http://www.leithart.com Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:40:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, M. H. Abrams notes the influence of the Bible on Romanticism: “A conspicuous Romantic tendency, after the rationalism and decorum of the Enlightenment, was a reversion to the stark drama and suprarational mysteries of the Christian story and doctrines and to ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/19/apocalyptics-return/ Hume thought his arguments against miracles applied to prophecy as well.  Miracles cannot serve as proof of the truth of Christianity because miracles violate natural law and because our knowledge of them rests on unreliable testimony rather than direct observation.  So too prophecy: "What we have said of miracles may ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/19/prophecy-and-miracles/ Pharisees of course are mentioned throughout Matthew's gospel.  After Jesus' scathing denunciation at the temple (Matthew 23), they disappear for most of the rest of the gospel.  They appear one last time, along with the chief priests, asking for a seal on Jesus' tomb (27:62). It's fitting: The last time we ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/18/pharisees-and-tombs/ Joseph places Jesus' body in a "new tomb." New wine cannot be contained in old wineskins.  The new wine of the new covenant, the wine that Jesus will drink new in the Father's kingdom, cannot be contained in old wineskins.  So too, a new kind of body requires a new kind ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/18/new-tomb/ My colleague Jonathan McIntosh writes the following in response to my post quoting Aristotle's statement about wonder as the beginning of philosophy: "on your quote from Aristotle on wonder, I like to juxtapose this with another passage from a little later in the Metaphysics in which he writes: 'It is necessary, however, ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/18/aristotles-wonder/ Three women are mentioned in Matthew 27:56: Mary Magdalene, another Mary, identified as "the mother of Jakobos and Joses," and the unnamed mother of James and John.  Who is the second Mary? Matthew 13:55 is the only other reference to these names, Jakobos and Joses, and their mother.  There, the mother ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/18/mary/ The women who come from Galilee minister to Jesus along the way (27:55).  They take the place of angels, who minister to Jesus after the devil has tempted Him (4:11).  They are daughters of Peter's mother-in-law, who rises and ministers to Jesus and the disciples (8:15). They are among the sheep, ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/18/ministering-to-jesus/ The women of Matthew 27 are the only ones in Matthew's gospel to behold (theoreo) anything (27:55 and 28:1 are the only uses of the verb). Women theorists.  What will Matthew think of next? http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/18/theoria/ Magdalene has plausibly been linked with Migdal-el (Joshua 19:38), one of the fortified cities in the tribal area of Naphtali.  Migdal-el means "Fortress" of God.  Mary from Magdala is a tower of God. What does that mean?  Perhaps many things, but it puts one in mind of the descriptions of the ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/18/mary-the-tower/ Where'd the Galilean women of Matthew 27:55 come from?  The only other references to a group of women, the only uses of the plural of gune occur in Matthew 14:21 and 15:38.  They are the women included among the 5000 and 4000 who are fed in the "desolate place" near ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/18/women-from-galilee/ A group of women from Galilee suddenly appears in Matthew 27:55.  They are "beholding from a distance" (makrothen), having "followed" Jesus (eklouthesan). This is precisely the description given of Peter in 26:58: When Jesus is arrested, he too "follows Him at a distance" (ekolouthe auto apo makrothen).  The women have not ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/18/replacing-peter/ Near the beginning of the Metaphysics, Aristotle notes that "it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about greater matters. . . . A man who ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/17/wonder/ "All men by nature desire to know.  An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses."  So Aristotle.  Jonathan Lear glosses: "That we take pleasure in the sheer exercise of our sensory faculties is a sign that we do have a desire for knowledge." Obviously, Aristotle is talking ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/17/desire-and-knowledge/ Frank Smith (Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classrooms) says that authors teach children to read: "Not just any authors, but the authors of the stories that children love to read, that children often know by heart before they begin to read the story.  This prior knowledge or ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/17/learning-to-read/ The Targum on the Song of Songs, deftly translated and annotated by Philip Alexander (The Targum of Canticles: Translated, With a Critical Introduction, Apparatus, and Notes (Aramaic Bible)), has its amusing oddities.  The bride in the cleft of the rock in 2:14 is Israel at the Red Sea, hemmed in ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/17/song-of-israel/ In an 1837 exchange on the interpretation of the Song of Songs in The Congregational Magazine, one James Bennett argued that the Song had to be interpreted allegorically because a literal interpretation made the woman sound immodest: "What writer, with the feelings, or the reason, of a man, would begin ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/16/need-for-allegory/ Stephen D. Moore (in an essay on "The Song of Songs in the History of Sexuality") notes that the shift from allegorical to literal/sexual interpretations of the Song is connected to shifts in understanding of male love.  Patristic and medieval commentators on the Song easily took the feminine voice of ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/16/turn-from-allegory/ Levin again: "Since, for Descartes, the senses are nothing but a source of deception and the body is nothing but perishable matter - that is to say, they are challenges, in both cases, to the power of the ego cogitans, the ego must 'abandon' them; the Cartesian ego is a ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/15/cartesian-pathologies/ Levin interestingly explores the question of whether human beings are completely determined by history by emphasizing human embodiment.  He plays off of Heidegger, who abandoned the "analytic of Dasein" in his later work because he had come to see it as a continuation of the metaphysical tradition he was trying ... http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/15/embodiment-and-being/ Merleau-Ponty asks, in Humanism and Terror, "What if it were the very essence of history to impute to us responsibilities which are never entirely ours?" A very Augustinian, covenantal question. http://www.leithart.com/2010/03/15/imputed-responsibility/