Now I *really* think that'd be a fun game, but even more fun would be all the research to make it possible.

It was reading Reza Aslan's Zealot that got me thinking that in the first place. Which brings me to an important question: I'm a total heathen unbeliever with that veneer of background in the scholarship that lets me ask the most base stupid of stupid questions, but what do actual scholars think of that book? I found it really fascinating, but I couldn't help being aware all through I was at the author's mercy for reading of ... well, most everything.

And this isn't because I doubt his scholarship, but just because sometimes I have the sense to ask what ocean I'm cast adrift in before sailing for shore.

Eusebius means "pious," if anyone is interested.

This is what the Catholic Encyclopedia says about Eusebius of Nicomedia

His work lived after him. He had trained a group of prelates who continued his intrigues, and who followed the court from place to place throughout the reign of Constantius. More than this, it may be said that the world suffers to this day from the evil wrought by this worldly bishop.

Me...I'm ROTFL...and getting odd looks from the dogs and cats.

It was certainly engagingly written, but again my perspective might be skewed by what I've been reading a lot of lately (early 1800's English cutlery texts).

Also, while skimming the bit about the Harrowing of Hell, my eyes managed to translate "guaranty theory of redemption" into "quantum theory of redemption", which would certainly be interesting.

We'd probably have to ask an actual scholar. (Myself, I just rush in where angels with PhDs in religious studies fear to tread.)

I haven't read the book. When I have, I'm certain that I'll have opinions.

Serge #5 Did you know that Jeffrey Burton Russell was Barbara Hambly's college advisor? I recommend any or all of his books.

#7 Lori I don't think the RCIA folks will have a problem with this (other than the rather flip tone). (As Tertullian said, "It is certainly no part of religion to compel religion.")

Yes, it totally deserves a remake. Hm. I wonder if I can get a game rejected from Apple's App Store for blasphemy...

Thinking of what they were doing as publishing letterzines, perzines, and apas makes a lot of the first couple of centuries understandable.

It's either that or John was eating the funny mushrooms.

And then they started arguing about the number of staples.

The End

So where would be a good place to start reading more about this kind of thing? Kind of a "church history for dummies"? I read "Saving the Bible from Fundamentalists" a couple of decades ago and that was enlightening, but there must be some reasonable bibliography for the dilettante?

It's a dessert topping and a floor wax.

"If you want to join the People's Front of Judea, you have to really hate the Romans."
"I do!"
"Oh yeah, how much?"
"A lot!"
"Right, you're in."

- Mysterious child of protagonist from the first series, prompting lots of surprised "whoah, that guy had a kid we didn't even know about?!" when he shows up.
- Takes over the role of the protagonist from the original canon, rendering that protagonist much less important.
- Does not follow canonical rules laid down in original canon.
- Hated and persecuted by everybody (except a very perceptive small group) despite being Perfect and Wonderful.
- Dies tragically to save the world, after which everybody who hated him eventually realize the Error of Their Ways.

It's a classic!

Alternately, He has Risen again many a time in the form of various Mary Sues, and had many romantic adventures at Hogwarts, therefore confounding all of the followers who don't like the books much.

This is why I believe Saint Nicholas should be the Patron Saint of Moderators.

Furthermore, I believe that every year on the Feast of Saint Nicholas, each moderator should get to squash one troublesome user without having to explain anything to anyone.

(Warning: This is from an atheist ex-Protestant, so it will be both ignorant and blasphemous, but this was too good to pass up. At least I have a physics degree so that aspect will be relatively clueful.)

I suspect that would be Protestantism, where redemption is clearly quantized; you're either redeemed or not, and there's no middle ground. (Purgatory could be viewed as a kinda-sorta-redeemed state, I suppose, but I don't know enough about it to say.)

In that case, sin is clearly the carrier particle, transitioning souls from redeemed to unredeemed. In the early universe souls originated in the redeemed state, until there was a phase transition at the Fall and now they start out unredeemed. The constant release of sin particles into the universe created an enormous imbalance, until the Resurrection produced an infinite source of anti-sin that could violate the arrow of time (which is why it's a miracle) and absorb sin in the past and the future, transitioning souls to the redeemed state.

Not sure how to get a superposition of states in here, though; it works better with the common misunderstanding of the situation (i.e. that Schrodinger's Cat is actually either alive or dead, you just can't know) than with the physical reality (that it's partly both.) I guess an omnipotent deity can be constantly collapsing the redemption wavefunction.

I should stop by here more. It's been awhile.

So. Am not dead, really like this post, sorry for inconvenience.

lorax @ 43: there's nothing new under the sun. I once wrote a very silly story involving a mashup of physics and Christianity. I didn't use sin particles (which need a name, really - how about "wrongons"? The antiparticle, therefore, would be the "righton"); I did, however, use quantum physics as the mechanism by which prayers were answered. And there's Maxwell's demon. And Beelzebub's office, which is... well, you'll see why he was chosen to be Lord of the Flies. And the Archangel Gabriel's heavenly coffee machine. And other lunacy.

Off to see if the library has Zealot

Here's how it happened: The old bishop of Myra died so the bishop from the next diocese over got the local presbyters together to elect a new bishop. And they couldn't agree, and couldn't agree, until finally the guy who called the conference said, "I swear to God, if you jerks don't get it together, the next guy who walks through that door I'm going to make him the bishop!"

Just then this young guy wanders in and says, "Hey, can anyone give me directions to the market?" And the visiting bishop says, "Guys, I'd like you to meet your new bishop! Say....what's your name?"

This was the young Nicolas, who went on to take the job seriously. He took care of the sailors by setting up lighthouses. He patrolled the waterfront. (Reportedly he had lengths of chain sewn into the ends of his sleeves to use as improvised blackjacks. (He was walking around at night carrying bags of gold, enough to allow young ladies to buy their way out of the game.)) Pimps, crimps, hustlers and thieves would dread A Visit From Saint Nicholas. You didn't mess with the bishop. He was also scholarly, devout, and really smart, so that when mysterious crimes were committed folks would go to Nicholas to help solve them.

He was tough. Imprisoned and tortured under Diocletian, he didn't break.

Nicholas is the patron saint of New York City.

If anyone wants to write Nicholas of Myra, Detective stories, well, feel free. Since it wasn't until Nicea that Canon Law forbid clerics from having young women living with them (mostly because until Nicea there wasn't any canon law) we can even give Nick a spunky female sidekick. Run it like the recent TV series "Elementary" where Sherlock Holmes is a recovering drug addict in modern-day New York and Lucy Liu is Dr. Watson, his live-in (but not romantically involved) sober companion.

*seriously wants to run with this idea, but honestly hasn't time at the moment*

And then they wondered why all the young fans decided to become Muslims.

Scuffle and Dustcough have thoughtfully, if gratuitously, sent all the papers with reviews in them. They make a gratifyingly large heap. Mr Earbrass refuses to be intimidated into rushing through them, but he is having a certain amout of difficulty in concentrating on, or, rather, making any sense whatever out of, A Compendium of the Minor Heresies of the Twelfth Century in Asia Minor. He has been meaning to finish it ever since he began it two years and seven months before, at which time he bogged down on page 53.

To explain the title of this post: "Nicodemus" means "People's Victory" (in Greek).

For those who are interested in our writing: my novel The Apocalypse Door takes the Stations of the Cross as its structure. And folks will now recognize, I hope, why the ship in our novel Land of Mist and Snow is named USS Nicodemus. (You know my methods, Watson, apply them!)

Em 32: his eyes change colour depending on his mood

Hey, that's not an entirely Mary Sue trait. My eyes have a splotch of yellow right around the pupil and are otherwise hazel to green. If I get angry suddenly, my pupils contract, and my eyes suddenly get dramatically yellower. I've scared the CRAP out of a couple of people that way.

Hated and persecuted by everybody (except a very perceptive small group) despite being Perfect and Wonderful.

Well, at the very end. Had big crowds following Him around singing Hosanna, remember? And He got kinda sick of it and told them "You guys have gotta hate your families if you're following ME around all the damn time." (This was later misinterpreted as a requirement, rather than an evaluation of their family feeling or lack of same.)

Teresa 36: Furthermore, I believe that every year on the Feast of Saint Nicholas, each moderator should get to squash one troublesome user without having to explain anything to anyone.

I can't agree. I think that this privilege should be strictly confined to days ending in 'y' in years that are not odd numbered leap years. And the number should be no greater than the total number of users on the system.

That said, let's remember this next December 6. A good time to renew the Permissions to Moderators and so forth.

Also: I would so read a series of Nicholas of Myra, Detective books. With or without Lucy Liu.

Other than that, me too, great article, and kudos. I stumbled upon two collections of the too-apocryphal-for-prime-time writings (later on, a friend gave me an edition with both books in one compendious cover). I particularly like how they (and Joseph Smith) all have little numbered paragraphs and plenty of thees and thous and shalts, in a two-column format with circles and arrows and a descriptive paragraph on the back, because that's how you know it's not a hoax, not a parable, not an imaginary story, but the real Word!

I'm editing a book with pictures of chocolate chip cookies — I'm sure the client won't miss one.

Coincidentally, I've been listening to the excellent History of Rome podcast since May. It covers everything from the founding to the fall -- 1,200 years. And I just listened to the episodes about Constantine and his relationship to Christianity. I'm now hearing about a promising young fellow named Julian.

Jim Macdonald: It's fascinating that divine revelation ends up being decided by committee.

(For those who don't recognize the reference, even though Arianism had been declared a heresy at Nicea, four of the next five Emperors were Arian Christians. The fifth was Julian the Apostate, who was a pagan, but supported the Arians anyway because he needed the support of the army, which was mostly Arian. This sad state might have continued had not Clovis, King of the Franks, become a Catholic, kicked some Arian tail, and converted everyone back to Catholicism.)

I figure it was someone who was more than usually historically literate.

So did Handel, or at any rate his librettist(s), since he wrote at least two oratorios based on the Books of Maccabees (Judas Maccabaeus and Alexander Balus). I am a huge fan of the latter work, and was sufficiently interested to do some digging around for historical background. Never do this with an artistic work you really love; I now live with the knowledge that the only character in the oratorio who is even halfway true to history is Jonathan, who isn't given his full name by Handel's librettist, but who is clearly Jonathan Maccabaeus, brother of Judas of that ilk. The other characters... well, I reckon that librettist should have got several points on his artistic licence.

Given that it all started out with a troika, what can you expect?

(Coulda been worse--say, a trilateral commission. . . .)

I suspect that when the Amsterdam class was extended to create the New Amsterdam object, the patron saint property was inherited with the class. (Note that in the 2.0 version, the name property was overridden to New York)

Ready. Go!

Anyone?

Here's one: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-carey/reza-aslan-on-jesus_b_3679466.html

Highlights:

"First, Zealot has formidable strengths. Aslan has done a great deal of homework, offering material that will instruct many specialists from time to time. The most important thing Aslan accomplishes involves setting Jesus in a plausible historical and cultural context. Indeed, more of the book may involve Jesus' contexts than direct discussion of the man himself. Someone very like Jesus could easily have existed in Roman Galilee. Aslan's Jesus is thoroughly Jewish, passionately committed to Israel's welfare and restoration. Aslan appreciates how Jesus' activities amounted to resistance against Roman domination -- as well as against collaboration on the part of Jewish elites. Many scholars would agree."

"I would add that Aslan provides some of the most helpful discussions I have yet encountered regarding the accounts of Jesus' healing ministry and of his resurrection. These stories represent minefields for any historical investigator. Aslan handles them with sympathy, imagination, and critical judgment."

"At the same time, I have some serious reservations about Aslan's portrait of Jesus, and I suspect that most professional biblical scholars will share some of them. First, the book contains some outright glitches, things a professional scholar would be unlikely to say. Aslan suggests there were "countless" revolutionary prophets and would-be messiahs in Jesus' day. Several did appear, but "countless" is a bit much. Aslan assumes near-universal illiteracy in Jesus' society, an issue that remains unsettled and hotly contested among specialists. At one point Aslan says it would seem "unthinkable" for an adult Jewish man not to marry. He does mention celibate Jews like the Essenes, but he seems unaware that women were simply scarce in the ancient world. Lots of low-status men lacked the opportunity to marry. Aslan assumes Jesus lived and worked in Sepphoris, a significant city near Nazareth. This is possible, but we lack evidence to confirm it."

"Finally, Aslan seems to have bought into an outdated model of Christian development. According to that model, Jesus was a mighty prophet, but it took decades for the idea of Jesus' divinity to take shape. Aslan imagines a Jewish Jesus tradition that developed without the trappings of a divine Jesus. It took the Hellenized Paul and his circle of Gentile converts to start the church on the path to Nicea. Paul, Aslan asserts, "created" the figure of Jesus as "Christ."

Contemporary scholarship is undermining that familiar model."

I hope that's useful.

Mongoose #66: Yes, that's what the Protestants call the Apocrypha. (Which is even more apocryphal than the above-cited Gospel of Judas et blooming cetera. There were a lot of non-canonical books.)

Luther tossed out first and second Maccabees, which contains the scriptural justification for praying for the dead. (Henry VIII of England disputed Luther's action, which is what got Henry the title "Defender of the Faith" before he had his own little problem obtaining a divorce and went his own way.)

So, praying for the dead. This implies that praying for the dead must do some good. If the souls are in hell, no amount of prayer will help them. If they're in heaven, no prayer is needed. So, if we pray for the souls of the dead, that implies they're somewhere else. So, what is that Somewhere Else? Answer: Purgatory, the place of purification. Essentially the souls of the saved-but-still-marked-by-sin (which is to say, pretty much everyone, since even the just sin) are told to sit in the corner and think about it until you're good and sorry for what you did, young man.

Prayers for the dead reduce the time they spend in Purgatory (helping them understand Just How Wrong They Were that much quicker, I guess).

This gets us to indulgences. Rather than relying on the kindness of strangers to pray for you, you can get time off for good behavior by taking certain actions yourself. Sometimes you will see indulgences listed as "Five days indulgence." What this refers to is that the merit of performing certain actions or saying certain prayers is the same merit that you would get by repenting in sackcloth and ashes, or fasting whilst wearing a hair shirt, or one of the other gaudy activities, for five days. What that merit might be is up to God, but we figure He'll be just about it.

Plenary indulgences grant remission of all temporal punishment due to sin. Partial indulgences grant just part (the time period as above).

One of the abuses that Luther saw among certain vain, worldly, and greedy churchmen of his time was the selling of indulgences. This was the ecclesiastical equivalent of selling diplomas. Rather than going to the expense and taking the time of going to college for four years, send twenty bucks to prestigiousaccrediteduniversity.com and get a beautiful diploma suitable for framing delivered to you by a uniformed government employee!

This was, indeed, an abuse, and a scandal. But it didn't justify tossing out Maccabees, where we find, not only prayers for the dead, but the Miracle of the Lights which is the origin of Hanukkah. So Luther fired the first shot in the War on Hanukkah, predating the War on Christmas by a hundred and fifty years.

Indulgences are still available today: For example I refer to them in one of the Crossman short stories ("Selling the Devil" available wherever fine e-books are sold):

His career as a fraudulent raiser of demons had been small stuff by this world’s standards—there were men in the corporate towers of Wall Street who worshipped Mammon and Lilith with a singleness of purpose that would have made this boy look like he made First Friday every month.

"First Friday" is the indulgence you get for attending Mass and taking Communion on the first Friday of every month for nine consecutive months, provided you do so with the intention of gaining the indulgence, and with no attachment to sin (even venial sin) in your heart.

Anyway. This all brings us around to Limbo. The question that vexed the minds of the supremely logical Greek Fathers was this: Suppose you have a complete innocent whose only sin is Original Sin which has not been remitted by being baptized. To send this soul to Hell, there to be tormented for eternity by demons, would be manifestly unjust. To send it to Purgatory to repent for its sins would be ridiculous since it had nothing to repent--what would they say, "Sorry I was conceived"? And to allow it into Heaven would be impossible, since it is marked by sin and only those who are free of sin may enter.

Thus, there must be another place, called Limbo (meaning "the boundary"). This is located in a corner of Hell, but one into which Satan and his demons cannot enter. There the soul is granted perfect natural happiness, but not perfect supernatural happiness (which would require entrance to Heaven and the full beatific vision).

Works out all neat and complete.

But Limbo was never a defined doctrine, and, in 1992, with the revised catechism, the last of it vanished. The thinking is that while the sacraments (e.g. baptism) bind humans, they don't bind God, who can do anything He jolly-well pleases. Further, we read in scripture Christ saying "Let the little children come to me; do not hinder them" as an explicit statement that He intends to save the unbaptized infants.

Right now Limbo is a possible theological opinion that has neither been explicitly condemned nor accepted by the Church.

"In your heart, you know it's flat."

Regarding praying for the dead, and asking (in prayer) for the dead to pray for the living: I've always loved the idea of the Communion of Saints, that the living and dead are part of a transcendent community, a loving fellowship which renders human time irrelevant. And though I suppose it's logical that prayers for those in hell cannot be efficacious, it's also true that no one knows or can know if someone is in hell.

Maybe no one is...

So God could decide "You know, I'm just not feeling as vindictive as I was before I became a Father. Now that I have a human child, I have a kinder judgement for human failings. Maybe I'll just let everyone out of Hell."

And the parable of the widow and the unjust judge (at least the way it's been preached in my presence) indicates that you should keep praying ceaselessly until God hears you. So why can't Christians pray for God to let the sinners out of Hell?

I'm sure these arguments aren't new and that there's Catholic theology that refutes the heck out of all of them. I just don't understand, and I don't think it's only because I'm a Pagan.

Aquinas's argument is essentially this:

Nothing that exists is 100% evil, since existence in itself is good.

God's mercy is infinite.

Over the length of eternity anything that is even the smallest fraction good must therefore receive mercy.

But Aquinas came a long while after the Greek Fathers who reasoned out the ideas of Purgatory and Limbo.

As far as Luther and his theses: Here are the 95 Theses And here is the Pope's response (finding fault with 41 of them, but not, sadly, linking to which exact one he was refuting each time). The Pope gave Luther 'til the 10th of December to recant those 41 theses. Instead, on the 10th of December, Luther publicly burned the Pope's letter. After that the gloves were off.

In my opinion, Luther was right that there were real abuses going on. But he was also trolling.

I get the impression that some Jewish thought on this simply rejects the idea that God's decisions are always and eternally right. You're supposed to be willing to critique them with well-supported argument, if necessary.

The Christians tend not to go this far but are all over the place on what is actually going on. There's the scary dispensationalist idea that the actual, absolute and indisputable definition of right and wrong changes from time to time.

I'm fond of the idea that perfection is not a phoenix; there is more than one perfection and multiple ways to be perfect or perform perfection.

And that a perfect decision in one time and place may require perfecting when situations change.

Thus God can be right, yet change His mind and still be right.

And also that "perfect" need not imply "changeless".

But these are all the opinions of an ex-Catholic Pagan whose last Sunday School class was more than 20 years ago, so.

"I don't know. I'm making this up as I go."

You've got Gibbon saying that Eusebius "confesses that he has related whatever might redound to the glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace, of religion." Then the author tracks down the original quote in which Eusebius says that he does not want to write about the schisms in the early church because "we have decided to relate nothing concerning them except the things in which we can vindicate the Divine judgment." And in a later chapter: "I judge it more suitable to shun and avoid the account of these things...I consider it most proper to tell and to record, and to present to believing hearers in the history of the admirable martyrs." And this is presented as if to rebut Gibbon.

And then in the second example, he criticises Gibbon for quoting Eusebius saying "It will sometimes be necessary to use falsehood for the benefit of those who need such a mode of treatment." But then he tracks down the original Eusebius which has a chapter title that translates from the Greek as "That it is necessary, sometimes, to make a lie/fiction a remedy for the service of those who need such a process." So how does our fannish friend deal with this?...well, by firstly claiming that maybe it wasn't Eusebius but some mysterious, previously undetected "later editor" who added that chapter heading, as if that makes any difference to Gibbon's criticism of the text attributed to Eusebius. And then, just in case you don't find that convincing, our fannish friend defends Eusebius anyway by pointing out that the Greek word pseudo doesn't necessarily mean "lie" but can also mean ordinary "stories/tales" or "that which is not true". Firstly this hardly negates Gibbon, and secondly it's a falsehood itself. Pseudos always refers to lying/cheating/deception/deliberate falsehood in Ancient Greek (check out the Perseus Tufts dictionary: every word starting with "pseudo" in the major Greek classics can be found here). It's only as a modern English prefix that it has a broader sense of meaning.

I decided not to read any further "examples". Really, this is a pretty desperate attempt to protect Eusebius's reputation from his own writings.

Hmm...I wonder what the folks leading the RCIA group I'm in would make of this?

Matt McIrvin @78:

A God who is omniscient and perfectly good ought not to change his mind about anything, because any decision he makes was always eternally perfect to begin with. But, of course, the Bible depicts God changing his mind all the time.

As for Saint Mary-Sue Thecla: BWEEEE!

--Nonie

The period of the late Roman Republic through the Julio-Claudian emperors is deservedly a great breeding ground for stories. But the period from Diocletian through Constantine seems very rich as well. But there doesn't seem to be much literature about it, to my surprise.

The period of the late Roman Republic through the Julio-Claudian emperors is deservedly a great breeding ground for stories. But the period from Diocletian through Constantine seems very rich as well. But there doesn't seem to be much literature about it, to my surprise.

This is very hard for us, living in time, to wrap our minds around.

I agree with Teresa that Jesus is more of a next-gen reboot.

For my money, the Mary Sue in the canonical Gospels is the Disciple Whom Jesus Loved, especially if you accept the common theory that he's a stand-in for the author.

In the Torah, you've got a tribal god whose most distinctive features is the lack of an idol, and his "jealousy" -- that is, unlike other gods of the time, he forbade his people to worship the gods of tribes or places they might be visiting, or to do anything that even looked like they might be worshipping another tribe's gods. (That's most of what the kosher and related laws are about, specifically forbidding the sacred practices of the Israelites' various neighbors of the time.)

By the time of the Jesus tales, you're already seeing a lot of classical-Greek influence: Still basically a Sun Child born of the Storm King (and you can bet that a lot of his listeners knew about the Promethean prophecy), but now there's much more abstraction and less reaction to the surround, and that progressed over time to where both the Christians, and the surviving Jews, were using logic and and inference to deduce features and characteristics of their god.

Another answer is that the greatest of evils -- fires, floods, wars, murder, slavery -- take place in the blink of an eye compared to the soul's life in eternity, and radical evil is necessary for radical joy to be possible.

Jeffrey Burton Russell (recommended above) wrote a four-volume scholarly history discussing the question, and a one-volume popular summary (among his many other works). Again, I recommend them.

God is really big on free will. It is the single most important thing to Him. Else we have the bit from Svengali:

Trilby: Oh Svengali! I love you!

Svengali: Silence, child. It is only Svengali ... talking to himself.

As to how I come to know this stuff: I had twelve years of Catholic education. My high school library had attractively-bound, fully footnoted, editions of all the extra-canonical books in translation (Book of Enoch, Book of Jubilees, Gospel of Judas, Lives of Adam and Eve, Third Maccabees, Fourth Maccabees, and so forth and so on) because how can you say you understand your religion if you don't know all this stuff? As Tertullian said, "Reason, in fact, is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason — nothing which He has not willed should be handled and understood by reason."

Later on, in college, I majored in Medieval Studies, which involved reading pretty-much every word ever written in Middle English (along with much else). The monks wrote a lot of saints' lives, and discussed the history of the Church ... endlessly. I went to the University of Rochester, home of the The Rossell Hope Robbins Library. Rossell Hope Robbins wrote the Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology; the library held his book collection, including his marginal annotations. I read a lot, and have a pretty good memory for text.

This has informed all my writing since. The Mageworld series, for example, in addition to being space opera, is also (in the first three volumes) my refutation of the Manichean heresy. (The Long Hunt, aside from being space opera, is also the Acts of the Apostles (for Crom's sake, when the heroes go to an upper room, have tongues of flame descend on them, and meet the Holy Ghost, what did you think we were doing?) mixed with sixth-century Byzantine politics.

I don't suppose I have to mention that our Peter Crossman stories are overtly, blatantly Catholic-didactic (along with being hard-boiled private-eye mysteries)?

So, that's me.

Hey, those Mithra guys have some great ideas! We'll just change the names a little. I like the sound of this one, but Ahura Mazda sounds like an Swahili light bulb, so we'll put something else in there.

Seriously, guys, instead of filing the serial numbers off, just write good honest slash… I mean, crossover fic. Jesus and Thor team up (after sparring briefly, due to mistaken identity) and save the world from Baal, just in time for a big Duvali production number!

It's not just that he set other words to the tunes that makes them filks, but that he did them all in service of his fandom.

Actually I really want to be able to buy All The Books, not just yours; I'd love that new 21st Century SF anthology. But until someone decides I'm good enough to be paid to do a job, that isn't going to happen, unfortunately.

My advisers were Professor Peck and Professor Hahn. Is Medieval House still there, with the stained-glass window by Pehr the Perfect and the half-timbered basement by Bettelheim?

U Rochester has the distinction of Walter R. Brooks's papers. He invented Mr. Ed and wrote the "Freddy the Pig" series, which is seriously under-represented in my library.

DIGRESSION WARNING. Oops, too late.

Of Irenaeus's many works, only two survive in full, both in translation. (Mere fragments remain of his original Greek).

One is On the Detection and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So Called (which everyone calls "Adversus haereses" (that is, against heresies) because it takes up less space). The Latin translation of the full document survives. (The other of his writing that survives in full is Proof of the Apostolic Preaching which exists in an Armenian translation. The rest -- snips from his articles in other people's Usenet posts are the only traces.)

Alas for this discussion here, Irenaeus's "How God Is Not the Source of Evil" is lost.

Adversus haereses was from Irenaeus's long-running flamewar with Valentius (not the Valentine that made saint--the other one). Valentine the Gnostic claimed that there was Super Secret Hidden Knowledge that only those in the gnow gnew.

Irenaeus's argument, in its simplest form, was, "Listen. I'm a bishop. I was instructed and ordained by Polycarp. Polycarp was instructed and ordained by John. John was instructed and ordained by Christ Himself. If there was any secret knowledge I would bloody-well know it. But no such secret knowledge was passed down to me. Therefore, it doesn't exist."

Irenaeus wasn't all flamewars, though. He urged the Pope not to get all doctrinaire on the date of Easter, saying words to the effect of "When the Guard arrests us and we're hanging side-by-side in the Flavian Amphitheater nobody's going to ask us, 'Hey, when's Easter?'"

Irenaeus was a contemporary of Tertullian. Irenaeus made saint, Tertullian didn't. (Part of the reason Irenaeus was in Rome was to ask the Pope what to do about the Montanists, who had just arrived in Lyons. (The Montanists believed in the New Prophecy, which was continued revelation. They also had female bishops and preachers.) Tertullian, unfortunately, was a Montanist. Even though Montanism was never formally declared a heresy, that wasn't the brand of Catholicism that eventually won out.

Irenaeus's opinion on the date of Easter (which didn't match the Pope's) didn't win out either, so there you go.

Peck and Hahn are still here, but I think Peck is finally retiring this spring. :( I had Classical & Scriptural Backgrounds with Hahn last year, and Myth & Fairytale with Peck; both were fantastic.

It is something of a jolt to be reading a Bible that is in modern English, I was brought up on the KJV.

Xopher: One of the Fatima prayers has a line: "Lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of your mercy." FWIW.

BTW, I really enjoyed The Apocalypse Door.

For those who are interested in our writing: my novel The Apocalypse Door takes the Stations of the Cross as its structure.

And folks will now recognize, I hope, why the ship in our novel Land of Mist and Snow is named USS Nicodemus.

Jim @97:

The Mageworld series, for example, in addition to being space opera, is also (in the first three volumes) my refutation of the Manichean heresy.

(The Long Hunt, aside from being space opera, is also the Acts of the Apostles (for Crom's sake, when the heroes go to an upper room, have tongues of flame descend on them, and meet the Holy Ghost, what did you think we were doing?) mixed with sixth-century Byzantine politics.

So, that's me.

Ditto, how I figured out that the Mageworlders pbhyqa'g or gur onq thlf gurl jrer vavgvnyyl znqr bhg gb or.

And you said it in the original Erassian! Hurrah!

With the exception of Jane and Claire, I do sometimes wonder how your other editors cope.

I wonder how our readers cope. Weirdly, most of our fan letters are from teenaged women, retired intelligence officers, and assorted priests and nuns.

To quote an early editor of ours, speaking to the next person up the food chain, "Be advised, this is the book where Jim Macdonald does away with the concept of linear time."

(This was after she'd talked him down from five time loops to only three. )

Teresa @84: Having only been in inquiry for a month, and attended the first group RCIA meeting last week, I'm not yet certain just how much of a sense of humor the good Father and Sister have...I have no doubt as to Jim's accuracy, I'm just hesitating over sharing the post. Maybe in a month or two.

It is something of a jolt to be reading a Bible that is in modern English, I was brought up on the KJV.

The reading that trips me up worst is from 1 Corinthians 13. We always get halfway through it before my brain does a sort of reorienting backflip, says "Oh! It's through a glass, darkly," and I thereafter know where I am.

I must admit that I don't think the KJV is at its best when translating Paul^*, especially if you're hearing it read rather than reading it yourself. And that's leaving out the issue of accuracy. And in that passage especially, I think 'love' works much better than 'charity', partly because of meaning drift over the years.

For Isaiah or Jeremiah you can't beat the KJV, but for Paul I'd rather have something more modern and less ornate.

^* ok, the author of the epistles traditionally attributed to Paul, if you prefer.

To quote an early editor of ours, speaking to the next person up the food chain, "Be advised, this is the book where Jim Macdonald does away with the concept of linear time."

(This was after she'd talked him down from five time loops to only three. )

Jim 106: Irenaeus's argument, in its simplest form, was, "Listen. I'm a bishop. I was instructed and ordained by Polycarp. Polycarp was instructed and ordained by John. John was instructed and ordained by Christ Himself. If there was any secret knowledge I would bloody-well know it. But no such secret knowledge was passed down to me. Therefore, it doesn't exist."

Wow, what an asshole. That only works if ordination is a wholesale telepathic transfer of knowledge from which the ordainer has no ability to hold anything back. Was this guy stupid, or did he just think everyone who'd read him was?

(The Montanists believed in the New Prophecy, which was continued revelation. They also had female bishops and preachers.)

And ultimately were forced to move out West and become cowboys. C'mon, someone had to say it.

Lori 108: There have always been Christians who wanted to believe in a God who was kind, because they themselves were kind (and/or in great need of kindness). There have also always been Christians who believed in a cruel, vengeful God. I leave an evaluation of them as an exercise for the reader.

I know which kind of Christian my Christian friends are. I shun the other kind; they scare me (not theologically; I don't trust them not to knife me for my shoes).

Yeah, "What an asshole!" does describe St. Irenaeus, bishop and martyr (which is why you'll find me mostly quoting Tertullian,* neither bishop nor martyr), but that is not the whole of his (many) argument(s) against gnosticism. If you'd like to read all five volumes in modern English, they're right here.

#119 ::: TexAnne

I hope I haven't ruined the books for you!

------------

*The guy who gave us the saying, "Out of the frying pan, into the fire."

Not that I have any dearly-held bedrock philosophies about the teacher-student relationship, or anything.

As far as Christ keeping secrets, in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Christ takes Mary aside and explains all kinds of secrets to her. And Peter gets kinda pissed by this because there shouldn't be any secrets among the Apostles. But John takes him aside and explains that if Christ wants to have secrets and only share them with a few, well, it's God's call on how He's going to spread His message, right? (The Gospel of Mary Magdalene didn't make in into canon because it was gnostic, y'see.)

(Christ spends all night in private explaining secrets to a beautiful young man wearing nothing but a linen cloak whom He has just raised from the dead in the Secret Gospel of Mark. But the slashiness of that one was so thick that not even the gnostics wanted it.)

I suppose this makes James Blish the St. Paul of Trekdom.

The idea that there really is a secret teaching known only to an inner circle of initiates is one that keeps cropping up. I keep hearing about the RC church a lot. Overwhelmingly from people whose knowledge of the Catholic church seems to come from Dan Brown novels or the equivalent thereof.

Nah. Harry Potter is pretty darned Anglican. For Calvinist you have to look at Stephen King.

I am not a theologian (or even a theist) but I don't think Aquinas ever said that.

On the contrary, what you describe was Origen's thesis and Aquinas was not Origenist.

Aquinas believed that persons who did a mortal sin deserved eternal punishment and could never reach redemption (see Summa contra Gentiles, III, 144 and IV, 93).

knowledge increases; secrets could have been created since the initial revelation.

Entropy increases; therefore knowledge = entropy?

"If you call the cable company and tell them you're going to cancel, you can get a free month of premium channels!"

So I'm reading through a psalm that's all about entering the court of the Lord with joy, when several verses in I hit "let us lament before God who made us" and I'm thinking, say what?!

So I pull up Douay on the Kindle and it agrees with "lament;" but when I check NABRE, that says "kneeled." Even more puzzled, I check the Latin verse and the word in question SEEMS to be "ploremus."*

Now, it's been a long time since I took Latin (over four decades) but the closest I could come translated it as "implore" or "beg" which is NOT "lament" by a long shot.

Color me puzzled.

*ploremus coram Domino qui fecit nos.

My Latin is strictly classical, not ecclesiastic, but in the classic sense the verb ploro means something like "cry aloud" or, transitively, "cry over." So I think it'd be pretty easy for that to develop into both the meaning of "mourn" (which is already there, really) and "beseech for aid", which would be an appropriate response to one's God, especially in times of need.

Which I suppose doesn't explain why a translation would choose "lament" when God is clearly in the dative, there, and the surrounding context doesn't sound all that sad.

And she's the reason I'm in RCIA. She had been trying to get my attention for quite some time, and in February of this year I finally realized that and began to listen to her.

And as St. Louis de Montfort says Mary is always pointing us toward Jesus.

(And Dante? Where does Dante come in?)

Voldemort = Calvinism I might buy -- the elect being pure bloods would fit the template.

Jim 106: Irenaeus's argument, in its simplest form, was, "Listen. I'm a bishop. I was instructed and ordained by Polycarp. Polycarp was instructed and ordained by John. John was instructed and ordained by Christ Himself. If there was any secret knowledge I would bloody-well know it. But no such secret knowledge was passed down to me. Therefore, it doesn't exist."

Xopher: Wow, what an asshole. That only works if ordination is a wholesale telepathic transfer of knowledge from which the ordainer has no ability to hold anything back. Was this guy stupid, or did he just think everyone who'd read him was?

Also, teaching back then was a direct person-to-person interaction. If there were secret doctrines that significantly altered the basic Christian message, John would have to have known them, and he wouldn't have kept them from Polycarp. If for some conveniently mysterious reason John had tried to hide them from Polycarp, it wouldn't have worked, because what you understand about a subject reshapes the way you think and talk about it. You know how that one works: even if you don't know what the secrets are, you know when there are secrets being kept.

The same goes for Polycarp teaching Irenaeus.

The Christian message was news to be spread, not a secret to be kept. It's still not a secret. "Have you read any of the literature on that subject?" is one of the stock answers I give atheists who are grousing about doctrine. (Spoiler alert: they haven't.) Vast amounts of material, from basic to advanced, is available online, and more goes up every day.

Fragano @124:

I take it that you experienced massive squee over Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

Fragano @133: IMO, "There are unacknowledged secret teachings" = "I am about to propose a massive retcon that suits my own agenda," or more simply, "I am pulling a fast one."

The line before "lament" is about falling down before the Lord and adoring him, so I really couldn't figure out why one's emotional state would change so abruptly.

There have also always been Christians who believed in a cruel, vengeful God. I leave an evaluation of them as an exercise for the reader.

As an aid to the reader, I will note that the Anabaptist tradition tends toward a belief in God's vengeance, specifically because of their belief that humans should never arrogate vengeance to themselves.

This post was awesome, and I sent it to my priest; I'm fairly certain she will enjoy it as well.

Brenda 135: Why stop there? Children grow and so does Japanese knotweed; therefore children == Japanese knotweed.

Teresa 145: I don't see why the teachers (except the First One) couldn't have forgotten some stuff, or underemphasized something so the next teacher forgot it. Not everything that will prove critical seems so right away (otherwise Muhammed, p.b.u.h., would have established a clear line of succession).

Moreover, things could have happened to Christians since the time of Christ that generated new insights that John may not have been aware of, and thus could not have taught to Polycarp.

It's all dependent on the teachers all being perfect human beings and perfect teachers with perfect memories, and having perfect knowledge not only of what they'd been taught, but of everything going on in the world.

(If Christian doctrine holds that once Christ ascended there was no further knowledge to be found, that God would never again reveal anything to humans, you can discard that last point. If it doesn't, couldn't there be revelations of which John was unaware, or that came after his time and that Polycarp was unaware of, etc.?)

In all humility I must confess that it could well be that I just don't understand. If so, I'd like to. What I know of Christianity comes from a limited amount of reading, and listening to sermons for a couple of decades in an extremely liberal Episcopal church.

SamChevre 147: As an aid to the reader, I will note that the Anabaptist tradition tends toward a belief in God's vengeance, specifically because of their belief that humans should never arrogate vengeance to themselves.

There's that line somewhere about "vengeance is mine, saith the Lord," but the idea that humans should not take vengeance doesn't necessarily imply that God will. I'll trust you on the Anabaptists, though, since I know next to nothing about them.

Also, while one should always be careful about rhetorical exaggeration, Irenaus' argument isn't just "My teacher had it this way!" but "Lots of other disciples of disciples of apostles are teaching my way!". Admittedly, not too far removed conceptually from "the lurkers support me in e-mail", but he's not just appealing to his own chain of instruction here.

I think the difference between your postulates and the Gnostic "secret knowledge" is the sort of knowledge being talked about. Refinements, details, applications to new circumstances--those can be learned or forgotten over time. But the Gnostics postulated something much more fundamental; their claim (as I understand it) was that the entire story was a falsehood intended to appeal to the masses, and the actual knowledge was something entirely different.

Against that sort of a claim, I think Irenaeus makes sense. "If there was some underlying truth and this was all a deliberate cover story, I would know" makes sense in a way that "I know every detail everyone ever did" does not.

Fred Clark at Slacktivist is worth reading, as usual
If you've ever read Job, you're familiar with the frustrating ending of that story. Not the tacked-on happy ending spelled out by the Greek-chorus narrator in the epilogue, but the actual ending to the story's central argument.

and

And that’s how the character of God starts off, just listing all the incredible things he’s created as a way of bolstering his authority and trustworthiness. But then it starts to get away from him a bit. God starts grinning goofily at the thought of all these amazing creatures and the argument morphs into more of a reverie about just how freakin’ cool all this stuff he created has turned out to be.

That leaves only the idea that any of the teachers, or Irenaeus himself, could have been outright lying. Which I bet the Gnostics didn't claim (except anonymously in the comments).

C. 153: So it's just yet another challenge to Biblical literalists, whose position is risible anyway.

Marcion was also a literalist (and some classify him as a gnostic because some of his beliefs were similar to some gnostic beliefs). Tertullian refuted him by taking some verses that Marcion himself accepted (from Luke 5:36-37):

And he spoke also a similitude to them: That no man putteth a piece from a new garment upon an old garment; otherwise he both rendeth the new, and the piece taken from the new agreeth not with the old.

And no man putteth new wine into old bottles: otherwise the new wine will break the bottles, and it will be spilled, and the bottles will be lost.

You may well be right.

However see Summa Theologica Question 99. God's mercy and justice towards the damned, Article 2. Whether by God's mercy all punishment of the damned, both men and demons, comes to an end? Which, it seems to me, leaves the door open.

(BTW the reason your post was gnomed was the broken link.)

If Jesus in his own words told stories which were not literally true in every word in order to instruct people, then surely other bits of the Bible can be equally useful for instruction without necessarily being literally true.

For the clothes, plenty of people would patch an old garment with a piece of new cloth -- but they mostly wouldn't trash a new garment to do so (unless they've already written off the new item for other reasons).

An old dried-out goatskin would burst if any additional fermentation took place.

That area had a lot more goats than forest to cut down to make glass, and glass-making takes a LOT of wood.

*For similar reasons, boubon is supposed to be aged in new wooden barrels, freshly charred on the inside. ON the other hand, some distillers take advantage of what's been in the barrels before--Laphroaig uses old sherry casks for their aging.

The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them; and they said unto the olive tree, Reign thou over us. But the olive tree said unto them, Should I leave my fatness, wherewith by me they honour God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? And the trees said to the fig tree, Come thou, and reign over us. But the fig tree said unto them, Should I forsake my sweetness, and my good fruit, and go to be promoted over the trees? Then said the trees unto the vine, Come thou, and reign over us. And the vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? Then said all the trees unto the bramble, Come thou, and reign over us. And the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow: and if not, let fire come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon.

I often think of it when I look at elected officials.

But hey, it's an excuse to post a link to the Corning museum of glass with photos of amazing period glassware:
http://www.cmog.org/collection/galleries/roman-glass

And this is where you get the next layer of fun with Scripture: translation. (You obviously get this layer of fun whenever anything has to be translated, but when it's material that people are going to be basing their lives on, it becomes a lot more important.) I'm an Italianist, not a Greekist, so I don't actually know what the original Greek word in the NT is which can be translated as either "bottles" or "skins". However, whatever the word is, it doesn't matter. The translator has a problem with it, come what may.

It's like this. At the time the NT was written, at least one common meaning of Word X was "vessel in which wine is sold, carried around and stored". History suggests that this vessel was normally made of skin, and the etymology and semantic space of Word X may well reflect that. But here and now, the word that means "vessel in which..." and so on is almost always "bottle" (or occasionally "winebox", but that's exceptional).

So, you're translating this parable, and you've got a choice. Do you say to yourself, "Ah, yes, Jesus was talking about vessels for carting wine about," and translate as "bottle"? Or do you say, "Yes, Jesus was talking about vessels for carting wine about, but in this particular context it's important that they should be skins, because bottles don't tend to burst if you get secondary fermentation in them, whereas the goatskins which were familiar to his audience, they would do that"?

For further reflection - and rather than allowing me to get started on the subject of translation, because if I do I will never shut up - I can highly recommend Umberto Eco's Mouse or Rat?, which goes into some detail about exactly this kind of issue.

SamChevre (#169): That parable makes me think of people who are good at their jobs and are therefore promoted to management.

Plus Eriugena had a fine wit (he responded to Charles the Bald's query as to the difference between a sot and a Scot -- the pun's identical in Latin -- by saying "the breadth of the table, sire").

In Job - and in some other contexts - it appears to me that you are reading it, and contemplating the Hebrew God or Christian God, as if God were a person; just some guy, who's being mean to people arbitrarily. Given, the book of Job tells the story specifically that way - or at least the beginning seems to.

But it seems to me (granted, I'm coming at this as a Buddhist) that the whole point of Job is after all his misfortunes and after all the suffering of his family, at the point where Job realizes something akin to a Zen realization. When Job finally personally experiences God, he directly sees that God is not anything *like* a person, that God embodies everything about the universe and something more besides: amazing, terrifying, awe-inspiring, ecstatic, painful, wonderful, horrible, and from our limited viewpoints, apparently arbitrary. When he confronts THAT face to face, he can do nothing but accept it with joy and peace. That personal realization and heartfelt acceptance is where the story really ends, dramatically.

I view the bits after that as an afterword for the readers who have to know how all the characters ended up.

Alas, the Denver Public Library findeth it not. Their closest suggestion is a book on how to decide between rats, mice, hamsters et. al. as pets, oddly looping back, or might be addressed in a different discussion opened by Teresa.

Rats. So to speak.

The Simulation Argument's concordance with the first point is rather obvious. The second takes a bit of work: imagine you are a super-mind in the post-human future interested in creating a high fidelity recreation of the past. However, the past sucks, with pain and suffering and all that, and to create any self-aware entities and subject them to that reality would be clearly immoral. Assuming that we are not, as is so often the case with this kind of speculation, a mind that has immeasurable knowledge and power but the morality of a four year-old, this is self-evidently not permissible.

However: there is no moral prohibition for *imagining* pain and suffering yourself. If you are a super-mind, imagining a hi-fidelity recreation of the past, imagining that part of your own mind is a self-aware entity within it, and even imagining that you don't know that it is a simulation--it's no more than an exercise in moral sympathy; reading the diary of Anne Frank raised to the nth degree. Provided that it all happens within your own consciousness. In other words, the only morally viable solution to the Simulation Argument is that all the sentiences within the simulation are literally part of the super-mind that is running the simulation within itself--along, presumably, with the demiurge that authors the simulation world.

We are all just fragments of God, seeking to return to the whole.

(Not that the Simulation Argument is very plausible, ultimately.)

What's up with the word 'heretic'? I mean, it means "clear sight" or something like that, so how did people go around calling people that in the original language while still holding the position that they were the ones who were wrong? Was there an obligatory 'so-called' that got dropped when the word moved into other languages, or was discourse back in those days actually as strongly steeped in irony and sarcasm as we moderns' is?

Jeff R. @180: I'm not sure where you're getting "clear sight" from. The well-attested etymology of "heretic" derives from a Greek word meaning "choice". So a heretic is one who has chosen something else to believe than the right opinions espoused by the main Church.

(I find it interesting that the medical procedure called "apheresis" is related; the details are beyond the scope of this post, but I can talk about them if anyone's interested.)

Less extremely, they believe that since the accounts of the Loaves and Fishes in different Gospels give different numbers of people fed, it must have happened more than once. They don't admit fallibility on the part of the Gospel writers, because they must have been guided by God (all the hacking in the OP here notwithstanding).

David 182: So a heretic is one who has chosen something else to believe than the right opinions espoused by the main Church.

Not according to...was is Augustine? Who said that if you believed things out of personal conviction or reasoning, rather than out of obedience to the Church, you were still a heretic even if you believed all the same things as the Church.

In the tradition of "hard cases make bad law," we have "hard questions make bad theology." That one is particularly poisonous.

That leaves only the idea that any of the teachers, or Irenaeus himself, could have been outright lying. Which I bet the Gnostics didn't claim (except anonymously in the comments).

When I try to imagine the Gnostics making the "Everyone's wrong except for us, and the obvious interpretations are all incorrect" argument, my imagined Irenaeus starts looking like Jim in his "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" mode.

Heresiarch @179:

(Not that the Simulation Argument is very plausible, ultimately.)

Jeff R. @180 et al.: Thomas Aquinas has a good basic definition of it. This is from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

St. Thomas (II-II:11:1) defines heresy: "a species of infidelity in men who, having professed the faith of Christ, corrupt its dogmas." ... "The right Christian faith consists in giving one's voluntary assent to Christ in all that truly belongs to His teaching. There are, therefore, two ways of deviating from Christianity: the one by refusing to believe in Christ Himself, which is the way of infidelity; ... the other by restricting belief to certain points of Christ's doctrine selected and fashioned at pleasure, which is the way of heretics. The subject-matter of both faith and heresy is, therefore, the deposit of the faith, that is, the sum total of truths revealed in Scripture and Tradition as proposed to our belief by the Church. The believer accepts the whole deposit as proposed by the Church; the heretic accepts only such parts of it as commend themselves to his own approval.

Marcion was not actually called "The Pontic Rat." he was called "mus Pontus" which you could render as either "The Pontic Rat" or "The Pontic Mouse." The images and connotations are very different for English speakers.

If the Ante-Nicene Fathers has been speaking modern English they might have called Marcion "The Pontic Fruitbat."

(It has also been said that no one in the second century understood Paul except Marcion -- and Marcion was mistaken.)

1. I have favorite Bible verses.


2. You pick and choose what to believe.


3. He or she is a heretic.

My own definition of Catholic is "Someone with an obscure doctrinal disagreement with the Pope."

There are practical problems--images vs symbols and alphabets, fragmentary or derivative manuscripts, arguments over translation, historical translations versus modern ones, organization by region or language, but they have all been worked over by scholars and traditional publishers. The result would look like a cross proto-Project Gutenberg / Wiki.

It seems that most of the ancient manuscripts are referenced in fragments in medieval studies books and rare manuscripts. I hear about this stuff by third hand descriptions rather than by to links to online reference copies.

But I find discussions of wine/beer/liquor flavors understandable if I just mentally translate to, say, cheeses.... (Does that sound weird? It's not meant to sound weird.)

IANARC, but my mother is a cradle Catholic and some of it rubs off. I've come across weirder conspiracy theories: The secret Anglican plot is one I especially cherish; no one ever let me in on it, and I was confirmed and all. You'd think that friendship with priests, deaconesses, and even bishops would let me in to the inner sanctum. But, no. I've done better with the Catholics, at least they allowed me to take a perfectly illicit photograph of the Botafumeiro the last time I was in Compostela.

Now I'm wondering whether first-batch-from-old-sherry-barrel tastes differently from first-batch-from-old-wine-barrel

Absolutely. It is generally labeled, but it's pretty noticeable even without the labels.

Bourbon must be aged in new barrels; Scotch must be aged in used barrels. This works out well for everyone--the "standard" barrel for Scotch is a used bourbon barrel. Generally, Scotch finished in something else will be labeled as such. (Look at the Glenmorangie site for a good example.)

More on-topic--Xopher @ 183

Are you talking parables, or miracles? (I maintain that the miracles happened, and that a parable could have happened (Parable of the Sower) while a fable could not have happened (Fable of the Trees)--but that's a linguistic distinction--Scripture clearly includes both.)

Try googling 'Scotch wine barrel' for more.

I love my wife, I want to do well at work. I'm hungry for breakfast now but I want to get a couple more things done before I break.

If the universe is a simulation: Well, I still love the part of the simulation that is my wife. I want to do well at my simulation of work. And my simulated belly wants me to put some food in it.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden (#184): As you (and Jim) may know: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence was originally stated by Carl Sagan with regard to UFOs. What he meant to say was that if you're just talking about some mundane event like a car accident, the evidence of three eyewitnesses is acceptable to anybody. The red car ran a red light and T-boned the blue car.

But if you're talking about something extraordinary -- like extraterrestrial visitors -- well, ordinary evidence like a few eyewitnesses doesn't cut it.

I have found this to be an incredibly useful rule of thumb, over time. It applies particularly well to political conspiracy theories (Obama Muslim Kenya sleeper agent, etc.).

It's also useful in personal life. If someone tells you that he saw your best friend in Starbucks the other day, well, that's an ordinary event, so you can believe they were in Starbucks. If someone tells you your best friend betrayed you, well, that's an extraordinary event, so you'd better get some extraordinary evidence before plotting your vengeance.

What effect do you think Jonathan Strange has had on fantasy?

Certainly the number of books published after JS&MN encompassing that kind of setting seems much larger than those published before ... though I might not have been looking in the right places.

A few months ago, I went to a small rye whiskey distillery in Northern Virginia (Catoctin Creek); apparently US law requires that whiskey (and bourbon) be aged in new barrels, so that's what they do. Some of their used barrels get sold to a local guy who ages maple syrup in them, and that stuff is amazing.

I've been considering experimenting with doing my own liquor aging; there are a few websites out there that will sell you new barrels. But it will probably be awhile before I get around to it.

I have always heard that it was the US cooper-makers and logging industryu that pushed that into practice.

Most Scottish whisky is aged in ex-bourbon casks, shipped from the US, with other woods (sherry, madeira, cognac, wine, ...) just used for finishing. Specifically madeira and port barrels darken the whisky something fierce, so those are almost only ever used for finishing.

Then there's the multi-finished whiskies, for an extra complex taste.

Cassy B @ #197:

Yes, to some extent.

SamChevre @ #199:

More like "four Scotch barrels started their lives as five bourbon barrels" (they're shipped as staves and re-assembled to barrels in Scotland, but the whisky cask is typically larger than the bourbon cask, so uses more staves of a given size).

That makes for an interesting definition of "old barrel"!

Two things to understand about the later frame - First - God is not the cause of the misfortunes that come upon Job. Second - Job didn't cause these by things he did. He didn't bring it on himself as righteous retribution. I am not a theologian, nor do I play one on TV, but these are pretty important points to comment upon in order for the underlying story to be clear.

So then it comes back to the case of "Duuuude - God *let* Satan do this to Job? How could he? He knew Satan had bad plans! He should have protected Job!" Which is, in fact, the point of the whole free will thing, and the whole "I know you're trying to, but I don't think you really understand" thing.

But I don't see the outer framing story as a really nasty bet about "Can you break this?" Instead I see it as "Totally not Job's fault, you can't say that he brought it on himself, nor can you say that God did it to him."

Tolkien was deliberately seeking to construct a fantasy world that could provide a mythos for England, on the basis of the late modern rural life of the Midlands. Clarke creates a mythos on the basis of post-modern Britain projected backwards to its multicultural origins in the Regency period. The result is a story that speaks to a wide variety of people, and does things that other writers, Neil Gaiman in American Gods for example, have also learnt to do: connect simultaneously to multiple audiences and bring them into the worlds they have imagined. because they can find themselves in those worlds.

I'm not sure how much Victorian fantasy is influenced by JS&MN, and how much is the result of the rise of steampunk.

#215 ::: Fragano Ledgister

That sounds to me like trends which were happening anyway rather than influenced by the particular book, but I may be missing something.

*Much of Stevermer's work, with or without Wrede, for example.

That's actually a pretty good way of putting it.

(I wonder if this "the Founder had the Secret Teaching that only I know" shtick applies in other religions than Christianity -- I think the Lotus Sutra may be a similar thing in Buddhism...)

If NOTHING actually worked that way it'd be far more trivial to push off the people trying to insist EVERYTHING works that way. :->

"Hlepy" is a way of disparaging people who try to help, but in the wrong way (according to the person who needed the help in the first place).

If someone ever says to me, "You're being hlepy" my response will be, "Then fuck you. You're on your own."

Do you have a better way of saying that, without the four-letter word? Because my longer version is too long for actual conversational use.

Sometimes helping in the wrong way is really harmful. It's not always a matter of preference, and you, Jim, are vastly more likely to give appropriate help than most people, and therefore people turning down your help are more likely to be doing so for stupid reasons.

Oh, so there's some stuff which wasn't included in my (roughly) 15 years of Sunday School, Church, Evening Youth Service, Daily Vacation Bible School, and Release Time (from public school) Religious Education which explains all the contradictions, the lack of correspondence with reality, and the way many Christians act on Mondays through Saturdays (cover it up, stonewall, move the priest to another parish)? Okay, then.

I'm with Feynman: this whole universe is just so we could partake in a brief morality play before graduating into one of two or more other universes? The stage is too big for the play.

I enjoyed the post. How anybody could see how the sausage was made - no divine revelation in sight, just lots of tall tale tellers, every word written, edited, translated, and published by humans - and still take it semi-seriously floors me. Not that what I think amounts to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Xopher, the guy who called the tow truck should pay for it. Pushing the car to the side of the road doesn't solve the problem.

My response to the person if he said "You're being hlepy!" would be, "Then fuck you, you're on your own." Because if he needs a tow truck wishing that he didn't need one won't change the situation.

And calling the tow truck may overwhelmingly be MORE hlepy than just suggesting it, because now the person who can't afford one is committed to paying for them showing up.

The word "hlepy" is a way of sneering at people of good will who genuinely care.

A related phenomenon is the people who get everyone else the gifts they really, really want. The year Aunt Agatha found a great inexpensive real-down comforter and decided everyone in the family needed one, even the people who already know they dislike down bedding ...

You wouldn't hlep in an Aunt Agatha way, Jim, because you're more self-aware and empathetic than that. And I think you're probably less prone to hlepiness at all because you actually listen and often ask questions first, before proffering help.

That doesn't make it NOT a very useful word, or at least a concept to wordify so we can look at it all in one place.

Not that any of this has anything to do with the top post. :-> But the wordification of that concept and the ability to call it SOMETHING (instead of not being able to think about it coherently) is something that a lot of the DFD regulars have strong, positive emotional reactions to, because that wordification (and the examinations it makes possible) has had massive positive effects in our lives.

Or mine, anyway.

So seeing it paired instantly and angrily with "Fuck You!" gave me some serious emotional whiplash.

I'm owned by two cats. They love to "help" me. Their "help", while adorable, often extends the task to double or triple the time it would take otherwise. I know they mean no harm; what term would you use for this (other than "help" with scarequotes)?

I know there was an early medieval church official, Venetian, I believe, who was quite incensed at a Byzantine princess who married into Venetian aristocracy and insisted on using forks to eat. FORKS! Fingers weren't good enough for the likes of her! He was positive she'd burn in hellfire.

Then, in 1945, a clay jar turned up in the Egyptian desert containing a bunch of fourth century Coptic copies of gnostic books (the Nag Hammadi library) and it turned out that Irenaeus had been scrupulously fair in describing gnosticism.

Best guess about how they got there was that when Athanasius was bishop he passed the word that gnostic literature was right out. There had been a monastery nearby so the monks would have followed the bishop's orders but were unable to bring themselves to destroy their books. Instead, they preserved them the best they could, off site.

Also sometimes people don't have good will, such as the person who responds to, "How do I deal with this Windows problem I'm having?" with "Go to www.ubuntu.com/download...."

Yes, the word can be misused to sneer at people who don't deserve it. There are lots of words that can be used that way, and that doesn't make them not useful.

When it's offered out of "I know better than you do what you feel and what you want/need, so I am going to ignore everything you say," then the appropriate response is FOAD. And if expressing my opinion that someone is being helpy causes them to say, "fuck off, you're on your own," that is an improvement in my situation because I no longer have to deal with their helpiness.

* I also dislike the spelling "hlepy", but that's because it feels to me like an unnecessary and non-useful elaboration on a word which already fits the required parameters.

Thus proving the value of offsite backups.

Papyrus is extremely durable, particularly in the desert. We have some of the ancient works we do only because someone used the backs of the leaves for more ephemeral purposes and then threw them away.

One always wonders what else is out there, as yet unrecovered.

There is an experience that I have, every time I've gone back to Britain in the past few decades, of finding it more and more my country. I'm not sure that it is one that is easy to put into words. When I left, I was someone who belonged but did not fit in. Each time I go back, it is to a place where, more and more I find I belong. Jonathan Strange is a novel that takes a world of fantasy and adapts the history of Britain in such a way that it makes that belonging possible, not just for me, but for a host of people like me. It makes me wish that there were writers like Susanna Clarke when I was a boy of ten and first entering into the realm of fantasy. C.S. Lewis, looking backwards into the late Victorian era, or Walter de la Mare, doing the same, just didn't hack it. Tolkien, when I encountered him in my teens, was a true genius, but his England was not mine.

Clarke opens up a world, and from my perspective, makes possible whole realms of the fantastic.

There was some amazing cross-pollination in theological and philosophical thinking going on in the Ottoman courts at the time (1200ish ff) amongst Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars -- it is possible (in the trove's letters in his hand and his published writings) apparently to track influences well-known Christian theological movements had on his thinking and vice-versa.

Mind you, Clarke is perfectly happy to be counted as One Of Us--heck, she's married to an SF&F writer, Colin Greenland.

It's also true that Jonathan Strange was one of those books bought by significantly more people than actually finished it (the classic example of this being The Name of the Rose), because Bloomsbury did a magnificent job of making the entire world curious about this very odd, very long first novel. But lots and lots of people did finish it, and many of them liked it a great deal. Meanwhile, from a publisher's perspective, sold is sold. It's clear that 19th-century elements are no inherent bar to commercial fantasy success--real mass success, not just success at reaching the niche-within-a-niche "steampunk" or "gaslight fantasy" markets. (Healthy though those are, relatively speaking.)

(Raises hand.)

I've bounced off it twice now. Fragano's comments have made me consider trying again.

I have retained almost no memory of about 80% of the content of the novel. Which is another thing it has in common with Tolkien ...

I've finished Name of the Rose.

I managed a volume and a half of Remembrance of Things Past.

First, I am gobsmacked to learn that Aquinas was one of those soft-headed Universalists, believing that everyone would be saved. How the hell does tht fit into the whole structure of respectable Chirstian thought, with its eternal damnation and all. It's just kind of eternal?

(Was going to say bleeding-heart, but that seems an inappropriate insult what with the Sacred Heart and all.)

A mere sidelight: When Gutenberg invented printing (or, if you prefer, introduced printing from movable type into the Euroverse), how long did it take for someone to start printing business forms, and for what business? Readers will guess that it didn't take long, a few years, and that the forms were for Indulgences. Right. The British Library, of course, has a sample.

Meanwhile, the Aquinas argument relies on an unstated assumption: that there are, or ever will be, only a finite number of souls.

If there were infinitely many, then he could pardon only the even-numbered souls and leave the infinity of odd souls still damned forever. Galileo could have told him this, if it weren't for a problem with chronology.

But with finitely many souls, he could indulge each one in succession and still have inifinite time on his hands, same as Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged.

(Then again, an infinite universe seems to have been problematic at one time, being apparently the main problem that got Giordano Bruno burned. Is an infinite creation still heretical? And does that mean God can't make an infinite universe? Is his infiniteness not as strong as the Continuum? Or was this just more of the slavish devotion to Aristotle?)

On Job, there are two concrete examples God points out that form my (non-Christian, atheistic) understanding of the story. The first is Behemoth: you don't get Behemoth. Sure, tail like a cedar, bones like iron. But you don't ask why Behemoth? It's just there; you do not expect to encompass it within your power. When things amaze you with their beneficence or awe you with their magnificence you don't demand explanation: why do you think suffering alone has to make sense? The second is: "Who provides food for the raven when its young cry out to God and wander about for lack of food?" One being's suffering is the precondition of another's satisfaction, and God must encompass them all.

I have since been corrected: That wasn't Aquinas but rather Origen of Alexandria. Still, it makes sense to me, and fits better with a God who is both just and merciful.

Yes, sinners are condemned to everlasting hell. This is just. Yes, God saves them. This is merciful. Thus both conditions are fulfilled.

As to an infinite number of souls, if we assume a Second Coming, Last Day, End of the World, and Final Judgment, then we are assuming a finite number of souls.

Dies Irae, y'all.

My beef with less-than-great genre fantasy is that it reshuffles the furniture over there while doing nothing of any especial note to readers here.

"EVERYBODY expects the Italian Inquisition!"

The end is about comedy and (rot13 for spoilers) cbvfba.

I do find JS&MN lags somewhere in the second half, which makes it very like most 19th century novels I've read.

Of course, the movie adapts only the plot of the book, which is perfectly appropriate, but not really what the book is about. The story is only a frame for some rather interesting discourse on semiotics. It is, for example, the first place I encountered a clear explanation of de dicto and de re. Confusion and deception between the two is the linchpin of many a joke, but I'd never had names for them or had it explained so clearly. It's a plot element in the book, but its use in the story supports the semiotic discussion, rather than being primary (in my humble opinion).

I should reread that book, now that I'm remembering what I liked about it.

I am reliably informed that the original in Il nome della rosa is a word-for-word lift from the Italian translation of A Study in Scarlet, but the translator missed it and gave us a translation of a translation, instead of just giving us the original again.

Re your #250: I did finish The Name of the Rose, and I hadn't even read much Aristotle at the time (the early 80s) either. I had, however, read the entire Holmesian canon and could detect Sherlock, er, Thomas of Bradwardine at 50 paces. I found the mystery of the hidden Aristotelian treatise in the finis Africæ fascinating. I understand that Jonathan Strange sold well beyond genre; as I said, I first heard of it on a local NPR bookchat programme.

TNH #260: I agree on less-than-great fantasy.

And a sufficiently large number is, practically speaking, indistinguishable from infinity, to anyone who isn't a god.

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first calls for a beer. The second calls for half a beer. The third calls for a quarter of a beer. The fourth calls for an eighth of a beer, the fifth for a sixteenth of a beer. ... the n^th calls for 1/2^n-1 beer....

The mathematicians are still ordering (indeed, there's still an infinite line stretching out the door) when the bartender pours two beers and says, "Gung'f lbhe yvzvg."

I've read Jonathan Strange. I found it an absorbing story, but there was one thing about it that bugged me and that nobody here has yet mentioned, so I'm starting to think perhaps it was just me. Did anyone else find the period style inauthentic? Not horribly so - it was a pretty impressive attempt - but just enough "off" for it to jar now and again.

So I had heard.

Because there's going to be more fascinating terraforming? I'll grant you that I found the part set on Earth the least interesting.

My first memory of Robinson's work is of reading The Gold Coast not long after having moved to San Diego. So that would be around the end of 88, beginning of 89. I enjoyed it.

But it does mean that I usually put such books off as "not right for me now" rather than "terrible." I save the latter for books like Black Body, which I finished in terrible fascination.

And yet, I can totally understand bouncing off his books - I think I was always on the verge of it with most of them, and I'm not sure why.

...

I easily understand how one could bounce off Jonathan Strange..., much though I adore it. It seems for the first few chapters as though nothing much is happening, and then when things do start happening it's still not much, and very slow. But that's quite deliberate; the momentum of the plot keeps gathering pace and increasing its scope slowly but steadily, and expanding and expanding and expanding.... The prose style is also a bit misleading - it's not written in a modern style exactly, but it's also not actually written in 19th century prose, which most modern readers would collide with very hard; it's written in a style which suggests or evokes 19th century prose but is actually more modern (plus, amazingly wonderful footnotes.)

As you may be able to tell, I love this book, and have loved it more after each rereading - at least 3 rereads now, maybe more. (It may help that I'm a very very fast reader and so get through the "slow" part relatively quickly in clock time.)

I feel like I should put in a disclaimer here. How's "not as braggy as I sound" work? Or maybe "I understand that this doesn't make me cool. Nothing does."

I read The Name of the Rose in the mid-1980s. I have no clear memory of the book's contents, but I do recall how caught up in it I was, and how much I adored it. Hmm, sounds like an excellent candidate to re-read!

Tom Whitmore @ 283: A friend of mine bounced off of The Lord of the Rings twice, at the same point: The Fellowship is in the boats given to them in Lórien, and reaches the stretch of river with the carved Kings of Gondor, and Aragorn starts reciting his lineage. I can't recall if he ever managed to soldier through. He did love the movies.

Speaking of that, though, I fully understand bouncing off JS&MN. I find that I have a hill to climb to get to the point where the book catches hold of me, and that remains true even now that I've read and loved it multiple times. The hill hasn't gone away with rereading, even though I fully trust that I'll enjoy the view when I get there.

But to pick one specific error at random, "IHS" isn't latin "In Hoc etc"; it's Greek [iota]-[eta]-[sigma], the "standard" abbreviation for "Jesus".

BOOK I:

CHAPTER XXVIII: How, while he was praying, God sent him a Vision of a Cross of Light in the Heavens at Mid-day, with an Inscription admonishing him to conquer by that.

ACCORDINGLY he called on him with earnest prayer and supplications that he would reveal to him who he was, and stretch forth his right hand to help him in his present difficulties. And while he was thus praying with fervent entreaty, a most marvelous sign appeared to him from heaven, the account of which it might have been hard to believe had it been related by any other person. But since the victorious emperor himself long afterwards declared it to the writer of this history, (1) when he was honored with his acquaintance and society, and confirmed his statement by an oath, who could hesitate to accredit the relation, especially since the testimony of after-time has established its truth? He said that about noon, when the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, CONQUER BY THIS. At this sight he himself was struck with amazement, and his whole army also, which followed him on this expedition, and witnessed the miracle. (2)

The story that IHS stands for In Hoc Signo is both ancient and widespread.

At any rate, people have been expanding non-acronyms as long as there have been acronyms. The tradition, of course, continues; one of my younger gay friends recently claimed with great sincerity that 'twink' was an acronym for "Teenage, White, Into No Kink." I tried not to laugh at him, I really did.

So why is it S instead of Σ? Why is only the one letter replaced?

That would be Iesus Hominum Salvator.

Since the IHS abbreviation wasn't used by anyone before the 8th century (four hundred years after whatever it was that Constantine saw), this is a silly objection. Next you'll be telling me that Vespasian didn't really have wasps living in his nose.

The internet might be the best argument yet devised that truth does not come from written texts, but from the persons who write them, and is not recognized by comparison with other texts, but by persons who are looking for persons who know who the uncreated light comes from.

OK, I clicked on your comment on the "recent comments" section of the main Making Light page, and laughed out loud. I have now gone back and read the main posting, which somehow escaped me.

Jim, Xopher - you have made my waiting in transit space much more entertaining. Thank you. Haven't read the 300 comments in between yet, but there is a reason that I say far too often "well, I was reading this great blog and one person on it pointed out..."

John of Antioch, called Chrysostom, frex?