satyadasa

I was going to write something long concerning how Leviticus 19:33-34 and the literally dozens of Scriptural reminders in the Law and the Prophets that "the alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born" (NIV) should compel Christians toward advocating social attitudes and legal systems that make no distinction between citizen and non-citizen, but since this article [PDF] lays the research groundwork and says what I was wanting to say (and does so without me having to do a lot of work), I'll just make a brief comment.

Scripturally, there is much more to this than "love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt". There is even a commandment for impartiality between alien and brother (Deuteronomy 1:16) It's not only in the Torah but in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Malachi, and other of the Old Testament Prophets from which Christians have tended to draw more social principles than the Torah. It is also certainly not one of those groups of commandments that Christians believe to have been abrogated for Gentiles by the sacrifice of Jesus. This isn't eating shellfish. It's a social justice principle echoed in the career of Jesus and the transnational, multilinguistic missionary explosion of the early Church. Can a self-professed advocate for a Biblical basis for the law really argue that people have different sets of rights based on where they were born or what nationality they hold? Or do they have to admit that concepts like "legal", "illegal", or even "immigrant" have completely secular origins?

Will the large intersection of people who a. see themselves as Biblical literalists who would better apply Scriptural principles to law and b. act as {insert nationality here} nativists ever see the inconsistency of their position? Perhaps those who are honest with themselves will. I have seen more hope for evangelical progressivism in the United States during this election cycle than I ever imagined I would see. For many others, it will always be a matter of relying on a select few verses that fit pre-existing culture clash memes, but I can see a future for the above argument in some important circles. Equality for aliens has certainly worked for social justice in Judaism, certainly has been emphasized by a great many Christians, and has parallels in Islam, but could it be part of a wider Christian, transmonotheist, or global spiritual movement against the nation-state?

I picked up a book today from the box of uncorrected proofs that appears in our break room at irregular intervals. It's probably very, very bad (see blurb below), but as a part-Nebraskan neoyorquino I couldn't resist the title: The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle by Edgardo Vega Yunqué [Amazon].

Just laid off from Kinko's, dumped by his girlfriend, failed in all his career aspirations, and burdened with a particularly frustrating anatomical shortcoming, Omaha Bigelow finds salvation in the streets of New York's Lower East Side in the form of Marquita Salsipuedes, a nubile young Nuyorican homegirl equipped with an array of magical powers to cure his problems. Their misbegotten romance transforms him from a perpetual loser to overnight success, but magic may have a price. Soon Omaha must struggle to remain faithful, as he becomes ensnared in the world of an irresistible WASP law student and a sinister ex-CIA agent who just happens to be her father.

Uh, yeah… well, I guess it's OK to base book choices on comedy instead of quality when the books are free. But, you can't judge a book by its ISBN-free cover, except to judge that it's not for resale, of course.

Much better is the book that Kristi recommended (thanks!) and which I checked out Wednesday night: Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. It brings New Testament textual criticism to a popular audience—specifically the variations between manuscripts, their origins in the mistakes, corrections, and purposeful additions of human scribes over the centuries, and the theological implications of a text that always was (and always will be) the product of human error. In junior high school I spent a lot of time in the 200s section of Mid-Continent Public Library, reading John Dominic Crossan, Burton Mack, and John Shelby Spong on the authorship of the Bible, the historical Jesus, and, from Spong, the need to rescue the Bible from fundamentalism. These readings influenced me in my views of theology, history, and politics profoundly. I was already not a believing Christian when I picked them up, and I still had a long way to go before my views developed into those I hold now (I was also still reading and believing books about how Jesus may have made his way to Kashmir after escaping death at Golgotha, books that identified Christ with Krishna, etc.), but these works were a major step. Miquoting Jesus is a book in that great tradition; it reminds us that where original texts are not available (and they never can be for the 1st and 2nd centuries), history must be read backwards as well as forwards, and that theology needs as much historiography and paleography as history and philosophy. A somewhat lengthy quote:

The passage in question, 1 Tim. 3:16, had long been used by advocates of orthodox theology to support the view that the New Testament calls Jesus God. For the text, in most manuscripts, refers to Christ as "God made manifest in the flesh, and justified in the Spirit." As I pointed out in chapter 3, most manuscripts abbreviate sacred names (the so-called nomina sacra), and that is the case here as well, where the Greek word God (ΘΕΟΣ) is abbreviated in two letters, theta and sigma (ΘΣ), with a line drawn over the top to indicate that it is an abbreviation. What Wettstein noticed in examining Codex Alexandrinus was that the line over the top had been drawn in a different ink from the surrounding words, and so appeared to be from a later hand (i.e., written by a later scribe). Moreover, the horizontal line in the middle of the first letter, Θ, was actually not a part of the letter but was a line that had bled through from the other side of the old vellum. In other words, rather than being the abbreviation (theta-sigma) for "God" (ΘΣ), the word was actually an omicron and sigma (ΟΣ), a different word altogether, which simply means "who." The original reading of the manuscript thus did not speak of Christ as "God made manifest in the flesh" but of Christ who was made manifest in the flesh." According to the ancient testimony of the Codex Alexandrinus, Christ is no longer explicitly called God in this passage.

Elsewhere Ehrman makes the point that where two different Gospels have the exact same quote of Jesus, it isn't necessarily due to a common source (the famous Q) being used, but due to the ubiquitous tendency of scribes to correct both to the one they liked better, because "of course" the strange one would be an "error." His scholarship of Greek brought him from his teenage embrace of biblical literalism in Lawrence, Kansas to a much more sober view (and a much more respectable basis within which to remain religious, if that's what one wants to do). Sadly, it's a path that will be followed by few others. May his book help a few at least.