#but the infancy gospel of thomas rules

[thebestestbat]

the only part of the bible ive read is i had to read some for english in high school. one time i told my mom i wanted to read the bible and she said "why?" i'm assuming because i would have to read it in english. i heard a few passages read out loud in armenian at sunday school (almost all at easter) and i remember a time i went like "um oh my god" but i dont remember what the line was...something about jesus's death i assume. but mostly i was worried that i wasn't allowed to shave my legs yet and i had to wear a dress

[whencyclopedia]

Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

In the 2nd century CE, as Christianity was in the process of becoming an independent religion, a body of literature emerged that scholars classify as apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. Apocrypha (Greek: apokryptein, "to hide away") are those books considered outside the canon, meaning that they were not included when the New Testament became official after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.

Pseudepigrapha ("false writing") were bluntly forgeries. They were written or pretended to be written in the name of a past famous person to provide credibility. Jews utilized this literary device, in their apocalyptic texts that pretend to be written by Enoch, Moses, and Abraham. Because they were in heaven, they were sources of both traditional and hidden secrets.

Christian religious expression encompassed ecstatic behavior, such as "speaking in tongues," spirit possession resulting in prophecy, and developed rules and regulations on uses of the body. Christian behavior was framed with the concepts of celibacy (no marriage contract) and chastity (no sexual intercourse) as ideal behavior. Charis ("gifts") were understood as gifts from the spirit of God. Scholars describe this literature as a particular point of view known as 'charismatic Christianity.' In these stories, the concept of charismatic gifts provided the background for the performance of miracles, healings, and conversions. All of the Christian characters remain chaste and celibate.

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas

People wanted to know more details about the movement. Only Matthew and Luke provided the birth story of Jesus of Nazareth, but then they moved directly to the ministry. What was Jesus like as a child? Did he know from the beginning that he was the messiah? The Infancy Gospel of Thomas answered those questions. The writer of this text remains unknown, but it was assigned to an early missionary named Thomas. For many modern Christians, the child Jesus is not what they expect; this is a portrait of what we would now deem a super-brat.

In the ancient world as well as the modern, people believed that great men must have had an unusual birth and childhood, where they showed early signs of being a prodigy. This was the case with the young Jesus. The text opens with Jesus playing in the mud (like all children). He fashioned the mud into birds which flew, but when Jesus played with the other boys on the street, he got mad and struck one dead. The parents came to Mary and Joseph with a plea to control their child, and so they tried to find him a tutor, but of course, Jesus was smarter than all of them.

One day a neighbor boy fell off a roof and died. Everyone blamed Jesus, so he then resurrected the boy from the dead (a preview of his later activity as an adult). This text does have a happy ending; Jesus went back and resurrected the first boy he struck down. The overall purpose of the text is to show the young Jesus (who has great power) learning eventually to control his gifts to be used for the salvation of humankind only and not his own interests.

Continue reading...

[ramrodd]

He's a Very Naughty Boy: The Infancy Gospel of Thomas

COMMENTARY:

Jesus grew up  despised as a bastard in a permanent rebuke to His mother. Jesus was the Scarlet Letter of Nazareth Jesus had super powers that He had to learn to command. Jesus was born like his predecessor, David, a total thugh coming out of the chute. David grew up killing wolves with a sling shot and the semi-step child of David is where the fresh DNA of Ruth pops up in the family treet. David was as beautiful as Micheangeo makes him out to be. And a congenital Gideon, the Patron Saints of the Green Berets. There is textual evidence of the blood libel historically : David cut off the dicks of 100 local gentiles as a wedding present.

Sociologically, there is two kinds of warfare relative to the profession of Arms and Robert E. Le. going back to Athens and Socrates i in Western Civilization: real warfare and true warfare.  The Gideons were the Jedi Knights of Israel: The Difference between the Gideon and the Jedi  Knights is the difference between the Gideons and the Roman centurions, who were the Gideons of the Roman Empire. The Gideons are creatures of a military aesthetic and the centurions are creatures of an identical military aesthetic as creature of the secular rule of law. Both the Gideons and the centurions were  servants to Yaweh< Queen of Battle, As a serving officer in a combat role, I was a servant to Yaweh, Queen of Battle. FOLLOW ME is the motto of the US Army Infantry for a reason . ,The issue isn't that you are Jesus, leading the way, it is that you are Jesus and/or David , trying to keep up with Yaweh, Queen of Battle into Hell. That is the nature of the Profession of Arms. All the water purity rituals of Israel began as a pantomime of a soldier, washing himself off after battle. My experience of the sort of competitive wrestling like Gym Jordan did and hand to hand combat is that, when you get in the showers, the amount of blood you wash off.

So, I think these Infancy narratives are absolutely authentic and mostly coincide with Ehrman's oral tradition model. The persistence of the residue from David cutting off 100 dicks of neighbors just for vanity persist  in the current oral tradition and documented by Henry Ford's antisemitism.

In contrast to Jesus, the Infancy Narratives of Krishna as the spoiled child, the Butter Thief. They knew he was holy and becoming enlightened in an It Takes a Village to raise a saint. well, the thing the capture oral tradition pre-Christian Jesus Followers. The Italian Cohort didn't realize they were Christians until it was dangerous to be a Christian. A difference between the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Luke is that Mark had no access to the Jewish population except Peter, while Luke was a foreign observer trained in medical observation who had access to the Infancy Narratives from the horses' mouth.     Jesus wasn't popular, growing up, and His relationship with Mary and his brothers was strained.  

I got to timestamp 12:3

9. More to follow. At least from the oral tradition, we are working from the same bage of the same book.

[santmat]

Talking Animals, Whales that Save Humans: Women Priests, Vegetarianism – An Early Christian Manuscript Holds Some Surprises: The Acts of Philip:   "For sanctity is the bridge for the souls of the righteous, and it abolishes the source of corruption. Therefore, raise yourself above the pollution of desire. Do not allow meat eating and excessive drinking of wine to rule in your members, lest your soul be cast in that mold." -- from chapter 15, verse 3, The Acts of Philip: A New Translation (@ Amazon), François Bovon, Christopher R. Matthews François Bovon and Christopher Matthews utilize manuscript evidence gathered within the last half-century to provide a new translation of the apocryphal Acts of Philip. Discovered by Bovon in 1974 at the Xenophontos monastery in Greece, the manuscript is widely known as one of the most unabridged copies of the Acts yet discovered. Bovon and Matthews' new translation incorporates this witness to the Greek text, which sheds new light on the history of earliest Christianity. François Bovon has spent many years peering into the mists that shroud the early history of Christianity. His investigations have shown him something that might surprise nonscholars that even in the religion's infancy, when the first generation of Christians were spreading the faith, diversity of belief was already the norm rather than the exception. “The usual view is that in the beginning was unity and then schisms developed. Now we have to say that in the beginning there were several communities that differed significantly from one another,” Bovon said. Bovon, the Frothingham Professor of the History of Religion at the Divinity School, has made a major contribution toward clarifying our picture of the early Christian world with his publication of a 4th-century text describing the acts of the apostle Philip. The manuscript describes a community of celibate vegetarians in which both women and men functioned as priests. Bovon and his colleague Bertrand Bouvier of the University of Geneva discovered the manuscript in a monastery library on Mt. Athos in Greece. That they found the manuscript at all is a testimony to Bovon's finely honed detective skills. While examining a catalog of the monastery's holdings, the Swiss-born scholar noticed that a Greek word in the title of a manuscript was plural rather than singular. “Only one letter, and yet it makes a great difference.” The word was praxeis, meaning “acts". The word jumped out at Bovon because most of the other known manuscripts chronicling the career of the apostle Philip record only one praxis or “act,” that of Philip's martyrdom “It was an invitation to me, to find out what was behind that plural.” Philip is mentioned several times in the New Testament, but little is known about him from canonical sources. But there is more information about Philip and other first-generation Christian missionaries in a body of literature known as The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, comprising stories that were eliminated from the New Testament by 4th-century editors. Both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches have tended to preserve these accounts, even though they do not have the status of sacred scripture. This is because the apostles (except for Judas Iscariot) are also saints, and in order to celebrate their feast days, the churches needed information about their lives on which to base ceremonial and iconographic traditions. But these apocryphal texts have themselves been subject to editing by Church authorities in order to bring the liturgical and theological elements in line with orthodox doctrine. The revisions tend to leave out passages that reveal the diversity of practice and belief that characterized early Christianity. “As scholars, we would like to go back before these revisions were made,” Bovon said. Recovering this earlier narrative of Philip's ministry involved something very much like a journey through time. The monastic community of Mt. Athos is a world unto itself, residing on a narrow, rocky peninsula that reaches into the Aegean like a bony finger. At its tip is Mt. Athos, a peak of white marble 6,670 feet in elevation. Along the coast are some 20 Orthodox monasteries that govern the peninsula as an autonomous theocracy. There are no automobiles, little electricity, and by a 1060 edict of the Emperor Constantine Manomachos, which is still in force, neither women nor female domestic animals are permitted to set foot on the monasteries' territory. There is evidence that the first Christian hermits arrived at Mt. Athos in the 7th century, driven out of Constantinople by the Muslims. According to legend, however, the place became a sacred sanctuary in 49 A.D. when a boat bearing the Virgin Mary was blown off course and landed on its shores. At the time, the peninsula contained many pagan shrines, but upon Mary's arrival, these spontaneously crumbled, and a stone statue of Apollo spoke out, declaring itself to be a false idol. Bovon found the manuscript describing Philip's exploits in the Xenophontos monastery, founded in the 10th century. The manuscript was copied in the 14th century, but the original text dates from the fourth century and itself reflects earlier traditions. These traditions are different in many ways from later Church practices. For example, instead of the Eucharist with its ceremonial consumption of bread and wine, Philip's fellow Christians simply sat down to a common meal of vegetables and water. Church leadership was democratic rather than hierarchic, and men and women served equally as priests. In fact, the manuscript describes Philip and the apostle Bartholomew traveling from town to town with Philip's sister, a woman named Mariamne. Bovon believes this woman to be Mary Magdalene. The community described in The Acts of Philip also seemed to follow ascetic practices more extreme than those reflected in New Testament sources. The group insisted on strict vegetarianism and sexual abstinence among its members. “The asceticism was not just a moral issue,” Bovon said. “They believed that living a pure life was a way to better communicate with God.” According to Bovon, the historical Philip along with Stephen and other disciples represented a distinct group of early Christians composed of Greek-speaking Jews centered in Antioch, whose mission was directed largely toward the pagan world. These are the so-called Hellenists of the canonical New Testament book of Acts. Scholars have identified two more groups active in Jerusalem, one led by Peter and another by James, the brother of Jesus. A fourth group, based in Edessa in ancient Syria (now part of Turkey), was led by Thomas, who, according to legend, later traveled to India. Other more radical groups have left traces of their doctrines as well. For Bovon The Acts of Philip is one of many noncanonical early Christian writings that exhibit a fascinating diversity of practice and belief. The author of The Apocryphal Acts of John, for example, describes Christ dancing with his disciples. The Gospel of Nicodemus and the fragmentary Gospel of Peter assert that during the three days between his crucifixion and resurrection, Christ was in the next world preaching to the dead. Another rich source of information on early Christianity is the collection of Coptic writings known as the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, found in Egypt in 1945. Believed to represent a branch of Christianity called Gnosticism, which stressed salvation through knowledge, the Nag Hammadi manuscripts comprise gospels, prayers, sermons, and theological treatises which, like The Acts of Philip, represent a viewpoint “very distant from mainstream Christianity.” These apocryphal writings not only throw light on the origins of Christianity, they can be valuable for understanding early Christian art as well. Bovon regularly takes his students on field trips to the Museum of Fine Arts, where he identifies and interprets art works based on noncanonical Christian sources. A French translation of The Acts of Philip by Bovon, Bouvier, and Frédéric Amsler, a former research assistant and doctoral student of Bovon at Geneva, was published in 1996. In 1999 Bovon published with Bouvier and Amsler a critical edition of the Greek text in the series Corpus Christianorum. It was followed by the publication of Amsler's dissertation, a commentary on The Acts of Philip, in the same collection. A general study, The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, co-edited with Ann Graham Brock and Christopher R. Matthews, was published in 1999 by the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2000/02/women-priests-vegetarianism-an-early-christian-manuscript-holds-some-surprises/

[got-no-skill]

Fuck.

YES Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

Some more choice selections:

When Jesus made the pools of water to create and give life to the clay sparrows, an extraordinarily ill-advised bully decided to disrupt Jesus's mud pools:

"O evil, ungodly, and foolish one, what hurt did the pools and the waters do thee? Behold, now also thou shalt be withered like a tree, and shalt not bear leaves, neither root, nor fruit." And straightway that lad withered up wholly."

Later that same day, Jesus was walking down the street and someone bumped into him:

"Jesus was provoked and said unto him, "Thou shalt not finish thy course." And immediately he fell down and died."

Understandably the people of Nazareth were getting tired of baby JC ruling their town like a child told he was God and given literal Godlike powers to boot, so they asked Mary and Joseph to rein him in. To wit:

"Jesus said, "I know that these thy words are not thine: nevertheless for thy sake I will hold my peace: but they shall bear their punishment." And straightway they that accused him were smitten with blindness."

watching a video on the infancy gospel of thomas and baby jesus had the right idea

[id: an excerpt from the infancy gospel of thomas, which reads: "Becoming irritated, the teacher struck him. And Jesus cursed him and the teacher fell and died." /end id]

[pamphletstoinspire]

Part 7 - The Last Installment On Catholic Social Teaching: Solidarity, Part 2

Last time, in this space, we noted that the Church speaks of solidarity as both a “social principle” and a “moral virtue.” Further, the Church doesn’t hesitate to teach that the state has a role to play in helping to reform “structures of sin” into “structures of solidarity” — since such a task is simply more than an aggregate of individuals can achieve.

At this point, it is common for some to complain that the state intervening with the force of law (in some cases) to help alter structures of sin somehow makes it impossible for the individual to do his part too. But this is like saying the Civil Rights Act destroying the structure of sin called “Jim Crow Law” wrecked the possibility of private business owners hiring black people at a living wage. It’s like saying that if the state were to demolish the structure of sin called the abortion regime by overturning Roe v. Wade, it would ruin the economy by adding more workers and consumers to the capitalist system.

Still others complain that if the state creates a social safety net for the weakest members of society, this is “wealth redistribution,” and Scripture envisages nothing but personal charity as the way to provide for the common good. But, of course, the fact is that Jesus and Paul both tell us to pay our taxes — taxes are nothing but wealth redistribution for the common good. Paul insists in Romans 13 that it is the proper office of the state to provide for the common good. So long as it gets done and everybody benefits from the good thing our pooled resources help accomplish, what difference does it make if it was done through private charity or the work of the state? There are still plenty of opportunities after we have paid our taxes to help those in need.

This is not, however, to say that we are to then leave the work of solidarity and the common good to the state. On the contrary, the bulk of the task falls to us as husbands, wives, sons, daughters, workers, owners and citizens to make it our very personal and hands-on business to love our neighbors. After rendering his taxes unto Caesar, Jesus (who was so poor he had nowhere to lay his head) still found plenty of opportunities to go about doing good. It’s supposed to be the same with us.

According to the Church, solidarity has to be deeply personal, not farmed out to some faceless bureaucracy while we play couch potatoes. So the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church continues, “Solidarity is also an authentic moral virtue, not a ‘feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good. That is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.’”

This is what St. James is getting at when he says, “What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:14-17).

It’s the same point Jesus makes when he declares, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day, many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers’” (Matthew 7:21-23).

Solidarity is deeply threatening to much of Western — especially American — culture because we have deeply internalized the belief that “my rights” are the sole concern of law and the sole criterion of the good is “consent.” The idea that we stand in a permanent relationship of debt to God, to all who come before us and to all who come after us is abhorrent to many millions. Nonetheless, we are debtors, owing more than we can even imagine, much less repay. In the words of the Compendium:

“The principle of solidarity requires that men and women of our day cultivate a greater awareness that they are debtors of the society of which they have become part. They are debtors because of those conditions that make human existence livable, and because of the indivisible and indispensable legacy constituted by culture, scientific and technical knowledge, material and immaterial goods and by all that the human condition has produced.”

We owe our existence — and the existence of all that is — to God. But we also owe an unpayable debt to all who came before us and to the vast, interconnecting web of relationships that sustains us at this very hour. Without the civilization they built — without language, Mozart, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, the man who made the first shoe, the inventor of the wheel, the company who is making sure your electricity is on right now, the creators of the trucking network who made sure you got the meat for your Big Mac at lunch, the soldiers who stormed Normandy, your mom who taught you to tie your shoes, the Framers of the Constitution, the scribes who invented the alphabet, the people monitoring weather satellites, the nuns who invented hospitals, the people who discovered fire, the inventors of agriculture, the martyrs who died for Christ, the people who cooked up the scientific method, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, Shakespeare, Les Paul, Ed Sullivan and Gregor Mendel — you and I would be bawling beasts in a howling wilderness and in all likelihood would have died in our infancy.

But we don’t just owe a debt to those who came before us. We owe a debt to pay it forward, just as they have paid it forward to us. We owe this debt because God has commanded us to love one another as he has loved us. That is how the debt is repaid, and by repaying it, we love the God who needs nothing from us and to whom we can give nothing that is not already his. Similarly, when we refuse to give generously (and this includes, especially, the forgiveness of enemies), we stand at peculiar risk of facing the same judgment of the servant in the parable who, having been forgiven a debt of millions by the King, turns on a fellow servant who owes him a paltry sum and treats him mercilessly. When the King discovers his treatment of his fellow servant and his refusal to “pay forward” the mercy he received, the King condemns him — not for his sin, but for his refusal to grant the mercy he himself received (Matthew 18:23-35).

Therefore, the Compendium calls us to exhibit “the willingness to give oneself for the good of one’s neighbor, beyond any individual or particular interest … so that humanity’s journey will not be interrupted but remain open to present and future generations, all of them called together to share the same gift in solidarity.”

Most of this teaching is both explicit and implicit in the natural law: the law written on the heart — what J. Budziszewski called “what we can’t not know,” the law known as the Golden Rule. But in the kingdom of God, grace perfects nature and raises it to participate in the life of God himself. And so the Compendium tells us that solidarity reaches its climax in Jesus, the Son of Man, who joins himself to our humanity, becomes poor that we might become rich and becomes sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). As the Compendium says:

“The unsurpassed apex of the perspective indicated here is the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the New Man, who is one with humanity even to the point of ‘death on a cross’ (Philippians 2:8). In him it is always possible to recognize the living sign of that measureless and transcendent love of God-with-us, who takes on the infirmities of his people, walks with them, saves them and makes them one. In him and thanks to him, life in society too, despite all its contradictions and ambiguities, can be rediscovered as a place of life and hope, in that it is a sign of grace that is continuously offered to all and because it is an invitation to ever higher and more involved forms of sharing.”

In the kingdom of God, says the Compendium: “One’s neighbor is then not only a human being with his or her own rights and a fundamental equality with everyone else, but becomes the living image of God the Father, redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ and placed under the permanent action of the Holy Spirit. One’s neighbor must, therefore, be loved, even if an enemy, with the same love with which the Lord loves him or her; and for that person’s sake, one must be ready for sacrifice, even the ultimate one: to lay down one’s life for the brethren” (1 John 3:16 and John 15:13).

That is why the Church — and each of us — is bound to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world: because the ultimate aim of working for the common good is that each person become a participant, not merely in economic life, but in the divine life, a member of the Body of Christ.

Just as the point of Catholic economic teaching is that we become workers and owners of property as well as generous givers to the needs of others, so the point of salvation is that we become active participants in the work of God, not merely passive patients. So Paul teaches God has given each member of the body “varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:4-7).

For our destiny is that each person become a full participant in the joy of glorifying God, loving neighbor as oneself and the splendor of the new heaven and the new earth, where every member is given his or her gifts, as Paul teaches:

“… for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; so that we may no longer be children, tossed back and forth and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love” (Ephesians 4:11-16).

BY: MARK SHEA

From: https://www.pamphletstoinspire.com/

[thomasgmcelwain]

Foreword

Foreword

FIND truth, my soul, and do not flee away

From light that pains the darkened eye with day.

Is man the gauge of right and wrong, one man

Who rules, the erudite or strong, who can

Impose by arm or reason his own will,

Or even the free soul that's standing still?

I think not, my experience shows me

That human search has limits it can be.

If I am limited, it does not follow

That there is greater in the world to wallow.

But if there is One violent Beloved,

He may extend a hand, though it be gloved,

A hand of revelation in my need,

A word of knowledge and a loaf to feed

The soul whose barren corners lack the light

To know the right from wrong at the first sight.

Sweet Reader, dearest, take this book in hand,

And open it, and read, and understand.

It holds the words of One divine and true,

Called Allah, Ælohim, or God, or YHWH [Huu].

I sip the bright and glowing syllables

Of revelation, myth and miracles,

As some contend, but none of these describe

Those words to me. I see no lie or bribe,

But only billets-doux from the Beloved.

I answer them, cloved, cinnamoned, fox-gloved,

Rose-watered and in bitter lime inured,

Yet shyly pausing to pluck at His word.

Sweet Reader, dearest, take this book and read

The words of one Beloved, if you'll not heed

My flocked rejoinders. Meet the Sabbath day

With book in tow and in it lose your way.

I might cast curses on that education

That turned me preacher to the church and nation

That will have nothing of the words I say.

I speak to bare walls who once spoke for pay.

And yet I cast suspicion on the priest

Who eats his hearers' bread, offence increased.

Instead of bare walls I preach on to God,

Call Him Beloved who am made of the sod.

Since none stop on the corner where I preach

My livid rhymes, I'm free of those constraints

That hired bishops lay on self and each.

I live among wild creatures and their saints.

I thank that education that gave me

The languages to read the sanctity

Entombed in Bible and Qur'an for earth,

And taught me what a lexicon is worth.

With Hebrew text and facile dictionary

I can dispense with other commentary.

Caedmon alone in Saxon tongue was bold

To start the brave tradition of the old

Medieval singers of the divine Word.

Such troubadours but copied Arab style

That spoke Qur'anic language for awhile.

A pox upon Wickliffe's and Tyndale's curd,

Who turned the poetry to prose and thus

Began tradition of translating worse.

I laud the two, however, for their fame

Of opposition to priestly acclaim,

And setting every ploughboy on the hill

To knowing Scripture better than church mill.

The only way to translate's with the heart

And rhythmings and rhymings from the start.

But divine Word bears no translation well.

Its incarnation in body a spell

Quite failed to rend the veils and fill the earth

With knowledge of the Lord and of His worth.

Rather than a translation, I shall speak

Of sermons for the listener that I seek,

The barkings of a dog let off the leash,

The contemplations of a lone dervish.

I read the Massoretic text and take

The Byzantine or Received Text in stake,

Just as did those who followed good King James,

And so relieve myself of blames and claims.

I trace Apocrypha attached in Greek,

And add to this two other works I seek,

The Book of Enoch and of Jubilees,

Whose language is beyond my expertise

That must rely on Lawrence, Charles and

Josh Williams's edition out of hand,

But most upon delighted reading of

Ras Feqade the First's compelling love.

And so I here recuperate the narrow

Canon of Ethiopic church and marrow.

I hesitate not to redeem a few

More ancient texts that have freshness of dew

And speak of our Lord in his infancy,

Or like Clement affirm morality,

Or like Thomas reveal a secret word

Of what Christ said and of what then occurred.

Axum and Yemen must have taught the first

Of Muslim refugees what was not worst,

The popular faith, not official go

Of king, but that of peasant and the low.

This unspoiled, pristine faith by some called Jew

And by some Christian is retained by few,

And is expressed in Qur'an to guide to

Reform behind the sectarian view.

And so I take also Arab Qur'an,

And try its glowing words and put them on

To wear in English eight-step lines as brash

As any Turkish folk bard makes from trash.

My speeches to the Lord I make resound

In ten-step lines with some ghazel-like sound,

Although in both I sometimes let the measure

Run in a rhyme feminine for its treasure.

These freely singing sonnets from the heart

Reply to the Beloved from horse and cart.

I let the modern translator run prose

In pseudo-scientific power pose,

And take each word I taste as full inspired

No matter what the critic has admired.

The old scholars say faith arose in time

Through fear of ghosts or high gods in their prime.

Both evolution and diffusion make

Some errors that the new-come seems to take.

I lay off every theory and instead

Know that all faiths are of one power bred.

They all began once when a crowd complained

They heard God speaking on a mountain trained.

Some call the mountain Sinai some Redstone

Pipe Quarry, others have their grant and throne,

But all are right as far as they retain

The message of the Decalogue amain.

All is just book and visions of the wary,

The Torahs, Psalms, and Gospels, no doubt true,

Are ancient words repeated, ancillary

To that one revelation that will do

For all time, I mean Decalogue. That's all

We find in any book of faith that's call

Direct from God to multitudes to show

What is belief and faith and how to go.

To me the words are lovely things to hear,

That God is one, and yet He is so near

To me that I cannot see Him at all,

As I cannot see heart, vein, or eye-ball.

No thing can express Him in image or

Be object of my worship, but abhor.

His name is lovely to be called upon

In joy, in fear, in quietness and calm,

Who holds guiltless who do not call in vain.

Though He is always present, I can gain

No hiding place from Him, yet He appears

Each Sabbath day with happiness or tears.

He gives one duty only to be done,

Not great feats nor things tiring to be won,

But simply honour to one's mom and dad,

By doing so, one avoids all things bad,

In judgement has the chance to come home free.

He lovingly protects from harm by saying

Not to kill, not commit adultery,

Not to steal, and in bearing witness staying

Within the truth. But greatest satisfaction

Comes in not coveting another's faction.

The Bible and Qur'an have just one plot,

Examining the Decalogue's love-knot.

O pagan Christian, lay this book aside.

You've not honesty to bear truth, abide

In your Mithraic sacrifices and

Their festivals to sun on every hand.

Or else put off idolatry that wears

The false face of three gods in one for dares,

Put off your human sacrifice and cup

Of human blood you drink and then look up,

Put off your hate and criticism of

The sacred Word of God dwelt on in love.

Bow down in sacrifice of self this day

Of Sabbath rest held in repentance' sway

Instead of the emotions of false story,

Seductions of fanfare and churchly glory.

The dross of seven evils I replace

With gold of love to God, before His face

Obedience to His word rightly known

That He sent out from Sinai and His throne.

The first evil eschewed is pagan gods

Set in their trinities cast on the sods.

The second evil is the works of hands

Set up for worship, iron credo bands.

The third is Sunday worship, sun worship,

The fourth is priestcraft and bowing from hip.

The fifth is payment to the priest and crown,

The sixth is violence and killing for

The so-called faith and weal, and what is more,

The last is pride of power, seeking renown.

Sweet reader with a loving heart, read not

This book at once as in an hour taught.

Instead take it each day in sacred draught,

And after whirling holy names at eve

As Sabbath draws on, do not take your leave

Until you've made a portion of its fire

And calm one with your secret soul's desire.

A daily, weekly guide its pages are

To those who follow David's key and star.

The Baptist way of worship guides my hand

With prayer and song and preaching to the band.

The Torah is a song, the Psalms a prayer,

The Gospel and Qur’an preach to the fair,

And so the whole’s a Sabbath meeting’s share.

Beloved, God of the Universe, the One

Who stands alone in royal dignity,

Creator of the worlds and all things done,

Look in Your love and mercy upon me.

I put Ed Elwall's turban on my crown

And don his white and seamless Turkish gown.

I start my pilgrimage at Eden's gate,

Pass Egypt and fair Babylon with hate,

Bow at the Kaaba of my own threshold,

And penetrate the streets of Salem, old

And worn, kiss Ephrata's steep hills and fly

To Yemen and Axum beneath clear sky.

Beloved, God of the humble and the small,

Hear one poor dervish and his single call.

The camels and the caravans pass by,

The trains of pomp and wealth beneath a sky

Clear sunned. I walk my circle now alone,

No comrade here to share my wine and bone.

None hears my footsteps fall in sacrifice

But You alone, Beloved, and You suffice.

I lay Ed Elwall's turban now aside,

Take off the Turkish gown once donned in pride,

And naked step into the slaughtering ground.

The sighing of Your name's the only sound

That touches on my ear. Alone I whirl

While the great and the true come to unfurl

A flag of conquest and a seat of state.

Outside the fold I humbly kiss Your gate.

The wilderness about my ringing ears

Re-echoes with the sermons in arrears

E. Eckerlin recites into the wind.

Like his my fellows are both winged and finned,

Who can sit through the rhetoric of hours,

Day after day, night after night, in showers

Of jewels let loose from Your eternal Word.

I meet the lone dervish of beast and bird.

The man was satisfied to be alone,

Cabined in the woods, friend of earth and stone.

He was again in peace when others came,

Establishing about him halls of fame.

He lived to see the comers go away.

Still he was satisfied to stay and pray.

The most obscure of Your band is St. Beathan,

Not even certain which of two we mean,

Or if he is progenitor of mine

Or only mentor of my fathers' wine.

The Celtic hermitage beside the lake

Was where he learned in every beastie's wake

And taught the humble who came to his door

To pray to You, Beloved, upon the shore.

I too in centuries beyond his ken

Avoid the tabernacles of strong men

And sit between the lake and forest trees

And learn from robins and the bumble bees

To take my breath and nourishment from You

Alone beside the pansies and the dew.