The House of David

Monday, January 08, 2018

How old is Swahili?

East African Bantus, south of the Somalia, have hit upon a common-tongue suitable for trade. This "Swahili" has a number of Arabic loanwords and is commonly thought to be mediaeval - because of The Great Arab Slave Trade. But maybe it's earlier.

The origins of the slave-trade lie in the sugar-cane. When this came to the Sugar Land, it sucked in slaves toward the Persian Gulf. Since the east was Sasanian and the south sparse in population, traders sailed further south, for the Zangestan - east Africa. The trade never really stopped; Islam just changed the masters. I have long suspected that the slave traders remained the same: Arabians, and Yemenis. Maybe Himyar.

Specifically I'd assumed that up to the Sasanian era, the traders were the sailors of Aden: Jews and Sabaeans. One could counter, here, that the Sasanians had sailors closer to home: Basra and Oman. As of the seventh century AD these were Lakhm, Kinda, and Azd. I expect their language was early eastern Arabic, basal to Classical (with hamza) rather than to Qâric and Safaitic. Western Arabs at Jidda might have gotten into the Zanji trade as well.

Relevant here is al-Jallad's new look at ḥatté, "until": that it might be ḥadd-tî, "to the limit of". Al-Jallad also lets slip - as a parallel development - that Swahili also uses "to the limit of" to denote "until". There it's mpaka.

I smell Sprachbund. This *ḥadd-tî hints at pre-Arabic traders in a pidgin with proto-Swahili, one calquing the other. And these would be the pre-Arabic Arabians, not the Yemenis or Himyar or (lol) Mahra. And it happened early enough that the traders hadn't yet contracted to ḥatté - or, given that we don't yet have literal ḥadd-tî in writing, that the traders remembered the contraction's roots. Sasanian era is my guess.

posted by Zimri on 11:39 | link | 0 comments

Until...

Ahmad al-Jallad is back with a study of the Qâric and Classical ḥatté / ḥattâ, meaning "until". ḥatté is not found in any other Semitic or Akkadian language; such - any Jew will tell you - will use 'ad. One "Safaitic" dialect, according to al-Jallad's 2015 grammar of same, used ḥatt without the té (p. 164)... once.

On the Semitic / western side some languages went with 'ad-kî; the Aramaic family on the northern edge had 'ad-zy. But although these look like they could be corrupted into ḥat-tî, al-Jallad won't entertain the possibility. And he's right: the Arabic languages have no isogloss to convert an 'ayin into a ḥâ. If pre-Arabic 'ad-zy did turn into proto-Arabic ḥat-tî, then some outside force pushed it there.

Al-Jallad's theory is that an early Arabian population hit upon ḥadd-tî, "to the limit of". (We can speculate on BUT HOW?, in another post.) The contraction ḥatté spread through the Arabic dialect continuum, into the early poetry and - finally - the nascent Qur'an. With that, ḥatté became G-d's Self-Evident Arabic Tongue. 'ad-kî or 'ad-zy would mark you as some kind of scheming Jew or bumpkin Christian (respectively).

posted by Zimri on 11:28 | link | 0 comments

Hasbro's paedo problem

If you can stomach it, check out TheQuartering on the sex-offenders and spouse-abusers who have taken over official Magic: the Gathering tournaments. UPDATE 2:45 PM - Ian Cheong types the Quartering's minutes.

Now, Magic isn't my game. But D&D kind of is. I've been getting bad vibes from ENWorld's policies and the latest D&D publications. They've been increasingly strident for various sexual "orientations", and accordingly harsh against criticism thereof.

That means that the dice-rolling RPG establishment has been infiltrated by a pink-mafia as well, particularly D&D which is also, I think, still under Hasbro. D&D events have become another venue not to take your kid. Just like WorldCon for science-fiction. Just like Disney.

posted by Zimri on 01:11 | link | 0 comments

Sunday, January 07, 2018

Falun Gong recruits me

I got a mail ad for some "Chinese cultural" thingy called Shen Yun. Five thousand years of Chinese culture, it advertised - coming here to Denver. The timespan smelled wrong to me, even with my very-limited knowledge of Chinese history and culture. The little I do know tells me that that Chinese history starts in the Bronze Age, with the Shang, and that's if we're being really generous and counting oracle-bones as literature.

When I squinted, I noticed Falun Dafa in a corner. And then I saw a Shen Yun ad in my YouTube. So I looked it up and - yep, it's Falun Dafa.

As far as Gong/Dafa being an "evil cult", as the ChiComs call it, it probably is one, but then so is Chinese Communism. And the commies have a higher butcher-bill in China.

I'll keep on... keeping on, not bothering with either side.

posted by Zimri on 20:49 | link | 0 comments

Upload #164: running up that hill

I found a few articles over at Rice over the last week, and they had some effect here.

My last two uploads last month have featured "The Barren Garden" on sura 68. Sura 68 mentions Jonah, as do suras 21 and 37. A couple years back Hannalies Kolostra had - unbeknownst to me - written her own essay on the 10 / 21 / 37 / 68 relationship. In her own turn, she had not noticed my essays which set 10>...>37>21; we are in agreement on 37>21, and (if I read her right) on 52>68, but not on much else. Anyway Kolostra has uploaded her essay to academia: The Sign of Jonah: Transformations and Interpretations of the Jonah Story. So I had to alter my essay to take this into account, and to refute it.

"Running Over The Sabbath" dealt with sura 62. I had, for whatever reason, not noticed WHY sura 62 thought that Friday was important. This was a miss on my part. So now I've cited Shelemo Dov Goitein, “The Origin and Nature of Muslim Friday Worship”.

"Monks, Muslims, and Sura 57" was composed in 2009 and it shows. It has been in dire need of focus since I first uploaded it. Today I found where sura 57 had cited sura 39 and, given what I've lately found about sura 39, sura 57's other correspondences with suras 5, 14, 22, and 34 must be quotes from them. Sura 57 might even have quoted suras 2 and 9. So sura 57 is late, Marwanid-era late. So late, in fact, that I have deleted most of my essay's chatter about Islamo-Christian relations 630-690 AD - this topic is, simply, irrelevant to a post-70/690 world. Instead, a bonus: sura 14 cited sura 5.

Madrassa.

posted by Zimri on 15:50 | link | 0 comments

The irrational Orient

Hadi Jorati casts a critical eye upon Romanticism in the West and the East: Misuse and Abuse of Language, and the Perils of Amateur Historiography (of Science). After nine pages of book-review he looks at what academics now call Orientalism, which was the Western tendency to see the East as exotic and inferior.

Jorati points out that this definition of Orientalism reflects nothing more than a species of general Romanticism. The same sorts of Westerner also agreed that their own Middle Ages were exotic and inferior "Dark Ages". In the East, the analogue would be Islamic and Hindutva revivalists. Jorati does not foist the "Orientalist" label upon modern scholars of Islam nor even upon the likes of Robert Spencer / Pamela Geller (Orientals themselves, in Western eyes, but hey). Jorati is mostly concerned with non-historians in the East scribbling out excitable tomes about their own nations' greatness and Western perfidy: in this case 1001 Inventions, although one can say the same for Shashi Tharoor. Anyway Jorati's paper is excellent and I recommend you read it.

I am not here to say if Romanticism is an Eastern tendency; Westerners have our pageantry too. I will say, as a student of Late Antiquity, that Oriental attitudes toward their own history have always... differed. The Sasanians produced a rich literature with much reference to their past, but it was almost always an imagined past. Michael Jackson Bonner has documented this fully, and noted that the same held in India. I can report a similar trend in Armenia: Faust's history is pretty much prose-poetry, Movses Khorenatsi's history is a lie, and there's some tenth-century "History of the Anonymous Story Teller" that collects tales told (by Persarmenians) in northern Azerbaijan.

If you wanted a real, sober history of Armenia you had to go to the Church. There you could pick up Pseudo-Sebeos, John V, or Levond. They might be wrong and they might have a bias. But they tended not to go in for the lies of a Movses or the fantasy of a Faust.

posted by Zimri on 09:47 | link | 0 comments

Saturday, January 06, 2018

Report on a journey from Houston to Denver

Since 2010, I've been driving my SUV-For-Hobbits from Houston to Denver and back again - about once a year, although the specific time of year varies (depending on scholarly conferences, Houston contact availability, mine own free time, OPSEC etc). It occurs to me that I've never delivered a travel diary here. So:

The worst part of the itinerary in either direction as of 2018 is, hands down, the trip south through Fort Worth on the TX-287. It is hard to pinpoint a highlight, in the maze of road-construction signs and inadequate information on WHERE THE FUCK WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE GOING. But I remember a sign warning about a toll road which was placed above a ramp which was NOT the toll road, but in fact was where the TX-287 was supposed to go. That's right: the sign just flat out lied to me. I would like Fort Worth to hire some consultants actually to try that Wichita Falls - to - Waxahachie route (this is the northwesterners' route to Houston/Galveston). Go on; I dare them. Oh, by the way, a Fortworthian told me that Dallas' road-signage was even worse. If that is true then Dallas must be a literal circle of Hell.

Raton Pass (I-25, NM/CO border) is, in good weather (this year had good weather) manageable, like Rabbit Ear Pass over on Steamboat Springs is manageable. However the people planting the roadsigns there, it seems, like to scare the crap out of drivers, especially northbound. FALLEN ROCKS. ELKS. DEERS. FUCKIN' BEARS! In seven years of taking this route I never saw any of those things but, tonight when driving north, I saw all those signs. I suppose after late December gluttony I'd needed the cardio . . .

Texas rural Republicans, man. By most measures I'd admit to being pretty far out there on the Right - many would consider me alt right, in this the Current Year (I'd mostly blame Current Year, but let's leave that debate for other posts). North of about Huntsville the driver will start to see billboards saying stuff like DEMO-RATS YOU WILL PAY ON ELECTION DAY and God Bless Abbott and Trump. The town Clarendon was lined with rebar crosses attached to squares, which I assume had posters attached to them at some point - those have been there for years. And I saw many posters for "SAVE THE BABIES" (probably Evangelical, although they do have Papists up in north Texas - one billboard was advertising a Catholic shop in Amarillo). Also I saw a phone hotline for anyone who might doubt that God exists. I don't know how well these roadside evangels work at saving souls. For my part I was reminded of gangland "tagging", marking territory.

The Petrol Cartel: In Amarillo and Dumas, the town elders have agreed that 86-octane petrol costs $2.25 a gallon. In the 'Harts - Dalhart, Hartley, Texline, (when I've passed through there) Stratford: $2.49. In NM don't even bother, somebody's doing the raping and it isn't you, the driver. You will NOT find a better deal shopping around the stations. It doesn't matter if it's Alon, Valero, Shell, or Exxon - from Clarendon TX to Clayton NM, per town, there's a price that the town deems Fair, and that's the price you're paying. My suggestion to 287 northbound travellers is to fill up at Quanah or maybe even before that. And then fill up at Dumas - closing your eyes and thinking of Quanah, presumably. It's still better than what you'll get from the TX and NM towns northwest of that.

posted by Zimri on 01:01 | link | 0 comments

Sunday, December 31, 2017

Year-end editorialising on the comics page

Everyone has their opinions on whether any given year was a good one or bad one. Much of this is situational - the good citizens of Houston come to mind, as having seen better days. I don't think, however, that a generic American can disagree on 2017. This year was a winner for stockholders, jobholders, taxpayers, black people, anyone under ISIS back in 2016 not so afflicted today, and various intersections of all of these.

So when I read the Sunday comics, I assume that the characters of generic white Americans there speak for the writer. I don't even bother with Batiuk, Ayers, or Trudeau of course; I already know what they are.

Today's roll of shame is with the writers of "Sally Forth" and "Hi and Lois". The former seems to be a soccer-mom, upper-middle-class panderer. The latter made some editorial comment on "chaos on Capitol Hill!!" as if this were either true or a year-wrecking bad thing, if true.

I was pleasantly surprised with Borgman for "Zits" though. Borgman used to be an annoying editorial-cartoonist. Now he's an astute observer of male-adolescence and family-dynamic.

posted by Zimri on 16:20 | link | 0 comments

Thursday, December 28, 2017

Liberations

Every now an' again I see someone talk about freeing, or LIBERATING!!, a scrap of territory. Territory doesn't tend to have a mind of its own - unless we're animists. So when I see it I suspect I'm being lied to. Here is about the most defensible example: on the removal of ISIS-kebab from the Sykes-Picot region.

"Liberation" movements where they are directed against civilians are the most obvious, as in "free Palestine!" or "Judenfrei" signs (which mean the same thing). This also comes up wherever The Saker writes about Kosovo. Both regions have a majority of people living in them who don't want this "liberation", believing that they're free enough and living in the land of their ancestors. I note that when the "liberators" speak, they know it - they talk about the land, which they would cleanse, of the people living on it.

With ISIS, a movement dedicated to submission, removing them does relate better to that antonym of submission, which is freedom. And given how this outfit made attempts on the landscape they'd conquered, levelling mosques and ruins and other monuments, I can see an argument that the very land groaned under their oppression.

Somewhere in between are the Free Tibet stickers (Tibet under Tibetan rule was hardly free) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (they don't have Saddam anymore so... yay?).

I'd prefer that the "liberation" talk be left to genocidal liars like The Saker.

posted by Zimri on 11:01 | link | 0 comments

Friday, December 22, 2017

Did Jesus speak Hebrew?

Jesus was a rabbi and could assuredly comprehend Hebrew. But the Gospels are in Greek and generally quote the Septuagint. When they let Jesus speak outside Greek, he speaks in Aramaic. But Jan Joosten is now questioning that.

Joosten points out that Hebrew was alive at the time in several parts of Judaea. Jesus speaks Aramaic to non-Jews, like Mark 7:26 has him speak it to a "Greek". To the Pharisees on halakha, he should have spoken Hebrew. Joosten tests this hypothesis by looking at some of the non-Greek idioms Jesus used in parables and commandments. Many are panSemitic calque - for instance, when Jesus calls Herod Antipas a "fox", this is a compliment to the man's cunning in Greek but an insult to his prowess in Semitic, so more likely Semitic.

Joosten holds that some of these are not good even in Aramaic and work only in Hebrew. Whenever Matthew and Luke have their Jesus, the messiah for the poor, talk about the "good eye" and the "evil eye" he is talking about the philanthropist and the miser. That infamous Evil Eye of magic is Aramaic.

Unfortunately I do not think that Joosten's argument is a strong one. I see in "the good/innocent eye" not necessarily a Hebrew idiom but a Jewish one. To be assured of a spoken, living language I want dialectical variations as I see in Mishnaic. Joosten is silent on exactly that: e.g. if Jesus spoke to the Pharisees in Hebrew, was it Standard or proto-Mishnaic? As far was the New Testament will tell us, Jesus could be an Aramaic-speaker steeped in the proverbs of (say) Ben Sira, as literally translated. In this case those idioms which might not make sense in Imperial Aramaic or emerging Syriac would be forced into sense, in marginal Galilee.

posted by Zimri on 11:11 | link | 0 comments

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Some thoughts on eggplant parmigiana

I went out to a restaurant tonight and had Eggplant Parmigiana. I didn't like it much, and I was thinking about why not on my way home. My general thought is that it was bland, covered up with oversalting and oversouring. But then I thought, well, it's going to be salty and sour. So it has to be mitigated. This week also happens to be the week of the Ace Of Spades, Moron, Deplorable Cookbook, so...

The basics of an Eggplant Parmigiana are eggplant and cheese. Post Columbus, it tends to have tomato as well - usually purée in a sauce. That sort of cheese has salt already. The eggplant and the tomato, for their part, are both acidic. So, the last thing you want is to add salt to the sauce. And you shouldn't add any lemon, vinegar, sulfuric acid etc into the sauce, either. This will rule out your Sysco "House Recipe", Tobasco, or whatever other lazy hacks you as a chef might be tempted to dump into sauces. Even onion is dangerous in an already-sour meal. There's hydrochloric in that.

There do exist several dishes which are great when soured up with a tomato sauce. Seafoods, veal - if your standard tomato or marinara is used for these, then keep on keeping on. But for eggplant you will need a separate sauce - as non-sour as it can get.

Part of eggplant's problem is that it is not a protein dish. All the protein is in the cheese. So there's insufficient substance to counteract the vegetable flavours.

My suggestion, then, is to add non-meat sources of protein to add body to the sauce. Nuts are good here; if your restaurant has a sign out there warning that nuts are served here. Also good: mushrooms. I love mushrooms. Your vegetarian customers will thank you for the added proteins as well. Or your Catholics, in early springtime. I can also recommend a dusting of various peppers: cayenne, for instance.

posted by Zimri on 19:45 | link | 0 comments

Theodore of Mopsuestia's dyophysitism doesn't work

The House of David has been pondering Nestorius as a Chalcedonian before Chalcedon. We are, here, blogging for the dyotheletes and holding Heraclius' Ekthesis in anathema. Like, obviously.

But for this, we needs start with the mono-physites.

The Church of the East (Iraq and Iran) has been Nicene since the AD 410 Iraqi Synod, at least. Meanwhile in the West, one Nestorius - a dyophysite - was archbishop of Constantinople. After Theodosius II's monophysite synods in Ephesus, Nestorius himself got the boot and many of his Syrian followers fled to Iraq. After reading the dyophysite Tome of Leo, the Easterners saw that it continued to anathematise Nestorius, but otherwise that it vindicated Nestorius' basic argument. The Church of the East started calling itself "Nestorian" partly because some true Nestorians had joined it, partly as a slight to the West's needless compromises with the monophysites.

But among the many theologies arising in the Church of the East, was a non-Nestorian (and non-Chalcedonian) interpretation of dyophysitism. Such came out of the Christology of Theodore of Mopsuestia. A dyophysite Christian has to take this seriously.

From Chalcedon, and later Toledo and the filioque formula of the mid-1050s AD, Catholicism has it that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The Son is preëxistent and equivalent to the hypostatic Word. As such, the Virgin Mary is the Mother of God, as in Monophysitism. A Nestorian would agree with much of this; he just objects to the overemphasis on Mary. (I am, myself, a Nestorian.)

But there have been other experiments in Trinitarian dyophysitism, preceding Nestorius. Karl-Heinz Ohlig in "Syrian and Arabian Christianity", published in German a decade ago, discusses Syrian formulae extensively and how they might have given rise to that ultimate monotheletism, Islamic Tawhîd. According to Ohlig Eng. tr. 378, 383: Theodore argued that Jesus was infused with the Logos.

One might then argue about when that infusion happened, if this was Adoptionism. Ohlig talks about Jesus proving himself worthy. It may or may not have been at his baptism at John's hands. Either way, Theodore taught it wasn't at conception.

If I am reading Ohlig right: then for Theodore's clarification of the Nicene creed, the Spirit issues not from the Father and the Son, but from the King and the Word.

In the Church of the East, which was after all a church over a large region, Ohlig notes nods to Chalcedon tr. 370 (he's thinking of Henana); pro-Theodore doctrines tr. 383-4. Theodore's division between the King and the Word proved too incoherent to fend off monotheletism: as of AD 418 in one inscription, Christ belonged to the King, so Ohlig, tr. 383. Babai the Great ended up a formal monothelete: tr. 384-5.

In order to preserve dyotheletism and its mimetic separation of church and state, we have to keep the Son as the independent instantiation of God's Word. Given this, I think Justinian I was right to denounce Theodore as a heretic.

posted by Zimri on 15:46 | link | 0 comments

Friday, December 15, 2017

Christian Latin

Classical Latin had its rules; on its way to the Romance languages, it acquired new rules. I've discussed some military terms that entered the common vulgar-Latin. These were, best I can tell, directly or indirectly Celtisms. There was also influence from the Church. The Church was an Oriental import and so its jargon was heftily Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic.

The Church may have affected the grammar as well. Here is Versteegh, in an summary-aside:

[Christine] Mohrmann ["Quelques traits charactéristiques du latin des chrétiens" In Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati, edited by Anselmo María Albareda, vol. I, 937–66. Vatican City: Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, 1956. (Reprinted in Christine Mohrmann, Etudes sur le latin des chrétiens, vol. I, 21–50. 2nd ed. Rome:Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1961.)] explains that the best way to determine whether Christian Latin was a Sondersprache is to look at the indirect Christianisms, i.e. those features of the language that set it apart from non-Christian Latin, but without any direct relation with religion. She mentions a number of morphological features that are characteristic of Christian Latin, such as the prevalence of verbal compounds in -ficare, e.g. beatificare, and the derivation of adjectives in -bilis, e.g. incorruptibilis, and of nouns in -tor, e.g. fornicator. She also mentions some syntactic features, for instance the high frequency of constructions with possessive adjectives instead of constructions with a genitive, e.g. dominica fides, ecclesiastica disciplina; and the construction of verba dicendi with the preposition ad.

Yes, all of this cast a shadow in western vulgar Latin. I see these traits in English. Most of them, I consider bad habits. But although the "-tor" suffix is Greek, as in "rhetor", that's a tough call as Christian because the Romans were already big on that: "imperator". I could see it being common in army Latin too.

The Latins used the -ficare / "-ify" suffix like the Greeks used "-ize". Romans, at the time, also had recourse to what we English have in some of our rarer verbs: "-esce" and "-ate". And again, Latins had -ficare already, for such as "pontifex". So our question becomes, how did the -fex / -ficare suffix crowd out the others? I'll guess here that here is the Greek habit of compounding words, coupled with another habit of overusing facio which is now a cliché in modern French (faire).

As for -bilis, also plaguing English, I put that down to upper-class snobbery in Latin, as it is in English.

As for the replacement of the genitive by adjective, here mainly "-ic": this is interesting. I should think that a Christian dialect would pick up on Semitic construct-state and go even more into genitive constructions. The switch to adjective looks more like... Luwian (-assos), to me. Ionian dialects (>-ikos) from Ephesus and southwestern Anatolia generally...?

posted by Zimri on 16:11 | link | 0 comments

The Last Jedi math says that critics are corrupt

Ed Driscoll has a bad feeling. All is proceeding as Vox Day has foreseen . . .

93% of critics love it in agreement with 60% of viewers. However. The latter, mostly, bought their own tickets. For sequels, we may assume the punters are self-selected toward Star Wars fans. Some might be hate-watching it but, honestly, those people will be borrowing the disc from the library, like I did for Rogue One.

To put this in another way: if the critics were all fans, if they were already biased, we should expect 60% from them.

The 93% is telling me that Something Else Is At Work. It's not Rotten-Tomatoes / Warner this time; Disney is a rival studio which, I suspect, Warner would wish was weaker.

I'm going with politically-driven Wrorth Wratching shpiel. Assuming they weren't just bought.

UPDATE 12/16 - The only review you'll need.

posted by Zimri on 11:30 | link | 0 comments

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Upload #163: the Kingdom cometh... back

I was looking over Ibn Warraq's What The Koran Really Says again and stumbled onto pp. 648-9. This is GA Wells' translation of Wellhausen, "Zum Koran", which Germanophones may read for free. For the past near-fifteen years I never was able to make much sense of it. It's got a poem - but a BADLY transmitted one, which thanks to Wellhausen and Wells we may now read (sort-of) in English. Wellhausen's commentary was okay but incomplete; still, interesting enough that Wells and Ibn Warraq deemed it worthy of translation and publication into our tongue. Now that I've been thinking of David propaganda in the Arab-Syriac matrix, I think we can pick up the baton. This means... new project! "Song for the Resurrected Kingdom".

Among its findings is a likely witness to the Mas'udi variant of Q. 17:71. As I was getting into that, I suspected sura 69 as another such witness. So: "Blasting the Caliph" got an update (it also used sura 84 I think).

"The Barren Garden" is really new, so it was inevitably going to take on some new content, soon. Last week, I remembered I had some Nöldeke (and Schwally) here. Mainly what I had to do was to shoo away old Muslim claims that the sura 68 is interpolated. IT IS NOT. As usual, these are excuses that Muslims gave on how come a seemingly-early sura has parts that act like late suras and are out of step with the rest. Well... maybe it's NOT early and it was, in fact, quoting those later suras. Duh!

I was looking at sura 52 for "Fire From The Mountain" to get a handle on what current events it might have used. Best I can tell, this was a blast from heaven that induced rockslides. But I cannot find such an event in the Syrian chronologies including Ibn Khayyat. Ah well. Still, more content, and a likely quote from sura 81.

I found that the "Q" sura - the 50th - quotes from ALL of sura 38, which I couldn't show before. "Embargo against the Turks" mentions the anti-Khazar marriage ban. "Defending Jesus": sura 43 parallels sura 39 in another place, having to do with "blackened faces". To "Reformer" I added DAM 01-27.1 "Sana 1" as another variant-order codex which, nonetheless, maintains the 39>40 order. I don't remember what I did with "The Muṣallûn".

Madrassa.

posted by Zimri on 14:02 | link | 0 comments

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

John's women against the synoptics'

I've been reading Mikael C. Haxby's April 2013 dissertation on the Apocalypse of James. She (I assume) didn't have the Greek fragments; she's using the two Sahidic-dialect translations.

In it, she discusses the Apocalypse's dependence upon other Christian literature; she detects use of Luke-Acts and John, both. Luke is considered the Feminist Gospel; John, the Spiritual Gospel. There is an additional parallel with Sophia of Jesus Christ; namely, that there are seven female disciples alongside the twelve males. The canonical gospels don't tell us this but they wouldn't, would they?

For "James", the best gospel is John's. Oddly, for a feminist, "James" doesn't approve of Luke. Sapphira, executed for larceny in Acts, is a martyr here.

I've seen this disregard of Luke in other gnostic literature - like the Apocryphon of James, which wholly ignores Luke's Ascension timeline. But there I assumed the Apocryphon was just so early and/or uninformed it didn't know Luke. Here, in the Apocalypse, it looks like hostility. Also note here that choosing Saint James as your muse is a not-too-subtle way of declaring independence from Saint Paul. And superiority over Peter.

I wonder if Sapphira had disciples of her own already. Or at least sympathisers... who started out rejecting Luke, and later decided they were done with the whole Church.

Another thought is how the text handles persecution. Perhaps it was composed under a Christian ruler's persecution, against "Gnostics". Later, during the Melkite / Miaphysite riots, one faction or the other would have found and copied this text, taking Sapphira as an early victim of the official church.

posted by Zimri on 18:43 | link | 0 comments

Niche

On the one hand, two species cannot hold the same niche at the same time. So the Neanders (partly hybridised with humans) lost to the humans (partly hybridised with Neanders). Their shared niche was mammoth huntin' and berry pickin'.

On the other, the old hunter-gatherers lived in symbiosis with the first farmers. These were - at the time - different races. But the two didn't, anymore, share a niche.

In an alternate universe, the Neanders of Europe held off the first hunter-gatherers from more of Europe and for longer than they, in fact, did. (Barring some additional light hybridisation.) Then when the farmers came, peace was had. And there would be Neanders surviving well into the Bronze Age, meeting the Yamnaya. Maybe even visiting Egypt . . .

posted by Zimri on 17:22 | link | 0 comments

Orthodox corruption of gnostic scripture

Jessica Saraceni is still at it; posting summaries of modern archaeology -

Rare Greek Document Identified by Religious Scholars : AUSTIN, TEXAS — Newsweek reports that fragments of a rare Christian text dating to the fifth or sixth century have been found in the Nag Hammadi Library, which was discovered in Egypt in 1945 and is now housed at Oxford University. A collection of 13 Gnostic books, or codices, the documents in the Nag Hammadi Library purported to record “secret knowledge” imparted by Jesus to his followers.

... and getting it wrong. The text here is the so-called "First Apocalypse of James". According to Candida Moss at MSN / Daily Beast (yeah, I know), the new Greek fragment-aggregation was found in Oxyrhynchus. Nag Hammadi is the Coptic site, many MANY miles up the River. The specific Coptic is Upper Coptic - more specifically, Sahidic; most Nag Hammadi is, they tell me, Lycopolitan. Oh, and it was translated at least twice (pdf), without each others' knowledge and - given their divergences from standard Sahidic - outside official sanction. But enough of that; we're here to talk Greek.

What's of interest here, to us Ehrman ~~groupies~~ readers, is that the Coptic translations we got were NOT made from THIS Greek edition. Those translations were probably done earlier or, perhaps, from a centuries-old MS like how the Gospel of Peter was copied. In the meantime somebody else copied this Greek edition and censored it. The "holy seed", preserved in Coptic, has become the "holy spirit" here in Greek. It is annoyingly common how scriptures are better preserved in translation than in later copies in their original language; the book of Jeremiah, for instance.

Anyway, for those interested, here is the Apocalypse in English, from the original Klingon.

posted by Zimri on 17:11 | link | 0 comments

Why Moore is staying in sweet home Alabama

It's a mighty, fresh, Southern-fried shit sandwich for breakfast here; so I'll take my bites of it in this post.

I wanted the Congressional GOP put on notice that they should quit giving air to the likes of Corker and McCain. So when the primary came down to Moore and Strange (because apparently Mo Brooks etc weren't a thing), I supported Moore. I didn't say I liked Moore, but I liked what he represented more than I liked what Strange did.

Then the Allegations came out. Mostly bullshit (the yearbook forgery etc) but there was some fire behind that smoke, the dating of barely-legals. Senator Blumenthal did the same thing at the same age but, as on Twitter, whataboutism is a nowhere argument. I wanted Moore to say something useful like "I was dumb back then, I thank Jesus he sent an angel to me, my future wife" but - well, he didn't.

People say Moore didn't have the money, that he didn't have the support; but that's because people don't want to support a loser who, best-case, might be a four-year gaffe machine in the Senate. (It was the same with Akin.) If Moore had looked like a winner, and like an asset to Republican races elsewhere, the money and support would have come to him.

As far as lessons learnt, there is just not a lot partisans can do when their candidate is blowing it. Just ask a Hillary supporter from last year. The time to head that off is during the primary.

UPDATE 9:30 PM MST - Mo Brooks has been struggling with prostate cancer. I guess that's why he didn't try too hard, and why McConnell et al. chose Strange instead (it was a mercy). That is... unfortunate. I wish Brooks a speedy remission.

posted by Zimri on 09:36 | link | 0 comments

Palestine's capital

I first heard this meme floated on Twitter by a highly-regarded scholar of Syrian Christianity and Islam. But now Islamic demagogues are catching on: Jerusalem as Palestine's capital.

In what follows I am leaving aside the aboriginal population of the coastal Levant. Yes, these still survive (mostly); mostly in the Christian Lebanese. But these people would call themselves Canaanites - if they were honest. And nobody is saying that Jerusalem is Canaan's eternal capital. (What would that be, anyway... Tyre? Anyway, not our concern.)

For a start, Erdogan as an Anatolian should know that "Palestine" as a name didn't exist in the Bronze Age, when "Urusalim" was first noted. Best I can trace it, the closest term to "Palestine" referred first to the Adme / Edessa / Callirhoë region; and then to seaborne invaders called Peleset. Various Semitic invaders wiped them all out over the early Iron Age.

Palestine Mark II was the province the Romans installed over Judaea when they were trying to wipe that place out, and to turn it into a boring Graeco-Roman colony like, I dunno, Thrace. Oh wait, did I imply that this was the name of the province; I forgot. The province was "Syria-Palaestina" and its capital was Antiochia, far from ~~Jerusalem~~ Aelia Capitolina. (For y'all Texans, think how Santa Ana bundled Coahuila y Tejas with its capital up in Saltillo.) So, this "Palestine" was an insulting naming-convention with, effectively, no capital. Jerusalem meant something only to the people removed from it.

Later Emperors created a "diocese of the orient" with sub-provinces. In those days the Roman citizens of old Judaea did get their own pr... oh wait, in that iteration there were three Palaestinae. Galilee was the second, and Sinai-Transjordan was the third. But Hierosolyma was in the first one!! - although the provincial capital was Caesarea Maritima...

The Arabs inaugurated Palestine Mark III - the Jund Filastin. Capital cities in those days: Ludd, and then Ramla. As for Jerusalem, the caliphs stuck on "Ilia" (Aelia) as its name, and treated it as a showcase for Islamic supremacy and not much else.

I haven't found where Jerusalem was treated as a capital of any Palestine ever until the Fatimids. (Maybe under the Sasanian decade-or-two? But they'd put Jews back in charge. So that's wasn't a Palestine; that was another Yehud...)

To sum up, to the extent Jerusalem is "Palestinian" it isn't the capital. "Palestine" exists - has always existed - as a negation of Jerusalem and of the Jewish claim to the area. Without the will to power and Jew-hatred keeping "Palestine" alive, it would be nowhere, like the Ottoman vilayet of that name. Palestine is Angmar, in short. As for the Jews: where supporters of "Palestine" are not flat antiSemites, they have their image of what a Jew should be and that is a man without a home.

And scholars who sign on to any pro-Palestinian or, worse, Israel-boycott statement are prostituting their vocation.

posted by Zimri on 08:58 | link | 0 comments