The Fountain and the Cistern

I. The stone that outlived the temple

There's a slab of limestone in a museum case in Istanbul. It carries seven lines of Greek, cut sometime between Herod's builders and the fire that ended their work.¹

It was a sign. It stood on a low balustrade that ran around the inner courts of the Temple in Jerusalem, and what it says, in the standard rendering, is this: no foreigner may pass this point, and whoever is caught has only himself to blame for the death that follows.

Three things are true about it.

The first is that a man was nearly torn apart in the street over it. The crowd that seized Paul in the Temple had a specific charge: further brought Greeks also into the temple, and hath polluted this holy place. The narrator then does something that changes the whole scene — he tells you it wasn't true. For they had seen before with him in the city Trophimus an Ephesian, whom they supposed that Paul had brought into the temple (Acts 21:28–29). Somebody saw the two men together downtown and filled in the rest.

The second is that somewhere inside those courts there was a market — almost certainly the outer one, the only ground a foreigner was permitted to stand on, though the text doesn't say. And the sentence Jesus quotes while He's turning the tables over is the one about who the house was for: My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer (Mark 11:17).²

The third is that the building is gone. Titus's men took it apart in the summer of 70, and there is not one stone of it left standing on another, which is what He said would happen.

The fence is in excellent condition.

That last fact is not an irony. It's the subject of this essay.

II. The word Stephen used

A man stands trial and tells the court the history of his own people. Abraham, then Joseph, then Moses and the wilderness — all of it uncontroversial, all of it ground his judges stand on too. Then he gets to Solomon, and it goes wrong.

But Solomon built [God] an house. Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet, Heaven is My throne, and earth is My footstool: what house will ye build Me? saith the LORD: or what is the place of My rest? (Acts 7:47–49)

None of it is improvised. That is Isaiah 66, read back at them out of their own scroll, and every man in the room could have finished the verse — so what happens next isn't a reaction to a novelty.

Made with hands is χειροποίητος, cheiropoiētos, and in the Greek scriptures those men had been raised on, that word means idol. It's the term for the carved thing in the pagan shrine — the manufactured god, the one you can point at. Stephen picks it up and sets it on the Temple. In Jerusalem. In front of the court that ran the place.

Stephen doesn't get to the end of the paragraph.

Cheiropoiētos is also ordinary Greek. It's in Herodotus and Thucydides meaning nothing more interesting than manufactured, and anyone with a lexicon can find it there.³ So the claim is not about the language. It's about the register — about what that particular word was for in the particular books these particular men had memorized. In the Septuagint it is an idol-word, and the man saying it knew exactly whose ears it was landing in.

So the accusation at the center of this essay is not one I'm bringing to the tradition. It's one the tradition made about itself, out loud, at the top of its voice, and it killed the man who made it.

And Isaiah, when he asks what house will ye build Me, doesn't answer none, and nowhere. He answers with a person: but to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at My word (Isa 66:2).

Not a place. A person, and a poor one.

III. What an idol actually is

The charge is not the one a modern reader expects. Read the Hebrew Bible's mockery of idols and the complaint is almost never this god is false. Look at what it actually says.

Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands. They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not: They have ears, but they hear not: noses have they, but they smell not: They have hands, but they handle not: feet have they, but they walk not. (Ps 115:4–7)

Every clause in that inventory is about something that does not move. It has a mouth, and the mouth has nothing new to say. Whatever it was going to be, it already is, and it will be that in a hundred years.

Jealous of a Calf takes this psalm to its turn — they that make them are like unto them, and the harm is to the worshipper. What matters here is the property the psalm is describing when it says like unto them. It isn't falsehood. It's stillness. You become as fixed as the thing you kneel to.

Now set that against how God answers when Moses asks what to call Them.

I AM THAT I AM. (Ex 3:14)

A verb, where a name was asked for. Not a noun, not a title, not a word you could carve over a door — a sentence that will not sit still long enough to be a label.⁴

And Jeremiah builds an entire indictment out of the distance between those two things:

For My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken Me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. (Jer 2:13)

Two evils, and the second is the one worth stopping on. The first is leaving. The second is what they built instead — and the contrast is not between God and a rival, but between water that is moving and water that has been stopped. A fountain cannot be owned; you can only go to it, and it will be different water when you do. A cistern is a container for water that has stopped moving, and a cistern can be owned, sited, inherited, and defended. That's the whole appeal — and the prophet's last detail is that the things leak anyway.

So here is the charge:

An idol is not a false god. It is an arrested one. Something living, pinned to a finite form, so that it can be held, defended, and handed on.

Which means idolatry has considerably more forms than statues. A place. A sentence. A conclusion somebody else reached.

IV. The first form: a place

A fence does two things in one act. It says God is here. And it says, of everything on the other side of it, and not there.

The second one is the arrest. It takes an infinite presence and gives it an address, which is a smaller thing than it was, and then it builds a wall to keep the smaller thing where it was put.

The tradition works this out on itself in one scene. A man is on a roof, hungry, waiting for lunch, and he sees a sheet come down full of animals and hears: Rise, Peter; kill, and eat. He refuses, and his reason is his whole life: Not so, LORD; for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean. And the answer comes back: What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common (Acts 10:13–15).

Nobody instructs him to do what he does next. Within a day he's standing in a house he isn't allowed to enter, explaining himself to the people in it: Ye know how that it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation; but God hath shewed me that I should not call any man common or unclean (Acts 10:28).

The vision was about food. Peter spent it on people, immediately, and understood something the rule he had kept his entire life had been quietly teaching him the whole time: it was never really about animals. It was about a line, and the line ran through the human race.

And there's a mechanism here, which Jesus names with more contempt than He gives almost anything else. Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor! Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifieth the gold? (Matt 23:16–17). Inside a fenced holy place, value migrates to the fenced object — the gold ends up outranking the house that made the gold matter. That's not a story about bad men. It's what a partition does to ordinary people standing inside it for long enough.

And the widest form of it, stated plainly: a partition doesn't need a building. It needs a sorting. An hour that is God's and an hour that is mine. A day that is holy and six that are for getting through. A room where I'm reverent and a street where I'm not. Every one of those draws the same line the balustrade drew, and makes the same small thing out of Them.

Somebody once asked Him to settle exactly this. A woman at a well raises it: Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship (John 4:20). It isn't theoretical. The sanctuary on her mountain had been destroyed — by an army out of His capital, a century and a half or so before that conversation.⁵ The woman is naming a demolition to a man from the city that did it.

He doesn't adjudicate. The available answer was ours is pure and yours is corrupt, and it had an army and a scripture and a long grievance behind it, and He doesn't take it.

Woman, believe Me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. ... God is a Spirit: and they that worship [Them] must worship [Them] in spirit and in truth. (John 4:21, 24)

The place isn't reassigned to the better party. It's dissolved.

And between those two sentences sits a third: Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews (John 4:22). He does not flatten the two mountains into a draw. He says plainly that one side has the referent right and the other doesn't — and then He takes the mountain away from His own side too. Both things are true in the same breath, and the second doesn't cancel the first.

Which is harder than what usually gets taken from this passage. The institution is not nothing. It carried something true, and it carried it accurately, for a very long time, at real cost. It is simply not a place, and it was never going to be able to hold what it was holding.

V. The second form: a sentence

The same operation runs on words, and it is harder to see, because a sentence doesn't look like a thing you could build a wall out of.

But a reading can be fixed exactly as a place can. Settle what a verse means, permanently, and the verse stops being able to tell you anything you did not already know. It still has a mouth. It has nothing new to say. That is the psalm's inventory again, performed on scripture.

The gospels name it happening, to the people who were best at reading:

Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of Me. And ye will not come to Me, that ye might have life. (John 5:39–40)

The Life Is Not in the Book makes that case in full. What this argument needs from it is only the operation: the error named there is not the reading. It's the point at which the reading stopped moving.

Which convicts this argument's likeliest ally. The Reformers said the holiness is not in the institution, and they were right; they said it is in the Book instead, and the fixity did not dissolve. It changed address. Sola scriptura relocated the arrest, and literalism is what an arrest looks like once the text is where the holiness is kept: a sentence that has been decided, defended, and can no longer be asked a question. Everything said here about a fenced place applies without alteration to a fenced reading, and the second is now far more common than the first.

The third form is the quietest, and almost nobody experiences it as a doctrine at all. It isn't the text. It's the conclusion somebody else reached about the text — four centuries ago, in another language, under pressures nobody in the room can now name — received whole, never once reopened, and defensible tomorrow. We have always understood it this way is the sentence, and it is doing the work of a wall.

Here's the tell, and it's the same tell in all three forms. A living conviction can be asked a question. A fixed one can only be defended. If a reading has stopped being able to surprise the person holding it, the question of whether it is true has already been answered in a way that has nothing to do with whether it is true.

Jesus has an image for this and it is not gentle:

Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved. (Matt 9:17)

The skin is not wicked. It has stopped stretching, which is what happens to skin. And the loss in that verse is not the container — it's the wine, which ends up on the floor.

Which is also why the thing He asks for is so strange, and so much less flattering than it sounds: Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven (Matt 18:3). Not innocence. Not simplicity. The condition of a person who can still be told something.

VI. The little brass thing

There's an object in the Hebrew Bible that settles what to do when the container starts collecting the worship.

In the wilderness, God tells Moses to make a serpent out of brass and put it on a pole, and the people who look at it live (Num 21:8–9). It's commanded. It works. It is not a concession or a compromise or a thing anyone smuggled in — it's an instrument, given, that did what it was given to do.

Centuries later, a king takes a hammer to it.

He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan. (2 Kings 18:4)

And the passage counts this as righteousness. It sits in the list of reasons Hezekiah did that which was right in the sight of the LORD. The king is not rebuked for destroying an object God had commanded; he is commended for it, in the same sentence that describes it.

Then he names it, and the name is contempt — he calls it after the metal. Not the healing thing, not Moses's serpent, not the pole from the wilderness — the brass one.⁶

So: a thing God really gave, which really worked, which became the thing that had to be broken. Not because it was a fraud. Because it had stopped moving, and the people kneeling to it had not noticed. Because it wasn't. Something has to be genuinely good before anyone will burn incense to it.

Which is why this essay is not an attack on the church and can't be made into one without misreading it on purpose. You can't make an idol out of nothing. You make it out of what worked. The argument requires that the container was really given, or there's nothing to be arguing about.

The nearer instance is the calf at Sinai, hailed with the LORD's own name over an altar, and Jealous of a Calf has it. One distinction matters here: the calf is a thing the people made. The serpent is a thing God gave. The church claims to be the second kind, which is why the second kind is the one this essay has to reason about.

VII. The schoolmaster whose job ends

So: why would God let the institutions that carry Their name go bad?

One answer on offer is that They permit it in order to teach us something. I don't know that, nobody does, and a God who arranges corruption as a curriculum is a punishment engine under a nicer name. The smaller version doesn't require anyone to have arranged anything.

Paul chose the metaphor first.

Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. (Gal 3:24–25)

Schoolmaster is παιδαγωγός, and he isn't the teacher. The paidagogos was the household slave who walked the child to school and kept him in line on the way — crowd control, as a job description.⁷ And the conclusion Paul draws from his own image is the one that matters: the schoolmaster isn't dishonored by being outgrown. Being outgrown was the job. Nobody reads that verse as an insult to the law.

Jesus does the same to a specific commandment. Asked about divorce, He says: Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so (Matt 19:8). A law pitched down to the capacity of the people who received it, with the higher original named in the same breath, by the one being asked — and the same shape again in the milk fed to people who cannot yet take meat, and in I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now (1 Cor 3:2; John 16:12).⁸

A text that has to be enforceable can't ask for the interior. You can legislate thou shalt not kill. No court that has ever sat can try whosoever is angry with his brother. There's no evidence, no witness, no remedy — it isn't a law, it's a diagnosis. So for as long as one document has to be both the moral vision and the statute book, the interior demand can only ever be an appendix to it, because the enforceable part is the part holding the roof up. And every but I say unto you runs the same direction — killing to anger, adultery to the look, an eye for an eye to the other cheek — making the unenforceable demand the primary one, which is available to a teaching that isn't also a legal code and isn't available to one that is.

The tidier version of that — that Rome took over the policing and freed the teaching up — isn't true; the ancient world was full of law codes long before Moses, and Jewish legal development in the first century was accelerating rather than winding down.⁹ The capacity that changes isn't the state's. It's the audience's. A reading of these texts that takes women seriously as full souls wasn't unavailable in the twelfth century because the text was different. It was unavailable because it would have been laughed out of the room, and the room is what changed.

So the mechanism needs no villain. An institution that has to hold a people together when nothing else is holding them together will grow the organs for it. Hierarchy. Enforcement. Gatekeeping. Shame. A fence with a penalty carved into it. Every one does real work at the founding, and every one turns harmful the moment the conditions that required it are gone. The organ outlives its conditions. That's the first-grade teacher still running crowd control in a graduate seminar — not a bad teacher, and not doing anything she wasn't trained to do. Doing the right thing in a room that stopped needing it.

The biologists do not say that we die so the species can improve; that reasoning was argued out of the field sixty years ago. What they say is narrower — selection grips hard while an organism is reproducing and weakly afterward, so late-acting faults accumulate because the mechanism that removes faults has stopped reaching that far.¹⁰ Institutions have no alleles, and this is an analogy. But it transposes, and it stands on institutions' own evidence: whatever corrected a movement was operating at its founding. Persecution. Poverty. The founder's voice in the room. The need to persuade people who could simply walk away. None of that reaches the third generation, and the faults that arrive late arrive unopposed.

The tradition says it about itself once, very quietly. Israel asks for a king like all the nations. The answer isn't that this is unwise. It's they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them — and then, in the next breath, hearken unto their voice (1 Sam 8:7–9), with the whole price read out to them first. Israel is handed the institution that displaces Them, on the record, with the cost disclosed and no rescue attached.

Which is the answer, and it should be said flatly. The non-rescue is not neglect. God doesn't hold the thing up, and the reason is neither indifference nor discipline: holding it up would confirm the one claim it should never have been allowed to make. A container propped past its own integrity proves nothing except that somebody is propping it. To keep it standing forever would be to agree, in public and with power, that the holiness was in the structure.

A thing that cannot fall would have to have been right forever. Permanence isn't a gift you would want to give an institution; it's the withdrawal of its capacity to be amended. The possibility of collapse is the condition of correction, and nothing made with hands is right forever, so nothing made with hands gets to be permanent.

That isn't a sentence passed on it. It is what it means to have been a schoolmaster.

VIII. Objections, and the room I sit in

"This is Protestantism with a longer bibliography, or deconstruction with a better vocabulary." Largely fair, and the history is worse than the objection knows. The answer of 1517 had built new fences within a generation and was executing people over which side of them you stood on.¹¹ The answer of the last decade built an audience, a subscription, and a set of opinions you can be excommunicated for lacking. Both relocated the arrest instead of ending it, which is the easiest thing in the world to do by accident, because moving a fence feels exactly like removing one when you're the one doing it.

And that is the answer rather than a disclaimer attached to one. The movement on the fixed sentence convicts the Reformation by name. An essay that said the holiness is not in the building would be Protestant. This one says the holiness is not in any fixed form, which takes the building and the Book — and sola scriptura is the largest single instance of the thing being described. A reader who wants to file this under Protestantism has to explain why its central movement is an argument against literalism. A better-drawn line is not what I'm arguing for, and the essay spends a movement proving it rather than promising it.

"Then nothing is holy." The claim isn't that the holy is nowhere. It's that it's unfenced — and that's a harder thing to live under, not an easier one, because it leaves nowhere profane to relax in. A man who believes one hour belongs to God can give that hour and have the rest back. A man who believes the fence was false doesn't have an hour that isn't. The complaint that this makes everything less sacred is the exact reverse of the bill.

"The institution fed the poor, kept the text alive, and got you here." Conceded, without qualification, and it's not a small concession. The Sheep in the Basement counted that same ledger in the other direction, and counted it honestly.

"Your developmental argument is supersessionism with a school metaphor." First grade to graduate school, applied to Judaism and then Christianity, is an old move with a body count, and the objection is right that the shape is the same.

The schoolmaster reading is Paul's — a Jew, writing about his own tradition, from inside it, in a letter arguing that gentiles don't have to become Jews. It is not a verdict passed from outside.

Judaism didn't stop developing in the first century, and treating it as though it did is the actual error being committed. The rabbinic tradition ran this same argument on itself, harder than anything in this essay: there's a famous dispute in which a heavenly voice endorses one rabbi's position and the majority rules that a heavenly voice doesn't get a vote, because it is not in heaven.¹² The tradition that supposedly stayed in first grade wrote that down.

And the well already refused the ranking. He said salvation is of the Jews and then took the mountain away from His own side too, in one breath, and I don't get to keep the first half. A developmental claim that always arrives at the conclusion that my stage is the advanced one isn't an argument. It's a flag. The test of whether this reasoning is honest is whether it ever points at the person making it — and if the twelfth century couldn't hold a reading we now find obvious, then somebody three hundred years out is going to find something obvious that I can't currently see, and by this argument's own logic I don't get to be the exception. We are somebody's first grade.

"You're dressing up your own resentment as theology."

I've worshipped in more than one church this year — Jesus found me in one of them — and I can tell you, without stopping to think about it, which room I'd call holy ground and which one I wouldn't. I have the ranking. I didn't build it deliberately and I couldn't put it down if I wanted to. There's a room I walked out of feeling that God was nearer there than anywhere, and another I walked out of thinking that whatever was happening in it had gotten a long way from Him.

That's the fence. That's the whole argument of this essay, running in the man writing it, and it didn't need a balustrade or an inscription or a court of stonemasons. It needed a Sunday and an opinion.

So the objection is half right, and the half that's right doesn't get me out of anything. Resentment is available to me — there's a version of this essay that's just a man settling up with a room that made him feel small. And so is the flattering version, which is worse, and which is the one I'd actually reach for: the version where the fence stays exactly where it is and my church is the one inside it. I'm not standing outside this. I'm a man who found God in a room and started keeping score of rooms almost immediately.

IX. Lively stones

The answer Isaiah gave wasn't nowhere. It was to this man will I look.

And the New Testament says it again without ever quite stopping to argue it, as though it were obvious. Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? (1 Cor 3:16). In this place is One greater than the temple (Matt 12:6). And, most directly, standing in the building itself: Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up — but He spake of the temple of His body (John 2:19, 21).

The move there is not from a building to a believer, which would only be a change of address, and a change of address has not solved anything so far. It's the material that changes. Look at what Peter reaches for:

Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house. (1 Pet 2:5)

Lively stones. Living ones — a contradiction in terms, and he means it to be: the one building material in scripture that hasn't stopped moving, set against the only kind anybody had ever built a temple out of. A quarried block is a piece of a mountain that has been arrested. That is what makes it useful, and that is what makes it an idol the moment you put God behind it.

At the death, the veil in front of the innermost room tore from the top to the bottom (Matt 27:51): the partition came apart from the far side, and nobody on this side did it.

None of which is consolation. If the holy isn't fixed, then there's no ground you're standing on that isn't holy ground, and no room you get to be careless in, and no person in front of you who isn't the temple — including the one on the wrong side of whatever line you're currently keeping. That's a heavier rule than the one it replaced, not a lighter one, and it can't be satisfied in an hour on a Sunday.

Peter is the proof — he came down off that roof and walked into a house he wasn't allowed to enter. The vision didn't relieve him of anything. It sent him somewhere.

X. What you cannot inherit

Back to Istanbul, then, and the case, and the seven lines of Greek.

The building that stone defended is gone, and it went exactly the way He said it would go: not one stone left upon another. Everything it was built to hold — the courts, the veil, the altar, the gold that ended up outranking the house — is rubble under a plaza, and has been for nineteen centuries.

The fence is behind glass, intact, legible, and you can go and read it.

That's not an irony, and it isn't luck. The partition survived because the partition was the part that was already dead. It was cut to be permanent. Nothing in it could break, because nothing in it was moving in the first place — which is exactly why it could be carried out of the ruins, and why it was. You can set a fence up in another country, in another century, in a building that would horrify the men who cut the original, and it works there. Around a doctrine. Around a reading. Around a movement, a Sunday morning, a man's private ranking of the rooms he has prayed in.

That is what an arrested thing is for. It travels, it costs nothing to keep, and it will never once tell you anything you did not already believe when you inherited it.

The other thing cannot be inherited at all. Nobody has ever been handed a fountain. You can be told where it is, and walked to it, and the walking is most of what a church is honestly for — but the water has to be moving when you get there, or you have arrived at a cistern, and the prophet has already told you those leak.

And I saw no temple therein (Rev 21:22).

The Temple Warning inscription, also called the soreg or balustrade inscription (OGIS II.598): a limestone slab in Greek, dated between roughly 23 BCE and 70 CE, found in 1871 by Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau near the Temple Mount and now in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums; a second, partial copy was found in 1935 and is in the Rockefeller Museum, Jerusalem. The rendering used here — "No foreigner shall enter within the balustrade and the enclosure around the sanctuary. Whoever is caught will himself be responsible for his death, which will follow" — is the common English form. Josephus describes the balustrade and its notices in Greek and Latin (War 5.193–194; Ant. 15.417); the Mishnah gives its height (Middot 2:3). ↩
Mark says only that the trade was in the temple (ἐν τῷ ἱερῷ). That it stood in the outer court — the only ground open to a non-Jew — is an inference, and a widely held one (Lane, Nineham, Casey), from which some readers take the point of Isa 56:7's of all nations to be that the market was blocking the one place a Gentile could pray. R. T. France (The Gospel of Mark, NIGTC, 445 n. 60) and E. P. Sanders (Jesus and Judaism, 68–69) rebut that emphasis, Sanders calling the location "not determinative but coincidental." Brian Dennert, "Mark 11:16: A Status Quaestionis," Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 5 (2010), surveys the dispute. The body rests on the quotation, which is in the text, and not on the location, which is not. ↩
χειροποίητος, "hand-made." In the Septuagint it renders terms for idols — Lev 26:1 reads οὐ ποιήσετε ὑμῖν αὐτοῖς χειροποίητα οὐδὲ γλυπτά, ye shall make you no idols nor graven image; also Isa 2:18 and 10:11. In the New Testament it is used of the Temple at Acts 7:48 and Mark 14:58, of shrines generally at Acts 17:24, and of the earthly tabernacle at Heb 9:11 and 24. It is also unremarkable classical Greek for manufactured (Herodotus, Thucydides), which is why the argument in the body is about the biblical register and not about the word in isolation. ↩
Exodus 3:14, ehyeh asher ehyeh: a first-person form of the verb "to be," which is why the English renderings differ — I AM THAT I AM (KJV), I will be what I will be, I am who I am. The body's point stands on what is not in dispute: the answer to a request for a name is given in the verb rather than the noun. ↩
The Samaritan sanctuary on Mount Gerizim was destroyed under the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus. Josephus (Ant. 13.9.1, §254–256) places the campaign against Shechem and Gerizim immediately after the death of Antiochus VII Sidetes in 128 BCE; numismatic evidence from the site points to c. 112–110 BCE. The body says "a century and a half or so" for that reason. On the redating and Hyrcanus's aims, Jonathan Bourgel, "The Destruction of the Samaritan Temple by John Hyrcanus: A Reconsideration," JBL 135.3 (2016): 505–523. ↩
Nehushtan is formed on nĕḥōšet, bronze or brass, with a play on nāḥāš, serpent — which is why the renaming reads as contempt: he calls it after its material. The Revised Version margin glosses it a piece of brass; BDB gives "probably = bronze god." The body claims only the renaming after the metal. ↩
παιδαγωγός: in a Greek or Roman household, the slave who accompanied a boy to and from his lessons and was responsible for his conduct and discipline on the way — not the didaskalos, the teacher. The King James's "schoolmaster" obscures this, and the point of Paul's image depends on it — the office is custodial, and it ends when the child comes of age, which is the argument he makes two verses later. ↩
The Life Is Not in the Book quotes John 16:12–13 and narrows it in the body: the promise of continuing guidance is made to persons and says nothing about what gets bound between covers. Nothing here widens that. The use in this movement is narrower still — it is cited only as evidence that revelation is described, in the text itself, as rationed to what its hearers can carry. ↩
When Judaea became a Roman province in 6 CE the Sanhedrin and the high priest were granted near-exclusive control of the nation's internal affairs, and Rome was content to leave national matters to the Jerusalem court so long as order held and revenue came in (Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. "Sanhedrin"). The legal material that becomes the Mishnah, redacted c. 200 CE, is more elaborated than what precedes it, not less. The developmental claim in this movement is therefore about what a teaching can ask for, not about which authority was doing the policing. ↩
The standard accounts are Medawar's — that the force of natural selection declines with age, so late-acting deleterious mutations are not selected against (An Unsolved Problem of Biology, 1952) — and Williams's antagonistic pleiotropy, in which variants that help early are favored even where the same variants harm later ("Pleiotropy, Natural Selection, and the Evolution of Senescence," Evolution 11, 1957). Both are individual-level. The "for the good of the species" reasoning the body disclaims was argued out of the field by Williams's Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966) — sixty years ago this year. ↩
Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat by order of the Zurich council on 5 January 1527 — the first Anabaptist executed by a Protestant government, within a decade of Wittenberg. Michael Sattler was burned at Rottenburg on 20 May 1527 by Catholic authorities. The fence was being enforced from both sides within the same year. ↩
b. Bava Metzia 59b. Rabbi Eliezer, outvoted on whether a certain oven can contract impurity, calls on miracles and finally on a Divine Voice, which sides with him. Rabbi Yehoshua stood on his feet and said: It is written: "It is not in heaven" (Deuteronomy 30:12) — the Torah, once given at Sinai, is decided by the majority and not by a voice from heaven. The Gemara adds that God, asked what He did at that moment, smiled and said: My children have triumphed over Me (Koren/Steinsaltz rendering, via Sefaria). ↩