied it seriously until middle age, when the advent of the Internet opened up to me the vast store of knowledge which could formerly be acquired only at great cost. Indeed, by an informed use of the Internet, I am able not only to keep abreast of the latest developments in the comparison and evaluation of ancient manuscripts (technically known as 'textual criticism'), but also to actually add my own contributions.

This is the case in the study before us today, which evaluates the assertion, now assumed to be valid by the majority and most eminent of textual critics, that:

The Pericope Adulterae (John 7:53-8:11), while demonstrably ancient, could not have been present in John's Gospel as he wrote it.

In defending this assertion, Bruce Metzger marshals both External (manuscript) and Internal (stylistic) evidence. Perhaps the best online compilation of external evidence (on the affirming side) is by Wieland Wilker, published here. He alludes to what will no doubt be the best compilation (from the dissenting side) as a work still in progress by Maurice A. Robinson. Unfortunately for the layman, Wilker leaves tantalizing portions of his textual commentary out of reach of anyone not proficient in both Latin and Koine Greek.

The best online compilation of internal evidence (from the dissenting side) is probably by Andrew W. Wilson, who devotes to the Pericope an entire chapter of his online book to The adulteress and her accusers. Inasmuch as he makes statements on intrinsic probability which stand at loggerheads to comments made by Wieland Wilker, I've chosen to devote this blog to comparing the two where their opinions divide.

The first question to be considered concerns Authorship. Here the assertion would be stated as follows:

Internal Considerations point to an author other than the Apostle John.

Wilson devastates this assertion with one telling blow after another, but in so doing he makes no specific refutations of any of the finer points of detail from the affirming side. For instance, Wilker shows Luke to be a possible author, both from external (e.g. nearly a dozen manuscripts place it in Luke's Gospel) and internal considerations (he cites a dozen 'Lucan' words or phrases). Wilson doesn't address these examples directly, but in a general way shows the external arguments to be dismissible, and the internal arguments to be specious. I will not directly address this assertion, but what follows should add a little to the discussion.

The internal question is very much related to the external one. Certainly when the same passages is found in so many different locations within the gospels (a total of 9 different places, with further complications considering the extent to which the entire Pericope is represented), the question arises as to what was its original location--if there was one--and why it didn't stay there. Wilson makes the case for the Pericope belonging right where it is still found in the overwhelming majority of manuscripts, where it is far better suited to the context, and its absence would be more keenly felt, then in any of the locations where it has been apparently inserted.

This argues for a scenario in which the Pericope was unique to John 7-8, but very early on in the transmission stream (certainly by the beginning of the 3rd century), it was dropped from the text of John's gospel in a growing number of manuscripts. Perhaps as early as 100 or so years later, it began to be re-inserted. The haphazard nature in which this was done indicates that the scribes of these later manuscripts were themselves in doubt as to its correct location; perhaps they were going by an independently circulating copy of the Pericope, or more likely (given the wide textual variation of the Pericope wherever it is located), from oral transmission.

The implications of this may at first be startling: over 300 Greek manuscripts--including all extant monolinguals prior to the 8th century--as well as all Italic, Bohairic, and Gothic manuscripts, along with a considerable number of manuscripts in Georgian, Armenian, Syriac, and Sahidic, are all guilty of a major omission.

But actually, what is startling to me is only that the patristic evidence for the Pericope predates the earliest manuscript evidence by two centuries. That says more to the quality of the oldest manuscripts than to that of the earliest fathers.

ALL of the earliest manuscripts exhibit excessive omission or transposition, so the absence of the Pericope in any one of them carries very little weight in my book. Its absence in all of them is significant, but it is not a foregone conclusion that such indicates that the Pericope could not have been in the original Gospel--any more than the apparent absence of KAINAM from Luke 3:36 in P75 leads to the foregone conclusion it is an early 3rd century addition to the text.

It is apparent that, as time went on, manuscripts became less erratic and more in tune with some standard. Whether that standard was an artifice of theological orthodoxy, or simply the closest to the original that could be determined at the time, is hard to prove. Suffice it to say that critical editions of the Scriptures date back nearly as far as the earliest manuscripts, and the critics of ancient times had access to considerably more--one could say dozens or even hundreds of times more--early manuscripts than we do today. And those who did, came to the overwhelming conclusion that the Pericope was canonical. The only confusion (exhibited in a small minority of even the earliest texts where it is found) was over where it belonged, and how exactly it should be worded.

UPDATE: I address this issue again in this post.