The word of the day, thanks to numbskull Marco Rubio, is thumos unfortunately

 

Rubio Urges Defense Of Western Civilization At Acropolis: "We Choose The Unapologetic Pursuit Of National Power"

 ... The ancient Greek city-states were filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict. But from that constant struggle for distinction came the great flowering of art and philosophy and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.

The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it, the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride, is the heart of great civilization. And without it, without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive. Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality. ...

Passion is one of the works of the flesh (Galatians 5:19f.), the angry heat which almost got Jesus killed at Nazareth:

And all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath [θυμοῦ], And rose up, and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong.

-- Luke 4:28f. 

Civilization is most certainly not built on the disorder and conflict of passion, but on the mutual respect its people have for law and order, in the state and in themselves. The quickest way to end it is to surrender to passion, as the Athenians did in the Sicilian Expedition.

Marco is seriously confused, as are all spermologoi. Today's Athenians, alas, might have told him so.

And some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers as well were conversing with him. Some were saying, “What could this scavenger of tidbits want to say?” ...

-- Acts 17:18  

  

How is your AI pastor different from your regular pastor?

AI Is Weakening Pastors’ Authority

... Can a chatbot pray for you? (No.) Can it know you? (No.) Can it be trusted to tell you the truth when the truth costs something? (No.) ...

Cost? Did someone say "cost"?

When you can hardly find a real pastor who will admit that the cost of discipleship was selling everything and giving it to the poor, what difference does a lying AI pastor make?

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

-- Luke 14:33

Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth.

-- Luke 12:33  

The gospel was supposed to be good news to the poor for a reason (Matthew 11:5; Luke 4:18; Luke 7:22).

Now it's mostly good news to the middle class. 

The median pastor in America makes about $60,000 and the people regularly in the pews are concentrated among the middle classes, just like him.

  

Where had "hate thine enemy" been said?

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

-- Matthew 5:43f.

Hate thine enemy was said at Qumran: 

... to love all that He has chosen and to hate all that He has rejected ...

to love all the Sons of Light, each according to his lot in the council of God,

to hate all the Sons of Darkness, each according to his guilt in the vengeance of God ...

 

-- 1QS, The Community Rule 1.4f, 10f.

 

But hate thine enemy was also said in old Athens, reflecting a widespread societal value: 

Justice benefits friends and harms enemies.

-- Plato, Republic 1.334b.

Evidently the Greek leaven had leavened the Jewish lump, and Jesus was nothing if not a reactionary Jew opposing such degeneracy.

Jesus' appeal to good works in response to evil kept to something hardly novel within Judaism, even if the eschatological moment was:

If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink: For thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head, and the LORD shall reward thee.

-- Proverbs 25:21f.

What was truly novel was Paul's later application of this beyond the boundaries of Judaism: 

Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.

-- Romans 12:20.

Socratic philosophy as a form of madness

Magnum Force 1973

Socratic philosophy as a form of madness

 

... ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ ...

... the unexamined life is not worth living for a man ...

 

-- Plato, Apology of Socrates 38a 

The unexamined life is not worth living, so you examine it, but subsequently more life happens which requires further examination, so you examine it, only to find that you were mistaken about the results of your previous examination. 

Wash, rinse, repeat ad infinitum. It's like bailing out a boat with a sieve and it drives you crazy, but if you are lucky you realize that you are not the measure of all things.

You have died to the self. Like Sergeant Schultz, you know nothing.

You might as well be a Lutheran then, practicing the Socratic elenchus on yourself by drowning the ignorant Old Man daily in the waters of your baptism:

Baptizing with water indicates that the Old Adam in us should by daily contrition and repentance be drowned and die with all sins and evil desires, and that a new man should daily emerge and arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever. 

-- Martin Luther, The Small Catechism, "The Sacrament of Holy Baptism" 

Better to die daily than to die forever.

Paul described this variously, including by underscoring the contingency of human nature, and therefore the possibility of its passibility:

ἑαυτοὺς πειράζετε εἰ ἐστὲ ἐν τῇ πίστει ἑαυτοὺς δοκιμάζετε ἢ οὐκ ἐπιγινώσκετε ἑαυτοὺς ὅτι Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς ἐν ὑμῖν εἰ μήτι ἀδόκιμοί ἐστε

Examine yourselves to see if your faith is genuine. Test yourselves. Surely you know that Jesus Christ is among you; if not, you have failed the test of genuine faith.

-- II Corinthians 13:5

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

-- Philippians 2:12  

Perhaps what the Delphic oracle was really trying to get at (Γνῶθι σεαυτόν) after all, as seems to be the earliest interpretation, is that there really is nothing infinitely deep in man, but that man has his limits indeed and must come to know them.

Unlike Briggs.

 

The saying Γνῶθι σεαυτόν: ‘know yourself’, is of heavenly origin,

It should be fixed in the memory, dwelt on in the heart, whether

You’re seeking a wife, or aim for a place in the sacred Senate;

Thersites had no wish to win the contest for Achilles’ armour,

That breastplate in which Ulysses made an exhibition of himself.

If it’s you who affect to defend a difficult and highly important

Case, then take counsel with yourself, ask yourself what you are,

A powerful orator, or merely a windbag, like Curtius or Matho?

You must know your measure, and be conscious of it in great

Things and in small, even for instance when you’re buying fish;

No point in desiring mullet, if your purse only runs to gudgeon!

Think of the fate that awaits you, as your wallet grows leaner

While your appetite increases, when you’ve sunk your paternal,

Inheritance, your property, your silver plate, all of that heavy

Stuff, with all your fields and herds, in your spacious stomach.

With spendthrift lords the last to go is the Roman knight’s gold

Ring, after which Pollio ends by begging with a naked finger.

It’s not a premature demise, an early funeral, the extravagant

Should fear, but old age, that is more to be feared than death. 

-- Juvenal, Satire 11, 26ff.

People seriously ask how Jesus became so influential when our world goes crazy for men like Fulton Sheen and Pope Leo XIV

People perennially underestimate the human capacity for exaggeration, self-deception, and idolatry.

 

Make not my Father's house an house of merchandise

 μὴ ποιεῖτε τὸν οἶκον τοῦ πατρός μου οἶκον ἐμπορίου

 ... Postulators are tasked with preparing a “positio” – a formal dossier summarising the case for sainthood, which can often span several thousand pages. These must be translated into Latin, printed, bound into special red volumes, and hand-delivered to the Vatican – meaning they can rack up exorbitant costs, often around €500,000 (£429,000).

Sheen’s positio ran to 15,000 pages, according to the Catholic University of America, where he taught. Two books published in 2016, Avarizia and Merchants, by two investigative journalists, claimed that leaked Vatican documents showed costs for Sheen’s sainthood cause had spiralled to €330,000 (£283,000) by 2013. ...

More.

Sainthood is big business. 

 

Holy moly, we truly do live in The Age of the Awesome and The Season of the Superlative

 

 The murky legacy of America’s first televangelist ‘saint’ 

... Just 62 saints were crowned in the 150 years before Sheen’s case was put forward, his own diocese stated in 2002.

But sweeping changes to saint-making rules have seen a flurry of halos handed out in recent decades. In 1983, Pope John Paul II reduced the mandatory waiting period before a sainthood bid could be opened from 50 years after a person’s death to just five. It allowed the Polish pope, who died in 2005, to beatify and canonise more people than all his predecessors combined.

Pope Francis, who died in 2025, went even further – authorising 912 saints during his 12 years as pope. He made 800 saints in one fell swoop in 2013 by canonising the “Martyrs of Otranto”, a town of 15th-century Italians who were massacred by Ottoman invaders.

Each of the past three popes has personally canonised more saints than all other popes combined. ...

Yes, the arguments for Catholicism are so compelling

Why didn't they just stuff him like Trigger, Buttermilk, and Bullet, and put him on tour?

 

How Fulton Sheen Paved Way For American Acceptance of Catholics

NCReporter

 

 

 

It turns out that Scottish New Testament scholar I. Howard Marshall (1934-2015) was a driving force behind the NIV's redefinition of adelphoi as brothers and sisters

Under I. Howard Marshall's influence, the NIV ended up interpolating "sisters" and "sister" in the New Testament about 150 times when they didn't appear in the Greek, in order to make the NT more gender neutral.

 

But to do this it had to supply a novel definition of "brothers" to justify doing so, even though the New Testament authors were perfectly capable of writing "sisters" when they wanted to, and did.

 

An example of the novel definition is shown below at Acts 1:16.

  

 

Except there is no Greek word for brothers and sisters, and it certainly isn't adelphoi.

 

To convey this meaning the language routinely relied on compounding the two words. If "brothers" were in fact the shorthand for "brothers and sisters" as the NIV insists, it is news to the gospels, which shouldn't have bothered to say "sisters" alongside "brothers" for example in Matthew 19:29, Mark 10:29f., and Luke 14:26.

 

If "brothers" means "brothers and sisters", why use "sisters" anywhere at all?

 

I. Howard Marshall (The Gospel of Luke, 1978, reprint 1986, 688) was remarkably uninstructed by the Luke 14:26 example above (If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple) in his interpretation of Luke 18:29 (And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or children, for the kingdom of God's sake), where Marshall says sisters is omitted because "brothers will include both brothers and sisters just as Luke uses parents for father and mother". 

 

His authority for this is not in any early Christian literature, but in usages outside the New Testament which themselves appear only occasionally and in special contexts (e.g. when referring specifically to a brother-sister pairing, or with the classical Greek dual which virtually disappears in koine). Ordinary usage everywhere in classical and koine displays the typical male dominance of "patriarchal" society.

 

It is simply not the case in Luke 14:26 that brothers includes both brothers and sisters, nor is it justified to say brothers contains sisters in Luke 18:29 in the same way that parents contains mother and father.

 

On the contrary, Luke used parents and father and mother freely, even when parents alone would have served:

 

And when he came into the house, he suffered no man to go in, save Peter, and James, and John, and the father and the mother of the maiden. ... And her parents were astonished: but he charged them that they should tell no man what was done.

 

-- Luke 8:51, 56.

 

Marshall was straining for excuses to justify his novel definition of brothers instead of relying on New Testament and especially Luke's own usage. 

 

The fact of the matter is Luke edited out "sisters" once before when the parallels had included it (Mark 3:35 and Matthew 12:50):

 

And he answered and said unto them, My mother and my brethren are these which hear the word of God, and do it.

-- Luke 8:21.

Marshall strangely missed this opportunity at 8:21 to argue that brothers included the sisters on his new definition of adelphoi. Instead he says Luke is abbreviating Mark to avoid referring to the distasteful topic of the strife which existed between Jesus and his family. 

It's characteristic of Luke sometimes to compress language and omit elements, especially those which may seem needlessly repetitive, descriptive, or offensive to him.

Luke famously omits the scourging of Jesus by Pilate, which would have been a distasteful topic for Luke's Roman audience to read.

Luke tones down the coming judgment of Israel at the center of an eschatological drama from Matthew in favor of a gospel preached to the ends of the earth by Paul, culminating at the center of the world. "And so we came to Rome" (Acts 28:14).  

Luke omits "lands" in addition to "sisters" at 18:29, possibly as Marshall says because Luke is against the idea of material reward for disciples. Luke emphasizes that the gospel is good news for the poor, not the rich (Luke 1:53; Luke 4:18; Luke 7:22). Luke well understood that the cost of discipleship was saying goodbye to everything which one owned (Luke 14:33). Luke is nothing if not uncomfortable with the talk of rewards in Mark 10 and Matthew 19, to the point that he is completely non-committal about just what the "manifold more" actually is which the disciples will enjoy "in this present time". 

Is Luke omitting "sisters" twice in his gospel not because they are subsumed under "brothers" but rather because Luke just thinks that they are not worth mentioning? That dismissiveness could simply be unconscious expression of the "patriarchal" mindset of the times reflected more broadly in the language itself, against which feminists in the church have been raging since the 1960s.

Marshall was nothing if not a child of this time, as were the early Christians in theirs. 

Luke generally is omitting things here and there mostly because as the longest of the gospels he has to make room for a lot of other things which he wished to emphasize. Occasionally the hobby horse of a crank is a victim.

In keeping with most Greek speakers of the time, Luke does not think of females when he thinks of "brothers". He thinks of males. Marshall knew and admitted this, but Marshall's ideological prejudices overrode what he knew to be the truth: 

... Ian Howard Marshall, who was one of the translation committee members for the gender-inclusive TNIV Bible, has made an argument along these lines in a recent article:

What we are suggesting is that the usage is one in which sometimes the context may make it clear that the reference is exclusive and purely to males, but that the letters are addressed directly to mixed audiences, and therefore generally adelphoi is used in a way that does not exclude women, even if it is probable that the author may have been thinking primarily of the men. 

... But there is a problem with this argument. The problem is, the writers of the epistles ordinarily seem to be "thinking primarily of the men," as Marshall allows, and so his statement that the epistles are "addressed directly to mixed audiences" is rather problematic. If the writer is thinking primarily of the men when he addresses the congregation, then he is not really addressing the men and the women equally. Yet Marshall proceeds to build his argument concerning the meaning of adelphoi squarely on the idea that men and women are addressed equally, as equals, in the epistles of the New Testament. It is largely on the basis of this idea that a gender-neutral sense for adelphoi is posited by him and by Strauss. The whole argument collapses under the simple recognition that the apostles directed their attention primarily to the men, and used language which reflected this orientation. There is no intent to "exclude women," but the habits of speech reflect a male orientation.

... First, it is clear that Marshall's egalitarian vision of the early Church has prejudiced his whole approach to the linguistic issue at hand, in such a way that no careful philologist is likely to approve. Second, this egalitarian vision of the early Church is simply false. It represents an anachronistic illusion about the early Church, and not the historical fact of the matter. Despite the "trajectory" imagined by Marshall, men and women were not equal in the early Church. Third, Marshall ignores the contrary linguistic evidence from New Testament itself. Fourth, we note that his argument shows the inner connection of "inclusive language" with egalitarian views on the TNIV committee of translators. Spokesmen for the International Bible Society have repeatedly denied that any such ideological connection exists, and have asserted that the reasons for their gender-neutral TNIV are purely linguistic, but Marshall makes the connection clear. A revisionist egalitarian view of the early Church plays an important part in his "linguistic" argument. ...