New Developments in Dead Sea Scrolls Research

Here's a link to a popular article about research on textiles recovered from Qumran, the site of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It seems the Qumranites dressed exclusively in white linen, just like Josephus' descriptions of the Essenes.

The article exaggerates, in my opinion, the amount of debate about the identity of the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  The majority of scholars have been convinced that they were Essenes almost since their initial discovery, although there have always been a few dissenting voices that have gotten more press coverage than their theories necessarily merit.

The idea of the Qumran site having been a fortress is not new: however, it was not built with defensive fortifications, and there is little in the area that the vicinity that the Romans would have been interested in defending (for example, see this article).

There are many lines of evidence that converge to identify the Qumran community as an Essene settlement.  This latest contribution of data from textile studies is a welcome confirmation of what most Qumran scholars have already believed.

"Semper Paratus!": The Readings for the First Sunday of Advent

The last month of the liturgical year was spent reflecting on the Last Things, culminating in the Feast of Christ the King last week, when we pondered the Final Judgment, the separation of the “sheep” and the “goats.”

There is actually a fairly smooth transition from the end of the liturgical year to its beginning, because the first week of Advent is spent meditating not on the First Coming of Christ, but on his Second. By next week, the perspective will shift, and the liturgy will anticipate the coming celebration of the incarnation.

In any event, although it is a new liturgical year this week, the end-times focus of previous weeks continues:

Faithfulness in the Small Matters: The Readings for the 33d Sunday in Ordinary Time

St. Josemaría Escrivà, the founder of the personal prelature Opus Dei, has often been called the “saint of the ordinary” for the emphasis he placed on achieving holiness in every-day living.


In fact, one of his most famous sermons was entitled “The Richness of Ordinary Life.”


St. Josemaría once said he could tell a great deal about a man’s interior life by looking at his closet. Good order in one’s soul is often reflected by good order in one’s lifestyle. A man who is sloppy or inattentive in the care of his personal effects will often likewise be careless in his life of prayer.


The Readings for this Lord’s Day focus on the theme of fidelity to the seemingly small matters that God places in our care.

The Successor of Peter and Biblical Interpretation

The Chair of Peter in the Basilica of St. John Lateran

Some months ago on this blog, we had a discussion about the role of the Papacy in the Church and specifically with respect to the interpretation of Scripture. 

I keep coming back to the Pope's homily upon assuming the Chair of Peter in St. John Lateran (7 May 2005).

(St. John Lateran is, of course, the Cathedral of Rome--not St. Peter's in the Vatican.  St. John Lateran is the official church of the Bishop of Rome, and thus considered the mother church of Christianity.  This church has it's own feast day, which we celebrated yesterday.  When a new pope assumes the Chair of Peter in St. John Lateran, it marks the beginning of his tenure as Bishop of the Diocese of Rome.)

In this homily, the Pope pointedly addresses the issue of Scriptural interpretation, and his own role in it.

I quote here the most relevant paragraphs for reflection:

Great Time at the Shrine

Shrine Director Leif Arvidson with Drs. Hahn & Bergsma

Dr. Hahn and I had the pleasure of visiting and speaking at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wisconsin, this weekend.  A crowd of 400 came out to make the Marian pilgrimage, and hear talks on Confession and Eucharist, and receive those very sacraments.  The Shrine, built by the people of the Diocese of La Crosse under the leadership of now-Cardinal Raymond Burke, is a hidden treasure of Catholicism in the Midwest.  Extraordinarily beautiful, the shrine church and its grounds were designed with the help of Duncan Stroik, the expert in ecclesiastical architecture from the Architecture School of the University of Notre Dame. (He's also godfather of several Bergsma children, but that's another story!) If you ever find yourself in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, the Shrine is well worth a day's visit!

Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, with Monastery of the Franciscans of the Immaculate, overlooking La Crosse, Wisconsin

Off Topic: Steve Jobs' Last Words

Oh Wow! Oh Wow! Oh Wow!

Click here for story.


Does it mean anything?

Virtuous Leadership: The Readings for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time

A few weeks ago at Franciscan, we had Alexandre Havard on campus to speak about virtuous leadership.  His fine talk is on You Tube here. 

Havard will be followed in about a week by Andreas Widmer, who will again speak about virtuous leadership, based on his experiences as a Swiss Guard during the pontificate of Blessed John Paul II.  

These speakers on leadership came to my mind this week as I pondered the Sunday Readings, because virtuous leadership for the people of God is the unifying theme of these Scriptures.

The Supper of the Lamb: The Mass as Heaven on Earth

The videos of the presentations at the Franciscan liturgical conference, "The Supper of the Lamb: The Mass as Heaven on Earth," are now posted here.  Bishop Seratelli, Dr. Hahn, Denis McNamara, Adam Bartlett, and John Bergsma presented.

Conference on Science and Faith

Al Plantinga, Emeritus Prof. of Phil., Notre Dame

It's a little tangential to Biblical Studies (although not as much as one might think), but I think it's worth mentioning that there's a fabulous Conference on Science and Faith coming up in just over a month (Dec. 2-3), right here at Franciscan University. All the specifics are here.

We have some of the brightest coming to address this subject from a Christian perspective, including Alvin Plantinga, Michael Behe, William Carroll OP, Stephen Barr, Ed Feser, Jay Richards, Ben Wiker, with members of our own faculty responding. It's well, well worth the registration fee to see these men all in the same room dialoguing about some of the most important questions of the human condition!

The Supper of the Lamb: The Mass as Heaven on Earth

This weekend I had the joy of participating in the "Supper of the Lamb: The Mass as Heaven on Earth" conference sponsored by the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology and Franciscan University's Office of Chapel Ministry.  The link to the conference webpage is here.  We were privileged to have Bishop Serratelli of the Diocese of Patterson, New Jersey, giving the initial keynote on Saturday morning.  Bishop Serratelli is one of only eleven bishops on the International Committee on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), the commission that oversees the translations of the Mass and other liturgical rites for all English-speaking Catholics worldwide.  Bishop Serratelli spoke about the process that lead to the New Translation of the Mass, which goes into effect this Advent.  The New Translation is more literal, dignified, poetic, and biblical than the texts that English-speaking Catholics have been using for the last forty years.  For those curious about the inner workings of the translation process, the podcast of Bishop Serratelli's talk should prove intriguing.


I spoke after Bishop Serratelli on the theme of the confluence of nuptiality and liturgy in Scripture and the Mass.  My talk outline is below the break.


We also had the pleasure of an address by Dennis McNamara, one of the nation's foremost authorities on Catholic church architecture; Mr. Adam Bartlett, and expert on liturgical music; and batting clean-up, Dr. Scott Hahn addressing the mystical relationship between the earthly and the heavenly liturgy ("A Heavenly Banquet for Earthly Beggars").


Podcasts of the talks will be available shortly, and I'll post links when they are up.


I'm afraid I'm not able to do my usual commentary on the readings this weekend since I was occupied with the conference.

Digital Dead Sea Scrolls Project

If you haven't check it out yet, the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls project from the Israeli Shrine of the Book museum is worth checking out.  It features high-quality, easily-accessed digital images of the actual scrolls.  So far they have only a handful of the most prominent scrolls available in this format.  One hopes that this will be an ongoing effort that will eventually include all scrolls with any significant textual content.

My initial impressions of the descriptive and introductory materials they posted with the scroll images are very good.  The project seems to have been pursued in a moderate, generous manner, offering the scrolls to everyone as part of world culture.

How Do We Dress for this Wedding Banquet? The 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

The standard of dress at Mass has declined in recent years.  People show up looking like their ready for the beach or a football game.  Some pastors are calling attention to this problem.  I agree--I’m all for encouraging modesty and taste in the way we physically dress for worship

But our external dress is not the main point of this Sunday’s Readings.

What is the real "dress" of the Christian who approaches the Eucharistic Banquet?

Are We a Fruitful Vineyard? Readings for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

The past several Sundays we have been reading from the vineyard parables of Jesus in Matthew, and this Sunday we reach a climactic point in the hostility between the leaders of the people (chief priests and elders) and Jesus.

The Readings for this Lord’s Day are skillfully chosen to complement the Gospel reading.  Most commentators agree that the vine parables of the Old Testament found in Isaiah 5 and Psalm 80 are the textual background for Jesus’ own vineyard parable in Matt 21:33-43.

Is God Fair? Round Two: The 26th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Apparently Holy Mother Church wants us to learn something about God’s justice and mercy, because the themes of this Sunday’s Readings repeat, with variation, those of last week’s.

Last week we had to deal with the difficult Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, which raised the issue of whether God is “unfair” in his merciful generosity.  (On a side note, a good friend and fellow scholar passes on a suggestion from a saintly priest that the “denarius” in last week’s parable may be identified with the Eucharist, the “daily wage” or “daily bread” that sustains us for Today so that we may live to see Tomorrow.  Beautiful!)

This week the topic of God’s “fairness” rises again at the beginning of the First Reading:

Is God Fair? The Readings for the 25th Sunday of Ordinary Time

The Gospel Reading for this Lord’s Day raises the issue of the fairness of God.  Jesus, being a good teacher, wants his students to think.  He teaches in parables that—on the one hand—do indeed communicate truth and answer questions, but—on the other—also raise new, puzzling questions that require the student (discipulus means student, after all) to expend some mental energy. 

Our First Reading emphasizes the distance between God’s perspective and ours:

Forgiveness: The Readings for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

The Readings for this Lord’s Day are unified around the theme of forgiveness.  We begin and end with the words of “Jesus” on this topic: the First Reading records the words of Jesus, son of Sira, and the Gospel records the words of Jesus, Son of God.

One of the last books of the Christian Old Testament to be written, Sirach (also known as Ben Sira or Ecclesiasticus) often seems to anticipate the teachings of Christ himself:

Warning and Rebuke in the Christian Life: Readings for the Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

I don’t like personal conflict.  I try to avoid it as much as possible.  Probably most Americans do.  I’m not sure what it’s like in other cultures, although I’ve heard of others where open social confrontation is more common.

This Sunday’s readings deal with situations in which Christians have a duty to confront one another.  They don’t make for comfortable reading in a culture that puts a high value on keeping the peace and minding one’s own business.

The First Reading is the great “Watchman” passage from the prophet Ezekiel:

Why the Pope Has to Be Infallible, Part 3

This is the third in a series of posts about Papal infallibility and its relationship to the interpretation of Scripture. See part 1, part 2, and part 2a.

In the first and second parts of this series of posts, we discussed the infallibility of the Church as a whole, and then the infallibility of an ecumenical council.

We concluded the last post with the question, Is the infallibility of an ecumenical council enough? In other words, in order to preserve the unity of the Church, and to transmit the faith with certitude to the common believer, is it enough that ecumenical councils alone be infallible?

Why the Pope has to be Infallible, Part 2a

The semester is in full swing for many of us, and the time to blog is scarce.  In preparation for my next post on papal infallibility, I'd like to call attention to this well-known essay by Protestant theologian Stephen Long from Garret Evangelical Seminary, who made some excellent and succinct remarks on the necessity of the papacy during the time of John Paul II's funeral and the election of Benedict XVI: click here for the pdf.  While Long does not specifically address infallibility, the points he makes about the necessity of the papacy are relevant to the issue.

Some of my favorite quotes from the essay:

* "The final logic of this version of Protestantism can only be that each individual makes up his or her own religion, which will then be defined over and against every other individual's religion. In other words, what
holds this tradition together is that it is against something. This kind of Protestantism needs an object against which it dissents for its own identity."

Why the Pope has to be Infallible, Part 2

In my last post,  I tried to show that there were two basic positions about who is the final arbiter of the interpretation of Scripture, either (A) the Church or (B) the individual Christian, and if (A) is true, then the Church has to be infallible; otherwise one returns to the default position (B).

I think many are willing to grant that the Church is infallible.  I would have accepted that proposition in theory even as a Protestant.  However, I would have held it in a form something like this:

(C) The Church is infallible, but the voice of the Church is not to be identified with any of her ministers, bodies or representatives.

It follows from a position like this that no Pope, Bishop, theologian, council, synod, etc. can be identified as speaking for the Church.