Sunday, November 30, 2014

Pope Francis: Muslim leaders should condemn terrorism



https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4YflGTr9irk

Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew I signed a pledge to support Christians in the Middle East






Pope Francis has urged Muslim leaders around the world to condemn terrorism carried out in the name of Islam.


Speaking on board a flight back to Rome, the Pope said that he understood the harm caused by the stereotype that linked Islam with terrorism.


He said a "global condemnation" of the violence would help the majority of Muslims dispel this stereotype.


Pope Francis was returning from a three-day visit to Turkey, where he discussed divisions between faiths.


The pontiff denounced people who say that "all Muslims are terrorists".


"As we cannot say that all Christians are fundamentalists," he said.


In Istanbul, Pope Francis called for an end to the persecution of Christians in the Middle East.


In a joint declaration, the Pope and Patriarch Bartholomew I said they could not resign themselves to a "Middle East without Christians".


Patriarch Bartholomew is the spiritual leader of the world's 250 million Orthodox Christians, whose Church broke with Rome in 1054 in a schism that divided the Christian world.


Constantinople, as the modern Turkish city of Istanbul was once known, was the centre of Orthodox Christianity until the Ottoman conquest in 1453.


Only around 120,000 Christians remain in Turkey, where the vast majority of the 80 million citizens are Muslims.


Pope Francis also called for dialogue with Muslims to counter fanaticism and fundamentalism when he visited the Turkish capital, Ankara.


'Indifference of many'
Pope Francis flanked by Vatican spokesman father Federico Lombardi talks to journalists during a press conference aboard the flight towards Rome Pope Francis was returning to Rome after his three-day visit to Turkey when he made his latest comments


Christians have been targeted by Muslim hardliners in Iraq and Syria in recent years, with a violent campaign of persecution by Islamic State militants this summer when they captured the Iraqi city of Mosul.


In their joint declaration, the two Church leaders said: "We express our common concern for the current situation in Iraq, Syria and the whole Middle East.


"Many of our brothers and sisters are being persecuted and have been forced violently from their homes. It even seems that the value of human life has been lost, that the human person no longer matters and may be sacrificed to other interests. And, tragically, all this is met by the indifference of many."


The pontiff and the patriarch also called for peace in Ukraine.


The violent conflict in Ukraine this year has accentuated differences between its large Orthodox and Catholic communities.


The Pope and the patriarch said: "We pray for peace in Ukraine, a country of ancient Christian tradition, while we call upon all parties involved to pursue the path of dialogue and of respect for international law in order to bring an end to the conflict and allow all Ukrainians to live in harmony."


As his visit drew to a close, Pope Francis met Turkey's chief rabbi, whose flock has diminished to just 17,000 people.


At the Blue Mosque on Saturday, one of the greatest masterpieces of Ottoman architecture, the Pope turned east towards Mecca, clasped his hands and paused for two minutes as the Grand Mufti of Istanbul, Rahmi Yaran, delivered a Muslim prayer.


The Pope then visited Hagia Sofia - which for almost 1,000 years was the most important Orthodox cathedral, then for nearly five centuries a mosque under the Ottomans, and is currently a museum.


For Istanbul, a city that passed from the Byzantines to the Ottomans, a place where religions, empires and cultures collided, the Pope's message of interfaith dialogue has profound resonance, says the BBC's Mark Lowen in Istanbul.


Map



More on This Story


Related Stories

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

If Genesis Borrowed from Babylonian Epic, why an Egyptian ‘loan word’ for Noah’s Ark?



by

 Damien F. Mackey

 

 
 

Pan-Babylonianism is a far too one-dimensional approach

to the study of the ancient Scriptures.

 

 

 

Professor A. Yahuda (The Language of the Pentateuch in its Relation to Egyptian, Oxford, 1933)

dealt a shock blow to both the documentary theory and to the related Pan-Babylonianism. Yahuda, unlike P. J. Wiseman (New Discoveries in Babylonia about Genesis, Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1936), was an expert in his field. His profound knowledge of Egyptian and Hebrew combined - not to mention Akkadian - gave him a distinct advantage over fellow Egyptologists unacquainted with Hebrew, who could thus not discern any appreciable Egyptian influence on the Pentateuch.

Yahuda, however, realized that the Pentateuch was absolutely saturated with Egyptian – not only for the periods associated with Egypt, most notably the Joseph narrative including Israel’s sojourn in Egypt, but even for the periods customarily associated with Babylonia (presumably the Flood account and the Babel incident[*]).

For instance, instead of the Akkadian word for ‘Ark’ used in the Mesopotamian Flood accounts, or even the Canaanite ones current elsewhere in the Bible, the Noachic account Yahuda noted, uses the Egyptian-based tebah (Egyptian db.t, ‘box, coffer, chest’).

Moses, traditionally the author of the Pentateuch substantially speaking - and I believe the editor of Genesis - was he not, to all appearances, “an Egyptian”? Exodus 2:19: “An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds. He even drew water for us and watered the flock”. (Cf. Acts 7:22).  

 

 

[*] Though Anne Habermehl has, in a recent ground-breaking article, Where in the World Is the Tower of Babel? (https://answersingenesis.org/tower-of-babel/where-in-the-world-is-the-tower-of-babel/) completely shifted the playing field, by re-locating the biblical “Shinar”, and the Babel incident, to the Sinjar region of NE Syria.

This may render even less relevant the Babylonian view.

 

Most important was this linguistic observation by Yahuda:

 

Whereas those books of Sacred Scripture which were admittedly written during and after the Babylonian Exile reveal in language and style such an unmistakable Babylonian influence that these newly-entered foreign elements leap to the eye, by contrast in the first part of the Book of Genesis, which describes the earlier Babylonian period, the Babylonian influence in the language is so minute as to be almost non-existent.


{Dead Sea Scrolls expert, Fr. Jean Carmignac (Birth of the Synoptic Gospels), had been able to apply the same sort of bilingual expertise - in his case, Greek and Hebrew - to gainsay the received scholarly opinion and show that the New Testament writings in Greek had Hebrew originals: his argument for a much earlier dating than is usual for the New Testament books}.

 

While Yahuda’s argument is totally Egypto-centric, at least for the Book of Genesis, one does also need to consider the likelihood of ‘cultural traffic’ from Palestine to Egypt, especially given the prominence of Joseph in Egypt from age 80-110. One might expect that the toledôt documents borne by Israel into Egypt would have become of great interest to the Egyptians under the régime of the Vizier, Joseph (historically Imhotep of Egypt’s 3rd dynasty), who had after all saved the nation of Egypt from a 7-year famine, thereby influencing Egyptian thought and concepts for a considerable period of time.

The combination of Wiseman and Yahuda, in both cases clear-minded studies based on profound analysis of ancient documents, is an absolute bomb waiting to explode all over any artificially constructed literary theory of Genesis. Whilst I. Kikawada and A. Quinn (Before Abraham Was: The Unity of Genesis 1-11) have managed to find some merit in the JEDP theory, and I have also suggested how its analytical tools may be useful at least when applied to the apparent multiple sourcing in the Flood narrative (and perhaps in the Esau and Jacob narrative), see my:

 

Tracing the Hand of Moses in Genesis

 


 

the system appears as inherently artificial in the light of archaeological discoveries.

U. Cassuto (as quoted by Kikawada and Quinn) may not have been diplomatic (their view), but nevertheless he was basically correct in his estimation of documentism: “This imposing and beautiful edifice has, in reality, nothing to support it and is founded on air”.

It is no coincidence that documentary theory was developed during the approximate era of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (c. 1800), who had proposed an a priori approach to extramental reality, quite different from the common sense approach of the Aristotelian philosophy of being. Today the philosophy of science is saturated with this new approach. Kantianism I think is well and truly evident too in the Karl Heinrich Graf and Julius Wellhausen attitude to the biblical texts.

And Eduard Meyer carried this over into his study of Egyptian chronology, by devising in his mind a quantifying a priori theory – an entirely artificial one that had no substantial bearing on reality – that he imposed upon his subject with disastrous results. See my:

 

The Fall of the Sothic Theory: Egyptian Chronology Revisited

 



Again an “imposing and beautiful edifice … founded on air”.