Vacuous Blather v. Text Criticism

N.B.: This post will be continuously updated in order to provide references and sources to my counterclaims of the vlog in question.

1. The vlog begins with an editorial on Carl's resistance to the Bible, "especially the King James Version" and shifts to a discussion of "St Jerome." This move we would call a non sequitur, as the second point does not follow logically from the first one. Or even historically for that matter; the "King James Version", more properly called the Authorized Version, was commissioned by King James I of England and remins essentially an Anglican-use version, despite its misuse by Fundamentalists.

Car'ls version of the history of St Jerome contains several blunders.

In the first place, the task given to St Jerome was purely one of translation. St Jerome was commissioned by Pope Damasus I (d. 384) to undertake a new translation of the Bible, as there had already been one in circulation termed the Old Latin or Italic version. Moreover, Carl fails to take into account that there were already Bibles in circulation, especially the edition ordered by Emperor Constantine I (a.k.a. "Constantine the Great"); in fact, the Codex Sinaiticus is thought to be one such example of these Constantinian Bibles (see T. C. Skeat, "The Codex Vaticanus and Constantine," in Journal of Theological Studies 50 [1999] 583–625).

If Carl had the remotest knowldege of the Bible's textual history, which he clearly does not, he would have made good use of P.R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, 3 vols. (Oxford, UK: Oxfored University Press, 1970), especially volume 1, From the Beginnings to Jerome.

Second, Carl mentions that St Jerome edited out certain narratives of the Bible, citing for instance the lack of Mary's parentage in the narrative (he does not indicate which narrative). He also asked for the names of Mary's parents, and concludes that St Jerome must have deleted them. Again, he is incorrect; according to ancient testimony, they are named Joachim and Anne (or Anna); their names are still retained by the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Coptic Church of Alexandria, Church of England, and several other eastern churches; in point of fact, St Joachim and Anna are liturgically commemorated on 26 July in the Roman Calendar and on 9 September in the Byzantine Calendar. Thus Carl's assertion that we do not know the names of Mary's parents is neglects the evidence of (i) liturgical praxis, (ii) post-biblical writings, and (iii) the testimony of the Fathers. Most importantly, Carl neglects (or is ignorant of) the testimony that comes from the Protoevangelium of James.

2. The vlog mentioned "archives of the Catholic Church." This is a statement of ambiguity . What "archives of the Catholic Church" does he refer to? The Vatican Secret Archives? The Apostolic Library? A scriptorium in a Roman monastery? His vaguely general statement betrays a profound ignorance of the history of Late Antiquity.

3. Carl asserts that Protestants recovered the "suppressed stories" and reinstated them. However, a simple comparison a Catholic Bible with a Protestant Bible will demonstrate the exact opposite. What Carl states here is not mentioned in any reputable work of Protestant theologians or historians. For instance, Prof Dr Alister McGrath, for instance, professor of theology at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford, wrote In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How it Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (New York, NY: Random House, 2001), makes no mention of this. Not even the fiercely Protestant but scholarly sound website www.Bible.org makes any such claim.

4. Carl also mentions that there is no historical record of the geography mentioned in the Book of Job. He is correct, but this is hardly new information. Whether or not the narrative of Job "actually happened" misses the point entirely, as the narrative serves as a parable, not an history. Carl obviously is unable to distinguish fact and truth--they are not necessarily coterminous. To take a famous example, the story of young George Washington chopping down a cherry tree and later confessing to his father has no basis in fact; yet, for all the historical fiction that it is, the story nonetheless holds an important truth about the virtue of honesty. Even if it were proven beyond all reasonable doubt that young Washington never chopped a wodden tree and--for the sake of the argument--never even existe, the "myth" still has merit, precisely because it relays values, not statistics. Ovid's Metamorphoses are pure fiction, but because they are "myth," they contain truths (consider Narcissus' entrapment in the pool of water, to take an obvious example).

5. In yet another non sequitur, Carl argues for the Bible's inaccuracy on the basis of Bush's failed economic policy. Does this mean if Bush's economic policy led to the greatest prosperity in the history of the United States, the Bible would become true? We have here a miserable instance of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy.

6 "God is not a politician" is another non sequitur. But here, Carl argues for the "wall of separation" (Thomas Jefferson) because God is not a politician. On what basis is he able to determine what God is or isn't? I'm not sure who should be insulted--God, civil servants, or political science majors.

Be that as it may, the American doctrine of the separation of Church and state is wholly irrelevant to the discussion on the Bible's historical veracity.

7. "People need to respect other religions." Absolutely! In fact, the Catholic Church has institutionalized respect for other religions; the Second Vatican Council issued Nostra aetate (II Session) and Unitatis redintegratio (III Session). Not only that, the bureaucracy of the Vatican, the Roman Curia, has specific dicasteries devoted to dialogue with other religions with the aim of creating mutual respect and understanding. There is the Pontifical Council for Promoting Inter-Religious Dialogue, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, as well as several distinct international committes devoted to interreligious dialogue. In point of fact, the Catholic Church has personnel devoted precisely to the cause of religious liberty, the most notable being His Eminence +Walter Cardinal Kasper.

Respect for religions must go beyond saying or signing "Respect for religions!" It must be actualized by honesty and integrity, which Carl fails to show in his inability to verify the premises in the Newsweek article he refers to repeatedly throughout his vlog.

Now, an editorial of my own.

Carl, who claims to be a professor, displays a shocking degree of academic dishonesty: Carl fails to cite his sources; he fails to verify secondhand or thirdhand information; he fails to remain within his field of expertise, instead pontificating on matters of theology, text-criticism, Late Antique history, and logic.

Since my training is in theology and Biblical hermeneutics, I will make a two specific corrections to Carl's many phantastic assertions.

First, he discipline of researching, identifying, and cataloguing fragments of the Bible is called text-criticism. Carl's nonsensical talk about "editing out" narratives, suppressing fragments of the Biblical text, and translations lands him in the court of text critics such as Prof Dr Daniel B. Wallace, Prof Dr Bart Ehrman, Prof Dr J. Harold Greenlee, and the late Prof Dr Bruce Metzger. Each of these experts have written volumously on the question of the Bible's textual history. I refer the interested reader (read: academically honest people) to their books, listed in the bibliography below.

Second [to be continued]

Bibliography

ALAND, KURT, AND BARBARA ALAND. The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism, rev. ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989.

BROWN, RAYMOND, and RAYMOND F. COLLINS. "Canonicity." In RAYMOND BROWN, et al., The New Jerome Bible Commentary. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990.

BROWN, RAYMOND, and D. W. JOHNSON. "Text and Versions." In RAYMOND BROWN, et al., The New Jerome Bible Commentary. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990.

GREENLEE, J. HAROLD. Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism, rev. ed. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995.

HAYES, JOHN H. and CAROL R. HOLLADAY. "Textual Criticism: The Quest for the Original Wording." In Biblical Exegesis: A Beginner's Handbook. Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1987.

METZGER, BRUCE, and BART EHRMAN. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005.

"Mystery of Faith" in ASL

Here I would like to begin a series of ASL commentaries on the Ordinary of Mass, especially giving attention to certain liturgical texts which, in my opinion, fail to be conveyed in its original intent by way of commonly-used signs in the Deaf Catholic community. I would like to begin with the "Memorial Acclamation", that point immediately following the Words of Institution in which the presider says "Let us proclaim the mystery of faith" (or in the new translation, "The mystery of faith").

The Latin text simply reads mysterium fidei, "[the] mystery of-faith." What does it mean? From the way it is usually conveyed in ASL, one might guess that it means that object of faith which is incomprehensible, puzzling, secret, or supra-intellectual. This is the impression given by E. Costello, Religious Signing (New York, NY: Bantam, 1986), 122.

In point of fact, the English word "mystery" used here is wholly unrelated to the sort of mystery one finds in Murder She Wrote or Matlock. The Latin mysterium is actually a Grecanism, a noun borrowed from the Greek language, having nothing to do with 'mystery' in the conventional English sense (cf. Warren C. Trenchard, A Concise Dictionary of New Testament Greek [New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 104). Allow me to quote from Edward Foley's recently-reprinted From Age to Age: How Christians Have Celebrated the Eucharist (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2008), 74:

One of the ways this "Latinizing" process will affect Christian thought is through the translation and adaptation of Greek texts, like the New Testament. For example, the Greek New Testament does not speak about "sacrament" but about musterion. Musterion, which occurs twenty-seven times in the New Testament, is a difficult word to translate. It was a term that was employed in Greek philosophy and ancient mystery cults to designate rites in which devotees of a god celebrated and participated in the god's fate. In the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures known as the Septuagint the word appears nine times, and it takes on the sense of a divine mystery in the process of being fully revealed in the future. In the New Testament the term occurs when Jesus explains the purpose of the parables (e.g., Mark 4:11) or when Paul speaks of Christ as the "mystery of God" (Col 2:2), but it is never used to describe or explain worship.

One of the more common translations of the Greek musterion was the Latin sacramentum. As used by Romans, the word sacramentum had numerous legal meanings. For example, it could designate a sum of money that the parties to a lawsuit had to deposit with a magistrate before the suit would go forward. The "sacred"connotation of the word (Latin sacra = holy) comes from the practice of turning the money of the losing party over to the state for religious purposes. [...] More important for the history of Christian sacramentality, however, was the borrowing of the word sacramentum by Latin writers like Tertullian--the son of a soldier who understood the range of legal and political meanings of the word. By borrowing such a word, Tertullian inadvertently introduces legal connotations into a Christian understanding of worship that did not exist with the Greek musterion.

Obviously, the Latin sacramentum was used as the Roman inculturation of the Greek musterion. It means, primarily, a religious or cultic ceremony, and secondarily one such ceremony that was "secret" or "private", i.e., available only to the initiated. Liturgists would immediately recognise the custom of the disciplini arcana, the "discipline of the secret", in which only those who experienced the Sacraments of Initiation knew what "Eucharist" was all about.

Given this, then, it follows that the Mysterium fidei is a cultic rite pertaining to faith. The Scholastics were fond of speaking of the sacraments as precisely the "sacraments of faith" (e.g. Summa theologiae IIIa, q. 64, art. 2, ad 3). They were keen on maintaning the connexion between the sacraments and the theological virtue of faith (a connexion that was lost to juridical concerns by the Manualists and Neo-Scholastics).

This is why, for example, the post-baptismal catechesis is called mystagogy: it is a discourse for those who have been initiated into the sacred mysteries, namely the rites of baptism, chrismation/confirmation, and Eucharist. And of course, the introduction to the Penitential Rite at Mass begins, Fratres, agnosticamus peccata nostra, ut apti simus ad sacra mysteria celebranda--we are invited to acknowledge our sins before the "sacred mysteries" are celebrated. We do not mean something primarily baffling or that which makes us clueless; we mean a ceremony, ritual, or rite of sorts.

In the context of the Eucharistic Liturgy, the more specific meaning of Mysterium fidei, following the Memorial Acclamation, presents itself at the Anamnesis: "Calling to mind the death your Son endured for our salvation, his glorious Resurrection and Ascension..." The Anamnesis in the Eucharistic Prayer recalls precisely the Paschal Mystery! The event of Chist's Passion, Death, and Resurrection is the ultimate worship given to God; the Eucharist, according to the Council of Trent, is the re-presentation of this event (Denzinger 1741; cf. 3848). The Eucharist, in a way unique to itself, is the sacrament that proclaims precisely the Lord's Pasch (1 Cor 11:26). This "event", this "cultic rite", this musterion is the action which proclaims this Pasch which forms the foundation of Christian faith. It was no mere poetry when the supreme magisterium taught that the Eucharist is the "source and summit" of the Christian life (Lumen gentium, 11), because our life of faith is founded on both the tragedy of Good Friday and the Triumph of Easter Sunday. It is precisely for this reason we respond to the Mysterium fidei with the Memorial Acclamation--of the the three succint statements of the Easter event: "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again", "Dying you destroyed our death; rising you restored our life, Lord Jesus, come in glory", "When we eat this Bread and drink this Cup, we proclaim your death, Lord Jesus, until you come in glory." Each of these acclamations stress the event of Christ's Death and Resurrection in articulation of the "mystery of faith." The liturgy is its own best interpreter.

It was common, especially since Pope Innocent III, to think that Mysterium fidei meant the incomprehensibility of transubstantiation. St Thomas Aquinas certainly picked up on this. Not that Pope Innocent is entirely wrong, but the incomprehensibility of the change from bread and wine into the Sacred Body and Precious Blood of Christ is to be subsumed into the events of that first Paschal Triduum, which was the ultimate worship given to God by Christ, the ultimate musterion. We cannot drive a wedge between the Real Presence and Easter; rather, the Real Presence is true because of Easter, and therefore the primary focus of our attention is indeed Easter, the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ.

As I hope it is obvious by now, Mysterium fidei is not a religious or liturgical way of saying "Huh? But I'll take it on faith." Rather, as an acclamation, it calls attention to the central, defining event of Christianity--the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ--which in turn defines our faith or belief.

I would therefore propose that in conveying Mysterium fidei in ASL, we retain the linguistic and theological overtones of the Greek noun musterion. Two signs can be proposed:

SACRAMENT [OF] BELIEF or FAITH (formal equivalency)

CELEBRATION [OF] BELIEF or FAITH (dynamic equivalency)

Since catechesis and liturgy are interrelated and symbiotic, we cannot expect to thrust a new way of signing the Mysterium fidei without any proper introductory catechesis. It would be, I think, a golden opportunity to re-introduce certain elements of the Ordinary of Mass to our Deaf congregations in hopes of enhancing that "full, conscious, active participation" in the sacred liturgy mandated by the Second Vatican Council (Sacrosanctum concilium, n. 14).

Readers are invited to post possible ASL signs for communicating Mysterium fidei.