The Birth of Christianity: A Jewish Story

I'm taking the class offered jointly through Rice Continuing Studies and the Houston Museum of Natural Science based on the exhibit The Birth of Christianity: A Jewish Study. Personally, I feel I got much more out of this exhibit after just the brief lecture our class was given before we viewed it. To that end, I'm posting my impressions. Go see the exhibit. I found it incredibly moving and I can't wait for the other classes, to learn more about the people who gave rise to my faith.

*****

There’s a dream-like quality to a museum after hours. A stillness deepened by hushed voices, shadows deepened by the few last lights left on. I think this class will take on a completely different dimension from being in the museum in the evenings. Knowledge seems to hang in the air as palpably as incense in a temple.

Today’s first class began with a lecture given by one of the co-curators of the exhibit, Matthias Henze, a professor of biblical studies at Rice. Dr. Henze spoke about the creation and development of the exhibit as a collaboration between himself and two archeologists in Israel. He discussed the history of scholarship focused on Judaism during the period the exhibit covers, and the story the exhibit tells in response to that scholarship.

Until mid-way through the 20th century (CE), scholars of Judaic history focused on the writings of Josephus, a Jewish rebel captured by the Romans during the 1st century CE who eventually returned with Titus to Rome, Latinized his name, and became a historian. He described the Jewish people as three schools of thought, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes, and for many years his writings were taken as authoritative.

This changed midway through the 20th century, primarily due to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, expanded study of non-canonical texts, and archeological projects begun in the newly established state of Israel. This exhibit aims to show that Judaism of the Second Temple Period was much richer, more complex, and more diverse than Josephus' three-school paradigm, and that Christianity at its roots was one of many Jewish groups. Jesus himself and his followers were raised within Jewish society and tradition, and Paul in Romans 9-11 describes the foundling faith as a branch grafted onto an olive tree, and supported by the roots of Judaism.

Dr. Henze summarized the five time periods that divided the exhibit and suggested a particular display to take note of in each. The class then proceeded into the exhibit hall for a self-paced tour.

The first part of the exhibit comprises artifacts from the Helenistic period beginning in the 4th century BCE when Alexander the Great conquered pretty much everything. The Jewish people divided along the lines of acceptance or denial of the new Greek culture. Some took on Greek names, others adhered strictly to their own traditions. This reminded me of an idea I discussed a bit with a friend about what seems like a recent increase in neo-traditionalism in some Christian faiths. At any rate, those tensions culminated in the Maccabee revolt in the 2nd century, when the temple in Jerusalem was retaken and the Hasmonean dynasty established.

The first point of interest was actually the time line near the entrance, stretching from the 6th century BCE into the 1st century CE. Just standing at the timeline reading it brought forth things to give pause. After about three minutes of confusion, I realized that the timeline was oriented from right to left, the way Hebrew is read, instead of the left to right I was expecting. While I was realizing this, I overheard a Jewish couple as they discovered out loud that AD did not represent the years after the death of Jesus. They’d always thought that’s when the counting began, but here the death of Jesus was in 34 CE (AD).

Me being me, I piped up that AD, standing for anno domini, meant “the year of the Lord” and so measured time beginning with Jesus' life, and that I used to think it stood for “after death” and had been confused as well. When I began my unsolicited expounding, they turned to me with looks of rapt attention, and I remembered the cross hanging from a chain around my neck above my collar. For no real reason I began to feel like I must sound pendantic and patronizing, and I felt my face go hot. I’m sure I didn’t offend. I hope I didn’t. They seemed interested. It just made me feel so self-conscious of the things I take for granted. It’s not that I’ve never noticed them before, and worked to be more aware of them. It just hit closer to home for a few moments than it normally does.

I stared at the timeline for several minutes more, just collecting myself and letting my face cool before moving on to the next portion of the exhibit, covering the Roman period. Pompey conquered the Jewish lands in the 1st century BCE, and from 37-4 BCE, Herod the Great ruled as the king of the Jews, elected to this position by the Roman senate. The point of interest here was the model of Herod’s rebuilt Jerusalem. The docent and the accompanying text described the different sections along with Herod’s renovations to the existing temple (including the addition of a commercial arcade directly bordering the temple precincts). The docent spoke of Herod’s struggle to rule a Jewish people when he himself was Roman with only faint traces of Jewish ancestry, the controversy surrounding views of his personality and leadership, and his undeniably rich gift to the Holy Land in terms of architecture.

I found it interesting, of course, that the Herod who slew the innocents in the New Testament died four years before the birth of Christ. I think this is something I knew before. I’ve never had the benefit of a theological explanation, but to the literary critic in me, it seems like a clear retelling of Moses’ escape from the slaughter of Pharaoh, used in the context of the Gospel to emphasize the authority of Christ as a figure leading his followers out of oppression (it was hoped) and establishing with them a faith that in the time of the gospel writing would have been straying ever farther away from Judaism. Reason number 428, I suppose, why I can’t interpret the Bible literally.

The third section of the exhibit featured a number of ossuaries, relatively small boxes, about 1 ft by 3 ft, used to hold the bones of the dead after their remains have lain for a year in the customary rock tombs, sort of like the above-ground burial tradition in New Orleans.

What struck me most about the ossuaries was how, no matter how beautifully the stone boxes were carved, the names seemed to be scratched on, or even written on in ink, as an untidy after thought. The docent I questioned pointed out that one would buy these boxes from a master carver, the artist who created them, and the name would be put on later, but this didn’t really make sense to me, because after all, you have a year to be coming up with this box and all before you actually put the next person in it.

One ossuary had an elaborately carved rosette on one side, and an unfinished raised circle of stone on the other. The docent said that one theory of why it was left unfinished is that it was needed suddenly, and once the body was put in, the carver could no longer touch it for reasons of ritual purity. Again, this seeming haste doesn’t make much sense to me, considering that not only does one know for a year that one will be needing this thing, but one might also have already used it, since some ossuaries are inscribed with multiple names, and held the remains of several family members. It is interesting to note, though, that the unfinished one was inscribed in Hebrew while the only ossuary with artfully and carefully inscribed names had them in Greek. Another was inscribed with Aramaic, another instance of the cultural and linguistic diversity of the times.

The point of interest in this section, though, was not the most ornate ossuary. The most significant ossuary there hadn’t even been smoothed. Its sides still showed the scalloped marks the chisel that carved it out of a block of limestone. But faint scratches mark it as the ossuary of “Alexander, son of Simon the Cyrene,” the same Simon of Cyrene, father of Rufus and Alexander, that helped Jesus carry the cross.

Awe is not what a 52” LCD hi-def television inspires, no matter how many times my friend insists that his television is literally awesome. Awe is the icy grip that clenched my stomach and made my heart race standing before this plain stone box. The terror and humility of my own smallness before this depth of history and power of tradition, a force that can make something so rough and ordinary mean so much. Amazement that after so much has been destroyed by time or war, this box is still here to dovetail with a seemingly inconsequential detail from a text almost two thousand years old.

Still in awe, I walked into the Masada section of the exhibit, to be turned farther inward by the music of a flute, low and hauntingly sad, more of a moaning wail of breath than melody. Looking at a photograph of those startling hilltop ruins, the sigh of the flute became the sound of a desolate wind wailing around rock crags, the only voice in an empty waste.

The artifacts here aren’t the artifacts of commerce and luxury as in the other exhibits. They are the artifacts of life under siege. Jars for the storage of dry goods in storerooms that all too soon must have begun to look as bare as the unassailable and inescapable hilltop the fortress perched on. Built by Herod to house his family in safety during revolts in his own time, by the time the rebels of Masada fled there, the palace fortress was already a ruin. Long after the Romans put down the revolt elsewhere, Masada still stood in unconquered isolation, until the remaining Jewish rebels committed mass suicide rather than face their inevitable capture and enslavement.

The point of interest in this room is the Jeselsohn stone, a tablet of two columns of Hebrew are written in black ink, faded with time, the same format used for the Dead Sea Scrolls. The tablet appears to recall a visitation by an angel. One scholar, somewhat controversially, interprets the text as an angel’s account to a messianic figure of his impending death, to be followed in three days by his resurrection to eternal life. The stone is estimated to be contemporary with the Dead Sea Scrolls, dating back to before the birth of Christ.

The fifth and final section of the exhibit was in a room darker than any before it. I’m not sure if anything was intended by the journey from well lit rooms into this darkness, just as Jewish and Christian artifacts begin to appear side by side, other than protection for the most delicate pieces there: passages of gospel in Greek on papyrus, and the gem of the collection, fragments of the Dead Sea Scroll containing the book of Isaiah. I leaned over the display, my face close to the clear cover, taking in ever detail of the text, the discoloration of the fabric it’s written on, the fine, even grain of the material that makes it look like woven silk, and makes me wonder what methods of preservation were necessary to keep this brittle, fragile parchment safe on it’s travels. This scroll will leave next week, to be replaced by another. By law the scrolls cannot be outside of Israel for more than three months.

It was a gift to see it, Isaiah, beside early manuscripts in Greek of the gospel of Luke and a letter of Paul. To see newly emerging Christian imagery, the overlapping chi and rho, and even Christ with a sword defeating a basilisk, a drastic departure from the strict avoidance of graven images in the Judaic art, with its menorahs, shofars, wreaths, or purely geometric ornaments. The exhibit was a gift, and gave me so much to think about in the weeks ahead, as I learn more of the stories behind the objects.

I walked into the museum in a kind of dream. I left in a dream of a different sort.

Thy will be done.

Lately it seems, sometimes, that the things I’ve felt most sure of are the things I seem most likely to be wrong about. The dreams that feel the most right, so many things point to them being wrong, impossible, not for me. Do I trust my heart and the feelings inside, or do I trust the outward signs that speak to my mind. I know I act with confidence. I probably look like I know what I’m doing and where I’m going. But in truth, I’m pretty much winging it. I’m doing what I’m doing and I’m exactly where I’m at. And I’m trying to trust the tides that move around me for where I’ll be and what I’ll do next.

You see, something in me is letting go, I think. Dreams I’ve cherished are fading, and other dreams are new, but they aren’t as clear and strong as what I’m letting go. I pray to God to guide me, to give me a direction, and to thank Him for at least giving me this renewed trust in His will, so that I haven’t been as frustrated lately with the dreams I want but can’t act on.

And I’ve prayed to God that if the dream is not to be, that He will take away my longing for it. That He will gift me with resignation and acceptance, and finally, peace. I think it might be happening. I think I might be learning to let go. And there’s something comforting in that, but there’s also something so sad. Am I growing and accepting and moving on, or am I giving up?

There are still many things that I know are right, even when they seem wrong. Even when there are signs that might have made me refuse the path years ago, before I grew in some of the ways that I’ve grown, I see them, and I accept that they change my path a bit, but they aren’t road blocks, and while I have a road open before me, I will take it to see where it leads, and trust the feeling in my soul that here, at least, is where I need to be. That there’s some meaning to my presence on this path at this time. I have something to learn. I have something to teach. There’s a reason.

But other things that seemed so certain once… That still seem right to my mind, I feel gently leaving my soul. Maybe I’ll never be married again. Maybe I’ll never have the family that I know I could love and nurture with all my heart. I don’t feel like I’m giving up. I’m trying in the ways that I see to meet the person that will make that possible. But for the most part, it’s completely out of my hands, and I feel like I have to be prepared for the worst.

More than prepared. The worst will need to become the best. The path I never thought I’d be able to bear taking could become the road I take with more than resignation. With joy and with triumph, with more giving and sharing than seem possible right now.

I still want so badly to be a mother. I’d be such a good mother. And I’ve been reminded that technically I don’t need to meet someone to love and spend my life with for that to happen. I’m keeping an open mind about that, I guess, but all the same, my children deserve the absolute best, in my opinion, and that includes me making the choice to give them the very best father I can find for them. I want that for them as much as for myself.

Everyone says he’s out there somewhere. I trust God that when the time is right, if he is, I will find him. And if I haven’t found him yet, that simply means the time isn’t right.

But there’s a still small voice inside me saying he might not be out there. That I might have been born to stand alone, and in the strength that will take, and that God’s Spirit will surely give me when I need it, in that strength I will be able to become most fully who I am supposed to be, and give the gift of myself most fully to this life and this world.

There is comfort in that. But the dreams I’d have to give up are so beautiful. To watch them fade… It’s a grief just like the grief of slowly losing a friend to time and change and distance. More than that, it’s the grief of watching someone I love die by inches.

The two constant prayers in my heart and mind and soul, the words that well up from within me daily are, with a burning longing, “Please, God,” and then, with sorrow and with trust, “Thy will be done.”

Galleria Adventures

So my Italian classes are every Tuesday night in the Galleria. In the hidden corner between the old Macy's and Sacks Fifth Avenue. So today and last week, I decided to go explore the mall a bit. Have some grand adventures.

Get my watch batteries changed.

Buy a few things I need.

There are so many beautiful things in the shops. Rich fabrics, sparkling jewels, fragrant perfumes. And so many beautiful people walking around wearing what they've bought shops like these. I'm easily the least expensively turned out person I saw the entire time. I think even the girl in a tank top and running shorts spent more on those clothes, the sandals, and the make up and styling products than I did on my ensemble.

And the shop people can see that about me. I was looking for a pair of Ecco sandals I've seen on line, and would like to buy. Funny how busy all the sales people are when I walk by. If I stop and ask directly, "Excuse me, do you carry Ecco shoes?" They answer me, but it seems to be a great condescension on their part to do so.

Empty, futile, pointless little snobs.

I know it shouldn't bother me, but it's disheartening, a bit. I want to wear soft, luxurious, beautiful clothing, but I can't afford the quality my tastes lean towards, and a lot of that stuff only looks good on sticks. I am not a stick, and I've always been given reason to be happy with my, ahem, shape. :-P

I feel like screaming that the emperor has no clothes. The only person who I think would have understood was the hired pianist in the Nordstrom's, who played beautifully and seemed bored out of his skull. Bored enough to start his next song in tempo with the service phone ringing over the intercom. I was the only one who noticed, and he noticed my noticing, as I almost stopped dead and laughed aloud, moving on with just a stutter-step and a silent chuckle. Nordstrom's doesn't seem to be the place to laugh aloud.

I was even more unsettled as I wandered into the corner between the Ninfa's Express and the Coldstone. I was overcome by the memory of standing in just this spot watching a CNN report on il conclavo, the conclave, after the death of John Paul II. I remember crying a little for the Pope familiar to me from childhood. A man who, in spite of his authority, seemed gentle, thoughful, loving, and open. Deeply prayerful, quietly wise. I didn't know him personally, but he seemed so much warmer and more fatherly than Pope Benedict seems to me now. Tonight I wept again a little inside.

After a while I got sick of the whole charade, and found a quiet corner to read in before my class started. And I wept a little externally for the unfairness of it all. Have you BEEN to the Galleria lately? Versaci, Armani, Kenneth Cole. There are people in this world who go hungry while these beautiful people buy their beautiful clothes, and the shoe sales man in the casual shoe section, who seems lower in the totem pole than the man selling women's dress shoes, sneers at my request for a $70 pair of sandals.

I'm not an ascetic, and I'm not an activist, and I don't think any of the people in the Galleria are evil heartless bastards.

There's just so much I don't understand, and it doesn't seem right, and it overwhelms me sometimes.

Soul-Making

I just finished reading Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. And just finished with the requisite sobbing my heart out. Oh, wait, not *quite* finished with that, apparently.

Book seven came in the mail today. I haven't even opened it. I didn't sleep well last night, and I promised myself I'd go to bed at a decent time tonight. Meaning, of course, right after I finish this blog. So I should probably leave it in its package.

Tomorrow I have my first Italian lesson, so I might take my book with me to read while I get myself some dinner in the Galeria food court and wait for my class to start.

Or, well, I still haven't seen the new movie. Didn't manage it this weekend. Maybe on Wednesday I'll go do that instead of hanging out at the Volcano. Even though I haven't played pool in forever. Who knows.

Somehow, this time as I read, Dumbledore's blue eyes became my father's. I saw Ruddygore on Sunday, and there's a song about a little flower that shelters under an oak tree until the tree is torn away.

That's how I feel right now. Five years after his death, these things remind me of him, and how he taught me and sheltered me and loved me.

And left me.

I'll be fine. Really I will. It's just... It never goes away.

A thought came to mind recently. Probably not original, but somehow it made sense. I was thinking about how this will never go away. It may smooth itself out, and become less jarring as the years continue to pass. It's already less acutely painful than it was. At least most of the time.

But it's not something I can eject from myself. I can't leave it behind, because it's now part of who I am. I can't live away from it. I can't live apart from it. I have to live through it, with it, around it.

And the image that came to mind was the grain of sand that becomes a pearl. How painful it must be at first. Sharp, jagged, a focused little dot of agony. And slowly time and faith and love and life begin to smooth it over, round it out. Sometimes it remains knobby and awkward, but maybe it can grow into a soft brilliance of perfection. Always lodged inside of me. It can't ever be comfortable.

But maybe it becomes a thing of incredible value and beauty. I've felt for a long time that Daddy's death wasn't something that had some absolute message, given to me from outside. I do believe in God, and I do believe he is here with me, and has a plan for me. But I do NOT believe that my God killed my father to open my blinded eyes, or to test my faith.

I do believe that God calls to me through this pain, though. And helps me to create my own meaning, gives me the strength and patience to slowly make my grief, and my father's death, something of worth. Something that happened not in vain. I'd still have rather it hadn't happened, of course.

But it did. And these things will happen. Life is as much about losing as it is about gaining. But you can turn the tables, gain a little with the loss, and you *can* beat the house, I believe.

And thinking of this brought me to one of those recurring ideas I have sometimes, and tend to bring here when I'm ready. The idea from John Keats' letter to George and Georgina Keats from February 14th to May 3rd of 1819. (You can tell I'm an English major. I always cite my source.) Keats' presents his ideas as an alternative to the Christian view, though the two aren't mutually exclusive. I've linked the entire letter above for anyone who's really curious, but I'll end with the essential passage, and leave you to ponder how this fits in with my pearls:

The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is 'a vale of tears' from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitary interposition of God and taken to Heaven-What a little circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world if you Please "The vale of Soul-making". Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) I say 'Soul making' Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence- There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions-but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. I[n]telligences are atoms of perception-they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God-How then are Souls to be made? How then arc these sparks which are God to have identity given them-so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this?

It Loses Something in Translation

It's an interesting problem for a translator. It's an interesting problem for a journalist.

I was listening to NPR on the way home. They were doing a story on brick kilns in China that kidnapped laborers and worked below the radar as far as government regulations go. One farmer described how the polluted smoke would roll down the hillside from the kiln to his farm. He exclaimed, in the words of the translator:

"These companies, they have money and connections, they can pollute as much as they want. We don't have money or connections, and we get in trouble for polluting if we so much as break wind."

I found myself wondering if the term the farmer had used in Chinese was more equivalent to the very polite and somewhat picturesque "break wind" or if what he actually said was more along the lines of something coarse like "farted."

Now, it *really* doesn't matter. But it got me thinking. If the man had been speaking English, and had said "farted," would they have used the quip? It's not a bad word, but it's somewhat crude. And the tone of journalism on NPR is pretty high-brow (though I'm occasionally irritated by grammatical mistakes in their coverage).

If he's said it in English, and they *couldn't* use it, would they have paraphrased? Voiced over? What? Perhaps the person they were interviewing used a more polite term. Though I thought I heard a guffaw of the"Oh no he didn't" sort in the background. But since they had the opportunity to choose the English they would use, and didn't have to use someone's actual English words...

I'm just curious about how NPR handles/handled that. As a person interested in the problems of translation.