The Son Bears It

From my brother who has lost his child:

Three years, ten months, and two days. The time that Maria was given on earth. A life cut short. So much left undone. So many dreams unfulfilled. Each day we are haunted by the anticipation of plans that will never be completed. She was saving money to buy a doll. Her coins rest silently and unused in her piggy bank. She was so excited to hold her new baby sister. Lucy was born one week to the day after Maria's death. I was cleaning up my garage a few days ago, putting away Christmas decorations, and cleaning up clutter. I had to store away the bike that I was teaching her to ride four days before her death. She never got past training wheels. There was a show on television last night. A father was walking his daughter down the aisle. He said she was beautiful and that he was so proud of her. I wept. Maria loved one dance outfit more than all of her other clothes, but it was hard for her to take off quickly and that causes problems for a little girl not long potty trained. She had a couple of accidents while wearing the outfit, so we took it away from her for a few weeks. She began to do much better going to the potty, and we promised her that she could wear her dance outfit again soon. We buried her in it the next week. So much left undone. So many dreams unfulfilled.
Thirty-seven years, five months, and fourteen days. That's my current mark. Oh, how much of that I have wasted? Far too many days spent on selfish pursuits. How many days remain to love my wife, to raise my four living daughters, to carry my cross? Whatever my final number, I'm sure some will say “a life cut short.” Are all lives cut short? Does everyone leave uncompleted plans and unfulfilled dreams?

Thirty-three years, they say he lived. His life too was cut short. So much seemingly left undone. A kingdom unestablished. Cowardly friends hiding from his suffering. A body scourged. A mission left incomplete. Can redemption really come to a life cut short?

Yet this is unendurable. And then one babbles -- "If only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her." But one can't tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover how seriously we had meant it. But is it ever allowed?

It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be so done. He replies to our babble, "You cannot and you dare not. I could and dared." -C.S. Lews on the death of his wife

Jesus on Celibacy

The (second to) Last Temptation of Christ

When is the last time you heard a sermon on celibacy (or chastity) at your church?

Matthew 19:

8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
10 The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.”11 Jesus replied, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. 12 For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”

Of course Jesus himself was celibate, and we are told a man tempted in every way.

U2's Bono: Who is Jesus?

Jesus Was Married, Probably not Gay, But Might Not Have Existed

[UPDATE: At her own blog, Valerie Tarico has now added "(most likely a forgery)" to the sentence I mention below, but the article on Salon.com hasn't changed.  She has the inaccurate "2014" date both places.  Doesn't Salon have editors?]

...and a few other dumb things from Salon.com's Valerie Tarico. Actually, for a Salon article, it's not half bad; the author is able to stumble upon some truths in spite of herself and in spite of statements like these:

We have no record of anything that was written about Jesus by eyewitnesses or other contemporaries during the time he would have lived, or for decades thereafter.

Mostly true, but this is clearly stated to get the reader into skeptical mode; yet it's a red-herring, and an obvious one at that.  One needn't have writings by eyewitnesses to have knowledge of historical facts.  One needn't have documents written within less than decades of an event to have knowledge of the events.  Furthermore, one could say the same thing as our author in spades for virtually everyone in antiquity who we claim to know anything about.  In fact, we have more historical documents written within a close proximity of the time of Jesus (and about Jesus) than we do for anyone else in the ancient world.

Nonetheless, based on archeological digs and artifacts, ancient texts and art, and even forensic science, we know a good deal about the time and culture in which the New Testament is set. This evidence points to some startling conclusions about who Jesus likely was—and wasn’t.

So, let's basically ignore the massive amount of textual evidence available from the authors' writings which have been collected into the Bible, and let's speculate on what Jesus might have been like mostly from other evidence.  In other words, if the evidence counts in favor of Christian belief, we'll basically ignore it.  I'm not liking where we're headed...

1. Married, not single. When an ancient papyrus scrap was found in 2014 [sic] referring to the wife of Jesus, some Catholics and Evangelicals were scandalized. But unlike the Catholic Church, Jews have no tradition of celibacy among religious leaders. Jesus and his disciples would have been practicing Jews, and all great rabbis we know of were married. A rabbi being celibate would have been so unusual that some modern writers have argued Jesus must have been gay. But a number of ancient texts, including the canonical New Testament, point to a special relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. The Gospel of Phillip says, “[Jesus] loved her more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often on her mouth.”

It's never good when you begin your "facts" with evidence from an "ancient papyrus scrap [that] was found in 2014 [2012!] referring to the wife of Jesus" that is probably a forgery, but if not, still proves nothing since it would date to the EIGHTH century and have its origins in Gnosticism. Valerie must be getting her news from The Huffington Post.

Okay, read the rest if you want to learn a few things ("or laugh").  I'll end by letting Ms. Tarico speak for herself:

That leaves each of us, from the privileged vantage of the 21st century, with both a right and a responsibility to consider the evidence and make our own best guesses about what is real and how we should then live. A good starting place might be a little more recognition that we don’t know nearly as much as we’d like to think, and a lot of what we know for sure is probably wrong.

Commentary on Bart Ehrman's NPR Interview

Bart Ehrman was interviewed Monday (April 7th, 2014) by Terry Gross on National Public Radio's, "Fresh Air" (a more apt name for the show would be "Hot Air," since that's about the only kind of air that comes out of the mouth of Terry Gross and her typical guests.  Tax dollars hard at work.  But I digress...)  The interview was about his book "How Jesus Became God."  Since there's just way too much to respond to in that interview, I'm going to restrict myself to commenting on the following about historical scholarship, because I think this is a good illustration of Ehrman's own biases:

GROSS: When you're asking the question of did Jesus really rise from the dead, was there really an empty tomb, a tomb that he had been buried in, as a scholar of the historical Jesus, where do you go to try to answer those questions?