Friday, November 03, 2023
.jpeg)
What A Pointless Exercise! - After All - The Authenticity of That Bit of Cloth Is Extremely Dubious!
This recent AI generated image offers a strikingly lifelike depiction of Jesus. CT.
Er, Yes. I think that I'll be giving it a miss, thanks.
Is Temu a Chinese company?
Temu says it's Boston-based with a headquarters on St. James Avenue. But it's actually owned by a Chinese-based company PDD Holdings. "The parent company is based in the Cayman Islands," Tran says.29 Sept 2023
Thursday, November 02, 2023
Give Thanks For Brexit!
Kemi Badenoch announces date for mega £1trillion Brexit trade deal.
EXCLUSIVE: Kemi Badenoch has revealed that she will be signing a major Brexit trade deal with Florida in two weeks' time.
A question to which so many of the left would not dare to attempt an answer.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1830436/hamas-israel-protesters-left
I Think We Can All See Where This Is Leading!
Living in Love and Faith discussions to continue ahead of next General Synod.
A group drawing from different traditions across the Church of England is to meet ahead of the General Synod in November to discuss next steps in the Living in Love and Faith process. CT.
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
Interesting Fact.
And then you’ve got a weary electorate, concerned about the future of this precious Earth of ours, but unwilling to pay more to achieve arbitrary green targets – not least when reminded that UK emissions have fallen by 49 per cent since 1990, despite the economy growing by 75 per cent over the same period. DT.
No Delays, Rishi! - Serious Funding Is Required.
Scientists create cancer-killing treatment they hope will annihilate most aggressive tumours
- Nottingham University scientists found the particles left healthy cells unscathed
- Around 2,000 people every year in England are diagnosed with glioblastoma
So. Where Was Nicodemus?
61 Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?”
62 “I am,” said Jesus. “And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.”
63 The high priest tore his clothes. “Why do we need any more witnesses?” he asked. 64 “You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?”
How Come So Many Namby Pamby World Leaders Do Not Know This? - Or Maybe They Know This Perfectly Well!
Their aim is the destruction of Israel. They say so.
|
Wednesday, November 01, 2023
The ECHR Is NO Place To Seek Justice.
Christian school shuttered by German government appeals to European Court of Human Rights
An award-winning Christian hybrid school in Germany is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights after the government shut it down for allegedly violating the state's "educational mandate." CT.
Read more:
.jpeg)
Who Was That Man?
Who Was That Young Man?
“A young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, was following Jesus. When they seized him, he fled naked, leaving his garment behind” (Mark 14:51–52)
We find this story in Mark’s Gospel right after the account of Jesus’s arrest, and it’s one of the least understood narratives in the entire New Testament. Scholars have described the account as strange, bizarre, confusing, enigmatic, and whimsical. But this two-verse story is in the Bible, so we have to assume Mark included it for a reason. Who was the young man, and—more importantly—why did Mark include this information about him?
(Un)Cloaked in Mystery
Most scholars believe that, like an artist painting himself in a corner of his canvas, Mark included a cameo of himself in his Gospel. The history of identifying this character with the author himself began with a thirteenth-century Coptic manuscript in which a footnote identified the young man as Mark the Evangelist (or as James, son of Joseph). But Papias, the early second-century bishop of Hierapolis, declared that “Mark neither heard the Lord nor followed him” (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 3.39.15) during Jesus’s lifetime. Others have speculated that the naked runaway was Lazarus, or Joseph of Arimathea, or a number of others. For some scholars, the fact that Matthew and Luke omitted this misadventure provides proof enough that it lacks any obvious theological meaning and that it is irrelevant to the purpose of Mark’s overall story.
What Was Mark Doing?
Such hypotheses and evaluations tacitly assume that Mark was an inept writer. But such a conclusion is unwarranted; of sloppy editing, Mark knows nothing. His work is the product of a sophisticated theological mind, assisted by the Holy Spirit, of course.
In fact, with this vignette, as with all of the scenes in his Gospel, Mark was doing something deliberate and purposeful, as narrators always do. Macbeth, for instance, is not a brochure detailing the history of Scotland, but a work that warns of the dangers of gaining a kingdom by losing one’s soul. Authors do something with what they say. Mark had a goal in telling this particular story. And to determine this “doing,” we must pay close attention to the text itself.
Symbol of Failure
The juxtaposition of the brief episode in question with that of the disciples’ fleeing is telling. Following the betrayal by Judas and the arrest of Jesus (14:43–49), all the disciples left him and fled (v. 50). Immediately thereafter comes this account of a young man who “followed Jesus” and who, when seized, abandoned his garment and fled. It is significant that this youth is described as one who “followed” Jesus. To follow was what Jesus called the disciples to do, and following was what they had been doing. “Following” is therefore a literary clue. Mark is labelling the young man as a “disciple.” The disciples followed; the young man followed. The disciples fled; the young man fled. Here, then, in the picture of the naked runaway, followers have become “flee-ers.” In Mark’s narrative, the ignominious flight of this anonymous sympathizer serves to underline the complete failure of Jesus’s disciples.
At one time these disciples had left all to follow him. But now, in the abandonment of even the shirt off this young man’s back, Mark shows his readers that the disciples have left all to get away from Jesus. The writer displays this naked runaway as symbolic of the total abandonment of Jesus by the band of disciples who fled to escape the consequences of association with him.
Shame of Abandonment
But why include this little scene? The only substantive fact added here is that the young man had an unfortunate wardrobe malfunction. His nakedness, mentioned twice, points to the shamefulness of the disciples’ abandonment. Those who had been called to follow had failed. They chose shame over fidelity to Jesus.
At the Mount of Olives on his way to Gethsemane, Jesus had warned his disciples that they would all fall away (v. 27). Peter protested that even if all fell away, he would not (v. 29); and the rest of the disciples vehemently denied the possibility that they would be faithless (v. 31). Yet, now, they fled.
Failure! And who among us has not failed in our discipleship as we follow Jesus? In one way or another, in some fashion or another, we have all fallen—in sin, in faithfulness, in courage, in commitment. And we continue to stumble in discipleship. Is there hope for us?
Exchange of Clothing
What is interesting in this cryptic story is that there is only one other instance of the Greek word for “linen cloth” in Mark’s Gospel—in reference to the burial shroud of Jesus (15:46). There, as with the story of our naked runaway, the word occurs twice.
What a clever narrative strategy! In utterly discreditable circumstances, the disciple is stripped of the “linen cloth” he wore, and following an equally degrading crucifixion, a “linen cloth” becomes Jesus’s burial shroud. The former garment, which represents shame, buries Jesus in death. In other words, Jesus gets the garment of shame from the young man. That, of course, is not to assert that it was the one and same linen cloth. Rather, Mark uses the cloth as a literary device.
The purpose for this device becomes evident when we read the announcement of Jesus’s resurrection (16:1–8). Another “coincidence”: there we find the only other use in all of Mark of the term “young man”—to describe the angelic reporter clad in white (16:5). The only reason for Mark’s unique appellation, labeling as “young man” the one whom the other Gospel-writers called “angel,” must have been to link the two incidents with “young man” in them, in Mark 14 and 16, respectively.
But this “young man” in Mark 16 wears no “linen cloth”; he is wearing white. Another “coincidence”: the only other instance of the word “white” in Mark’s Gospel is where the garments of Jesus’s Transfiguration are so described (9:3). Aha! So that’s where the “young man” in Mark 16 got his whites: Jesus donated his garment of glory to the “young man.”
It appears, then, that garments have been exchanged (in a literary sense, of course): the “linen cloth” the young man wore, that was stripped from him rendering him naked (14:51–52), covered Jesus’s body in the tomb (15:46). In exchange, the “white” garment Jesus wore at his transfiguration now covers the young man who makes the announcement at the empty tomb (16:5). In other words, the runaway’s garment of shame in Mark 14 becomes Jesus’s in Mark 15, and Jesus’s garment of glory in Mark 9 becomes the reporter’s in Mark 16.
The garment of shame of the “young man” buried Jesus; Jesus’s garment of glory restores the “young man.” All of these not-so-subtle literary sleights of hand point to the rehabilitation of the failed disciple: the naked, shamed one is clothed, and this with the clothing of glory of his master, while Jesus takes on the clothing of shame, the garb of failed followers.
This artistic portrayal of the exchange of garments bears an implicit promise: for those disciples who have failed in discipleship, God offers hope. Yes, there is hope for all of us who follow Jesus, albeit stumbling and failing, clumsy and hesitant. The shame of our failures is exchanged for the brilliance of Jesus’s glory, and we have hope indeed—because of what our Lord did for us. Amazing grace!
Editor’s note: At Dr. Kuruvilla’s website, homiletix.com/preaching-resources/abes-articles, you can find and download the original version of this article that appeared in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society.
Simply Brilliant.
The west's mass psychopathy moment
The Palestinian cause has destroyed the free world's moral compass.
 |
The massive demonstrations of support for Hamas on the streets of European and American cities, with baying mobs calling for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews everywhere while the liberal, educated classes are either silent or are actually supporting barbarism against civilisation, signifies a profound crisis for the free world.
This mass psychopathy moment has a number of causes. For now, let’s just discuss one of them. A principal contributor to this cultural degeneracy is support for the Palestinian cause.
This support is the default narrative for the “progressive" classes throughout the west. There are a number of reasons for this, including the “colonialist” anti-west narrative, antisemitism and the shallow and meretricious liberal article of faith that all actors in every conflict are governed by reason and self-interest, and that as a consequence every cause is negotiable and open to compromise.
This has led to the fixed belief, very much on show in the Biden administration and underlying all liberal discussion about the Hamas pogrom and the war in Gaza, that while there are “bad” Palestinians, called Hamas, there are also “good” Palestinians called “Gazan civilians” and the Palestinian Authority (PA) led by Mahmoud Abbas— who after this war is over must be assisted to realise their “legitimate” aspiration for a state of Palestine, which will bring this conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to an end.
This is all based on a fundamental and egregious set of errors.
While there are undoubtedly Palestinians in both Gaza and the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria who desire nothing more than to support their families and live in peace with their Israeli neighbours, the division between “good” and “bad” Palestinians is a liberal fantasy with murderous consequences.
In Gaza, despite the fact that the election there which brought Hamas to power was hardly free and fair, polling persistently reveals that a majority of Gazans support Hamas and that around three quarters of them support the killing of Israelis.
Once the scale of the Hamas pogrom became known, ordinary Gazan civilians were filmed in scenes of exited jubilation, handing out sweets to celebrate the murder of 1400 Israelis and kidnap of more than 230. Ordinary Gazan civilians were filmed spitting on and desecrating the bodies of the Israeli victims who had been dragged into Gaza and paraded around the streets. And ordinary Gazan civilians poured through the shattered boundary fence after Hamas had broken through and joined in the orgy of bloodletting and hostage-taking in the kibbutzim along the border.
Hamas may wear green bandanas and military fatigues while PA officials wear suits, but the PA’s aims and motivation are the same: the eradication of Israel and the waging of Islamic holy war against the Jewish people.
The PA make this plain time and time again. Their officials and preachers incite holy war to “defend” the Al Aqsa mosque against “Jewish destruction” (the utterly false and murderous Muslim casus belli ever since the 1920s); the state of “Palestine” displayed on the PA’s maps and insignia occupies the whole of Israel; and their preachers and educational materials teach their children that their highest calling is to murder Jews and steal all their land.
And these “good” Palestinians have been cheering on Hamas for its depraved atrocities and urging more of the same. As Nadav Shragai records in Israel Hayom, Abdel-Rahman abu Arab, a member of the Fatah in Jenin, described the morning of the massacre as a morning of joy, victory, and pride, and blessed the “heroic martyrs in Gaza”.
Abbas Zaki, a member of Fatah's Central Committee who had already admitted that “the goal is the end of Israel,” praised Hamas for the attack and threatened to crush the skulls of all the Jews and Americans in the region. Jamal al-Huwail, a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council in the PA, promised a “big surprise” in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) and hoped that the carnage in Israel’s border communities would be replicated there as well.
Palestinian Media Watch has been documenting more such reactions among the “good” Palestinians championed by the Biden administration and “liberals” everywhere. Mahmoud Al-Aloul, the deputy to Mahmoud Abbas in the PA’s dominant Fatah movement, exulted:
The blood of the [Hamas] heroes will turn into a curse that will remove this occupier (i.e., Israel).
A senior Fatah official, Iyad Jarrad declared:
We stand alongside our brothers in the Gaza Strip, because truly they are a source of pride, heroism, and honour for the Palestinian people.
While the Hamas pogrom was still taking place Fatah’s terror wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, rejoiced that the Hamas terrorists, were
recording spectacular epics of heroism and sacrifice,
while Fatah member Raafat Alayan lauded
the heroic operation that the resistance carried out on October 7.
In Ramallah, Palestinians chanted:
If you have a rifle ... you should either kill a Jew or give it to Hamas.
One of Fatah’s student factions, the Student Union Council and Fatah Shabiba Student Movement at Palestine Polytechnic University ,issued the following “request” about the Jews:
Allah, count them and kill them one by one, and do not leave even one of them.
Palestinian Media Watch reports elsewhere:
At the beginning of this war, PMW documented that Fatah’s terror wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, called to kill Jews and “strike the sons of apes of pigs... slaughter everyone who is Israeli.” A few days ago, the PA instructed all preachers to teach worshippers in the mosques that extermination of Jews is an Islamic imperative. Abbas’ own adviser on religion has defined the war as a holy war: “Jihad.”
One faction of Fatah’s Student Movement praised Hamas murderers as “Allah’s roaring lions” and called for terror in the West Bank. Other factions have urged Palestinians in the disputed territories to emulate Hamas’ massacre and carry out terror attacks against Israelis.
Moreover, anyone who thinks only Hamas is depraved should think again. In Israel Hayom, Shragai records some of the Israeli Jews slaughtered by “ordinary” Palestinians not from Gaza but from the disputed territories:
Hallel Yaffa Ariel, a 13.5-year-old girl, was slaughtered in her bed in her home on the outskirts of Kiryat Arba with a knife. Ori Ansbacher, a 19-year-old, was raped and brutally murdered in Jerusalem, and then her body was mutilated. Her killer gloated in his trial that “raping and murdering a Jewish woman is the most important thing I have ever done”. The Fogel family from Itamar was murdered in their home shortly before Purim in 2011. Yoav, 10, and Elad, 4, were strangled and stabbed, and Ehud and Ruth, their parents, who tried to save their children, were stabbed repeatedly in their neck, throat, and abdomen. The three-month-old baby, Hadas who was found because she was crying, was also killed by the Nazis (now it is acceptable to call them that).
On one Saturday night, a similar massacre took place in the Salomon family's home in Halamish. Esther Horgen was killed with a rock that crushed her skull. Shalhevet Pas, who was less than a year old, was executed in her stroller by a sniper. Kim Levengrond Yehezkel was tied up in the Barkan industrial zone and was then shot to death.
Few of these massacres were even fully reported by western media, let alone provoking appropriate reactions of horror and revulsion. That’s because many of these victims were Israelis living in the disputed territories. For western “liberal” supporters of the Palestinian cause and the “two-state solution”, such people are “occupiers” and thus aren’t even to be considered properly human.
Given this brutalised callousness, why should anyone be surprised by the “liberal” west’s current psychopathy moment?
Now people are asking whether Israel’s war in Gaza can be a “just war” if no settlement for post-war Gaza is being proposed. In The Times (£) of London this morning, Phil Collins argues that people like the US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, are urging a degree of restraint on the Israelis not on the grounds that their war is wrong in intent but that it cannot hope to succeed. He writes:
Prudence on this point is not just a problem after the fact. It is part of the moral case for the intervention itself. If an action has no feasible hope of success, the moral case for war is damaged… It is easy to see how the Israelis get into Gaza, but there is a fog shrouding how they get out. What plausible regime can Israel leave behind?
The precise composition of Gaza’s administration after the war is indeed impossible to see at present. However, this is to seek an answer to the wrong question. The solution to Gaza depends on the solution to the Palestinian issue, and that depends in turn on identifying the problem correctly. This is not, as the west tells itself, a conflict over the division of the land. It is a century-old jihadi and genocidal attempt to drive out the Jews from the ancestral homeland to which they alone are legally, morally and historically entitled.
This terrible conflict has been kept going by the west, which by supporting the Palestinian cause has indulged, funded, sanitised, legitimised and incentivised an agenda of annihilation, ethnic cleansing and murderous antisemitism.
The problem of Gaza will only be solved, like the Palestinian issue itself, if the west stops supporting the Palestinian cause -- and start addressing this conflict not as a fight over the division of land but as a genocidal war of extermination against Israel and the Jewish people.
Israel is fighting in Gaza not just against Hamas but against Iran. It is fighting a war for its existence against a genocidal enemy. That’s why this is a just war by Israel — indeed it could hardly be more justified. And the failure by the west to grasp how this has come about is why the west is now being convulsed by the forces of barbarism from within.
For it’s impossible to exaggerate the extent to which support for the Palestinian cause has destroyed the west’s moral compass. It’s not just that it’s been supporting an agenda whose aim, whether people understand this or not, is the annihilation of Israel and the murder of Jews. It is that it has produced a diabolical and deranged inversion of morality, which views genocide against the Jews as resistance and Jewish resistance as genocide.
As a result, the west has the blood of countless Jewish and non-Jewish Israeli innocents on its hands — and unless it purges this poison from its culture, its hands will be stained by yet more.
ZERO empirical evidence indicates a resounding NO to this silly and pointless fiction!
Did Joseph of Arimathea go to Britain?
.jpeg)
.jpg)
