Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

My college chum H, with a couple of days notice, told me that she & her hubby were coming up to Seattle for the Folklife festival, and could we get together? Shyeah! She was even willing to get on a bus, so we met in lower Fremont, ate some malatang at 19 Gold, walked around while I played tour guide, had some mead at Mr. B's, and then had to walk all the way to Wallingford to find a stop for their bus that wasn't closed! Even in sensible heels, it was a hike for me.

But yes, it was a lovely evening!

In other news, Good Sister is hip deep in the nitty gritty of plans for fixing up and selling Mom's house. I applaud her, and once again I think I have to whack somebody if she says to. Not that she would ever do that.

And what have I been doing instead of writing Dreamwidth entries? Hanging homemade devil girls* up high with the Wendling's help, staying up too late reading The Expanse, and cleaning up for a joint visit by Dancer and the Tickler. Ahem.



*Based on a drawing from Stjepan Šejič's "Fine Print".

My son is in LA as of yesterday. I slept fine. Huh. We'll see about tonight.

Latex dinner last night. Got to talk to Rubbermaid last night for the first time in a couple of months. She'll be spending the summer in Berlin. I'm a little bit jealous, but as I told her, I'm disappointed that I won't be able to throw myself at her. I mean I could and I just might, but sheesh.

It's enough to make me want to hit the apps again. The apps don't make it easy to tell them, look, I'm a lesbian in my middle late fifties with certain... tastes, looking for roughly the same not too far away. Surely it isn't that hard.

I ordered the next three books of The Expanse from Powell's. May Goddess have mercy on my soul.

I finished Kink Is last night. I give it an enthusiastic thumbs up. Why? Mainly because the team that curated and edited it did an excellent job of covering a broad cross section of the community. I've emailed my contact on the team to tell them so. If you have (ahem) unusual tastes, you'll love this book, and you'll often find your self either nodding in agreement or thinking, 'O RLY?' or, 'That's a new one on me.' If you don't have unusual tastes, this will give you some clue as to what the rest of us do, and above all why we do it.

Yes, there are some photos. No, I didn't think they're that hardcore, but consider the source.

Oh: you can buy it from the publisher.

I took the advice of a certain lady in latex, seconded by my favorite vampire witch queen, to skip the rest of the epistles and go right to Revelation, the last book of the New Testament. The epistles do get kind of samey after the first couple: unify, quit your sinning, misogyny, anti-Semitism, Judgment Day is coming, blah blah blah. Most of the epistles are the work of Paul, who as I've said previously here sucked a lot. Maybe I'll read the few by Peter if I get a wild hair someday.

But speaking of Judgment Day! Revelation reads like someone neurodivergent got a hold of whatever hallucinogens are speculated to have been used by the Greeks in their Eleusinian mysteries. Why neurodivergent? The constant appearance of numbers in the text. Three of this, seven of that, twelve angels, 666 (or maybe 616) of the other thing, 1260 days, and 144,000 people. And why am I the umpteenth reader to suspect awesome party drugs? Because most of it reads like a description of an ayahuasca trip, only with angels instead of machine elves.

The highlights:

• Revelations 8:7, with its burning forests, hits different in these days of global warming.
• Revelations 9:7-11, containing an extended description of chimerical locusts, sounds like the written equivalent of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Bosch was likely batshit Catholic, and it would surprise me not at all to learn that Revelations was a fave of his.
• Revelations 10:9, the bit about our author John – I assume John the Presbyter – getting told to eat a scroll. Because I'm occasionally twelve years old, it immediately put me in mind of blotter acid.
• Revelations 11:18 contains what I take to be a message that accidentally sounds environmentalist to modern ears: divine punishment for those who "destroy the earth".
• My edition, the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, has tons of conscientious footnotes about, among other things, differences among various source manuscripts. One of these is for Revelations 12:18, where our humble narrator may have called himself one of the monsters that he so lovingly describes.
• Revelations 14:4 is anti-sex and misogynist. So what else is new?

There's probably a German word for how appalled and laughingly astounded I am that this absolute hazmat train wreck of a book, one that you couldn't have gotten published in the last four hundred years, became a foundation – maybe the foundation – for a cult that spread like memetic grey goo across four continents plus chunks of the rest. I find myself wishing that the Athenian scoffers that Paul mentions in Acts had understood the threat that they faced and proselytized.

But people join cults for the same reason they do drugs: it feels really, really good, at least temporarily. The closest thing to memetic Narcan I can come up with are appeals to compassion, which ironically enough brings me back where I started, with that long-dead Indian fellow who reached a similar conclusion.

Next up: the Quran? Nonononono. I'm halfway through a pretty good comic book in Esperanto about relationships. More on that when I'm done with it.

Remember how my train to Portland took two hours longer than it was supposed to? I put that two hours to good (?) use and finished Acts Of the Apostles. And I took notes, baybee.

Horror
Acts 13:6-12 - Paul blinds a guy using, basically, the Force.

Acts 19 approvingly describes the burning of books about magic, and describes how much they were worth. They'd be priceless today.

Horror comedy
Acts 16:16-24 - Out of annoyance Paul exorcises a demon out of a slave with a “prophetic spirit”. Her owners get mad and have Paul arrested and beaten.

Comedy
Acts 8:26-40 - The Ethiopian eunuch apparently can’t understand what he’s reading aloud?!

Acts 14:8-18 - There's a hilarious culture clash at Iconium (modern Konya). Pagans offer sacrifices to Paul & Barnabas, calling them Hermes & Zeus, respectively.

The comedy of poor editing: starting around Acts 16, the narration switches back and forth between third-person singular and first-person plural.

Also in acts 19, freelance non-Christians invoke Jesus while attempting an exorcism, but the demon beats their butts.

It was funny to me when in Acts 17, Paul visits Athens, long the cultural capital of the Greek world by then, and has an unusually civilized chat with Stoics and Epicureans. The Athenians scoff at Paul, but they don't persecute him. That's how the rest of you ancients should have handled the Christians, you muppets. But neau, you Saducees, Pharisees, and Romans had to get your undies in a bunch.

Acts 26:29:

Paul replied, "Whether quickly or not, I pray to God that not only you but also all who are listening to me today might become such as I am – except for these chains."

If wise guys have a patron saint, I think Paul should be it.

Drama
Acts 15:36-41 has internal dissension! Paul told Barnabas didn’t trust “John called Mark”, saying he bailed on them when they were in trouble, so Paul split up with Barnabas.

History
Acts 10:9-16 - Peter’s vision reads at first like an argument against kashrut, i.e. Jewish dietary laws. But no! It’s in favor of internationalism! Sure enough, in Acts 10:28-33 Peter preaches to Cornelius, a “centurion of the Italian Cohort”! It's striking how often throughout the New Testament the Roman military doesn't act very military.

Acts 15:1-21 - Paul wins the argument about circumcision. Yeah, maybe he didn't really, but by not getting killed as soon as his opponents in this matter, he won for any practical purpose.

Acts 24:26-27 - Paul accuses Governor Felix of expecting a bribe from Paul and leaving him in prison when Felix's term ended as a “favor to the Jews”. Mostly, though, Acts is much kinder to the Romans than the Gospels. That's a sad irony considering that – wait for it – the Romans executed him.

Acts 16:35-37 - We find out about the perks of Roman citizenship. Paul claims to have been born a citizen in Acts, but modern scholars dispute that. In Acts 22:25 citizenship gets Paul out of a flogging; no kinkster he.

Fave rave
Acts 20:35 - Paul says, "[...] We must support the weak."

In some ways, Paul was, or is at least portrayed as, yuckier than Jesus. It's hard to imagine Jesus blinding somebody. On the other hand, Paul wasn't outright nasty to people who were close to him.

John 14:6:

Jesus said to [Thomas], "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."

Gosh, megalomania much? I mean, I'm starting to get why not a lot of people in his day took him seriously.

In John 14:22-23, Jesus seems to be telling the Apostles that they will see him after the resurrection, but no one else will. It's all quite neat.

In fact, I take back some of what I said about Luke being the slick Gospel. Where Luke had style and the literary fashion of the day, John has grit, tension, emotion, developed characters, dialog, and some neatly darned plot holes like the above. You want dialog and tension? Try John's account of Jesus sassing people after his arrest, or Pilate and the chief priest arguing about the wording of the sign on the cross.

Oh, and at the very end, it appears that John the Evangelist is claiming to be John the Apostle. Wayell, if that were the case, he would have been about eighty years old when he put pen to paper. There's a minority view out there that mayyybe he could have been fifty. Either way, I don't buy it. Why would he have waited at all? The writers of the synoptic Gospels didn't. Ancient and medieval writers had little compunction about spinning yarns, especially if they thought there was a greater good to be served by it.

Next up: Acts, for which I confess to some anticipation: it's partly a travelog of Peter's & Paul's trips all around the ancient Mediterranean. After that, the mercifully bite-sized Epistles, which as opinion pieces I expect to make me jump up and down and yell. Then I drink the Kool-Aid with Revelation.

I've started in on The Gospel According To John. It's easily the trippiest of the Gospels, and judging from the NRSV's copious footnotes it seems to have given translators fits for centuries as they tried to determine where quotes and even sentences began and ended. There's a little of that in the other Gospels, but not nearly as much as in John.

So who was this John guy, anyway? More than one person, if you believe modern scholarship. If you don't, St. John the Apostle; St. John the Evangelist, i.e. the author of the Gospel; and St. John the Presbyter, i.e. the author of some Epistles, are all the same person. While Christian tradition has it that John was the youngest of the Apostles and the only one who didn't get killed for being one, the dates just aren't right for all three of these dudes to have been one person. They may have been two, but they weren't one. Quit giving your kids overly common names, you muppets.

I noted with great satisfaction that the Samaritan woman in John 4:9 straight up calls Jesus a Jew. Take that, racists!

But speaking of Jews, there's definitely an anti-Jewish vibe running through John. John 7:35 mentions preaching to the Greeks; I'm reading about the birth of Christian internationalism. It's too bad it was so gross. I mean, yeah, the Jews didn't buy what you freaks were selling, but I wonder if John the Evangelist et al. would be proud to hear that their words would one day be used as a pretext for mass murder. I hope he wouldn't, but that I'm not completely sure doesn't speak well of him.

It occurred to me that I found a nice passage for churchy anti-vaxxers: Luke 4:12, which has an analog in [checks Bible] Matthew 4:7 and the story of Abraham but none that I can find in Mark. To wit,

Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'"

And speaking of Jesus's notable habit of quoting the Old Testament, Luke has him reading the Torah aloud in a synagogue in Luke 4:16, unlike the preceding Gospels. Again, I don't think this guy was the working class hero that he's been painted as.

Another beauty is Luke 3:23, another iteration of that dumb genealogy: "He was the son (as was thought) of Joseph [...]" Luke can't seem to help himself with the parenthetical expression there, unlike Matthew. (The passage is missing from Mark.) But if Jesus is the son of God, how does the genealogy even matter? It's yet another attempt to sell Christianity to Jews.

So I read the part in The Gospel According To Mark that talks about divorce. Jesus's take in Mark is substantially the same as the (probably later) one in Matthew: nope. Mark doesn't even make an exception for "sexual immorality". And I note that while Mark's language is commendably not sexist – either party could initiate a divorce, which has been Jewish law for millennia – the possibility of divorce by mutual consent appears not to have occurred to Jesus. Speculation: Matthew was trying to inject some sanity with his mention of "sexual immorality".

This to me seems weird. The ancients weren't that different from you & me, for better or worse. Uncontested divorce is commonplace now, and in both the recent and distant past most people were fine with that. The objections in between stem mainly from – wait for it – the Gospels. People who don't want to be married to each other really shouldn't be; you don't have to live very long to find that out now, and with the lower age of marriage you could probably learn it even faster in ancient times.

Which brings me to Jesus and his own domestic situation, or lack thereof. Would no woman have him because of his crankiness? Jesus Christ, incel? Or did a woman he loved die or divorce him? Any of the above seems plausible of a man who wanders around acting like a prophet, telling people not to divorce, and credibly claiming not to care that the Romans were about to kill him.

Edited to add: I think I'd rule out death. Mark names all kinds of names we don't really need to know, a unique feature of his Gospel, and surely he wouldn't hesitate to mention Jesus's late wife, had she existed. No, I'll bet you a denarius with Caesar's face on it that a lady broke Jesus's heart. The question is, who and how?

That’s right: I’ve read The Gospel According to Matthew and I’ve started in on Mark. TL;DR: WAT?!

It seems pretty clear to me that Christianity is a Jewish movement that got taken over by internationalists, the original nationalists having been brutally killed. Jesus starts out saying that he’s not against “the law” meaning Jewish law, telling his disciples not to bother with the “gentiles” and even speaking disparagingly of them (us) on several occasions. But after the resurrection, he’s telling people to spread the word to the “nations”, i.e. everyone who isn’t Jewish.

And another striking way that it at least starts out as a Jewish project is the number of references to Old Testament prophecies. Only the kookiest of gentiles have ever really known or cared what they had to say, which surely the Evangelists knew. Those passages that say, “Look! This prophecy came true!” are an attempt to sell Christianity to Jews.

Which brings me to another bit of skullduggery: the bit about the flight into Egypt at the start of Matthew, all according to prophecy, is missing from Mark. Traditionally, Matthew is the first book of the New Testament, being considered older. Modern scholars who’ve actually compared the Gospel texts, however, think Mark came first, and was likely a source if not the source for Matthew and Luke. Mark is easily the shortest of the Gospels, with the most superfluous, unflattering, and colorful details.

The traditional bit about Jesus being some regular, blue-collar Joe? Bullpuckey. The number of times Jesus claps back at establishment (i.e. Pharisee & Saducee) types with “Have you not read [Bible thing]” is noticeable. You needed a lot of money to afford books back then, not to mention time to study them. And oh by the way, Jesus & co. came from a society that has revered literacy for going on three thousand years. The Jews even have a unique religious belief in the power of the written word; witness the story of the golem and the time I was personally told to read prayers even though I’d inevitably memorized a few. No way were even the blue-collar Joes of Roman-era Galilee going to pay attention to any aspiring prophet who didn’t have at least some credibility as a scholar.

My goodness, there’s a whole lot of healing the sick going on! And feeding the hungry! We’re talking a double-digit percentage of the text here. The modern deemphasis on that part is nothing short of criminal. We have the power to do what he did through perfectly ordinary means, but we don’t.

Something I didn’t expect was Jesus trying to keep some of his miracles secret. Sure, points for modesty, and I can’t blame him for not wanting to get killed when the news got out, but come on, they were miracles.

Mark seems to be into exorcism. Matthew seems to have anticipated the modern era’s distaste for that.

It’s true that Jesus’s take on divorce was less liberal than the entirety of Jewish tradition, saying it’s only copacetic in cases of “sexual immorality”, and that marrying a divorcée is wrong. However, he still wasn’t as bonkers about it as the Roman Catholic Church. Besides, this one has to be taken in context: what happened to women in that society who got divorced because their hubby wanted a younger model?

Jesus was kind of a cranky bastard, wasn’t he? Sometimes I sympathize with his crankiness, but often I don’t. I’m tempted to compare him to (Osamu Tezuka’s depiction of) Buddha, who comes across as less cranky. On the other hand, Buddha was awfully chummy with the powerful of his day. Jesus was having none of that and kissing no butts, even though he knew it would get him killed.

And speaking of his killers, the Romans, and especially Pilate, come across as weak-minded goons. Deadly dangerous, but still weak-minded goons.

Oh, and Jesus saying that his disciples are his family, and saying that you should be ready to break with your family in favor of him? I’m ambivalent about it. On the one hand, it sounds cult-like. On the other, what if your parents really do suck?

Speaking of people whose parents often suck, the Gospels don’t mention queers by any of our names, but Jesus does say that the people of Sodom & Gomorrah are better than people who don’t listen to his disciples. And he does lean pretty hard on loving your neighbor as yourself. So I’m satisfied that Jesus wasn’t particularly out to get us.

But you know, the whole damn Bible is such a stew of conflicting agendas and edits that it’s a Rorschach test. People have always seen what they want to see in it, and that’s only partly the readers' fault.