I am a Christian contemplative and, sorry fundamentalists, skeptical about much of what is in the Bible. My religion is a lot about "love being a condition of justice and justice being in the service of love," to use the words of a wonderful Jesuit. I am not counting on and spend very little time thinking about heaven. I love some myths, such as the one about angels we have heard on high, but I am not one who ever expects to hear them or the flapping of their wings much less to grow a pair myself. I am an Episcopalian, and my denomination, which is currently rejected from communion with the Catholic Church because of its relatively liberal stands on women's and gay and lesbian rights, generally doesn't throw out skeptics and in fact is quite comfortable with us all being at God's table.
Despite my skepticism, my Christianity is not only a call to service of humankind on this wonderful planet but also a source of daily mysterious comfort on the journey of life--so I embrace it for what it is, quietly fulfilling but impossible to define. Ironically orthodox on many things, I find intuitively acceptable the quirky doctrine called the Trinity, and I thrive on the depth of the Liturgy and the beauty and seasons of the Church, admittedly borrowed to a large extent from various preceding customs. Most of all, I have grown quite fond of an admittedly invisible friend I call Jesus, despite the fact that we know very little about him that is reliable.
As a leftist, I take it as wonderful, not devastating like the character does in John Irving's Pigeon Feathers when he finds a copy of H.G. Wells's Outline of History, that the real Jesus probably would not fit in with his Church and might even be considered sacrilegious:
[B]efore he could halt his eyes, David slipped into Wells's account of Jesus. He had been an obscure political agitator, a kind of hobo, in a minor colony of the Roman Empire. By an accident impossible to reconstruct, he (the small h horrified David) survived his own crucifixion and presumably died a few weeks later. A religion was founded on the freakish incident. The credulous imagination of the times retrospectively assigned miracles and supernatural pretensions to Jesus; a myth grew, and then a church, whose theology at most points was in direct contradiction of the simple, rather communistic teachings of the Galilean.
It was as if a stone that for weeks and even years had been gathering weight in the web of David's nerves snapped them and plunged through the page and a hundred layers of paper underneath. These fantastic falsehoods--plainly untrue; churches stood everywhere, the entire nation was founded "under God"--did not at first frighten him; it was the fact that they had been permitted to exist in an actual human brain. This was the initial impact--that at a definite spot in time and space a brain black with the denial of Christ's divinity had been suffered to exist; that the universe had not spit out this ball of tar but allowed it to continue in its blasphemy, to grow old, win honors, wear a hat, write books that, if true, collapsed everything into a jumble of horror. The world outside the deep-silled windows--a rutted lawn, a whitewashed barn, a walnut tree frothy with fresh green--seemed a haven from which he was forever scaled off. Hot washrags seemed pressed against his checks.
Just like Charles Schultz created wonderful Peanuts characters and put words into their mouths about Christmas, a long time ago someone created characters in a play we now call Christmas and put words into their mouths in the Gospel of Luke. It probably has at most half the reliability of a movie "based upon a true story."
However, the words written by "Luke" matter a great deal, not because they might be true but because they are a source of faith and, even if they were not, they are repeated so often that they affect humanity through the cultural hegemony of the Church, to use Gramsci's phrase. While I do not really believe that the angels sang in Hebrew or Aramaic and that the shepherds passed the words on accurately to various persons in and around Bethlehem until one day they could be written down accurately in Greek by a physician called Luke and be passed on down accurately through various fragments to appear in all of the various versions of the book we now call the Bible, that is beside the point.
I am for the moment mostly interested in how this affected Peanuts, and specifically, my man Linus. For the words of the King James or "authorized" version that have been spoken for four hundred years in most Protestant churches, and are still prevalent in many fundamentalist churches, and were ably rendered by Linus (what an actor) were both catchy and weighted. It seems silly to argue that Linus got the words "of angels" wrong when angels probably never said those or any words, and Linus got so much right. He was right to impliedly criticize the commercialization of this designated federal holiday. But, according to the best scholarship, Charles Schultz was using a bad Bible translation of Luke 2:14. Had the Church for the last almost 2,000 years been the economically radical Church the real Jesus arguably would have prescribed, better word choices on Christmas Eves around the good ole' arch-capitalist U.S.A. might have made, and might still make, a positive difference. What am I talking about? Please go below, into the Sheol of this diary, to get ... the rest of the story.
Let's start with words of Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium, which we cannot dispute, because we can read them for free online:
The special place of the poor in God’s people
197. God’s heart has a special place for the poor, so much so that he himself “became poor” (2 Cor 8:9). The entire history of our redemption is marked by the presence of the poor. Salvation came to us from the “yes” uttered by a lowly maiden from a small town on the fringes of a great empire. The Saviour was born in a manger, in the midst of animals, like children of poor families; he was presented at the Temple along with two turtledoves, the offering made by those who could not afford a lamb (cf. Lk 2:24; Lev 5:7); he was raised in a home of ordinary workers and worked with his own hands to earn his bread. When he began to preach the Kingdom, crowds of the dispossessed followed him, illustrating his words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor” (Lk 4:18). He assured those burdened by sorrow and crushed by poverty that God has a special place for them in his heart: “Blessed are you poor, yours is the kingdom of God” (Lk 6:20); he made himself one of them: “I was hungry and you gave me food to eat”, and he taught them that mercy towards all of these is the key to heaven (cf. Mt 25:5ff.).
Perhaps this quote will serve as the cornerstone of Christmas Eve services around the world. I doubt it. But one can rest assured that Luke 2:14 will. Let's compare translations shall we?
First let me note that MugWumpBlues did a helpful diary the other day about the early, i.e., pre-King James translators of the Bible into English. (MugWumpBlues was focused on earlier events than those which reveal what a terrible person King James was, but I will take this opportunity to make that point and cite you to some strong words of poetic justice and helpful links on the subject.)
So let's start with the Wycliffe Bible: "Glory be in the highest things to God, and in earth peace be to men of good will." Not what Linus said.
Then let's look at the Geneva Bible (for as MugWumpBlues wrote, "Tyndale’s translations formed the basis for both the Geneva Bible (written by CalvinistPuritans in Switzerland) and the King James Bible, published around 1611."): "Glory be to God in the high heavens, and peace in earth, and toward men good will." Similar to what Linus said.
Then let's look at the Kings James (Authorized) Version: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men." Exactly what Linus said.
Now, let's go to the traditional Catholic Bible that the Church did not let the laypeople read for a long time, the Vulgate, for some Latin: "gloria in altissimis Deo et in terra pax in hominibus bonae voluntatis." As a companion to that, let's go to the Douay-Rheims English translation, the Catholic translation of the Vulgate that was made as part of the Counter-Reformation: "Glory to God in the highest: and on earth peace to men of good will." Not what Linus said.
Then, let's go to the version used most often in my church, the New Revised Standard Version: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” Not what Linus said.
Now, let's go to the version favored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE): “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” Not what Linus said, and similar to the version favored by us loathsome sinful Episcopalians.
I won't go into the Greek (which you can find here, but which is all Greek to me), but if you are interested, much of the translation arguments seem to focus on the presence or absence of the Greek letter for "s" at the end of the final word. (Many online commentators discuss this dispute; here is one which I am not endorsing but including just to give you a flavor.) The NABRE has a footnote that addresses the dispute, while revealing a broader interpretation position:
On earth peace to those on whom his favor rests: the peace that results from the Christ event is for those whom God has favored with his grace. This reading is found in the oldest representatives of the Western and Alexandrian text traditions and is the preferred one; the Byzantine text tradition, on the other hand, reads: “on earth peace, good will toward men.” The peace of which Luke’s gospel speaks (Lk 2:14; 7:50; 8:48; 10:5–6; 19:38, 42; 24:36) is more than the absence of war of the pax Augusta; it also includes the security and well-being characteristic of peace in the Old Testament.
So, what in the name of Snoopy difference does this all make? Well, if Linus had said "peace among those whom he favors" or "peace to those on whom his favor rests" he might have been promoting the idea I favor that there is no true peace without justice. He might have been expressing the concept that the oppressors do not deserve peace, because they are taking advantage of the poor, who are in God's special care. The weak, not the exploitative powerful, are those whom a just God favors. Or, as the Pope says:
218. Peace in society cannot be understood as pacification or the mere absence of violence resulting from the domination of one part of society over others. Nor does true peace act as a pretext for justifying a social structure which silences or appeases the poor, so that the more affluent can placidly support their lifestyle while others have to make do as they can. Demands involving the distribution of wealth, concern for the poor and human rights cannot be suppressed under the guise of creating a consensus on paper or a transient peace for a contented minority. The dignity of the human person and the common good rank higher than the comfort of those who refuse to renounce their privileges. When these values are threatened, a prophetic voice must be raised.
219. Nor is peace “simply the absence of warfare, based on a precarious balance of power; it is fashioned by efforts directed day after day towards the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect justice among men”. In the end, a peace which is not the result of integral development will be doomed; it will always spawn new conflicts and various forms of violence.
As
I wrote recently, those of us on the left need to be mindful that if some of us do not engage in a praxis that includes parsing of religious words and concepts, including those relating to the economic justice doctrine of the Church, we will be ceding the field entirely to the right and failing to work in solidarity with Pope Francis. (My prior diary relied heavily on "
A Socialized Reflection on the Praxis Implications of EVANGELII GAUDIUM, Jesuit History, and Jesuit Scholarship.")
Happy designated federal holiday, whatever your feelings about religion!
[Note latinvulgate.com used for Vulgate and Douay-Rheims; usccb.org for the NABRE; and biblegateway.com for the others.]