Author: Josh Philip Ross

Happy New Year! I’ve been away for a bit, enjoying my holidays, and I hope you enjoyed yours. Now it’s back to the daily grind — which, fortunately, is not too grinding for me personally.

This is a bit out of date, but that General Assembly resolution I was working on passed. The text of the resolution is still not available on the UN website, but I’ll post it once it’s up.

Unfortunately, due to the NYC transit strike, I missed last night’s marathon holiday banquet. Something new under this ambassador, the banquet consisted of a lavish buffet, a raffle at which dozens of gifts were given out, and a hired master of ceremonies who conducted interviews and game show-like activities in between speeches by just about everyone. The entire affair lasted a grueling four hours, I’m told, and for obvious reasons most of it took place in Korean, so it was hard on my speechwriting colleague.

On a different note, one of the diplomats just dropped by my office with an odd holiday gift: a yearbook-sized, fake-leather-bound 2006 “Cyprus Diary” with gilt pages. Essentially a glorified day-runner, it’s obviously a production of the government of Cyprus, and includes a map of the European Union (which Cyprus recently joined), a map of Cyprus itself (undivided), and pages of basic info about the country, including a lengthy section on “The Cyprus Problem,” which I haven’t read.

So far, though, I’m still waiting on a new wall calendar. Last year we got one from the Korea National Tourism Organization (whose URL has a grammatical error) and an even bigger one from Asiana Airlines. With a week to go, though, all I’ve got is an awkward little “Dynamic Korea” desk calendar from the Korean OverSeas (sic) Information Service.

Pandora

This amazing music toy does some kind of alchemy by which you can enter the name of an artist or a song, and it will play stuff that it thinks is similar. Plenty of details about how this works on the site, so I’m not gonna bother going over it here, but suffice it to say that it’s fascinating, and comes up with some surprising and enjoyable choices by bands you’ve never heard of. (Via Radosh.net.)

I haven’t said anything about this because it’s mostly tedious and irrelevant, although also distressingly anti-Semitic. But I very much enjoyed a little rant called Fuck Christmas, which is not so much anti-Christmas as anti-War on Christmas. It’s pottymouthed, but makes a strong and impassioned argument against John Gibson, Bill O’Reilly, Pat Buchanan and their insane and dangerous cries that Christianity is under assault from a “a cabal of secularists, so-called humanists, trial lawyers, cultural relativists, and liberal, guilt-wracked Christians — not just Jewish people.” (Thanks, Pat.)

One hint: follow the links. They’re important.

Just in time for everyone’s favorite minor Jewish holiday, Slate has an article that reminds us of the true spirit of Chanukkah: theocratic civil war.

Like many Jewish holidays, Chanukkah is pretty ambiguous once you scratch the surface. It celebrates not just the victory of the Maccabees over their Assyrian Greek overlords, but also their defeat of the assimilationist, Hellenized elements in Judean society. In modern terms, it would be the defeat of Tel Aviv at the hands of Jerusalem. Or the defeat of the Shah at the hands of the Islamic Revolution. It was a reactionary reimposition of religious rule on a people who had been drifting culturally toward a globalized ecumenism.

Judaism has been undergoing this struggle from its beginnings, between the desire to guard the unique identity of the Jewish people and the urge to be a normal nation. You can see it in the conflict between Moses and those who wished to return to Egypt, and you can see it in the demands of the Hebrews for a king “such as all the other nations have,” which gravely displeases the prophet Samuel (I Samuel 8:4-6). This tension has continued to the present day and remains an important aspect of Israeli and American Jewish politics.

It’s done, and thank goodness. Now it comes down to getting all the MTA workers back to their jobs and getting the system up and running. I saw an MTA transport van running down Court Street at about 4 p.m. with its emergency lights flashing, hopefully on its way to the Smith and 9th Streets subway station or some other vital location.

As for the transit workers, I know they work hard in tough conditions, and I wish them the best. Let’s hope that the MTA and the TWU can now strike a deal that everyone feels okay about, because they do have to keep working together.

Meanwhile, this whole affair has demonstrated once again both how fragile and how resilient this city is. We saw the same thing on 9/11 and during the blackout of 2003. New Yorkers pull together in a crisis, and we go on with our lives and continue to make this place the greatest city in the world. But each crisis also reveals just how much chaos can be created by a substantial disruption of New York City’s infrastructure. Mayor Bloomberg estimated that the strike cost the city’s economy $400 million a day, and it affected millions of lives.

Are we ready for something bigger?

The transit strike may be ending soon, but one effect has been a huge spike in local news viewership. This particular crisis, which involves primarily inconvenience rather than death and destruction, has not led to blanket coverage on any of the national news networks, which has left the usually sleepy NY1 to pick up the slack.

I’ve been charmed by the mostly quite young news team at NY1, who have approached this municipal situation with admirable gravity and detail. While I caught an anchor on WABC mouthing moralistic platitudes, NY1 has stuck to meaningful analysis and details about how riders are coping, what the negotiations hinge upon, how long it would take to get the subway up and running, internal union politics and other salient information, interspersed with on-the-street interviews.

And babes.

I will admit to having developed a little crush on reporters Sandra Endo and especially Solana Pyne, who has been standing bravely in front of the union hall in her cute little knitted winter hat while her hair blows in her face.

When it’s all over, NY1 will go back to covering school financing and city council negotiations (snore), and I’ll stop watching. But in the meantime, thanks for brightening these stir-crazy days.

I have been watching the four-hour Frontline documentary, From Jesus to Christ, which traces the origins of Christianity through its establishment as the Roman religion. The show takes a historian’s perspective on this remarkable series of events, beginning with a fascinating exploration of the social milieu of Nazareth at the time of Jesus’s birth and life.

A recurring issue is how literally to take the Gospels. How useful are they as historical documents? And how useful or problematic is it to give added historical weight to the four canonical Gospels over the many heretical Gospels that have been discovered? In a discussion of these issues, one historian posits that either the original writers meant much of the material to be understood symbolically, and we have been mistakenly trying to take it literally ever since; or else the authors meant it all literally, and we have mistakenly been trying to make it into allegory and symbol. He claims to believe the former.

From my own experience of traditional religious life, coupled with my experience of India — which, with its polymorphous pagan traditions and vast population of illiterate poor, joined together in one national polity, is in many ways strikingly similar to ancient Rome — I would suggest that the historian is running up against a fundamental misunderstanding of how people in the time that the Gospels were written would have understood truth.

We tend to think of truths as singular and by definition non-contradictory. This view is especially useful in terms of science, where truths are accepted only if they can be verified or demonstrated in a clear way, usually repeatedly. We take, therefore, a materialist and humanist view of truth, where truth is that which can be materially proved to the satisfaction of other people.

To understand the Gospel conception of truth, we have to take ourselves back to a world where rationalism is not a dominant force, and where there are no mass media. Even for the literate, the vast majority of information arrives in the form of spoken words, delivered by individuals within earshot. There is no easy way to verify what is happening in a neighboring city, much less hundreds of miles away. Thus stories are easily magnified or shifted as they travel, and tales of miracle-workers and great healers are quite common.

Philosophically, however, it has been discovered that there are certain truths that seem to be true everywhere and always. This unusual quality of geometrical and mathematical truths led some of their discoverers to regard them as profoundly spiritual. Meanwhile, Jews believed strongly in an omniscient God who inspired the divine speech of His prophets. Those Jews who had come to believe in the particular importance of Jesus — his teachings, his death and resurrection, or both — would have certainly supported the tradition of prophecy and divine inspiration. And both Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions would have supported the idea of deep mysteries at the heart of that which is sacred.

Mark wrote the first Gospel, and Matthew and Luke followed his closely. We know they shared source texts because many of Jesus’s sayings are identical in Greek. Jesus, of course, spoke Aramaic, so no two translators would have rendered his words exactly the same in Greek unless they were using the same sources. But what would allow each Gospel writer to embellish the story, to change the emphases, to refer to arguments and debates that had more to do with his own time then that of Jesus? Here we come to that historian’s supposition that the Gospel writers intended their texts to be taken as allegory or symbolism, as what Jesus would have said and done rather than what he actually spoke and did.

I think this is wrong. I think that anyone setting out to write a Gospel at that early period of Christianity would have to have been profoundly devoted to this minority cult, and furthermore would have felt divinely called to write. This task would have required what we call imagination, but what the Greco-Roman world saw as the inspiration of the Muses — in other words, divine inspiration.

The idea that the imaginings of even a highly spiritual person are in fact the words (or inspiration) of God or the gods is foreign to us, but it would have been natural and not strange in the ancient world. I can picture the Gospel writer meditating and praying for the needed clarity and understanding to move the story forward, then feeling a sense of divine grace as the narrative emerges almost automatically from his flowing pen.

Indeed, this kind of literary inspiration remains one of the most mysterious aspects of writing. It cannot be taught, writers torment themselves in search of it, and no one knows why it settles upon some but not others, or why it comes and goes and comes again. Writers to this day treat inspiration with a great deal of superstition. What seems inconceivable to me is that the Gospel writers would have seen themselves alone as the originators and controllers of the texts they produced; divine inspiration is almost a given.

Once you have grasped that the Gospel writers themselves would have felt divinely inspired, it becomes easier to imagine how early Christians might have reconciled the contradictory pictures that emerge of the life and character of Jesus. Clearly there was much concern over what was true and what was not, because there was much persecution of heresy, and only four of the many Gospels were finally canonized. But in a world with no photographs, no photocopies, no technologies of precise reproduction, people must have made do with a somewhat blurrier sense of truth than we are comfortable with. What does the Coliseum look like in Rome? What does the emperor look like? What did Paul say last night at dinner? These questions could not be definitively answered, but you might try to fill out your picture by asking more than one person or looking at more than one source. Reconciling divergent sources, or at least accepting them as equally true, would have been cognitively necessary in a way that it is not in our world.

And there is also the issue of mystery. The Jesus of Mark is abject in his misery, while the Jesus of John is serene. How can that be? One answer is that Jesus was both, because he appeared differently to different followers.

And how would that have been possible? With someone as mercurial, mysterious and ultimately powerful as Jesus, I think his followers would have been more surprised if everyone had the same impression of him. The assumption would have been that there was an aura of magic around Jesus at all times, a divinity, and both Jewish and Greek traditions believed that divinity was mysterious — Jews, of course, believing that no one but Moses had ever looked upon the divine, and Moses only at God’s back, so that the true face of divinity remained hidden. That Jesus would reflect back different images to different people would have been unsurprising to his early followers.

What we have difficulty with now, then, is less the question of whether to take the Gospels literally or symbolically, than how to take them as something else entirely — something we don’t have a word for, but that coincides with the kind of truth his followers would have believed was possible.

Today, at 1:35 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, the northern hemisphere of the Earth will reach its maximum incline away from the sun: the winter solstice. (Interestingly, the time of sunrise continues to get later even after the solstice. Can anyone explain this phenomenon?)

Wikipedia is full of facts (or something like them) about the winter solstice. Did you know that the Iranians celebrate the winter solstice as Yaldā, and that the earliest celebrants of this astronomical event were the ancient Persians the earliest celebrations go back at least 30,000 years (thank you, Garrison Keillor [RealMedia file])? (The name of the holiday is a Syriac Christian import of relatively recent origins and means “birth,” but doesn’t seem to have much to do with the word Yule, whose Teutonic origins the Oxford English Dictionary claims are obscure.)

Another fascinating fact:

In Ireland’s calendar, the solstices and equinoxes all occur at about midpoint in each season. For example, winter begins on November 1, and ends on January 31.

Meanwhile, in East Asia, the solstice is celebrated as dōng zhi (Chinese: 冬至; Korean: 동지). In Korea, people traditionally eat a gruel made from the sweet red adzuki bean (pictured above) because red is supposed to ward off evil spirits. Click here and here to learn more about the festival.

And, of course, the winter solstice marks the Neo-Pagan festival of Yule.

Wikipedia also provides a helpful list of winter festivals from around the world. Happy Newtonmas!