Middle East

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Could these writings shatter Christian history? True or false, journalists might take a look

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Could these writings shatter Christian history? True or false, journalists might take a look

Let's pretend there's not much news coming out of Washington, D.C and a reporter yearns to cover something different. And what if the press has missed "the biggest biblical discovery to date," indeed, "arguably the most important religious discovery of all time"?

Sounds interesting. And if those lavish promotional claims turn out to be false, that's a story, too.

A friend of The Religion Guy uses the News360.com app, whose algorithms scan 7,000 newspapers and magazines for articles keyed to the individual's interests. This friend's interests include Christian history, and he was alerted to a Jan. 29 article announcing the discovery of ancient documents that "could revolutionize our picture of Christianity."

A seasoned journalist immediately recalls hoaxes of this sort. Leave aside the deceptive history on Christian origins offered as fact in "The Da Vinci Code" novel, a huge 2003 seller that spawned a movie starring Tom Hanks. A claim of proof Jesus Christ was married that emanated from august Harvard Divinity School was debunked. Evangelicals swooned over spurious reports about finding a manuscript of the Gospel of Mark written in the 1st Century. In 2017, The Guy attempted to assess the Shroud of Turin dispute.

The Jan. 29 article wasn't from a recognized scholarly journal or site but CoreSpirit.com, which informs practitioners, entrepreneurs and curiosity-seekers about magic, esoterica, life enhancement nostrums, transcendence and "ancient wisdom."

By the way, this site is potentially useful for media. The Guy bets journalists know nothing about most of the 800-plus topics covered (e.g. global brain, isolation tank, medical intuition, superhuman agility, urine therapy, tongue cutting, wall crawling, you name it).

Core Spirit neglected to tell readers that its news is not new.

The mysterious "Jordanian Codices," a collection of small, bound-together metal tablets, first won publicity in 2011 and mostly in Britain. Though scholars scoffed, there's been lively chatter across the Internet ever since that reporters can plumb to assess story prospects. The history of where these items came from is confused, but they're now being held by Jordan's antiquities department.


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Yes, this is a religion question: Year in, year out, why is January 1st New Year’s Day?

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Yes, this is a religion question: Year in, year out, why is January 1st New Year’s Day?

THE QUESTION:

Why is January 1st New Year’s Day?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

There’s a religious angle here, as with almost any major aspect of human culture past and present. Our January 1 observance stems from ancient paganism. The numbering of “2021,” as with every year, reflects the global reach of Christianity. And the specific day everyone reckons to be January 1 was fixed by the Catholic Church during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation hostilities.

Alongside this conventional calendar, many faiths observe their own religious new years by calculations apart from the January 1 tradition.

The perpetually valuable Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us that worship of the Roman god Janus, with his festival (on January 9th, not the 1st) in the month eventually named for him was practiced even before the legendary founding of the city of Rome in 753 B.C. Janus was the animistic divinity of doorways (januae) and archways (jani). The idea of auspicious entrances and exits, endings and beginnings, eventually applied to turn of the year. January 1 officially replaced March 1 as the start of Rome’s year in 153 B.C..

Due to this pagan background, much of Christian Europe came to reject January 1 observances and celebrated the new year on Christmas Day or March 25, the feast of the Annunciation (the angel Gabriel’s message to Mary that she would bear the divine Son).

The year is the length of time the earth makes one circuit around the sun, but the day upon which a year begins is an arbitrary choice. In 46 B.C., Julius Caesar kept Rome’s January 1 starting point but reworked the “Julian calendar” to better fit with astronomy. The Julian system gained widespread use all the way until A.D. 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII ordered the “Gregorian calendar” cleanup that is universal today.

The Julian system figured that a year lasts roughly 365 days plus 1/4 of a day, so it added one day in the “leap year” every four years.


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Behind the #WhiteJesus wars: Lessons to learn from ancient Christian iconography

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Behind the #WhiteJesus wars: Lessons to learn from ancient Christian iconography

For modern skeptics, the 6th-century icon hanging in the Orthodox monastery in the shadow of Mount Sinai is simply a 33-by-18-inch board covered in bees wax and colored pigments.

For believers, this Christ Pantocrator ("ruler of all") icon is the most famous image of Jesus in the world, because the remote Sinai Peninsula location of St. Catherine's Monastery allowed it to survive the Byzantine iconoclasm era. The icon shows Jesus -- with a beard and long hair -- raising his right hand in blessing, while holding a golden book of the Gospels.

This Jesus does not have blond hair and blue eyes. "Christ of Sinai" shows the face of a wise teacher from ancient Palestine.

"When you talk about ancient icons, you are basically talking about images of Jesus with long hair, a beard and some kind of Roman toga. That's just about all you can say," said Jonathan Pageau of Quebec, an Eastern Orthodox artist and commentator on sacred symbols.

In the early church, he added, believers "didn't ask other questions -- about race and culture -- because those were not the important questions in those days. … Once you start politicizing icons there's just no way out of those arguments. You get into politics and dividing people and then you're lost."

In these troubled times, said Pageau, many analysts are "projecting valid concerns about racism and Europe's history of colonization and the plight of African-Americans back into issues of church history and art that are centuries and centuries old. It's a kind of category error and everything gets mixed up."

But that's what happened when debates about some #BlackLivesMatters activists toppling Confederate memorials -- along with attacks on Catholic statues and even insufficiently "woke" Founding Fathers -- veered into #WhiteJesus territory.

"Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy," tweeted Shaun King, author of "Make Change: How to Fight Injustice, Dismantle Systemic Oppression, and Own Our Future."

The popular Internet scribe later added: "All murals and stained-glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down. … We can debate [whether] or not Jesus was real all day long. What I do know, is that white Jesus is a lie. And is a tool of white supremacy created and advanced to help white people use the faith as a tool of oppression. Also, they never would've accepted a religion from a Brown man."


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Old news in Turkey: What does Islam teach about turning Christian churches into mosques?

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THE QUESTION:

What does Islam teach about seizing Christian churches to become mosques?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The bitterly contested Hagia Sophia (“Holy Wisdom”) in Constantinople (the city now named Istanbul) was the grandest church in Christendom across nine centuries. Then Muslim conquerors under Mehmed II confiscated the church in 1453 and converted it into the Aya Sofia Mosque. In 1935, Turkey’s government secularized it to be an interfaith museum, but three weeks ago turned it into a working mosque once again.

Christian leaders worldwide are aggrieved by that latest development.

But apart from Christian feelings and fears for the future of the building’s celebrated artwork, in strictly Islamic terms was the 1453 takeover of a church proper? Should it be perpetuated in 2020, and are such takeovers legitimate today? Turkey’s summertime action has sparked new debate among Muslims.

A traditionalist view is well articulated at www.muslimmatters.org by Muhammad Wajid Akhter, a physician on the council of the British Islamic Medical Association who studies Islamic history.

He notes that Christian conquerors in Spain took over the Al-Hambra Palace and Cordoba Mosque, and built Granada Cathedral over the site of a mosque. That is accurate. But when was the last time Christians confiscated a mosque? Those events occurred in 1236, 1492 and 1529. In the centuries since, the world has gone through the Enlightenment, the rise of democracy and widespread support for human rights.

Tolerance-minded Muslims say Istanbul has plenty of mosques already and didn’t need to add one in 2020, Akhter, however, contends that a mosque “is owned by Allah” and Muslims have no right to simply give away “something that does not belong to us.” By the same reasoning, of course, Christians can say Hagia Sophia is sacred ground that belongs to their God, not Mehmed and his forces of 1453.

Akhter dismisses the concern some Muslims express about Christian sensitivities as “impractical” and “untenable.”


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What's a hot take on Israel worth? Depends on one's media celebrity status (Hello Seth Rogen)

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How do you tell the difference between a Jewish pessimist and a Jewish optimist?

Easy. The pessimist says, “Things just can’t get any worse. The optimist says, “Sure they can.”

Well, they certainly have — as far as the fraught connection between Israel and liberal American Jews goes.

The latest stressor is a predictably nasty media exchange over high-profile liberal commentator Peter Beinart’s recent declaration that he no longer backs a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A single bi-national, or perhaps a confederated, state, said Beinart, is the best remaining equitable option. This, he concluded, is because of Israel’s deeply entrenched West Bank settlement project. Further undermining the two-state option, he said, is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s threat to annex much of the occupied West Bank that Palestinians want to include in their own independent state.

Beinart detailed his thoughts in this New York Times oped and, in much greater detail, in this Jewish Currents essay.

For liberal Jews — who have long argued that two independent states coexisting side by side, one Jewish-run and one Palestinian, is the best and only realistic option — Beinart’s abandonment of full Jewish nationhood was nothing less than Zionist heresy.

Naturally, given today’s insatiable 24/7 media universe — in which all who dare venture are but a tweet away from “woke” fame or “cancel culture” renunciation — the verbal warfare started immediately.

Beinart’s, you may be wondering, is but one voice in a cacophony of voices claiming to know what’s best for Israel-Palestine, so why the fuss? Moreover, he lives in the United States, not Israel, so to what degree does his opinion even matter?

The answer, of course, is his American media prominence. His frequent talking-head appearances, (he’s a CNN regular) and voluminous writings have won him a place in the liberal Zionist media firmament, where he’s long been a harsh critic of Netanyahu and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. That’s not Hollywood famous, but it’s a start.


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Was Jesus white and should sacred art that depicts Him in that manner be scrapped?

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Was Jesus white and should sacred art that depicts Him in that manner be scrapped?

THE QUESTION:

Was Jesus white?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

No.

But in these racially anxious times for America, there’s more to be said.

In a biblical dream-vision, presumably not meant to be taken literally in racial terms (Revelation 1:15), the feet of the triumphal Jesus Christ are bronze in color. In terms of actual 1st Century history, it makes the most sense to think that Jesus was neither north European white nor African black. As a man of the Mideast, he’d presumably have had a light brown or olive complexion like today’s Arabs or Sephardic Jews, with a good tan from all those outdoor travels.

Megyn Kelly assured Fox News viewers in 2013 of the “verifiable fact” that “Jesus was a white man.” In recent days, similar racial uproar was generated by Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King. After tweeting that memorials to “despicable” slaveowners George Washington and Thomas Jefferson must come down, he added obliteration of statues of “the white European they claim is Jesus,” seen as “a form of white supremacy.” A further tweet extended the ban to such “racist propaganda” in murals and stained glass of Jesus.

King did not specify that paintings should likewise be removed from display or destroyed, though that seems an obvious implication. Such iconoclasm would denude the world’s museums of countless masterpieces. In one example, so treasured is Leonardo da Vinci’s “Savior of the World” portrait of a Caucasian-looking Jesus that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia paid $450 million for it in 2017.

Moving to popular art, should we still watch those movies and TV productions where Jesus looks Caucasian, and more Gentile than Jewish? On that score, Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ” (2004) gave Jesus a modest prosthetic nose and colorized the actor’s eyes to darken them.


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Editors should pay attention when King David bursts into news 3,000 years later 

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Merriam-Webster’s definition 2(b) of the term “peg,” as a noun states: “something (such as a fact or issue) used as a support, pretext, or reason,” for example “a news peg for the story.”

When it comes to media peg-manship and the Bible, it certainly appears that any old pretext will do.

The Religion Guy toiled on several of those Time magazine Bible history cover stories pegged to Christmas or Easter, often analyzing the pros and cons of the latest sensations sent aloft by skeptics in academia and elsewhere.

The Guy successfully used a new book as the peg to sell Time on the 1997 cover “Does Heaven Exist?” What could be more “off the news” than that?

Yet news pegs of any kind are remarkably absent with the most recent example of the genre, in The New Yorker dated June 29. The 8,500-worder by Israeli freelance Ruth Margalit consumes 10 pages of this elite journalistic real estate.

The cute headline announces the pitch: “Built On Sand.” Subhed: “King David’s story has been told for millennia. Archeologists are still fighting over whether it’s true.”

Was David the grand though flawed monarch the Bible depicts, or merely some boondocks bandit or sheik?

The debate affects current Israeli-vs.-Palestinian settlement politics, but in archaeology the last major news peg on David occurred 15 years ago while this pretext-free article appears in most news-crazed year imaginable.

That should tell media strategists something. Margalit’s reputation as a writer and skill at story pitches presumably helped, but the magazine’s editors knew that multitudes gobble up this stuff. The New Yorker’s long-form journalism is well suited to exploring such matters.

Pegs from the past? Any claims that David never even existed were all but eradicated by the 1993 discovery of the “House of David” inscription within a century of the king’s reign.


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'Head of Christ' story ignores centuries of art depicting what Jesus looked like: A first-century Jew

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Well, this Religion News Service piece sure has an interesting premise. I am talking about a lengthy feature — seen here in the Washington Post — that implies American Christianity is racist because of one popular painting of Jesus Christ.

Never mind that many of us have grown up disliking the painting for its sickly sweet religiosity. Never mind that this is not the iconic image seen in Christian traditions with ancient roots and liturgical art that reveals those roots in the Middle East. There’s a crucial word missing in this piece — “Jewish.”

Even as a child, this particular image repelled me, as it didn’t reflect the lively, infuriating and suffering Jesus I saw in the Bible. There’s an assumption that Americans adore this image.

Now, our modern-day iconoclasts want to get rid of it.

CHICAGO — The first time the Rev. Lettie Moses Carr saw Jesus depicted as black, she was in her 20s.

It felt “weird,” Carr said.

Until that moment, she had always thought Jesus was white.

At least that’s how he appeared when she was growing up. A copy of Warner E. Sallman’s “Head of Christ” painting hung in her home, depicting a gentle Jesus with blue eyes turned heavenward and dark blond hair cascading over his shoulders in waves.

The painting, which has been reproduced a billion times, came to define what the central figure of Christianity looked like for generations of Christians in the United States — and beyond.

“Some in the church,” the reporter says, are calling for the eradication of that painting because it makes Jesus look white with blue eyes.

Folks, haven’t we been here before?

Remember the dust-up in 2013 when Megyn Kelly told us all that Jesus was white?


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Jewish businesses in Los Angeles ransacked in riots, but only Israeli and Jewish media care

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Not long after the first riots linked to the death of George Floyd had erupted, I realized a fact that hadn’t been emphasized at all in most media: How huge swaths of major cities had been destroyed by rioters.

It took the New York Post’s video on the wreck that was downtown Manhattan — block after block after block of broken glass and boarded-up storefronts — (plywood and board-up companies are making a killing these days) for me to see a side of the protests that most media weren’t showing us.

Out on the Left Coast, the ruin was similar. The Oregonian called riot-plagued Portland “a city of plywood.”

Since then, images have emerged of a darker narrative, with rioters targeting Jewish businesses. Israeli newspapers ran with this angle this past Saturday, but by the end of the day, there was nothing about the Jewish vandalism to be found on the New York Times website. Usually the Times is pretty up on anti-Semitism, but it was easier to find a piece about Anna Wintour than any mentions of vandalized Jews.

So now we’re avoiding news about anti-Semitism in these riots urging diversity? American Jewish media have been on this for some weeks. The Forward ran this on June 1:

(Local businessman Jonathan) Friedman said he believes Jewish businesses were targeted specifically. “All Jewish businesses and temples in the area were either broken into or had graffiti tagged on their walls. I understand the demonstrators’ frustration, but we have nothing to do with what happened to George Floyd.”

Do read that story, as it’s heartrending, especially the part about the Iranian Jewish immigrant whose jewelry store was completely ransacked. Insurance won’t cover much of the loss, so he’s ruined.

Arutz Sheva, an Israeli TV network, covered the riots with this video.

Now, where’s the mainstream press on this obvious religious targeting? I haven’t seen a thing about this in the Los Angeles Times, not to mention other media. Have you?


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