Joseph Henry Thayer's chief example of anthropos "without distinction of sex" isn't

A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.

ἡ γυνὴ ὅταν τίκτῃ λύπην ἔχει ὅτι ἦλθεν ἡ ὥρα αὐτῆς· ὅταν δὲ γεννήσῃ τὸ παιδίον οὐκ ἔτι μνημονεύει τῆς θλίψεως διὰ τὴν χαρὰν ὅτι ἐγεννήθη ἄνθρωπος εἰς τὸν κόσμον.

 

-- John 16:21

John obviously had to hand τὸ παιδίον to express human being without distinction of sex if he had meant that again, but he uses ἄνθρωπος instead. The birth of a man-child was a default value of Jewish women.

Thayer was infamous in his own time for denying the "unerring verbal accuracy" of the New Testament, claiming that the Lutherans didn't make the Bible the "standard" in the same way as his fellow American Congregational Calvinists had done.

 

Thayer, lauded for his devotion to the truth by his contemporaries in the scholarly community, believed in a myth.

 

Thayer got his information second hand, not from personal knowledge of the history of Lutheranism, relying instead on Philip Schaff, who himself was notably ignorant of much about Luther, especially about the enthusiasm for the Formula of Concord in his own time, which states in the opening:

We believe, teach, and confess that the sole rule and standard according to which all dogmas together with [all] teachers should be estimated and judged are the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures of the Old and of the New Testament alone . . ..

Thayer obviously never got the Lutheran memo, either, to let John interpret John. Circumcision was for an ἄνθρωπος after all (John 7:23).

Back in those days, apparently, you could in fact tell a Harvard man quite a lot . . . of hooey.

 

The difference between the Protestant version of Christian nationalism for America and the Catholic one

In the Protestant one at least you'll still be alive to not eat the actual body of the Lord and not drink his actual blood.

 

 

Academic co-authors of famous study about honesty now shown to contain fake data still think it OK how remarkably uninvolved they were in it

This is how it works. It's about credentialism and arguments from authority, not about "science". Academia is rife with this sort of thing. Today's academics are as phony as the medieval clerisy ever was.

 

Renowned psychologist Dan Ariely literally wrote the book on dishonesty. Now some are questioning whether the scientist himself is being dishonest:

... four of the five authors said they played no part in collecting the data for the test in question.

That leaves Ariely, who confirmed that he alone was in touch with the insurance company that ran the test with its customers and provided him with the data. But he insisted that he was innocent, implying it was the company that was responsible. ...

Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School professor and one of the authors, wrote, “I was not involved in conversations with the insurance company that conducted the field experiment, nor in any of the steps of running it or analyzing the data.”

Another author, Nina Mazar, then at the University of Toronto and now a marketing professor at Boston University, told the blog, “I want to make clear that I was not involved in conducting the field study, had no interactions with the insurance company, and don’t know when, how, or by whom exactly the data was collected and entered. I have no knowledge of who fabricated the data.”

Gino declined to be interviewed for this story, and Mazar did not return a request for comment. ...

Bazerman of Harvard ... had questions about the insurance experiment’s seemingly “implausible data.” A coauthor assured him the data were accurate and another showed him the file, though he admitted that he did not personally examine it. When the 2012 paper made waves, he “then believed the core result” and taught it to students and corporate executives alike. In retrospect, he wrote, “I wish I had worked harder to identify the data were fraudulent, to ensure rigorous research in a collaborative context, and to promptly retract the 2012 paper.”

Shu, another coauthor who now works in venture capital, voiced similar regrets on Twitter this week. “We began our collaboration from a place of assumed trust — rather than earned trust,” she wrote. “Lesson learned.” She declined to comment for this story.

Mr. Ariel Sabar uncovers the lies, damn lies and rotten scholarship involving The Gospel of Jesus' Wife

Here in "The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife" for The Atlantic, where the old-fashioned work of a gumshoe reporter exposes the hard work too often lacking in much of contemporary scholarship:

[S]keptics had identified other problems. Among the most damning was an odd typographical error that appears in both the Jesus’s-wife fragment and an edition of the Gospel of Thomas that was posted online in 2002, suggesting an easily available source for a modern forger’s cut-and-paste job.

With [Karen L.] King [Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard] and her critics at loggerheads, each insisting on the primacy of their evidence, I wondered why no one had conducted a different sort of test: a thorough vetting of the papyrus’s chain of ownership. 

Prof. King has replied to the author, here:

For four years, Karen L. King, a Harvard historian of Christianity, has defended the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” against scholars who argued it was a forgery. But Thursday, for the first time, King said the papyrus—which she introduced to the world in 2012—is a probable fake.

She reached this conclusion, she said, after reading The Atlantic’s investigation into the papyrus’s origins, which appears in the magazine’s July/August issue and was posted to its website Wednesday night.

“It tips the balance towards forgery,” she said. ...

Thursday afternoon, however, she called me to say the story was “fascinating” and “very helpful.” ...

“I had no idea about this guy, obviously,” she said. “He lied to me.”

I asked why she hadn’t undertaken an investigation of the papyrus’s origins and the owner’s background. “Your article has helped me see that provenance can be investigated,” she said. ...

[T]he preponderance of the evidence, she said, now “presses in the direction of forgery.”

Russell Kirk: I abhor Christ's doctrines

Quoted here:

Additionally, Kirk noted in the summer of 1942, the only Christian body that seems to approach the truth and rigors demanded of Christianity is the Catholic Church. “The closer it comes,” he continued, “the further I draw away from it.” He admired Christ as a person, he continued, but “I abhor his doctrines. Christianity is truly a religion for the expropriated.” When pushed to the quick, Kirk turned to the humanism of Harvard scholar Irving Babbitt. Babbitt’s philosophy offered more rigor and discipline than Christianity, as it contained “a ruinous moral laxity, a sort of indiscriminate sentimentalism.” Christ and Christianity simply could not live up to the highest standards of the good life. In this, Kirk sounds much like the Romans who were appalled that Christians admired King David and, thus, believed it a lesser religion.

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Reading this in the summer of 2014 brings to mind the Russell Kirk of 1985. That summer while reading Paul Elmer More with him in Boulder, Colorado, he asked me what I thought of More. I remember telling him I thought More's ideas repulsive, as More would doubtlessly think mine. Kirk just smiled that wide-eyed grin of his.

The Deleted Anonymous Harvard Ichthus Blog Post "Why Us?"

click on the image and open in a new window to enlarge

In the interest of freedom of speech, which is dead on almost every college campus, and dead at google which also removed the cached version, the screenshot at the left from The Boston Globe, here, is reproduced.

So don't tell us there is nothing google, bing, et alia can do about removing filth off the internet. If they can remove something a Jew for Jesus wrote because it is offensive to Jews, they can remove anything.

They just have to want to.

Born to Die

"However, in early democracies, as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were -- State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the 20th century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the 19th Century. ...

"If humanism were right in declaring that man is born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism."

-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard, 1978, full speech here

"Endeavour to Persevere"

Yesterday's sermon endeavored to tell the story of the Book of Job from the point of view of James 5:11, with a view toward encouraging us to reflect that our troubles often pale in comparison to those endured by Job, who persevered despite their severity: "Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy."

No sermon, of course, can do justice to the many difficulties the Book of Job presents to the reader. Not the least of these difficulties presents itself in the opening chapter: "And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. . . . [and] there came also another [messenger], and said, Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house: And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

It has always arrested my attention that this last of the preliminary calamities which fall upon Job estimates the value of his own progeny as just so many possessions, right down there with all the other possessions he loses: the caravan camels, the sheep, the oxen, and the asses. And the servants who go with them, who all likewise perish. Job is not unmoved, to be sure, and displays the proper mournfulness, but a student of the gospels cannot help but remember the jarring contrast this presents to the saying of Jesus: "Behold the fowls of the air . . . Your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?" In other words, whereas Job's story minimizes the worth of some human life, and does so in a way which makes it look like God toys with human destiny in a capricious, unpredictable, unreliable, unmerciful, yea even malevolent and Manichaean way in its dualism between good and evil, there is another story in the Bible which tries to assert itself from time to time, maintaining the infinite worth of every person to the God "who so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son . . .."

It is tempting to choose sides. Down that path endless debates ensue about the priority of the various testimonies of Scripture, screened through equally various interpretive lenses, which have multiplied in the twentieth century to such an extent that Biblical study has largely been reduced to bibliography. "Enlightenment" types still sketch out the progress of religion, from the offending God who appears in Job to the liberal Jesus of a daydream afternoon, who couldn't possibly have predicted the consummation of all things in his own lifetime. Stalwart defenders of the inerrancy of the Bible continue to want to have it both ways, never quite reconciling the texts and holding them, and us, in a perpetual, nervous tension.

Without disrespect to the text, may we not ask whether the text does not instead say something about the human imagination that we have written about God in both of these ways for about as long as writing has existed? Is the text not a reflection of our experience of reality, that we are born into a world of both joy and sorrow, of gain and of loss, of judgment and of forgiveness, indeed only to one day face death ourselves as sure as the noon day sun? The list of antonyms is almost endless, and the ineffable dream of religion is to escape from them.

A very famous man who died last year was wont to warn our generation that the line separating good from evil runs through every human heart. He was not well received. But evil and death do always seem to prevail. There can be no other explanation for the American century just passed with its millions upon millions senselessly slaughtered and gone. Countless sons and husbands and fathers who never came home, to live and prosper and work and love as my father came home to do in 1945. It is of such escapes that our dreams are made, our hopeful stories written, our belief in the goodness of life born anew established.

According to Chief Dan George in The Outlaw Josey Wales, the Cherokee nation is lectured by the Secretary of the Interior that they must endeavor to persevere on the reservation set aside by the U.S. government for the Indian nations. "We left," says Dan George, "and thought about the phrase 'endeavour to persevere.' When we had thought about it long enough . . . we declared war on the Union." And we know how that ended. As everything must, one way or another.