Some may have received and email of a just published post “Flesh and Blood” and then discovered “not available.” Sorry, too quick with the mouse. That post will appear in August.
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Daily Archives: July 3, 2024
Perseverance and Freedom
When the Fourth of July comes around each year it is quite common to hear quotes, passages, and speeches that invoke the name of Thomas Jefferson the American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and later served as the 3rd president of the United States. He wrote a plethora of letters, essays, and more over the course of his life. As you might expect he is a quotable person. Continue reading
Status and Standing
This coming Sunday is the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time. What do the hometown people know about Jesus that would lead them to reject him? While there is much that I disagree with in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, by John Dominic Crossan, his social status of tekton is enlightening:
Ramsay MacMullen has noted that one’s social pedigree would easily be known in the Greco-Roman world and that a description such as “carpenter” indicated lower class status [Roman Social Relations: 50 B.C. to A.D. 384]. At the back of his book he gives a “Lexicon of Snobbery” filled with terms used by literate and therefore upper-class Greco-Roman authors to indicate their prejudice against illiterate and therefore lower-class individuals. Among those terms is tekton, or “carpenter,” the same term used for Jesus in Mark 6:3 and for Joseph in Matthew 13:55. One should not, of course, ever presume that upper-class sneers dictated how the lower classes actually felt about themselves. But, in general, the great divide in the Greco-Roman world was between those who had to work with their hands and those who did not. [p. 24]
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