Little Gidding and Gospel Harmonies

I keep a separate blog for family and friends who might have an interest in our little UK adventures, but I decided that my posts on our recent drive around the countryside have enough to do with the general biblical studies / academic nature of this blog to justify including them here. This is the first installment:

Unless you come on pilgrimage "to kneel where prayer has been valid," following the "broken king" Charles I or drawn by the famous lines in T. S. Eliot's poem, there is not much to see or do in Little Gidding beyond inspecting the tiny church, parts of which may go back to the building that was standing when Charles visited in the 1640's (see the links here and here).

I didn't notice a pig-sty, but in other respects T. S. Eliot's description of Little Gidding can't be matched:


If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
...
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull façade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, ...
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.
- From T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding"

To be honest, we came to inform curiosity not to kneel, but out of respect for those who were already there when we barged in, I didn't get many pictures of the inside of the church:

The "Four Quartets," of which "Little Gidding" is the final part, has long been one of my favourite poems, and it was neat to be able to pick up a copy and skim through "Little Gidding" on location. Perhaps I will find that "the purpose is beyond the end [I] figured, and is altered in fulfilment."

At any rate, I am also fascinated by the story of the religious community that drew King Charles to Little Gidding in the first place.

The property was purchased in 1625 by Mary Ferrar, the widow of one of the founding members of the Virginia Company, and her son Nicholas. They were joined by her other son John, her daughter Susanna, and their extended families. Nicholas was ordained as a deacon by the future Archbishop Laud in 1626 and soon established a devotional routine based on the Book of Common Prayer that included daily services for the whole family--matins at 6:30 a.m., the litany at 10 a.m. and evensong at 4 p.m.--as well as hourly prayers and a night vigil with readings from the Gospels and Psalms. According to the Little Gidding Church website,

"To instruct the younger members of the extended family in the gospel story and to develop their manual dexterity, Nicholas devised a Harmony of the four gospels. This Harmony provided the narrative for the hourly gospel readings. To create it, individual lines were cut from the four gospel narratives and pasted together on the page to make one continuous text. The pages were also illustrated with engravings, some of which Nicholas may have brought back from his continental travels many years earlier. When King Charles heard of the Harmony’s existence, he sent to borrow it, returning it only when the family agreed to make another for him."

I like telling my students this story to show that studying a synopsis of the Gospels--with parallel passages laid side-by-side--can be a devotional practice.

The best information we located about Little Gidding is in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entries on Little Gidding, Nicholas Ferrar, and John Ferrar. Less authoritative, but free alternatives may be found here, here and here.

Our next destination, via back roads and rolling hills, was Bedford.

Fall Course Line-up

Another major project this summer is to prepare for next semester's classes. This fall I will be teaching Gospels (our required introductory New Testament course in the college); Romans (offered jointly as both a college and seminary modular course); and third-semester Koine Greek (also cross-listed between the college and seminary).

Current Briercrest students can check out the Gospels and Romans syllabi on Briercrest Live; everyone else can find them here (along with a collection of my other past syllabi), or click on these links:

• BLST103 Gospels (15-01)
• BLST306 Romans (college version); BLST825 Romans (seminary version)
• The syllabus for Greek Syntax (also cross-listed in the college and seminary) is still in progress. (I know we'll be working through Mark 1-4 and talking about Greek syntax, but I am planning to try something a little different this time around, and that requires working through my course notes before I outline the class.)

If you are at all interested in a Romans "study vacation," I would be delighted to have you join the class in Caronport during the week of October 26-30. If Greek is your thing, Greek Syntax is also potentially open to distance students by live Skype-cast.

Summer also includes recess. Today's activity involved climbing freshly bailed hay in the field behind our house.

Wright and Sanders on First Century Jews

I've commented before that I think N.T. Wright's portrayal of first-century Judaism is "a flawed historical model moulded to serve a theological purpose," and I've tried to rehabilitate the Pharisees (here and here). This may only mean that I am more influenced by Sanders than I am by Wright. At any rate, the contrast between the two is stark. Consider the following examples:

N.T. Wright:

The Gospels thus also tell the story of corruption within Israel itself, as the people who bear the solution have themselves become (with terrible irony that causes Paul to weep every time he thinks of it) a central part of the problem. The Pharisees are offering an interpretation of Torah which pursues a kind of holiness but only makes matters worse. The priests in the temple are offering the sacrifices which should speak of God's grace but which instead speak of their own exclusive and corrupt system. The revolutionaries try to get in on the act of God's in-breaking kingdom (Matthew 11:12), but their attempt to fight violence with violence can only ever result in a victory for violence, not a victory over it. This means that the death of Jesus, when it comes, is bound to be seen as the work not only of the pagan nations but of the Israel that has longed . . . to become "like all the nations" (1 Samuel 8:5, 20) and now is reduced to saying that it has no king but Caesar (John 19:15). - N.T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (IVP, 2006), 80-81.

(Wright is describing what he takes to be the portrayal of the Gospels, but it appears that he agrees with it.)

E.P. Sanders:

The various actors in the period that we have surveyed are often the objects of moral censure. We shall understand them better if we view them sympathetically. I rather like the chief priests. I think that on the whole they tried hard and did better at staving off revolt and protecting the Jewish population from Roman troops than any other group could have done -- except a succession of Herods. . . . I rather like the Pharisees. They loved detail and precision. They wanted to get everything just right. I like that. They loved God, they thought he had blessed them, and they thought that he wanted them to get everything just right. I do not doubt that some of them were priggish. This is a common fault of the pious, one that is amply displayed in modern criticism of the Pharisees. . . . Mostly, I like the ordinary people. They worked at their jobs, they believed the Bible, they carried out the small routines and celebrations of the religion: they prayed every day, thanked God for his blessings, and on the sabbath went to the synagogue, asked teachers questions, and listened respectfully. What could be better? - E.P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 BCE - 66 CE (SCM, 1992), 493-4.

My question: Do the Gospels present the Chief Priests, Pharisees and rebels as corrupt for the reasons Wright cites, or is it--as Sanders has argued elsewhere--a case of solution to plight? In other words, the main thing the Gospels find wrong with the Chief Priests and Pharisees is not their piety (or hypocrisy) but their rejection of the Messiah.

I-Monk on the Suburban Jesus

I've been reading excerpts from this rant by the late Michael Spencer to my Gospels students ever since I came across it a few years ago, and thought it would be worth sharing here:

I am just amazed at why anyone would want to be involved with Jesus unless you were convinced that what Jesus said, Jesus taught and Jesus did was the truth. I cannot understand why someone wants to be involved with Jesus if they don’t either intend to believe and emulate Jesus or at least encourage, assist and applaud those who do. Taking the Christian label and then acting like Jesus was someone from whom we should never take advice or example is incomprehensible.

I used to get paid by large churches to tell their kids all about Jesus, get them into Bible studies and take them on mission trips- which I choose to be in the inner cities of Chicago and Boston, not the beach. The basic assignment was actually to keep these kids out of drugs, jail and pregnancy so they could go to college, make lots of money and pursue the lifestyles of rich Americans while attending large prosperous megachurches.

I figured this out early on, but I kept telling myself it wasn’t the case. I thought that if one of those kids becomes a serious Jesus revolutionary, going among the poor, giving up the suburban lifestyle, my churches would have applauded.

Then, a few years ago, a church kid from Minnesota came to talk to me. She’d been out of college for a few years, had come to Appalachia to teach English, then taught and coached at our school for a while, after which she took off for Africa for a couple of years. She brought me a letter from her parents where they told her what they thought about her life.
...
In this letter, the parents honestly said what they thought of this girl. They thought she was nuts. The called all the ministries she worked for abusive, slave labor operations. They begged her to come home, take her college degree into the city and make some money, get a house in the suburbs and find a husband with wealth and security.
...
Hey, I understand what parents go through. I feel their pain. I really do. But that letter told me, once and for all, that I had been right all those years ago, and I’m still on target today when I feel this way. Suburban Christianity is frequently not about an honest following of Jesus. It’s about an edited, reworked Jesus who blesses the American way of life and our definition of normal and happy.

It’s Jesus the sponsor of our beautiful church. It’s Jesus the bus driver of the ticket to heaven. It’s Jesus the guy who wants us to be nice to children. It’s Jesus who presides over all kinds of niceness.

...[I]f we don’t really believe Jesus is the one for whom we sell it all to buy the pearl of great price, what’s the point?

I also know my own answer. Learn to know the virtues of relative poverty. Learn to see poverty as Jesus and the saints saw it. Keep real poor people in view. Keep real poor churches in mind. Don’t listen to the broadcasted, published propaganda of the suburban Jesus. Read the sermon on the mount. Remember that Jesus is a true revolutionary, and those who want Jesus but reject the revolution always have a nice slide show and plenty of facts and figures.

A sarcastic Jesus?

I was reading Mark 14 this morning and noticed that the standard Greek editions (NA27 and UBS4) do not punctuate Jesus' final comment about the disciples' sleep with a question, as the translations I grew up with do.

According to the NIV, NRSV, NET, ESV, NKJV, and NASB, Jesus returns the third time and asks a variation on the question he addressed to Peter in verse 37: "Are you still sleeping and resting? Enough! The hour has come. Look, the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners." (NIV)

The sentence could also be a command, however, since in Greek 2nd person plural indicative and imperative verb forms are identical, and the original text would not have indicated the difference between a question and a command by punctuation. A (sarcastic) command fits the context well. This was the interpretation that the KJV adopted, and that the NLT returns to:

And he cometh the third time, and saith unto them, Sleep on now, and take your rest: it is enough, the hour is come; behold, the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. (KJV)

When he returned to them the third time, he said, "Go ahead and sleep. Have your rest. But no -- the time has come. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. (NLT)

He came back a third time and said to them, 'You can sleep on now and have your rest. It is all over. The hour has come. Now the Son of man is to be betrayed into the hands of sinners. (NJB)

On this interpretation, the disciples have missed their chance to watch and pray; they may as well sleep. It fits the context and is consistent with Mark's portrayal of Jesus. What do you think?