08AR13-44
( - previous issue - )
Apologia Report 13:44
December 18, 2008
Subject: Newsweek's clumsy defense of homosexual marriage
In this issue:
HOMOSEXUALITY - Newsweek's attempt to defend gay marriage by Scripture overreaches
ISLAM - former missionary recommends summary of Wahhabi influence
+ French academic lauds American approach to combatting Islamic extremism
NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM - is Junia among the apostles?
-------
PLEASE NOTE: This is the last issue we have planned for 2008. Look for issue 14:1 in the week beginning January 4, 2009.
Merry Christmas!
-------
HOMOSEXUALITY
"The Religious Case for Gay Marriage" by Lisa Miller -- so reads Newsweek's December 15 cover. The disasterous main feature, titled "Our Mutual Joy" (pp28-31), reduces the arguments over gay marriage to extremes. In a sense, it's as if Miller concludes "Inclusivism is positive and exclusivism is negative." It would be difficult to make her reasoning more painfully ignorant or simplistic. "The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better" than that of the Old. "[N]either [the Bible or Jesus] explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman." "[N]o sensible modern person wants marriage - theirs or anyone else's - to look in its particulars anything like what the Bible describes."
Miller argues that "Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married - and a number of excellent reasons why they should." "It probably goes without saying that the phrase 'gay marriage' does not appear in the Bible at all." "Sex between women has never, even in biblical times, raised as much ire" as sex between men.
Even more lengthy expressions of logic involve great leaps. "Why would we regard [the Bible's] condemnation of homosexuality with more seriousness than we regard its advice, which is far lengthier, on the best price to pay for a slave?
"Paul was tough on homosexuality, though recently progressive scholars have argued that his condemnation of men who 'were inflamed with lust for one another' (which he calls 'a perversion') is really a critique of the worst kind of wickedness: self-delusion, violence, promiscuity and debauchery." Given this license, Miller concludes: "Religious objections to gay marriage are rooted not in the Bible at all, then, but in custom and tradition ...."
One half expects the last line to read: "When you're not inclusive of others, someone always gets left out." <www.newsweek.com/id/172653>
---
ISLAM
God's Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad, by Charles Allen [1] -- reviewer and former missionary to Muslims in Egypt and Lebanon, Colin Chapman reports: "Here is a very readable account of the succession of movements that led directly from eighteenth-century Arabia to the bin Ladens of today." In Chapman's view, Allen has provided "an indispensable tool for understanding 'Islamic fundamentalism' and 'Islamism' today." Chapman notes a series of Wahhabi-inspired movements that are spread about the globe and relates Allen's suggestion that "one highly significant lesson [is] 'remove the grievances and mainstream, moderate Islam stands a better chance of reasserting itself.' If this book needs to be read in mission colleges, it is even more important that it be read in the White House, the Pentagon, and other government offices around the world!" International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 32:4 - 2008, pp210-211.
"An inside look at Islamic militants" by Sebastian Rotella -- highlights the work of Farhad Khosrokhavar, Iranian French professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes de Sciences Sociales in Paris, who "has conducted in-depth interviews in French prisons with 15 inmates convicted of terrorism-related offenses such as the assassination by Al Qaeda agents of an anti-Taliban leader in Afghanistan and a plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris.
"Inmates often were hostile at first. Some accused him of being a government spy. But the wry 59-year-old won them over with the persistence of a good listener. It didn't hurt that he is a Shiite Muslim who speaks Arabic."
Khosrokhavar is concerned about prison conditions. "There are only 117 imams, or Muslim chaplains, for a prison population that is half Muslim: more than 30,000 Muslim inmates in France. In contrast, there are 600 Christian and Jewish chaplains. The knowledge of Islam among many inmates is less than rudimentary and that helps radicalize them. We have to fill this gap.
"They have the feeling of being inferior citizens in prison too. The Christians have Sunday prayers, the Jews have Saturday. But collective [Muslim] prayer is prohibited because there are [not enough] imams. That's not the fault of the authorities; they don't want self-appointed inmate 'imams' developing power.
"There is a lack of imams because of a screening problem. Screening is strong; there are three agencies involved. But it is also the fault of the Muslim community. Many Muslim associations don't want to get involved. They feel these are bad Muslims. They don't want that post-9/11 stigma, the suspicion.
"Also, most of the Christian ministers work for free. Imams generally cannot afford to work for free."
Perhaps most interesting of all is Khosrokhavar's perspective on one approach to combatting terrorism that is being taken in America. "Europeans often criticize U.S. counter-terrorism methods, but you see the American approach to religion as a kind of buffer against extremism.
"In the United States, in spite of 9/11, it is a society which understands religion much better than in Europe. Muslims can be practicing and devout without being treated as if they were fundamentalists. Europe is clearly different from the U.S. Islam is the religion of the oppressed in Europe. Most Muslims are working class. There is an underclass that is comparable to the black or Latino underclass in U.S. cities." Los Angeles Times, Nov 25 08, pA3 <www.tinyurl.com/6hzsse>
No doubt Khosrokhavar's new book, Inside Jihadism [2], elaborates on all the above.
---
NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM
Junia: The First Woman Apostle, by Eldon Jay Epp [3] -- with this review, John Hunwicke, former Head of Theology at Lancing College in England and now Senior Research Fellow and Pusey House, Oxford, does a fine job of making a technical debate available to the masses.
Hunwicke first cites promotional copy from the book's publisher: "Epp investigates the mysterious disappearance of Junia from the traditions of the church. Because later theologians and scribes could not believe (or wanted to suppress) that Paul had numbered a woman among the earliest churches' apostles, Junia's name was changed in Romans 16:7 to a masculine form...." In response, Hunwicke reflects: "Poor Epp must have been very distressed and embarrassed if he read this passage, because, to be fair to him, his book is not at all about scribes suppressing the fact that Junia was a woman. It is not at all about tracking how this happened in manuscripts. And, so far from giving Tradition a walloping, Epp in fact demonstrates that Tradition, and the New Testament manuscripts, got Junia's gender right."
At the root of the controversy is how Junia is "linked with Andronicus, in Romans 16:7 as one of many recipients of St. Paul's greetings as he writes to recommend himself to the Christians of Rome, and she does so in a Greek accusative Iounian. Depending on what sort of accent you put on it, the corresponding nominative can be either Iounias (masculine) or Iounia (feminine).
"So which accent do the early manuscripts have? Neither; because early manuscripts lack all accents. ...
"So how did the idea get around that the female Junia was really a male Junias? Perhaps a monkish hand can, after all, be detected in this; the ex-Augustinian Martin Luther seems to have set this ball rolling. ... But even despite Luther's influence, with only one exception, Greek New Testaments down to 1927 continued to give her the feminine accent. Yes! Even through the dark oppressive decades of Victorian patriarchy, Junia's femaleness remained unproblematic as far as editors were concerned.
"Who, then, is guilty of the sex change? Stand up the thirteenth (1927) edition of Nestle: the standard Greek Testament beloved of twentieth-century 'scientific' and 'modern' biblical scholarship! ... Not Dark Age monks; not obscurantist popes; not medieval misogynist conspirators; not pre-Enlightenment bigots; it is the brightest and the best of liberal European and North American modern scholarship that took a reconstructive scalpel to Junia's groin. All subsequent Greek Testaments, including the influential United Bible Society editions, slavishly followed the obviously infallible magisterium of the younger Nestle without qualm or hesitation.
"Eighty-five of [Epp's] 98 pages deal with what is largely undisputed and was believed by nearly every scribe, church father, and Bible reader before the sixteenth century: that the person St. Paul greets was a woman and that she was called Junia. A mere thirteen pages are devoted to the unresolved and far more important questions: Was she an apostle; and, if so, what does the word 'apostle' mean in her case?" And with this, Hunwicke delivers a nice presentation of the issues facing translators combined with the rationale involved in their work in this particular case. Along the way, Hunwicke notes how "it is curious that Epp does not devote a couple of dozen pages to discussing a point so basic to his thesis as the status of Romans 16" as a later addition which is not found in the earliest manuscripts of the text.
Hunwicke concludes with insights on Epp's general egalitarian agenda as seen in his other published work. Cover story. Touchstone, Oct '08, pp22-27. <www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=21-08-022-f>
-------
Sources, Monographs:
1 - God's Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad, by Charles Allen (Da Capo, September 2006, hardcover, 368 pages)
<www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0306815222/apologiareport>
2 - Inside Jihadism: Understanding Jihadi Movements Worldwide, by Farhad Khosrokhavar (Paradigm, 2008, hardcover, 304 pages)
<www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594516154/apologiareport>
3 - Junia: The First Woman Apostle, by Eldon Jay Epp (Augsburg, 2005, paperback, 160 pages)
<www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0800637712/apologiareport>
--------
( - next issue - )