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.

Religion is not the cornerstone of the American Republic

Religion is not the cornerstone of the American Republic, but know-nothings keep repeating that it is, such as "the Framers first listed religious liberty for a reason".

No, they did not.

The original First Amendment to the US Constitution involved representation, not religion. The original Second Amendment in its turn addressed representation's remuneration, not religion. Not until the original Third Amendment did religious liberty come up, and guns in turn in the Fourth, and so on through what is now our Tenth Amendment. The original First and Second Amendments were the first two of twelve, but failed of ratification.

The supposed primacy of religion because it was a subject of the First Amendment is a myth, recently repeated again here by one Josh Hammer:

Religious liberty, defined perhaps as the ability of the religious to freely and unobtrusively practice their faiths and worship and obey the Almighty in accordance with the idiosyncratic dictates of one’s own conscience, is the cornerstone of the American republic. Numerically, the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment are the first enumerated provisions of the very first ratified constitutional amendment. That is no mere coincident — the Framers first listed religious liberty for a reason.

This is nonsense. The original First Amendment, Article the First below, was about a formula for regularizing representation. That was the matter of first importance at the founding of the country. It is first in all the bills of rights which passed the Congress in 1789. Because it and its companion amendment were not ratifed at the founding, however, the Third Amendment became the First only by accident. While Article the First should have been ratified in view of what the Congress later did because the article wasn't ratified, as we'll see below, Article the Second was at least eventually ratified in the 27th Amendment ... in 1992.

Ratification of Article the First remains the great unfinished task from the Revolutionary era. If Article the Second could live on and be ratified in 1992, so can Article the First still be ratified today, or something close to it.

If the Revolution was sparked by a central animating outrage, it was taxation without representation. More than anything else it drove the first Americans to revolt against their English countrymen, with whom they otherwise shared the most intimate bonds of religious feeling, language, law, history, blood and custom. But religion or no, a distant parliament across the sea thought it could pick their fellow countrymen's pockets without their input or consent.

Americans today face a similar situation with the US Congress, even if they can't quite put it into words. The US president today may be greatly disapproved, but even he routinely far outscores the 535 men and women of an insular Congress in far away Washington, DC, who do not and cannot represent the 329 million people sprawled across this continent. The members of Congress go on and on wildly spending money which they no longer even collect sufficient taxes to cover but instead just borrow, in the people's name. This has been the default position of both parties in the wake of tax reform since the 1980s: "If you won't let us tax you to pay for it, we'll just borrow it instead", they seem to say. There is no brake on the spending, and in truth many don't want there to be.

We've seen this default behavior before.

Never too terribly bright in the first place, it finally dawned on the Congress back in the 1920s that it could fix the number in the US House at 435 because the founding generation had never settled the issue in Article the First.  With the Senate becoming a "super House" by virtue of the change to popular election, the House found it expedient to protect its own power by stopping itself from growing. Every new member, after all, dilutes the power of those already there and adds a vote for or against something current membership is already for or against. At the same time burgeoning immigration meant there were many new Germans, Irish and Italians in America which a WASPy Congress would rather not sit next to in the Capitol. The time was ripe to end the growth of representation.

The people, no longer reliably connected to the well springs of the founding, were none the wiser. They still aren't. Yet that act was the biggest power grab in the history of the Republic, second only to Abraham Lincoln's violation of the sovereign rights of the States. Each member of Congress since that time has accrued more and more power as a simple consequence of the country growing in population. Each one wields authority over ever larger legions of nameless faces in congressional districts now bloated to an average of 756,000 souls each in 2019. This subversion of the growth of representation with population was as sure a violation of the original intent of the constitution as was the Executive's War On the States. From the point of view of self-government, the one was as much an expression of tyranny as the other.

The results haven't been pretty. We now have a Congress the election of whose members routinely costs $10 million for a representative on average, $20 million for a Senator, none of whom know your name or care what you think. They pay more attention to the 11,586 registered lobbyists in 2018 than they do to us. There are nearly 27 lobbyists per member of the US House, and nearly one lobbyist for every 30,000 Americans, which ironically is the ratio for initial representation which Article the First originally had in mind. We have the best government which special interest money can buy. But just imagine: The founding generation fought bitterly over representation ratios of 1:30,000 vs. 1:50,000 and couldn't agree about them, but we sit idly by and let grifters domineer over ever growing hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans. The founding generation would not recognize us as a free people.

As a consequence of this concentration of more and more power in fewer and fewer hands in the US House and Senate, the leaders of Congress such as Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell also loom much larger in importance than they ever should have, as have the political parties they represent. Minority voices get no hearing and gain no traction. A stultifying degeneration to the lowest common denominator prevails, purple in hue, mostly. Mediocrity spreads everywhere. Millions feel disaffected, to the extent that ex-patriation has become a thing in the last refuge for freedom on earth.

A US House today of 6,580 under Article the First, on the other hand, would indeed be more cumbersome and inefficient than the Speaker of the House having to whip just 218 votes to spend us blind, but that's kind of THE WHOLE IDEA. It's much harder to rack up a national debt of $22.829 trillion when you have to herd 3,291 cats to do it instead of 218, but that's exactly what passing the Reapportionment Act of 1929 was designed to forestall. The 1920s was about nothing if not about revolutionizing America in the interests of power concentrated in a large, professional and centralized government controlled by specialists, answering only to an elite of 535 zeroes which has gone on to bequeath to us a debt of $23 with twelve zeroes after it. 

Meanwhile religious people today still have their choice of roughly 345,000 congregations in the US where 151 million worship as they please, and the rest don't. We are not suffering under the dim pall of an Established Religion of Rome, Wittenberg, Jerusalem or Mecca. Yet somehow all this religious activity has done absolutely nothing to prevent all this profligacy and debt slavery. Some would even go so far as to say that religion has more than contributed to this sorry state of affairs. 

The inescapable truth is that WE ALL are indeed in servitude. WE ALL are on the hook for those trillions upon trillions of dollars, with no end in sight. Not individually perhaps, but when countries can no longer pay their bills, they tend not to last too long, and the innocent end up paying the same price as the spendthrifts, usually involuntarily through social decay, disease, famine and war.

We really ought to fix this while we still can. Representation is the cornerstone of the Republic, not religion, and it's high time we had some of the former again.     

Article the First:

"After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons."

Article the Second:

"No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened."

Megan McArdle discusses the failure of communism beyond the small scale . . .

. . . but misses that its origin is in the most intimate unit of small scale experience of all, the nuclear family. Once you extrapolate much beyond that level ("Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother." -- Mark 3:34f.) it's not going to last long.

Megan McArdle, here:

[C]ommunism has never successfully worked above the level of a small group; it’s trying to manage transactions with strangers on the logic of small-group reciprocal altruism. Those small groups have a lot of social mechanisms, from shaming to threat of exile, to prevent people from cheating. When you try to scale it up to millions of strangers, it collapses into destitution or bloody tyranny. 

And all that believed were together, and had all things common. ... And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. ... And one of them named Ag'abus stood up and foretold by the Spirit that there would be a great famine over all the world; and this took place* in the days of Claudius. And the disciples determined, every one according to his ability, to send relief to the brethren who lived in Judea; and they did so, sending it to the elders by the hand of Barnabas and Saul. 

-- Acts 2:44; 4:32; 11:28ff.

*probably sometime between AD 44 and 48

Joel Osteen and the irony of a typo

Joel Osteen, quoted here:

“I think in general the scripture talks abut how there’s earthquakes and famines and wars and you know you’re close to the end times. Well, we see a lot of that happening today. Does that mean a hundred years, a thousand years, or ten thousand years? Well, I don’t know. My thing is let’s make the most of this day. God’s given us this day and it’s a gift and we may not have tomorrow, but let’s be our best today and be a blessing to someone else and live it in vain.”

"Live it in vain"? Surely that must be a typo, leaving out the "not" before the "live" (the reporter also left out the "o" in "about").

Ah, but the irony of that omission.

The $56 million preacher who reportedly says Mormons also are Christians can't be accused of looking into things too deeply. The kindest way to say it is he isn't overly familiar with how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, nor with how he flirts with the "wisdom" of a hedonism which was warned against by both Paul and Isaiah:

"Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die"(1 Cor.15:32/Isaiah 22:13).

Well before the career of Christ, who preached the end of the age, the prosaic idea of the priority of now was reported for ubiquitous wisdom among non-Jews.

So Strabo (Geographica, 14.5.9f.):

'Then to Zephyrium, which bears the same name as the place near Calycadnus. Then, a little above the sea, to Anchiale, which, according to Aristobulus, was founded by Sardanapallus. Here, he says, is the tomb of Sardanapallus, and a stone figure which represents the fingers of the right hand as snapping together, and the following inscription in Assyrian letters: 

"Sardanapallus, the son of Anacyndaraxes, built Anchiale and Tarsus in one day. Eat, drink, be merry, because all things else are not worth this,"

meaning the snapping of the fingers. Choerilus also mentions this inscription; and indeed the following verses are everywhere known:

"[Well aware that thou art by nature mortal, magnify the desires of they heart, delighting thyself in merriments; there is no enjoyment for thee after death. For I too am dust, though I have reigned over great Ninus.] Mine are all [the food] that I have eaten, [and my loose indulgences,] and the delights of love that I have enjoyed; but those numerous blessings have been left behind. [This to mortal men is wise advice on how to live.]"'

Osteen's megachurch is the largest in the country. 43,500 attend weekly to hear the spermologos.

Against the Tithers

The preacher man on TV last night kept saying how false teaching is destructive to one's immortal soul. I couldn't help but reflect on the irony of that statement because nine years ago a good blast of false doctrine had worked wonders on me. It functioned like smelling salts, waking me to a clearer-headed assessment of where I had been. Not because the false teaching was in any way true, but because it was so blissfully, wonderfully, ignorant and out of place. That a Lutheran pastor actually fell for it showed me that his Lutheranism had been no match for it. It was a "peace that passes understanding" kind of moment.

I had been teaching my students at my church Paul's "authentic" letters, in chronological order, when the incident occurred. A fund raising campaign was getting underway for a building expansion and all classes were being asked to interrupt their curricula and incorporate some stewardship components to support the effort. The materials we were asked to use openly advocated tithing, arguing for it on the basis of mostly Old Testament precedents. The pastor himself one Sunday announced his intent to tithe, and actually blurted out the amount in dollars and cents from the pulpit. Proud of his title, the Rev. Dr. apparently took degree exams which hadn't covered such trivial matters as the command of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount "to give in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you," let alone Paul's argumentation in the Letter to the Galatians against becoming debtors "to do the whole law." At the very least one would think that a real Lutheran would have some affection for the ideas of Paul, and that it would therefore occur to such a person that tithing speaks the very language of what Paul calls "necessity" or "compulsion," not the language of Christian freedom in the spirit, which we find so forcefully expressed in Paul's early letters. It turned out that the pastor's M.Div. was Lutheran, but his D.Min. was not.

Under such circumstances, about the only avenue open was to point out how tithing hardly even represented an intellectual category in early Christianity. One can see this in volume two of Luke's history of Christianity, The Acts of the Apostles, and despite the skepticism which sometimes attaches to this source, the broad picture it paints on the subject of money is clear enough and coheres with Paul's own testimony.

Paul's conversion to the Way occurred at a time when the followers of Jesus in Jerusalem were experimenting with a form of communism in which "no one said that anything he had was his own." Pooling of resources made it possible to supply the wants of a growing number of poor, dependent on the generosity of the Christians, both Jew and Greek. This distribution for the poor no doubt contributed greatly to the early success of the Christian sect, but the weakness of this arrangement was exposed by the famine in the land in the mid 40's, and the dispensers of aid themselves soon became in need of help.

It is at this juncture that Paul's role as a kind of entrepreneur comes into focus. Although entitled to compensation from the churches he had founded, Paul instead chose to self-fund his various missionary travels throughout the eastern Mediterranean from the proceeds of his own leather business, which he combined with his role as apostle to the Gentiles. This decision was taken in part to prove to the leadership of the church at Jerusalem that his conversion from violent persecutor to follower of the Way was genuine, but also to remove suspicions about the nature of and motivations behind his law-free gospel to the Gentiles and, indeed, to remove suspicions about the authenticity of his appointment as apostle by the risen Jesus. Paul's own testimony from his letters shows that he was not entirely successful in quelling these suspicions, and he operated under a cloud which seemed to follow him everywhere.

So instead of taking compensation from his various churches, Paul frequently had urged them to collect and set aside monies for the relief of the community at Jerusalem, "every man according as he purposeth in his heart." It is a pledge of support such as this, made freely and voluntarily by the church at Corinth, which for some reason had subsequently gone unfulfilled and which prompted Paul's comments about money in the correspondence which comes down to us in the two Corinthian epistles. Far from addressing such issues as how or even whether the local churches were to fund themselves, Paul's comments about money are instead focused on this "collection for the saints" at Jerusalem. It was the peculiar problem of the Corinthians that they had lost their sense of urgency about the suffering of their fellow believers and had become self-absorbed, which gives Paul's epistles to the Corinthians some of their special edge.

Paul's ultimate success with this collection must have been considerable, a tribute to his powers of persuasion. But the trouble which subsequently fell upon him in Jerusalem, when after many years of missionary activity he at length delivered the monies there, cannot have been due solely to such things as his reputed relaxation of circumcision rules for the children of Jewish converts to Christianity. Somehow the magnitude of the alms and offerings he had presented had become known outside Jewish circles, since after his arrest the Roman governor Felix kept Paul under confinement for two years hoping "that money should have been given him of Paul, that he might loose him." It would seem likely that Paul had bypassed the Temple administration in bringing his "alms and offerings" and had delivered the funds directly into the hands of James and the elders. Knowledge of this must therefore have leaked out of Christian, perhaps Greek, circles within the church. We can well imagine how anger and jealousy over this must have stirred up the hubbub against Paul in the city, and it helps explain one line of Paul's subsequent defense of himself, that "against the temple he had not offended at all."

A scrupulous person like a tither doesn't get into this kind of trouble.