Book Review for 1.22.26: Family Walk

Trigger warning for some: Christian content. Actually a newer Christian book review should have been here on Sunday. Well, this is the review that is here.

Title: Family Walk

Editor: Bruce H. Wilkinson

Date: 1991

Publisher: Zondervan

ISBN: 0-310-54241-3

Length: 276 pages

Illustrations: cartoons by Martha Campbell

Quote: “You’ll never run out of the riches of wisdom.”

In 1976, Bible teacher Bruce Wilkinson organized Walk Thru the Bible Ministries in Portland, Oregon. In 1978, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where his ministry really took off. In this 1991 devotional book, he reports that the organization has trained over 200 teachers to read the Bible with over a million students, in 21 countries, in 30 languages.

Family Walk is designed for short, simple family meditations. In between “New States” and “Christmas,” with strategically placed chapters on Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas music, parents are free to move around among Worship, Holiness, Leisure, Success, Angels, Love, Listening, Proverbs, Peace, Serving, Growth, Mankind, New Life, Prayer, Joy, Gentleness, God, Creativity, courage, (the Epistle of St.) James, Sin, Meditation, Humility, Money, Reading, Faithfulness, Heaven, Good News, Patience, Memory, Forgiveness, Church, Commandments, Learning, Peer Pressure, Honesty, the Holy Spirit, Suffering, Anger, Youth, Endurance, God’s Names, Contentment, Values, Goals, Fear of the Lord, and Giving.

Each of these chapters contains five one-page meditations on short passages from the Bible, suitable for use at breakfast or after dinner,. There’s a question, an answer, a short-short story, a Bible verse to look up, usually more verses quoted in the text, and a paragraph or two of commentary, which may include a song, poem, or cartoon.

Although it’s more Protestant than Catholic, the book is meant for interdenominational use, and one note to parents suggests, “If vacation travel permits, expose your family to the richness of worship experiences by attending a service at another church.”

Some of the stories are commonplace: a boy’s mother “watched him slam the gate, kick two garbage cans, and angrily shove his dog” and act surly all evening until “the truth came out. He was mad at himself for failing a math test.” Others are taken from history. Randomly flipping through my copy, I notice brief stories about George Müller’s orphanage ministry, Haralan Popov’s book Tortured for His Faith, Nicky Cruz’s conversion, Amy Carmichael’s mission, and Abraham Lincoln’s brainstorming process.

Few Christians will find anything really offensive in this book, although those who know that pumpkins are one variety of squash may chortle over the phrase “squash pie cleverly disguised as pumpkin.”

Family Walk is recommended to any family who would like to study Bible teachings without bogging down in the ancient history and genealogies. It is as suitable for adults who feel “young in the faith” as it is for children and teenagers. 

Book Review: The Bible Story the Book of Beginnings

Book Review: The Bible Story: The Book of Beginnings

Author: Arthur S. Maxwell

Date: 1994

Publisher: Review & Herald

ISBN: 0-8280-0795-0

Length: 96 pages

Illustrations: many full-page color paintings

Quote: “The Bible Story provides the widest coverage of any Bible storybook on the market...all the stories suitable for telling to children, form Genesis to Revelation.”

Arthur S. Maxwell (1896-1970) collected several true, instructive Bedtime Stories for children, and wrote some nonfiction for adults, but his life’s work was The Bible Story. During his lifetime the series was printed in ten volumes, all copiously illustrated with beautiful full-color paintings. These books were bound to stay bound through years of abuse by generations of children—and puppies. The paper was remarkably mildew-resistant; the glossy, colorful covers were peanut-butter-and-jelly-proof. I know of no American book that was a better example of the bookbinder’s craft than the original Bible Story set. 

(Maxwell was not American--his life began in England and ended in Australia--but his publishers were US-based. The Bible Story, as a picture book whose high market value owed a lot to the paintings and the binding, could even be classified as a Maryland book since several of the paintings were done in Maryland. Many a pleasant afternoon can be spent finding the real-world versions of Bible Story paintings northeast of Washington.) 

In the 1990s, however, some tasteless innovator decided to change a good thing, and so The Bible Story is now being printed in twelve volumes. Although the language has been changed too, the most obvious difference is the quality of the new edition—or the lack of it. The paper is thinner and slicker. The pages are glued, not sewn, so they won’t lie flat and Grandma can’t read aloud while she knits. The covers won’t take much scrubbing. The binding is guaranteed to fall apart the very first time a puppy drags it under the porch to chew on it. It is still a better bound volume than many children’s books on the market today, but this one will not be enjoyed by generation after generation of children.

The innovator wanted to use recent translations of the Bible. “Language that today’s children readily understand”? Not quite. Children do not understand “vegetation” more easily than they understand “herb yielding seed.” Children do not understand “hallowed” at an earlier age than they understand “made holy.” Children learn “serpent” as easily as they learn “snake.” Maxwell wrote histories using King James’ and Queen Elizabeth’s words alternately to help children realize that they were synonyms, but the innovator changed the vocabulary to include only the “modern” words, making Maxwell’s stories sound repetitious and clunky. This may have been a favor to parents who had learned English as a foreign language, but it’s no favor to children like Maxwell as a boy, or like me as a girl, who are fascinated by exotic words and names, who may enjoy the rich strangeness of the King James' Version's language before they’re old enough to understand its content.

The long-term effect of dumbing down biblical or classical language is not to make traditional books more accessible to children; it is to cut off children’s access to older language, and thus to older books, and thus to ideas. Children can learn words like “tilled the earth” and “beast of the field” by seeing them used alternately with “worked the soil” and “farm animals.” Learning is what childhood is all about. By learning obscure phrases, as Maxwell intended them to do, through hearing those phrases alongside their modern equivalents, children were prepared to understand the Bible, and also Shakespeare, Milton, Paine, Jefferson, Adam Smith, and Margaret Cavendish, if they so chose. By being taught that they “can’t” understand the language of older books, children are prepared to be defeated by any opportunity they may get to become educated adults.

There is another effect of using the new translations of the Bible. The Geneva Bible, Authorized Version (KJV), and Revised Standard Version (RSV) are works in the public domain—not copyrighted. The up-to-the-minute translations are copyrighted, and the copyright holders demand credit (and payment). Some readers may believe, as I do, that it is not only tasteless but blasphemous for mortals to claim commercial copyrights on the Bible. The publishers of this travesty of Maxwell’s Bible Story claim to believe that the Bible is the Word of God. How, when, and to whom did God assign the copyright on the Word of God?

It gets worse, Gentle Readers. My review copy of the first volume of the “new” Bible Story was marked “Display Copy,” the one pediatricians and dentists will be offered to store in their waiting rooms, to encourage children to beg their parents to buy the rest of the set. The “display copy” marketing technique worked well during Maxwell’s lifetime. But this particular “display copy” can’t serve its intended purpose very well, because it was so hastily slapped together that not only does it identify itself as “the first of 10 volumes” on the back cover and “the first of 12 volumes” inside, but it also cuts off in mid-sentence on page 96. I am not mean enough to have made this up if I’d sat down and worked at it. Nothing has fallen out or been torn out., The table of contents still promises 187 pages of stories, and the last 90 of those pages have not been glued in.

The Bible Story is global—multilingual and ecumenical. Maxwell had the books vetted by ministers in several denominations, including a probably Messianic Jewish Rabbi, to ensure that they could be used by all the major religious groups. (Maxwell, personally, was a Seventh-Day Adventist.) The stories are available in several other languages as well as English. And they’re still distributed by deserving college students who board with church members, during the summer, and sell the books door to door for tuition money. And you can still call your local S.D.A. church and request that a deserving student bring a complete set of Bible Story books out for your inspection. But you should know that the older editions were much, much better bargains than the new edition. Review & Herald needs to be held to its own standard. 

BJ Book Review: Welcome Holy Spirit

Title: Welcome Holy Spirit

        
Author: Garrie Fraser Williams

        
Date: 1994

        
Publisher: Review & Herald Publishing Association

        
ISBN: 0-8280-0852-3

        
Length: 365 one-page devotions, 6-page scripture index

        
Quote: “Spend a year studying everything in the Bible on the Holy Spirit.”

        
More than 365 Bible passages mention the Holy Spirit. Williams has considered some verses that appear close together as one passage, and some as more than one, to get 365 one-page commentaries. The passages appear in the same order they appear in the Bible. Like most writers who choose Revierw & Herald Publishing, Williams is a Seventh-Day Adventist minister writing primarily for other Seventh-Day Adventists, to whom this orderly sequence will be natural and easy to follow.

        
He doesn’t try to address all denominations impartially. There’s what might be called a mainstream view of the Holy Spirit, and what might be called the charismatic view. Adventists take the mainstream view, and Williams writes within that view throughout his book. He does, however, refer to the history and literature of other Christian denominations.

       
He also makes some typically S.D.A. mistakes. On page 54 Williams cites, as an example of “satanic attack,” the following incident: “A pastor who became depressed was asked, ‘Why don’t you practice what you preach?’” It’s not unusual, Williams continues, for Christian people to find themselves, “for no fault of their own, the objects of insult, suspicion, and ridicule.” It is not unusual for those people, later, to ask their verbal abusers why they don’t practice what they preach. It is unusual in mainstream society, yet quintessentially typical of verbally abusive Adventists, for verbal abusers to call this natural consequence of their actions a “satanic attack.”

        
Further internal evidence suggests to me that Williams may have been the pastor who received that particular “satanic attack,” or prophetic message, depending on how we look at it. On page 87 William shares what “a pastor” learned from a bout with depression as a symptom of a physical disease. “‘I went in bitterness, in the heat of my spirit; but the hand of the Lord was strong upon me.’—Ezekiel 3:14, NKJV. God’s Spirit does not operate in our lives on the basis of our feelings but rather in response to our willingness.”

        
There speaks a man who has found the same Great Key Principle I've found in depression-as-symptom: Fix facts first; feelings follow. If Williams has never cured or recovered from a depressing disease, and watched the depression, which Positive Thinking never helped, just melt away, he has at least learned something from someone who has.

        
This book is recommended to mature Christians who know how to read the religious writings of our fellow mortals, comparing each idea against reason and revelation, taking the good ones and leaving the bad ones. Welcome Holy Spirit is the earnest effort of an ordinary fallible mortal. He has taken the trouble to assemble 365 Bible texts that are worth reading comparatively, as a set, whether you bother to read his commentary or not. If you read only the Scripture at the top of each page, this will be an enlightening book for any Christian.

New Book Review: The King's Feather

Title: The King's Feather 

Author: Amy Earls

Date: 2023

Publisher: Portal

ISBN: 979-8-9874017-2-9

Quote: "...and now on the afternoon of my seventeenth birthday, the same man who took Mom away would come for me."

This is a science fiction story about human trafficking. About two-thirds of the plot seems to come from the narratives of refugees and trafficked humans in "the developing" countries; about one-third is a very, very, very loose reinterpretation of the story of the siege of Jericho in the Bible. 

Pero, or Ro for even shorter, has a name derived from a word for "feather." She has an adoptive mother she barely remembers and an adoptive brother she's never met. They are the Three Chosen to travel back and forth between alternate worlds, identified by special necklaces whose pendants are "wooden feather" carvings. What they're chosen for is a special relationship with Elohim, the Hebrew name for God that is a plural form used as if it were singular. (If you don't think it's appropriate to use God as a fictional character, don't read this book.) Two villains, Carper, who is "chosen" in his own way and will repent, and Rose, who is still a baddie at the end of this story, think that their being "chosen" means that they need to be part of Carper's army of drugged teen soldiers, 

As Pero's mother has outgrown being a teen soldier, she has been kept as Carper's personal slave. Exactly what that entails has been left to the lurid imaginations of teenagers. We're told that she's been forced to kill other soldiers in the same army and that she's been a "concubine." In the Bible story the Israelite spies stayed at an inn operated by a well-known prostitute called Rahab, and part of the plot was that, as a prostitute, she displayed red things from her windows--a red "cord" from which the spies climbed out of a back window, and a red flag the spies pointed out to the army as a sign to rescue the occupants of that house when they took the city.  In this story Pero's mother's name is Bahar and she ties a red scarf and a red hose to the window at the appropriate parts of the story, but no one specifically says that she's been prostituted. 

Human trafficking is not part of the story of the siege of Jericho in the Bible. Rahab may have been led into prostitution as an enslaved or trafficked child--the Bible doesn't say--but she's a free woman, the manager of her own house, in the story. It's hard to say just why human trafficking is a dominant motif in the novel. One reason may be that it's hard to discuss the moral ambiguity of Rahab's early career in the Bible. We tend to want to judge Rahab as if she had grown up in a culture where we still want to think that women are respected more for chastity than for wealth. She didn't. If we can't whitewash Rahab's past with the claim that innkeepers or even mere extroverts were sometimes called "harlots" in Middle English (they were, but the Hebrew word was more specific), we'd rather see her as a victim. She wasn't. The Bible didn't split Rahab's character into a victim mother and hero daughter; she's a heroine, just as she is, because she acts with the converted form of the same boldness that had to have guided her pre-conversion career. 

Historically, Rahab was part of a culture where fertility and sexuality were literally idolized; the "gods" were worshipped through temple prostitutes, so Rahab might have gained her reputation as a girl who chose to show special religious fervor by sacrificing her virginity instead of her hair (history records that that was the choice girls made before marriage in Babylon), then went on to specialize in legal private prostitution, profiteering on younger women's...enough said. Anyway what she did was legal and socially accepted in her culture. Even in ancient Israel...Rahab married an officer in the army and became one of the ancestors of the kings of Israel, and of Jesus. We're not comfortable with the idea that a woman who very likely participated in the trafficking of young girls who had not chosen sex work as a career, who certainly had chosen that career for herself, could simply convert to a religion that frowned on prostitution and become a respectable man's mature, sultry, yet respectable wife. It's not compatible with that foolish notion, started by weak men, that a "good girl" is basically asexual. But it's in the Bible.

There is an obvious reference to the current focus of the mainstream media's feeding frenzy...In this election year we have three male presidential candidates, three old men, two old enough to be forced out of almost any other job and the third old enough to be pensioned off in most offices. ("You've earned a higher salary than we can afford so now, please, take a pay cut and go home.") And each of those three old men has done things that showed the level of contempt for women that was normal when he was young. And yes, in a more enlightened world, we need to be teaching little boys, any man who's done any of those things will be lucky if anyone ever employs him to come in at night and scrub toilets. But in this present world, that's what we have for presidential candidates. Kennedy has, I think, the most credible excuse--he was on drugs at the time and did himself almost as much harm as he did his friends. Trump has at least claimed a religious conversion, conveniently timed at an age when almost everyone develops resistance to sexual temptation. Biden has never repented and never had a valid excuse. In terms of conventional Christian morality, though I want to emphasize that nobody's soul can be judged by their public record, Biden's public record puts him on the lowest moral ground of the three.

Not that the spiritual struggle Pero goes through when Elohim tells her that Carper can repent and be her friend was necessarily written as a rebuke to people, like Beth Moore, who think Trump should never be forgiven. Carper, when he shows signs of softening and repenting, is still a jerk. It's still hard for Pero and her friends to believe that he's capable of repenting or changing his ways. If they had only the general idea of forgiveness, rather than a directly inspired "chosen" prophetess who hears God's voice regularly, Pero and friends would probably feel inclined to kill Pero; their story gives them so many opportunities, and it doesn't seem as if he could possibly be missed. But in the story Carper does something good for them in the end.

Oh, and also the man who teaches the characters about forgiveness in private prophetic visions is not a romanized Jesus the Christ, but a completely Jewish Rabbi Yeshua the Messiah. The main characters have modern Hebrew, Israeli names and belong to "the Abram family." I'm not sure whether the story is better described as whole-Bible Christian or as Messianic Jewish. (That aspect of the story, as a whole-Bible Christian, I approve.)

So, in summary, this is a very controversial, very speculative novel. I think the author (and editors) did a better job than could reasonably have been expected, splicing science fiction, trending news, and the tattered scraps of a Bible story together into a boys' (and girls') adventure story. I can't say the mix works for me, but it obviously works for Amy Earls' students, Now you know the main reasons why some people won't like this novel and can make your own decision about reading it. 

Book Review: Lord Teach Me to Pray for Kids

Title: Lord Teach Me to Pray for Kids

Author: Kay Arthur and Janna Arndt

Publisher: Harvest House

Date: 2002

ISBN: 0-7369-0666-5

Length: 176 pages

Illustrations: line drawings by Steve Bjorkman

Quote: “Welcome to Camp MacHaven, the training facility for God’s Special Forces.”

Kay Arthur wrote a Bible study for adults called Lord Teach Me to Pray in 28 Days. Janna Arndt revised and abridged it for middle school readers. Her revision features a lot more silliness about the hypothetical boot camp for future “prayer warriors,” and it’s printed in a school workbook format, but it still contains plenty of Bible references and instructions on studying the Bible’s teachings.

Topics discussed include what it means to pray “with faith,” the hazards of expecting that Christians can “just name it and claim it” while praying for personal benefit, the concept of trying to know and fulfill God’s Will, the Lord’s Prayer, praying for forgiveness, praying for protection from temptation, praising God, avoiding “vain repetition,” and more.

Bonus features include several puzzles, “sound off” chants, and an explanation of Morse code.

Vacation Bible School and Sunday School teachers who feel up to the challenge of telling half-grown wigglers to sit down, read, write, and learn things, will be able to use this book to good purposes. Scattered throughout, at the beginnings and ends of sections, are hints about providing physical drill, hydration, and Meals Ready to Eat for ten-year-old “soldiers.”

When considering Vacation Bible School I’m tempted to pad out this review with a reminiscence of the summer I “taught Vacation Bible School.”

I was fifteen years old.

I had never attended a V.B.S. sponsored by any church, anywhere.

I had no idea whatsoever about what I was expected to do.

That made me a little bit less prepared than many of the parents who volunteer to teach V.B.S. at their church…but not a lot.

And it turned out that what I was expected to do was very similar to what the teachers are expected to do for parents who sit down and plan, “Now there’s a Baptist V.B.S. for the first week of June, there’s one at the Church of Christ for the middle two weeks, one at the Methodist church in the fourth week, and one at the Adventist church in July…”—In other words, V.B.S. teachers are typically handed a few Sunday School books and some junk the children might use as craft materials, and expected to baby-sit the rug rats whose parents don’t want to pay to send them to summer camp.

Some factors that made my “teaching” experience a little less embarrassing were that the children were relatives whose parents were gathering to rebuild a house that summer, they all liked each other and looked forward to spending time together, the ones who spent the most time in our little home-based Vacation Bible School were the ones I’d been baby-sitting all winter, and they had all gone to an “official” V.B.S. sponsored by some church or other and had some idea what they were supposed to be doing. They were nice Christian children, on the whole. (Later in life I tried teaching a Sunday School group of middle-schoolers who had heard it all before and who always wanted to skip the lesson and just order pizza.)

We all liked singing Christian songs together; those of us who had some musical ability were accustomed to putting up with the voices of those who had none. We all were familiar with Bible stories and could draw or enact scenes that everyone recognized right away. That took up about an hour while the morning dew dried off the grass, after which we could reach a consensus about whether the weather was more favorable to Wholesome Socializing or Getting Out In God’s Creation. In other words, it was baby-sitting.

That is what some Vacation Bible Schools accomplish and there’s nothing much wrong with it, but a good teacher can actually use V.B.S. to teach children something about the Bible, along with the physical activities, refreshments, and music.

The funny part about my V.B.S. experience was that, after the summer when I’d read The Living Bible at thirteen and the summer when I’d read the Psalms, the Prophets, and the Epistles as well as the stories at fourteen, this was the summer when I was reading the entire Bible. Aloud. To my siblings—at least two children, separated by five years in physical age and at least ten years in mental age. From some Mennonite friends our parents had bought a Spanish Bible, and I was earning it by translating it aloud into English by way of a bedtime story for the siblings, while Mother followed along in the English Bible and supplied words I didn’t know. (We skipped the most violent sections and the dullest ones, but we read the entire book of Job.) It was a good way to learn more Spanish words and more about the Bible. I think, by age seven, even my baby sister was getting something out of our explorations of the non-narrative parts of the Bible.

So why did I not even try taking that Spanish Bible to the home where we met for V.B.S., letting one of the older children follow along in one of the English Bibles there, and astonishing the cousins as well as the siblings with the fact that it’s possible to read words printed in one language while translating them into another language? No idea. Well, nobody told me that getting the kids to think about anything in the Psalms or the Epistles would have been a valid goal for a Vacation Bible School.

You, Gentle Reader, now have this information. A Vacation Bible School teaches children who are old enough to read something about the Bible, and if you and your students can endure the corny “soldier” motif in this book, you can use it for that purpose. They will learn about prayer, about the Gospel According to St John, and they might even choose to learn the Morse code.

Book Review: Suppose We Are Israel

Title: Suppose We Are Israel

Author: James S. McGaw

Publisher: America’s Promise

Date: not shown (a reader of one of my copies thought 1902, which was the publication date of a hardcover book this booklet cites)

ISBN: none

Length: 16 pages

Quote: “If we are Israel, then God has…kept faith with Abraham.”

Why was there ever an Anglo-Israelite Identity movment? Given the New Testament teaching that all sincere Christians are adoptive descendants of Abraham, why did adult Christians ever feel a need to prove that physical descendants of Abraham might have populated the west coast and islands of Europe? For some ministers in the twentieth century, the Anglo-Israelite controversy was enough to move their radio broadcasts out of competition for Sunday morning slots and thus attract audiences who were in real churches on Sunday morning…but why did anyone need the Anglo-Israelite Theory to be more than a “hook” into history?

(History does not, in fact, either prove or disprove the Anglo-Israelite theory. The hypothetical wanderings of the “Lost” members of the ten northern tribes of old Israel involved people who wrote down very little history. Abundant evidence suggests that some European Christians could be physically related to their favorite Bible characters, but does not positively prove that they are. Some, not all, Jewish men inherit Y-chromosome DNA that has not been dispersed throughout Europe.)

The Rev. Dr. McGaw wrote this pamphlet in support of the full-length book Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright, which argues for the Anglo-Israelite theory, which became an important part of his faith and the faith of several Christians in the late ninetenth and early twentieth centuries. 

At this period in history, growing religious tolerance allowed Christians to admit that while God had promised to bless the heirs of Abraham in this world and the next, Jews were still being herded into slums, barred from owning land or entering many trades and professions, blamed and persecuted for doing the work the law allowed them to do, and generally not receiving the blessings promised to the children of Abraham. Western Europeans were receiving those blessings, especially if they had migrated to North America. This observation was actually being used to “debunk” the Bible. Christians who chose to debate in favor of the Bible wanted an explanation of why the blessings seemed to have been transferred to the “adoptive” heirs. Anglo-Israelite theory was that explanation. It taught that the British Isles and the nations along Europe's Atlantic coast might have become the homes of physical descendants of Abraham. If so, the prophecies of blessings for Abraham's descendants had already been fulfilled.

Today's DNA studies, and Modern Israeli history, suggest a different interpretation. Abraham had other sons and grandsons besides Israel. If a genetic quirk that is still peculiar to Jewish men is not found among British men, that suggests that any undocumented physical connection between "Anglos" and Israelites that may have existed failed to transfer whatever was special about Isaac's descendants to any British "race" (tribe). Instead, the special blessings promised to Israel as "Judah's sceptre and Joseph's birthright" may be yet to come. McGaw's argument is still interesting, but it may be wrong.

There were schools of Anglo-Israelite or Euro-Israelite thory that were used as excuses for hating Jews. Other schools of thought used the theory as a base for friendly outreach to Jews, as McGaw does in this pamphlet, thanking a Jewish friend for referring him to Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright. The pastor who talked most about it to my parents, when I was growing up, used it as a reason to encourage Christians to study the whole Bible, look up their family history, and of course tune in to his radio broadcasts. McGaw specifically says that “there is no place here for race pride” in the sense of arrogance or bigotry, but “for appreciation of the gifts bestowed by God upon us as a race.” (He used “race” in the old sense of “people claiming descent from a common ancestor.” For him Celts and Saxons were different “races” from Italians.)

Historically the more benign versions of Euro-Israelite theory seem to have predominated, because Hitler and Mussolini didn’t try to exploit it.

The comments—relevant and otherwise—handwritten in my copy of this booklet show a late twentieth century, skeptical reader’s reaction. Many whole-Bible Christians do not feel that Anglo-Israelite theory is a necessary base for studying the whole Bible. The reader concluded, “Bible says ‘a mighty angel will preach gospel to all Earth.’ (Men love lies for gain & fame.)”

For myself, I don’t know how typical I may be…My first conscious commitment to Christianity occurred while my family were involved with the Lord’s Covenant Church. We were whole-Bible Christians. I am a whole-Bible Christian. I am comfortable with a truth that seems to make many people uncomfortable: we don’t know everything, nor will we know everything. I don’t feel a need to believe any theories about ancestors who left no records of who they were, much less what they believed. 

What I do know is that following the teachings of the whole Bible is self-rewarding, enough that any reasonable person might want to live as an adoptive heir of Abraham. The Bible makes clear, and the L.C.C. taught, that individuals from any ethnic group might choose to make this commitment, as did Ruth, and the rules about separation from unclean foreigners no longer applied to them. In any case the Ishmaelites (Arabs), Edomites (descendants of "red and hairy" Esau, generally understood to meant northern Europeans), and descendants of Abraham and Keturah (Africans and Indians) are clearly identified as descendants of Abraham who were destined to follow the descendants of Jacob, or Israelites, into material wealth and spiritual prosperity.

In the ancient prophetic vision it may have mattered whether people were "Nordic," or true White, light-haired and hairy-skinned, like Esau, or "Mediterranean," dark-haired and smooth-skinned, like Jacob. It never mattered in the sense that one type was more valuable as human beings: Jacob and Esau were born as twins, and both were loved. It would not have mattered in the sense that anyone's human potential was limited by ancestry, but it may have mattered in the sense of a prophet's having foreseen a certain individual doing a certain thing. The church has not received such a "key" to the understanding of any prophecy, but it ma receive such a "key," according to the prophecies themselves, in due time. 

In Heaven our ancestry may matter...a little, if there are ceremonies in Heaven, in the order of precedence on formal occasions or suchlike. As far as salvation and morality are concerned it doesn't matter. Anyone who senses the vocation within may be adopted as a spiritual heir of Abraham and enjoy the benefits of living by the whole Bible's teachings. If we are Abraham's heirs physically through the children of Keturah, whom Abraham didn't have time to teach much, or through Esau, who was less favored ("hated") because he lacked spiritual sensitivity, or through Ishmael or not at all, God still knows us by our own names and can bless us as God chooses.

Meanwhile the English-speaking countries have certainly enjoyed blessings beyond the rest of the world. So if others still want to support their whole-Bible Christian practice with McGaw’s claim that it is their duty to claim the birthright of their British ancestors’ “race,” or races, this book is for them. Otherwise, it is an historical curiosity.

 

Book Review: Prayers Jabez Didn't Pray

Title: Prayers Jabez Didn’t Pray

Author: Kenneth C. Hill

Publisher: Hearthstone

Date: 2002

ISBN: 1-57558-118-3

Length: 285 pages

Quote: “With more than six hundred fifty prayers from which to choose, it was difficult to find the proper mixture of prayers.”

Bruce Wilkinson’s Prayer of Jabez had been a huge seller at the turn of the century. Kenneth C. Hill, a vice-president of Southwest Radio Church Ministries, thought the world needed a book on all the other answered prayers in the Bible. As he admits in the foreword, the great thing about his book is that it presents a survey of the different kinds of answered prayers the Bible recommends to us, each with some more recent commentary and a hymn or poem that expresses a similar thought. (And if you’re an ear thinker like me, you will love this book’s sound track! Someone ought to record it.) The frustrating thing is that even a full-length book can’t discuss all of the prayers in the Bible with the attention Wilkinson’s short book gave the short prayer of Jabez. Hill’s expositions upon twenty prayers are brief.

The prayers chosen are those of Moses, Samson, Hannah, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, Job, David, Isaiah, Daniel, the Syrophoenician woman who asked Jesus for healing, the rich man in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, the apostles, Paul, the saints and angels in the Revelation, and Jesus Himself. Surprisingly, “The Lord’s Prayer” is not discussed first, last, or at greatest length, though it’s the one given to us as a general example; and the prayers are not discussed in either the order they are printed in the Bible, or in what is believed to be their chronological order in history.

Hill was the pastor of a church in Kingsport, Tennessee, and the manager of the Christian-content radio station in Bristol, so in addition to being a meaningful study of prayer this book belongs in any collection of Local History.

Book Review: How to Study Your Bible for Kids

Title: How to Study Your Bible for Kids

Author: Kay Arthur and Janna Arndt

Publisher: Harvest House

Date: 2001

ISBN: 978-0-7369-0362-2

Length: 190 pages

Illustrations: line drawings by Steve Bjorkman

Quote: “To my husband, Jerry: Thank you for all those long hours of designing our puzzles and mazes.”

As with some of Kay Arthur’s other “inductive Bible study” books, what some will love and some will hate are the same thing: This book is for people who still enjoy puzzles, cartoons, a silly story line, and a writer’s “voice” addressed to a fourth or fifth grade level, and who are capable of reading and thinking on a college level. This book is for “Vacation Bible School” students who will be flattered, not frustrated, when this book asks them to print words like “dissipation” on dotted lines. This book is for people who are comfortable with a kids’ “detective agency” based in a tree fort tracking down words through Greek lexicons. If you know a child like that, run don’t walk.

There are children for whom church, Sunday School, and Vacation Bible School attendance become routines by the time they’re in the middle grades. They yawn, they fidget, they answer every searching question about what the lesson means to you with “Can we send out for pizza now?” A season in my life when a college friend and I prayed and agonized over ways to enliven the Piaget-sanctioned, totally age-appropriate lessons ended with a bump, for me, when one of the mothers sailed in to demonstrate that what really motivated her child to give serious answers to familiar questions were trinkets. This was during the period when “Loewens, the World’s Most Unusual Toy Store” imported collectible trinkets of every kind for just one or two dollars each, and this lady was bringing in a bag and handing out a trinket every time a kid gave a serious answer. Well, that was the stimulus to which those kids had been conditioned to respond, all right. Piaget would have approved, as would Pavlov. And who could resist any excuse to go to Loewens? (A student at an overpriced church college, that’s who.) But I have wondered, ever since I discovered some of Kay Arthur’s books, whether throwing a real intellectual challenge at those kids might have directed their attention to something…not yet spiritual, since middle school children don’t have much of a “spirituality circuit” in their brains yet, but at least more educational than adding trinkets to their collections. Maybe bringing in a magnifying glass, flinging it on the table like a gauntlet—“Who wants to read the first Greek word from the small-scale reprint from Vine’s?”—would have got those sharp little brains focussed on, at least, learning words. Hey, one of my schoolmates had a sweet, bored grandmother who lived in town, who actually spoke Greek....if we could have bribed her to come in, now that would have…

For some children, it wouldn’t have meant anything special. For the kind of sixth grade student I was, and the kind I gave up trying to teach because I couldn’t afford to buy complete collections of designer erasers for all of them, it would probably have been a real treat to have Greek vocabulary thrown at us.

Do not buy this book for your students if it intimidates you. The main Greek word Arthur asks students to track down through reference works, in this book, is hamartia. Arthur reprints a thorough list of where it’s used in the Bible and how it’s translated (basically it means sin) but expects you to know that Americans taking New Testament Greek in college usually say “hah mahr TEE ah,” and Greeks say something similar, only with adorable accents that make it sound completely different. If you’re one of those people whose blood pressure goes up at the sight of something every idjit with a four-year degree in Religious Studies knows, and you don’t, because you had to take a course that would be useful on a job, etc., etc., Kay Arthur’s books are not for you.

If you’re one of those people whose eyes light up at the sight of something you couldn’t afford to study in college, because you had to concentrate on accounting or physical therapy or even just a trade school course, but now you can go back and learn that kind of thing out of books…then you will like Kay Arthur’s books and want to collect them all, but please be careful about how you press these books into students’ hands.

But if your students are painfully familiar with Piaget-approved “Bible Stories for Children,” have already been baptized or confirmed as teen members of the church, and are starting to regret this as they think about all the game time they’re now losing to Sunday School, buy all these books that come your way: they’re worth their weight in gold.

Book Review: A Study into the Meaning of the Word Gentile As Used in the Bible

Title: A Study into the Meaning of the Word "Gentile" as Used in the Bible 

Author: Curtis Clair Ewing

Date: not shown

Publisher: Church of the Covenants

Length: 16 pages

ISBN: none

Quote: "Using the word Gentile to translate these words is often misleading." 

Though printed as a separate book, this little monograph was originally written to fill up a few full-sized pages in a magazine. It's short and concise, and what the author accomplishes is to demonstrate that the words translated by "Gentile" properly mean "tribe" or "nation" and could include the nation of Israel. (Abraham was told his descendants would become a great nation, goy, the same word that's translated in the context of "foreign nation" by "Gentile.")

It's easy to smile and dismiss Ewing as just another non-Jew (or non-Mormon) who didn't want to be a Gentile, but his linguistic study makes a solid case that all instances of goy and ethnos in the Bible should be translated by "nation," "tribe," or "people."

I've not found much information on Curtis Clair Ewing, but have been given to understand that at some point in his career he espoused the Anglo-Israelite Identity Theory, a view of European history that has never been proved or disproved. Like some Anglo-Israelites my family knew well, he apparently accepted the version that teaches that North America was the Promised Land, and, since real descendants of Israel had been led to North America, the U.S. (and presumably also Canada) didn't need to support the nation now known as Israel. So of course they were accused of being haters, for political reasons, whether any of them really was or not. (The ones we knew were not--but many people have heard that they were.) Bible students may or may not want to display copies of Ewing's books, in view of his reputation. The copy I have is usable but never was meant to be displayed, so if you want it for reference or as a rarity only, you might do well to buy it from me.

Amazon has had a copy of this book for sale (a nicer copy than I have, with a jacket--my copy was folded and stapled) but doesn't have one now; it's not an easy book to find. My copy was cheap when new and I'll sell it cheap now, in real life. About the price of cleaner, prettier copies I can make no guarantees.

Book Review: Worthy Is the Lamb

Title: Worthy Is the Lamb

Author: Ray Summers

Date: 1951

Publisher: Broadman

ISBN: none

Length: 218 pages plus introduction and bibliography

Quote: "There has been such a profusion of conflicting opinions about the meaning of the book [of Revelation/Apocalypse] thatmany have despaired of ever securing a comprehensiveinterpretation."

Summers proposes a minimalist approach to understanding the final, and most confusing, book in the New Testament. Quoting a 1935 book, "Let him who is without his favorite speculation cast the first stone!", he tries to set aside all attempts to identify the apocalyptic prophecies with any past or current events, "determine the meaning of the book for those who first received it," and apply it in a general way to whatever "conditions" readers may have in mind.

This is not every Protestant's preferred reading. Many Baptists, like many of Summers' colleagues, historically identified the ancient churches named in the book of Revelation with historical periods or "dispensations." Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses disagreed on the precise count, but read the numbers in the books of Daniel and Revelation as relating to historical events in such a way as to foretell the Second Coming in 1844 or in 1914, respectively. Other denominations and factions within denominations have other preferred interpretations. For some whole-Bible Christians these interpretations are a crucial part of their understanding of the Bible, and Summers' attempt to understand the book of Revelation in a general, abstract, moral-philosophical way may seem to miss the point for those who still believe that something of great spiritual significance occurred in 1844. That's what some readers won't like about this book.

For others, Summers obviously seemed to strike an ideal compromise. For him the book of Revelation is not necessarily the work of St. John and does not foretell events according to a clear chronology, but is a book of spiritual guidance containing advice on how we should react to various conditions.

So, how should we interpret the warning that "the number of his name," for the evil ruler, was to be 666? (Remember Viv Ivins in the Left Behind series? VI VI VIns?) As all baby-boomers learned from our Golden Book Encyclopedias in primary school, a favorite trick in the Middle Ages used to be finding a way to convert the letters in someone's name to numbers that spell out 666. Summers discusses ways to read NERO CAESAR, LATINUS (the Latin/Roman church/state), VICARIUS FILII DEI (the Pope), or HITLER as 666, and dismisses them. The original writers and readers of Revelation weren't concerned about any of those people; they were being persecuted by the Emperor Domitian. Reading the letters as Roman numerals, DOMITIAN adds up to 1502; reading them on the Pythagorean grid, DOMITIAN adds up to 40 if you count I and J as separate letters, 36 if you don't. Then there's the claim that the number may originally have been 616 anyway. Summers prefers not to bog down in such minutiae but to read 666 as a symbolic number. In the Pythagorean system 6 was the stay-at-home number, lucky for married women and unlucky for soldiers or travellers. In the Hebrew system, Summers says, where 7 was the number of completion, 6 was the number of incompletion; 8 was the number of more-than-completion, and an obscure old text assigned Jesus the symbolic number 888, so the author of Revelation was simply calling Domitian inadequate-in-three-ways.

This web site is not going to take sides. I don't claim to know whether any more elaborate (or "speculative") interpretation is better than Summers'. I'll say this: Summers has made a thorough study of what the book literally says. If it has a more esoteric meaning--if, perhaps, all people whose names add up to 666 really are sources of confused if not positively evil thought, or the Christian Church as a whole has gone through seven distinct stages corresponding to the conditions the author of Revelation addressed in the seven churches--that would be an addition to its literal, historical meaning. For those who want to study the weirdly impressive imagery of the last book of the Bible, this is a first guide.

To buy it online in aid of this web site, click here: https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/11 . (You can e-mail me, or just type the author and title into the message on the Paypal page.) Or send a U.S. postal order for US$10 (the post office collects its own surcharge) to the address on the Payment Information Page.

Book Review: The Splendor of Easter

A Fair Trade Book



Book Review with Bonus Rant: The Splendor of Easter

Editor: Floyd W. Thatcher

Date: 1972

Publisher: Word

ISBN: none

Length: 134 pages

Quote: “[O]n the first Easter morning the human response was one of fear...Fear transformed to great joy.”

Here are fourteen Easter “reflections,” longer than the usual devotional meditations, shorter than sermons, plus three Easter poems, by people who have written other Christian material for Word Press. Thatcher, vice-president of the publishing company, commissioned and arranged these meditations for Christians to read one a day during the two weeks before Easter.

In some ways Easter is a more perplexing, divisive holiday even than Christmas for whole-Bible Christians. The Christmas story is relatively simple. Jesus was born in a warm country where celebrations of the winter solstice were minor. If He grew up celebrating Hanukah, the celebration was probably even lower-key than it is now. His family were temporarily homeless at the time, not because they were terribly poor (carpenters were respectable, often well off, as the working class went) but because they were being oppressed by one of those imperial decrees whose main purpose was to remind people that they weren’t living in a democracy. There is no evidence that He ever celebrated the Pagan winter solstice parties that involved gift exchanges, drunken orgies, and extravagant “sacrificial” barbecues, nor is there any valid reason to imagine His birth taking place “in the bleak midwinter” of northern Europe. On the other hand, in places where midwinter is bleak and many people become homeless...I suspect that Jesus could have thought of a better fundraising gimmick than appealing to the false image of His birth in some place that looks more like Bern or Banff than like Bethlehem, but I’m sure he’d empathize with those of us who exploit the false image when raising funds to help needy people through winters that really are bleak.

But then there’s Easter, the spring celebration. Jesus never celebrated Easter. What He celebrated was Passover. He left no instructions to Christians to replace Passover with a strictly Christian observance that might have been called something like Resurrection  Sunday, although He surely realized that His resurrection was the kind of event that people want to celebrate. Did He expect Christians to make a very strict division between celebrations of Passover (commanded), Resurrection Sunday (not mentioned), and Easter, the Pagan spring festival?

The theological questions can become tricky indeed. Eostre was the old English name of a “goddess” concept found all across Pagan Europe and Asia. The Bible writers were more familiar with “her” Middle Eastern names such as Ashtaroth, Ashtoreth, Asherah, and Ishtar—“Ishtar” may have sounded closer to “Easter” than “Eostre” did. This goddess was part of a myth or cult that celebrated rebirth or resurrection or at least reproduction, springtime, the cycle of the seasons, fertility, and the stars as markers of the progress of the earth through its orbit. She was often identified with a particular star or planet, often with Venus. In some places she was considered less important than other goddesses identified with Earth or the moon, but in several she was crowned “Queen of Heaven.” In Egypt she was Isis, whose mythical story probably predates Semiramis, Queen of Babylon, who allegedly reenacted the story. Both Isis and Semiramis lost their husbands, mourned for them, and claimed to have recovered their husbands “reincarnated” in sons. (Whether these sons were posthumous or illegitimate depends on which side the historian was on.) Lucius Apuleius famously claimed, in the novel Metamorphosis, that despite the official worship of Jupiter and Juno and the flourishing cults of Venus and Diana, Isis remained the most powerful of the “goddesses” in the Roman Empire.

Ancient Hebrews were strictly forbidden to worship Isis or Asherah. Queen Maachah of ancient Judah was dethroned for having joined the Asherah cult. The  cult’s practices evidently included a Lent-like period of “weeping for Tammuz” prior to the spring celebration. Tammuz and Dumuzi were Semitic names for the husband the “Queen of Heaven” lost. There was also an ancient Semitic vision of something like the Harrowing of Hell; some of the star goddesses—most memorably Inanna, the name of the star goddess in a poem that has been reconstructed and translated—went to the Land of the Dead to reclaim their loved ones. Inanna supposedly paid the guardians of the underworld everything she had, including her own “first” life, to reclaim Dumuzi. Bible writers mention the practice of “weeping for Tammuz” in ancient Israel as something good Jews wouldn’t do, an abomination when tolerated in the temple. Nevertheless the month when other Semitic tribes “wept for Tammuz” was called Tammuz in the Hebrew calendar, and it still is.

Fasts and vows of abstinence have a certain inherent appeal to all humans. Early spring, when food stores were depleted, seeds needed to be replanted rather than eaten, and people might have felt the need of a fast, seems the universal season of choice for annual customs of fasting and abstinence. Later spring, when fresh greens, some fruits, and young animals appear, naturally called for feasting. Whatever it was called, the season of abundant new life always called for celebration. Extensive studies like The Golden Bough describe the “Corn King” cults that worshipped natural, vegetable death-and-renewal. Easter belongs to that tradition.

The New Testament story of Jesus clearly identifies the Resurrection with the historical event celebrated by Passover. That year Passover fell on a Thursday. There is actually some debate whether Jesus went to Jerusalem to eat the Seder on that Thursday, then was crucified on Friday and resurrected on Sunday (problematic, because it doesn’t allow for three days and three nights) or ate an early Seder on the Tuesday, was crucified on Wednesday, was resurrected on Saturday evening, and showed Himself to His friends on Sunday (not part of the beloved Catholic tradition, but it does allow for three days and three nights). If He used the word sabbath to refer to that Passover Thursday, Jesus could only have intended to reinforce the idea that His disciples should continue celebrating Passover. At a Passover Seder the main dish was traditionally an innocent, perfect young lamb, and Jesus, as an innocent, perfect young martyr, was “The” Lamb.

Christians have long agreed that it’s not merely a coincidence that the Passover and Resurrection celebrate events that took place at the same time that Pagan cults were celebrating the renascence of animal and vegetable life. According to one ancient and honorable tradition, this is the result of a spirit of confusion that encouraged satanic rituals, with orgies and human sacrifices, to distract people from celebrating the grace of God. According to another ancient and honorable tradition, it is the result of God working, in mysterious ways, to prepare non-Jewish people to understand something about the Resurrection.

Meh. I think St. Paul might have said that which it was depended on how any given individual responds to it. Most of us now celebrate Easter with traditions that may be irrelevant and silly, but are hardly satanic. If egg-rolling has anything at all to do with ritual prostitution in the cult of Ashtoreth, the connection has stretched too thin to be noticed by those at the egg-rolling stages of life. And it’s hard to say that Christians should ban the name “Easter” from our vocabulary when you know that the Hebrew prophets who denounced “weeping for Tammuz” not only left the “month of Tammuz” in their calendar, but also called God Ba’al, the same word (it means “lord and master”) they used to refer to the various Pagan “gods” they opposed so vigorously.

(The use of Ba’al in the Hebrew Bible isn’t even like the way modern Christians write “Those half-civilized Muslim barbarian fanatics are praying to a different God,” meaning that, while Muslims agree with Jews and Christians about there being only one Supreme Being, some Muslims’ beliefs about that Being are radically different from ours. It’s more as if a preacher chose to preach about the opposition of Christianity to Satanism and kept saying things like “Then Our Lord rebuked their lord...” and “Their lord tried to tempt Our Lord...”)

But here we are, with all these semantic conflicts, trying to remind ourselves that what Easter (or can we now agree to call it Resurrection Sunday) means is not “tulips and daffodils, / Bonnets and bunnies, / Baked hams and lambs” but “In me arise, my Lord! / And keep on rising.”

I don’t, can’t, believe that God doesn’t want us to admire and celebrate the joy of the natural renewal of physical life. If we weren’t meant to rejoice in tulips and daffodils and bunnies and lambs, the consensus of humankind wouldn’t always have been that those who fail to rejoice in those things are emotionally ill. I merely observe that the beautiful little “everyday miracles” of springtime, which are what Old English Pagans celebrated at Easter, fade into the background when we celebrate the unique, supernatural miracle of the Resurrection.

That’s actually Sallie Chesham seems to mean by the first poem in this collection, but to me it’s much easier to say it more clearly if we separate the concepts of Resurrection and Easter—oh, at least as clearly as we separate the concept of Passover from those.

End of quibble. What else do the writers have to tell us?

David Allen Hubbard offers a fictional interview with St. Peter, based on his understanding of Peter’s epistles.

Robert A. Raines notes that the resurrected Christ came to His friends as a stranger—after the resurrection they seem not to have recognized Him at once, when they saw him—and suggests that this might have been meant to help us “recognize [H]im now in a stranger on the road.”

Leighton Ford discusses the psychological issues that underlie faith and doubt: “If you find that you can’t believe that Jesus Christ really came back fromt he dead, you should in all honesty ask, ‘Is my problem merely intellectual? Or is it possible that I don’t want it to be true?’”

Gerald Kennedy reflects on the hymn “Amazing Grace.”

Charles L. Allen reflects on the hymn “He Lives”: “He lives, Christ Jesus lives today...He lives within my heart.”

Donald B. Strobe discusses the Christian concept of hope.

Bruce Larson shares insights from a tour of Jerusalem.

Gary W. Demarest considers how the Resurrection (can) set people free from fear.

Thomas A. Fry weakens his argument significantly by conflating death with resurrection. “Jesus...says that death is like a wedding.” Jesus says no such thing. In the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, He compared something—either spiritual repentance and renewal during this lifetime, or the Resurrection—with a wedding. Death itself would be the renunciation of bachelorhood, if resurrection is the wedding, or the life of sin and/or ignorance and/or lack of mature spiritual consciousness, if spiritual enlightenment is the wedding. In Gethsemane Jesus did not express the feelings of a bridegroom.

Vernon C. Grounds reflects on Galatians 6:14, which inspired the hymn, “In the cross of Christ I glory.” He quotes a Chinese writer, “antagonistic to the gospel,” whose rather awkward English can be paraphrased, “If a father was killed by a gun, would his children revere the gun?” The short answer to this argument has always been, “No—but if the father was shot and not killed, in the natural course of events, then his children might preserve the gun as a souvenir of their father’s big adventure. The Crucifix, the image of the cross with Jesus on it, is a blatant appeal to emotion that some Christians reject, although many churches that refuse to display a crucifix will allow sermons to be preached, and books printed, that dwell on that ‘ohhh, the anguish Christ suffered for your sake’ appeal. What Protestants revere is the empty cross, from which Jesus refused to come down while His enemies were destroying His original mortal body, but on which He did not die—the symbol of the Resurrection.” But Grounds offers a longer answer, arguing for the Crucifixion as proof that God is Love.

Robert E. Goodrich cites news items as evidence that the world had never needed God more than it did in 1972. Perhaps not; as baby-boomers’ memories begin to soften around the edges it can be useful to remember that, no matter how much more eupeptic and energetic some of us were in 1972, the world needed a Savior just about as much then as it does now, and probably just about as much as it did in 1872.

Wayne E. Oates describes St. Paul’s teachings in Galatians 2:19-20, Romans 6:1-4, and Romans 8:38-39 as a way of “participating in the Resurrection.”

Earl Palmer celebrates the victory the Resurrection has given us: “when [H]e promises forgiveness...I know that because of the victory of Easter, his promises...will hold.” 

Roger Fredrikson celebrates the “surprise” of a Baptist meeting in Moscow during the Cold War, and describes the spiritual presence of Christ as something that “has sneaked up on” us.

If you remember these writers, you already know to expect  each piece to be written in its author’s own style. Some writers offer Bible studies, some rely on traditional rhetorical devices, some offer personal narratives. Each was a successful author, in his day, with a following; Larson’s and Allen’s books are still being reprinted. None can be called heretical, apart from the confusion of Easter with the Resurrection. Only Fry seems to me to misrepresent Christianity, and that obviously (at least it’s obvious to a middle-aged reader)through carelessness.

At the time of writing, the Internet reported that Floyd W. Thatcher was still alive, though not young. If you buy The Splendor of Easter here, therefore, it's a Fair Trade Book; you send this web site $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment, and we send 10% of the original total price of $10, or $1, to Thatcher or a charity of his choice. Four or maybe six books of this size would fit into one $5 package.

Book Review: The Jesus I Never Knew

A Fair Trade Book

Title: The Jesus I Never Knew

Author: Philip Yancey

Date: 1995

Publisher: Zondervan

ISBN: 0-310-38570-9

Length: 275 pages plus bibliography

Quote: "How would telling people to be nice to one another get a man crucified?"

It used to be trendy to observe that in any conversation where you could see two bodies, six people were present: the real selves of the two people, known only to God, and the incomplete images of self and the other each one saw "as through a glass, darkly" in his or her mind. So with Jesus. The neighbors who said "Is not this the carpenter's son?" obviously didn't know Him as His Mother or His disciples did, and the confusion has only grown since their time.

"The more I studied Jesus, the more difficult it became to pigeonhole him. He said little about the Roman occupation, the main topic of conversation among his countrymen, and yet he took up a whip to drive petty profiteers from the Jewish temple...He had uncompromising views on rich men and loose women, yet both types enjoyed his company...He spoke eloquently about peacemaking, then told his disciples to procure swords."

Even ordinary thought is hard to "pigeonhole" if you understand it. Jesus offers serious bewilderment for anyone attached to the idea of classification.

His family weren't all that poor, under ordinary circumstances. Camping in a stable was a one-time inconvenience Caesar Augustus inflicted on them one year. They had a decent little business that probably paid well. Still, they were working people, in a town, not a royal family (although of royal blood), nor a rich landowning family. Yancey begins by noting the birth of Jesus as an example of radical humility. If Jesus chose to be born when and where He did, for Reasons, then among those Reasons must have been screening out any elitists from among His followers. The elitists of His day just knew the Messiah was going to be a "rich young ruler" type, not a "carpenter's son."

Yancey's next point is that Jesus was Jewish. He was a rabbi. He'd been circumcised, dedicated as His Mother's firstborn Son as prescribed in the Torah. He prayed and preached in synagogues. (Churches came to exist entirely because reactionaries banned His followers from those synagogues.) Although His teaching became like "a sword between" members of many Jewish households, Jesus never ceased to be a Jew. Yancey diverges a bit from this point in an effort to be inclusive of Muslims too, which clearly has good intentions but belongs (I think) in a different book; the mere inclusion of a more general ecumenical argument in this book seems to point up the problem Yancey is addressing.

Historically, as early Christians left their synagogues and buddied up with non-Jewish fellow Christians, they adopted several customs that would have been altogether foreign to Jesus. Some of these changes, like using languages other than Aramaic, Hebrew, and Koine Greek, probably were in harmony with the teaching and practice of Christ, although they weren't part of it. Others, like changing the day reserved for rest and worship from the Jewish Sabbath observed by Jesus to the Sun-day when the Emperor Constantine's family had traditionally worshipped their departed ancestors, are subject to debate. In some places those calling themselves Christians went so far into the practices of the savage Gentile tribes, ha goyim, that they even made war on Jews. Jesus is recorded to have observed that God could convert stones into true spiritual heirs of Abraham, but when we read of so-called Christians persecuting Jews we must agree that the process of conversion has not gone far enough.

It's not just that Christians who want to represent Christ in this world want to practice good will and courtesy toward everybody, although that is also true. It's that Christians who really want to represent Jesus are identifying themselves with a controversial, but still thoroughly Jewish, rabbi. The Hebrew Scriptures are our Lord's Scriptures. The law of Moses is His law, and ours. Yancey could have said much more about this than he does.

Yancey proceeds to consider what we learn about Jesus from His account of His "temptation." Before His public ministry began, Jesus spent forty days fasting, and during this time, whether in a vision or in an ordinary debate with another religious man whose ideas were "of the devil," or in whatever other way, He refused three great temptations: to use supernatural power for His own convenience, to join forces with "the devil," to demand more of God than God was leading Him to take. Yancey summarizes His resistance to these temptations as "restraint." There was no greed, no impulsiveness, about Jesus. More than any ordinary person Jesus must have understood what people wanted. For Him, to give people what they wanted, even what they "needed," was temptation. For Him that aggressive, possessive, "outgoing" craving for control-through-attention, which so many of us have been misled to call friendliness or good will, was clearly understood as mortal sin. Jesus could very easily have been what many still prefer to imagine He was--a popular preacher who told people to be nice to one another, and did faith healings. It would have been much more fun than being a Cosmic Sacrifice! Jesus could have been the greatest salesman, preacher, teacher, poet, or healer of all time, and for Him, any of those things would have been a rejection of His own unique mission, and a sin against God.

So He went out to be what He was. "A reed shaken by the wind?" Not exactly. People have imagined Jesus in all sizes, shapes, and colors. He didn't want to be remembered by a body type, though. In order to be contained by a physical body Jesus had to settle on one sex, male, and one age, between 30 and 40 during His active life. (There is some question whether the year that marks the beginning of the "Common Era" is in fact the right date for His birth. He might have been as young as 34, or as old as 42, at the end.) I've often wondered whether He might have preferred that we overlook even those aspects of whether or not people have a "physical resemblance" to Him. What Jesus told us to look for, as a likeness to Him, were material needs. "Inasmuch as you have done unto the least of these My brethren, you have done unto Me." For our purposes it might be better to try to imagine Him old, or female--or even unhealthy. From the fact that little children hounded Jesus to tell them stories we can be reasonably sure that His face never had the kind of ugly hostility we see on many convicted felons, but Jesus specifically advised those who wanted to see Him to look in the prisons.

What can we learn about Jesus from the Beatitudes? One thing we can learn from the Beatitudes, surely, is that if Jesus was tempted to be a mere attention-grabber, it was partly by His own rhetorical skills; the Beatitudes certainly grab attention. Yancey describes three ways he's understood the Beatitudes over the course of his career as a Christian writer: as pie-in-the-sky promises of future compensation, as a description of the revolutionary effect of sincere Christianity, and as "psychological truth" about how we instinctively admire people who have suffered. I think he might have been well advised to stop at the "revolutionary" level, because most people do not admire people who have suffered, in any noticeable way. Yancey may need to reexamine his sense of "psychological truth" for feel-good, pop-psychological falsehood.

There are, of course, practical applications of the Beatitudes on what some scholars are accustomed to dismiss as a crude material level. "The meek inherit" when, e.g., two huge corporations pay for an elaborate advertising war by inflating the price of their products, and the small generic producer, who has stayed out of the ad war, keeps prices low and gains loyal customers. (How many of us might never have discovered various off-brand products that have become our favorites if the big-name products hadn't become overpriced?) "Those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake," e.g. at school, because they're not participating in Jane's gossip campaign or buying drugs from Joe, not infrequently end up being admired by the same idjits who had previously done the persecuting. Jesus was not an elitist and, whether that sort of thing was or was not what He meant, He does not read like the sort of teacher who would have sneered at it. Sometimes it just plain pays, in the long run, to be nice. The kids who "hate" you just because the social bully of the class has decided you look like a target probably aren't really loyal to the bully, and may rush to your side as soon as someone (not that this web site would suggest that it needs to be you) gives them a reason or even an opportunity to turn on the bully. And then again, sometimes we all just know that somewhere in the cosmos being nice still earns some sort of reward.

What about the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus goes even further and becomes positively offensive, even infuriating to His audience? Read it, if you haven't already done, in a modern translation; the good old KJV sounds beautiful but its beautiful sound can veil its profound snarkiness. Perhaps some readers share my childhood memory of being scolded for paraphrasing "My Father" as "my Dad." The KJV gives "Father." The original Aramaic was closer in meaning to "Dad," or maybe even "Pops."  Jesus didn't use slang with the intention of shutting older listeners out, and His grammar was apparently impeccable, but He most definitely favored the vernacular...and He was anything but p.c. In fact, if He missed an opportunity to offend the self-righteously pious, we're not told about it.

Yancey could have said more about the fundamental outrageousness of Christian practice. It's not merely nonviolent; it's positively revolutionary. As an example of revolutionary righteousness Jesus said, "If someone compels you to walk with him one mile, walk with him two." He was not just advocating longer exercise sessions or nature walks, though His intentions might have included those, sometimes. In the Roman Empire private soldiers weren't paid enough that they could afford to pay "armor bearers." Instead they had the right to demand that any able-bodied person they met walk with them, and carry their packs, for one mile. Not only did this eat into civilians' work schedules, it forced righteous Jews into contact with objects that were ritually impure--and probably fairly nasty. So there was this strong young man whose whole job was travelling around as a preacher, saying, in effect, "Freak the soldier out; tell him you'll carry his gear for two miles--give some other Jew a break." Imagine hearing this line as a tired middle-aged parent, maybe a rug weaver with a deadline to meet, one of whose sons had been murdered by a Roman soldier on suspicion because he had allegedly been seen talking to a revolutionary. I don't think Jesus ever gave a flip about the possibility that His extravagant, idealistic rhetoric might be heard as "hurtful." I suspect He revelled in it.

Instead of developing this theme, Yancey retreats into confessionalism. He's not outrageous enough, he tells us. Nobody is. Anyone who thinks very seriously about the Sermon on the Mount is going to find it "hurtful." Yes, but some of us have learned that if a bee stings, the best way to relieve the pain is to dig into it and take out that sting. Yancey, not there yet, feels the need to end his study of the Sermon with a whimper of "It's okay, nobody's perfect..." Jesus empathized to some extent with Christians who have felt unable to do what we think we ought to have done. He Himself admitted that in His own town He "could not do many great works" because people couldn't wrap their minds around the idea of homeboy being even a messiah, much less The Messiah. Nevertheless the bland, feel-good quality Americans communicate by saying "it's okay" has no easily identified parallel in the Gospels. Along with the fact that He was unable to help some people as much as He would have liked to have done, Jesus accepted the "sorrows and grief" that accompany the fact of failure.