Meanderings, 18 January 2025

Good morning!

Photo by Anton Sharov on Unsplash

From Megiddo, a substantive confession of Christ, the earliest evidence

A church floor was discovered in Israel in 2004 in the ancient city of Megiddo. It was found a few miles down the road from Tel Megiddo, one of the most famous archaeological sites in the Holy Land, inside a prison.

“It was in fact directly inside the walls,” said Jeffrey Kloha, former head of curation at the Museum of the Bible.

Archaeology is hard enough under normal conditions. Megiddo Prison, which holds more than 1,000 Palestinians believed to be security threats and has been a source of serious controversy in Israel, made things a lot more complicated.

But in 2024, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) finally excavated the 580-square-foot mosaic, conserved it, and offered it to the Museum of the Bible for its first public appearance in a temporary display in Washington, DC.

IAA experts cut the mosaic into ten pieces. They packed them up and shipped them to America, where the pieces were reassembled at the Bible museum.

The mosaic is being touted by the museum as “one of the most groundbreaking archaeological discoveries since the Dead Sea Scrolls.” …

Israeli archaeologists say the church floor was built around AD 230. They were able to give a precise date based on coins found during excavation, as well as from the style of mosaic and the type of pottery uncovered at the site.

This is, to date, one of the oldest-known church buildings and the first to be constructed specifically for the purpose of worship. A century later, after the Roman emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, churches began to proliferate throughout the Mediterranean. Only three churches from before that time have been discovered by archaeologists: a house church in Capernaum, a house church in eastern Syria, and now this structure in Megiddo.

A second inscription in the mosaic is even more exciting to scholars of early Christianity. It reads, “Akeptous, the friend of God, has offered the table to God Jesus Christ [for] remembrance.”

This is the earliest archaeological mention of Jesus Christ and is evidence early Christians thought Jesus was not just a good teacher, but actually God. Some historians had previously argued that the first followers of Christ didn’t believe in the Incarnation and only later came to see Jesus as divine. The inscription shows this early community affirmed Jesus was God.

If you did not see John Blake’s interview with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, here’s the link.

Roger Olson, Jimmy Carter, and what’s a good person:

There are two major ideas of “good person” in America. (Setting aside minor ideas that exist on the fringes of society.) One is the general, secular idea that identifies a good person by his or her kindness and lawfulness. The other is the Christian idea that identifies a good person by that PLUS by his or her acknowledgement that he or she is NOT really good and that Jesus was the only really, perfectly good (human) person—the model of personal goodness.

The two ideas do not necessarily conflict, but the Christian idea goes beyond the secular idea.

As Christians we believe that it is not possible to be a truly good person simply by being kind, nice, and law-abiding. In fact, we believe being good begins by acknowledging that we are NOT good, at least not in comparison with Jesus, but that we can approach goodness by acknowledging that and by allowing the Holy Spirit to change us into the image of Jesus Christ.

As I contemplated the difference I thought of the late President Jimmy Carter who may or may not have been a good president. But he was a good person in both senses—secular and Christian. He was a kind, caring, compassionate person AND a person who knew he was not good except by God’s grace and with God’s empowering presence in his life.

On gut microbes:

Our guts are home to trillions of microbes that have a profound influence on our overall health. Now, a new study finds that — whether you're vegan, vegetarian or omnivore — the key to a healthy gut microbiome is the same: Eat lots of different plant-based foods.

Gut microbes break down food that your body can't digest and in turn, they produce chemical messengers that influence everything from your blood sugar levels to your immune system. Some of these messengers can boost health, others can hinder it. It all depends on what you feed your microbes.

"The microbiome modulates the effect of diet on our health. It basically decides our health status," says Nicola Segata, a professor at the University of Trento in Italy who studies the microbiome using advanced genome sequencing.

He and an international team of colleagues wanted to know how different diet patterns shape the kinds of microbes that dominate our guts. So they analyzed stool samples from more than 21,000 people in the U.S., the U.K., and Italy. The researchers not only knew whether participants were vegans, vegetarians or omnivores, but they also had detailed information about what these people ate for a couple of weeks at a time.

What they found is that the more plant-based foods people ate, the more gut bacteria they had that are linked with better health — such as less inflammation and a stronger immune system. Perhaps not surprisingly, these good bacteria were a hallmark of the microbiome of vegans.

As for omnivores, their gut microbiomes tended to have more bacteria associated with meat digestion, which makes sense. But they also had more bacteria linked to inflammatory bowel disease and a higher risk of colon cancer. That's the bad news.

But the good news for meat eaters is that, when it comes to having a healthy composition of good bacteria, their gut microbiomes looked a lot like those of vegans and vegetarians — so long as they ate an array of plant-based foods in large amounts.

"Omnivores who were eating a large diversity of vegetables were actually quite similar in terms of having the good microbes compared to vegans," Segata says.

Mike Bird reviews Matt Novenson:

A good follow-up to Matthew Thiessen’s book A Jewish Paul (reviewed here), is Matthew Novenson’s latest book Paul and Judaism at the End of History, a volume that is rightly getting a lot of attention and stimulating much discussion. In many ways, it is a good extension to his previous collection of essays in Paul, Then and Now.

Novenson is a Bellweather scholar on how things are tracking in study of the apostle Paul. He has intra-mural discussions with scholars associated with Paul within Judaism (PwJ), he offers criticism of the New Perspective on Paul (NPP), and sometimes even the Apocalyptic Paul (AP). He shows that Pauline studies are riveting, contested, and even a little bit tribal! …

In his piece “Who Says Justification is from Works of the Law?” Novenson contends that no Jews or Jewish Christ-believers affirmed justification from works of the Law/Torah.

For Novenson, such an expression was Paul’s construal of opposition to his claim that Christ-believing gentiles should not seek to be circumcised. So, on Novenson’s account, Paul’s polemic against “justification from works of the law” is either a straw-man argument or else an entirely invented counter-accusation imputed to his critics. For Novenson, justification from works of the law “is not any pre-existing form of [Jewish] piety; it is a strategy for not buying what Paul is selling” (76). In other words, the formula “justification from works of the law” is Paul’s own construal of anti-Paulinism and is “Paul’s own polemical invention” (76).

To be fair, I do think Novenson makes a very, very good point that Pauline interpreters often regard justification from works of the Law to be Paul’s negative evaluation of some form of Jewish piety, they then re-name that piety as “legalism,” “synergism,” “national righteousness,” “calculations of human worth,” and proceed to find that piety somewhere, anywhere, in Qumran, in Philo, or in rabbinic literature (64).

Accordingly, I agree with Novenson that in Qumran’s 4QMMT the so-called “works of the law” do not refer to Jewish boundary markers or legalistic deeds, but denotes the sectarian teachings of the Qumranites concerning their annual calendar in contrast to the priestly leaders of Jerusalem. Plus, these “works” are not related to Paul’s subject of proselytism, but concern the totality of the Torah with respect to what is “good” and “right.” So 4QMMT’s relevance to Paul’s negative evaluation of “works of the Torah” is oblique rather than exhibit-A for what he is opposing.

Even so, I would maintain that justification from works of the law does not emerge merely from the quest for anti-Pauline parallels, nor from Paul’s argumentative rhetoric, but arises from the socio-religious situations Paul was confronting.

True, there might not have been any person in Syrian Antioch, Pisidian Antioch, or Philippi, who entered into a house church chanting, “Don’t be a jerk or a bore, justification is not by faith, but from works of the law.” In addition, I acknowledge that Paul’s utilization of the largely forensic language of dikaioō (“to declare righteous/justify”) and dikaiōsis (“justification”), while not strictly unique to him (see Dt 25:1 [LXX]), are at least distinctive of him and unsual considering the various ways of talking about “salvation” in scriptural and sectarian discourses. However, justification from works of the law was Paul’s way of conceptualizing the belief that performance of the Jewish law, in whole or part, determined one’s membership in the covenant and one’s position coram deo, before God.

Alan Jacobs, continuing his ideas:

In my first post of this series, I called attention to an issue raised by Christopher Lasch: “The school, the helping professions, and the peer group have taken over most of the family’s functions, and many parents have cooperated with this invasion of the family in the hope of presenting themselves to their children strictly as older friends and companions.”

But why do parents so cooperate? Lasch thinks it’s largely a matter of limiting conflict in the home, but I think something more important is at work: parents have internalized the logic of metaphysical capitalism and its implicit contractualism — its view that only what the individual chooses is legitimate for that individual — and are terrified of being tyrannical or even to be perceived as tyrants. Parents have bought into the illusion that if they do not direct and guide their children, then their children will make free individual choices — and then, if things go wrong, at least they won’t be able to blame Mom and Dad.

The illusion of free choice? Yes, absolutely. Here let me quote someone I’ve cited before on this subject, Christine Emba:

This story idealized detachment, “liberation” from mutual care, ensuring that relationships never came before career goals. It looked like bringing a capitalist mindset into our interactions, making it normal to use, discard, and objectify other people. And as they often do, our rapacious markets and short-term desires won out.

But:

Cui bono? Whom did this new story serve? Who benefits from a world of consequence-free sex, weak ties, the putting off of childbearing and family? Today, the pharmaceutical and medical industries benefit, by selling decades-long prescriptions for contraceptives, and then various attempts at ART [Assisted Reproductive Technology] later on. Corporations and employers benefit: they gain a new labor force unsaddled by commitments to family, place, or other less-than-profitable concerns.

If you look at those stories I’ve cited in earlier posts about people who are cutting off their parents, you might ask: Who is encouraging them to do so? And the answer is: therapists who profit from family alienation. Similarly, when young people experience, or think they are experiencing, what we’re taught to call “gender dysphoria,” who is encouraging them to pursue some major change? Often counselors at their schools, who have pressed for the power to hide such information from parents (though there is pushback against that policy).

So: Cui bono? As Lasch said, the schools and the “helping professions.” By encouraging young people to sever, or at least weaken, family ties, they create psychological and moral fragility that they step in to remedy, in exchange for money or power or both. And neither group has to deal with the long-term consequences of their interventions.