God bless Swanie. RIP.

Eugene Swanson (Swanie)

Eugene Swanson (Swanie), my neighbor for many years, died a few days ago, on March 27, 2014. His obituary is here >

My wife and I moved away last summer; neighbors apparently did try to notify us, but somehow we didn’t get the news, and we were unable to pay our last respects.

We cared for this man very much, and as I think we all do upon the loss of a friend, we look back at how busy we were and wonder why we let that interfere with stopping for a moment to visit on the sidewalk or take over a home-cooked meal.

He was very good to Dee Dee. He frequently gave her little gifts, sometimes things he had in the house, sometimes things he went out of his way for, like the Big Boy coin bank pictured below, which is in Dee Dee’s bedroom today.

As you may be able to tell from his obituary, Swanie was not a religious man, but he was a kind and gentle soul, and an example of how goodness can exist apart from a religious belief; and that should give some of us pause who think our religious belief magically confers those qualities.

This is the coin bank he gave Dee Dee a few years ago, filled, of course, with his spare change. I took these pictures this evening as the sun set in Ada, MI, maybe 20 miles from where Swanie and I were neighbors.

Big Boy coin bank at dusk

Big Boy coin bank by smartphone flash

[2014-04-07]

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Everybody keep a tight bagel hole, now.

Hey, Mister Bagel Man, yeah, you, the guy that oversees the bagel balling and baking and bagging: Did you know that some of our favorite bagel toppings get a little drippy after that bagel is toasted?

Yes, drippy. Stuff like butter, peanut butter, cream cheese, Nutella.

If you close that hole up in the middle a little, that will keep our drippy bagel condiments from slowly and inexorably exuding onto the plate, thusly reserving each drop for our palates.

Then you can patrol the bagel assembly line like a general reviewing his troops and say things like, “Everybody keep a tight bagel hole, now."

[2014-03-31]

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When you’re feeling low in wintertime in Grand Rapids, there’s no place to go to be that old guy sitting on a park bench feeding pigeons, like in the movies, where people throw Frisbees and walk dogs, and little children come over and sit down next to you and share wisdom beyond their years.

There’s no place like that.

[2014-02-18]

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Sack of potatoes tied in the middle (and coal-burning furnaces).

When I do something kind that I know is unknown or soon forgotten, I wonder what good things that action might yield a generation or two or three from now.

But it’s more fun to think back to a simple act a hundred years ago that was observed by a child, who repeated it later, and so on, until it became my turn.

Likewise, when I do something I’m ashamed of, what horrible consequences will that someday have?

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File under Things My Dad Used to Say:

“You look like a sack of potatoes tied in the middle.”

He was not being unkind, and I never understood it that way. He didn't have a mean bone in his body and I never heard a disparaging word cross his lips. Kind people can joke like that and not be misunderstood.

One of the reasons I am noting this is that a hundred years from now, no one will likely know what a sack of potatoes even looked like, just as I couldn't tell you what a coal chute looks like, but I heard Dad talk lots of times about shoveling coal in his boyhood home when coal was delivered through a basement window. I can picture it, but I never experienced it.

(Homes used to be heated with coal-burning furnaces. The house I grew up in had a gas furnace that had been converted from coal; it still had a huge iron grate that you could peer through, very much like an old-fashioned locomotive steam engine you might recall from the movies.)

[2014-03-04]

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We seem to be wired to become small minded after a certain age.

Album cover of Parliament's 'The Clones of Dr Funkenstein'

We eventually become less receptive (and even hostile) to new ideas as we age. Every generation has a disparaging version of “Kids these days.”

When I was tween-ish, I thought the cover of Parliament's 'The Clones of Dr Funkenstein’ was among the coolest anti-establishment album covers I’d ever seen, sort of a funky twist on Kiss and Alice Cooper. I stared in rapt fascination at the hair, the girls, the platform shoes - not because they were peculiar, but because they were utterly magnetic.

Now at fmphn years old, I look at new music by Lady Gaga or Ke$ha or Lil Wayne (random pop/rap names I happen to be aware of) and shake my head; I just don’t get it, don’t want to get it, don’t care who does.

The last time I was excited about new music was the days of Nirvana, Soundgarden, Faith No More.

[2014-01-31]

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Stepping back from “The Jesus Discovery: The Resurrection Tomb that Reveals the Birth of Christianity”

Descent from the Cross, 14th Century, from the Church of Saint Marina, in Kalopanagiotis, Cyprus. Joseph of Arimathea is standing in the center, holding the Body of Christ. Read more on Wikipedia >

A few days ago I began a blog article on The Jesus Discovery: The Resurrection Tomb that Reveals the Birth of Christianity, by James D Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici (the same tomb behind the Discovery Channel documentary you may remember).

I had begun noting a few points of disagreement (I’ve footnoted them for those that are interested[1]), but after reading some alternate viewpoints outside the book, I took a step back and considered what the more interesting story was:

If you you can delicately upset popular convictions - not topple them, mind you, just tip them a bit - then you have the perfect recipe for outrage and publicity: “I’m not really destroying your mythology, just enhancing your understanding - you can still keep your myths and confront the evidence like I did.”

All you need is a premise and a little mystery, like an assassination and missing bullet, or enormous ancient structures built without modern machinery, or a hairy biped and a blurry photo.

If you read this, you’ll have enough info to settle your own mind: The Talpiot Tomb on Wikipedia >

[2014-03-27]

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[1]

Now reading (very slowly) The Jesus Discovery: The Resurrection Tomb that Reveals the Birth of Christianity, by James D Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici. The “resurrection tomb” is the primary focus but one of two that figure in the book. They are identified as the Garden Tomb (aka the “Jesus Tomb”, which was partially destroyed by construction) and the Patio Tomb (aka “Resurrection Tomb”  which is intact). The Garden Tomb contained a number of ossuaries (bone boxes) bearing the names of a man named Jesus and his family, including the inscription “Jesus son of Joseph.” Tabor and Jacobovici suggest the Garden Tomb holds Jesus’ family and the Patio Tomb belongs to Joseph of Arimathea and his family).

(A short background: All four biblical gospels tell us a man named Joseph of Arimathea got permission from Roman prefect Pontius Pilate to bury Jesus before the Sabbath, which began at sundown the same day he was crucified. Joseph of Arimathea is assumed to have been wealthy and influential (he could get in to see Pilate and buy fine linens to wrap the body). Joseph and Nicodemus and the disciples worked quickly so Jesus was prepared with spices and interred before sunset.

I look forward to continuing the book (which I’m reading for its archeological insight into first century Jewish funerary practices), but I’m skeptical they will be able to plug the holes in their thesis.

1. Level-setting: There’s no doctrinal reason I know of that, it it were learned Jesus had a family, Christianity would suffer irreparably. But even atheist biblical scholars (like former evangelical Bart Ehrman) see no evidence that Jesus had a wife and family of his own.

2. Most of the names of interest were common in Jerusalem at that time (there is even another unrelated ossuary inscribed “Jesus son of Joseph"). There have been ~2000 tombs excavated in Jerusalem dating roughly 1 BC-1 AD, but there is no way to know if is a representative corpus of data (ie, are those 2,000 tombs a fair representation of the social class Jesus and his family occupied?).

In my bible reading just last night (end of Mark 15 and beginning of Mark 16), there were 3 Marys mentioned within a few verses, all different and unrelated, and none of them Mary the mother of Jesus.

The Talpiot Tomb, aka Jesus Tomb and Garden Tomb. This is picture is from Wikipedia Commons, which reproduced it from Discovery.com here. Use of this image is Fair Use. It is being used for critical commentary, discussion, scholarship, or research. See this article >

3. Although Joseph of Arimathea and the others worked quickly, there’s no indication anyone had planned to move Jesus’ body afterward, especially to a family tomb, which would have been news since it likely already contained Joseph, Jesus’ father.

4. And if Tabor’s and Jacobovici’s assertion that 1st Century Christians believed in a “spiritual resurrection” and not a bodily one (making the Resurrection and physical remains compatible), there’d be no reason at all to invent accounts of the empty tomb.

5. Even Tabor and Jacobovici admit that cataloging and guarding the Garden Tomb after it was discovered were badly managed (to put it mildly) and important information was irretrievably lost. (At one point children were playing soccer with skulls and bones and an Orthodox resident went house to house collecting them and gave them to Israeli archeologists, though no one knows what happened to them after that).

6. The book is accessible and reads like a mystery, but so far there is far more speculation than fact. (Think Erik Von Daniken meets The Ten Commandments.) Tabor and Jacobovici just seems to desperately want the Patio Tomb to belong to Joseph of Arimathea.

This tendency is no more evident than when they speculate that the James Ossuary (unrelated to the Garden or Patio tombs) will prove to be genuine, but it was shown after The Jesus Discovery was published to be (at least) a partial forgery (James Ossuary on Wikipedia >).

That’s one of the risks of speculating with historical evidence: subsequent scholarship may cast your conclusions in a very different light.

7. If, after the last chapter, this all comes down to names and symbols inscribed on ossuaries, there really is no story at all:

“Peter Lampe, professor of New Testament Studies at the University of Heidelberg and working in archaeology, pointed out that in the 120s/130s C.E. in the port town of Maoza at the southern end of the Dead Sea one Jewish household comprised the following names: Jesus, Simon, Mariame, Jacobus and Judah (Papyri Babatha 17 from 128 C.E.; 25-26 and 34 from 131 C.E.). These people had nothing to do with the New Testament or the Talpiyot tomb. ‘According to the rationale of the filmmakers, these people should not have existed.’   Source >

[2014-03-24]

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