Though diseased, yet shall you live

Though every human constitution is morbid, yet are there diseases consistent with the common functions of life.

-- John Arbuthnot (1667-1735)

What is a communist?

What is a communist?

One who hath yearnings

For equal division of unequal earnings.

Be he idler or bungler or both, he is willing

To fork out his sixpence and pocket your shilling.

-- Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849) 

Church is middle-class

On the inevitability of income and wealth inequality

Experience teaches it, to be sure, and it's an old enough piece of common sense wisdom that it got enshrined by the Torah. Subsequently it was gifted to us by Christianity, in Pharisaical form, as crystallized by the tyranny of the Pauline consensus contaminating the gospels.

For the poor shall never cease out of the land . . ..

-- Deuteronomy 15:11a

For ye have the poor always with you . . ..

-- Matthew 26:11a 

For ye have the poor with you always . . ..

-- Mark 14:7a

For the poor always ye have with you . . ..

-- John 12:8a

For Paul, "poor" is what it has always been, an explicit category which is "other", and is not the essential element and mark of Christian self-definition, let alone Jewish:

only they would have us remember the poor, which very thing I was eager to do.

-- Galatians 2:10

Except Luke will have none of it.

He alone avoids the saying because it destroys the binary. Luke knows that voluntary poverty is the mark of true repentance qualifying one to be the disciple of Jesus, to be one of the few who will escape the imminently coming judgment. Luke's Jesus does not imagine a "church" which will feed and clothe the poor, let alone one which has enough substance to feed and clothe itself and "therewith be content". The choice is only binary, God or mammon.

Hence the unique Lukan witness, which takes the place occupied by "you have the poor always with you" in the other gospels:

So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple. 

-- Luke 14:33

Not very commonsensical, not very Jewish, either. Moses Maimonides did not approve. And Christians today avoid talking about it like . . . well . . . the plague.

An infinite number is absurd

∞

How clear soever this idea of the infinity of number be, there is nothing more evident than the absurdity of the actual idea of an infinite number.

-- John Locke

Stone cold Stoic

In lazy apathy let Stoicks boast

Their virtue fix'd; 'tis fixed as in frost,

Contracted all, retiring to the breast;

But strength of mind is exercise, not rest.

-- Alexander Pope

Somehow we will pay

The Gospel of Luke's unique use of "pestilences" (loimoi) turns Jewish apocalyptic into Greek

And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven. (King James Version)

(σεισμοί τε μεγάλοι κατὰ τόπους καὶ λιμοὶ καὶ λοιμοὶ ἔσονται φόβητρά τε καὶ σημεῖα ἀπ᾽ οὐρανοῦ μεγάλα ἔσται) (Textus Receptus)

-- Luke 21:11

The parallel use of loimoi in Matthew 24:7, found in the KJV and NKJV (footnoted), is weakly attested in the manuscripts and is therefore omitted by the NIV, ESV, RSV, ASV, NET and NASB.

Luke alone in the New Testament uses the otherwise relatively rare "loimos" (see in Bruzzone, below, p. 890), and in but one other place, Acts 24:5. There Luke puts the word in the mouth of a trained orator employed by the Jews to accuse St. Paul of being a "pest", which is quite funny actually (cf. Demosthenes 25.80). It must have been the mention of "famines", "limoi", in the tradition received by Luke which probably triggered his addition of "pestilences". 

This is likely because "limoi" and "loimoi", "famines" and "pestilences", are part of a classic literary constellation of calamities, those two especially and frequently in combination with "polemos", "war" (which Luke also has in 21:9f., kicking off the list of troubles). These terms in combination reach deep into Greek memory, back to such eminences as Homer (Iliad 1.61), Hesiod (Erga 243), Aeschylus (Suppliants 659), the historian Herodotus (7.171.2; 8.115.2f.), Plato (Laws 709A), Pindar, Sophocles, and particularly to the historian Thucydides (1.23; 2.47; 2.54), whose account of the famine and plague at Athens opens his History of the Peloponnesian War. The pairing of famine and plague in particular had become a topos taught in the schools already by the time of the Attic orator Aeschines (3.135), so thoroughly ingrained in the imagination had it become by then (see now Rachel Bruzzone, "Polemos, Pathemata, and Plague: Thucydides' Narrative and the Tradition of Upheaval", Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 57 (2017) 882-909, esp. 888ff., here).

As an obviously educated writer, Luke probably had learned the topos as a boy. 

Once this is appreciated, one can also observe and better appreciate Luke's (double) introduction of the felicitous "te...kai" construction, also in imitation of good style found in Herodotus and Thucydides in similar contexts, and how Luke uses it to pair "great earthquakes" with this topos "famines and plagues" in the first half of the sentence on the one hand, and in the second half of the sentence, the "signs from heaven" with a description of them as "both fearsome and great" on the other.

The only translation I know of which even attempts to capture this, at least in the first half of the sentence, surprisingly, is that of J. N. Darby:

there shall be both great earthquakes in different places, and famines and pestilences; and there shall be fearful sights and great signs from heaven.

Luke's is a morbidly beautiful sentence in its way, if not pulled off entirely successfully, attempting as it does to express how more or less two things of all too familiar and essentially terrestrial terror will be doubly echoed in the heavenly realm by signs at once spectacular and disturbing, confirming the gods' displeasure with men:

There shall be both great signs in place after place, as well as famines and pestilences, and signs from heaven both fearsome and great.

These "te...kai" and topos niceties are wholly lacking in Matthew 24:7 and Mark 13:8, which are artless and probably closer to the original form of the saying, omitting "pestilences" and "both...and". Hence the confusion in the manuscripts with the word order in Luke 21:11 itself, producing many variant readings, because the introduction of the terminology by Luke fought with the received elements.

It's all Luke's fault.

Smart people are frequently misunderstood.

But if one can keep from getting bogged down in all that for one moment, it points to the effort made by Luke to make the apocalyptic teaching of the Christians intelligible to Greek minds. He's trying to make it sound even more familiar to them than it already was. And this begs the question of the origin of Christian apocalyptic in the first place. Just how Hellenized was all this to begin with? It looks more plausible to me after reading Bruzzone, who, by the way, says narry a word about it. The success of the Christian movement is at least partly explained by the resonance of its message with the actual hopes and the fears shared by its hosts.

Bruzzone makes a good case that the Greek tradition is immemorially rich with suspicions of divine involvement in human ills of civil strife, war, natural calamities, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, as well as wonders and portents in the skies, and on the earth below famine, plague, and mass death (loigos). All of these things are associated, if not always in every detail, with the gospels' memory of Jesus' apocalyptic teaching . . . and with Thucydides.

Oh my God, not Thucydides.

This unique case in Luke's Gospel involving pestilence might lead some quickly to say and too quickly to say, "See, Luke was a physician, preoccupied with 'medical' terminology. That's all this is." Well, that hardly makes Luke a physician than it makes one of Thucydides.

But maybe it makes Luke an historian, and a very Greek one at that, at least in his own imagination.

"I came not to judge the world", or "Woe unto the world"?

This is another one of the few places in which Matthew preserves a memory of the historical Jesus' "Jew only" gospel. There are "woes" on Jews, too, of course. Many in Israel are called, but few even of them are chosen. There is no thought of calling Gentiles and Samaritans, only the lost sheep of the house of Israel. οὐαὶ τῷ κόσμῳ.

John is part of the post-crucifixion consensus whose hand thoroughly contaminates and dominates the record with Christianity as universal religion, open to all.

Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!

-- Matthew 18:7

And if any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.

-- John 12:47