Readers Reply

002

Thanks!

… for the great December issue. The art and the articles were delightful.

BR a False Teacher

In asking why the popular media invariably represents Jezebel as a sexual temptress, Leonard Greenspoon in his column “The Bible in the News” (see Jots & Tittles, BR 18:05) fails to recognize there are two Jezebels in the Bible. Revelations 2:20 reads: “I have a few things against you, because you allow that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, to teach and seduce My servants to commit sexual immorality and eat things sacrificed to idols” (New King James Version).

You are an unreliable source of information and thus a wonderful work for Satan. The Bible clearly states that those who support false teachers are guilty of their sins (2 John 1:7–11). But then again, I’m sure you can twist that Scripture passage, too, to justify your evil work.

Annunciation

That’s Nothing

In our enlightened age of artificial insemination, when any virgin who wants to can become impregnated sans sexual intercourse, do we really have to ask “How Can This Be?” as David Cartlidge does in “How Can This Be?” BR 18:06?

Just remember, Jesus penetrated the locked doors of his tomb after His Resurrection. God placed Jonah in a whale. In Matthew 17:24–27, God put coins in a fish for the apostles to use to pay their taxes. So, to place a tiny sperm in Mary’s womb is not such a difficult task for God to do, is it?

December 25

Is Jesus a Libra?

I was disappointed by Andrew McGowan’s statement that “the Bible offers few clues” regarding the season of the birth of Jesus (in “How December 25 Became Christmas,” BR 18:06). I have read several articles proposing an early October date based on Luke 1, which discusses the conception of Zachariah and Elizabeth’s son, John the Baptist. Luke 1:5 describes Zachariah as belonging to the priestly order of Abijah. The angel who informs Zachariah that Elizabeth will conceive appears to the priest “while he was serving as priest before God and his section was on duty” (Luke 1:8). According to 1 Chronicles 24, there were 24 priestly courses or lots during the year, and Abijah’s was the eighth. An article in Bible Advocate (October 1995) explains that this meant “Zachariah ministered … [in the month] corresponding to [our] month of July.” Luke 1:24–27 tells us that the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary six months after John the Baptist was conceived, which would make it January. He was presumably born nine months later, in October. Is there some problem with this proposal?

Andrew McGowan responds:

The value we give Luke’s narrative for providing details of Jesus’ time of birth will depend on our assumptions about the character of Luke’s gospel. Like most biblical scholars of critical bent, I see Luke’s and Matthew’s accounts as theologically motivated constructions, which take some earlier traditions and reminiscences and use them to create stories that suit their respective goals. Details such as Zachariah’s priestly service (or the presence of shepherds in the fields, or the phenomenon of a star in 004Matthew) may not really be able to bear the weight of such strict calculations.

Based on His Bris

A few years ago, a rabbi gave me this theory about why Jesus’ birth is celebrated on December 25: In Roman times January 1st was the most festive day of the year. The beginning of the new year was the occasion for a large celebration.

At the same time, the most important date in a Jewish male’s life was (and is) his bris, or circumcision, which marks the passing of the covenant to the son. This is a major celebration among Jewish families, and Jesus’ religious family would have been no exception.

Jesus’ bris would be glorified the most by placing it on the most celebrated day of the year, January 1. Count back eight days, and you arrive at December 24, Christmas Eve. Jewish holy days begin in the eve, at sundown; the holiday would continue on December 25, Christmas day.

I’ve never heard anyone dispute this theory and would be interested in your thoughts on it.

Andrew McGowan responds:

This is ingenious enough, but January 1 probably wasn’t really the highlight of the Roman year—however it looks in Times Square today! But this theory, like the other ones suggesting appropriation of pagan festivals, has to account for the apparent interest in the December 25 date earlier than the Christmas festival itself. And as my article attempts to state, the awkward relations between Christians and pagans before Constantine make it unlikely that Jesus’ birth would be related to pagan festivals of civic importance.

Calendrical Confusion

In “How December 25 Became Christmas,” BR 18:06, Andrew McGowan writes: “The Babylonian Talmud preserves a dispute between two early-second-century C.E. rabbis who share this view, but disagree on the date: Rabbi Eliezer states, ‘In Nisan the world was created; in Nisan the Patriarchs were born; on Passover Isaac was born … and in Nisan they [our ancestors] will be redeemed in the time to come.’ (The other rabbi, Joshua, dates these same events to the following month, Tishri.)”

Nisan, however, is the month of the vernal equinox, while Tishri is the month of the autumnal equinox, called the “seventh month” in Hebrew calendars that reckon Nisan as the first month (following Exodus 12:2, “This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you,” referring to the Exodus from Egypt, commemorated by the Passover festival in Nisan). However, it is Rabbi Joshua’s view—that the creation of the world occurred in Tishri—that became normative in Judaism. The first day of Tishri became Rosh HaShanah, literally “the head of the year,” that is, the Jewish New Year’s day. The rabbinic disagreement reflects two world-views (according to some scholars, one from Canaan and the other from Babylon) as to whether the year begins in the spring or the fall.

On another note, McGowan seems to think that the celebration of Christmas on January 6 by the Armenian Church reflects a different tradition about the date on which Jesus was born. Nothing of the sort is true. The Armenian date is different simply because the Eastern 006Orthodox churches did not accept the Roman Catholic Church’s replacement of the Julian calendar by the Gregorian calendar. (The Protestant countries took more than a century, but they did finally accept it, and for ecclesiastical as well as civil purposes.) By the 19th century, the Eastern churches, still using the Julian calendar for religious dates, had their December 25 falling on Gregorian January 6, which purely coincidentally is the date of Epiphany (or “twelfth night”) in both calendars. Evidently, at this point the Armenians decided to accept the Gregorian calendar for civil purposes, noted that their Christmas was falling on January 6 and stopped tracking further divergences between the calendars.

Ever since the schism between the Eastern and Western churches, the rules for determining the date of Easter have also been different in the two branches, and their dates only occasionally coincide. But this difference in when Easter occurs also has nothing to do with different traditions about the date when Jesus died and was resurrected.

Andrew McGowan responds:

Professor Golomb is right on one count but not the other. Tishri and Nisan are of course not consecutive months. [We apologize for inserting this error in McGowan’s article.—Ed.] The Armenian celebration of January 6, however, is not related to the calendrical changes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries but is simply the preservation of the original Eastern Christmas date. While a Julian January 6 and Gregorian December 25 may have coincided a century or so ago, the January 6 date is anciently and quite independently attested, and is unrelated to the Julian-Gregorian differences—which of course do account for the continuing differences between Eastern and Western celebrations of Easter.

Handel’s Messiah

Sorry, But

Sorry, William H.C. Propp, but I give you an A- in oratious buffoonery for “Bah, Humbug! A Scholar Rips Handel’s Messiah,” BR 18:06. I know there is no word oratious … but Mr. Propp made up stuff too!

Messiah Ordains Women?

I’m surprised that William Propp failed to jab Handel and Jennens’s jolly chorus “The Lord gave the word,” based upon Psalm 68:11 (68:12 in Hebrew), in which “the company [of the women]” is converted to the “company of the preachers.” Jennens abandoned the King James Version here and took this text from the Book of Common Prayer, although I don’t know why the 18th-century Book of Common Prayer read this way in the first place.

William H.C. Propp responds:

I congratulate the acute Reeder on spotting another case of Jennens’s interference with the biblical text. Not that his version is necessarily wrong. The King James has “The Lord gave the word: great was the company of those that published it.” I suppose that the Book of Common Prayer and Jennens substituted “preachers” for euphony, and also to avoid the humorously anachronistic implication that the Psalmist referred to commercial printers.

The Hebrew original is admittedly obscure. In fact, Psalm 68 is so strange that the late great William F. Albright threw up his hands and suggested that it was simply a Table of Contents for a lost collection of poems! Assuming the text is not corrupt, my rendering of this particular verse would be “May my lord give speech, the lady-heralds constitute a great army.” Quite weird. A female herald appears also in Isaiah 40:9 as a personification of Zion.

What’s a Virgin?

William H.C. Propp complains that Isaiah 7:14 (“Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel: God with us”) can’t possibly mean what Handel and Matthew 1:23 take it to mean, because the Hebrew word ‘almah doesn’t mean “virgin” but “young woman.”

It’s not that simple. While ‘almah isn’t the normal word for virgin, it isn’t the normal word for young woman either. Strong’s Concordance lists it only seven times. In three cases (Genesis 24:43; Exodus 2:8; and Psalm 68:25) she’s simply young; Proverbs 30:19 and Songs 1:3 have her old enough to notice boys; but Songs 6:8 places her in a separate category from the “queens” and “concubines.” And so the pre-Christian translators of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible used by Matthew, chose to translate the 052word as parthenos, or “virgin.” The argument that the word doesn’t imply virgin only arose in anti-Christian polemic.

William H.C. Propp responds:

It’s not even that simple. First, the cognate Semitic languages—Punic, Ugaritic, Aramaic and North and South Arabic—all use the root ‘lm neutrally to denote a youth of either sex. Second, the masculine counterpart in Hebrew, ‘elem, is explicitly just a young man (1 Samuel 17:55–56, 20:21–22). Third, Greek parthenos can connote a young woman. Fourth, if Isaiah says that an ‘almah is pregnant, it follows, as day follows night, that she has experienced sex.

In short, without Matthew’s interpretation of the Septuagint of Isaiah 7:14, one would never suppose that an ‘almah was an intact virgin. Some in fact argue that Christian and Western mores have skewed our entire notion of biblical virginity, that it was more a social classification than a physical state. However that may be, I see no reason to regard ‘almah in Isaiah as connoting a virgo intacta other than a prior conviction—one admittedly, held by millions—that the author of Matthew understood the biblical text better than we and was committed to its literal interpretation.

Hendel

Choose Flint

Ronald Hendel says, in his column That Old Time Religion, BR 18:05, that the use of flint knives for circumcision must have become fixed and formalized because people continued to use them even after iron knives had become available. He calls the use of flint “a frozen archaic trait.”

The cutting edge a skilled worker can create on a flint knife equals or even excels in sharpness the edge possible on a contemporary surgeon’s scalpel, even though the latter is made of high alloy, well-hardened steel. No wonder those boys wanted their witch or other doctor to use flint knives instead of an early Iron Age blade. “Formalized,” I suspect, had little to do with it. I’ll bet that flint was preferred and used until the flint knapper became extinct.

Thanks!
… for the great December issue. The art and the articles were delightful.