Tag Archives: Christianity

“Yana Dropped Off First”: Vanishing Pagans of Egypt and Syria

To begin with, there were just a handful of them. And some are going silent, as Cara Schulz writes for the Pagan Newswire Collective:

The situation in Syria appears to be more grave, according to the last messages I received from the five Pagans I chat with regularly.  They spoke of the fighting and how places looked like Beirut,  buildings just shells of themselves, rubble blocking the streets.  They detailed neighbors going missing.  Islamic fundamentalist patrols that monitor behavior and took violent action against people who violated rules and customs. They debated fleeing, worried about being outed as a Pagan, and started destroying or burying altars.  Three began attending local mosques to show their devotion to Islam.

I would bet that in a generation, even the Egyptian Christians will be gone, off to North America or somewhere else. I have even met a few in my area — and we see very few Middle Easterners. In this case, it was the family coming to visit their daughter who had married an American and then moved with him to this area — and then I heard that they were still in the United States. Trying for political asylum?

Revising the Story of Christmas

It is an article of faith (an appropriate word here) for contemporary Pagans that Christianity stole holidays left and right from our spiritual ancestors, particularly Christmas.

Here Mollie Ziegler at Get Religion, a blog about the critical examination of religion-writing in the (mostly) American media, gets into some of the nuances in the process of critiquing a typically breezy seasonal piece from the Washington Post.

Yeah, well, it’s certainly true that when the calendar was standardized, there was a push for Dec. 25 as the date to mark Jesus’ birth. But was this because it was a co-opting of Saturnalia? It’s certainly a theory. But Dec. 25 was one of the many dates being used by Christians to mark Christ’s birth and maybe not for the reasons you hear.

Some historians argue — read her piece for details — that Jesus’ birth was placed on December 25th centuries before “Christmas” was celebrated. In the early church, Easter was much more important.

Now before somebody says “Yeah, and ‘Eostre’ was a Germanic goddess,” we are not talking about Germans but about the eastern Mediterranean region (and Rome) when we say “the early church.” The Germanic tribes were mostly unaware of Christianity until some converted in the fourth century, right? And complete conversion took another six hundred years.

It is the news media, not the Pagans, that keeps the “Christmas started out as a ‘pagan’ holiday” meme alive. Maybe that is more of a secularist position — taking organized religion down a notch — that provides a convenient bit of cover for the modern Pagans?

And let’s not forget another group that contributed to the Christmas-is-pagan meme — the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Just today at the laundromat I saw a one of their Awake booklets, which made that very same argument, one that they have been making for many decades.

Nazi ‘Neo-Pagans’ and Their War on Christmas

A headline from 75 years ago in the International Herald-Tribune:  ” ‘Neo-Pagans’ Target Carols” with further discussion about the relations between National Socialism and Christianity here.

Weirdest Google Search String Yet

This brought a visitor to the blog: “grizzly bears knowing Jesus Christ is coming.”

The truth is that I did have Jesus Christ and a grizzly bear in one blog post.

Following Up the Hint of Jesus’ Wife

The  recent announcement of a bit of Coptic writing that apparently referred to Jesus’ wife has stirred up plenty of controversy. Was the inscription really as old as claimed? Was it a forgery? Did it really mean “wife”?

At the Bulletin for the Study of Religion blog, Ian Brown will bring you up to speed.

But whether or not GosJesWife was written in the 4th century or the 20th century is not actually all that interesting to me (for the record, I suspect it is 4th century, although here I defer to the papyrologists and paleographers who have also drawn that conclusion). Yes, I do Christian origins and am always happy with more data. But I am more interested in the ways in which the initial story was taken-up by the media, particularly the conservative reaction arguing it to be a modern forgery. Regarding the former, it seems we are still standing in the shadow of the Jesus Seminar. Popular interest is focused almost exclusively on the possibility that the historical Jesus was married, and not at all interested in the fact that, assuming its authenticity, people in the 4th century were telling stories about a married Jesus—a detail which I, for one, think is pretty neat! Regarding the latter, well, we are still in the shadow of the Jesus Seminar, only here we feel echoes of the conservative reaction against its version of the historical Jesus.

At Heterodoxology, Egil Asprem passes along some more commentary, focusing on the paleographic questions.

And the reaction of the Vatican is predictable.

Evidence of Jesus’ Wife?

You don’t think a good Jewish boy from a peasant culture got to be thirty years old without being married, do you?

Now there is textual evidence that suggests that he was.

“This fragment suggests that some early Christians had a tradition that Jesus was married,” Dr. [Karen] King said. “There was, we already know, a controversy in the second century over whether Jesus was married, caught up with a debate about whether Christians should marry and have sex.”

Was or was it not Mary Magdalene, that is the question. Or was she just a well-off woman who helped to finance the ministry, as so often happens? Or as the Gnostic gospels suggest, one of the disciples — maybe one with special privileges — which brings us back to the question of her possible spousal status. Or were there two Marys — Magdalene the patroness and Mary the wife?

The Historical Jesus and the Grizzly Bears

When it comes to who Jesus of Nazareth was, I tend to think that there is somebody behind the stories, a real person, not, for example, a mushroom. (Although that would make for great video.)

As Craig Keener argues in this column, it remains the simplest explanation at its counter-intuitive core:

Scholars’ confidence [in the historical Jesus] has nothing to do with theology but much to do with historiographic common sense. What movement would make up a recent leader, executed by a Roman governor for treason, and then declare, “We’re his followers”? If they wanted to commit suicide, there were simpler ways to do it.

On the other hand, there are people in some esoteric circles who think that the Jesus of the New Testament was a composite character, made of perhaps three individuals’ stories.

It works with grizzly bears.

Last month, on my birthday, M. and I made a sort of pilgrimage to the haunts of Old Mose, the last grizzly bear killed in central Colorado, on 30 April 1904. (The last known grizzly killed in Colorado died in 1979.)

When I lived in that county, I heard and read all the stories about how Old Mose was this terrible bear, killer of several humans and countless livestock, et cetera et cetera, who lived to be at least forty years old.

But a Colorado historian who dug into the story and conducted some elementary scientific research made a good case that Old Mose’s legend conflated the lives of at least three bears between the early 1880s and 1904. The big male grizzly killed in 1904 was simply too young to have done all that.

And this in an era of (by 1904) telephones, telegraphs, electric lights, railroads, and newspapers, not an antiquity of oral wonder stories and hand-copied manuscripts.

If it happens with bears, I wondered at the time, could it happen with prophets?

Still, I lean towards the single-Jesus theory. And if I could choose between bringing a messianic Jewish wonder-worker or a big grizzly bear back to walk this earth, I know which one I would pick.

Business Opportunity for the Next Generation

Tattoo removal. It‘s starting to take off (pun intended).

The psychological motivations for tattoo removal (change of lifestyle and relationship status, changes in body and skin over the years, upward mobility in society and employment, etc.) are a constant, and will lead to an even larger market for tattoo removal than currently exists today.

And some related critiquing:

By enlarging ourselves with tattoos, we’re belittling ourselves in the process. It’s a sign of our low expectations that having control over flesh decorations is considered to be the limit of our capacities as an individual.

Kind of related—how do you as a priest dress to be counter-hip so that hipsters will “relate” to you? We’ve been down this road before. Anyone remember “folk Masses” with tambourines?

Be authentic. Be real. Invest in a chain of tattoo-removal clinics. That is all.

Eating Tomatoes Makes You a Christian

Salafist Muslims proclaim that eating tomatoes might lead you down the false path to Christianity.

The group posted a photo on its page of a tomato – which appears to reveal the shape of a cross after being cut in half – along with the message: “Eating tomatoes is forbidden because they are Christian. [The tomato] praises the cross instead of Allah and says that Allah is three (a reference to the Trinity).

[God help us]. I implore you to spread this photo because there is a sister from Palestine who saw the prophet of Allah [Mohammad] in a vision and he was crying, warning his nation against eating them [tomatoes]. If you don’t spread this [message], know that it is the devil who stopped you.”

Silly fundamentalists. Eating tomatoes will lead you to worship Coatlicue.

Pentagram Pizza for April 21st

Week-old pizza from the back of the refrigerator …

• Here’s an idea for a novel: “two down-on-their-luck entrepreneurs who stumble upon the idea of reviving for-profit idolatry. Selling statues of household gods to the masses, and building a neo-pagan religion around it.” Um, I think that people have been doing this for some time.

• Circus Breivik. Norwegian scholar of esotericism Egil Asprem analyzes the trial of Anders Behring Breivik. (He wrote about the shootings for the current Pomegranate.)

This trial will be about two things: psychiatry and ideology. Two drastically conflicting reports on Breivik’s mental health have already ensured this. Added to this, of course, is Breivik’s own clearly stated wish to be judged as sane, and have his actions confirmed as ideologically motivated.

• Teaching classical philosophy to Brazilian schoolchildren:

I assured the students that until the nineteenth century hardly any philosopher was an atheist. Plato’s Euthyphro—with its argument about the relationship between ethics and the will of the gods—gets us into a lively discussion.

* This is called “edgy, irreverent outreach” by some of today’s Christians Jesus Followers. I think the pastor needs to look up “pathos” in the rhetorical dictionary, because he is doing it wrong. But to be fair, some long-ago saints would have agreed with him.

• Alcohol  “sharpens the mind.”  But “beer goggles” are real too.

• Canada braces for more Danish aggression.