Blue Cord

For those who are unfamiliar with the debate about the date of the exodus from Egypt, Claude Mariottini has a good article summarizing the issues and some of the arguments.  For many, the debate comes down to a date in either the 15th or 13th century BCE.  Mariottini’s discussion is occasioned by a forthcoming article by James Hoffmeier.

A lot of the debate that centers on these two dating possibilities is assuming that the exodus narrative in Exodus actually refers historically to one event.  If the biblical account is a combination of several “exoduses” (exodi? exodoi? exodim?) that were collapsed in the cultural memory of the Israelites, the question becomes much more complex.

The Associated Press is reporting that an amateur scholar has come up with yet another theory about Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper painting. The scholar, Slavisa Pesci, says that superimposing a horizontally reverses image of The Last Supper on itself reveals several images, including Jesus blessing the bread, a baby being held in the arms of one of the men, and a Templar knight. A number of sites are carrying the article, but here is a link to the MSNBC version of the AP story.

When the story broke, so many people rushed to several Da Vinci sites that those sites crashed. I could not find Pesci’s image, but I found a similar picture done by someone else that was available in Wikipedia’s image section. I have circled the relevant areas and included that picture here (click on the image to view a larger version).

The apostle who is supposedly holding the baby looks more like he is strangling one of the other disciples, while the figure on the far left looks vaguely like a knight (though not necessarily of the Templar order). With Jesus in the middle holding out his arms, it is easy to see how him holding out both arms in to the side looks similar to paintings of Jesus blessing people (the reversal makes both palms appear to be facing upwards). The patterns in Jesus’s clothes also maybe sorta possibly look like a chalice.

While I am far from convinced by looking at the picture, I have not read Pesci’s arguments (I can’t find them online). It would not be surprising for da Vinci to do something like this. He enjoyed this kind of fun with mathematics. It has been suggested, for instance, that da Vinci used a mirror image of himself as part of the model for La Joconde (a.k.a., Mona Lisa). But this implies that da Vinci could imagine someone looking at his painting, mentally reversing it, and superimposing a semitransparent version of the reversal back onto the original painting. Perhaps da Vinci could perform such a mental trick, but I doubt many others could, even if the idea of doing it occurred to them. If it were a hidden message, it was a hidden message only he could read.¹

Of course, even if it turns out the Pesci is correct, none of this adds any evidence to the odd theories that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child whose descendants are protected by the Knights Templar. All it would show is that da Vinci thought that they did, and da Vinci had access to far less historical material than we do. Even if he were a member of some secret society, there is no reason to think that the secret society had better historical information. Secret societies have secret information, but just because something is a secret does not mean it is correct.

1. Very few people in da Vinci’s day possessed the kind of technology that would allow them to superimpose transparent images on each other. Remember, back then computers took up an entire room and were much too expensive for individuals to own. [back]

As I drove to class this morning, I had an idea for an interesting — though not particularly useful — Internet application. I don’t necessarily have the coding skills to write it right now, but I thought I would check to see if anyone knew whether such a program that was already written.

The program I have in mind is a piece of software that would track the genealogy of scholars.  It would allow us to build a “family tree” of scholars, tracing back someone’s academic lineage through his or her Doktorvater (or Doktormutter).  In turn, the Doktorvater’s Doktorvater could be traced. We could also include additional information such as other scholars at the same school with which the scholar took classes (Doktoronklen) and other scholars who were students there at the same time (Doktorgeschwistern).

I am not saying that we could find an Urscholar from whom we are all descended, but it would be interesting to see who was trained by whom and how influences run through academia. For instance, I am proud to trace my lineage through P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., who was trained by Frank Moore Cross, who studied with W.F. Albright.  I find it cool that W.F. Albright is my doctoral great-grandfather.  Of course, as Plutarch remarked, “It is indeed desirable to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.”

With all the social networking software out there, surely someone has done something like this.  It may just be a case where we need to tweak it for academia.  It anyone knows of something like this, I would appreciate it if you could let me know.

Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, Proper 12 (series reading)

The OT reading from the Revised Common Lectionary for this Sunday is Hosea 1:2-10. This is the theme reading, although the connection between this passage and the NT readings is not immediately clear (assuming there is one).

The Hosea is passage is well-known to most preachers. It would be hard to imagine a seminary class on the OT that didn’t deal with this text when covering Hosea. The danger with such familiar passages, of course, is that we allow our prior understanding of the text to take the place of doing the exegesis again. Because of that, I wanted to point out something that seems to me to be a surprising element in the text that a preacher might not have noticed in previous readings.

The first of these is the fact that Hosea names his first child Jezreel, because God is going to punish the Jehu Dynasty for the coup in Jezreel that brought them to power. This is an interesting statement, because the coup in Jezreel was originally done at the command of God through the prophet Elisha. A common way of dealing with this is by saying that Jehu went overboard when he killed everyone in the Omrid Dynasty, but this is not supported by the texts we have. In 2 Kings 9:7, Jehu is told specifically that he is to destroy the house of Ahab. It is hard to go overboard when you are told to destroy something, as destruction involves wiping something out completely.

It seems to me that the direction of theological reflection on this text seems to me to be the multiple voices that the Bible is presenting concerning Jehu’s coup. Hosea views the coup negatively, at least in the way it was carried out. The DtrH, on the other hand, views it positively. The question for preachers is how to hear both voices and allow each to have its say without privileging one text over the other. The canon does not set the texts at odds with each other, but neither does it resolve the tension. Preachers can draw on that tension to provide energy to their sermons.

It is amazing what you get when you listen to late night talk radio.

On Saturday, I returned from my trip to Washington, DC. I stopped off in New Britain, CT, to see the New Britain Rock Cats loose to the Trenton Thunder in a AA game. It was a good way to break up the nine hour drive. When I got back on the road, I tuned the radio to a local station out of Hartford.

I only caught a bit of the show, but the topic at hand was the idea that ancient Sumerians were bioengineered by aliens. The person being interviewed - who was referred to as doctor throughout the show - was putting forth the idea that the Sumerians had originally been created by aliens to mine earth’s resources. They were later given an upgrade to raise them to the level of homo sapiens. Zecharia Sitchin seems to be one of the primary proponents of this idea, although I don’t think it was him I heard interviewed.

The idea for this comes from a creative misreading of the Enuma elish, which states that the lesser gods created humanity to do their work. Those who hold this theory view the Anunnaki (the gods mentioned in the text) as aliens. There is nothing in the text, however, to suggest that these were aliens, unless one reads the text with that already in mind. It is eisegesis at its finest.

I did find some sites on the Internet that discuss the idea that the Sumerians were created by aliens. I even found one that says the US invaded Iraq because a UFO had crashed near Baghdad and Bush wanted the alien technology. The Internet is proof that combining technology with poor critical reasoning skills is a bad idea.

On the other hand, anything that can make Sumerology interesting can’t be all bad.