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April 16, 2007

"Jesus Family Tomb" Scholars Backtrack

(Jimmy Akin)

I meant to blog about this last week (CHT to the reader who sent the link reminding me!), but some of the individuals connected with the "Jesus family tomb" nonsensamentary that the Dicovery Channel aired have been backtracking on their claims--or otherwise clarifying them in ways not supportive of the filmmakers' thesis.

THE JERUSALEM POST HAS THE STORY.

EXCERPTS IN BLUE:

The most startling change of opinion featured in the 16-page paper is that of University of Toronto statistician Professor Andrey Feuerverger, who stated those 600 to one odds in the film. Feuerverger now says that these referred to the probability of a cluster of such names appearing together.

That's a significant alteration since--if you've got 600 tombs with names laying around--you'd expect there to be at least one random cluster with this group of names, and that's assuming that the math is even right, which I have major questions about. Among the reasons are those pointed out by Frank Moore Cross:

In the film, renowned epigrapher Prof. Frank Moore Cross, professor emeritus of Hebrew and oriental languages at Harvard University, is seen reading one of the ossuaries and stating that he has "no real doubt" that it reads "Jesus son of Joseph." But according to Pfann, Cross said in an e-mail that he was skeptical about the film's claims, not because of a misreading of the ossuary, but because of the ubiquity of Biblical names in that period in Jerusalem.

"It has been reckoned that 25 percent of feminine names in this period were Maria/Miriam, etc. - that is, variants of 'Mary.' So the cited statistics are unpersuasive. You know the saying: lies, damned lies, and statistics," Cross is quoted as saying.

And then there's this:

The paper also notes that DNA scientist Dr. Carney Matheson, who supervised DNA testing carried out for the film from the supposed Jesus and Mary Magdalene ossuaries, and who said in the documentary that "these two individuals, if they were unrelated, would most likely be husband and wife,"

Let me interrupt the excerpt to point out that this statement is TOTALLY LUDICROUS. If you've got a family tomb with 30 or more burial slots in it (ten ossuaries, each of which can hold the bones of 3 or more people) and you've got one lebelled "X son of Y" and another with the feminine name Z on it then it is COMPLETELY UNREASONABLE to infer from a DNA test that if they weren't related that they are most likely husband and wife.

In a tomb containing multiple family members spanning several generations they could be any number of things: brother-in-law and sister-in-law OR nephew and non-biological aunt OR brother and adopted sister OR father and daughter-in-law OR grandfather and granddaughter-in-law OR great aunt and grand nephew--AND THAT'S ASSUMING THAT THEY'RE NOT RELATED BY *EITHER* THE MALE OR THE FEMALE LINE. If, on the other hand, you've only done a DNA test that shows that they don't have a recent common *maternal* ancestor then it opens up even more possibilities of how they could be related (brother and step-sister, for example), so you'd better hurry quick to get it on the record that

[he] later said that "the only conclusions we made were that these two sets were not maternally related. To me, it sounds like absolutely nothing."

And then there's this bit of dynamite:

Furthermore, Pfann also says that a specialist in ancient apocryphal text, Professor Francois Bovon, who is quoted in the film as saying the enigmatic ossuary inscription "Mariamne" is the same woman known as Mary Magdalene - one of the filmmakers' critical arguments - issued a disclaimer stating that he did not believe that "Mariamne" stood for Mary of Magdalene at all.

Pfann has already argued that the controversial inscription does not read "Mariamne" at all.

How 'bout them apples?

Posted by Jimmy Akin in Bible | Permalink | Comments (20)

March 09, 2007

Discovery Moves To Bury Tomb

(Jimmy Akin)

Well, the Discovery Channel, seems to be waking up to the blunder it made in getting behind James Cameron's titanic fiasco about Jesus' family tomb.

EXCERPTS:

Discovery Channel's controversial James Cameron-produced documentary "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" drew the largest audience for the network in more than a year on Sunday night, but the network has taken several recent steps to downplay the project.

Departing from normal procedures, the cable network didn't tout its big ratings win. The network also scheduled a last-minute special that harshly criticized its own documentary, and has yanked a planned repeat of "Tomb."

"This is not one where you necessarily beat the drum, from a business perspective," said David Leavy, executive VP of corporate communications at Discovery. "It's not necessarily about making money, or making ratings, or shouting from the highest office building. Sometimes having some maturity and perspective is more important than getting picked up in all the ratings highlights."

Although Mr. Leavy said the network stands by the documentary "100 percent," the company took several unusual steps in the wake of the controversy that could be seen as distancing itself from the content.

Last week, Discovery abruptly scheduled a panel debate to air after the documentary, moderated by Discovery newsman Ted Koppel. Discovery's announcement of the panel emphasized that Mr. Koppel "has no connection to the production of 'The Lost Tomb of Jesus'" and that "the panel will explore the filmmakers' profound assertions and challenge their assumptions and suggested conclusions."

When the panel discussion aired, guests criticized the documentary as "archaeo-porn" that played fast and loose with the facts.

The day after the March 4 airing, Discovery yanked a planned repeat of "Tomb" from its more hard-news-branded Discovery Times Channel.

When the Nielsen ratings revealed that "Tomb" averaged 4.1 million viewers - Discovery's largest audience since September 2005 - the network declined to put out a press release touting the numbers, as would be standard practice for a highly successful premiere. The second-season premiere of Discovery Channel's "Future Weapons," for instance, earned a media announcement for its audience of 2.5 million. A network representative, however, insisted Discovery was not trying to bury "Tomb."

The Discovery official issues a lot of spin trying to save face for the network, and they still haven't done all they need to to distance themselves from this stinkburger, but the overall message is clear: They screwed up and they know it. Now they're trying to avoid getting more egg on their collective face.

GET THE STORY.

OH, AND I WONDER IF THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT.

They just got a new CEO two months ago, and the Jesus tomb thing was certainly in motion before then. If his new broom is sweeping clean, some of the execs who signed off on Cameron's nonsense may want not to be swept away along with it.

Posted by Jimmy Akin in Bible | Permalink | Comments (18)

March 06, 2007

Meanwhile . . .

(Jimmy Akin)

. . . MARK BRUMLEY IS HAVING WAY TOO MUCH FUN AT JAMES CAMERON'S EXPENSE.

Posted by Jimmy Akin in Bible | Permalink | Comments (4)

Tomb Of Jesus Nonsense

(Jimmy Akin)

Many people on the Internet are ably demolishing James Cameron's opportunistic documentary regarding his ostensible discovery of Jesus' tomb.

There's so much material out there that it's difficult to process it all (at least in the time I have available), but I said that I'd offer some thoughts of my own on the subject, and so I'll do so. I'll also provide links to work being done by others.

Let's start with some principles that should be widely agreed upon, even by those who do not believe in the Resurrection.

1) Jesus was a Galilean.

2) Jesus' family was poor (as illustrated by the kind of offering they gave at the Temple at Jesus' birth).

3) Jesus was crucified by the Romans.

4) There were significant tensions between the early Christian community and the Jewish community (as illustrated by the executions of St. Stephen and St. James the Just and by St. Paul's own admitted persecution of the Church).

5) Early Christians made a big deal out of the claimed Resurrection of Christ.

6) In a first century Jewish context, that would mean that his tomb was empty.

7) Early Christians also made a big deal about the claimed Ascension of Christ.

8) Early Christians made a big deal about the Church as the mystical/metaphorical Bride of Christ.

9) Nothing remotely like the story envisioned by James Cameron and his colleagues is recorded in early Christian or Jewish or pagan literature about the early Church.

If we accept these premises, how likely is it that Jesus had a wife and a son and was buried in a middle class tomb in Jerusalem with multiple other family members spanning several generations?

Not very.

Let's watch the dominos fall:

The first domino to go over is the fact that Jesus was a Galilean. He was Jesus of Nazareth. His family's home was in the north, in Galilee. Why would they have a family tomb in Jerusalem? An individual might be buried there if he happened to die there (as with Jesus being [temporarily] interred in Joseph of Arimathea's tomb or when James the Just was martyred in Jerusalem). That would be expected since they buried people the same day, and there wouldn't be time to get a body down to Galilee. But the family's tomb would be in Galilee, since that's where most members of the family would die.So it's implausible to begin with that Jesus' family would have a tomb in Jerusalem.

Now the second domino falls: They were dirt poor. They just didn't have money. The lower-class status of the family is attested to both inside and outside of Scripture (including later records about kinsmen who demonstrated that they had never been anything other than working men by displaying the callouses on their hands). So how could they afford a middle or upper-middle class tomb even if they had a tomb in Jerusalem?

In particular, why would they build an ornate one? See the picture at the top of this post? Notice the geometric designs above the door of the tomb? That's ornamentation, and it takes money to have rock carving like that done. Again, this isn't the kind of tomb poor people would have.

The ornamentation also calls attention to the tomb, causing dominos three through six to keel over. The early Christian community and its claims about a Resurrected Messiah were very annoying to the local non-Christian communities, both Jewish and Roman. To non-Christian Jews, the Christian message was a betrayal of the faith as they understood it. It was heresy. It was something to be stamped out.

To the Romans, and increasingly with time, the Christian community was also troublesome. Partly it was troublesome because it stirred up contention within the Jewish community (which itself was headache enough for the Romans at the time). Partly it was troublesome because it came to be perceived as a treasonous group that did not honor the state religion nor form part of the tolerated religion of Judaism. And if you buy the theories common in liberal critical circles that the authors of the New Testament tried to shift the blame for Jesus' death from Roman leaders to Jewish leaders then there's an extra reason for the Romans to be annoyed with the early Christian community. Even if you don't (as I don't) buy the idea of blame transferrence, put yourself in the position of a Roman governor and ask: "Do I really want a local cult worshipping as a god a man who we Romans put to death?" For the Romans too, there was motive to undermine Christian claims.

So when Christians are running around saying that Jesus' tomb is empty and that he's been raised from the dead and that this only proves that he's the Son of God, if you're a non-Christian Roman or Jew then you're going to have a powerful incentive to say, "Wait a minute! Jesus' tomb is RIGHT OVER THERE in what will become the Talpiyot neighborhood of Jerusalem! And look, his bones are right here in this ossuary conveniently labeled 'Jesus son of Joseph' in this conveniently-ornamented-and-thus-advertised tomb that the rest of his family is using!"

Matthew 28:11-15 is also noteworthy in this regard:

[S]ome of the guard [over Jesus' tomb] went into the city and told the chief priests all that had taken place.And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sum of money to the soldiers and said, "Tell people, `His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.' And if this comes to the governor's ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble." So they took the money and did as they were directed; and this story has been spread among the Jews to this day.

To the ears of any sensitive reader, but especially to an apologist, the nature of this passage is immediately apparent: It's counter-apologetics. Matthew is pre-emptively doing apologetics against a claim that was current among non-Christian Jews in his day. It doesn't matter if you believe that Matthew was right, or even if you believe that Matthew was Matthew (rather than a "Matthean community"). What's happening here is that the leading non-Christian explanation for the empty tomb is being debunked.

As an apologist for the Christian position--like Matthew--you don't want to raise alternatives to the Christian explanation in the reader's mind if you don't have to. Thus you don't raise the idea of Jesus' disciples stealing his body unless you've got a real, live objection out there that you need to offer a counter-explanation for (i.e., the chief priests bribed the soldiers to say this). You don't even want the reader's mind moving in that direction if you can avoid it.

So the fact that Matthew (or the "Matthean community") takes the trouble to raise and then debunk the idea of the disciples stealing the body shows that this was the leading explanation  in the non-Christian Jewish community of why the tomb was empty. (And why Matthew--rather than Mark or Luke or John--deals with this, since Matthew's gospel was most clearly written for a Jewish audience: This was the audience in which this explanation was common.)

But there would be no reason to concoct this explanation if Jesus' bones were, in fact, lying in a clearly labelled ossuary in a publicly marked tomb that was in multigenerational use by members of his family in Jerusalem. If you've got the body then you don't need to make up the story about his disciples stealing it.

Domino seven--the early Christian preaching of the Ascension--also tips over against James Cameron's case. It provides the Christian explanation for where Jesus' body is: It ain't on earth! It's up in heaven! He's been exalted to the right hand of God in accord with his status as Messiah and Son of God. So if you've got that oh-so-conveniently-identifiable tomb right there in Jerusalem, why don't you use this to dethrone the Ascension claim by pointing out (in excellent Latin if you're a Roman) Habeas corpus!--"That you have the body!" Right there! In that ossuary!

And then there's domino #8: The Church as the Bride of Christ. This image would never have arisen if there was a Mrs. Jesus living right there in Jerusalem. Look at what happened in other religions where the founder was married. Do we know about their wives? Well, let's see . . . Moses was married to Tsipporah and then later to an Ethiopian woman. Muhammad was married to Khadijah and then later to Aisha and Sawda and Zaynab and . . . well, let's just say that he was very enthusiastic about marrying women. Joseph Smith Jr. was married to Emma Hale and Lucinda Pendleton and Louisa Beaman and . . . uh . . . let's just say he was enthusiastic about marrying women, too.

We know about these women because they were honored figures as wives of The Founder, and if Jesus had a wife then (a) we would know about it and (b) the whole Church-as-the-Bride-of-Christ metaphor would never have come into existence.

And then there's the fruit of marriage: offspring.

Now, Dan Brown wants to sneak a forgotten daughter of Jesus by us, but we tend to know about even the daughters of religious founders. Muhammad's daughter Fatima comes to mind.

It would be much harder to sneak a forgotten son by the eyes of history. For example, Moses had Gershom and Joseph Smith Jr. had Joseph Smith III.

It's not just hard to sneak sons past because patriarchal cultures focus more on sons, it's also because of this: In traditional societies, the son is looked on as the father's natural successor.

The son may not end up as successor, but we still tend to know about sons because of their role as potential successors. If a son dies before he can assume office, it's viewed as a great blow to the community because it destabilizes the leadership and triggers a struggle for succession. That struggle gets recorded. Or, if the son doesn't die, a succession struggle may break out anyway, and it, too, gets recorded. Thus when Joseph Smith Jr. was killed after shooting at the people who had come to lynch him (no passive martyr he), there was a succession struggle in the early Mormon community after which Joseph Smith III ended up out of power (later forming the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now the Community of Christ) while Brigham Young ended up in charge of the main Mormon establishment.

And we know about this because succession struggles are the things history is made of and so they get recorded.

So if Jesus had a son named Judah (or anything else), we'd know about it. We know a lot about the politics of the early Church, and we'd certainly know about a succession fight involving the son of Jesus. We'd have all the arguments of the winning side about why their side was right and the son of Jesus was not his legitimate successor.

This is especially the case when you realize that Jesus' surviving male family members were active in the leadership of the Church, like James the Just, who became bishop of Jerusalem. But it was his "brothers" who played these leadership roles, not his son.

Thus the ninth domino falls: The fact that nothing like Cameron's version was recorded by anybody--including those hostile to the Church who would want to discredit it--underscores the utter implausibility of the whole idea.

Then there are the specific arguments brought forth by Cameron and his crew in favor of their hypothesis, but those have been ably rebutted by others.

SEE HERE.

AND HERE.

AND HERE.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed the last!)

Posted by Jimmy Akin in Bible | Permalink | Comments (247)

February 28, 2007

The Tomb Of Jesus Nonsense

(Jimmy Akin)

I've gotten numerous links from readers (CHTs all round!) about the Tomb of Jesus nonsense that is being peddled by James Cameron and The Discovery Channel.

I plan to have a response to this soon, but I just wanted to let y'all know it's coming.

Till then . . .

Posted by Jimmy Akin in Bible | Permalink | Comments (104)

February 07, 2007

"On/In Earth As It Is In Heaven"

(Jimmy Akin)

A reader writes:

I'm on the RCIA team for my parish, and this past week, a gentleman asked me if I could find out something for him about the Our Father.  His mother says the line above as "in earth as it is in heaven" and he said she told him that's how it used to be or that was how her translation of the Bible had it.  I asked him what denomination she was, and he said just a regular Protestant, non-denominational. 

I've tried checking out a few sites with different Bible translations and have not found any that say "in" earth.  Wondered if you had any historical information as to this question.   

This man is very very interested and knowledgeable about the Faith and is very much looking forward to the Easter Vigil and coming into the Church.  I suspect he may be getting a little grief from his family, and the poor man is aggravated by, as he puts it, "a one letter difference,"  so I told him I would try to find out for him.

Your friend may be right that his mother is getting this from her ordinary translation of the New Testament. Many groups of Protestants still use the King James Version of Scripture as their ordinary translation, and in this translation it does read "in earth as it is in heaven" (SOURCE). So that's likely where this is coming from.

As to the reasonability of the "on"/"in" translation, this comes from the Greek of the text. In the Greek New Testament, there is a difference in the prepositions that are present in the two phrases. The "earth" phrase is introduced by the preposition epi, which would naturally be rendered by "on," "upon" or something like that, while the "heaven" phrase is introduced by the preposition en, which would naturally be rendered by "in." So there is a distinction in the Greek between the two phrases.

The image that is conveyed by the Greek prepositions seems to be one in which the person saying the prayer is located on earth, which is below the heaven where God's will is performed perfectly. We're thus asking that his will be done on earth (i.e., down here) the way it is up there (i.e., in heaven).

This seems to be what the Greek translator has in mind, informing the English language translation, though if we want to trace this all the way back to its rootes, we have to go into the Aramaic.

Here we find something different.

It's always hard to translate prepositions from one language to another, because prepositions can mean a variety of things, and their meanings don't perfectly overlap from one language to another. That's a problem that happens with all words, but it particularly happens with prepositions.

If we look at common Aramaic versions of the Our Father (LIKE THIS ONE), we find that the preposition introducing both the "earth" phrase and the "heaven" phrase is b-, giving us bish-maya ("in/on heaven") and b'ar-ah ("in/on earth").

The distinction between the two thus likely wasn't there in the original Aramaic of this prayer. Jesus probably said b-heaven  and b-earth, which could be translated "in heaven" or "on heaven" and "in earth" or "on earth." It was up to the translator to decide what was best.

The Greek translator decided that--in Greek--it sounded more natural to say "in (en) heaven" and "on (epi) earth," and many English translators looking at the Greek have decided similarly, leading to the standard English translation of the Lord's Prayer. The translators of the King James Version seem to have decided differently, rendering the preposition as "in" in both cases.

But this is not an essential point. It's a matter of translation (specifically, a matter of English translation that does not apply to other languages), and I suspect that your friend's difficulties with his family may involve weightier matters in the end.

Still, let's keep him--and them--in prayer.

Posted by Jimmy Akin in Bible | Permalink | Comments (23)

February 01, 2007

Hard Sayings Of The Old Testament

(Jimmy Akin)

A reader writes:

I have a very important question about God and right now my faith is at stake.  I doubt you will be able to provide a satisfying answer but please try your best.

In the Exodus and several other instances God ordered the Israelites to perform what I think we can all agree is genocide.  Samuel told Solomon to go forth and kill and kill every man, woman, child and beast.  Making no distinction between age, sex or whether or not they were innocent. 

These were real people living real lives.  They were not wicked evil doers in some cases, they were just in a land that was supposedly promised.  The people God ordered executed had been living there for generations and the Israelites came and murdered them for their land. 

I now know two men who will be dead soon from cancer.  A girl that was in my kindergarten class was hit and killed by a bus in first grade.  I have experienced death first hand and will soon do so again.  Nobody deserves to die and what God did was a despicable, disgusting and unjustifiable crime. 

God said every man, woman, and child.  Put yourself in the shoes of the murdered.   Maybe you have a son/daughter, perhaps a nephew or a co-worker has a child.  Imagine any child that you regularly come in contact with and then imagine some terrorist coming in and killing him/her.  "They say, oh our God ordered it.  You see, even though you own this land it really belongs to us because our God told us it was ours so we have to kill you."  You don't believe in their God but that doesn't matter to them.  You are just in their way and you happened to worship a different God, therefore you deserve to die.

How could a God that supposedly loves us perform genocide on us at the same time?

I am sorry to hear that your faith is currently being challenged, and will certainly pray for you. I encourage my readers to do likewise.

It is understandable that, if anything were to challenge your faith, this kind of thing would. Not only are the passages in the Old Testament difficult to understand, but the reality of suffering and death in our lives is the hardest thing for many people to endure. I have had to endure it myself, and I sympathize entirely with your situation.

Let me do what I can to see about answering your questions. I hope you'll bear with me as I lay some principles that will become relevant later in the discussion. I want to give you as thorough an answer as I can.

First, regarding the commands to exterminate particular populations, these are, indeed, horriffic from a modern-day point of view. Such commands are incompatible with the Christian age, and anyone today who would claim to have received such commands--such as the terrorists you mention--is wrong. God does not work that way today.

The question is whether he ever worked that way, and the answer to this question must be either yes or no. We will look at both possibilities.

Suppose that the answer to the question is yes: God did at one time command the extermination of whole groups of people. How could we possibly make sense of this?

It would seem that the point of departure for the discussion would be this: All life is a gift from God.

Because all life is a gift from God, it is up to God to determine how much of that gift we receive. Whether he gives us a day or a century, it is his gift to give, and because it is a gift, it is not something we are owed. We therefore cannot claim that God is being unfair if he gives us one amount of this gift rather than another.

In fact, he gives all of us an infinite amount of this gift because, once we are created, we will endure forever. After the resurrection, we will all--every one of us--have an infinite amount of physical life ahead of us. What we are discussing, therefore, is whether some of us receive an infinite amount of physical life plus a varying amount of finite physical life as well.

In some cases, such as a person who dies one day after conception, the person receives an infinite amount of physical life plus one day. In other cases, as with a person who lives for a century, the individual receives an infinite amount of physical life plus a hundred years.

From a mathematical point of view, these two gifts are indistinguishable. Infinity + 1 and infinity + 36,524 (the number of days in a century) are the same. In both cases, a person is given an unlimited (infinite) amount of life.

Further, we are also given non-physical life even in the space between death and resurrection, and that is a gift as well, even if we are not in our bodies at the time.

The question, it seems, is thus not how much life we receive, because (a) it is all a gift from God that we do not have a claim to and (b) it is always an unlimited gift, even if there is a temporary period in which we don't have the use of our bodies.

Instead, it seems that the question is whether we suffer unjustly in this time.

Here is where the problem of evil comes in, because it is clear that God does allow suffering to exist in the world, including for the innocent. Why he does so is something that we have some theories about (e.g., that he allows it in part in order to allow a certain kind of free will to exist in the world), but much of it remains a mystery.

But the fact that God allows unjust suffering does not strike me as meaning that God himself is unjust. It would mean that he is unjust if he was inflicting it for its own sake. That would be cruel on his part and thus unjust. But it seems to me that God can avoid the charge that he himself is unjust if two things occur.

The first is if he is allowing the unjust suffering for a good cause. We have already mentioned one reason he is thought to allow this--so that he can allow us to have a certain kind of free will--but this explanation may not explain everything--partly because we can't always be sure of what the good reason is that God is allowing suffering and partly because we ourselves may not be the beneficiary of that good reason.

Suppose, for example, that God allowed this to happen: He allows me to be conceived in my mother and then, one day after conception, he allows me to die. I never have the ability to exercise free will in this life, and so I am not the beneficiary of the reason (or at least the best-known reason) for which God is thought to allow suffering.

That much actually happens in the real world. Some people do die a day after conception. But what happens next?

If it were the case that God allowed me to simply be damned at this point and suffer in eternity as well as in this life then it would indeed be possible to charge God with injustice. I was an innocent, I never got to exercise free will and thus could not choose for or against God, and to automatically be sentenced to eternal suffering when I myself was innocent would be to condemn an innocent person to hell. (I know Calvinists have ways of trying to argue around this, but I don't think that they are successful). God would be unjust. Nobody should inherit an eternal and thus infinite amount of suffering if he didn't choose this.

The Church shares this intuition and concludes, therefore, that this is something God does not do. Nobody will suffer in eternity unless they themselves have chosen it.

What are the alternatives, then?

It would seem that there are two:

1) God miraculously allows such a dying infant to choose whether to embrace God's offer of salvation or to reject it. In this case the child would be in the same state as anybody else. If they end up suffering in eternity, it is because they chose it themselves and thus are not innocent. If they end up in eternal beatitude, it is because they chose it. In neither case would God be unjust toward them, for he enabled them to freely choose what destiny to embrace.

2) God does not miraculously allow the dying infant to exercise free will and instead automatically grants the child a positive destiny in the afterlife. This could be either a positive natural destiny (one which does not include the full glory of heaven but which is nonetheless positive, as the speculative state of limbo is commonly understood) or it could be a positive supernatural destiny (one that does include the full glory of heaven, as in recent speculations about the fate of children dying without baptism). Once again, either way you go, God is not unjust toward the dying infant because his destiny is positive.

It seems, then, that God is not ultimately unjust as long as he makes sure that the innocent do not get a raw deal from the eternal perspective. As long as the innocent person ends up with a positive eternal destiny then God has not been unjust to that person. Further, since all eternal destinies are infinite in duration, a positive eternal destiny means an infinitely positive one. Over the course of eternity, those with such destinies will receive an infinite amount of natural and/or supernatural happiness.

This means, as St. Paul says, that "the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is  to be revealed to us" (Romans 8:18).

All of our sufferings in the present are finite and so cannot compare to the infinite beatitude that awaits us.

With these principles in mind, we are able to return to the situation of the populations that God commanded the Israelites to wipe out. What could one make of their situation?

First, in any population of human beings, some of them will not be innocents. Some will be people who genuinely do deserve death (mass murderers, to take an obvious example). Therefore, in the original population of Canaan (i.e., the holy land), some of the Canaanites were not innocents.

I am sure that the reader recognizes this, as his question focuses on the suffering of the innocent Canaanites, and we will discuss these in a moment, but it is proper to note that some Canaanites had committed sins that were worthy of death. Probably more than we realize, given the brutal nature of their cultures.

Further, the Canaanites did have a relationship with God. It isn't the case that El (the Hebrew equivalent of "God") was a foreign deity that they had never heard of. There are passages in Scripture that indicate that the Canaanites were already familiar with El and worshipped him. This is the case, for example, with Melchizedek, the king of Jerusalem who was a priest of El, or Balaam at the time of the Exodus, who was a prophet of El.

Archaeology confirms this. We have dug up religious texts written by the Canaanites, and they confirm that the Canaanites did indeed worship El. The problem is that they didn't recognize him as the one true God. They recognized him as the high god, the chief god of their pantheon, but they also worshipped other gods and goddesses, such as Ba'al and Yam and Ashera and Anat. Since El was the original, true God, this suggests that they had departed from the true faith at some point and become idolaters.

This may shed light on what God told Abraham in Genesis 15:16, which was that he would not give Abraham and his descendants the promised land immediately, because "the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete."

In other words, the Canaanite culture had not yet become so thoroughly corrupt (through idolatry or other sins) that God felt a clean start was necessary. He knew that this time would come--since from his perspective outside of time he could see that the Canaanites would become that corrupt--but he was unwilling to have their culture be destroyed before it reached a certain level of corruption.

That level of corruption, incidentally, is one the Israelites themselves brushed up against. Not only did God repeatedly discipline them in order to wean them away from idolatry (an effort that was eventually successful, following the Babylonian Exile), but even at the time of the Exodus itself their corruption reached a point that Scripture says God was willing to let them all die and start over with Moses.

How literally this language is to be understood is open to question, but the point that it makes is that the Israelites were not better or morally superior to the Canaanites. What was different about their situation was that God was determined to fulfill his promise to bless the world through Abraham by creating a body of people who would be vessels capable of conveying his truth to the world and so bringing his light to all mankind.

God therefore allowed calamities to fall upon those who were unwilling to cooperate with his grace and become vessels of light and truth. This happened with the Canaanites. It happened with the Jewish people in all their trials (including most notably the Babylonian Exile). And it has happened to Christians as well. The reason that the Christian community is fragmented and has suffered many setbacks is that many of us have not been willing to cooperate with God's grace and have turned our back on God's truth.

And yet, through the drama of the last almost forty centuries (taking us back to the time of Abraham), God has progressively advanced his program to the point that now fully half of mankind (counting Jews, Christians, and Muslims) worships the Creator of the World and the God of Abraham, even if they do not all understand him perfectly. By the standards of the Old Testament, when the world was swallowed in pagan darkness, we are living in an age in which the ancient prophecy has been fulfilled and "the knowledge of the Lord covers the earth like the waters covers the seas."

This has been with many setbacks and failures, and with the guilty among Canaanites, Jews, Christians, and others suffering the consequences of their actions, but through the sweep of history God has still accomplished his promises of old.

And this sheds light, even if it does not address in particular the question of the innocent who have suffered, on the overall purpose that God is pursuing.

Now let us address the question of the innocent.

It is quite true that not all people in the Canaanite culture were guilty, just as it is true that not all Jews at the time of the Babylonian Exile were guilty and that not all Christians who have suffered are guilty. So what of them?

Let's look back at God's plan of the ages for a moment. If we begin with the premise that God wished to create for himself a distinct people that could carry the knowledge of him to the world then it is logical for him to give this people a homeland in which he could purify them from the corrupting influences of the cultures around them. This is what the Old Testament says he was doing with Israel, and it is what history suggests has been accomplished, as illustrated by the vast numbers of humans who now honor the Creator and the God of Abraham.

But if we put ourselves back in time and culture by thirty two or more centuries, taking us to the time of the Exodus, what would have been involved in giving the people of God a homeland in which he could purify them?

It would seem--since there were already humans everywhere (habitable) on earth--that he would need to remove whoever was already living in the homeland that he gave them. Since these people would not want to move, war would result.

War at this time also had a different character than it does now. In the ancient world, when people were organized in a tribal fashion, people's primary loyalty was to their tribe. It was the tribes and the protection that they gave to their members that allowed society to function. Consequently, when people from one tribe went after those of another, it often meant total war between the two tribes. If a person in one tribe killed a person of another tribe, the tribe of the killer had to be taken on in a general way. It was usually not possible to extract just the guilty party for judgment.

This tribal reality shaped the mentality of the people of the day such that they thought in terms of total tribe-on-tribe conflict. They did not have the experience that we do of relying on a strong, central government to carefully investigate matters and punish only those who were personally guilty. For them, since the whole tribe could be counted on to come to the defense of the guilty, the whole tribe was complicit in the offenses of the guilty and it was legitimate to make war on them all.

This is one of the reasons that we today have so much trouble in parts of the world where society is still organized along tribal lines.

And it is one of the reasons why God had so much trouble dealing with the whole of the world thirty or more centuries ago.

In other words: In working with the early Israelites, God was dealing with a blunt instrument. He wasn't working with a people who had already been broken of their tribal mentality and who were used to distinguishing those who were personally guilty from those who were fellow-members of the guilty party's tribe.

This may shed light on why God allowed a total tribe-on-tribe warfare situation to result, because this was what the people of the day understood. The development and purification of their ideas about collective versus individual guilt and innocence had not yet taken place.

The fact that God needed to shield the Israelites from idolatry adds a further consideration here. If God allowed remnants of the Canaanite culture to survive then this would tempt the Israelites--even more than they were already tempted--to embrace polytheism and ruin their ability to convey the truth of God to the world.

All of this deals with what God could have done if he had a way of making sure that the innocent were ultimately taken care of. It sketches a possible reason for why God commanded what he did in the Old Testament, but this theory is no good if it still results in the innocent--or even one innocent person--receiving a raw deal. If even one person gets the short end of the stick with God then God is acting unjustly.

So what about it? Given his commands in the Exodus, could God make sure that all of the innocent Canaanites who suffered would come out on the plus side?

Yes.

As we noted, all life is a gift from God, and it is his choice how much of it we get. Further, he gives us all an infinite amount of life, and no one will suffer in eternity without choosing this.

Suppose that there was a Canaanite child who was four years old--young enough to still be an innocent, but old enough to experience the horror of watching her civilization killed around her before being killed herself.

From a purely human perspective, that is HORRENDOUS. My heart is SICKENED at the thought of what such a child would go through.

But is God--who is infinitely powerful--INCAPABLE of making it up to this child?

No, he is not incapable of making up to her the sufferings that she experienced on earth, however horrible they were. If he gives her an infinite amount of happiness (natural or supernatural) then that more than makes up for the finite amount of unhappiness that he allowed her to suffer in this life. And if he assigns her a positive destiny in the afterlife, an infinite amount of happiness will be hers.

I know that if I myself were in her situation--if I experienced a horrible, devastating, but still finite amount of suffering in this life--and then God gave me an infinite amount of happiness in the next that I would count myself fortunate. I would say with St. Paul that--no matter how horrible they were--"the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that [has been] revealed to [me]."

As long as God makes sure that I receive more happiness than unhappiness as an innocent then I cannot claim he was being unjust with me, and as long as God compensates the innocent for the sufferings that have come to them in this life then I do not see the grounds for him being fundamentally unjust.

It thus seems to me that if we make the assumption that God did give the commands to wipe out the Canaanites that this would not prevent him from making it up to the innocent Canaanites who suffered and thus he would not be unjust toward them.

But suppose that he didn't do this. We mentioned earlier the question of whether God ever gave this kind of command, and we said that the answer to this question is either yes or no. To this point, we've been considering what if the answer was yes. But what if it was no?

In this case the commands found in the Pentateuch concerning the Canaanites would not be meant to be taken in a literal sense. We know that the early history in Scripture contains symbolic elements as well as literal ones, and these commands would then turn out to be symbolic.

Presumably, they would symbolize things like the need to be totally separate from pagan culture, of how radically incompatible the pagan lifestyle is with faith in God. On this theory the books of the Pentateuch would have reached their final form some time after the events they describe, and these stories about wiping out the Canaanites (which the Israelites did not actually fulfill; there were still Canaanites living later) were included to teach the later readers how they must reject paganism, and that the original audience was meant to understand the nature of these stories as cautionary tales from which they were to draw a moral lesson (i.e., don't be pagan; stick with God).

If this is the case then God never did command the extermination of the Canaanites and we, because we are not familiar with the way literature was written at this time, tend to take as literal something that was never meant to be literal. (It's certainly not the first time that's happened!) It is just that because we live in such a different age and because our literature works so differently that we don't easily recognize which parts are literal and which are not.

It thus seems to me that, either way one goes (assuming that the commands were literal or that they weren't), a rational account can be offered that shows God was not acting unjustly.

Now let me go a step further and address the question of the reader's potential loss of faith concerning this matter:

Whether or not one buys the above account, this is not going to change the fact that suffering--including innocent suffering--exists in this life. It just does, and us wanting it to be otherwise will not change this fact. The question is how we interpret the existence of suffering.

It seems that we can interpret it in one of two ways: Either the sufferings of the innocent are meaningless and can never be redeemed or they are part of larger plan in which they do make sense and they can be redeemed. It is belief in God that allows the latter possibility to happen.

I, personally, would not like to believe that the innocent who suffer are just out of luck, that their suffering was meaningless and that nothing will ever happen to make it up to them. I'd rather believe that there is a meaning and purpose to what happens to us--even if I don't fully understand it in this life--and that we live in a world in which those who have suffered innocently will ultimately be comforted and have their sufferings all made up to them.

So that's what I do believe--that we're not living in a meaningless world in which people suffer to no purpose and they will never be compensated. Instead, even if we can't understand it all from our tiny perspective, we're living in a world that is guided by a loving God who will vindicate the innocent who have suffered, who will wipe away their tears and give them happiness, who will make sense of all the pain and anguish that they have had to bear, and who will ultimately bring good out of their sufferings--just like he did the sufferings of his Son on the Cross.

When faced with the reality of innocent suffering, one can either suffer a loss of faith and suppose that the world is meaningless and cruel or one can make a leap of faith and believe in a world were suffering can have meaning and where the innocent will be compensated.

I choose to leap.

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January 25, 2007

Prophecy

(Jimmy Akin)

A reader writes:

I was hoping you could discuss St. Paul's teaching on the spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12-14.  In particular, I'm wondering about the emphasis St. Paul places on prophecy.  He tells the Corinthians to be especially eager for prophesying, indicating its superiority over the gift of tongues.  In chapter 14 verse 31, he says that all can prophesy, though they should do it one at a time.  He warns against pride (Ch 14 v 36) and disorder (v 40).

Now I am wondering what he means by prophesying in this case; are we to assume that all the men (women are excluded in verse 34-35) are receiving messages from the Lord, to be spoken to the community, one at a time? 

No. When Paul says you can all prophecy, he's restricted his universe of discourse to those people who are able to prophecy. He's giving an assurance that those who have the prophetic gift will all be able to just it, but they must do so in an orderly manner. He is not saying that all have the prophetic gift, as is clear from his rhetorical question in 1 Corinthians 12:29, which in context has the implied answer "No, not all are prophets." This is also implied by the fact that he encourages the Corinthians to desire this gift.

Also, women are not excluded from prophesying. They are excluded from teaching in church, but they can prohesy, as illustrated by his reference a few chapters earlier in 1 Corinthians 11:5 to women praying or prophesying with their heads covered.

And why is it that women are to stay silent? 

They didn't have to be absolutely silent. They could pray or prophesy in Church. They couldn't then teach or interrogate teachers (hence the reference to them asking their husbands at home if they want to know something). The reason for this had to do to a considerable extent with the culture of the early Christian community and was to a considerable extent of disciplinary rather than doctrinal force. It does, however, have a doctrinal nucleus that is reflected in the fact that the Magisterium is capable of being composed only by men (who have been ordained to the episcopacy). Today women can teach in religious settings (though they cannot give the homily) but they cannot teach magisterially.

I have gone to charismatic prayer meetings in the past, where indeed some people had messages from the Lord.  However, I always had doubts as to whether they were genuine prophecies or not.  How do you tell?

In general terms, if the messages contain predictions that come true then this is a sign that they are genuine; if they contain statements of a theological nature that are false then it is a sign that they are not genuine. In general, the same kinds of criteria that apply to discerning private revelations would apply here.

The spiritual gifts, in particular the gift of tongues and the gift of prophecy, were obviously of some importance at least from within the context of the Corinthian community at the time St. Paul was writing, since he devotes a good chunk of his first letter to the Corinthians to them.  In the Church today, they don't really seem that important, except from within the charismatic movement.  I've often wondered why that is.  Any thoughts?

The development of Christian history revealed that the miraculous spiritual gifts began to appear more rarely than they appeared in the first century. This is consistent with the history of the Old Testament, in which prophecies seemed more common in some periods than in others. While God has never completely stopped giving private revelation, it seems that the initial intensity with which it was given at the beginning of Church history was something to help the early Church get off the ground. Afterwards, as the Church became firmly established, the granting of miraculous gifts and private revelations became less common, though it has never completely ceased.

In the second half of the 20th century, the Catholic Charismatic movement developed, and many more reports of this type of activity began to be made. The Church thus far has not attempted to make a systematic determination of how many of these reports are genuine, and it is likely to do so given the overwhelming number of them. Instead, it has allowed Catholics (in general) to make their own assessments of how common these phenomena are at present. I would characterize the Church's attitude in this matter as cautious but open, which incidentally reflects St. Paul's instructions:

Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophesying, but test everything; hold fast what is good (1 Thess. 5:19-21).

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January 24, 2007

Infancy Narrative Questions

(Jimmy Akin)

A reader writes:

My husband and I were trying to figure out what happened to the gifts the Magi gave to Jesus. Was the gold kept as well as the other gifts. Also why did the wise men just leave and not stay to continue to worship Jesus. The Shepherds also knew Jesus was the Messiah. Why didn’t they stay and honor him and become his first apostles.

Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are unknown due to our disturbing lack of time machines, but we can speculate. So here goes:

1) Presumably the gold was initially kept by the Holy Family but then was later spent (perhaps during their sojourn in Egypt). The frankincense and myrrh could have also been sold, or they may have been burned, since they were used for incense.

2) It's not clear that the Magi understood fully what Jesus was (i.e., that he was God). The worship they paid him might not be the worship of the divine but the "worship" (reverence) due to a king or other figures in authority (which is why the British sometimes refer to high officials as "Your Worship"--not implying that the officials are God but that they are to be reverenced because of their office; the word "worship" has become exclusively used to refer to divine worship only recently). The Magi thus may have understood there visit simply as a visit to an important king, who wouldn't even take his throne for years. Hence, they went home.

3) Same thing with the shepherds. Even understanding that Jesus is the Messiah, they wouldn't have known that he was God or that he would have disciples. They would likely have thought of him as the future king who would kick the Romans out of Israel--but that wouldn't happen for years, and so they, too, went home.

Those are my thoughts, any way. Shy of getting a time machine, I don't know how to check them out. If you happen to run across a Delorean with a flux capacitor accessory installed, though, let me know.

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January 19, 2007

Genesis One Redux

(Jimmy Akin)

A reader writs:

I’m having trouble finding your several day posting on Creation/evolution that you did awhile back.  Is there any way you could send me the link?

If it's the one I think you mean (it having taken several posts to play out), it wasn't on creation and evolution per se, but on the interpretation of Genesis 1.

That was a post I was particularly pleased with, and yours is not the only request I've had for a link to it. Newer readers also may not have seen it, so I'll just go ahead and link it here.

IT'S THIS ONE.

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January 15, 2007

James 2:14

(Jimmy Akin)

A reader writes:

What's your opinion of the translation that one often sees in James 2:14: 

Can such faith save him? (NIV)

Can that faith save him? (NAS)

as apposed to the KJV and NKJV:

Can faith save him?

To me, this one translation choice seems to be make a big difference in how one reads James in light of the Sola Fide debates.  But I'd be interested in your thoughts on it from an "original language" viewpoint and if it's really as critical as it seems to me.

The Greek of the passage allows either translation. In the Greek original there is a definite article (the Greek equivalent of "the") in front of the word for faith in this passage. The thing about the definite article in Greek is that it's a little tricky. It doesn't fully correspond to the English word "the" in its meaning and usage.

If I may put it this way, the Greeks were kind of definite article happy. They slapped it in front of all kinds of nouns where we just wouldn't. For example, if you're reading along in the Greek New Testament you'll run into statements that "the Jesus" or "the Paul" did or said things. (In other words, they'll put the definite article in front of a proper name.) They also put it in front of a lot of other words where we wouldn't use it, and in these cases it doesn't convey the same force as the English "the."

In other cases, though, they used it with more force than "the" has. In these situations, it has the force of a pronoun, like "that."

There are thus three ways the translator may need to handle the definite article:

1) Leave it untranslated because it doesn't correspond to English usage/doesn't have as much force as "the"

2) Translate it as "the"

3) Translate it with a pronoun or similarly more forceful term, like "that"

Pretty much everybody agrees that option #2 is not the correct one in James 2:14. A reference to "the faith" would be most naturally understood as a reference to "the Christian faith," and it does not seem plausible that James wants to say that the Christian faith does not save people.

Translations thus divide between following option #1 (like the KJV and NKJV) and option #3 (like the NIV and NAS).

If you are coming from an interpretive school that tries to solve the James/Paul issue by saying that James is talking about a different kind of different and inferior faith than Paul is (e.g., "dead faith") then that would push you toward option #3. I think that there are problems with that approach, and I've written about that elsewhere.

The passage is more naturally handled with option #1, as the King James and New King James translators (who were firmly Protestant) did. The passage naturally reads like one in which the definite article has less force rather than more, and if you aren't being motivated by a variant of the "dead faith" solution to the James/Paul problem, I don't see why you'd want to go with option #3.

Thus Protestant author Bob Wilkins (who founded a ministry in support of the doctrine of sola fides) writes:

The Greek merely has the definite article. The noun faith occurs 11 times in vv 14-26. Of the 11 uses, 8 times James uses the definite article. Yet clearly in none of the other 7 places does it make any sense to translate the noun and article as that faith or such faith. For example, v 17, if handled the same way as some translate v 14b, would read, "Thus also that faith by itself, if it does not dead." Is there some kind of faith, then, that is not dead when devoid of works? Hardly. James's point is that faith without works is dead. Not some special kind of faith [SOURCE].

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January 04, 2007

Jesus Immanuel Bar-Joseph?

(Jimmy Akin)

In an e-mail titled "Does Jesus have two given names?" a reader writes:

How does Mary and Joseph naming their infant "Jesus" square with Isaiah's prophecy that his name shall be Immanuel? In Matthew the angel revealed to Joseph that Mary, "will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel" (which means, God with us)." (Matt.1:21-23)

This is one of those cases where the solution lies in the nature of prophetic fulfillment.

The starting point to unraveling the mystery is to go back into the Old Testament and look at the prophecy in its original context. The passage being quoted is Isaiah 7:14, which is a famous Messianic prophecy. But in its original context, it has a different signification.

In Isaiah 7, God has sent the prophet Isaiah to King Ahaz of Judea that the king of Syria and his ally, the king of the northern ten tribes (Israel) will not be able to conquer Judea. In fact--the northern kingdom of Israel is to itself be conquered (a reference to theconquest by the Assyrians and subsequent deportation that Israel suffered). To convince Ahaz that this prophecy is true, he invites the king to name a sign for God to give him, and Ahaz refuses, saying that he will not but God to the test. This was the wrong thing to say, and Isaiah responds:

"Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary men, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Imman'u-el. He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.

Now, there are two things about this passage that help us understand its original reference, and I've put them in blue.

The first is that the birth of the child is supposed to be a sign that God is giving to King Ahaz, since Ahaz refused to name a sign for himself. The purpose of this sign is to convince Ahaz that his kingdom really will not be conquered by Syria and the northern kingdom of Israel.

Ahaz reigned from appropximately 735 B.C. to 715 B.C., so it would do him no good at all if the sign were not to be fulfilled for over seven hundred years. That would (a) be long after he was dead and (b) long after the then-existing situation with Syria and Israel was over. It could scarcely serve as a sign backing up the truth of Isaiah's prophecy concerning the situation.

This points us to look for the original fulfillment of the prophecy to be within the life of Ahaz, which ended in 715 B.C.

The second thing about the passage which helps us understand its original reference is the fact that it says before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good (i.e., avoid things that will hurt him and accept things that will help him), that the lands he is afraid of will get conquered. Now, the conquest of Israel by the Assyrians happened around 721 B.C., and it's possible that the conquest mentioned in the prophecy is an even earlier one, which occurred in the 730s B.C.

So once again we're pointed toward a child born in the 8th century B.C.

This child was not, in all likelihood, born of a virgin. The term that is used in Hebrew--almah--refers to a young woman. It is commonly assumed that an almah was a virgin, and the Septuagint translates it thus in Greek (parthenos), but that is not what the Hebrew requires.

This child may have literally been named Emmanuel, though not necessarily. Since "Immanuel" means "God (is) with us" and since saying that God is with us is a common idiom in the Old Testament for saying "we will be victorious" or "things will go well for us," the child's prophetic "name" may not have been what he was literally called on a daily basis but may be taken as an expression of the fact that the child is a sign from God that God is with his people and their country will not be conquered by the alliance Ahaz feared. Or, in a third possibility, Immanuel may have been the literal name of someone who also had another name, such as was the case with kings, who took regnal names upon their accession to the throne. Thus some have speculated that Immanuel was King Hezekiah, who succeeded Ahaz and lived during the fulfillment of the prophecy. (Whether any have argued that Immanuel was Hezekiah's birth name, I don't know.)

However that may be, prophecy often has more than one fulfillment, and the authors of the New Testament recognized a deeper, Messianic fulfillment in the prophecy. There would come who truly was born of a Virgin and who truly was God with us, and thus Matthew sees in the prophecy of Isaiah a second, greater fulfillment in the person of Christ.

This is thus one of several passages in the New Testament that reveals that the sacred authors had a somewhat different idea of prophetic fulfillment than we tend to today. We tend to assume that, if Thing X fulfills Prophecy Y then X must be one and only fulfillment of Y, literal in all its details.

Not so to the authors of Scripture. To them, a prophecy might have multiple fulfillments, not all of which were equally primary and not all of which were equally literal. Some fulfillments might echo or reflect or correspond to the original prophecy, without its being its primary fulfillment.

That's what we have here: A child born in Ahaz's reign is the primary fulfillment of the prophecy, but within the spiritual sense of the text is another, grander, and later fulfillment that points to Jesus. We should not understand from Matthew's application of this prophecy to Jesus that he was literally named Immanuel in the same sense that he was named Jesus. The application of "God with us" to Jesus is something that goes beyond being a name in the conventional sense--even in the conventional Hebrew sense--and applies to him directly as a descriptor of his Person. Jesus is literally God with us in the flesh.

What Matthew is doing, therefore, is taking a text from Isaiah and discerning within it (which is to say, within its spiritual meaning) a prophecy of a Virgin Birth leading to God Incarnate being with us.

Incidentally, here's a tip for understanding how some New Testament fulfillments of Old Testament prophecies work: To avoid the trap of thinking that each Old Testament prophecy has one and only one fulfillment, which is the one the New Testament records, or that the New Testament fulfillment must be the primary fulfillment of the prophecy or that all the details of the New Testament fulfillment have to match those of the Old Testament prophecy, try replacing the word "fulfills" with a broader word, like "corresponds to" or "reflects" or "echoes," to reflect the broader understanding that the biblical authors had.

In a particular case, they may have meant only " . . . and this reflects what was said by Isaiah the prophet" instead of " . . . and this is the one and only literal-in-all-its-details fulfillment of what was said by Isaiah the proiphet."

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November 15, 2006

How Big Was The Widow's Mite?

(Jimmy Akin)

A reader writes:

I was surveying commentary on the Widow's Mite and ran across one commentary indicatiing the most serious problem is that, while the story can be made to relate to a number of other sayings of Jesus on trusting, detachment, poverty, etc., it is not consistent at all with Jesus' Corban statement. He proclaims in Mark (7:10 -13).

Furthermore, it would seem that the only way out of these acute difficulties is quite simply to see Jesus' attitude to the widow's gift as a downright disapproval and not as an approbation. The story does not provide a pious contrast to the conduct of the scribes in the preceding section (as is the customary view); rather it provides a further illustration of the ills of official devotion. 11 Jesus' saying is not a penetrating insight on the measuring of gifts; it is a lament, “Amen, I tell you, she gave more than all the others.” Or, as we would say: “One could easily fail to notice it, but there is a tragedy of the day—she put in her whole living.” She had been taught and encouraged by religious leaders to donate as she does, 12 and Jesus condemns the value system that motivates her action, and he condemns the people who conditioned her to do it.

I am interested in your commentary on these remarks.

I'm inclined to disagree with them. First, though, let's start with the passage itself:

Mark 12
41: And he sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the multitude putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums.
42: And a poor widow came, and put in two copper coins, which make a penny.
43: And he called his disciples to him, and said to them, "Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury.
44: For they all contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, her whole living."

It is not immediately clear how the widow's mite would be a violation of Jesus' teachings regarding the corban rule. When Jesus critiqued the use that was being made of corban, he pointed to some individuals' use of it to circumvent the need to care for one's parents, which is not in view here.

One could, however, construct a parallel argument to the effect that just as one owes a certain amount of money to the care of one's parents so that they aren't reduced to destitution, one also owes a certain amount of money to the care of oneself, and to donate this money to the temple would be wrong.

This is, indeed, something that often strikes people when they read this passage: They wonder what the widow was going to live on if, as Jesus said, she gave her whole livelihood.

It would be wrong to starve oneself to death by giving away all the money one has so that one is unable to care for oneself, but I don't think that we can infer from this fact that Jesus disapproved of the woman's action. The obvious interpretation of the passage is that he approved of what she was doing. The plain sense of Jesus statement that "Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For they all contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, her whole living" is that he is favorably comparing what the widow did compared to those who put in larger amounts but had larger amounts of money that made their gifts less sacrificial.

If needed, I can go into detail about why this is the likely interpretation, but for most readers I assume that it will be obvious that this is the natural sense of the text.

If we then accept that (a) Jesus was saying something favorable about the woman in comparison to others and (b) that it would be immoral to starve oneself to death by giving away all one's money then that allows us to infer (c) that the woman was not starving herself to death by giving away all her money.

What might she have been doing?

Hypothetically, she might have had another source of support lined up and was expecting new money to come in soon--perhaps a small business she had or from a relative.

Or perhaps she really was at the end of her financial rope and, rather than spend her last two lepta on herself, she decided to give them to God in an act of faith, asking him to provide her with a new source of income so that she could keep living.

Or Jesus was using hyperbole.

Hyperbole--or exaggeration to make a point--is an extremely common feature of the biblical language, and my strong suspicion is that Jesus was using it here. In other words, the woman really wasn't giving "everything she had, her whole living." Jesus uses these phrases in order to forcefully underscore the value of what she did put in relative to what she had. It wasn't literally all that she had, but it was enough of what she did have that it made the use of hyperbole warranted when comparing what she gave to what those who were rich gave.

Incidentally, the picture above is of the front and back of a first century BC coin that is the same type as the widow used (though the pictures on the coin may have been different by the time she made her offering).

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Asking For Forgiveness

(Jimmy Akin)

A reader writes:

I listen to a radio show called People to People and the commentator, Bob George states that we never have to ask for forgiveness because, it has already been given. We just have to give God thanks for forgiveness.

Callers confront Mr George with 1 John 1 :9 which says, If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us [our] sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Mr George states that in the Greek, the real translation would be in the “past tense” not the present, so the verse should read, “ he has been faithful to have forgiven us our sins. “

He uses this to support his claim that we do not have to ask for forgiveness since it has already been given.

Could you please shed some light on if he is right or not. In the Greek does it really use the past tense and not the present?

I haven't heard Mr. George's claims, so I can't comment on them directly, but if he has said what you report then he is flatly in error.

First, Greek does not have a past tense. It has several tenses that can refer to the past: the pluperfect, perfect, imperfect, and (often) the aorist.

Here's a so-literal-it's-klunky-English translation of 1 John 1:9 with the relevant verbs (and one other important word) emphasized:

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just that he would forgive us the sins and would cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

The first verb in this that describes God is "is" (estin). It's an ordinary, present-tense "is." Nothing special about it; nothing past-tensy at all. In context, it tells us that God is faithful and just, not that God has been faithful.

But John has something particular in mind when he says that God is faithful and just, so he clarifies what he means by introducing the clause beginning with "that," which I've put in red.

In Greek the word corresponding to "that" is hina, which is often found at the beginning of clauses where the verbs are in the subjunctive mood. That's what we have here. The verbs in this clause aren't in the indicative mood but the subjunctive mood, which is why I've translated them as "would forgive" and "would cleanse." They tell us what God would do if we confess.

Now, these two verbs are in the aorist tense, and the aorist tense usually indicates an action occurring in the past--if the aorist is in the indicative mood--but in the subjunctive mood the aorist tells you nothing about time. It just refers to the occurrence of an event without telling you whether it is past, present, or future. Since we're in the subjunctive mood here, one cannot appeal to the aorist as showing that God has already done something.

So if Mr. George has been claiming what is reported about the Greek in this passage, he is making some elementary (first year Greek) mistakes, including not recognizing the correct tense of "is" and/or not recognizing that the aorist doesn't point to the past in the subjunctive.

The claim that we shouldn't ask God for forgiveness but should only thank him for receiving it is particularly absurd because Jesus built into the model prayer for his followers  the petition "forgive us our debts." That "forgive" is in the imperative mood which, in Greek, is used to ask for things (among other things), and here it is being used to ask for forgiveness.

Unless one is going to say that the Lord's Prayer is not for Christians, you're going to have to say that Christians have an ongoing need to ask for forgiveness.

Posted by Jimmy Akin in Bible | Permalink | Comments (11)

October 26, 2006

"Bread"

(Jimmy Akin)

These passages--particularly those in Acts--may refer to the Eucharist, but it is not clear to me that any of these passages, in their primary, literal signification refer to the Eucharist. The expressing "breaking bread" is a well-known idiom referring to simply eating a meal, particularly given the fact that bread was the principle constituent of diets in this period of human history--to the point that in Greek the ordinary word for bread (arton) is the same as the word for "food."

I cannot rule out the possibility that in each of these cases what is being referred to is the sharing of an ordinary meal. This is particularly the case with the one from Luke, which occurred so closely after the Crucifixion that (given that Cleopas and his companion did not recognize Jesus) it could well have been an ordinary meal rather than a celebration of the Eucharist (which Cleopas and his companion may not have been empowered to celebrate, anyway).

I thus don't know if these texts raise the issue that you are asking about.

If they don't, however, others do.

In 1 Corinthians 10, for example, we read:

16: The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?
17: Because  there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all  partake of the one bread.

St. Paul clearly indicates that consuming "the bread" of the Eucharist involves "a participation in the body of Christ," so the issue of the Real Presence is not in question. He indicates that "the bread" is "the body of Christ." He is so serious about this that he warns against profaning it in the strongest terms in chapter 11:

27: Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.
28: Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup.
29: For any one who eats and drinks without  discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself.
30: That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. 

   

Because of these biblical usages, I do not think that Catholics should scruple at references to the consecrated elements as "bread" and "wine" as long as these are understood correctly. St. Paul uses such terminology without diminishing in any way the reality of Christ's Presence in the sacrament--to the point that he warns people against profaning it lest they die.

What one must recognize in such usages is that they are spoken (or written) according to the language of appearances rather than the language of reality. In reality, what is before us is the Body and Blood of Christ, but according to our senses--the appearances--what is before us looks and tastes like bread and wine.

God meant for us to live with both ends of this duality, held in tension: Sensing one thing but recognizing in faith the presence of something else.

Since God expects us to live with this duality, acknowledging both the appearance and the reality, and since he did not mandate a unique mode of language to accomodate the duality but instead allowed the divinely inspired Scriptures to speak of the elements according to both aspects of the duality, we must be prepared to receive and correctly understand both kinds of expressions.

Today we have a special kind of vocabulary that we can use to express the language of appearances. Philosophers call it "phenomenological language." We use phenomenological language when we describe something according to how it appears, without addressing the question of what it is. Thus we can talk about the sun rising, without failing to recognize that the Earth is a sphere (not a flat surface above which something else rises) that actually moves around the sun instead of visa versa.

In the same way, we can phenomenologically speak of the consecrated host as "bread"--the way St. Paul does--without failing to recognize the reality of the Real Presence.

We thus must be prepared to accept either phenomenological language (the language of appearances) and ontological language (the language of realities).

Of course, some today may be unclear on the reality of the Real Presence, and when we encounter someone with such a defective understanding, we must strive to correct him.

Similarly, there are sacramental and liturgical dissents who, one suspects, refer to the Eucharist as "bread" and "wine" because they have a defective understanding of the realities this sacrament involves. It is quite understandable that one feels uncomfortable with their using such language, and it is legitimate to question them about what they mean, but the mode of language itself is not prohibited, for Scripture itself uses it.

 

One note about the passages the reader cites: Regardless of what the primary literal sense of these texts might be, the Church early on recognized a reference to the Eucharist within at least the spiritual sense of these texts, and so it is legitimate today to appeal to them in Eucharistic contexts.

Posted by Jimmy Akin in Bible | Permalink | Comments (69)

October 25, 2006

Let Matthew Be Matthew

(Jimmy Akin)

Down yonder, a reader writes:

Has there yet been proof one way or another as to whether St. Matthew the Apostle is the Matthew who wrote the Gospel of Matthew? Ray Brown gives credence to the Apostle via Tradition but some other Matthew by Content. B16 apparently goes with Tradition. What sayest thou??

I haven't looked up what Ray Brown said on the subject, so I can't really comment on that. As to B16, he uses traditional language regarding biblical authorship without intending this language to be a comment one way or another on what critical scholarship would say on the subject. A careful reading of his words in the audience on Matthew shows that he is not trying to settle the question of the authorship of Matthew. Indeed, he is trying to avoid doing so, saying:

We recall, finally, that the tradition of the early Church agrees with attributing the authorship of the first Gospel to Matthew. This was already the case beginning with Papias, bishop of Gerapolis in Phrygia, about the year 130.

He wrote: "Matthew took up the Lord's words in Hebrew, and each one interpreted them as he could" (in Eusebius of Caesarea, "Hist. eccl.", III, 39, 16). The historian Eusebius adds this detail: "Matthew, who previously had preached to the Jews, when he decided to go also to other peoples, wrote in their maternal tongue the Gospel he was proclaiming: In this way he tried to substitute in writing what they, whom he was leaving, lost with his departure" (Ibid., III, 24, 6).

We no longer have the Gospel written by Matthew in Hebrew or Aramaic, but in the Greek Gospel that has come down to us we still continue to hear, in a certain sense, the persuasive voice of the publican Matthew who, in becoming an apostle, continues proclaiming to us the saving mercy of God.

This is a very neutral and ambiguous statement that can mean a number of things, from the (minimalist) idea that the gospel's treatment of the figure of Matthew allows us in a sense to hear his voice due to learning from his example to the (maximalist) idea that the Greek gospel is just a translation of Matthew's Hebrew or Aramaic original or anywhere in the middle (e.g., the Greek gospel of Matthew builds on the Hebrew or Aramaic one as one of its sources). B16 is thus trying to honor the traditional authorship of the gospel without committing to it.

When it comes to what I would say on the question, I consider the matter less decisive than the authorship of the Pauline epistles since there is no attribution of authorship contained within the document itself, but I give very significant weight to the authorship tradition for this document in the early Church and would say that there is significant evidence (not the same as proof) that Matthew was the author.

Some have argued this based on internal considerations. For example, W. Graham Scroggie (who deals with the authorship of the gospels extensively, albeit from a Dispensationalist perspective) argues that Matthew shows a preoccupation with money (as one would expect from a tax collector) the same way Luke shows a preoccupation with healing (as one would expect from a physician).

Even more than Scroggie's book (which is good for raw data, though I don't always like what he does with analysis), I'd recommend the introduction to the New Testament by Donald Guthrie, who also deals extensively with authorship issues.

I do think that there are indications that Matthew was not the product of a "community" (though it certainly responds to the needs of a community, and specifically a Jewish one) and that the authorial vision of a single individual is responsible for it. Regardless of what sources this individual may have used, the book exhibits far too much literary architecture and organization to be a patchwork document assembled without a single authorial vision.

As evidence for this fact, I would point both to large-scale structures in the work, like the fact that the sayings of Jesus that are scattered in Mark and Luke tend to be gathered into collected discourses on distinct topics that are then organized chiastically as follows:

1. The Sermon on the Mount: Jesus on the Law (ch. 5-7)

2. The Evangelization Discourse: The Church's Outer Function (ch. 10)

3. The Kingdom Parables (ch. 13)

4. The Discipline Discourse: The Church's Inner Functions (ch. 18)

5. The Olivet Discourse: Jesus on the Prophets (ch. 23-25)

If you look within these discourses, one also finds at times intense literary structuring. The Kingdom Parables as presented in Matthew (as opposed to in Mark 4) are themselves structured as a chiast, and the Sermon on the Mount is built around recurring phrases ("Blessed are the . . . " "You have heard, but I say . . . " "When you X, do not Y . . . " etc.) so that it exhibits clear internal structure, and in the Olivet Discourse Matthew organizes material that Luke has scattered all over the place.

The result is that Matthew's gospel, while following the general synoptic account of the ministry and passion of Christ, has been organized in such a way that the teachings are gathered up into distinct discourses that are both internally structured and arranged in an overall structure that spans the whole book.

Of particular note is the fact that Jesus is presented in the Sermon on the Mount as the new Lawgiver and in the Olivet Discourse as the fulfillment of the Prophet, so the gospel is bookended with major discourses that correspond to the Law and the Prophets.

We also have subtle recapitulations that bespeak the hand of a single author, such as the way Jesus recapitulates the Old Testament history of Israel and Moses in the first four chapters of the book before he assumes the role of Lawgiver in chapters 5-7.

All of this speaks to the authorial vision of a single individual, and that leaves us with the question: Who was that individual? We have no better, more reliable guidance on this point than the voice of tradition, and I see no reason to ascribe the gospel to anybody other than Matthew.

One reason for this--aside from the early date and weight of the tradition itself--is that it is singularly unlikely that Matthew's name would become attached to the gospel if he were not the author. In fact, if one were looking to fictitiously attach one of the apostles' names to a gospel in order to give it more authority, Matthew is the last person whose name you'd want to use (except Judas Iscariot, who offed himself before the gospels were written).

Why's that?

Because not only was Matthew a non-major apostle (we know very little about him), he also is the apostle who would have had the hardest time with a Jewish audience, given that he was a tax-collector for the Romans. He was a former collaborator with the hated enemy, who became even more hated after the two Jewish Wars and the destruction of Israel and Jerusalem.

Yet Matthew's gospel, as is clear, is the one most written for a Jewish audience. There could scarcely be anything more offputting for such an audience than having the gospel story told to them by a tax-collector/collaborator, and thus "Matthew" strikes me as a name unlikely to become attached to the most Jewish of all the gospels if he were not the author.

Posted by Jimmy Akin in Bible | Permalink | Comments (10)

October 23, 2006

Doctrines Known By Tradition

(Jimmy Akin)

A reader writes:

I was wondering whether you could think of any doctrinal issue (other than the canon of scripture itself) which virtually all Christians would agree on, but which has not been spelled out by either: scripture, ecumenical council or ex cathedra papal pronouncement. 

I'm imagining that perhaps there is at least one essential Christian principal which has been established solely by Sacred Tradition.  If so, it might help non-Catholic Christians better understand the concept of Sacred Tradition. 

Doctrines that have been promulgated (or buttressed) primarily by papal pronouncements would undoubtedly be denied by many non-Catholic Christians to be essential Christian doctrine.  For some reason, some Protestants seem to accept early councils as valid (yet without thereby validating the concept of Sacred Tradition). So while the doctrine of the Trinity itself, which is not explicitly delineated in scripture, would be a pretty strong argument for (& explanation of) the concept of Sacred Tradition, I am looking for another such doctrine.   

After all, some Protestants will assent to anything (like the Trinity) that was laid out in the Nicean Creed, but will still deny the authority of Sacred Tradition. Can you think of another example of a universally agreed upon Christian doctrine which was not explicitly made clear by either scripture or ecumenical council?

I'm not sure that all of the elements named above are needed for a doctrine to help non-Catholics understand the role of apostolic Tradition. For example, while--let's say--an Evangelical would not accept a teaching that had been defined ex cathedra because it was defined ex cathedra, if it were not stated or implied in Scripture and he nevertheless accepted it, it would be possible to point him to the extrabiblical history of belief in the doctrine and thus help him understand the value of apostolic Tradition.

Similarly, I suspect it's not necessary to point to doctrines that no ecumenical council has addressed, just those councils to which Protestants do not appeal. If, for example, the Council of Trent had defined something extrascriptural that a Protestant accepts then he won't accept it because Trent defined it, so his basis must be something else, and it would again be possible to point to the history of the doctrine and thus its basis in apostolic Tradition.

When it comes to those ecumenical councils to which Protestants commonly do appeal (either the first four or the first six), while they do accept in broad outlines the results of these councils, they do not attribute to the councils an infallible teaching authority. As a result, they defend the results of these councils on the grounds that their teachings are rooted at least implicitly in Scripture.

For example, the doctrine of the Trinity--as taught by I Nicaea and I Constantinople--will generally be defended by Protestants not by appealing to the authority of the councils but by appealing to the passages of Scripture which provide bases for fact that there is one God, that the Son and the Spirit are God just as the Father is, and that the three are distinct Persons. There is no single text of Scripture which puts the doctrine together, but the different aspects of the doctrine are clearly enough reflected in Scripture that the Bible may be said to imply the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

It seems to me that all that is essential to finding a doctrine that can help our Protestant brethren understand the role of Tradition is that the following conditions be met:

a) The doctrine in question is accepted by the Protestants to whom one is speaking
b) The doctrine is not stated in Scripture
c) The doctrine is not implied by Scripture
d) The doctrine has an extrabiblical history to which one can appeal as an alternative, extrascriptural basis

The canon of Scripture is a subject which, in broad outlines, meets these criteria. Actually, it would be better to formulate this as "the canon of the New Testament," since Protestants do not accept precisely the same Old Testament canon. If one focuses on the New Testament, however, it is quite clear that the reason individuals in the Protestant community today accept the books of the New Testament that they do is because these books were passed down from the early Church as having been written by the apostles or their associates and were regarded by the early Church as divinely inspired. It is thus God's guidance of the Church's Tradition that provides the basis for our knowledge of the canonicity of these books.

(At least, this would follow for those Protestants who do not accept the claim that the Holy Spirit enables each individual to recognize for himself which books of Scripture are inspired--a claim that is very easy to falsify in practice. It would be quite easy, for example, to write an imitation of 3rd John that sounds enough like John that a person who had not read the original document would not be able to tell, by reading the two, which was authentic and  inspired and which was not.)

When it comes to other doctrines meeting the above requirements, I would propose two which readily spring to mind: the fact that there is to be no more public revelation and the fact that there are to be no more apostles.

Neither of these is directly stated in Scripture and, while there are verses to which some may appeal in defending them, these verses fail to do so upon examination.

For instance, in connection with the claim that there is to be no more public revelation, some may be inclined to appeal to the verse in Jude that says that the faith has been once for all delivered to the saints or to the book of Hebrews' appeal definitiveness of God's revelation through Christ. While these passages do indeed show that the substance of the Christian faith was already revealed, they cannot show that there is to be no more public revelation unless one is prepared to say that Jude and Hebrews are not part of public revelation, in which case their statements are non-inspired and correspondingly lacking in authority.

Others have appealed to the fact that at the end of the book of Revelation it says that no one is to tamper with the contents of "this book" as proof of the idea that Scripture, and thus public revelation, is closed. However a clear-eyed reading of the passage in its context shows that this is an illusion.

Part of the illusion is generated by the fact that Revelation is placed at the end of the New Testament in its traditional canonical order. But the canonical order of the books of the New Testament does not represent the historical order in which they were written but is based on other criteria. Revelation happens to be placed at the end because it deals (at least in its final chapters) with the end of the world, but the fact that it has this subject matter doesn't tell us when it was written. We simply don't know with any precision when Revelation was written relative to the other books of the New Testament. Even if it can be established that Revelation was written after some of them, we can't possibly show with any certitude that it was written after all of them. This is especially true if you accept--as I do--that Revelation was written prior to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, which is depicted as still in existence in the book itself.

Further, the illusion is based on the idea that Scripture is a single book. This is an anachronism that would not have occurred to the original readers of the work. Books in the first century were not bound the way they are today, with the pages sewn together in a spine. This form of book is called a "codex," and it was popularized in the early centuries by Christians (presumably because of the ease with which it allows one to flip to particular Bible passages), but in the first century books were normally bound in the form of a scroll, and the New Testament was not a single book but a collection of scrolls, just as the Old Testament was.

Also, right at the beginning of Revelation John is told to write down the vision he sees "in a book," and the most natural (one might say, blindingly obvious) interpretation of the book mentioned at the end is that it is the same book. In other words, John is firs commissioned to write the vision in a book and then, at the end, a warning is given against tampering with the contents of the book John has written.

Reading these passages in light of how books were bound in he first century (indeed, the word for "book" was synonymous with the word for "scroll"), John is first told to write the vision "in a scroll" and then after he has done so there is a warning against anyone who tampers with the contents of "this scroll."

One certainly cannot derive from this the idea that there is to be no more Scripture, much less that there is to be no more public revelation.

When we turn to the question of whether there are to be any more apostles, some might appeal to the passage in Acts 1 where the Twelve select Judas' replacement, Matthias. In this passage one of the criteria for selection is that the replement must have been a witness of Jesus' ministry, from the time of his baptism to the time he ascended into heaven. Since no one after the first century met those requirements, it could be argued, there could be no futher apostles. But if that is a requirement for being an apostle then it would exclude two individuals who are directly called apostles in Scripture, namely Paul and Barnabas.

This passage forces us to recognize that there is a difference between The Twelve and the office of apostle in general. Scripture is not explicit on what the difference is, but from the available evidence it would appear that The Twelve were a select group who served not just as witnesses of the risen Christ (of whom there were many who weren't ever apostles) but as witnesses specifically of his earthly ministry. You had to witness that to be one of The Twelve, but you didn't have to be a member of The Twelve to be an apostle.

So what did you have to have to be an apostle? The term in both Greek (apostolos) and Aramaic (shlikha) signifies one that has been commissioned to act on behalf of another (like an ambassador, emissary, or legate), and it seems essential for being an apostle that one receive such a commission from Christ to function in this capacity. In the case of all of The Twelve except Matthias this commission was given directly by Christ during his earthly ministry. In the case of Matthias it was given through a special procedure used in Acts 1. And in the case of Paul it was given (apparently) through visions.

There is one point at which Paul says "Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen the Lord?" and he may be referring to the incident on the Damascus Road, where Christ appeared to him and then commissioned him to preach his word to the nations. There is also the incident, in Acts 13, where the Holy Spirit directs that Paul and Barnabas bet set aside to the work to which he has called them, following which hands are laid on them.

But all this happened after Christ had ascended to heaven, and if that's the case then there is no reason why Christ and the Holy Spirit could not have continued to appear to or speak to people and commmission them as apostles. The office didn't have to die out in the first century. God could have kept it going. Christian history simply records that he didn't.

(NOTE: While the bishops are sometime referred to as the successors of the apostles, this does not mean that they are themselves apostles. They're not. They succeeded the apostles in the leadership of the Church when the apostles died out, but the two offices are distinct, as illustrated by the fact that they co-existed in the apostlic age--and by the fact that bishops generally can't work miracles and certainly can't write inspired books of Scripture.)