During the summer months (Cochabamba) while in the USA I brought home a respectable stack of books from the USA. As I've said, the List of Ten Things I Miss from the USA includes "Bookstores / Libraries". Gotta get a Barnes & Noble with WiFi and a coffee shop in Cochabamba......
This review is on Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. HarperCollins, 2005. Ehrman is a colleague of the late Bruce Metzger, a famous Biblical scholar. Metzger's work focused on the many thousands of manuscripts of the early New Testament that didn't quite jive with each other. To make a long story short, the New Testament that we have in hand today is the result of a long sifting out process that did not necessarily result in the use of the oldest manuscripts. This drives the very conservative nuts to think that the New Testament that we have is not necessarily what it "was" in its earliest forms. I say "was" as no one has ever found any complete book that dates from early after Jesus' death and resurrection.
Erhman is a prolific author on the same general topic. The basic problem that we face is that the very earliest manuscripts of what would later become the New Testament via the canonization process are nowhere to be found. The oldest manuscripts date from roughly 100 years after Christ, and they are very fragmentary. More interesting is that when one collects these fragments and compares them, they are not completely consistent. So what Ehrman does is to weave a very readable text trying to figure out "who done it?" and "why?"
The book was written for everyday folks, not just Bible scholars. It was on the NYTimes best seller list for a pretty good time and so got a lot of coverage (and readers). I've got several books by Ehrman & Metzger and so none of what is in this book is particularly revealing to me. That said, there was some "news" that I was not aware of. Bart Ehrman started out quite evangelical. As he understood more and more of the Bible's origins he became less and less strident. With time he finally became agnostic (and as he says "maybe even atheist.") His faith broke upon the rocks of "how an omnipotent God can allow such suffering in the world?" This commentary on his faith journey ("faith shipwreck" anyone?) contains a "PLUS" chapter with his comments on his spiritual status. That is a topic for another post someday.....
I highly recommend the book. It should now be in every public library in the English speaking world. I don't know that it is yet translated into Spanish or Portuguese, but due to its popularity I would suggest that it will be. When it is, I'll buy a copy and put it in the local public library. Might be awhile as public libraries such as we know them in the USA simply don't exist.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Lights out in Cochabamba
Our one hour of lightlessness saw (or maybe didn't see) almost all of the lights in the house and outside turned off. From the vantage point here in San Jacinto, some 12 km to the east of the "casco viejo" or central area, it is hard to tell if much of Cochabamba is following suit. We are just outside of the suburbs and so it is normally pretty dark at night. The 3/4 moon is most of the light here on the property.
The statistics for Bolivia show an amazingly small amount of consumption compared to the industrial north (and São Paulo too). Something over half of the electricity in the country comes from hydro-power. So Bolivia is pretty green compared to most of the world. The Andean countries have relatively more hydro resources and thus less dependance on carbon based energy. But in the northern range of the Andes there has been less rain this year and so there has had to be rationing of power in Venezuela and Ecuador. Not fun.
The statistics for Bolivia show an amazingly small amount of consumption compared to the industrial north (and São Paulo too). Something over half of the electricity in the country comes from hydro-power. So Bolivia is pretty green compared to most of the world. The Andean countries have relatively more hydro resources and thus less dependance on carbon based energy. But in the northern range of the Andes there has been less rain this year and so there has had to be rationing of power in Venezuela and Ecuador. Not fun.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
The Lost History of Christianity
Another sunny, but slightly cooler day in late summer. Another book review of a fairly recently finished read. This one is by Philip Jenkins. One of my favorite authors. My opinion is that you, dear reader, will enjoy just about anything by Jenkins, especially his works on where Christianity is going and where it has been.
And this book review is one concerning his The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia-and How it Died. Published by Harper Collins in 2008, I waited until the more affordable paperback was available. The longish title says what the subject is. The "lost" adjective refers to the general ignorance that we in the Occidental Church, long under the spell of Rome, have of our ancient antecedents in the Orient. The Oriental churches (multiple, very multiple) were long deprecated by Rome, and then forgotten (if even known) to the Reformation & the Protestant movement. The Great Schism between the church in Rome and that of Constantinople (1050) is only part of what happened between Occident and Orient. The Orthodox church of Constantinople was only a very small representation of the tremendous breadth and depth of the Church(es) Oriental.
The ancient churches of the Orient stretched from the Middle East through the (now modern) areas of Iran, Iraq, India, Afghanistan, Central Asia and all the way to ancient China. And beyond to even Japan. [Don't let the missions of the Jesuits to China in the 15th-17th centuries fool you, there were Christian missionaries in what is now modern China nearly 1000 years before.] We of the Occidental lineage after having our notions of what is 'orthodox' for Western Christianity certainly would consider the Oriental versions of Christianity to be quite heterodox. But Christian they were. They professed Christ. And a host of other beliefs that just don't fit into our western mindset.
So what happened to what was clearly the largest segment of Christianity? While Europe was still largely pagan before 1000 CE (A.D.) there were far, far more Christians to the east and in Africa. Jenkins spends a large chunk of the book on "what happened?" The largest single disaster to hit the Christian communities was the rise of Islam. For long years after the Islamic conquest of what we now call "the Middle East", the Christians lived in relative harmony with Muslims. However, as the Islamic faith hardened things were more difficult. Worse was the negative response of the Islamic communities to the invasions of the "Christian" Crusades from the west. In an effort to resist the Crusades (a phenomenon of Western Christianity) the Oriental Christians were suppressed and worse. The invasion of the Mongols into the region was also a complication.
Jenkins also asks "how/why did the Christian communities of Egypt, the Coptics, survive when all the rest were obliterated?" His answer has to do with the observation that in most of the Orient that the Christian missionaries established the church largely among the ruling class. The idea (also common in Europe) was "first convert the king, and then you've got the whole country..." According to Jenkins this was widely true from the ancient Middle East through central Asia. So when 'regime change' came with the Islamic invasions, the same process resulted in "conversion" of the conquered countries. What was different of the Coptics is that the religion took root in the base communities first. Thus it is that the Coptic church in Egypt still survives (though quite precariously) today over 1300 years after the arrival of Islam. Quoting the book (p.229-230) "Where the African church (Carthage) failed was in not carrying Christianity beyond the Romanized inhabitants of the cities and the great estates, and not sinking roots into the world of the native peoples. .... ...the African church had made next to no progress in taking the faith to the villages and neighboring tribes, nor, critically, had they tried toe evangelize in local languages." The difference in Egypt was that early on there was an effort to take Christianity into the countryside.
Thus a fascinating book that speaks to efforts to evangelize in other parts of the world, especially of native peoples. A top --> down evangelization effort that focuses on the city folk simply can't get into the countryside. In large swaths of Latin America we see sharp distinctions between the city and the countryside. It isn't just economic. But cultural. Even the language is completely different in the ancient Maya areas of Central America, of the Aymara & Quechua peoples from Ecuador through Peru and Bolivia into northern Argentina & Chile. So it is that I got a lot out of this book. RECOMMENDED READING!
And this book review is one concerning his The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia-and How it Died. Published by Harper Collins in 2008, I waited until the more affordable paperback was available. The longish title says what the subject is. The "lost" adjective refers to the general ignorance that we in the Occidental Church, long under the spell of Rome, have of our ancient antecedents in the Orient. The Oriental churches (multiple, very multiple) were long deprecated by Rome, and then forgotten (if even known) to the Reformation & the Protestant movement. The Great Schism between the church in Rome and that of Constantinople (1050) is only part of what happened between Occident and Orient. The Orthodox church of Constantinople was only a very small representation of the tremendous breadth and depth of the Church(es) Oriental.
The ancient churches of the Orient stretched from the Middle East through the (now modern) areas of Iran, Iraq, India, Afghanistan, Central Asia and all the way to ancient China. And beyond to even Japan. [Don't let the missions of the Jesuits to China in the 15th-17th centuries fool you, there were Christian missionaries in what is now modern China nearly 1000 years before.] We of the Occidental lineage after having our notions of what is 'orthodox' for Western Christianity certainly would consider the Oriental versions of Christianity to be quite heterodox. But Christian they were. They professed Christ. And a host of other beliefs that just don't fit into our western mindset.
So what happened to what was clearly the largest segment of Christianity? While Europe was still largely pagan before 1000 CE (A.D.) there were far, far more Christians to the east and in Africa. Jenkins spends a large chunk of the book on "what happened?" The largest single disaster to hit the Christian communities was the rise of Islam. For long years after the Islamic conquest of what we now call "the Middle East", the Christians lived in relative harmony with Muslims. However, as the Islamic faith hardened things were more difficult. Worse was the negative response of the Islamic communities to the invasions of the "Christian" Crusades from the west. In an effort to resist the Crusades (a phenomenon of Western Christianity) the Oriental Christians were suppressed and worse. The invasion of the Mongols into the region was also a complication.
Jenkins also asks "how/why did the Christian communities of Egypt, the Coptics, survive when all the rest were obliterated?" His answer has to do with the observation that in most of the Orient that the Christian missionaries established the church largely among the ruling class. The idea (also common in Europe) was "first convert the king, and then you've got the whole country..." According to Jenkins this was widely true from the ancient Middle East through central Asia. So when 'regime change' came with the Islamic invasions, the same process resulted in "conversion" of the conquered countries. What was different of the Coptics is that the religion took root in the base communities first. Thus it is that the Coptic church in Egypt still survives (though quite precariously) today over 1300 years after the arrival of Islam. Quoting the book (p.229-230) "Where the African church (Carthage) failed was in not carrying Christianity beyond the Romanized inhabitants of the cities and the great estates, and not sinking roots into the world of the native peoples. .... ...the African church had made next to no progress in taking the faith to the villages and neighboring tribes, nor, critically, had they tried toe evangelize in local languages." The difference in Egypt was that early on there was an effort to take Christianity into the countryside.
Thus a fascinating book that speaks to efforts to evangelize in other parts of the world, especially of native peoples. A top --> down evangelization effort that focuses on the city folk simply can't get into the countryside. In large swaths of Latin America we see sharp distinctions between the city and the countryside. It isn't just economic. But cultural. Even the language is completely different in the ancient Maya areas of Central America, of the Aymara & Quechua peoples from Ecuador through Peru and Bolivia into northern Argentina & Chile. So it is that I got a lot out of this book. RECOMMENDED READING!
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