Tuesday 20 February 2018

Toomas Karmo: The Greek Interlinear NT and Mark's Anointing Narrative

Quality assessment:

On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his  grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 3/5. Justification: Kmo was able to be post a reasonable set of thoughts, but within a frame of reference narrower than in those of his postings which are graded at 4/5 or 5/5.

 
Revision history:
 
All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné,  a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 5 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 2 hours. 
  
  • 20180221T0045Z/version 3.0.0: Kmo finished converting his fine-grained outline into coherent full-sentences prose. He reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosrmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented version 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.3, ... .
  • 20180220T2235Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo uploaded a fine-grained outline. He hoped to finish converting this into coherent full-sentences prose, through a series of incremental uploads, over the coming 3 hours.
  • 20180220T1742Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo, already running around 12 hours late, had time to upload just a coarsegrained outline. He hoped to updgrade this later in the day into a finegrained outline, and still later in the day into polished full-sentences prose.
[CAUTION: A bug in the blogger server-side software has in some past months shown a propensity to insert inappropriate whitespace at some points in some of my posted essays. If a screen seems to end in empty space, keep scrolling down. The end of the posting is not reached until the usual blogger "Posted by Toomas (Tom) Karmo at" appears. - The blogger software has also shown a propensity, at any rate when coupled with my erstwhile, out-of-date, Web-authoring uploading browser, to generate HTML that gets formatted in different ways on different downloading browsers. Some downloading browsers have sometimes perhaps not correctly read in the entirety of the "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS) which on all ordinary Web servers control the browser placement of margins, sidebars, and the like. If you suspect CSS problems in your particular browser, be patient: it is probable that while some content has been shoved into some odd place (for instance, down to the bottom of your browser, where it ought to appear in the right-hand margin), all the server content has been pushed down into your browser in some place or other. - Finally, there may be blogger vagaries, outside my control, in font sizing or interlinear spacing or right-margin justification. - Anyone inclined to help with trouble-shooting, or to offer other kinds of technical advice, is welcome to write me via Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com.]

Winter wanes, both here in southern Ontario and "Back Home", in Estonia. If - this seems improbable - the Ontario sugar maples have not yet started their vernal run of sap, then they must be about to start. Everywhere, at any rate, is the feeling of a change in season, as celebrated by Québecois artist Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté (1869-1937):






And with the running of the sap comes Lent.

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Here in Ontario, the Church is supporting us, its lay parishioners, in various ways. It was good upon walking into St Patrick's in downtown Toronto, on Ash Wednesday, to see the hanging ceiling lamps modified - I imagine with glass or plastic filters - to a correctly penitential purple in the upward portion of their beams. And I was glad to see my "Local", Mary Queen of the World in Richmond Hill, launching a programme last Sunday whereby in exchange for a penitential-purple carrier bag, we support the York Region food-bank system. Under this scheme, we are to bring tins to Mary Queen of the World, with our requested personal total Food Bank donation over Lent comprising one tin for each of the 40 canonical days.

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In all this atmosphere of communal hunkering-down and communal concentration, I am fortunate to have a black booklet, formally The Little Black Book, of "Six-minute reflections on the Passion according to Mark". This slim offering (on sale recently at Mary Immaculate in Richmond Hill for 5.00 CAD) is published under the auspices of the Diocese of Saginaw, in the northern USA. Interested readers of this present blog can find some relevant Saginaw Web outreach at www.littlebooks.org. Having already used the 2017 version (based, to be sure, on a different Gospel in the three-year liturgical cycle), I can already vouch for clarity and theological soundness.

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This year's Little Black Book urges meditation on the following Markan passages for the Lent-opening Thursday, Friday, and Saturday which are, respectively, 2018-02-15, 2018-02-16, and 2018-02-17:

When Jesus was at Bethany reclining at table in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of perfumed oil, costly genuine spikenard. She broke the alabaster jar and poured it on his head.

                                                                *

There were some who were indignant. "Why has there been this waste of perfumed oil? It could have been sold for more than 300 days' wages and the money given to the poor." They were infuriated with her.

                                                                *

Jesus said, "Let her alone. Why do you make trouble for her? She has done a good thing for me. The poor you will always have with you, and whenever you wish you can do good to them, but you will not always have me. She has done what she could. She has anticipated anointing my body for burial. Amen, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed to the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her. 


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Spikenard, The Little Black Book helpfully explains, is distilled from the rhizomes of a plant growing in the Himalayas. The exotic provenance, at the far end of the merchants' slow caravan routes, would account for the extraordinary financial value put by the recounted hostile critics upon Our Lord's anointing.

A further hasty check of commentaries reveals that the anointer's product-of-choice got packaged up, as a standard practice in the luxury trade, in small alabaster vials. Each individual vial was meant to be broken and used up in one single application.

It was of course standard procedure at a banquet in Our Lord's own Jewish community to anoint the head of the guest of honour.

****

A phrase from Mark's narrative, translated in The Little Black Book as "she has done what she could", is suggestive. In the original, it reads ho eschen epoiesen (ὃ  ἔσχεν  ἐποίησεν). I see from my 1993 Brown-Comfort-Douglas Greek interlinear NT that this means "she has done what she had". The second verb is a past tense of echo (ἔχω), with nuances and shades of meaning fully explicated in a display reachable via a short chain of hyperlinks from http://www.greekbible.com/index.php:

1) to have, i.e. to hold  1a) to have (hold) in the hand, in the sense of wearing, to have  (hold) possession of the mind (refers to alarm, agitating  emotions, etc.), to hold fast keep, to have or comprise or  involve, to regard or consider or hold as  2) to have i.e. own, possess  2a) external things such as pertain to property or riches or  furniture or utensils or goods or food etc.  2b) used of those joined to any one by the bonds of natural blood  or marriage or friendship or duty or law etc, of attendance or  companionship  3) to hold one's self or find one's self so and so, to be in such or  such a condition  4) to hold one's self to a thing, to lay hold of a thing, to adhere  or cling to  4a) to be closely joined to a person or a thing

So Our Lord's idea is that this bold woman did "what she had it in her to do". The English translation chosen for The Little Black Book cannot be faulted as inaccurate. And yet the Greek is more vivid. Here appears a woman who (surely) cannot have had rabbinical, in other words Hebrew-as-distinct-from-merely-Aramaic, and textual-as-distinct-from-merely-verbal, learning "in her". Further, she might perhaps not have "had in her" that special charism of concern for the poor which marks various NT women (and in the modern history of Christianity, again marks various women - to take two examples, in Imperial Russia, interwar New York, and postwar Ontario, the Madonna House foundress Ekaterina Fyodorovna Kolyschkine de Hueck Doherty (Екатерина Фёдоровна Колышкина; 1896-1985); and in New York again, "Katya's" close associate, and Catholic thinker Peter Maurin's disciple, the Catholic Worker co-foundress Dorothy Day (1897-1980)). But what this bold woman "had in her", says Our Lord, "she did".

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Many are these days scolded for their innate limitations, in other words for not having the right things in them.

I used to be mildly annoyed with Pope JP2, admittedly of happy memory, and now canonized, for his cold, glittering, Slavic theatricality. (This I saw with my own eyes, at very close quarters indeed, when the Popemobile cruised right past my front-rows seat in the big National Stadium in 1980s Singapore. As I clearly saw it, JP2 was wooing his crowd, in the way a gesticulating Juan Peron also might.) Added to this was my dismay at his aloofness toward (surely legitimate) South or Central American Catholic social-justice aspirations.

I used, again, to be more than a little upset with Benedict XVI, for his failure to grasp elementary pastoral realities. He was inept enough to let himself be welcomed, in the USA, by a choir singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Somewhere in the ranks of YouTube commentators, I have seen even an American military veteran explaining that this seems in some way inappropriate. And at one point someone is said to have asked Benedict, "Holy Father [I think at that point it was 'Holy Father', and not, as for a mere cardinal, 'Your Most Reverend Eminence'], have you met any homosexuals?" To this he is said to have answered something to the following sad effect: "Yes, I did once, actually. It was in Berlin. I was watching a protest demonstration." - Well, the story would have to be checked, and my own quick foray into Google has not succeeded in corroborating it. But it does seem to fit some of what else we know of this unhappily professorial figure, so cut off from the realities of ordinary life.,

I used, as I say, to be more than a little upset with Benedict XVI. Since 2013, however, the courage and humility of his resignation have forced my reassessment. Further, I do have to admit to have being spellbound by the personal warmth of Benedict's Deus caritas est (as read in English, to be sure; nevertheless, I did read it pretty much when it came out, well before his so-unexpected resignation).

My big heroes among recent Popes are John XXIII and Francis. It is noteworthy, and perhaps inspiring of some special confidence in Francis, that Francis is now being so roundly berated in some Church circles. (Our Lord was Himself berated, most notably by those religious professionals who paraded their credentials of theological orthodoxy while imposing burdens both on the financially poor and on the publicly sinful.)

Other people will have their own heroes. But no matter where we may stand on controversies within our current Church, we can nevertheless all agree, following Our Lord, that unless special Grace intervenes, people at best do only what it is "in them" to do. Human nature being what it is, it is asking too much to have John Paul II speak words of comfort in the style of Francis to the radical priests of Central America, or of Benedict XVI to ask in the manner of Francis "Who am I to judge?" - or, again, of Francis to achieve the steely concentrated concern for doctrinal clarity that characterized the pontificates of JP2 and Benedict XVI. People have to be taken as they are, not as we might imagine them to become under miracles of Grace.

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I hope in drawing the just-drawn moral  to be offering some comfort also, in this holy penitential season, to my presumed (and lately industriously downloading?) case officers in FSB or SVR. Miracles, although not unknown, can hardly be demanded. In particular, we have no right to demand them, in our easy Western presumption, in the case of such a troubled jurisdiction as Russia.

One thing, though, we can urge on our eastern neighbours. They, along with the modern Greeks and Greece's modern Balkan neighbours, seem charged by the Heavens with conserving the charism of Byzantium. They have to do it even in the teeth of the so legalistic, so over-thinking, so emotionally impoverished, West. Let Russia seek to understand the West - Latin as a school subject constitutes one window (as I argued last week), the cultures of those easy tourist destinations which are Finland and Estonia another - without aping its vices. Let the Russians above all immerse themselves in their own scholarly and theological tradition, with its Byzantine roots, working as occasion may permit even from the New Testament Greek.


[This is the end of the current blog posting.] 



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