Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Herbert

Hanah: Charlie has learned that really annoying technique where I ask him to take one bite of his food, so he picks up a nearly invisible molecule of food and eats it.


Scott: Time to put him up for adoption.


Hanah: Fortunately, he's being extra-cute at the same time.


Scott:
Very clever of him.


Hanah: Yes, it's all part of his plan to take over the world.


Scott:
He's the Kwisatz Haderach!


Hanah:
the what?


Scott:
I can't believe you thought you could bring forth the Kwisatz Haderach before his time!


Hanah:
ok...


Scott:
Ah. Apropos of nothing, you should read Dune.


Hanah:
I did once, but I didn't understand it.


Scott:
It's Dune, not Finnegan's Wake.

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Works Cited

This is the one and only passage in the New Testament in which Jesus is called a carpenter. The word used, TEKTŌN, is typically applied in other Greek texts to anyone who makes things with his hands; in later Christian writings, for example, Jesus is said to have made "yokes and gates." ... How could someone with that background be the Son of God?

This was a question that the pagan opponents of Christianity took quite seriously; in fact, they understood the question to be rhetorical. Jesus obviously could not be a son of God if he was a mere TEKTŌN. The pagan critic Celsus particularly mocked Christians on this point, tying the claim that Jesus was a "woodworker" into the fact that he was crucified (on a stake of wood) and the Christian belief in the "tree of life."

And everywhere they speak in their writings of the tree of life... I imagine because their master was nailed to a cross and was a carpenter by trade. So that if he happened to be thrown off a cliff or pushed into a pit or suffocated by strangling, or if he had been a cobbler or stonemason or blacksmith, there would have been a cliff of life above the heavens, or a pit of resurrection, or a rope of immortality, or a blessed stone, or an iron of love, or a holy hide of leather.


Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus

Sunday, November 07, 2010

Works Cited

This kind of continuous writing is called scriptuo continua, and it obviously could make it difficult at times to read, let alone understand a text. ... what would it mean to say lastnightatdinnerisawabundanceonthetable? Was this a normal or a supernormal event?


Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus