U.S.: Peter Jennings, Jesus and Paul

Jennings is looking for that little Borinqueño down the block. The one named Jesus. Yo! Jesus! Y' mama's calling y', boy! As for Paul, that must be Jesus's friend Pablo. Jennings has got a cast of characters, which includes female liberals like Elaine Pagels, Karen Armstrong, and who present Christianity as a Pauline invention, and some males, one of whom is N.T. Wright, I believe. Some of the men make sense, some are questionable. I'm dealing with the women, though, cuz they're the source of the most blatant errors.

As far as that band of "scholars" are concerned, Paul didn't intend his letters to be authoritative for today. It was just for then, cuz, so they say, Paul thought the world was going to end. Another of the "scholars" says Paul was making it up as he went along. Paul intended marriage to be for the control of passions; it wasn't about having kids because Paul, they say, thought the world was going to end soon.

Karen Armstrong, a British former nun, wrote, amongst other things, Islam: A Short History, and she thinks that the view of Islam as a "violent, backward, and insular tradition" is passé. Somebody ought to tell Muslims that so they can show us another side to Islam. The IoP side, you know. Moreover, Armstrong believes that all religions are essentially the same. Elaine Pagels wrote The Gnostic Gospels, amongst other books. In her view, the source of Christian orthodoxy is not Christ's teaching but political issues of his day.

I speak from the standpoint of one who has an M.A. in Biblical Languages and was working on a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies before a very rugged program clashed with my need to work to pay rent. For the most part, these women, amongst Jennings commentators, don't know what the hell they're talking about. They're so busy doing a third level, historical critical analysis of the New Testament text that they ignore what the text actually says. They are constantly putting themselves into Paul's mind and telling us what he thinks. Well, we don't know what Paul thought. To know what the Word says, we can do a First Level analysis. Parse the language, study it at the level of the word. Then, we can do a Second Level semantic analysis of the text to probe meaning via the combination of words into clauses, sentences, and paragraphs, and the text in in its context. At most, we can say, based on the grammar, this is what the text likely means. However, though we may probe the intention of the writer -- the pragmatic force of the text and what he intends to achieve -- we may not say this is what the writer thinks. That's what these women have done. Apart from Jennings himself, the most egregrious errors come from Armstrong and Pagels.

Thanks be to God that we feeble-witted Christian ignoramuses can read, else we'd watch Jennings and believe the tripe his post-modernist band of "scholars" are spouting.

I'd like to see Jenning do a show on Islam, about how Mohammed was a paedophilic, murderous madman raving in the desert. Think it would happen? Hah! Twist the Christian Bible, claim that Christ was illiterate, denigrate Christianity as an invention of one man, claim that there was not one true Christianity but many versions of it, say anything. Not one Christian pastor will issue a fatwa. The pope will issue no bulls condemning Jennings. Nobody will excommunicate him and damn him and his band of "scholars" as heretic. Nobody will commit acts of terror against him and his happy little band. Anybody who did, would be roundly denounced, and rightly so. That is the nature of Christianity. Say what you will, God will sort you out; meantime, the Cross is lifted on high, and the bloodstained banner of our Lord goes on before us.