How to be in the presence of Jesus

is the title of a piece I wrote for Daily Episcopalian published today. It was a sermon preached at Trinity Episcopal Church, Castine, Maine this past Sunday July 21st, 2013. 

Margalit Fox on Alice Kober and the decipherment of Linear B

In The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox (Ecco, 2013), the work of Alice Kober in deciphering Linear B is described. Margalit Fox is a senior staff writer for the NY Times. Her book is summarized here in the Daily Telegraph. Matti Friedman in the NY Times reviewed the book recently here and part of the review states:

Ms. Fox makes a case for Kober, the “unprepossessing” daughter of Hungarian immigrants, as the story’s hero. Her thick glasses, unstylish hair and prim mouth belied the “snap and rigor of her mind, the ferocity of her determination, and the unimpeachable rationality of her method,” Ms. Fox writes. Kober dedicated her life to solving the riddle, laboring at her dining table in Brooklyn, “ever-present cigarette at hand.” She never married, and her extensive correspondence, we learn, contains a total of two mentions of a social life.

There was hardly time. To aid her quest, she learned Chinese, Akkadian, Persian, Hittite and Basque, among other tongues, and eventually prepared no fewer than 180,000 index cards as she struggled to develop a system that would allow her to crack what Ms. Fox calls a “locked-room mystery” — deciphering an unknown script that an unknown society used to write an unknown language. A Linear B scholar was operating in a “linguistic terra incognita with neither map nor compass at hand.” Without a guide like the Rosetta stone (the multilingual inscription that finally allowed scholars to decode Egyptian hieroglyphs) the task was thought to be all but impossible.

That it turned out not to be is a testament to what the human brain, or at least the rare human brain, is capable of. In explaining the problem and eventual solution, Ms. Fox makes the complexities of linguistic scholarship accessible...

Margalit Fox describes her book as a six year project here. She maintains that Kober's work was "all but lost" and that her book is an antidote to "British male triumphalism." However, Fox's book is also reviewed by Jonathan Lopez in the WSJ on May 16th more critically: 

Unfortunately, Ms. Fox's claims about the neglect of Kober's legacy are exaggerated to the point of being misleading. "The Story of Archaeological Decipherment" (1975), by the British classicist Maurice Pope, is an authoritative survey of hieroglyphics, cuneiform and other ancient scripts decoded by modern researchers. Chapter Nine is devoted to the Knossos tablets and is titled "Kober, Ventris and Linear B"—amply demonstrating that Kober is neither unknown nor unsung in the standard histories. The very first (and still the best) book on the subject, "The Decipherment of Linear B" (1958), by Michael Ventris's friend and collaborator, the Cambridge University classics professor John Chadwick—Ventris himself died in an auto accident in 1956—clearly states that "Kober would have taken a leading part in the events of later years, had she been spared; she alone of the earlier investigators was pursuing the track which led Ventris ultimately to the solution of the problem."

You decide.

Pompeii in peril

The BBC reports on the perilous state of Pompeii, a World Heritage site, including recent collapses at the House of the Gladiators due to heavy rain. 

Same-sex desire & gender identity at the British Museum

Under "topics to explore" is "Same-Sex desire & gender identity" on the British Museum website. If you are around, there's a lecture on June 28th:

Lecture
A little gay history

Friday 28 June,
18.30–19.30
Stevenson Lecture Theatre
Tickets £5
Members/Concessions £3

Book online 

Phone +44 (0)20 7323 8181
Ticket Desk in Great Court

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Richard Parkinson, British Museum, discusses a recently published British Museum project on the history of same-sex desire.

The talk will explore issues raised by objects in the collection, ranging from ancient Egyptian papyri to modern gay love scenes filmed in the Museum, to ask a question that concerns us all: how easily can we recognise love in history?

In collaboration with Write Queer London.

Robin Lane Fox: "Alexander & the Gods" at the Hellenic Society

Judith Bingham's Hymn to St Paul

is on Choral Evensong from St Paul's Cathedral on BBC Radio 3 for 7 days. Here's more information about the composer Judith Bingham and from the BBC. 

"The Boxer at Rest" on view at the Met June 1-July 15th

One of the great masterpieces of Hellenistic sculpture is making a brief visit to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Made sometime between the late fourth and the second century B.C., this life-size bronze depicts a battered and weary athlete resting after a fight. The work is astonishing both for the gripping realism of the anatomy and the touching pathos of the expression.

Zenobia, Empress of Palmyra

Discussion on the BBC Radio programme In Our Time on Zenobia, (240 – c. 275 Greek: Ζηνοβία Aramaic: בת זבי Bat-Zabbai Arabic: الزباء al-Zabbā’) intellectual military leader of Palmyra b. 240 CE who became Empress of the Palmyrene Empire in the Middle East which she extended to Ankara in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), Egypt, the Holy Land to the Euphrates. Palmyra appears in the Bible as Tadmore (2 Chron 8:4; 1 Kings 9:17), fortified by Solomon. 

With Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at King's College, London; Kate Cooper, Professor of Ancient History at the University of Manchester and Richard Stoneman, Visiting Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Exeter. 

Prof Kate Cooper has some fascinating reflections after the programme: 

One of the most fascinating questions about Zenobia is what she thought she was doing.  Was the establishment of her empire intended as a revolt against Rome, as many believe? Or was she simply, like so many after her, trying to bring peace to the Middle East?

Roman Weapons and Armour in Water as a Religious Ritual

Classical accounts, the presence of specific water deities, and the archaeology of Celtic groups in Britain and Gaul suggest that soldiers stationed in the western Roman provinces witnessed and eventually adopted a strong religious tradition of water veneration, whereby individuals dedicated valuable military gear in water. Unlike the Celtic material, Roman helmets far exceed swords, and the highest concentration of Roman gear is found along the Rhine River, the frontier between Rome and Germany.

The hybrid Romano-Celtic deities and the similar practices in the deposition of arms and armor in water paints an interesting picture of Roman and Celtic religion and interaction from the first century B.C.E. to first century C.E. The religious practices of the Roman army did not take over and replace native Celtic forms nor did Celtic religion remain the same. The Roman practice of offering military gear in water was a result of Celtic interaction. The purpose and belief systems behind such a tradition varied across time and space. Celtic culture saw water as a life force, key to wellbeing and fertility. It is impossible to determine if Roman soldiers who dedicated their gear perceived water or their newly adopted ritual in the same way. Although generally, in practice, the Roman and Celtic traditions concerning water appears similar, different cultural and ideological backgrounds gave the ritual a distinctively different meaning.     

2011 Brandon Olsen article, Anthrojournal

A great discussion on the reception history of John 20

Recently, I sailed into a lecture room to do an Adult Education forum in a nearby church on the reception history of John 20 as "Ban and Blessing" continuing their theme of resurrection in the post-Easter season leading up to Pentecost. All the chairs were set up in front of a screen. In the centre of the room stood the LCD projector on a podium with all the connecting cables out and ready for my lap top. They had a Thunderbolt connector which connected to a Thunderbolt port on my MacBook Air. And we had sound through the sound cable connected to two loudspeakers. When the associate priest arrived, I was ready to demonstrate images and sound for the presentation. She introduced me to the IT guy whom I thanked profusely.

This is the way life should be.

I gave an overview of the presentation. How is it, I asked, that in the reception history of John 20, two contrasting strands of ban and blessing emerge: "Do not touch me!" and an encounter with Jesus in the garden?

We begin with a discussion of the composition and motifs of Titian's Noli Me Tangere: Imagine you had never seen this painting before, I suggest, what do you notice? We discuss colors and lines, the tree and the path to the village. We notice the half naked man with an implement in his left hand and the clothed woman reaching towards him. We try to determine if he has any scars from the nails on the cross (the image is small).

Then we go back in time to the Biblia Pauperum of the Middle Ages and discuss this image below with three panels. We discuss typology and prefiguring.

We notice cruciform halos (nimbus) around the head of Christ. And we notice a halo around the head of the woman in the centre panel but not around the head of the woman in the right panel.

We discuss landscapes and buildings, walled gardens, lanterns and jars, gardening implements and facial expressions. And the inscription recording the woman's speech in the right panel: ‘I have found him whom my soul loves; I will hold him and I will not let him go.’

Then we discuss the Song of Songs and the use of motifs around searching and finding the beloved in the garden to expand the scene of Jesus and Mary encountering each other in the garden. I play a motet, "Maria Magdalene stabat ad monumentum flores" and we discuss musical interpretations of John 20.

Finally we return to Titian and discuss how this single painting could be seen as blessing and ban at the same time.

This is indeed the way life can be at an adult education forum with good discussions and great energy. 

The relative novelty of the term "man" by Aysa Peraltsvaig

First consider its history merely within English over the past millennium and a half. Today, it is pronounced /mæn/ and means one of two things: either ‘an adult male person’ or ‘a person of either gender’. The latter meaning, however, is considered sexist by many, and is thus falling out of use. Words such as chairman, fisherman, and policeman are thus being replaced by such gender-neutral forms as chairperson, fisher, and police officer, just as mankind is yielding to humankind. But as the gender-neutral meaning of man is still evident in manslaughter and in the phrase no man’s land. As it turns out, the meaning of ‘an adult male’ is relatively new. In Old English (roughly, prior to the Norman invasion of 1066), this word—pronounced then with a vowel articulated further back in the mouth—did not mean a ‘male person’ but had only the gender-neutral sense of ‘a human being, person (male or female)’. The word acquired the sense of ‘adult male’ in Middle English. Prior to that time, an adult male was a wer, as distinguished from a wif, which then meant ‘woman (of any marital status)’, as it still does in idiomatic expressions like old wives’ tale and in the compound midwife, originally meaning ‘with woman (during labor)’. The word wer began to disappear in the late 13the century and was eventually replaced byman, which retained its old, more general meaning as it acquired the new, gender-specific one. (The term wer did survive, however, in such terms as “werewolf,” which make one wonder whether a female lycanthrope should be referred to as “wifwolf”.) Note also that the Old English man had additional meanings besides ‘person’, including ‘servant, vassal’, as in all the king’s horses and all the king’s men (we retain this meaning to this day). Thus, clearly the meanings of even “ultraconserved words” show considerable change over much shorter periods than 15,000 years.

Pronunciations of such core terms change too, as I indicated above with the shift in vowel articulation in man through the history of English. Within the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family, the reflexes of the reconstructed ancestral Proto-Germanic form *manwaz include Old Norse maðr, Danish mand, Gothic manna. In other Indo-European branches we find Sanskrit (Indic) manuh, Avestan (Iranian) manu-, Old Church Slavonic (Slavic) mozi. The latter is related to the Russian form muzh, found in the Russian version of the odd “Stone Age” passage above. This plethora of phonological forms in related languages is a result of sound changes, different in each family.

Source: http://geocurrents.info/cultural-geography/linguistic-geography/do-ultraconserved-words-reveal-linguistic-macro-families#ixzz2SuSX3u3Q

Now I am on a search to find Old English Bible translations!