I had dinner with the Indepundit tonight. I knew he’d get to post about it first. He had a shorter drive to his hotel than I had home. He’s in the Hampton/Norfolk area for a business trip, so we met at a restaurant in Williamsburg, which is about an hour away from me. Scott had a pretty crappy trip in, but we had a very nice dinner. Y’know, Red, Hot & Blue isn’t kidding when they say “Onion loaf” is fried onions in the shape of a loaf. It was loaf-shaped, all right. And very good.
We had a nice chat, and as we parted, I noticed one of those men/women things: We were chatting for a bit outside, and if it had been two women, we would probably have stood outside the restaurant chatting for another fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour. After about two minutes, Scott said, “It was great seeing you,” gave me a hug, and we said our goodbyes.
It made for a funny story to tell Sarah when I called her on the long drive home.
Off to bed now. It’s late.
MY: I thought you might want to read Bonnie Erbe’s op ed piece on Pat Robertson’s michegas:
Robertson doesn’t have a lock on God
By Bonnie Erbe
January 10, 2006
pictureBy now, most of the Western Hemisphere sees the exquisite (some would say divine) connection between ”Christian Wrong” commander Pat Robertson and Bugs Bunny. Together, they’re an undeniable pair of looney tunes.
After Robertson’s comment last week (undiplomatic at the least and certifiable at worst) that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke was empyrean retribution for ”dividing God’s land,” his fair-weather friends are far withering, deserting Robertson like a lightning strike. For example, The New York Times reports, ”Os Guinness, a prominent Christian writer and social critic, said: ‘I know hundreds of people who are just terminally frustrated with the idiotic public statements of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and the idea that these people represent us. They don’t.”’
Robertson’s latest in a long line of guffaws has stirred a fire-hose of discussion about the legitimacy of one person’s interpretation of God’s mind vs. another’s. But curiously, it has not provoked an even more sophisticated level of discourse on the same topic. To wit, why in this day and age do we view anyone’s claim to know God’s mind as more authentic than anyone else’s?
I’m inspired to ask the question because Robertson’s outburst coincides with my reading of L. Michael White’s ”From Jesus to Christianity: How Four Generations of Visionaries and Storytellers Created the New Testament and Christian Faith.” White is Ronald Nelson Smith Chair in Classics and Christian Origins and director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins at the University of Texas at Austin.
White’s elaborately dispassionate dissection of the creation of the Christian faith deals strictly in scholarly examination and historical testing of the facts. For example, as has been widely discussed by other scholars, no portion of the Bible was written down while Jesus was alive, nor for several generations after his death. Neither was Jesus born in the year 1 A.D., but at least four years prior to what the (later created) Christian calendar refers to as the year of his birth.
Scholars now date Jesus’ death to sometime between what Western Civilization calls 26-29 A.D. And the carbon-dated first version of any of the four gospels, that of Mark, dates back only to 69-75 A.D. Similarly, the first version of Matthew dates to 80-90 A.D., Luke to 90-100 A.D. and John to 96 A.D. or later.
This means, everything organized Christianity cites as well, gospel, was ”recorded” in the Oral Tradition for at least several life spans before being written down. Imagine the capacity for distortion and error such a scenario creates.
For example, White writes, ”The Gospels disagree dramatically regarding the cause of (Jesus’) arrest and execution. … Mark II suggests that the ‘cleansing of the Temple’ was the cause and the priests were behind his demise (cf. Mark 15:11). In John’s Gospel, however, the ‘cleansing’ occurs two full years before Jesus’ death and has no direct role in his arrest (cf. John 2:13-22). Matthew 21 seems to make the ‘triumphal entry’ and the priests along with the Pharisees the chief instigators (cf. Matt. 21:45-46). There are numerous other differences between the accounts.”
These clashes over the facts concerning one of the most important events in Western Civilization parallel claims made by some faithful right up to today. When people who managed to survive the ravages of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina last year were quoted as saying, ”Jesus spared me,” the first question in my mind was, ”Well, did Jesus then purposely destroy all the people who did not make it?” The answer to that question can only be determined by someone who claims to know what is going on in the mind of God.
This business of having the lock on God’s thinking is dangerous, indeed. The Taliban claimed to know it, and use it as a justification for repressing a whole nation (Afghanistan). Osama bin Laden lays claim to it, using it as his rationale for 9/11. Pat Robertson is now viewed internationally as little better than a madman for voicing his version of God’s plan. And anyone who claims to know better should take heed.
Bonnie Erbe is a TV host and writes this column for Scripps Howard News Service. E-mail bonnieerbe@CompuServe.com.
Velvel, in a case like this, simply send me the URL in email, or put this on a post that has something to do with the subject matter. Please do not quote entire articles in comments. I will delete them in the future.