At Patheos: TF: A partial list of famous people born of virgins in Bethlehem

Fred Clark has posted a new Left Behind post, TF: A partial list of famous people born of virgins in Bethlehem, at Patheos.

This week Fred writes about pp. 391-393 of Tribulation Force.

Excerpt:

There’s little quite as mortifyingly horrible as the church speaker who attempts to “reach the young people of today” by incorporating what he imagines to be their lingo into his message.

The result, almost always, is something wincingly awful and embarrassing for all concerned. The speaker usually sounds like a tourist trying to pretend to be a native speaker while relying on a guidebook of common phrases from 1953. His every over-earnest attempt to convey the idea “I’m one of you” winds up, instead, screaming “I have no idea who you are.”

Something similar is going on here in Tribulation Force as the authors attempt to portray the rabbinical studies of Tsion Ben-Judah. The reader gets the impression that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins don’t understand Judaism any better than those church speakers understand youth culture.

[Fred Clark, TF: A partial list of famous people born of virgins in Bethlehem, May 31 2011, posted at Patheos.com]


Commentators who would like to share their responses to the new post with all of Fred's fans (old and new) can cross-post to both boards.

 

Comments

[hapax]

I cannot possibly be first.

Ah well, in honor of the post title, I shall post this snippet from the book currently on nightstand:

Mithra was worshipped six centuries before the founding of Rome, and has had his ups and downs ever since. He was the Son of the Sun, and born of a virgin on the 25th of December. But then, so was everybody else. He died for the sins of all mankind, and was reborn at the spring equinox. That's standard, too, as are the rest of the clutch: baptism, communion, and the promise of eternal life. Perhaps the one best point of the religion is this: the violet is sacred to Mithra, and consequently the cultivation of flowerbeds is encouraged.

Virtual slices of the cherry pie currently on the counter to the first one geeky enough to identify the source.

[Lunch Meat]

Sounds Pratchett-y, but I haven't heard it before.

[hapax]

It does, doesn't it? Several decades earlier, though.

[aravind]

I cheated and googled. The book sounds interesting, but do you recommend it, hapax?

[hapax]

@aravind: Absolutely! Hardly deep or thought-provoking, and dreadfully politically retrograde (even for the times), but such fun! And the kind of pitch-perfect snark that makes you poke awake the person in bed next to you, so you can read it out loud, and make you despair of writing anything quite so delightful.

But good luck finding it; there's exactly one library in the USA that will send it out on inter-library loan, and I've got it right now.

OTOH, you can get the whole trilogy at a decent price as an e-book, if that's your flavour of ink.

[Mark Z.]

It sounds a lot like the beginning of Zelazny's Lord of Light, except that Mithra isn't in that.

[Dash]

Clearly my google-fu is lacking. Hapax, can you rot13 the title for me?

[Laiima]

Yeah, I couldn't find anything either.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

*checks the comments at Patheos*

Oh... wow. I am so hiring Chris Doggett as my next campaign manager.

[Cliff]

After Fred's last few TF posts, where he expertly dismantles the whole set up for Tsion's Prime Time Bible Hour, this week seems a little lacking.
I mean, if you know enough about Judaism, then it ranks right up there with the rest of the books. But for a Gentile like me, who garnered all he knows about Judaism from late night comics, the flaws in this part would have sailed right on by without comment.

[Kit Whitfield]

But for a Gentile like me, who garnered all he knows about Judaism from late night comics, the flaws in this part would have sailed right on by without comment.

Um, what? Are you saying it's okay to present ignorant misrepresentations of Judaism as long as they don't look ignorant to Gentiles who don't know very much about Judaism? And if not, then what's weak about pointing out the ignorance?

[Firedrake]

Surely the McDowellite approach as presented here is inconsistent with the usual Christian answer to lack of evidence for God, that proof denies faith and faith without proof is necessary?

The non-Jewishness of Tsion casts his name into a bit of a new light. If I were trying to pass myself off online as - say - black or Chinese, I might well do a pretty terrible job of picking my name...

Hapax, indeed, as I understand it, everyone who claimed to be a Great Leader around that time had to have a virgin birth; it was pretty much part of the required legend, like a business leader today saying "I started with nothing and worked my way up". Expected social lubrication.

[julie paradox]

a wild stab in the dark gives me (why did I just try to capitalise that? hmmm) DLS. Off to google...

[julie paradox]

okay, I am So Not A Geek ;-)

[Thalia]

@Cliff, ow. I remember when this bit would have "sailed on by without comment," and it's mortifying. My provincial self was sold that Judaism interpreted things the same way we did. Of course, then I had to meet a Jewish person, which wouldn't happen until I came to the big city, and then my understanding of what I'd been taught--well, it's a good thing we were rather vague on the subject. I can only imagine what it must be like to live out in the big world thinking in Christ-killing stereotypes, or that if the Jewish people actually caught on that Jesus' birth was supernatural the whole thing might be turned on its head.

[Lunch Meat]

Surely the McDowellite approach as presented here is inconsistent with the usual Christian answer to lack of evidence for God, that proof denies faith and faith without proof is necessary?

That answer is only given when the Christian is asked a question zie hasn't been trained with an answer for. It takes faith to please God, but it has to be totally obvious that God exists because otherwise you might almost accidentally think that atheists don't deserve to go to hell.

[hapax]

Sorry, I didn't actually think it was THAT obscure, mainly because the series came up in the comment threads of three different blogs I follow in the past month.

It's from STAR WELL, the first of the Antony Villiers series by Alexei Panshin; adventure romps / comedy of manners / caper novels with a thin science-fictional gloss, and an arch narrative tone reminiscent of Pratchett.

[Thalia]

I have never heard of Alexei Panshin, and now I must do something to remedy that.

[Sixwing]

It sounds a lot like the beginning of Zelazny's Lord of Light, except that Mithra isn't in that. Mark Z., my thoughts exactly.

I am now wondering what would've happened in that (exceptionally weird and thought-provoking, if occasionally infuriating) book if he had been.

[Rodeobob]

After Fred's last few TF posts, where he expertly dismantles the whole set up for Tsion's Prime Time Bible Hour, this week seems a little lacking.
I mean, if you know enough about Judaism, then it ranks right up there with the rest of the books. But for a Gentile like me, who garnered all he knows about Judaism from late night comics, the flaws in this part would have sailed right on by without comment.

I think the problem you're facing is that Tsion isn't actually Jewish. He has a Jewish name, and we're told he's Jewish, but he is as much a Jew as Buck Williams is a reporter.

Tsion doesn't "convert" to Christianity, doesn't "change his mind" about Jesus, because he was always a Christian who believed in Jesus, he just had a "Jewish costume" on. That's how he's written, and that's how he sounds. (A Gentile in Jew clothing?)

The problem with Tsion's lecture isn't that it's "wrong" in it's arguments, it's that it's simply not a Jewish argument. It's almost like me trying to argue as a Christian that the Second Coming of Christ is foretold in the Vedic concept of reincarnation. It's so jarringly out of place that the first reaction isn't to agree or disagree with the claim but to question the contradicting premesis. ("As a Christian, you're citing reincarnation?")

I don't know much about Judiasm, but I do know that it's odd when a Jewish scholar, discussing Jewish scripture, sounds like Tim LeHay talking about Christianity.

Tsion could have been written in such a way to convert to Christianity, even written so that his parroting of American Evangelical theology was plausible. But he wasn't.

Did anyone else suffer through the movie "Hancock"? The premise was intriguing: imagine if Superman was a dick. No, wait, not like that. Imagine he was a cynical, drunken jerkass, who learned to be inspiring and heroic. They cast Will Smith as the main character, and for the last act of the film, it fit. Will Smith, in tights, being heroic and brave. The problem is that for the first two acts, it didn't work. Will Smith as a hurt, misanthropic, burned-out hero just wasn't plausible. (In hindsight, I would have loved to see Martin Laurence in that role)

Or for a broader example, compare Darth Vader's eventual return to the Light Side with, say... Anakin Skywalker's descent to the Dark Side. When Darth Vader finally grabbed the Emperor and threw him down the well, that was a powerful moment because we all knew he was Evil. When Anakin Skywalker decides to become evil, well... sorry, but at that point he'd already committed multiple murders, was keeping an affair secret from his "friend" and mentor, and was something of a jerk to begin with. Darth Vader was an evil character who turned to good. Anakin Skywalker was an evil character who tried being good and gave up. Tsion Ben Judah is a Christian who is trying to pretend to be a Jew long enough to 'convert' to Christianity again.

[CZEdwards (who was CSHolocene)]

Dratted post. I'd really love to actually, ya know, think about it... but it started up an earworm chorus. It's June, darn it. I do not need to be half-humming O Little Town of Bethlehem to myself all. Frickin. Day.

[Cliff]

Um, what? Are you saying it's okay to present ignorant misrepresentations of Judaism as long as they don't look ignorant to Gentiles who don't know very much about Judaism? And if not, then what's weak about pointing out the ignorance?

Hmmm, no, that's not what I'm saying at all.

I'll try again, and try to express it as a personal, subjective viewpoint this time.
Let's say someone is criticizing Star Trek. If they say, "all the aliens are just humans with forehead doodads," I'm right there with them.
If they say, "Subdeck C is connected to the Holodeck via the secondary turbolift, not the main turbolift as seen in Episode 308," then I'm not going to follow along, because I've never invested time in learning the intricacies of Starfleet construction.

Same with Tsion Ben-Judah's presentation. I understand that Buck is an awful character and Rayford is an awful character and it doesn't make any sense for Tsion to have a presentation on international TV, but if I had read this book (for some reason) before Fred's deconstruction of it, I'd never have noticed that Tsion isn't making an argument rooted in Judaism.
I might have raised an eyebrow at his stupid math, but all this discussion of translations from Hebrew and Augustine's notions wouldn't have been on my radar. At all.

And what I'm thinking is, there've been a lot of people who have run across these books that have as much or less knowledge of Judaism as me. That may be wrong or it may be right, I have no idea.
Fred's takedown is valid, and educational, but it's not easily expressed to a person growing up in, say, rural Idaho, who's never met a Jewish person in their life. But pointing to the loss of all the children in the world and asking why no one cares in the books, that's something that damn near anyone can appreciate.
So Fred's argument is still valid here, but for me at least it doesn't have as much impact.

[Kit Whitfield]

So Fred's argument is still valid here, but for me at least it doesn't have as much impact.

Okay, fine, but why share that with the group? Are you trying to argue that Fred should only write posts that don't teach people things they didn't already know? Or are you saying it's unreasonable to expect people to take an interest in the realities of Judaism? What's your point?

[Ross]

("As a Christian, you're citing reincarnation?")

My mother in law believes that reincarnation is part of christian dogma. Just last night, she told my wife that the bits of the bible about reincarnation were suppressed and removed.

[Lonespark]

I have many thoughts on the concept of Hancock. It was not a coherent film. I liked many of the bits. The only bit I didn't like was the human villains. Why have human villains facing gods/superheroes? Unless they had a reason to know their foes' weakness, it makes no sense and is just really pointless and there was plenty of conflict anyway aaaargh!

I seek out any fanfiction I can find, and whatever else it was it was very slashy. I didn't think Will Smith was particularly ill-suited to the role, though I agree someone else could maybe have done it better. Can't have that, though. Too many black movie stars at a time, or something.

[Jarred]

@Cliff: Fred's takedown is valid, and educational, but it's not easily expressed to a person growing up in, say, rural Idaho, who's never met a Jewish person in their life.

Would you like me to tell you why I (and I suspect others will agree) hearing such information from Fred is even more important to that person who's never met a Jewish person? Because someone, somewhere is going to tell them something about Jewish people. And if they have never met any actual Jewish people, then the only thing they have to evaluate anything anyone tells them is in the light of what facts they have already learned. So if all they hear is half-truths and lies, then they have a problem.

Or more importantly, that's a potential problem for real-live Jewish people*, because people who don't like Jewish people and would like to discriminate against them, demonize them, dehumanize them, and otherwise cause them a world of trouble rely on getting support from people like your hypothetical person growing up in Idaho by telling them lies that affect their sympathies. And such people can be quite convincing, subtle, and manipulative liars. So it's important that people who ever met Jewish people* hears Fred discuss how real Jewish people think and act in contrast to how Imaginary Jewish People** are portrayed. That way, when the liars come, the person who has never met actual Jewish people is armed with the knowledge and critical thinking ability to see through the lies.

---

* The same can be said for people of any minority.

[Froborr]

@Jarred: I really appreciate Fred doing this post, largely for the reasons you describe. It drives me *nuts* when people assume Judaism is Christianity minus Christ. It's *not*, it's its own religion with its own focuses and interests and concerns, and they are *not* the focuses and interests and concerns of Christianity--in general, there's a far greater emphasis on ethics and ritual than salvation, on this-lifely concerns than the afterlife, and so on. "Judeo-Christian" in particular is a phrase that drives me nuts; I think "Judeo-Muslim" and "Greco-Romano-Christian" or "Neo-Platono-Christian" values make more sense, honestly.

[Chuck]

Jarred: because people who don't like Jewish people and would like to discriminate against them, demonize them, dehumanize them,

But nobody accuses us of killing Christian babies to make matzo any more, so we're living in a post-anti-semitism society, right?
/bitter snark

I do very much agree with the points Jarred and Froborr are making here.

I think that Cliff's comment should be taken more as a case of "we should be aware that people may be ignorant and educate them appropriately" rather than "this is unimportant because it doesn't immediately resonate with me". At least, that's how I read it.

[Froborr]

@Chuck: I read Cliff's comment the same way.

I have personally been accused of killing Christ. I was seven at the time, and more baffled than hurt--didn't Jesus die, like a hundred years ago? I wan't around then! My *parents* probably weren't even around then!

[Mmy]

@Cliff: I'll try again, and try to express it as a personal, subjective viewpoint this time.

Let's say someone is criticizing Star Trek. If they say, "all the aliens are just humans with forehead doodads," I'm right there with them.
If they say, "Subdeck C is connected to the Holodeck via the secondary turbolift, not the main turbolift as seen in Episode 308," then I'm not going to follow along, because I've never invested time in learning the intricacies of Starfleet construction.

But if you are part of a community that bases its purpose and identity on being **perfected** Star Trek fans or at least believes itself to be both rooted in and an improvement upon Star Trek it seems passing strange to treat rather major aspects of Star Trek-ness as being mere fan-fictish irrelevancies.

@Cliff: So Fred's argument is still valid here, but for me at least it doesn't have as much impact.

Hopefully the impact on many of Fred's readers is that they re-examine the validity of their conclusions about Judaism upon being brought face-to-face with their lack of knowledge of even its basics.

[Izzy]

@Froborr: I always liked the comment along those lines in IT:

"I've been after [Jewish kid] ever since I heard that. I figure, he's that old, he should be able to get us some beer."

[Lunch Meat]

I don't know many Jewish people. I am reasonably sure I do not participate in or actively support policies or activities that harm Jewish people. I can't think of a conversation relevant to theology that I've ever even had with someone who is Jewish.

However, I remember as a child reading the passage (coming up in the next few chapters) in which Tsion's family is murdered because he says Jesus is the Messiah. This contributed to my feelings that all Christians everywhere are persecuted and that people hate us because they know we're right.

LaJenkins' presentation of Jewish people is horrible, dehumanizing slander, and even if I never do have a relationship with a Jewish person, it is a dangerous thing for me to believe and it makes me a worse person. That's why this detailed deconstruction (and the insightful comments of the Jewish people on this blog, like Aunursa) are important.

[sarah]

I grew up in a mostly Catholic-and-Jewish area. You were one or the other, or you were of no faith (and I grew up Protestant, so I was weird in the eyes of my peers). And maybe it was just the environment in which I grew up, but anti-Semitism was foreign to me as a child--something that I read in books about World War II.

Strangely enough, the town we moved to in Massachusetts is probably more diverse religiously, though it's still heavily Catholic and Jewish, with some Protestants mixed into the majority. The town has changed quite a bit over the last ten or so years. My brothers, who are younger than me, had much more diverse (ethnically, racially and religiously) groups of friends than I did in high school.

Our school district had off for the major Jewish (and Christian) holidays, and it wasn't until I went to college and made friends with people from other parts of the country that I realized that this wasn't the norm.

By the way, I am still a little miffed at my parents for moving us out of Long Island right before all of my friends' bar and bat mitzvahs. :)

[Brin (not Meir)]

I grew up in a mostly Catholic-and-Jewish area. You were one or the other, or you were of no faith (and I grew up Protestant, so I was weird in the eyes of my peers). And maybe it was just the environment in which I grew up, but anti-Semitism was foreign to me as a child--something that I read in books about World War II.

Same here, except I was one of the many Jews. When I was younger, I figured anti-Semitism must not exist anymore because if it was still around I would have been subjected to it. (Ever watch The Butterfly Effect? I laughed at "At least I'm not a kike" due to perceiving it as blatantly anachronistic.) Apparently it doesn't always work that way.
(Neither "kike" nor "Semitism" is recognised by Firefox's spellchecker. I'm not sure what to make of this.)

[cjmr]

Brin (not Meir)--I'd say it just means that Firefox's spellchecker is not very useful...

[MaryKaye]

There's a general problem that in a society with one majority religion, that religion tends to define what "religion" consists of--to the detriment of ones that don't fit. Thus we get people questioning whether Buddhism is a religion because it lacks a clear-cut god, whether Paganism is a religion because it lacks a hierarchical structure, whether Jewish agnostics like my boss are "really Jewish", etc. There is an implicit assumption that other things are religions only insofar as they resemble Christianity.

I distinctly remember when I learned this wasn't true: it was a Usenet post on a roleplaying games forum, and it laid out a whole list of things that might be centrally defining to a religion. Theological belief, ceremonial practice, ecstatic experience, ancestry/tribal members, ethical code....there are *lots* of variations in human religious experience and some of them do not map all that well to Christianity.

(I wish I could find that post again, but it was a *long* time ago. Darn, I miss Usenet.)

I practiced Paganism on and off all through childhood and adolescence, and never identified these practices as religious, because they were not associated with a developed belief system nor with a hierarchical authority. But what else were they? I prayed, I did rituals, I collected lore....

[Will Wildman]

I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone refer to 'Semitism' all on its own. Things may or may not be 'Semitic', but the -ism only seems to arise when anti- is on there as well. Is this just a lack of awareness on my part? (Wikipedia defaults to the page on 'Antisemitism' and a page on 'semitisms', linguistics structures that indicate the influence of Semitic languages.)

[Brin (not Meir)]

I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone refer to 'Semitism' all on its own. Things may or may not be 'Semitic', but the -ism only seems to arise when anti- is on there as well.

Yeah, but the spellchecker treats hyphenated words as being separate. In order to accept "anti-Semitism", it has to accept "Semitism" as well, even if "Semitism" on its own isn't actually a word.
*test* Ah, that's it. Firefox expects me to spell it as one word, "antisemitism". Fair enough. I disagree with Firefox's spellchecker on many things (see also: "spellchecker" as one word, "recognise" with an "s").

[Julie paradox]

This seems like a semi-appropriate place to ask:

there's a bit in one of the gospels where Jesus's followers are in a room together, with the door locked "for fear of the Jews". Now, even as a small child I thought this a bit odd, because the entire group was Jewish. I suspect I assumed it was part of [one of the many bits of] our faith that we were slightly embarrassed by.

I have for a few years now wondered whether the original word was something like "people" which would be better translated as "for fear of the mob".

(.... although I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the Early Church ignored common sense and went with what fitted their prejudices. Why change a winning formula?)

Thoughts? Reactions? Any actual knowledge would be a bonus ;-)

[MercuryBlue]

Julie: What verse in what translation, do you know? 'Cause I have never heard that. Ever.

[Julie paradox]

John 2:19. I'm looking at the NIV, but we had it in church not long ago and I think that was different.

Looking at Bible Gateway - Common English and Contemporary English both reckon it was the Jewish authorities they were afraid of. (New Century just says elders.) I don't know what source materials those translations are based on. Good News, New Living Translation and Worldwide English do the same; interestingly, so does Today's NIV.

All the other English texts on BG say "of the Jews". I have insufficient familiarity with other languages.

Oh, and the New American Standard directs me to John 7:13 which says "no-one would say anything publicly about him for fear of the Jews" and looking at the foregoing verses quite obviously means the authorities.

OK, I seem to have my answer.

[Julie paradox]

gah! What happened there? John 20 (twenty) I mean.

TBAT?

[hapax]

Julie paradox -- the author of John's Gospel was clearly vitally interested in distinguishing this new Christian religion from the Judaism from which it originated.

(Contrast with the author of the Gospel of Matthew, who was quite concerned with demonstrating how Christianity was the perfection and culmination of Judaism)

This may have a lot to do with the fact that the Johannine circle probably was centred in Alexandria during the first part of the second century CE, which was not a ... safe, to put it mildly ... time or place to be identified as Jewish.

(John's passion narrative, for another example, is the only source for the declaration of "the Jews" that Jesus's "blood be on us and on our children", a passage which has a very unhappy history as a weapon in anti-Semitic hands)

If you're interested, THE ORIGIN OF SATAN by Elaine Pagels goes into this in some depth.

[Mark Z.]

Julie paradox,

The Greek in 20:19 (and 7:13) is just "the Jews". Obviously it doesn't mean all the Jews but the author doesn't actually make the distinction; throughout the book he talks about "the Jews" as though they're a small elite group, even in Jerusalem where just about everyone is Jewish.

[Cliff]

I think that Cliff's comment should be taken more as a case of "we should be aware that people may be ignorant and educate them appropriately" rather than "this is unimportant because it doesn't immediately resonate with me". At least, that's how I read it.

That's pretty much what I was going for. To me, the discussion of translations of Hebrew prophecies and early Christian thinkers seems rather esoteric. It's mildly interesting to me at best, but it won't be something I take away from Fred's project here.
On the other hand, he's made plenty of criticisms of the books that don't rely on an in-depth knowledge of Abrahamic religion. I think those criticisms are more relatable for some people (including me).

But if you are part of a community that bases its purpose and identity on being **perfected** Star Trek fans or at least believes itself to be both rooted in and an improvement upon Star Trek it seems passing strange to treat rather major aspects of Star Trek-ness as being mere fan-fictish irrelevancies.

Well, that's the major problem with my analogy, is that Christianity and Judaism have massive real world implications and Star Trek doesn't.