(...I can't teach any Sunday School lessons to kids with a straight face, which is why Mom now lets me stay out in the hall and write fic and only come in to help with the crafts and snack. :P )
Being a pastor, I don't really have that choice. (Although teaching songs is my best part of working with kids, I have to do everything, or be able to train others to do it.)
And you *really* should not have missed the naked (or possibly nekkid*) guy in Mark. There's a poem by Robert Cording that I heard back in 2003 that is my favorite Christian poem about that passage. (The Man Running Naked Into the Dark)Have you ever read the "secret Gospel" stuff?** A professor in seminary found out I liked that poem and read the "secret Gospel" excerpts aloud to the class. I had trouble keeping anything resembling a straight face. It was slashier than anything in Scripture, even more so than David and Jonathan, and hearing a middle aged professor read it in the middle of class was ... gah. I mean, you don't need slash goggles, you need straight goggles to see it as anything other than slash. I am always surprised that nobody in fandom has taken it yet and ficced it. Though I am grateful; I can read a lot of other sacrilegious stuff and not be bothered, but I Do Not Want to read about Jesus having sex. With anyone, of any gender. Just, no.
*One of my seminary professors (originally from Texas, with a Southern accent that came and went depending on what he was talking about), used to say that "naked" is being without clothes. "Nekkid" is being unclothed with intent
**fragments of a letter of a leader of the early church denouncing the use certain pieces of a "secret Gospel of Mark" were being put to. I don't know enough about the letter and the guy who found the copy of it to decide whether it was a forgery, but if it is genuine I don't believe the "secret Gospel" itself is genuine. It was probably a Gnostic attempt to insert their own beliefs (i.e. that there is secret knowledge that only the enlightened have, and that's the way to enlightenment/salvation, and it's hidden from the world) into the Gospel least hospitable to them. The entire idea of a "Secret Gospel" is a perfect example of a Gnostic idea--their name means "secret knowledge!"--and Mark has the least gnostic overtones of any of the Gospels. (Sure, he's got the "messianic secret", but not much "only the inner circle can understand this" because by and large the disciples in Mark consistently misunderstand *everything* even when Jesus is explaining things plainly. Also, the gnostics believed matter was evil, therefore in their interpretation Jesus wasn't really human, he was a spirit that looked human, but Mark's gospel is consistently the earthiest of the four gospels.) I mean, if it were supposedly fragments of, say, John, with all its erudite theology and spiritual discourse, I would be much more accepting.
The gnostics were an Eastern syncretic religion/philosophy floating around the Ancient Near East, particularly from the first or second century or so BCE to about the 7th or 8th century CE. They were prone to taking whatever the religion of the area was and arranging/reinterpreting it to fit their beliefs. There were quite a lot of "Christian" gnostics, who appropriated the stories of Jesus, so that's what we tend to focus on today, but there were also quite a lot of, say, traditional Egyptian religion gnostics, and traditional Greek pagan gnostics as well. (In fact, most "Christian" gnostics started out as Egyptian-gnostics and just added in Christian ideas and stories to the mix.) And the majority of Christians were quite consistent about denouncing gnosticism as heretical, far more consistently than just about any other heresy I can think of. Mostly because several of the main tenets of gnosticism mean that some of the critical aspects of those stories are interpreted just about exactly opposite of what Christians believe. Which is why the current fascination with gnosticism annoys me; it is not and never was Christian! If you like it as a philosophy, that's fine--just don't try to tell me it was the true religion of the ancient Christians that got suppressed in a huge conspiracy by evil church leaders.
RANT: The people who subscribe to any of the great Christian Conspiracy theories have no clue a) how diverse the river of Christian tradition really is, b) how many different branches of it there are and have been since the very beginning, and c) how incredibly unlikely it is that they would have been willing to cooperate together to suppress anything effectively, given their historical and theological disputes. I mean, the Roman Catholic church from about 900-1500 might have been able to get away with that in Europe. But even that's not a given, considering how much infighting there was, and the various Orthodox branches and the younger Protestant churches have never been anywhere near unified or hierarchical enough to do it. Given all of that, if just about every major Christian leader from every branch of the tradition who had to deal with a particular issue said "that's not Christian, no matter what stories of ours you appropriate," it's not a conspiracy, it really isn't Christian. Also, conspiracy implies secrecy, and these battles were fought out in the open for everyone to see, with publicly circulated letters and lots of sermons on the subject.
no subject
Being a pastor, I don't really have that choice. (Although teaching songs is my best part of working with kids, I have to do everything, or be able to train others to do it.)
And you *really* should not have missed the naked (or possibly nekkid*) guy in Mark. There's a poem by Robert Cording that I heard back in 2003 that is my favorite Christian poem about that passage. (The Man Running Naked Into the Dark)Have you ever read the "secret Gospel" stuff?** A professor in seminary found out I liked that poem and read the "secret Gospel" excerpts aloud to the class. I had trouble keeping anything resembling a straight face. It was slashier than anything in Scripture, even more so than David and Jonathan, and hearing a middle aged professor read it in the middle of class was ... gah. I mean, you don't need slash goggles, you need straight goggles to see it as anything other than slash. I am always surprised that nobody in fandom has taken it yet and ficced it. Though I am grateful; I can read a lot of other sacrilegious stuff and not be bothered, but I Do Not Want to read about Jesus having sex. With anyone, of any gender. Just, no.
*One of my seminary professors (originally from Texas, with a Southern accent that came and went depending on what he was talking about), used to say that "naked" is being without clothes. "Nekkid" is being unclothed with intent
**fragments of a letter of a leader of the early church denouncing the use certain pieces of a "secret Gospel of Mark" were being put to. I don't know enough about the letter and the guy who found the copy of it to decide whether it was a forgery, but if it is genuine I don't believe the "secret Gospel" itself is genuine. It was probably a Gnostic attempt to insert their own beliefs (i.e. that there is secret knowledge that only the enlightened have, and that's the way to enlightenment/salvation, and it's hidden from the world) into the Gospel least hospitable to them. The entire idea of a "Secret Gospel" is a perfect example of a Gnostic idea--their name means "secret knowledge!"--and Mark has the least gnostic overtones of any of the Gospels. (Sure, he's got the "messianic secret", but not much "only the inner circle can understand this" because by and large the disciples in Mark consistently misunderstand *everything* even when Jesus is explaining things plainly. Also, the gnostics believed matter was evil, therefore in their interpretation Jesus wasn't really human, he was a spirit that looked human, but Mark's gospel is consistently the earthiest of the four gospels.) I mean, if it were supposedly fragments of, say, John, with all its erudite theology and spiritual discourse, I would be much more accepting.
The gnostics were an Eastern syncretic religion/philosophy floating around the Ancient Near East, particularly from the first or second century or so BCE to about the 7th or 8th century CE. They were prone to taking whatever the religion of the area was and arranging/reinterpreting it to fit their beliefs. There were quite a lot of "Christian" gnostics, who appropriated the stories of Jesus, so that's what we tend to focus on today, but there were also quite a lot of, say, traditional Egyptian religion gnostics, and traditional Greek pagan gnostics as well. (In fact, most "Christian" gnostics started out as Egyptian-gnostics and just added in Christian ideas and stories to the mix.) And the majority of Christians were quite consistent about denouncing gnosticism as heretical, far more consistently than just about any other heresy I can think of. Mostly because several of the main tenets of gnosticism mean that some of the critical aspects of those stories are interpreted just about exactly opposite of what Christians believe. Which is why the current fascination with gnosticism annoys me; it is not and never was Christian! If you like it as a philosophy, that's fine--just don't try to tell me it was the true religion of the ancient Christians that got suppressed in a huge conspiracy by evil church leaders.
RANT: The people who subscribe to any of the great Christian Conspiracy theories have no clue a) how diverse the river of Christian tradition really is, b) how many different branches of it there are and have been since the very beginning, and c) how incredibly unlikely it is that they would have been willing to cooperate together to suppress anything effectively, given their historical and theological disputes. I mean, the Roman Catholic church from about 900-1500 might have been able to get away with that in Europe. But even that's not a given, considering how much infighting there was, and the various Orthodox branches and the younger Protestant churches have never been anywhere near unified or hierarchical enough to do it. Given all of that, if just about every major Christian leader from every branch of the tradition who had to deal with a particular issue said "that's not Christian, no matter what stories of ours you appropriate," it's not a conspiracy, it really isn't Christian. Also, conspiracy implies secrecy, and these battles were fought out in the open for everyone to see, with publicly circulated letters and lots of sermons on the subject.