Monthly Archives: April 2011

The Marriage of the Millennium: not William and Kate

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It is good to see ElShaddai Edwards blogging again, at He is Sufficient. And he has written an excellent post on the marriage of the millennium.

Prince William and Kate MiddletonNow the marriage of the month is, I suppose, going to be the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, on 29th April. Here in the UK we are having a public holiday to celebrate – but I will be working, because it is a good day for my current temporary work. I can imagine that some would want to bill this royal event as the marriage of the millennium so far, although I would put forward a different suggestion.

But the wedding ElShaddai is writing about is not that of William and Kate, and it will have no rival in the next thousand years, or indeed forever. It has its similarities: a royal prince marrying a commoner. It is the marriage of Jesus Christ with his church, as described mainly in the Book of Revelation.

ElShaddai links the wedding of the Lamb with teaching on the millennium. For him, the millennium is the time between the announcement of the wedding and the actual ceremony, when the guests are invited and the bride is made ready. For the details read his post.

ElShaddai avoids tying this in with events in the real world. But I suppose this is most easily interpreted with the millennium as the church age, the current age, at the end of which Jesus will return to be with his bride. This would then be a kind of postmillennialism, but without the triumphalism sometimes associated with this teaching.

There is certainly a lot to think about here – but we shouldn’t allow it to distract us too much from our primary task of proclaiming the kingdom of God and inviting people to take their part in the marriage of the millennium.

Ian Paul's Summary: the Bible on women and authority

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Revd Dr Ian PaulIan Paul has summed up his series on what the Bible teaches on women and authority. This material is due to be published as a Grove Booklet. In a previous post I referred to what Ian had written on 1 Timothy 2. The summary in Ian’s new post is presumably intended to sum up the series, and the booklet. Here is my summary of the summary, quoting Ian’s words:

  1. The creation accounts offer no evidence of hierarchy in male-female relationships as part of the original created order. …
  2. The gospel accounts appear to show no embarrassment about the commissioning of women to roles that would normally be restricted to men …
  3. The evidence from Acts and Paul goes further. …
  4. The critical texts in 1 Corinthians, Ephesians and 1 Timothy are best understood as offering a corrective in particular contexts in the light of the outpouring of the Spirit …
  5. There is no textual evidence that the New Testament envisages any permanent prohibition on women exercising authority or a teaching role on the grounds of their gender. …
  6. The nature of the texts on women’s roles sets this issue at some distance from current debates on same-sex relations. …

In other words, there is no biblical leg to stand on for the complementarian position that women must not exercise any kind of authority in the church.

For the full summary read Ian’s post.

Vote Yes!, then let the politicians do the real work

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YES to Fairer VotesClayboy, otherwise known as Doug Chaplin, is a priest in the Church of England. So I was interested to see that he had put together a list of five reasons to say No! in the forthcoming Alternative Vote referendum.

I’m glad to see for once someone trying to find substantive arguments on the No! side. I hoped that in Doug’s list I might find some real Christian arguments on this issue, perhaps in response to my post Towards a Christian view on the Alternative Vote, or to what Ekklesia and some bishops have had to say on this subject.

So I was a little disappointed that the Clayboy arguments are mostly not about the ethical issues involved, but instead are speculation about the consequences of a Yes! vote. But, following his five reasons, he does write the following:

the most moral system of voting in a democracy is the one most understandable to and accessible by the most people.

Well, he may be right here. But is he really suggesting that listing candidates in order of preference is not understandable or not accessible by people? If there is an issue here, then it needs to be addressed by proper voter education. If he wants to rule this out on principle, then of course the best understood system will be the current one. That makes his argument into one for maintaining the status quo however bad that might be – and I cannot accept that that is a good moral argument.

Now I’m sure Clayboy is correct that adoption of AV will not on its own be “all that is needed” “to reconnect people and politicians”. But surely it is a step, if only a small one, in that direction. Let’s indeed make the politicians “do some real work to connect to the electorate”. But first let’s show that we care about this work by voting Yes!

Move over, Jim West, here comes Gentle Wisdom!

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Zwinglius RedivivusI don’t know if Jim West meant to do this, but in his post yesterday Ok Houston (WordPress), We Might Have a Problem… (I had the same problem) he revealed his daily WordPress visit statistics for the last month. I can compare them directly with the statistics for this blog. It looks as if Jim has been averaging around 1000 visits per day through March, rather more in the last few days.

Gentle Wisdom cannot yet match Jim on a daily basis. But its daily average number of visits, which was 82 in February, leapt up to 493 in March. Since 17th March, when I published David Wilkerson prophecy: earthquakes in Japan and USA, Gentle Wisdom has had more than 500 visits every day, with a peak of 1356 on 21st March. On 19th, when it had 1181 visits, Jim West clearly had well under 1000, so I edged ahead of him at least briefly.

In September 2009 Gentle Wisdom joined the select (maybe) band of official bibliobloggers. Thirteen months ago it actually made it into the infamous Top 50. But it didn’t hold its position because I wasn’t blogging regularly last year.

Meanwhile Jim West, also known as Zwingli come back to life, has held the #1 spot in the list of biblibloggers for most of its life, except for a short break when his blog was deleted and before he started a new one. He is still there in the latest list published yesterday – its title Oh My Goodness!!! Jim West Lost is an April Fool. Over the years the Alexa rank required to qualify for the Top 50 has inflated (because a lower number indicates a higher position): biblioblog #50 had a rank of 1,397,865 in August 2009 but 863,218 in the latest figures.

As I was blogging very little for nearly a year, it is not surprising that Gentle Wisdom slipped well down the Alexa rankings, to below 7,000,000 on the one month figures from a month ago, just before I started to relaunch this blog. But its one month rank has already risen nearly six million to 1,333,112, and will doubtless continue to rise quickly if my daily number of visits remains above 500. So watch out for Gentle Wisdom in next month’s Top 50.

I can’t help wondering if Gentle Wisdom should really be listed as a biblioblog. After all, most of the posts are not about biblical studies. But then the same is true of Jim West’s writing. Also Jim often posts 20 times a day, mostly very short posts. This suggests that on average only about 50 people read each post. By contrast I had over 15,000 visits in March and 35 new posts in the month, which corresponds to nearly 500 readers per post.

It looks to me as if Jim West is maintaining his #1 position only by blogging large numbers of short posts. If he keeps this up he may maintain his position, just ahead of Joel Watts who has a similar posting pattern. But if Gentle Wisdom only needs to double its number of visits this month, to follow up its sixfold increase last month, then that #1 biblioblogger spot is by no means secure. Watch out, Jim West, here comes Gentle Wisdom!

Memories of Mary Gardner

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I met John and Ruth Hamilton at a campsite in the south of France in 1987. I also met, among others, a quiet Scottish woman called Mary Gardner. At the time we were all considering joining Wycliffe Bible Translators. Mary, John and Ruth, and I became members within the next few years, and we all spent several years overseas involved with Bible translation work. We would meet one another every now and then as our paths crossed at the UK Wycliffe Centre. I left Wycliffe in 2002. but continued to work on Bible translation until 2008. John and Ruth are still members, now based in Northern Ireland. And Mary Gardner went to be with the Lord just over a week ago, the sole victim of a bomb blast in Jerusalem.

STEP meal time - Mary Gardner on the left with the long red hairJohn Hamilton has now posted his memories of Mary, including some pictures from that camp in the south of France. As he also names me, that has prompted me to recognise publicly that I knew Mary. In John’s photo which I have reproduced here, I think the top of my head is visible at the back right. And there, on the left with long red hair, is Mary as I first knew her.

I don’t have anything else to add to what John, Eddie Arthur and several others have written about Mary. I just want to honour the memory of this dedicated woman who tragically lost her life while serving the Lord, but is now in a better place.

Contents of the ancient lead books revealed!

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On Tuesday I reported on what was being billed as “the major discovery of Christian history”, a new discovery said to be “as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls”: 70 books made of lead, said to be from the 1st century AD and of Christian origin. Today I am excited to read about the contents of these books, which have been revealed by Alan Knox at The Assembling of the Church. Thanks to Jeremy Myers of TILL HE COMES for the link.

"Priceless" Christian relicsThis is indeed a sensational revelation, fully justifying the hype “the major discovery of Christian history”. It seems that these books contain the oldest and most reliable texts of much of the New Testament. And these texts differ from the ones we have had up to now in some startling ways. Read Alan’s post to find out more.

Now of course Alan’s post completely contradicts the one by Jim Davila supposedly proving that these lead books are forgeries, which I quoted in my earlier post today. But both Alan’s and Jim’s posts are dated April 1st. Which of them is an April Fool? I will leave it for you, my readers, to decide.

"The major discovery of Christian history": a forgery

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On Tuesday I reported on what was being billed as “the major discovery of Christian history”, a new discovery said to be “as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls”: 70 books made of lead, said to be from the 1st century AD and of Christian origin. But even by the next day the credibility of this discovery was coming into question, as I noted in a comment, because of revelations about the identity of David Elkington who was publicising this matter.

One of three photographs of the ‘copper codex’Now there seems to be proof that these books are forgeries, or at least that one of them is. Elkington asked Peter Thonemann, who is a Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Oxford, to examine three photographs of one of the discovered books (this one is apparently made of copper or bronze, not lead) showing some writing in Greek. Jim Davila of the blog PaleoJudaica has posted Thonemann’s reply to Elkington and copies of the photographs.

In his letter to Elkington Thonemann gives a full transcription and translation of the Greek text, which is meaningless as it stands. But he has discovered the source of this text. This leads him to the conclusion:

The text on your bronze tablet … has been extracted unintelligently from another longer text … a perfectly ordinary tombstone from Madaba in Jordan which happens to have been on display in the Amman museum for the past fifty years or so.  …

The only possible explanation is that the text on the bronze tablet was copied directly from the inscription in the museum at Amman …

This particular bronze tablet is, therefore, a modern forgery, produced in Jordan within the last fifty years.  I would stake my career on it.

Strong words indeed from a scholar. If this one book is a forgery, then it is reasonable to suppose that the others allegedly discovered with it are also forgeries. I suppose it is possible that someone has mixed genuine antiquities with forgeries. But if they have they have so greatly compromised the value of the genuine ones as to make them worthless.

So let’s forget this sorry story, except perhaps as a warning not to be carried away by unverified hype.

Thanks to P.J. Williams of Evangelical Textual Criticism for the link to Davila’s post.