Davide's Notes

From the beginning of the Iron Age (1200 BCE) until the Babylonian Exile (586 BCE), two major types dominated Israelite domestic architecture: the larger is usually called the “four-room house,” the smaller, the “three-room house.”

In the four-room house, there was a back room the width of the building with three long rooms stemming forward from it. Most houses were two stories high, although two and three-room, one-story houses are also found. The lower part of the wall was constructed of stone and the upper part of adobe brick or wood and was plastered with lime. The flat roofs were made of wooden beams filled in with dried mud and brushwood and, in the larger houses, were supported by rows of stone columns. The inhabitants generally lived in the upper story, although in the hot weather the roofs were used for sleeping. According to Deut. 22:8, a parapet was to be built around the roof as a safety precaution.

In the Hellenistic (333-63 BCE) and Roman (63 BCE-324 CE) periods marked changes in architecture occurred under Western influence. As yet there is little information about the houses of the common people.

The base rock of the hill country of Palestine is limestone; this is the normal building stone for that area.

Timber was also a plentiful commodity in Palestine (Jos. 17:15, 18). Royal buildings were constructed and decorated with expensive woods such as cedar and fir (1 Ki. 5:6, 8) imported from Lebanon, almug (1 Ki. 10:11-12) from Ophir and the local olive (1 Ki. 6:23, 31, 33). General work was normally done with the most suitable local wood, which may have been sycamore (Is. 9:10), pine or oak.

Baked bricks and tiles were not used except in special circumstances before the Roman period in Palestine, and even then only by the wealthy. The use of (dried) mudbricks was much more common.

Some features of houses:

• Foundations. Bedrock was preferred for major construction, but if such were not available the next best was a solid stone platform constructed of layers of blocks of stone closely fitted. Cf the importance of solid foundations - due to the danger of floods, earthquakes (Palestine is a seismic zone), high winds - in e.g. Matthew 7:24ff.
• Cornerstone. The large stone placed in the foundation at the principal corner of a building.
• Stairs. Stairs were most common as a device for reaching the second floor or roof of a house. Sometimes they were external (cf Ez 41:7 and perhaps Matthew 24:17, do not waste time going down into the house from the top).
• Roof. Simple roof construction usually comprised a horizontal bed of branches or beams, sometimes supported by columns, on which layers of earth or limestone plaster were laid. They weathered into decay in rainy season conditions and needed to be restored in dry season weather to endure (cf Qo 10:18). The roof was used as storage, hiding space (Josh. 2:6-8), observation platform (2 Sam 11:2, David sees Bathsheba from the roof), space for shrines to foreign gods (2 Ki 23:12). In the NT, used as a proclamation place (Lk 12:3), praying space (Peter went up on the roof to pray, Acts 10:9).
• Doors. They could be bolted shut (cf Matthew 6:6 - shut the door of your room when you pray, Lk 13:25 - stand at the [narrow] door and knock asking to enter), both with horizontal and vertical bolt locks. They were sometimes reinforced with iron, carved or otherwise decorated, and, as with gates in city walls, were the most vulnerable point in the building’s perimeter when under assault. They had hinges (Prov 26:14). Scripture was to be written on doorposts (Deut 6:9).
• Windows. Few references found. Cf Josh 2:15, Rahab lets the spies down by a rope through the window; 1 Ki 6:4, the Temple had "windows with recessed frames", see also Ez 40:16; Acts 20:9, Eutychus falls from the window at the third floor and is then resurrected by Paul.

UPDATE: the picture of "A typical village of the 1st century" (from www.biblepicturegallery.com)

Found on the excellent NT Gateway Weblog:

• Life of Jesus
  By Prof. Barry D. Smith of Atlantic Baptist University, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada: extensive and detailed materials from a conservative perspective. Features Image Gallery, an history of the Quest and essays on several subjects including Jesus as Exorcist, Jesus as Healer, Jesus as Teacher, Jesus and the Law, Jesus' Interpretation of his Death and Titles. Very useful material for undergraduate student research.
• El Jesus Historico (New URL)
  By Santiago Guijarro, Pontifical University, Salamanca, Spain: full web materials including lecture notes, bibliography, links and more for an undergraduate course on the Historical Jesus.
• Jesus 320
  By Mark Given, Southwest Missouri State University, U.S.A.: web materials including course outline, bibliography and links for an undergraduate course on Jesus.

I just found the article Illuminating The World of Jesus Through Cultural Anthropology. It refers to and comments on the document by the Pontifical Biblical Commission L'interpretazione della Bibbia nella Chiesa.

I should focus in the next days on the following points of the article:

• Cultural Designation: the necessity of reflecting upon the labels people use to identify themselves and to identify others. Cf. Yehudim/Ioudaioi mistakenly translated in the anachronistic "Jews" (this mistake does not occur in Italian translations, where Jesus' designation is translated as "Re dei giudei").
• Group-Orientation: The Judeans - a collectivistic or group-oriented society. Collectivistic societies tend to identify people by stereotype. Nicely put: consider the people whom Jesus healed as reported in Mark's gospel. There is Peter's mother-in-law, a paralytic, a leper, a man with a withered hand, a man with an unclean spirit, a woman with a menstrual irregularity. The vast majority are stereotyped by their illness. Only one name is reported, Bar Timaeus (10:46), but Timaeus is the father's name, not the blind man's name. The reader learns not an individual but rather a family relationship, a collective rather than an individualistic value.
• Honor and Shame: the core culture values of collectivistic Judeans. Notice how genealogies (e.g. in the case of Jesus) are more concerned about honor than about lineal purity.
• Challenge and Riposte. This is an often used strategy when it comes to defend the key value "honor". See examples.
• From stereotype to prejudice. This seems a common pattern in both collectivistic and individualistic societies (wherever simplifications and uneasiness with cultural differences abound, I'd say). Cf Pharisees, fishermen, publicans, "from Nazareth", "from Jerusalem". On the other hand, Jesus appears to see and point past generalizations.

Felix Just SJ has several interesting pages online, among which there is one on Bible translations. I reproduce here part of his summary:

Translations Grouped by "Translation Philosophy":

• Formal Correspondence translations: Douay-Rheims, KJV/NKJV, RSV/NRSV, NAB, NIV
• Dynamic Equivalence translations: NEB/REB, TEV/CEV, JB/NJB
• The Amplified Bible is neither (or both); it "amplifies" the text by adding lots of extra words & phrases.

Translations Sponsored/Approved by various Churches:

• Catholic translations: Douay-Rheims, JB/NJB, NAB
• Protestant translations: KJV/NKJV, TEV/CEV, NIV
• Ecumenical translations (approved and used by both Catholics and Protestants): NEB/REB, RSV/NRSV

A good advice is, when not using Hebrew or Greek texts,

to compare at least three or four different modern translations; use at least one "dynamic equivalence" and one "formal correspondence" translation.

Just found this on Quodlibet: Online Journal of Christian Theology and Philosophy:

And Jesus said unto them, "And whom do you say that I am?" They replied, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed." And Jesus replied, "What?"

Being done with the exams for this year, it's time to think about next year.
I am currently inclined to work on:

• New Testament in English
• Church history to 461 CE
• Introductory Biblical Hebrew

Given time constraints and past experience, I am not sure I'll be able to do more than that, and that in reality seems very ambitious anyway. We'll see.

Having seen syllabus and past exams, I am tempted to pass on Church history: reformation and society, replacing it with Advanced Biblical Hebrew. This would leave for the years after the next

• Christian doctrine
• Christian ethics
• Liturgical studies
• Advanced Biblical Hebrew

Yesterday I took Philosophy of Religion. These are the questions I answered:

• If God knows that John will rob a bank next week, to what extent is John responsible for his action?
• "There are thinks that even an omnipotent God cannot do". Discuss.
• Does Hick's theodicy provide a satisfactory explanation of natural evil?
• Why are some prayers apparently unanswered?

I chose not to answer questions related to the existence of God. I was probably influenced in this decision by this interview with Peter Vardy.

There are 4 points:

1. Only by allowing evil can a good be achieved. But why can't God create a world where there is only good? The classical answer is the FWD. And the obvious objection to the FWD is, is the good worth the pain? The answer to this seems to be that if God is to give us significant control, then there has to be the possibility of really significant bad. Note that we can only accept the FWD in a world of genuinely free agents (liberty of indifference as opposed to liberty of spontaneity). If instead we accept that we act based on liberty of spontaneity, then the position of Antony Flew is justified, maintaining that there is no incompatibility between freedom and determinism (people are free and still causally determined to do only what is good). But this seems to escape the point just by redefining free will.
   This position of Swinburne's resembles Hick's, when he speaks of the two-stages conception of the creation of humankind -- first creation with the potential for knowledge, then a gradual process of further growth and development (through human freedom).
2. God does everything he can to bring about that good. So he would give us the maximum opportunity to achieve the good -- in the case where he allowed us to suffer pain, this would mean he is giving us the option of deciding how to deal with that pain: for example, in a courageous way (which is a good thing, hence we would achieve that good), or not in a courageous way (so we would not achieve that good). The key point is that there would be no point in the pain unless we also have free will to choose how to deal with it. Then this can be extended to parents, children, friends and society: how would they react to this pain? This would be an opportunity for them as well to exercise free will and choose or not choose good.
3. God has the right to allow evil. Swinburne justifies this saying that you have to be in a kind of parental situation with regard to somebody else if you are to cause suffering or allow them to suffer. The reason for that is that you are overall their benefactor. You've given them life, nourishment, education and so on and therefore you have the right to demand certain things in return. And God, it is maintained, is in that position.
4. The outcome has to be sufficiently good. I don't see how we can measure this for ourselves. Perhaps here it is appropriate to mention the position of Davies, arguing that we should not expect to be able to (fully) understand the reason for suffering.

A couple more points:

• I think I agree with Swinburne's definition of a toy world: humanity and its relationship with God is a developing, progressive enterprise, requiring humankind to make mistakes and to experience life's joys and pains in order to develop as a human being and, as a result, get closer to God. It looks that this makes sense only when seen as part of a more complete package, including life after death (whatever that means).
• Are we prepared to accept a "better world"? Davies points out that many find evil (to different degrees) more attractive. Milton's Satan is far more charismatic than the squeaky clean God, and many of us believe that the best world is one where there is no evil or suffering, yet are afraid of existing in some kind of Brave New World, devoid of passion.

Probably the most frequently raised objection to God's omniscience is, if God is omniscient, is the future determined and are human beings, therefore, not free? Another way to state this is, does an omniscient God cause our actions?

Aquinas maintains that God has knowledge, not because his effects suggest that their cause is intelligent; rather, because God is not material.

It is important here to distinguish between:

• Knowledge in people; in people, mind has two powers:
  • intellectus agens
    The intellectus agens abstracts from sense experience of particular things to form universal ideas.

    intellectus possibilis

    This is the storehouse of those ideas once formed.
  An obvious question is why there must be an intellectus agens. This is because the material world is, of itself, not intelligible, so we need an ability to grasp what the senses deliver. In other words, forms existing in matter are not thinkable without something (the intellectus agens) that abstracts ideas from their material conditions. Now, it is form which is the real object of human knowledge. The form of a dog exists individualized and materialized in a real dog; in this case, it has esse naturale. But it exists universal and immaterial in the mind; in this case, it has esse intentionale. This is where knowledge comes: when the form of a material thing comes to have esse intentionale as opposed to esse naturale.
• Divine knowledge; it is clear then that knowing is existence unlimited by matter, because it involves the receiving of forms immaterialy. Therefore, God has infinite knowledge: being completed unrestricted materially, God will be completely unrestricted when it comes to knowledge.

Now, what is it that God knows?

• God knows himself. God has no accidents and is identical with his nature; so all that is in God, is God. Now, knowledge is in God, as we have said. So this knowledge is God. Or, God and his knowledge are the same. In people, on the other hand, subject and object of knowledge are distinct (people can learn or become ignorant). Important: since God knows supremely, he does not proceed from ignorance to knowledge: God sees everything at once and not successively.
• God knows creatures through his essence. If God has self-knowledge, he knows perfectly his powers. Now the power of a thing cannot be known perfectly unless the objects to which the power extends are known. Hence, since the divine being extends to other things by being the first cause which produces all beings, God must know things other than himself.
• God knows individuals. God knows the differences between things in the world, because knowing generically and not specifically is to know imperfectly.
• God knows future contingents. This is because he changelessly knows himself as the Maker and sustainer of his creatures. Now, how can we reconcile this with free will? The key of Aquinas' answer is that God must be wholly outside the order of time. God sees everything as it is in itself, not as if it were future relative to his view. For example: I know that you are talking to me now. It does not follow from the fact that I know this that your talking to me is necessitated. So God knows all events in a way similar to the knowledge (which is certain) of facts that happen before us in the present (although for us events succeed each other in time).
• God's knowledge is the cause of creatures. This is clearly because there is no potentiality in God, so his knowledge cannot be dependent on creatures, and God is the first cause of things being changed.

Hughes argues though that this view of God's knowledge causes events in the universe, which leads to determinism. So he says that God's knowledge is not causal (it depends on what happens in the universe), which is against the thomistic definition of a perfect God. It seems to me that Aquinas tries to avoid exactly Hughes' argument. Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that Hughes is using categories that apply to a time-bound entity (future knowledge), while Aquinas says (and this is the key to his argument) that God is timeless.

Pike, on the other hand, thinks of an everlasting (= in time) God. But in this case (not in Aquinas') an omniscient God is a threat to free will. If God is everlasting but does not know the future, this preserves human freedom but is a radical change from the traditional concept of God's omniscience.

Vardy, indeed, considers two possibilities for what regards freedom:

• liberty of indifference, that is, genuine freedom: God cannot know our future choices, but he is omniscient in the sense that he knows everything which is logically possibile to know (Swinburne).
• liberty of spontaneity, that is, we are free to do whatever we wish, but what we actually wish is determined by our nature, background and education. So God could know our future free actions as these would be determined by our nature.

This is a list of some objections or difficulties that have been raised with regard to God's omnipotence:

• he cannot be omnipotent because he cannot change
• he cannot sin or deny himself
• if "God is omnipotent" means that God can do even what seems to us to be logically impossible, why did he not create a world in which human beings freely choose to do what is right in every occasion?
• the paradox of the stone: "Is God able to create a stone too heavy for him to lift?"

Now, this is Aquinas on omnipotence:

1. we can distinguish between 2 types of "power": active power (I can play tennis) and passive power (I can be kissed). There is no passive power in God, since he is wholly active and lacking in potentiality. Said otherwise,
   
   he cannot be acted on or affected by something other than himself.
   Therefore, God cannot change.

   God cannot bring about what is contradictory. This is because what is contradictory cannot be, and God's power ranges over what can be. So, for example, God cannot change the past, for the past not to have been implies a contradiction. This solves for example paradox of the stone: it would be contradictory for an omnipotent being to make a thing too heavy for him to lift.

   God cannot do all the things that other agents can do. For example, he cannot get drunk, or he cannot sin (sin involving a failure in act -- sin implies mutability and falling short of the perfect good).

So, God's power needs to be understood in the light of the fact that

his proper effect is existence

IOW, God is all-powerful because he can do what is absolutely possible = can bring about whatever can exist without any logical impossibility being involved. That is, if something could be, then God can bring it about.

The revisionist's concept of God's omnipotence assumes that God is no longer thought to be a personal being. This seems to mean that it is now human beings rather than God who are said to be powerful; they have the power to confront [not necessarily win] adversities, to follow a religious life and to work for the good of others. This is quite removed from the traditional concept of omnipotence, though.

Permalink  | Posted by Davide Salomoni @ 17:27  | 1 comments

First of all, the assumption is that the universe has to be explained (Russell would say "It's just there").

There are three points to the kalam argument:

1. The universe had a beginning
2. The universe was caused
3. This cause was personal

With regard to the first point, it is important to make a distinction between an actual infinite and a potential infinite.

We call actual infinite a timeless totality which neither increases nor decreases in the number of elements it contains. As is clear from the theory of infinite sets, a subset of an infinite set contains an infinite number of elements (i.e. this set can be put in a 1-1 correspondence with the actual infinite).

We call potential infinite a series that increases the number of its elements by addition. In this case obviously there is no 1-1 correpondence between a subset and the potential infinite.

Having said that, it seems that point 1 is warranted by at least the following arguments:

• the fact that an actual infinite cannot exist in the real world. IOW, it is not possible to instantiate an actual infinite in time. In time is the keyword here. Indeed: a dimention of the universe is time; if an actual infinite existed, then one can conceive the universe as beginningless; then an infinite numbers of events would have occurred in time. But if some of these were collected into a set, this set would have to have an infinite number of members. But it does not seem possible that this occurs in the real world. From the fact that we have a mathematic theory of infinite numbers does not follow that this theory applies to the real world (similarly, we can think of many geometries of the space, but not all of them have a real correspondence in the world).
• the medieval argument about the impossibility of traversing an actual infinite, assuming (against the point above) that this existed. This argument says that if an actual infinite exists, it must occur all at once. If this is not the case, then the actual infinite is in time, which means that it is a series with successive additions, which is a potential infinite (not an actual infinite), so the past would contain a finite (not infinite) number of events, so it had a beginning. I am not sure that saying that "we cannot count to infinity" enforces the argument against the possibility of an actual infinte.
• the Big Bang theory. It looks like the original configuration of the universe was a state of infinite density where all the mass, space, and time was contained in a single dimensionless mathematical point. One could counterargument with the theory of the oscillating universe model, but this goes against the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the fact that for this model to work the universe would require much more density (to account for the gravity needed to start the contraction phase) than it is found. I think that here there may also be problems in justifying causality at each singularity point (contraction/expansion).
• the 2nd law of thermodynamics: the entropy S of the universe is increasing. Since the state of max(S) has not been reached yet, the universe has not been there forever.

Point 2 seems to derive from the fact that everything that has a beginning is caused. Of course, following Hume, one can imagine a causeless beginning, but it does not follow that such a beginning exists in reality. On the contrary, with Anscombe we can say that we cannot separate the ideas of beginning from cause: we understand (give a meaning to) a beginning when we can understand its origin. I think a possible answer to this would be to claim that the universe is not intelligible (because we cannot understand its cause), but then one could question whether any intelligibility can be given to reason (and therefore to any reasoning, including the one that says that the universe is not intelligible).

On point 3, if we say that the universe began to exist at a certain point in time, and that this beginning was caused, then it must have been caused by the free decision of a personal agent. I think there is some ambiguity here in the term personal, though.

It is interesting to note a couple of objections to point 2:

• what caused God?

  If everything has to have a cause, why is God the exception? I think that a plausible answer is that God must be seen as timeless and changeless (following Aquinas); if these are characteristics of God (God is outside of time, does not change or evolve), then the requirement to have a cause does not apply to him.

• what about Quantum Mechanics?

  It seems that there are no causes at the QM level. This is not necessarily true: the interpretation of QM is debated on this point, we may well ignore causes of quantum phenomena, and finally this does not imply that events that occur above the QM level do not have causes.

Now, if the kalam argument is plausible, and to me it does seem plausible, what shall we think of natural theology? What of reformed epistemology? It looks to me anyway that point 2 is what could be doubted of the argument (perhaps at a very high price, but this is another question). On the other hand, one could disregard it altogether and work on an agnostic assumption ("it's just there").

I think Hick is right when he says that the world is religiously ambiguous.

Yesterday I took the Intertestamental Studies exam, and I hope to have done resonably well.

There are a number of things in the program I would have liked to cover more in depth: for example, 1 Enoch, Jubilees, 4 Ezra and Pirke Aboth. The Testament of the XII Patriarchs also needs attention.

All in all, it is an extremely interesting course; only, I found it quite difficult to cover all the examination questions in a decent way in the limited time allowed. One needs to stay clear of most complex and thorny issues and limit himself to general introductions. This is also why I did not choose any of the broad-scope questions (like: talk about the evolution of the concepts of resurrection/afterlife in the light of the set texts).

These are questions I answered:

• Comment on:
  • Dan 7 (the Son of Man passage)
  • 1 Mac 1:20ff (the spoiling of the Temple by Antiochus IV)
  • 1QapGen (wasf passage on the beauty of Sarah)
• Is temple propaganda an apt characterization of 2 Mac?
• Describe the organization of the Qumran community with reference to 1QS
• Write a critical introduction to one of the set texts (I chose Sir)