So yesterday, angry about being sent to her room, my little girl spent some considerable time drawing a “shadow” on the wall with a purple crayon. We didn’t find it until after she’d gone to bed; and this morning we were faced with the task of making her clean it off.

So how do you clean crayon off of the wall? (In this case, a wall of tongue-and-groove pine panelling with a coat of off-white paint on it.)

I went to Google, naturally, and Google led me to eHow.com, which had a number of suggestions. There were a number of suggestions from users of the site, some of which had a suspiciously commercial cast to them, and others which were just strange. Toothpaste? OK, it’s a gentle abrasive, but it

seems like it could make quite a mess. Dryer sheets and hand-lotion? Huh?

But above all of these was eHow.com’s own suggestion, which is the one I ultimately used. First, you scrape off as much of the wax as you can with a plastic spoon. This gets off quite a lot, but still leaves purple marks all over. Then, put some baking soda on a damp cloth, and rub with that. And my goodness, it works surprisingly well. A little elbow grease is required, but the crayon marks came right off–along with a shocking amount of other grime. And also some paint, but the paint on that stretch of wall was evidently in bad shape even before my treasure started drawing on it. Finally, use a damp cloth or sponge to wipe the wall clean, and dry it, and you’re done.

It was surprisingly easy, really.

Today I’ll continue my discussion of Tom Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God. As always, assume any errors in the following are mine, not his; I Am Not A New Testament Scholar. (Not that, judging from the footnotes, that’s any guarantee of infallibility.)

Wright’s purpose in this book is to lay the groundwork for serious study of the New Testament, and to study the New Testament one needs to understand the People of God, the Jews, as they lived and moved and believed in Jesus’ day. He does this by trying to identify their “world view.” Wright spends a great deal of time defining just what a world view is; here, suffice it to say that it involves unifying stories, symbols, and praxis. “Praxis”, I gather, is a fancy word for “how they put their beliefs into practice.”

First, the symbols: racial identity, the Land, the Temple, and Torah. The Jews were and are God’s chosen people, called apart from the nations to be His. This identity they retain to this day, nearly two thousand years after the destruction of Herod’s Temple and the end of Temple worship. Next, the Land. God promised blessing to his people, and (I’d not considered this before) the Land was his chief means of blessing them. It was through the Land that they received milk and honey, grapes and figs and wheat; it was in the Land that they found green pastures and still waters. Next, Torah, the Law. It is Torah that defines the Jews as God’s Chosen People, it is Torah that records God’s covenant with them, it is Torah that explains what is expected of them as God’s Chosen People. The Temple has been gone for over nineteen centuries; they have only recently regained the Land; for much of western history, Torah has been Land and Temple both to God’s people.

These symbols are all wrapped up in the Jewish story, which is told and retold in the Old Testament, and in a wide variety of other texts and traditions. Indeed, there are two stories, the greater and the lesser. The greater story I’ve touched on already: God chose the Jews and set them apart from the nations to be his People, to do his work in the world, and ultimately to be a blessing to all nations. The lesser story fits within the greater story–and indeed, has been repeated multiple times: God’s People become separated from the blessings of God’s Promise; God rescues them and restores His rule in the land of Israel.

In the days of Joseph and his brothers, the children of Israel are saved from famine by going to the land of Egypt, leaving the lands which God had given to Abraham. Note that they go at God’s command–this is important.

In time succor becomes slavery; and through Moses God rescues them again. He brings his people out of Egypt and back to the Promised Land, which he helps them to conquer. He is their God, and they are his People. This is the greatest rescue of all: they regain their identity, which they had forgotten; they regain the Land, which they had left; and they gain Torah, which tells them how not to lose themselves.

In time the Jews request a king, and God gives them Saul, and then David, and then Solomon; and Solomon at God’s command builds the Temple. God’s dwelling place is thus established forever more among his People.

Their descendents will number more than the stars in the sky, and they will dwell in God’s blessing forever–provided they remain within the Covenant.

Of course, they don’t. The kings of Israel were, unsurprisingly, of varying quality; many chose to follow other gods as well as (or instead of) the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In time, the Land was split into the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The prophets came to warn God’s people, to call them to repentance and back into Covenant with God, but ultimately to no avail; and they were led into captivity in Babylon.

The exiles did not forget their God, and in time the Babylonian Exile came to an end–but in a strange way. God delivered them, and restored to them the Land, but He did so through the hands of Cyrus the Persian, and the restored Israel was a client state.

They were rescued yet again, but this time from the consequences of their own folly rather than from the wickedness of others; and the rescue was somewhat ambiguous. As a result, the Jews began to look forward to a yet greater rescue, in which the Land would be fully theirs, in which the Temple would be properly restored, in which God would reign triumpant in Jerusalem through his holy Priesthood and a king of the line of David. The Jewish story became one which was not yet complete, one which demanded a proper ending.

The Lord helps those who help themselves, it’s long been said. Perhaps, some Jews reasoned, if Israel were to be restored it was up to them to move things along. Around 200 BC Israel was in the hands of the Syrians, and their ruler intended to set up a statue of his god on the Temple Mount. The Jews under Judas Maccabeus and his clan fought a successful rebellion. The Maccabeans declared that Israel was restored; and for over a century the head of the Hasmonean dynasty ruled Israel as both King and High Priest.

Again, God had rescued his people; and again the rescue was somewhat equivocal. The priesthood belonged to the sons of Levi; the kingship to the sons of David. Uniting them in one person ran counter to expectations. Moreover, the culture of Greece had spread throughout the shores of the Mediterrean Sea, and the Hasmoneans either started out or became (I am not sure which) far too Hellenized to suit the people they ruled. Morever, the Temple hadn’t been properly rebuilt.

It was during this time that the Essenes withdrew from the people of Israel to live apart, to pursue holiness at Qumran and possibly other sites; they believed that if they kept themselves pure God would eventually raise from their numbers two (2!) messiahs, one to be the new high priest, and one to be the holy king. We know this from the Dead Sea Scrolls and excavations at Qumran; otherwise, the Essenes vanished without a trace. (No, Jesus wasn’t an Essene. I’ll tell you why that’s so after I read the next volume.)

It was also during this time that the party of the Pharisees arose. If God hadn’t chose to rescue his people fully, perhaps his people needed to pursue purity and holiness even more strongly? The Pharisees emphasized purity over and above the commitments expected of the average Jew; they were a political force to be reckoned with; and some large fraction of them were not averse to pursuing political change by violent means–which is to say rebellion.

Eventually the Romans arrived, and installed Herod the Great as King of Israel. Herod was no fool, clearly. He understood the story as well as anyone, and proceeded to rebuild the Temple forthwith. He did not presume to name himself high priest, but on the other hand made sure the high priests came from previously undistinguished priestly families, so that the high priests would be personally loyal to him. By the time of Jesus, the bulk of the aristocracy owed their positions to the Herodian dynasty.

Herod’s attempts to use the Jewish story to bulwark his position were ultimately unsuccessful. Though his Temple was used and revered, it was used with an undercurrent of suspicion, for though it was a beautiful building and occupied the Temple Mount it was not the proper Temple–it had been built by a king not of Davidic descent, and moreover one who ruled at the sufferance of the Romans. The high priestly families were the tool through which the Herodians and later, directly, the Romans ruled Israel; but the people, all too aware of their origins, did not respect them as they ought. The Pharisees remained a strong party, and attempted rebellion was frequent from before Christ’s birth up to 135 AD when the last rebellion was crushed.

After 135 AD Torah took the place of both Land and Temple in the lives of the remaining Jews, as it had already begun to do among the Jews of the Diaspora; thoughts of rebellion and restoration of the Temple were no more; and the hope of God’s rescue of his people, the hope of a messiah, became increasingly remote.

As a Christian, of course, I believe in an alternate ending: that God sent a new high priest, a king of the Davidic line, in the person of Jesus; that Jesus was the perfect sacrifice such that no new Temple sacrifices need be made, and that Jesus’ body was itself a new Temple, which, risen from the grave and ascended into heaven, can never be cast down or destroyed. But that story belongs to the the next volume of Wright’s magnum opus.

Yes, it must.

A while back, Amy Welborn recommended two books by Tom Wright, the Anglican bishop of Durham: Jesus and the Victory of God, and another whose name I can’t recall at the moment. I found them at the bookstore; but found that they were volumes 2 and 3 of a connected series titled “Christian Origins and the Question of God.” Being naturally anal retentive, I of course grabbed Volume 1, The New Testament and the People of God, because you have to read things in sequence. It’s a much more scholarly tome than I’m accustomed to; I am now about halfway through it, and quite pleased with myself. It’s only taken a couple of weeks.

But what does it mean when you read a book and feel like you know less than when you started?

The book begins with a lengthy treatise on epistemology, that is, a discussion of what we can actually expect to be able to know about the New Testament era , and how we can know it. In all that follows, please remember that I am not a Philosopher, Theologian, or Historian, and that I’m doing such violence to his argument that I might just as well strap it into a wheelchair and hurl it down the stairs.

Anyway, what Wright’s doing in the first part of his book is highlighting a number of common epistemological errors that make studying the New Testament difficult, misleading, or pointless. To begin with, scholars tend to look at the New Testament through only one of three lenses: history, literature, or theology. Wright argues that the New Testament is literature and often follows literary conventions; that it involves historical events; and that its subject matter is inescapably theological. The nuances take him quite a while to work through, but I think that’s the gist of it.

Specifically, Wright rejects the Enlightenment positivist view, which is usually historical in nature. The positivist approach rejects supernatural explanations at the outset, which is rather putting the cart before the horse; second, it tries to pin the texts down to a single, precise, specific, objective meaning when in fact there are clearly layers of meaning.

After the failings of the positivist approach began to become clear, a theological approach became popular. Rather than worrying about what really happened so long ago, which we can’t know for sure anyway, the new game was to try to identify eternal verities. Here, the problem is that the meaning of the texts is clearly bound up in the time they were written.

And once you start neglecting obvious components of the text, you’re likely to go too far. More recently, postmodern analysis has been in vogue. There is no correct reading of the New Testament; there’s my reading and your reading and their reading and everybody can have their own reading and there’s no reason to prefer one over another. We can’t really know what happened or what the author was really thinking; all we know are our own thoughts, and we have to be happy with that. These folks treat the New Testament as Literature.

Isn’t it interesting how scholars can say things like this with a straight face, in books they expect other scholars to read and take seriously?

Anyway, here we’re gone from positivism at one end of the spectrum to phenomenalism at the other: I can’t know anything for sure except my own sense data, and so I don’t really know anything.

Wright rejects this extreme as well (as well he should); he maintains, contrary to the winds of scholarly fashion, that the time in which the New Testament was written matters; that the intent of the authors of the New Testament matters; that the history that led up to it matters; the literary forms matter; the theology matters; and that though we can’t know everything about these things with absolutely certainty we can know quite a lot with reasonable certainty.

Cool! It seems rather like common sense, to me; but then have you ever heard a mathematician trying to define the word “number”? It’s a lot more complicated than you might think.

Having got that out of the way, I’m now reading Wright’s thoughts (which I can, indeed, know something about, Derrida and Foucault to the contrary) on the history of the Jews from the time of the Maccabees until around 135 AD. There’s been quite a lot of he-said, she-said about the Pharisees, and as I say I think I know less about them than I did before. That’s partially because he assumes more background than I’ve got, and so is leaving things unsaid; at least, I think so. But partially it’s because most of the positive statements are hedged about with caveats and disclaimers.

I dunno. I think I’m learning something, maybe….

There’s been a great deal of concern in Christian circles over the upcoming film adaptation of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe: would Peter Jackson and Disney be able to make a film that’s true to the book and its Christian roots, or would they secularize it and in so doing spoil it?

Barbara Nicolosi had the good fortune to see a preview of it; according to her, we have nothing to worry about and a great deal to look forward to.

A miracle occurred a short time ago, and as a result Jane and I were able to have an unprecedented two nights off to ourselves this weekend. This is truly amazing, and I’m surprised yesterday wasn’t greeted with earthquakes, fires, plague, war and rumours of war. Instead, all was relatively placid. There were no earthquakes, the war hasn’t been a rumour for several years, and the fire was last weekend. We have walked on the beach, and eaten not wisely but too well (something I’ve certainly earned over the last six months), and around noon found ourselves next to a movie theater with an early matinee of the new Wallace and Gromit feature film, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Being on our own, and being who we are (Jane, remember, is the one who got a copy of Where’s My Cow? as an anniversary present and was pleased about it) we bought tickets forthwith.

And we had a glorious time.

As the movie begins, the entire town is eagerly awaiting Lady Tottingham’s Large Vegetable competition. All and sundry are pampering their tubers, melons, and roots in hopes of winning the coveted Golden Carrot–and only four days remain. Their chief concern: rabbits. As it happens, Wallace and Gromit have a new business: Anti-Pesto Humane Pest Control. They’ve got everyone’s gardens wired with movement detectors and such-like and act as an immediate response SWAT team if the detectors are tripped by a hungry bunny in the middle of the night. All is going well, and Wallace is the darling of the town…until things go suddenly, horribly awry.

I won’t give away anything else; suffice it to say that the film is every bit as good as The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, with all the bits we’ve come to love, and the animation was stunning–it’s all traditional clay stop-motion animation, and I have no idea how they did some of the shots.

Looking back on the film, I’m not sure it had any more real story than its shorter siblings; but it never dragged, and the extension to feature length appears effortless though I’m sure it was anything but.

So go see it.

Lynn Sislo has moved! And not only that, she was kind enough to send me e-mail telling me so, which is pretty spiffy.

This is Pratchett’s latest Discworld novel; and it is to my lasting
regret that due to soccer practice and an inability to find a babysitter
we missed seeing him when he was at our local bookstore a couple of weeks
ago. (So happens I missed Neil Gaiman last week, which is also
regrettable but not nearly as lasting.)

Thud! is yet another tale of the City, Ankh-Morpork, as seen
through the eyes of its most determined defender: His Grace Samuel Vimes,
the reluctant Duke of Ankh-Morpork and most eager Commander of her City
Watch. The topic this time around, as it so often is in the Sam Vimes
books, is race relations. Koom Valley Day is approaching, and
the dwarfs and the trolls are working themselves up to break a few
heads. The dwarfs and trolls first fought the Battle of Koom Valley
a thousand years earlier; they’ve given repeat performances every few
decades ever since, sometimes even within the confines of Koom Valley.

Koom Valley Day is always rather fraught in Ankh-Morpork, thanks to the
massive influx of dwarfs and trolls over the last twenty years; but this
year it’s shaping up to be a doozy. Indeed it appears that unless our
Sam can do something to ease the tensions, the city will be the site of
the next Battle of Koom Valley, and that eftsoons and right speedily.

Much of the tension may be laid at the feet of one Grag Hamcrusher, a
leader of a new group of “deep down” dwarfs who have recently come to
the city. Grag is not a name, but a title; it is the grags who are
responsible for transmitting the essence of dwarfishness to the next
generation. The closest human approximation is probably “rabbi”; and
if “grag” equals “rabbi” then Hamcrusher and the “deep down” dwarfs
make your average Hasidic Jew look like a secularist. Hamcrusher’s not
to impressed with the dwarfishness of your average city dwarf, and he’s
absolutely appalled by the vast numbers of trolls in the city, about
whom he has not been silent.

As the book begins, Hamcrusher is not only Vimes’ chief problem; he’s
also dead. The “deep down” dwarfs claim that the killer is a troll.
And Koom Valley Day is only a few days away….

Like all of the Sam Vimes books, Thud! is a mystery with
Vimes as the sleuth; and like all of the Sam Vimes books, the mystery
is odd, surprising, and funny. I’ll only say that the book Vimes
reads to his son Young Sam every night at six o’clock
precisely–every night, without fail, at precisely six o’clock, utterly
without fail, because if you’ll skip it for a good
reason you’ll eventually skip it for a bad reason–that is, the estimable
Where’s My Cow?, plays a dramatic (also odd, surprising, and
funny) role at the climax of the tale. Jane and I are going to be
giggling about it to each other for the indefinite future.

This is an odd little book, written as a companion to Pratchett’s new
Discworld novel, Thud!. Sam Vimes, commander of the
Ankh-Morpork City Watch, has a standing engagement every evening at six
o’clock–no matter what else is going on, he hurries home to read a
bedtime story to his very small boy, Young Sam. And not just any
book, but Young Sam’s favorite book in the world,
Where’s My Cow?:

Where’s my cow?
Is that my cow?
It goes “Baaa”.
It is a sheep.
That’s not my cow!

Speaking as a father, I’ve read dozens of books just like this. But
Where’s My Cow? isn’t just another kid’s book; it’s a book
about Sam Vimes reading a book called Where’s My Cow to
Young Sam, complete with pictures of Sam Vimes making all of the assorted
noises. (My favorite is the Hippopotamus: it goes “HRUUUUUGH!”) And
partway through the book, Sam begins to ask himself…why is he reading a
book about the noises made by barnyard animals to Young Sam when Young Sam
is going to grow up in the city and will never encounter barnyard animals
except on a plate? What if Where’s My Cow were about the
noises Sam hears every day as he travels about Ankh-Morpork?

And so Sam Vimes begins to embellish the book a bit, and extemporize, and
spread himself considerably….until Lady Sybil comes in and gives him
the eye.

Speaking as a father, I’ve done this myself, hundreds of times, with one
book or another (for example…but then, perhaps we should pass lightly
over
Princess Jewelianna and the Sparkling Rainbow Ball, in which
all of the tasteless princesses dress most excruciatingly gaudy. One day
my little girl is going to learn to read, and I’m going to be in
big trouble.)

Anyway, Where’s My Cow is good fun, if a bit lightweight, and
the pictures are excellent. If you’re both a parent and a Discworld fan, you owe it
to yourself to get a copy. I gave Jane a copy as an anniversary present;
she was thrilled. No, really, she was, and she sat in my lap while I
read it to her. And then we went back to Thud!, which I
expect we’ll finish tonight.

If you’re not a Discworld fan or a parent, though, give it a miss, because
most of the book will go right over your head.

…I’ve not been posting regularly. This is partially due to lack of interest; my project at work is taking almost all of my energy at the moment, and this is likely to continue for some time. Plus, I’m teaching myself to play the piano–the fruits of which are certainly worth a blog entry or two–plus I’ve been doing lots of reading, but haven’t had the energy to write much about it.

So much for excuses.

But frankly, one of the reasons I’ve not been posting much is that I’m about fed up with Movable Type and blog spammers in about equal proportions.

In Movable Type 3.x, the MT folks added the TypeKey commenter authentication system. I was drowning in comment spam, so I implemented it. It did for the comment spam perfectly well, but it dramatically reduced the number of comments I got. Then, a few weeks ago, my server was getting hammered so hard by spammers trying (and failing) to post comments that my web hosting service disabled the comments script. I didn’t say anything at the time, as it seemed like a short term thing; but it has gone on and on, and finally yesterday I simply disabled comments altogether. Existing comments have been preserved, but there will be no new ones.

In the meantime, Trackback spam is greatly on the increase. I’m getting hundreds of Trackback spams every day. I gather that MT 3.2 has some tools to help with that, and I really ought to install it. At the same time, I gather that MT 3.2 doesn’t have what I really want–a way to disable trackbacks altogether. There’s an “allow trackbacks” flag on every single post, and the only way to change them is one-at-a-time, by hand. Would it kill them to provide a better mechanism? Would it kill them to provide a safety valve: automatically close trackbacks on all posts older than X days? Or on demand, close trackbacks on posts from this date to that?

And how come I’m so darned popular with these blasted spammers? Other folks don’t seem to have to disable their comments mechanism just because of the mass of foiled spam attempts.

Sigh.