Friday, September 23, 2011
Jesus wept
A popular Bible trivia question is "What is the shortest verse" and the answer is "Jesus wept" which occurs during the raising of Lazarus. The Gospels of the first centuries were written in Greek in all capital letters (no lower case) and WITH NO SPACES between words. I spent a year in a Paltalk Catholic Chat and one sanctimonious old man afflicted with the sin of scrupulosity would scold anyone who typed "god" in lower case so I told him he is full of baloney. Hebrew also has no lower case either. Anyway, the early century Greek Orthodox theologians made the observation, regarding the verse "Jesus wept", that Christ resonated in compassion with the mourners EVEN THOUGH he knew that the next moment he would RAISE Lazarus from the dead. Greek oral tradition has it that Lazarus became a bishop in the early church. Lazarus was so sobered by his experience of death that he only laughed ONCE in his life after his resurrection, and it was when he saw a thief stealing an earthen vessel (pot) and he said "Look! Clay stealing clay!"
I meant to point out that separating scripture into canons and assigning verse numbers did not take place for the first several centuries. In fact it is interesting that the heretic Marcion was the first to suggest that there should be a formal canon of acceptable books of the Bible. Martin Luther referred to the Epistle of James as "a straw scripture" because it said "faith without works is dead" which reminds me of Bonhoeffer's "cheap grace" , grace without paying the cost of discipleship. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism For that matter, the heretic Origen was the first to coin the term "Theotokos" (birth-giver of God) for the Virgin Mary which is a very important term in Orthodoxy among Greeks and also Russians (Bogoroditsa).
