Where Everybody's Crazy

I've got a load of things to write about tonight, but I'll get this one out of the way because it's quick and snarky.

Since writing my JEMA rant, my field leader has been trying to encourage me to go to tomorrow's annual general meeting in Tokyo (yeah, OK, where else would it be?) to put across my views in person. Now there were a few reasons why I was a bit unwilling to go: I don't know enough of the background and so I don't want to cry wolf, I can't really afford it, and well, I don't actually really care all that much. He tried further cajoling me with the information that the guy who wrote the screamingly anti-Japanese piece in Japan Harvest has now been selected as the next president. OK, that's a bit more potentially disastrous. Maybe I should give it a bit of thought.

But then I looked at the AGM agenda, and found that this big contentious issue of the Fundamentalism response takes up a whole zero minutes of conference time. There are only two things on the agenda: a report from the "nominating committee" and "elections" of the candidates put forward by the nominating committee. The AGM appears to consist of an agenda with no action items, a meeting with no discussion, and an election with no choice of candidates. And you want me to traipse over to Tokyo for this? No thank you.

Dear JEMA, at your next meeting please decide upon a reason for your own existence. No love, Simon.

OK, I said it was coming. Here goes.

I've always believed that professional development is a really important thing. If you're not moving forward in your knowledge of your profession, you're moving backwards as things change around you. More fundamentally, if you're not learning from others and then reflecting about your own work, then you're going to end up plodding on without thinking, and that's the most terrifying thing for me.

So when I was a programmer, I joined the london.pm mailing list, went to their meetings, and subscribed to our trade magazine, The Perl Journal. I also kept up with three or four technical news web sites - I still do, in fact.

And when I became a missionary, naturally I did the same. If you want to know what's influencing me, I subscribe to Encounters, the missions magazine of Redcliffe College, EMQ which is generally pretty meh but occasionally there's some good stuff in there, and IMBR, which is the closest to a professional journal we have.

So that gives me an international perspective and some useful cross-fertilization ideas. (I also read everything on BBC News, occasional copies of the Guardian and Mainichi news, and a few sites on American political news. That and the programming news is why it takes me two hours to get moving in the morning.) But Japan has its own culture and challenges and I want to know what missiological thinking is happening here as well.

Our missionary trade organisation here in Japan is the Japan Evangelical Missionary Alliance, and today I decided not to renew my membership.

I'd been considering it for a while. They run a mailing list which tells you about what events they're putting on. All the events are in Tokyo, apart from those of course in Higashi Kurume, which is OK for those working with 10% of the population of Japan but rather does give the impression that they don't give a damn about the other 90%.

JEMA also has a trade magazine, Japan Harvest. It's very much a magazine rather than a journal, which is fine for people who want stuff at that level, but I was looking for something a bit more solid and that's not meant to be it. It has articles expressing how amazing and surprising it is when the Japanese church come up with ideas for themselves. There was an article last time explaining what manga and anime are, which I think can only be helpful if you've spent all of your time in Japan living in a cave or in the sterile santictity of a church building... oh, wait, yeah, maybe that is useful for some.

And that's basically what my JEMA membership gives me. As far as I'm concerned, JEMA is a waste of time, money and effort.

And now they've gone to war against their Japan-native equivalent, the Japan Evangelical Alliance. Grab me some popcorn, guys, I want to enjoy this one from the sidelines.

The topic that they've chosen to go to war about: Christian support for going to war. According to JEMA, (which is mainly made up of American missionaries) the foreign missionary community in Japan is shocked, shocked I say, that the JEA has put out a theological paper condemning both nationalism in the church and the (largely American) church's support for the Iraq war. Who would have possibly thought that Japanese Christians might be anti-war?

But why stick to the issue at hand? That would be boring! If you're in a fight, the first thing you need to do is escalate! The title of the article on the cover of this issue of Japan Harvest is "Theology in Japan: JEA Theological Pamphlet No. 6 an Example of Reactionary Cross-Cultural Theology?" That's right, it's nothing to do with the fact that the Japanese church won't support America's bloody stupid war like all the foreign missionaries do, it's because the Japanese church are all bad theologians. And they smell of soy sauce.

The author of the Japan Harvest article seems to think that "reactionary theology" is in itself bad; he fails to understand that all theology is fundamentally reactionary. Theologians would sell even fewer books than they currently do if all they ever said was "I agree with him." People do not do theology in a vacuum; they do so in reaction (or perhaps, more generously, reflection) to what they read, see and experience. The article that he writes is, indeed, in reaction to the JEA paper.

But I see little point in pointing this out, since the author also writes that:

The pamplet makes some strong statements regarding views held by many American evangelicals. These kind of strong statements have the potential to cause friction between evangelicals separated by the Pacific Ocean.

Which provides more depressing proof, as if more was needed, that irony is truly dead. (I could continue with a point-for-point refutation of the article, but I'm not morally obliged to, it's a Friday night, and I'm writing for a blog, not a bad magazine.)

Now I have slight reservations about Theological Pamphlet No 6, because I think it could have been a much better critique of nationalism in the Church if it had stuck to nationalism, rather than what it did do, which was treat nationalism as the inevitable outcome of fundamentalist American Christianity, and to examine how some of the doctrines of Fundamentalism has led to American Christianity. Which is nothing I haven't said here in the past, and I think they're dead right. After all it's a Theological Pamphlet, so they had to tackle theological issues.

But it would have been a better critique of nationalism in the church if they had just stuck to historical and social issues. The Japanese church knows very well from its painful history how bankrupt it becomes when its message is compromised by wartime nationalism, and it is, as such, in a good position to show the American Christian Church how bankrupt it has become as its message has been compromised by wartime nationalism. Introducing the theological category of fundamentalism isn't actually necessary to make this point, and potentially weakens it - the Japanese church was not compromised by fundamentalism, but by plain old compromise.

But Fundamentalist Christianity is one of the most dangerous threats to the church in our time, and I respect the Japanese authors for having a go at tackling it. And of course, to progress the debate there needs to be dialogue.

But not with this attitude. And not in my name. So I'm resigning my JEMA membership.

Sometimes I post some cynical stuff here, and sometimes it's warranted. Sometimes it's not, though. Like when I suggested that the fabulous story of Mister Genor might not actually be, as it were, true.

Today I got a lovely email from someone who'd seen my blog post and gone to find out the truth. And it turns out part of the problem was that the person's name has gotten corrupted in the retelling of the story:

Since I heard of Frank Jenner in 1993 from a friend of the Baptist pastor in England, Dr. Francis Dixon, many people have fed me with further facts. The spelling of his name was misinterpreted by the friend of Dr. Dixon’s – it is actually Jenner. This friend of Francis Dixon misspelt his name and it came across as Genor. His name was Frank Jenner from a Brethren Chapel in Sydney. The original Baptist Church was in Bournemouth, England.

Armed with that information, we find this web page, another with more information and a reference to the book "Jenner of George Street," by Raymond Wilson. The story does appear to be true, and as uplifting as it is remarkable.

Thanks to Heather Playfoot and David Smethurst.

Every Friday my pastor and I meet up for a chat. We talk about theology, sociology, Japan, the Japanese church, how things are going, on so on. And we study theology together. When we first got together, we read through my dissertation on leadership together, in English, and I took the teacher role. Then after that, we read Mitsuo Fukuda's book on contextualised church together, in Japanese, and he took the teacher role. Now we're studying one of my favourite books, Bosch's "Transforming Mission." Since the Japanese translation has just come out, I'm going through it in English and he's going through it in Japanese, but since I've already read it, like, a million times, I'm taking the teacher role again.

Bosch is very influenced by the liberation movement, and I'm very influenced by Bosch, so one of the things I had to do was to try to explain why liberationism is not scary. To someone steeped in the evangelical tradition, and trained at Bible college to have a sharpened hatred of liberals, this can be pretty tricky to do. This is how I went about it.

I explained that Jesus' ministry had three main parts: (1) he preached the coming Kingdom of God; (evangelistic proclamation) (2) he taught sermons about ethics and how we should behave; (ethical teaching) (3) he healed the sick and welcomed the oppressed and challenged the corrupt structures of society. (social action)

This is quite a handy analysis in lots of ways. For instance, the evangelical Japanese church focuses on part 1. (Massive stereotypes will abound throughout this post, but that's par for the course.) But when it comes to discipleship, the focus is one part 2: now you're a Christian, these are the rules you have to follow. Part 3 is sadly absent. The liberal Japanese church focuses on part 3, but its discipleship is equally based on part 2. Part 1 is sadly absent.

For the past hundred years, the church has been running a pitched battle between Evangelicals and Liberals. The church where I come from in Oxford is very good at part 1. It tends to leave ethics, part 2, to individual conscience and the witness of the Holy Spirit, although there is some light ethical teaching. It is just about waking up to part 3. We expect Evangelicals to work in areas 1 and 2, and Liberals to work in areas 2 and 3.

The ironic thing is that the 19th and early 20th century evangelicals worked primarily in areas 1 and 3. The Clapham Sect had both a fervent belief in the power of the Kingdom of God and a consuming desire to eradicate the evil and injustice of slavery.

Digression: At Bible college, one of the things I most enjoyed was giving a tour of the college to visitors during the college's Open Day. We started in the lobby, where the windows were frosted with the crest of the Buxton family who originally owned the house. The Buxtons were classical evangelicals in the mould I have just described. Part of their coat of arms is a beer barrel. Why, I used to ask my visitors, would good Evangelical Christians have a beer barrel on their crest? The answer is this: Thomas Buxton saw that, at the time, one of the more common temptations for the poor and destitute in London was gin, and gin really rots your insides. Wanting to stop the rot, he brewed and popularised beer, which at least is not per se dangerously unhealthy. He and his friends the Guinnesses had compassion on the poor of London and in doing so changed the way Britain drinks. Next time you have a beer in the UK, raise your glass to the Buxtons and the Guinnesses, without whose Evangelical faith and Christian compassion you would probably not be drinking. End of digression.

Back to our analysis. I thought it interesting, as a back-of-an-envelope thing, to place various Christian leaders within this matrix of proclamation, teaching and action. Now I'd be the first to admit that this isn't a good way to slice and dice Christian thought. If anyone ever gives me a schema based on three axes, I'd be the first to say "Why three? Why not four? Why not seventeen?" Of course there are many more dimensions that can, and should be, added. So I am not claiming that this is the be-all-and-end-all. I'm just claiming that it opened my eyes a little.

Oh, and the other thing I should say is that most, if not all, of the leaders I placed on this diagram, I know very little about. I've never actually read a single damned thing of Luther. Most of the people on there are there due to reputation rather than due to intimate understanding of their writings and thought. We can argue about the exact placings later, if you like, but I still think it's a useful matrix for understanding people:

This exercise has given me a new respect for Wesley. And it's reminded me that I really need to do more about the Sentamu-for-Pope campaign. And of course, I am reminded that my liberationist tendencies - and my liberal tendencies - and my evangelical tendencies - all need to be brought together, and brought into the service of the One. As with all things, balance.

Otherwise titled "Still A Biblicist?"

The more of the Bible that I read, and the more I respect the Bible, the less that the individual words of the Bible are significant and the more I have a sense of the whole. I guess I'd better explain that.

The book of Job is amazing book, as I've mentioned before. The main story is of a character who, after receiving a complete nightmare of a time from God, asks a load of difficult questions of God, and, instead of getting a sensible answer, gets put in his place. Meanwhile, three people tell him he must have sinned, but he hasn't. (I eagerly await those comments which say that, because my precis of the book is wrong, then my thoughts about textual criticism must be wrong also.)

Anyway, the whole climax of the book comes when Job has had a heck of a time at God's hand, and he decides that he's going to ask God a few questions. The turning point of the book is Job 13:15, which is held up as an example of amazing faith by many evangelicals:

Though he may slay me, yet I will hope in him; I will surely defend my ways to his face.

This is an amazing verse! I remember on my WEC orientation, the UK director pointing to this as the high point of faith in the Bible - a man who will trust in God even though God appears to be against him.

Or at least, that's what the NIV says. The authorised Jewish version, the JPS, (and the ASV and the RSV, and...) says something that can be seen as the exact opposite:

He may well slay me; I may have no hope; Yet I will argue my case before Him.

What has happened here? How can the translations be so divergent? At this point, the crux of the entire book, we have either a faithful Job who will trust implicitly in a God who seems to have it in for him, or we have a cynical and despondent Job who will argue with God even though it's completely pointless. Commentators will try to tell you that "the context requires" one option or the other, but actually, in context, both possible readings make sense. So which is it?

Well, the problem here is one of qere versus kethib. Basically, in the Hebrew Bible texts, we have certain passages which have two readings. One reading is what is written, but the Masoretes, who prepared the Hebrew Bible, wanted to preserve all the texts that they had received, even the mistakes. They worked out what the mistakes were probably meant to be, but they wanted to preserve the integrity of the text that they had received. So they wrote little notes in the margin saying "We have written (Hebrew 'kethib') the text as this, but when you read it, read it like this (Hebrew 'qere')."

Usually, there's a very slight difference between the Qere and the Kethib but a very slight difference in Hebrew can completely change the meaning. (And I hope the Biblicists are listening at this point.) So the Kethib of our verse in Job is "lo'" but the Qere is "lo". Like I said, a slight difference. The Qere then reads "I will trust him". ("lo" means "to him") But the Kethib reads "I will not trust". ("lo'" means "not")

What do we do with this? Is Job saying that he will trust in God, or that he will not trust? It depends on which translation you read. That can't be satisfying, can it? Well, at these junctures, Bible scholars look for an alternative translation, such as the Septuagint.

The Septuagint is an authoritative Jewish translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, prepared by seventy Jewish scholars before Christ's birth. From a Christian point of view, it gets a few things "more right" than the Hebrew text - for instance, in Isaiah, where the Hebrew says that a young woman will become pregnant and bear a son, which is not exactly a fantastic miracle, the Septuagint says that a virgin will become pregnant and bear a son. Which is a little more surprising. So some Christian confessions, particularly the Orthodox ("It's Greek so it must be good") rely heavily on the Septuagint rendering of the Hebrew Bible.

Unfortunately, for this verse, the Septuagint is, let's face it, a complete crock.

ἐάν με χειρώσηται ὁ δυνάστης ἐπεὶ καὶ ἦρκται ἦ μὴν λαλήσω καὶ ἐλέγξω ἐναντίον αὐτοῦ

I'm really not sure how best to translate this, because it's incredibly confused Greek, but let's have a stab.

Because even if the ruler overpowered me, and surely he ruled over me, indeed I will I speak and plead before him.

Is this indicative of a depressed but hopeful Job, or a despondent and cynical Job? I can't tell, because it doesn't make very much sense.

This is precisely the point where theology overpowers exegesis. If you think that theologically Job ought to trust in God despite his situation, you choose the Qere reading. If you think that Job is completely fed up and is howling pointlessly at God, you choose the Kethib. Half of the commentaries you read will spend this verse slagging off the other half.

Well, I don't care. Whichever reading you choose is between you and God, and completely changes the dynamic of the story, and - hopefully - the nature of your faith in God in difficult times. I hope it does change the nature of your faith, because otherwise you're reading the book of Job and getting nothing from it. If reading the Bible doesn't change the way you live, why bother doing it?

But whichever reading you decide suits you best, please don't tell me that "The Bible says..." whatever, unless you believe that you're qualified to make a judgment why the kethib is correct and the qere is wrong or vice versa.

The Bible doesn't say things. People do. (Lots of people get really lost at this point, but it's true.) The Bible does not make definitive theological statements. It can't. It's a book. It's an inanimate object. The Bible doesn't "speak today", and InterVarsity Press be damned. The Bible doesn't "say" anything. It's a book, savvy? People read from it, and sometimes they read into it rather than reading out of it. Sometimes they read the qere, sometimes they read the kethib.

Sometimes they just read whichever bit of it suits their own blessed theology. Real Live Preacher, with whom I rarely agree, but frequently love, absolutely nails this one. The Bible doesn't say anything. People do. So which set of people you follow is an important decision.

The important thing about the book of Job is not whether you read the qere or the kethib, but how your relationship with God changes as a result. If it makes you more humble, more mystical, more caring for your fellow man, and more devoted to God and to finding out more about him, then you chose the right reading. At that point, arguing over what "the Bible says" becomes meaningless.

Once we put down our biblicist weapons - because they are weapons for political control over one another - and start on the narrow path of humility and love, we can learn to embrace the ambiguity of the Bible; it shows us a little more of the ambiguity of life, and it challenges us to deal with that ambiguity in the way that Jesus would.

This video has been doing the rounds of late; I was tipped off about it by an Internet forum, and then I was handed a copy of it. It asks three questions:

• Is there evidence of the Creator God in Japanese history and culture?
• Is there a connection between the Tea ceremony and Communion?
• Is it contradictory to be Japanese and a Follower of Jesus?

It focuses on the first question - hence the name of the video - but really it's laying the third question down as a big subtext. The subtext is "Should missionaries throw out Japanese culture?" Well, that one ought to be a slam-dunk, but apparently not. But let's deal with the face-value question. Is there evidence of the Creator God in Japanese history and culture?

The introduction to the film claims that the question was occasioned by some interesting reading of Romans which says that there is evidence for Creator-worship in every country and culture. No, I don't follow it either. I thought the whole "different cultures" thing came from Babel, but there you go.

Speaking of interesting readings, one of the introductory cutaways had this on the screen:

In the beginning God (Literally "gods"; ie. the Trinity) created the heavens and the earth.

I found myself involuntarily assuming my best David Tennant voice and mouthing "No, please, don't do that." (Google for "elohim" and "trinity". It's just a idiom, people. Don't get so darned excited.)

So anyhow, I'm going to spoil the secret for you. After years of painstaking research, the best they come up with is this: There is a Japanese "creator god" concept in the Kojiki, called Ame-no-minaka-no-nushi. He's one of the three uncreated gods - Oh look, three, that must be significant! - and is worshipped at the oldest shrine in Japan.

And very few Japanese people have heard of him, because he's actually a very minor figure in the Kojiki. In the Kojiki, Izanagi and Izanami and all the gods created from them do the majority of the creative work. I cannot think why this was omitted from the DVD. Only serious scholars of Shinto would have heard of Ame-no-minaka-no-nushi. If this is, per Romans, how God has made himself known to all people, He's done a really bad job of it.

But the really odd thing about this section of the film is that it just left me thinking "So what?" Because it didn't actually make any claims. Of course it would be seriously dodgy to come out and identify the three uncreated gods with the Trinity, so they just leave it as a leading question: "Could it be...?" (Expecting the answer "yes".) Sorry, but that's just a device for avoiding responsibility while at the same time playing with emotion.

I'm happy to come out and say it plain: No, they're not the Trinity. Just because you know the name of the "creator god" concept, that tells you nothing about his ontology, or character, or indeed anything, really. And so it's no wonder that the video makes no direct claims about this god. Because where do you start and where do you stop? Obviously we're not going to accept the whole Kojiki theogeny idea - heck, I believe the reason Genesis 1 was written was to provide a monotheistic creation story for the people of God, in contradistinction to the various theogenic near-Eastern creation myths that were going around at the time. And yet at the same time, we have this "three uncreated gods" idea that we desperately want to appropriate into our story, and yet we have no good way of doing so.

I'm trying to see the up-side here. I think this section of the film can give missionaries a hint as to how to communicate the concept of a creator god with people who believe the Kojiki. Let me know if you actually come across anyone like that. And, if all this is true, then such people already get the idea of a creator god anyway. Oh well.

The second section - about the tea ceremony - is trying to sit between the two questions "is there evidence of a creator god in Japan" and "is it contradictory to be Japanese and a follower of Jesus." And it does so in a very awkward way: by following on from the first section, you get the impression that you're going to find another (or, at least "an") example of how God revealed himself to the Japanese people. But unfortunately right at the beginning of the section it gives away the fact that it's actually tied more to the third question. The video comes right out and says that Sen-no-rikyu, the author of the modern tea ceremony, was influenced by Christianity. Not exactly an amazing revelation of God in the culture, I'm afraid.

The section said a lot about the Hidden Christians, and how the tea ceremony may have developed to allow the Hidden Christians to perform communion in secret. Pardon me for a moment, let me just check what the Hidden Christians believe.

One evening the Lord came down from heaven in the form of a butterly and lighted on the face of the Biruzen Maruya. At that moment he named her Santa Maruya of Korodo and flew into her mouth. Immediately she conceived... From Maruya's womb, the child heard the words both women had spoken to each other. This is why after his birth, the Lord made their words into two prayers: the Hail Mary and the Our Father. Because these prayers were both composed at the Abe River, they are called the Abe Maruya as a single unit of prayer.

Tenchi Hajimari - the Creation of Heaven and Earth

Okay. Where do we take this, then?

You see, again, I'm left thinking "So what?" There are connections between the tea ceremony and communion. And hey, there are connections between the yakuza and communion. Now what? This seems to be a massive exercise in eisegesis, like our quotation of Genesis 1. Exegesis is trying to pull things out of the text; eisegesis is trying to force things into the text. I think if you look at something as broad as the Japanese culture and something as long as Japanese culture, and if you're not prepared to give up, you will eventually find something that you're looking for. Whether it's there or not.

Which brings us to the third point. Maybe this is what the film is about: Japanese culture isn't 100% opposed to the Gospel. For people who have problems with that idea, then maybe the film is useful. But for those of us who think that Japanese people are just human beings, just plain folks like everyone else, then this won't come as a big surprise to us.

Or at least, it shouldn't.

I got in a discussion today online about Christianity and politics, and what kinds of awful politics are done in the name of Christianity, and was asked why the Christians don't speak out about the false prophets in their midst. Completely by chance, I found an example of what happens when they do - all the other Christians turn against them.

Martyn Joseph is a Christian protest singer, and a very good one at that. He sang a song recently about Pat Robertson - an evangelist who has called for the assassination of presidents, suggested that homosexuals persecution of Christians is comparable to Hitler's Nazism, called for the protection of minority whites in apartheid South Africa, and a lot else besides, all while claiming to have a hotline to God. And, as I believe is important to do when talking about Pat Robertson, he dropped the F-bomb.

Listen to this interview for what happened next, and for a brilliant example of why I prefer the company of liberal Christians to Evangelicals. While Martyn wants to talk about justice, love and denouncing those falsely who claim to speak for God, the Evangelical in the debate would really rather avoid those topics and instead talk about why Christians shouldn't get angry or swear. (Let us ignore the fact that Jesus did the first and Paul the second.) His insistence in shying away from substantive issues (doing justly, loving mercy and walking humbly before God) and talking about superficial "personal holiness" (which of course refers more to Victorian values than anything Biblical) is absolutely typical, and puts me in mind of the Tony Campolo quote which Martyn also refers to:

The sad thing is that we're here at a holiness seminar while because of exploitation of the poor, a child dies in Africa every three seconds and none of us gives a shit. The really sad thing is that you're more upset that I said "shit" at a holiness seminar than about a child dying in Africa every three seconds.

What really irks me is knowing that that Evangelical probably went home smug and happy that he'd quoted a few Scriptures - you can hear him desparately trying to get in another one at the end of the broadcast - and that he'd been right about an issue of personal holiness, and that the whole love, justice and mercy thing really didn't cross his mind at all. He spoke the words of Jesus, so he must be in the right, yes? Thank God for people like him defending us against the excesses of liberalism.

See also Real Live Preacher for more on when only the f-bomb will do.

Now, this is a debate you really need to understand if you ever read the Old Testament prophets. They did some very freaky and socially obnoxious stuff, the ancient equivalent of dropping the F-bomb, as part of their role of keeping the people of God focussed on what matters.

Orthodoxy is correct belief. Orthopraxy is correct action. Through the prophets God calls the people of ancient Israel and Judah to a balance of right belief and action... The prophets can serve constantly as reminders to us of God's determination to enforce his covenant.

- How to read the Bible for all its worth

Their particular task, however, was to take to task those who acted "religiously" but without concern for love, justice and mercy. Actually Jesus did exactly the same:

Woe to you scribes and hypocrite Pharisees, since you tithe mint and dill and cumin and neglect the more important parts of the law, justice and mercy and faith.

Superficial orthopraxy (tithing, not swearing) is considered less important to Jesus - although more important to our Evangelical friend in the interview - than pursuing the "liberal agenda".

Man, he has told you what is good and what the Lord is looking for from you: that you carry out justice, and love mercy, and be humble in your walk with God.

These people come before me and honour me with their mouth and lips but their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is based on commandments taught by men.

As you read the prophets, with their harsh words and crazy actions, think that they have more in common with the wonderfully foul-mouthed Martyn Joseph than the squeaky-clean Evangelical - and they want to remind you what God actually cares about.

Have you heard the story of Mister Genor? I've heard it in lots of places now. (which is kind of ironic, given the story.) It's a very amazing and very uplifting story. Unfortunately, amazing stories are, by nature of being amazing, unlikely to be true, and uplifting stories are, by nature of being uplifting, unlikely to be critically analysed.

So I got thinking - what was Mr Genor's first name? We know he died in or around Sydney, so probably in New South Wales. I looked through all the death notices and records I could find and didn't find anything useful about him. Did he, as it were, exist? Anyone shed any light on this?

Compare and contrast.

More than one in five Christians in the UK faces discrimination in their local communities because of their faith, a survey for a BBC programme suggests. The poll of 604 people describing themselves as Christian, for the Heaven and Earth show, also found 25% felt discriminated against by colleagues. One in three said the media portrayal of their religion was discriminatory.

Rev Malcolm Duncan, of campaign group Faithworks, said: "The Christian church is suffering more than all other faiths in the UK.

- UK Christians 'suffer for faith'

with:

Shortly after his baptism in 1999, Antoine was arrested. Angered by his conversion to Christ, local Muslims had reported him to the authorities. Antoine was severely beaten with batons and thick electrical wires. He was also pressured to sign a document renouncing his faith.

- Open Doors

I don't think we have any right to complain about "suffering" in this country, as it cheapens the word for those who really are persecuted.

In the absence of a really good library, getting Accordance has helped me get back into theological geekery in a big way. One of the modules I got with it was the NET Bible, or "New English Translation". As a straight translation for reading I'm not all that fond of it, but the notes that come with it are solid gold. I'll just give you the notes from Mark 1:1 as an example:

sn By the time Mark wrote, the word gospel had become a technical term referring to the preaching about Jesus Christ and God’s saving power accomplished through him for all who believe (cf. Rom 1:16).

tn The genitive in the phrase τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ (tou euangeliou Iesou Christou, “the gospel of Jesus Christ”) could be translated as either a subjective genitive (“the gospel which Jesus brings [or proclaims]”) or an objective genitive (“the gospel about Jesus Christ”). Either is grammatically possible. This is possibly an instance of a plenary genitive (see ExSyn 119–21; M. Zerwick, Biblical Greek, §§36–39). If so, an interplay between the two concepts is intended: The gospel which Jesus proclaims is in fact the gospel about himself.

tc ℵ^* Θ 28 l 2211 pc sa^ms Or lack υἱοῦ θεοῦ (huiou theou, “son of God”), while virtually all the rest of the witnesses have the words (A f^1,13 33 M also have τοῦ [tou] before θεοῦ), so the evidence seems to argue for the authenticity of the words. Most likely, the words were omitted by accident in some witnesses, since the last four words of v. 1, in uncial script, would have looked like this: ιυ̅χ̅ρ̅υ̅υ̅υ̅θ̅υ̅. With all the successive upsilons an accidental deletion is likely. Further, the inclusion of υἱοῦ θεοῦ here finds its complement in 15:39, where the centurion claims that Jesus was υἱὸς‚ θεοῦ (huios theou, “son of God”). Even though ℵ is in general one of the best NT mss, its testimony is not quite as preeminent in this situation. There are several other instances in which it breaks up chains of genitives ending in ου (cf., e.g., Acts 28:31; Col 2:2; Heb 12:2; Rev 12:14; 15:7; 22:1), showing that there is a significantly higher possibility of accidental scribal omission in a case like this. This christological inclusio parallels both Matthew (“Immanuel…God with us” in 1:23/“I am with you” in 28:20) and John (“the Word was God” in 1:1/“My Lord and my God” in 20:28), probably reflecting nascent christological development and articulation.

sn The first verse of Mark’s Gospel appears to function as a title: The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It is not certain, however, whether Mark intended it to refer to the entire Gospel, to the ministry of John the Baptist, or through the use of the term beginning (ἀρχή, arche) to allude to Genesis 1:1 (in the Greek Bible, LXX). The most likely option is that the statement as a whole is an allusion to Genesis 1:1 and that Mark is saying that with the “good news” of the coming of Christ, God is commencing a “new beginning.”

So the first thing to say about the notes is that there are a lot of them, and they're very detailed. Four to a verse is not uncommon. They're divided between study notes, which are explanations about what the text means; translators notes, which go into detail about why they chose to translate things in a particular way; and textual notes, which explain the differences between different manuscripts. There's plenty in there to keep a Greek geek like me happy.

For instance, in the notes above we see perhaps the most significant textual variant in the New Testament: does Mark 1:1 say that Jesus is the son of God or not? We don't have an original copy of Mark's Gospel, so frankly, we don't know. I suspect it doesn't, to be honest, given that the whole theme of Mark is that Jesus is the son of God but this supposed is a surprise. It would be a bit silly to give away the surprise at the start. As the notes say, ℵ (which is a manuscript called "Codex Sinaiticus", one of the oldest full copies of the New Testament we have) is a very good manuscript, and it's more likely (in my view) that "the son of God" wasn't there initially but was added later to give the work more weight, rather than being there initially but being weakened later. One of the principles of textual criticism is that we generally take the more theologically unpleasant reading, because that's more likely to be "corrected" by well-meaning scribes later. But at the end of the day, it's a judgment call. We weigh up the evidence, and we decide what the Bible probably said.

How much this is a problem depends on your understanding of Scripture. If the very words of Scripture are the very words of God, then you're going to have quite a problem with humans sitting down and deciding what the words of God probably are. As I mentioned the other day, those with a Qu'ranic understanding of Scripture will get really freaked out by this, and sure enough, I came across Muslim apologists saying that since we have a scientific and critical approach to manuscript evaluation, we can't say for sure that anything is the word of God and therefore all bets are off. To be honest, this is a good argument against those who believe in a literal inspiration of Scripture: the original Scripture can be literally inspired if you like, but we don't have the original Scripture, so that doesn't help us, really. (And then there are the crazies, which proves the principle that people have to find something to anathematise other people over.)

John 5:4 is a fantastic case in point:

For an angel of the Lord went down and stirred up the water at certain times. Whoever first stepped in after the stirring of the water was healed from whatever disease which he suffered.

Is that the word of God? It's the word of God according to manuscripts C³ Θ Ψ 078 f^{1, 13} M. It's not the word of God according to manuscripts p^{66, 75} ℵ B C^* T pc co. How would you like to make the call?

As I've said, whether or not you think this is a good thing depends on your view of Scripture. I think it is a good thing, that we are able to evaluate multiple sources for the texts that have come down to us. There's an integrity there. Acknowledging the existence of variants, and dealing with them as a present reality, is much, much preferable to denying them and suppressing them in an authoritarian manner, even burning all the variants. (Which, let's face it, has happened in at least one major world religion, and tends to be a trademark of sectarian Christian groups as well.) We have to speak a lot more tentatively about Scripture if we can't even agree on what it says. We speak in terms of probabilities, which is a lot more honest a way to handle it.

A hard (what I've been calling "Qu'ranic") view of Scripture sees multiple variations as a weakness, because you have to "choose" which one God really said. That is the unfortunate consequence of going down the road of inerrancy and infallibility and all those other categories which the Bible does not appropriate to itself. But you don't have to do down that road. A flexible view of Scripture sees multiple variations as a strength. And I would argue that a flexible view is actually more in keeping with Biblical tradition itself. We have four Gospels because we know it's a bad idea to single-source a news story; there will be differences between those Gospels, but that's the nature of testimony. Textual criticism is just a logical extension of that: we're not single-sourcing a Gospel, and there will be differences between our sources of an individual Gospel, but that's the nature of human manuscript transmission.

But I think it's a good thing for another reason; it causes us to go back to what's important. The vast, vast majority of the textual variants of the New Testament are unimportant. In Mark 1:4, it really doesn't make any difference whether John the Baptist was in the wilderness, (Sinaiticus and others) or John was baptising in the wilderness (Alexandrinus and others) or John was in the wilderness baptising (Cantabrigiensis and others). Does it change what the text is saying? It doesn't matter whether John's gospel was written "that you may come to believe" or "that you may continue to believe". The net effect is the same.

Even Mark 1:1, which I can see people getting freaked out about, doesn't change the story one bit. It doesn't matter whether or not it says right there that Jesus is the son of God or not. The rest of the book is going to go on and demonstrate it, and if you don't believe the rest of the book, then having it in the title isn't going to help. Paradoxically, the indecidability of textual criticism, with its minute study of the individual words, forces us to take our eyes off the original words and look at big picture of the story.