PREFIGURATION AND FULFILMENT IN THE BIBLE

Jerry Harkins

The Bible is an anthology, not a novel.  It consists of the Old Testament of 39 books, the New Testament of 27 books and, in some versions, the Apocrypha of 14 books. [1]  These compilations were assembled by various authorities at various times from a much larger reservoir of similar texts.  Inclusion was based primarily on the assertion that they were divinely inspired. In fact, however, the Old Testament is mainly the mythology of the Jewish people together with some history, some wisdom, some literature and a fair amount (16 Books) of prophecy. [2]  The New Testament relates primarily the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth together with some history, some philosophy and some mysticism.

Although there is no central plot, several major themes emerge and evolve.  Among the most important are:   the belief in a single god who created the universe and continues to act in history, the gradual change in the personality ascribed to that god from the raging sociopath of Genesis to the loving, self-sacrificing god of 1 John, and the acceptance of a moral code that must be followed if one is to achieve eternal life in the presence of that god.  The power of these fundamental ideas is suggested by the adherence to them of billions of members of the Abrahamic religions.

There is another theme, less obvious but more explicated by theologians and that is the belief that various prophecies and other material in the Old Testament foreshadow or prefigure important events in the New Testament.[3]  Consider, for example, these five lines from Psalm 22 attributed to King David:

1.   My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? 

8.   “He trusts in the Lord,” they say, / “let the Lord rescue him. / Let him deliver him, / since he delights in him.” 

15.  My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, / and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; /  you       lay me in the dust of death.

16.  Dogs surround me, / a pack of villains encircles me; / they pierce my hands and my feet.
All my bones are on display;  

18.  They divide my clothes among them / and cast lots for my garment.

Each of these lines has been interpreted as prefiguring an aspect of Christ’s passion.  Line 1 is, verbatim, one of the seven last words of Christ as reported by Matthew (27:46) and Mark (15:34)  and Line 15 is a close parallel of another as reported by John (19:28).  Line 8 is often seen as the predicting the mockery of Christ as reported by Matthew (20:19), Mark (10:34) and Luke  (18:32). Line 16 is said to refer to the holes made by nails in his hands and feet and, of course, Line 18 is quoted almost verbatim in Matthew and seems to refer precisely to what the Roman soldiers did at the foot of the cross.  Obviously, if King David foretold so many details of the passion a thousand years before it occurred, the commentators have a strong argument for prefiguration and, indeed, for the divine inspiration of the Bible.

Line 1 of Psalm 22 refers to its author as “me” but  it is clearly not David who never had cause to think he had been abandoned by God.  Quite the contrary, even God’s punishment for his crimes of murder and adultery – the death of his first-born son by Bathsheba – was modest by comparison with those meted out to Adam and Eve, the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah or the entire world before the Flood. In the famous Psalm 23,  David recognizes that the Lord has been exceedingly generous to him.  “You anoint my head with oil;  my cup overflows.” [4]  Some think the “me” in 22 is Israel but there is nothing in the history to hint at any cause for despair during David’s reign. In any event, for a variety of reasons, the members of the Jesus Seminar coded the New Testament version of the forsaken line red, concluding that Jesus did not utter it on the cross but rather it may have been inserted by the author of Mark and copied by the author of Matthew neither of whom was present on Golgatha.  If so, it had to have been a deliberate attempt to promote an historical connection that did not exist.

Obviously, with perfect hindsight a case can be made for prefiguration in the Bible.  But the biblical prophets had no such intent. Rather they were raging against what they saw as the failure of the Jewish people to live up to divine expectations in the present and threatening dire consequences in the near future. (They would have been surprised to learn that there was a long term future, given God’s anger.)  It was, of course, the New Testament writers who introduced the idea of prefiguration.  Doing so forced them to stretch their interpretive powers to the breaking point in order to assure their readers of an intimate continuity between the teachings of ancient Israel and Jesus.  They were, after all, writing to their fellow Jews so it was natural for them to claim that Jesus was the promised Messiah. [5]  They found no fewer than 40 Old Testament citations to support this claim not one of which is convincing.  It is true that the Jews anticipated the coming of a Messiah or Redeemer from the earliest times but their belief was not based on any specific promise in any of the covenants God made with the patriarchs.  It is Isaiah in Chapter 53, not God, who describes the role of one who redeems mankind through his suffering.  The renewed availability of redemption after the fall is the central message of the Bible and the lynchpin of Western civilization.  Every aspect of it has been scrutinized in depth through every lens that could be devised including art.

Perhaps the most famous line of prefiguration is Isaiah 7:14:  “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a a son, and will call his name Immanuel.” This is repeated in Matthew 1:23 and used as a Recitative in Handel’s Messiah.  But Immanuel (God with us) cannot be Jesus Christ because two lines later Isaiah describes him as a boy saying, “before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste.”  A Christian, of course, must believe that Jesus is God and certainly knows the difference between right and wrong.  Another Recitative in the Messiah is taken from Saint Paul (1 Corinthians 15:54).  “Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.”  The “then” refers to the last days when “The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised.”  And the saying is said to be a paraphrase of the Prophet Hosea (13:14),  “I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction: repentance shall be hid from mine eyes.”  This is rendered by Handel in the duet, “O death, where is thy sting, o grave where is thy victory?”  The passage in Corinthians begins with Paul saying, “Behold I tell you a mystery.”  The writer wants you to believe that the resurrection of the dead will defeat death itself and he is certain because God promised it to the Jews.  But that connection is nonsensical.  Hosea meant almost the opposite.  In this passage, he was denouncing Israel, personified as Ephraim, in the voice of God who says he may still ransom the innocent but, of the guilty, “repentance shall be hid from my eyes.”  In other words, there are some sins so heinous that even God will not forgive them, a teaching quite at odds with Christian teaching.  Paul didn’t have to claim prefiguration;  the issue is moot once you believe in salvation. But throughout his epistles, Paul was determined to offer definitive proof of the correctness of his interpretation of the good news vis a vis that of the Jerusalem apostles.  He invents the story that he was taken up to heaven for a meeting with God the Father and Jesus who wanted him to correct the doctrinal errors being preached by Peter and the others.

A similar distortion of the Bible’s meaning occurs in many of the inscriptions carved on the Cross of Bury Saint Edmund (also known as the Cloisters Cross).  In one case, the quotation seems to have been selected as foretelling the perfidiousness of the Jews of Jesus’s time.  In fact, Zechariah was denouncing lapses in keeping God’s commandments.  But a medieval scribe latched on to an obscure phrase (12:10) mentioning “the one they have pierced” as though it were intended to foretell Christ’s crucifixion. This sort of mendacity is easy to practice.  A close reading of Homer’s Odyssey can be used to prefigure many of the “superweapons” developed during World War II and the opening lines of Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid can be interpreted as the Allied invasion of the Italian mainland in 1943. A dedicated scholar would have no trouble finding a forerunner of the Republican Party Platform in Marx’s Das Kapital or, for that matter, in the Sermon on the Mount.  History may or may not repeat itself but those who use it in debate rarely strive for objectivity.  As Shakespeare tells us,  “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. / An evil soul producing holy witness / Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, / A goodly apple rotten at the heart. / O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!” [6] But if someone tries to tell you that The Merchant of Venice prefigures the Trump presidency,  you should check to be sure you still have your wallet no matter how much you might agree.

Notes

1.  The numbers given are for the King James and most other Christian versions of the Bible.  The Hebrew Bible contains the same material as the Old Testament but arranged in 24 books and does not include the Apocrypha.   Christian versions that contain the Apocrypha vary in their understanding of its authenticity and authority.

2.  The Biblical Prophets have a different function than the Greek and Roman oracles and from the Prophet Muhammad.  The oracles see and predict the future.  Muhammad is best thought of as the Messenger of Allah, the last in a line that includes Jesus.  The Hebrew prophets are guardians of God’s commandments to the Jews.  In addition to the 16 prophets counted here, Job, David and Solomon are sometimes considered to be prophetic.

3.  What I call "prefiguration" is often referred to as "typology" by biblical commentators but this strikes me as confusing.  The Latin root of type refers to an image or a symbol and its use in the sense of a prediction as meant here is a long stretch.  Some authors of commentaries propose that every verse of the Old Testament predicts something in the New Testament which is clearly nonsense.

4.  There is no chronological or other discernable order to the Psalms.  Thus, it is merely coincidental that David’s thanksgiving follows immediately on the heels of the despair described in Psalm 22.

5.  The “writings” that constitute the Bible were probably aimed at the very small number of people who knew how to read and write and, in the case of the New Testament, were perhaps meant as guides to them to teach others about the person and message of Jesus.  The gospel authors, with the possible exception of John, were not the disciples we refer to as the evangelists but codifiers of slightly different traditions who ascribed their work to more authoritative names.  The gospels were written by individuals two to three generations removed from the life of Jesus.

6  I am well aware that, like the Devil, I am quoting the Bible in this essay for my own purposes and that I benefit from the fact that hardly anyone these days has read the Bible cover to cover.  I would like to think that, like Sir Galahad, “My strength is as the strength of ten / Because my heart is pure” but most days I know better.

A YARDSTICK OF FACTS ABOUT 2016

Jerry Harkins

I am thoroughly amazed at the fog that has descended around our collective memory of the 2016 presidential campaign.  So many unimaginable stories have emerged from  the Wonderland on the Potomac recently that the brain has to purge itself of the old outrages every evening.  We tend to (and want to) forget as much as possible.  But you may recall that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the election by about three million votes but failed to become President because of a constitutional compromise reached in 1789.  If you believe in one-person-one-vote, which is to say the equality of all voters, the Electoral College was a betrayal of a fundamental democratic principle.  It and the even worse compromise that counted a slave as three-fifths of a human being were essential to getting the constitution adopted.  Nevertheless, however necessary, both were immoral.  Both were necessitated by the worst facets of our collective soul and only one was finally annulled seventy-six years later by the expenditure of vast amounts of blood and treasure.  The annulment was, of course, only theoretical for African Americans.  But the Electoral College compromise was never rescinded and so we arrived at 2016 with California having 68.2 times the population of Alaska but only 18.3 times the votes in the Electoral College.  In other words one Alaskan had 3.7 times more influence than one Californian.  Thus, for the second time in sixteen years, a Republican "won" the presidency with fewer votes than the Democrat who "lost" it.

Actually, it was not the Electoral College that cost Secretary Clinton the election.  What did her in was a conspiracy that cost her at least 107,000 votes, her margin of loss in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The plot had three and maybe four elements:  

-       The announcement eleven days before the election by FBI Director James B. Comey that the FBI was re-opening the investigation of Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State.  They had previously exonerated her even while castigating her “carelessness” and even while admitting that no damage was done;

-      The release of unflattering Democratic National Committee emails regarding the primary campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders by Julian Assange of Wikileaks on July 22;

-      The delivery of those same DNC emails to Assange by the Russian government which had hacked them in an effort to influence the election on behalf of Trump; and,

-      The collusion or attempted collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign which shared the objective of defeating Clinton.

There can be no reasonable doubt about the last three elements in that list.  Nor can there be any doubt that Director Comey’s unprecedented actions influenced voters in swing states.  He had the motive, means and opportunity to destroy Clinton’s credibility just eleven days before voters went to the poll.  Finally, on Sunday, November 6, Comey admitted that the re-opening had turned up nothing.  He has alleged that both revelations were the most difficult decisions he ever had to make but, in fact, they were both simple.  He knew he was influencing an election without any evidence that the new information had any validity.  He knew it would fuel the chant heard in Trump rallies, “Lock her up!”  Although the source of the newly found emails was not Assange, the FBI had been either careless or complicit in dealing with the earlier ones.  Comey knew this and should have followed the advice of the adage, “Once bitten, twice shy.”  But he did not.  We still do not know whether he was involved in any way with Assange, the Russians and/or the Trump campaign.  It seems unlikely but there is nothing likely about this story.  The Department of Justice, no friend of Comey, has investigated the matter and has concluded that, reprehensible as his actions were, there is no evidence that he acted for political reasons.  He has repeatedly said that he did it to protect the reputation of the FBI and preserve the rule of law.  In fact, his decision predictably made the reputation of the FBI lower than ever among both liberals and conservatives.  The President of the United States recently called it a “den of thieves” but, of course, no one in his or her right mind believes anything he says.

Comey or no Comey, Hillary Clinton was defeated by a conspiracy.  Sure she made mistakes and sure a lot of people didn’t like her, but:

-       There is solid evidence that Julian Assange despised Clinton, even resorting to the Trumpian (i.e., absurd) allegation that she tried to assassinate him using a drone.  

-      There is equally solid evidence that Assange conspired with the Russians to defeat her and elect Trump.  He certainly offered to provide defamatory information about her to the Trump campaign. The offer and the information were accepted.  

-      There is also solid proof that senior members of the Trump campaign sought the same kind of material from the Russians without using Assange.  

So, Comey or no Comey, there was a conspiracy which is defined as. “An agreement between two or more persons to engage jointly in an unlawful or criminal act, or an act that is innocent in itself but becomes unlawful when done by the combination of actors.”  No matter how often Mr. Trump shouts “No collusion” from the rooftops, if it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. 

There are many aspects of this story that are truly eerie.  For one thing, there are millions of Americans who don’t believe any of it. These are mainly the same people who don’t believe in evolution, the fluoridation of water or climate change but the deniers include Republican office holders and a significant majority of evangelical Christians.  And don’t forget Rudy Giuliani, America’s Mayor, who is given to emitting the most asinine comments as long as they get him fifteen seconds on the six o’clock news.  He must make even his client, Donald Trump, blush.  But the most frightening aspect of it all is the fact that the conspirators were able to dispossess every American of the fundamental right of a free people to freely govern themselves.  We became, in effect, a colony of Russia, stripped of our independence by a cabal of political opportunists, thugs and religious fanatics.  We were reduced to a puppet state with no influence in the world except that which derives from our arsenal of doomsday weapons.

It is conceivable that Trump could be removed from office by either of two constitutional provisions.  It is even possible that we could find relief in the words of our Declaration of Independence:

That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

But that’s not the way to bet. Barring another Nixonian Saturday Night Massacre, it is probable that he will complete his term of office.  He might even survive pardoning himself given the craven tolerance of so many Republican officeholders.  As he himself has boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” 

Democracy isn’t easy.  Arguably there has never been a pure democratic government of any community larger than a couple of hundred people.  All larger ones have been forced to accept compromises that tend toward either authoritarianism or anarchy.  These tendencies run in cycles that can be driven by sudden events or long term trends.  America today – what we like to call the Great American Experiment – is showing signs of both extremes at the same time.

Subsequent Event

On March 22, 2019, Attorney General William Barr released a letter he sent to Congress which reported the key conclusion of special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.  He quoted Mueller's 300-page submission as saying that the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."  That it did not establish conspiracy or coordination does not mean that one or the other did not occur, only that the evidence was insufficient to reach a conclusion.  The conspiracy statues rightly establish a high bar for criminality.  However, we may resort to a somewhat lower standard if our only concern is with logic and decency.  

As usual, the Republicans resorted to the Big Lie:  No conspiracy, no collusion, fake news, case closed.  Mr. Barr, who had "redacted" massive amounts of the Mueller report, refused to let Congress see what he had taken out or the evidence for parts he left in.  In other words, anyone who believes a word Barr says might find fellowship in the Flat Earth Society.  As the Psalmist said, "How long, O Lord, shall the wicked triumph?"

FINIS:

CHRISTIANITY AND THE IRISH VOTE FOR ABORTION RIGHTS

Jerry Harkins

On May 25, 2018 Irish voters overturned a constitutional ban on abortion by a landslide of two to one. They had already repealed the criminalization of contraception and approved a law that legalized gay marriage.  It is widely expected that they will soon repeal laws that give control of virtually all state-supported elementary schools to the church.  But the abortion vote was transformative.  Simply stated, it put an end to the church’s influence in this most Catholic of all countries.  Rejecting the most prominent teaching of the church since the Council of Trent, it also marked the end of the Christian Era in Europe.

The Irish did not vote for abortion.  No one actually likes terminating a pregnancy, even a doomed one, because everyone knows it is always a tragedy, always the result of an agonizing decision.  Every sane person knows that, to the extent state and church have any standing in the matter, it is limited to finding ways to reduce unwanted pregnancies.  At the same time, every sane person also knows that unwanted pregnancies do occur in the real world.  No one has ever needed a coterie of politicians or celibate male hierarchs with a cultish understanding of biology to express opinions they ascribe to God without the benefit of either reason or evidence.  No God ever proclaimed from Mount Sinai, "Thou shalt not abort a fetus!"

Over the course of history, the church has shown itself to be a despicable, criminal custodian of sexual morality and the Irish government has been an enabling partner.  The most recent example of this collaboration began to come to light about 20 years ago. For 231 years, at the behest of the hierarchy, Irish law regarded an unwed mother as a criminal and turned her and her child over to the tender mercies of the Magdalene Laundry system where she and her baby were subjected to slave labor and the sexual depravity of the clergy. The income generated from this demonic practice became a mainstay of the church’s income, much of which was forwarded to Rome.  What the Irish were voting for on May 25 was freedom from the self-serving mythologies of the Vatican and the Irish government.  To comprehend the unlimited reach of their influence and the basis of their despotic power, it is necessary first to understand those mythologies which are similar but not identical.

Ireland began to emerge from nearly a thousand years of brutal British colonialism in 1922.  One of the leaders of this process was Éamon de Valera, an aloof Irish-American introvert who became the principal architect of what he imagined to be the Irish ethos.  He had played a peripheral role in the 1916 Easter Uprising and surrendered to the British who tried him and dozens of other people for treason.  He was convicted and sentenced to death but the British did not follow through because he was actually an American citizen and Britain was desperately trying to persuade the United States to enter World War I.  As it turned out, Britain, America and Ireland would have been a lot better off had the Brits shot him.  For 54 years beginning in 1919, he was the dominant player in Irish politics as President, Prime Minister (Taoiseach) or Leader of the Opposition.  He thought of Ireland as a bucolic nation of small tenant farmers, contented peasants serene in the bosom of holy mother the church. His creed was “One faith, one church, one baptism and after that the fires of hell.”  He tried to create a nation intellectually and morally isolated from the corrupt modern world which led him to maintain Ireland’s neutrality in the face of Nazi genocide.  Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945 and the Germans surrendered eight days later.  In between, de Valera visited the German ambassador in Dublin to express his sympathy.  His major fault was that he was against change which he considered the work of the devil.  Like so many other twentieth century dictators, he was highly skilled at manipulating the levers of power.

The church promoted the same medieval vision of Irish society and backed it by its authority to condemn souls to eternal damnation.  The God marketed by the hierarchs warned, “…wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.  But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”  Since the middle ages, Catholics had been taught to yearn and pray for salvation as the whole purpose of earthly life and its trials and that the bishops exclusively held the keys to the Kingdom.  Irish Catholics prayed mainly to the only womanly figure the church admitted to the divine pantheon as the Mediatrix of All Graces, the virgin uniquely conceived without sin or, in the words of the thirteenth century prayer Salve Regina, “O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.”  Perhaps she was but very few attained the goal.  Christianity was a casino and, to keep its subjects playing the lottery, the church preached unquestioning obedience in the here and now.  As always, the odds were stacked against you but you can’t win it if you’re not in it.

In Ireland, the blended mythology translated into a bizarre system of sexual governance promulgated by the church and enforced by the state.  For generations, condoms were not sold in Ireland and, later, if you bought a morning after abortion pill online, the penalty could be life imprisonment followed by damnation.  No dancing in public.  No men and women present at the same beach.  No girls riding bicycles.  No female sports of any kind.  No civil service jobs for women after marriage.  No female ownership of property.  No female drinking in public.  No denying sex to a husband for any reason.  Such misogyny was not, of course, unique to Christianity or to Ireland.  Elsewhere, however, the theory supporting the misogyny involved (more or less) protecting the so-called weaker sex.  In Ireland (and everywhere else), the church taught that women are the cause of all evil.  As a concomitant, it taught that suffering is good for the soul and it would excommunicate a doctor who tried to relieve pain of any kind.  If the doctor was actually a midwife, the penalty could be death. In the Christian world, the theory was that God invented the pain of childbirth to punish women.  He invented sexual attraction to insure that they would bear many children and experience much pain.  Except for one woman, Mary the sinless, sexless Christ bearer.

Even many Irish women bought into these absurdities.  The laundries were, after all, operated by religious sisters, among them, the ironically named Mercy Sisters, Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, Sisters of Charity and Good Shepherd Sisters.  But the direction came from and the profits went to the bishops.

Ireland is presently going through its own Truth and Reconciliation process modeled in part on the pioneering work of the South African post-apartheid commission chaired by Archbishop Tutu.  One of the problems for the Irish, however, is that there is simply no religious figure with Tutu's credibility or compassion.  Another is that the Irish church was the central perpetrator of the evils it is supposedly investigating and it remains largely in denial.  There is hope.  Ireland’s strengths going forward – its economic success, increasing diversity and highly educated work force – are also among the forces of modernization that are driving the worldwide marginalization of the church and the accountability of the government.  But the mythology is strong.

The church’s dogmatic mythology holds that humans are born in a state of original sin, that the sin forfeited any claim people may have had to salvation and that the blame for this is attributable to Eve who “tempted” Adam.  The “son” of God had to suffer and die to “redeem” humanity and make it possible (although extremely difficult and unlikely) for individual humans to avoid the flames of hell.  None of this has any basis in fact or even in any rational understanding of the Bible but it is promulgated vigorously because it is the basis of the absolute power the hierarchy feels entitled to.  Mythology is useful for many social purposes, prominent among them for the assertion and projection of power.  Communities need a power structure but Lord Acton was right, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  If kings and bishops are seen to have the instruments of power and their power is thought to have magical roots, it becomes irresistible and virtually uncheckable.  Matthew reports that Jesus imparted to Peter the absolute power to “bind” or “loose” upon earth and in heaven whatever he wanted and the church claims (again without evidence) that the power was transferable to his successors.  (The only exception was Pope John Paul II’s assertion that he had no power to ordain women.)

The Irish rejection of the abortion dogma has no precedent.   There have been successful revolutions and even rebellions against papal power:  Luther’s Reformation comes to mind or, more recently, Garibaldi’s defeat of the Papal States.  But Luther was able to avoid the stake only because of German politics and the powerful support of Frederick III, the Elector of Saxony.  Garibaldi’s victory was only partial.  He was never able to destroy the Papacy itself which he referred to as “that pestilential institution” and the unification of the Italian peninsula, Risorigimento, has never resulted in successful governance.  But the Irish rebellion promises to be different.  All over the world, the pedophilia and other sex scandals have exposed the hypocrisy of the church’s perseveration on sexual sin.  In Ireland, however, it goes beyond horror and beyond evil.  It is nothing less than a betrayal of the cardinal virtues of faith, hope and love by the one power that the people looked to for succor in the centuries of their agonies.  The church will crumble to dust long before it can be forgiven and the hour of accountability is at hand.