Jots & Tittles

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A First for the Last Supper

Leonardo da Vinci got it all wrong—at least according to BASIC, Brothers and Sisters in Christ, a Roman Catholic group in Ireland that supports the ordination of women as priests.

BASIC faults Leonardo for depicting only males in his Last Supper. The group’s Web site (www.iol.ie/~duacon/basic.htm) says key details of the painting are off base: Daylight streams through a window, but the Last Supper took place at night; the figures are seated around a table, but Jesus and the disciples would have reclined on couches; the painting shows a meal of fish and ordinary bread, but the supper was a Passover meal of unleavened bread, roast lamb and bitter herbs.

But the group finds greatest fault in what da Vinci left out altogether: women and children. A Passover meal, it notes, had to be eaten by the entire family; children are especially important because they must ask questions so that their parents can teach them the meaning of the holiday.

To counter Leonardo’s presentation, BASIC commissioned Polish artist Bohdan Piasecki to execute a Last Supper that was more historically correct, in its opinion. The result, viewable on the Web site, shows 22 figures, including seven women and two children, dressed in Palestinian garb and partaking of Passover food.

However, Joseph Fitzmyer, a distinguished New Testament scholar who has served as president of the Society of Biblical Literature and of the Catholic Biblical Association, told BR that there is no scriptural support for the view that women were at the Last Supper. He notes that the three Synoptic Gospels specify that only Jesus and the Twelve Apostles were present. (The Gospel of John dates the Last Supper to the night before Passover.)

BASIC sent a poster of Piasecki’s painting to Pope John Paul II, but there has been no indication of the pontiff’s reaction.

Would You Like Fries with That?

…And speaking of groups who are using the Web to broadcast their own “take” on Scripture, a home page maintained by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) declares, “Jesus was a vegetarian.”

The page (www.jesusveg.com) says that “Jesus mandates kindness, mercy, compassion, and love for all God’s creation.” The site claims that “evidence is strong that he was a vegetarian…He drove those selling animals for sacrifice and consumption out of the temple, instituted baptism in place of animal sacrifice…and eliminated animal sacrifice altogether at the Last Supper (a vegetarian Passover meal).”

What about the miracle of the loaves and fishes, you ask? PETA counters, “The earliest (pre-Gospel) accounts of this miracle do not include fish, and Jesus, when he refers to it, refers only to the bread (e.g., Mt 16:9–10, Mk 8:19–20, John 6:26).”

PETA’s position has not impressed L. Michael White, director of religious studies at the University of Texas at Austin. “This is just another cause making bad use of Scripture,” White told the Washington Post. White added that he does not know any Bible scholars who believe Jesus was a vegetarian.

The Plague of Plagues

A doctor specializing in infectious diseases thinks he knows what killed Egypt’s firstborn in the climax of the Ten Plagues. According to Vanderbilt University physician Martin Blaser, the killer was the same plague that decimated Europe during the 14th century—the Black Death. Furthermore, according to Blaser’s report in the August 1998 issue of Discover magazine, observing Passover may have inoculated the Israelites from the disease.

As the Book of Exodus recounts, the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, and Pharaoh would not let them go. Nine plagues—water turning to blood, frogs, gnats, flies, dying livestock, boils, hail, locusts and darkness—did not unharden Pharaoh’s heart. So God announced that he would bring one last plague on Egypt: Every firstborn in Egypt would die. Only the Israelites would survive by marking their doorposts with the blood of a lamb, so that death would “pass over” their homes.

In the middle of the night, as the firstborn Egyptians are being killed, Pharaoh releases Moses and Aaron: “Rise up and go away from my people, both you and the Israelites! Go, worship the Lord!” (Exodus 12:31). The Israelites, who have been busy preparing bread for their departure, must flee before the dough has been leavened. God later tells them that they will remember this night every year during the Passover festival by removing all traces of leavened bread from their homes and by eating unleavened bread for seven days.

According to Blaser, the tradition of discarding all leavened bread, grain and yeast, which remains part of the modern Passover 019celebration, may have its roots in ancient harvest festivals long celebrated by the Israelites in Egypt. This practice, according to Blaser, could explain how the Jews survived the plague of the firstborn.

Blaser, noting that the Bible mentions that many of the Egyptians’ cattle died along with their owners, believes that the final plague was caused by Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the bubonic plague, the Black Death or, simply, the plague. It is one of the few diseases that is highly fatal to both humans and animals; it takes its name from the buboes, or swollen and rupturing lymph nodes, of those infected.

When the bubonic plague broke out in Europe in the 14th century A.D., it was initially transmitted to humans by parasitic fleas living on infected rats. Thousands of years earlier, the Israelites in Egypt would have made their neighborhood less attractive to rats—and thus safer from the plague—by throwing out their stores of grain and leavened bread every year. If the ancient Israelites recognized the value of annually cleaning out stored grain, this may explain why it came to be recorded in Jewish law, Blaser suggests.

Blaser finds support for his theory in reports of the bubonic plague that struck Venice in 1631. According to these records, Jewish deaths during the Venetian outbreak were half those of other inhabitants. Tragically, this higher survival rate led to accusations that the Jews had caused the plague, and many Jews were massacred as a result. But, in fact, the relatively low number of Jewish plague victims may have been directly related to observance of the Passover festival.

Hot Enough for ’Ya?

Brace yourself for some very bad news. If the scorching temperatures for Heaven and Hell calculated by one physicist are correct, none of us will be resting in peace—not even those who wind up in Heaven. But refined scientific calculations may come to our rescue.

The entire afterworld was first set on fire, so to speak, in 1972 by an anonymous physicist who, using Bible verses and the laws of physics, determined temperatures for Heaven and Hell that left Heaven the hotter of the two by a whopping 145 degrees Fahrenheit! The findings appeared in an unsigned letter to the editor of Applied Optics. Ever since, physicists have attempted to come up with a more comfortable temperature for Heaven.

Beginning last year, Physics Today and New Scientist magazines published a series of letters contesting the equations and their unknown colleague’s reading of the selected Bible verses.

The mystery scientist had based the temperature of Heaven on Isaiah 30:26—“The moon will shine like the sun, and the sunlight will be seven times brighter, like the light of seven full days, when the Lord binds up the bruises of his people and heals the wounds he inflicted.” The verse seems to indicate that the radiance of Heaven was seven times brighter than seven Earth days, 49 times brighter in all. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann fourth-power law for radiation, which divides the radiant energy of an object by a constant, the temperature for Heaven would be an alarming 977 degrees Fahrenheit! The maximum temperature of Hell, however, was no greater than 832 degrees Fahrenheit, the boiling point of sulfur (also known as brimstone), a key ingredient of the place based on the description in Revelation 21:8: “But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars, their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”

The problem with this approach, Jorge Mira Pérez and Jose Viña wrote in a letter to Physics Today, is that the verse in Isaiah does not necessarily refer to Heaven. And if it did, it clearly indicates “that the light of the Sun falling on heaven is only seven times greater [than that on Earth], not 49 times.” According to their amended calculations, Heaven was only 448.7 degrees Fahrenheit, definitely cooler than Hell, but still awfully hot. “A lot of colleagues,” Pérez told New Scientist, “have said that they prefer to stay on Earth.”

In a letter to New Scientist, Chris Oldman suggested that the temperature understood as the Earth’s average, 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit, needed to be changed to a more moderate 59 degrees Fahrenheit. That would bring the temperature of Heaven down to 411.8 degrees Fahrenheit. “However,” Oldman went on, “Revelation 21:17 gives the thickness of the walls of New Jerusalem…as 144 cubits.” The insulating value, combined with “shining white raiment that reflects most light, and the air conditioning supplied by luxuriant wings” would, in Oldman’s opinion, bring the temperature of Heaven “down to tolerable levels.”

“Avoid unqualified assumptions,” Kristin Janz concluded about the entire debate, “particularly where matters of eternal significance are at stake.”

Pray for Your Soul, Not Your Body

Religious faith may not improve your health after all. But it doesn’t seem to hurt, either.

A number of studies, several of them reported in this department recently, tried to link faith to improved overall health and a better prognosis for patients with illnesses. Now a study of those studies casts doubt on that conclusion. “Even in the best studies,” according to Dr. Richard P. Sloan, director of behavioral medicine at New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, “the evidence of an association between religion, spirituality and health is weak and inconsistent.”

Writing in the medical journal the Lancet, Sloan concluded that it was premature to promote faith and religion as adjuncts to medical treatment.

Sloan and a team of researchers reviewed hundreds of previously published studies. They found wide inconsistencies even in the best of them. “The findings were all over the place,” Sloan told the New York Times. Sloan concluded that it was inappropriate for health professionals to “intrude” into matters of religion. He also worried that patients would be assailed by guilt if their religious practices failed to produce a cure for their illness.

A First for the Last Supper

Leonardo da Vinci got it all wrong—at least according to BASIC, Brothers and Sisters in Christ, a Roman Catholic group in Ireland that supports the ordination of women as priests.