Monday, February 20, 2012

Be thou, therefore, a spiritual Bezaleel

Actually, the first sentence, in ancient Syriac, of St. Isaac the Syrian's "Pearls"  says "All the sins of all humankind throughout all time are as but a handful of dust before the divine compassion" (paraphrased from memory) - I was in a Greek monastery with the monk who learned ancient Syriac to translate that book into English and became one of the world's renound scholars of ancient Syriac, Dana Millier. He left the monastery after 20 years, became a professor at Fordham, and my stepson had him for Philosophy 101.  We corresponded a little in email. He kind of remembers me. He is a bit reclusive and does not want memories of those days so much, I suspect. Life is weirdly serendipitous. My other friend from monastery days is still a monk, Fr. Justin, who went to St. Catherine's in Sinai Egypt, the only non-Greek every to be accepted, and he is head librarian (probably only librarian) in charge of electronically preserving the crumbling volumes electronically for future generations of scholars. One of those volumes is the Sinai codex, the earliest know complete Bible in Septuagin Greek in approximate present canonical form, including Apocryphad-Deuterocanonical books.  He emailed me a few times, once to mention how Moses had one chief architect to execute the plans for the Temple, Bezaleel, and one theologian of early centuries counselled some other theologian "therefore be thou a spiritual Bezaleel" MEANING that the plans, blueprints, are laid out in detail, BUT as a Bezaleel one has some license, or necessity, to improvise, interpret subjectively, slightly, BUT one must remain in the spirit of the blueprint, the tradition. And it is oral tradition which is redacted into scripture. Tradition produces scripture. Scripture does not produce tradition.

The Apocrypha-Deuterocanonical books, Maccabees etc, were rejected by Reformation in part because they justified concepts of purgatory and prayers for dead. I saw a court pamplet in NYC which spoke of ones "sacred" duty to serve on jury duty. The word "sacred" can ONLY be found ONCE and it is in the Apocrypha, in Maccabees, where they decided to create a "sacred holiday" to commemorate some event. Ah, the wal


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