Theologically Sick: What do Baptists Have in Common with Unitarians?

Unitarians deny the Trinity, the "first name of God" as Karl Barth once quipped. Baptists, along with the mainstream of Christianity for the last two millenia, have affirmed the Triune nature of God. Try telling that the this church in Bolton, Massachusetts.

As someone who went to seminary in Massachusetts and pastored in New Hampshire, this pagan synchetism is hardly new to me. A Unitarian pastor I knew in New Hampshire, a brand new Havard Divinity School grad, told me he was a Christian Unitarian because he "actually believed that Jesus of Nazareth lived"! Read it and weep...

A sign of the times marks First Parish

Thursday, February 01, 2007 - Updated: 03:32 PM EST

The First Parish of Bolton, 673 Main St., has made its name change “official” with the installation of a new sign. Since 1931, the town’s oldest church had been known as the Bolton Federated Church, the result of the town’s three churches — Unitarian, Baptist, and Quaker — agreeing to worship together and have one minister, while maintaining their own individual identities. In 2002, the church voted to use its original and historic name — “The First Parish of Bolton, Interdenominational.”

“We have not been a federated church for two decades,” said Rev. Richard Jones, the church’s minister. “The federated name really only indicated a small part of the church’s history.”

Jones said the federation formally ended in 1985. Most new members had chosen simply to join the church, he said, rather than align with either the Unitarians or the Baptists (the Quakers disbanded in the 1950s), so it made sense to become what is known as a “merged parish.” The church maintained its affiliations with the Unitarians and Baptists, but there were no longer distinct denominational groups within the church. In 1999, the church added an affiliation with the United Church of Christ (Congregational), a liberal Christian denomination whose perspective, Jones said, is much the same as that of the Bolton church.

“The worshipping congregation is largely young and relatively new to the town,” said Jones. “They are seeking community. Providing a sense of community is the role our church has played in the town since its inception.”

“It took vision and some courage for Bolton’s three churches to unite in 1931,” Jones said. “The great gift those churches gave was the intent to be a community that focused on what all held in common, rather than what might divide them. Today we are affiliated with three denominations, but we have members that come from nearly a dozen more. What unites us is a liberal and decidedly ecumenical Christian perspective that is unique among churches in the area.”

The new sign, the gift of several individuals, features the logos of the Unitiarian Universalist Association, the United Church of Christ and the American Baptist Churches. It was crafted by Lloyd Dubois, founder and head of Lloyd’s Woodworking of Hudson, which specializes in work for churches. Dubois’ late wife, Doris Babcock Dubois, who died in 2006, was a life-long member of the church and the granddaughter of one of its longest-serving ministers, Rev. Joseph Pardee.

If You See This Man, Do Not Let Him Near Your Children. Especially Infants

This is Peter Singer, and he is dangerous.

Let me explain.

On Wednesday, I will be doing a continuing educatrion seminar for health care providers at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena. It's titled, "Worldview, Healing and Spiritual Care" and it's on how worldviews shape medical decsions.

Getting ready for this foray into medical ethics made me look back at some things I did a few years ago for what we call our Summer Bible Institute. That year, 2005, was on "Worldview Boot Camp" and this man, Peter Singer came up in the context of naturalism.

What is naturalism?

Naturalism can be defined negatively as being opposed to all that can be called “supernatural”—the existence of God and miracles. Broadly, this includes secular humanism and atheism. Scientific naturalism refers to the view that only scientific knowledge is reliable and that science can, in principle, explain everything.

Naturalism is not new. Some ancient Greeks were proponants of naturalism. Thales of Iona advocated atheism. Atheism requires some form of evolutionary theory, so Anaximander produced one, believing that human beings were descendants of fish. (Sorry, apes.)

Human beings are therefore merelty the cleverest animal. Not surprisingly, both Athens and Sparta practiced infanticide. Infants were killed if they were the "wrong" sex, or smaller than hoped for, not “just” for birth defects. Mt. Taygetus in Sparta was used as a execution location for these “inferior” infants.

The modern "Greeks" are with us in the person of Peter Singer (among many, many others). In 1983, he wrote,

Once the religious mumbo-jumbo surrounding the term "human" has been stripped away, we may continue to see normal members of our species as possessing greater capacities of rationality, self-consciousness, communication...than other members of any other species; but we will not regard as sacrosanct the life of each and every member of our species, no matter how limited its capacity for intelligent or even conscious life may be. If we compare a severely defective human infant with a ... dog or pig ... we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacities.... Species membership alone ... is not relevant.... Humans who bestow superior value on the lives of all human beings, solely because they are members of our own species, are ... similar to ... white racists...

Far from being the ravings of a marginal figure, Singer is an honored member of the Princeton faculty and is widely considered the most influencial ethicist of our time.

Over at a good blog I just came upon, Barry Carey's With All Your Mind, we read of Dr. Singer's latest naturalist rants:

Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, has once again made clear his standings on the concept of human dignity. On Friday, 1/26/07, in a piece in the NY Times, while discussing the case of Ashley, a severely disable girl, he stated the following:
Here’s where things get philosophically interesting. We are always ready to find dignity in human beings, including those whose mental age will never exceed that of an infant, but we don’t attribute dignity to dogs or cats, though they clearly operate at a more advanced mental level than human infants. Just making that comparison provokes outrage in some quarters. But why should dignity always go together with species membership, no matter what the characteristics of the individual may be?

In his book, Practical Ethics, he opines:

The fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species Homo sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it; it is, rather, characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference. Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings… This conclusion is not limited to infants who, because of irreversible intellectual disabilities, will never be rational, self-conscious beings.

Singer’s views are considered radical by many and illicit outrage by some. I, of course, am among those who consider his viewpoint outrageous. However, I at least give him credit for being consistent with the argument supporting abortion.

In contrast to the view of Singer is the Christian view of human dignity. In the words of Al Mohler, whose blog alerted me to Singer’s comments:

Christians believe that every single human being possesses full human dignity because every human being is made in the image of God. A worldview that denies the existence of God and thus denies the reality of the image of God has to come up with some other explanation for human dignity — one that lacks essential dignity. Thus, in this worldview, the humans that are thought to deserve dignity are recognized as having it, while others are denied the same.

All I can do is say Amen to Al Mohler, Barry Carey. And I can say, keep this man away from your kids. Far away.

The Power of Simple Goodness

I was just a kid. Well, a college student all over 20 years of age, and on the trip of a lifetime. I went to a small church-related college in West Virginia, Alderson-Broaddus College, and that school for years had a European Term option. Just after Thanksgiving, 1977, I boarded an airplane for the first time in my life and flew to New York and then on to Europe via Iceland. I learned all about jet lag and discovered for the first time what it was like to be a foreigner.

We were based in Austria, studying German and 20th century European history Monday through Thursday morning. That meant that virtually everyone took off Thursday afternoon to grab a train to points all over (everyone had a Eurail Pass).

In January 1978 the entire group traveled down to Italy: down through the snowy Brenner Pass into the Po Valley and on to Florence. After several days there, we went on to Rome.

One thing on our schedule was having an “audience” before the Pope, which at the time was the ailing Pope Paul the VI (he would die in August of that year). Now at the risk of offending Catholic readers of Temple City Life, you have to understand that I was a 20-year-old Baptist kid from Ohio, and that Pope Paul wasn’t anything approaching the cultural figure that John Paul II would soon become. My impression was that of an old, old man with a simple message.

Well, he may have been old, but I was dead wrong about his message. I recall the passage he cited (in many languages). It’s from Romans 12:21:

Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

It seems so simple, and at the time I remembered being distinctly unimpressed. I was wrong.

Let me explain it this way: what I’ve learned over the years is that there is virtually nothing as powerful as the doing of pure good.

Last November, I had a taste of this when our church delivered food baskets—really full Thanksgiving Dinners with a just out of the oven turkey—to about 40 families right before, actually the night before, Thanksgiving. I drew two of the more distant deliveries up in Pasadena and had a great time. It was just so joyful to do something entirely good, no strings attached. We also decided to deliver them in baskets people can use: new laundry baskets, which people were just as delighted to receive. One thing I’ve learned is that when money is tight, you don’t spend money on things like a laundry basket.

We did this with no desire to get anything in return. But here’s the really amazing thing: we had several of those families show up for worship the following Sunday. And they’ve stayed. Frankly, the experience of truly selfless deeds of good done on their behalf was so unique and delightful that they wanted to check these people out. I even baptized a couple of people from that ministry on the morning of Christmas Eve!

I was wrong about that aged Pope in Rome. The message of Romans 12:21 is timeless. One theologian reminds us that evil itself is a shadow, a kind of black hole of nothingness. That is, it’s the denial of good. But good is a powerful positive source. It was the goodness of God that sent Jesus to the Cross for you and me, and His goodness expressed through his people that has sent missionaries, built schools and hospitals and fed the needy down the centuries. Goodness is powerful. God’s goodness is the best. Never ever underestimate what simple goodness can do.

The Truth About Americans in Iraq

Ex-Presidents Lay an Egg: "New Baptist Movement" is Just the Old Tired Theological Leftisms

This past week, the so-called New Baptist Movement proposal put forth by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton sought to create a new, progressive (read liberal and compromised) voice for Baptists.

How we can take seriously Jimmy Carter, who recent anti-Semitic book on Israel caused members of the Carter center in Atlanta to resign, and how can we take Bill Clinton seriously who...well you know all about Bill. If these are the standard bearers of the Baptist witness in America...Lord help us

The inititive was directed mainly at Southern Baptists, but ABC officials such as A. Roy Medley jumped on the bandwagon. This was the same Roy Medley who ran off to Lebanon to stand shoulder to shoulder with Hezbollah after their summer conflict with Israel.

The inititive deserves the derisive rejection by all Biblical Jesus-followers, and all Baptists, north south, American, Southern and Transformational. Wisely, many Southern Baptists have already voiced their rejection of this travesty. Evangelical American Bapists must do the same.

Here I disagree with fellow-blogger Dennis McFadden, who wrote,

So what do we make of the upcoming meeting? While I am certainly no fan of either former president, Clinton for his obvious failures and Carter for his self-righteous disdain for anyone more conservative than himself, it is difficult to fault this initiative. SBC blogger Wade Burleson seemed to sound the right note when he wrote: "it would be difficult for me to criticize any evangelical Christian movement whose stated goals are to live out the gospel through doing justice and loving mercy."

Call me cynical, but I simply doubt the sincerity of the key participants. It seems to me to be more of an effort to recruit more people of faith for leftist causes. I'm not fooled, and I'm not impressed.

Is Holland Showing the Way?

An article in the current Weekly Standard discusses the emergence of a new and vital semi-underground church in the Netherlands. It is clearly an evangelistically post-modern church for a post-modern culture. In North America, we tend to think of the Netherlands as a spiritual wasteland of promiscuity and secularism triumphant. Yet there is reason for hope as the church assumes new forms. Read the article here.

Teddy Kollek, Ex-Mayor of Jerusalem, Dies at 95

No man has influenced the modern city of Jerusalem as much a Teddy Kollek, who died this past Tuesday. No one has changed the city so much a Kollek since Herod the Great--unless you want to count Emperor Titus, who destroyed the city and Temple in 70 AD.

Greg Marinovich/Associated Press

By STEVEN ERLANGER and MARILYN BERGER

Published: January 2, 2007

JERUSALEM, Jan. 2 — Teddy Kollek, who as mayor of Jerusalem for nearly three decades did more to build and develop the city as Israel’s capital than any other figure while still seeking to meet the needs of its Arab residents, died today in Jerusalem. He was 95.

The Jerusalem Foundation, the fund-raising organization he established, announced his death, saying it was of natural causes.

Mr. Kollek, a former aide to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, became mayor of the small Jewish West Jerusalem in 1965 and nearly resigned after a difficult first year. But after Israel conquered the city’s eastern sector in the 1967 war, he threw himself into the project of a reunited Jerusalem and was re-elected five times before losing in 1993, at age 82, to Ehud Olmert, now Israel’s prime minister.

Mr. Olmert always chafed at Mr. Kollek’s reputation as an indefatigable fund-raiser, institution builder and preacher of coexistence, but he praised Mr. Kollek today, saying, “His name will always be an inseparable part of Jerusalem’s glory.”

The late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin called Mr. Kollek the greatest builder of Jerusalem since Herod the Great. Mr. Kollek was a founder of significant markers of the modern city and state: the Israel Museum, the Jerusalem Foundation, the Jerusalem Theater, the Cinematheque, the Kahn Theater and other cultural institutions.

Uri Lupolianski, the current mayor, said today, “Teddy was Jerusalem and Jerusalem was Teddy” — a high compliment from a leader of the city’s ultra-Orthodox community, with whom Mr. Kollek sometimes fought.

Mr. Kollek was a man of will, charm and energy who loved being a friend of the rich and the famous, including Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, tapping many of them for money for his beloved city.

He was above all a Labor Zionist who set about trying to unite the two halves of Jerusalem the best he could. “He’d say, ‘I’d love the city to be empty of Arabs, but since they are here, we need to serve them, because if we treat them badly they will hate us more,’ ” said Tom Segev, an Israeli historian who ran Mr. Kollek’s office for two years in the late 1970s.

Within hours of Israel’s conquering of East Jerusalem in 1967, Mr. Kollek went to the military commander and demanded milk for Arab children. “He was the symbol of the unification of Jerusalem and he was considered pro-Arab,” Mr. Segev said. “But he was simply pragmatic.”
But Mr. Kollek felt he should have done more for Arab residents, said Yisrael Kimche, an urban planner. "He himself said he did not do enough for East Jerusalem,” Mr. Kimche said. “He did not bring equality in city services between east and west. He tried, but not hard enough."
In 1967, Mr. Kimche said, “the gap between east and west was vast.”

“Three times a week there would be running water in the east,” he said. “Many neighborhoods there did not have sewage or phone lines. Eventually, needs were mostly met, but there was never a budget large enough to cope."

Meron Benvenisti, who worked closely with him, said Mr. Kollek saw Jerusalem “in terms of Vienna, a mosaic of different cultures where the tension is benign, invigorating, not threatening to destroy the city.” But what Mr. Kollek called heterogeneous others, like Mr. Benvenisti, called dangerously polarized.

Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem has not been recognized internationally, and the 190,000 Jews who moved into it are considered illegal settlers by much of the world. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.

In his 28 years as mayor, Mr. Kollek often worked 18-hour days, prowling the city and keeping his home telephone number in the public directory. He would often return home to a pile of little message slips taken by his wife, Tamar. Sometimes he would return those calls, even at 3 a.m., telling people that he would get their problems fixed.

Mr. Kollek was “someone who always wanted something to do,” Mr. Segev said.
“The worst thing that could happen to him was if a meeting were canceled,” Mr. Segev added, “and he’d wander around and pick up a paper from a desk and it became the most important thing in the city of Jerusalem for a moment.”

After 1993, Mr. Kollek devoted much of his time to the Israel Museum and to the Jerusalem Foundation, which he set up in 1966 to raise millions of dollars in private financing for city projects, including parks, sports facilities and the restoration of archeological treasures.
“He really forged the landscape of modern Jerusalem as we know it and he saw the museum as the jewel in that landscape,” said James Snyder, the museum’s director. “The idea of this modernist museum complex on the crest of Jerusalem was his, to build a great national museum for this new state.”

Mr. Kollek will be buried on Thursday in a state funeral in a section of Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl cemetery reserved for Israel’s leaders.

He was born Theodor Herzl Kollek on May 27, 1911, in a small village near Budapest. He was named after the Viennese founder of the Zionist movement. He grew up in Vienna, where his father was a director of the Rothschild bank.

“I came from a multiracial society,” Mr. Kollek once recalled in an interview.

By the age of 11 he was already a Zionist, and as the Nazis came to power, he organized an underground to smuggle refugees into Palestine. He emigrated to Palestine in 1935 and helped found the Ein Gev kibbutz. That first year, he contracted typhoid five times and suffered several bouts of malaria.

Still, Mr. Kollek remembered life at Ein Gev as paradise. “We came to an empty land, we started growing trees, fishing on the Galilee,” he said. “You saw your dreams materialize.”

In 1937, he married Tamar Schwartz, whom he had met in Vienna. They had two children, Amos, a filmmaker, and Osnat, an artist. His wife and children survive him, as do five grandchildren.

Mr. Kollek was sent to England in 1938 to work with a Zionist youth movement, but he spent most of his energy getting Jews out of Nazi-occupied countries. In 1939 he went to Vienna carrying British entry permits for Austrian Jews. There he met a Nazi who seemed like a minor clerk, and after 15 minutes the official agreed to release 3,000 Jewish children from concentration camps.

Mr. Kollek said he never saw the man again until 1961, when the “clerk” was brought to Israel to face the charge of crimes against humanity. It was Adolf Eichmann.

In England, Mr. Kollek met David Ben-Gurion, who became his mentor. During the war, Mr. Kollek said, it became clear that “a country of our own was an absolute necessity to save the Jewish people from extermination.”

Mr. Kollek made frequent trips to Cairo, where he met Jewish soldiers serving in the British Army and used his connections to smuggle British arms to Palestine, then under the control of Britain. He was later criticized for giving the British the names of 1,000 members of the Jewish underground whose terror tactics were meant to force the British out.

“I’m proud of it,” he said later. “I’d do it again. The Jewish Agency, our government at the time, was respectable and on the way to becoming a state. We had one large defense organization, the Haganah.

“There were splinter groups — Stern, Irgun — who killed, blew up the King David, hanged British sergeants,” he added, referring to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

After World War II, Mr. Kollek was sent to New York, where he worked partly out of a telephone booth and partly out of an office over the Copacabana nightclub to arm the Jewish state-to-be for an expected invasion by Arabs.

As Israel neared statehood in May 1948, he helped smuggle weapons. In one day, he raised a million dollars in Mexico City to buy airplanes. There was a ban on arms exports to Israel, so dismantled airplanes, for example, were shipped as prefabricated houses. Help came from unexpected quarters, like the Irish dockworkers who, he said, “saw us as comrades in arms against the British.”

When Israel became independent, Mr. Kollek headed the American desk in the Foreign Ministry, then went to Washington as minister in the Israeli Embassy.

Mr. Kollek was a founder of the modern Israeli foreign intelligence service. Throughout the 1950s he was a liaison between Israel and the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency. In 1956, he helped the C.I.A. obtain a copy of a secret speech that changed the course of the cold war. It was a denunciation of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, then dead three years, by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev. A copy of the speech went from Poland to Israel to the director of central intelligence, Allen W. Dulles, who gave it to his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who leaked it to The New York Times. It was the first sign that Stalin’s reign of terror might be over.

In 1952 Ben-Gurion summoned Mr. Kollek to Jerusalem to become director general of the prime minister’s office. In 12 years, Mr. Kollek became involved in everything from broadcasting to the Dead Sea Scrolls, from aid programs to desalination.

When Ben-Gurion left office, Mr. Kollek transferred his energies to the Israel Museum. He had nursed the idea from the early 1950s, when most of Israel’s leaders considered a museum of art a luxury the young state could not afford. But he argued that if Israel needed to absorb immigrants and build its military power, “it also needs expressions of culture and civilization.”
Ben-Gurion, then in retirement, urged his protégé to seek the mayor’s office in Jerusalem. Mr. Kollek’s son offered no encouragement. “What will happen if you win?” he asked. “You’ll be in charge of the garbage?”

When a coalition on the city council elected him mayor in 1965, he went to Jerusalem’s best tailor and ordered smart olive-green uniforms for the sanitation inspectors.

“I got into this by accident,” he said. “I was bored. When the city was united, I saw this as an historic occasion. To take care of it and show better care than anyone else ever has is a full life purpose. I think Jerusalem is the one essential element in Jewish history. A body can live without an arm or a leg, not without the heart. This is the heart and soul of it.”

Mr. Kollek never spoke perfect Hebrew, or perfect German or perfect English, Mr. Segev recalled. “In some ways, he remained an alien. But Israel is a colorful mosaic, and there was also a place for a stone called Teddy Kollek.”

THANK YOU, ALL OF YOU, FOR ALL YOU DO!

Here at the end of the year, it’s only fitting
to say thank you to all the people who have made not
only the Holiday season special, but to those who have
blessed us all by their above and beyond service. At
the great risk of forgetting someone:

Thanks to everyone in worship and music ministry who
excelled in leading us in worship this season, and
especially to our Worship Director, Matt Cooper.

Thanks to the guys who just painted and fixed up Room
113, turning it into one of the best-looking rooms on
campus: Brad Goodrich, Alex Vago and Joseph Kwong.

Thanks to the those who lit the Advent candles this
month: the Sulistios, the Joshuas, the Gardners and to
the Debra Cuda and Joyce Callen.

Thanks to the Vision Task Force who worked hard this
year to steer us in a new and exciting direction:
Keith Allred, Don Buchanan, Robin Giammalva, Bob
Rardin, Janet Stephens, Errol Strickler and Deanne
Strickler.

Thanks to all our wonderful interpreters, laboring
week by week to make the worship services accessible
to people speaking Mandarin, Spanish and Indonesian:
Sofia Kwong, coordinator; Robin Chandra, John Cortez,
Katharin Kuhn, Victoria Fan, Lucina Felix, Philip Pan,
Gelia Ramali, and Lisette Rhine.

Thanks to our office and support staff: Kathy
Alexander, Betty Kelly, Gene Mills and Bob Marston.

Thanks to all the people who make dinner for our
mid-week children’s ministry. What a great
group!

Thanks for all those who work in our ESL (English as a
Second Language) ministry: Martha Beyer, Bob Boyd,
Celia Bushfield, Joyce Callen, Ralph Ramirez, and Jim
Weiss.

Thanks to all the people who help with audio-visual:
Ismael Felix, Justin Giammalva, Chuck Hysell, Bib
Johanessen, Than Tran and Terry Yocum.

Thanks to all our teachers: Sunday school, youth, VBS,
home Bible studies and so forth—to many to
mention!

Thanks to Joseph Kwong for wiring us for high-speed
Internet.

Thanks to Dave Lazzarini and Errol Strickler for
making numerous repairs around the facility and for
giving the restroom by Laura’s office a
“complete makeover.”

Thanks to Betty Marston for directing His Kidz.

Thanks to Howard Somer for the use of his theatrical
lights for special occasions and for all his hard
work.

Thanks to Janet Stephens for being to
“registrar” for several educational events
we held this year.

Thanks to Karin Wentzel, the lady who writes the
checks to pay the bills.

Thanks to Paul Parker who has done so many things
behind the scenes to improve our use of technology.

Thanks to all of our hard-working Diaconate members,
and to our Moderator, Alex Vago, who concludes his
term Dec. 31.

And thanks be the God, who gives all good things and
who will continue to guide and bless as we enter 2007
with faith, hope and love.

--Pastor Glenn

Re-Dating Christmas

Most people assume Jesus was born on Dec. 25. After all, that’s the date celebrated throughout the world as the day of His birth. A careful analysis of Scripture, however, clearly indicates that Dec. 25 is an unlikely date for Christ’s birth. Here are two primary reasons:

First, we know that shepherds were in the fields watching their flocks at night at the time of Jesus’ birth(Luke 2:7-8). However, shepherds did not remain in the fields of Judea at night during December due to lack of forage and the bad weather.

Similarly, The Interpreter’s One-Volume Commentary says this passage argues “against the birth [of Christ] occurring on Dec. 25 since the weather would not have permitted” shepherds watching over their flocks in the fields at night.

Second, Jesus’ parents came to Bethlehem to register in a Roman census (Luke 2:1-4). The Romans would have known better than to have taken such a census in the dead of winter, when temperatures sometimes dropped below freezing and roads were in poor condition for traveling (due to rain).

So if Jesus Christ was not born on Dec. 25, does the Bible indicate when He was born? The biblical accounts point to the autumn of the year(in the northern hemisphere) as the most likely time of Jesus’ birth, based on details of the conception and birth of John the Baptist.

Since Elizabeth (John’s mother) was in her sixth month of pregnancy when Jesus was conceived (Luke 1:24-36), we can determine the approximate time of year Jesus was born if we know when John was born. John’s father, Zacharias, was a priest serving in the Jerusalem temple during the course of Abijah (Luke 1:5). There is an old tradition (I believe Jerome records this) that his service was in the early summer.

It was during this time of temple service that Zacharias learned that he and his wife, Elizabeth, would have a child (Luke 1:8-13). After he completed his service and traveled home, Elizabeth conceived (verses 23-24). Assuming John’s conception took place near the end of June, adding nine months brings us to the end of March as the most likely time for John’s birth. Adding another six months (the difference in ages between John and Jesus) brings us to the end of September as the likely time of Jesus’ birth.

Although it is difficult to determine the first time anyone celebrated Dec. 25 as Christmas, historians are in general agreement that it was sometime during the fourth century. This is an amazingly late date. Christmas was not observed in Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire, until about 300 years after Christ’s death. Its origins cannot be traced back to either the teachings or practices of the earliest Christians.

Further, we know that Herod died in what we would call February of 4 BC. Since his decree was against little boys age 2 and under, and that was based on information from the Magi, Jesus was most likely born in the fall of 6 BC.

Rehabilitating Herod

A group of revisionist historians have formed the King Herod Appreciation Society in efforts to revamp the king's reputation. They say he should not be judged too harshly and that his actions should be evaluated in the context of the brutality of the Roman Empire. Nice try, guys. The denial of the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem on the basis that Herod killed his own sons is as logical as saying that since Sadaam Hussein gassed Kurds, he couldn't have also killed Marsh Arabs at the end of the Gulf War. I guess next we'll see the Nero Admiration Guild.


Historians, Fans Defend the 'Real' King Herod
By Nicole Neroulias
Religion News Service


He ruled over the ancient Jews for 37 years, and when it comes to bad publicity, King Herod has reigned supreme ever since.

Annually vilified in Christmas pageants as the tyrant responsible for the slaughter of Bethlehem's baby boys and for chasing Mary, Joseph and Jesus into Egypt, Herod the Great should receive more balanced treatment, some historians and academics argue.

Like most biblical villains -- Judas, Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate, take your pick -- Herod has simply gotten a bad rap, some say.

For example, historians say Herod probably never ordered the Massacre of the Innocents that Christians commemorate in late December.

The account from the Gospel of Matthew may be derived from the execution of three of the king's own sons and the author's desire to convey that even as an infant, Jesus was an acknowledged threat to the establishment.

"Dramatically, it's a story with tremendous power, but there's a kind of irony that the one thing that most people know about Herod is probably wrong," said Peter Richardson, author of "Herod: King of the Jews, Friend of the Romans" and a professor at the University of Toronto.

Basing their views on recorded history and continuing archaeological discoveries, Richardson and other academic experts contend that Herod's brutality and heavy taxation should be taken in the context of the violent Roman Empire and his skills as a diplomat, master builder and enlightened economist.

Herod was born in 74 B.C. to an Arabian princess and a politically active father whose family had converted to Judaism. As a young man, Herod was appointed governor of Galilee. When his father was poisoned in 43 B.C., Herod had the murderer executed, launching a lifelong reputation as a ruler to be reckoned with.

The Roman Senate named Herod "King of the Jews" in 40 B.C., despite controversy at home over his religious lineage. But Herod always claimed to be an observant Jew, evidenced by the discovery of ritual baths in his palaces and records of a joke told by Emperor Caesar Augustus that he'd rather be one of Herod's swine -- safe from slaughter because the king kept kosher -- than one of his sons.

Convinced by their research, members of the Progressive Jewish Bet Tikvah Synagogue in England formed a King Herod Appreciation Society in 2001. Rigid concepts of Jewish identity were used to downplay Herod's accomplishments, they argue, which included rebuilding the Jerusalem Temple, building the largest harbor in the Roman world, alleviating a famine by lowering grain prices and supporting the cash-strapped Olympic Games.

"He was not just a paranoid tyrant, but an idealist and financial genius, way ahead of his time," said Anthony Kerstein, a co-founder of the group. "I believe if he would have been regarded as fully Jewish, his reign would have been regarded as a golden age."

Herod's commitment to Judaism and his positive relationship with Rome meant his subjects were allowed to worship freely. They were granted a rare exemption from the imperial requirements of offering incense to the emperor's statue, serving in the army and swearing oaths in court, Richardson said.

But plenty of historical material depicts Herod as a ruthless man as well as a visionary. Of his 10 wives, he had one executed for accused unfaithfulness; of at least 14 children, three were executed for allegedly conspiring against him. He imposed high taxes on his subjects, in part to finance his grandiose construction projects, and he employed secret police to report on their activities.

He acted brutally to put down dissent. In 4 B.C., Torah students smashed a golden eagle at the Temple -- probably placed for Roman visitors but viewed by opponents as idolatrous -- and he had them burned alive to set an example.

Even though scholars can't find any historical basis for the Bethlehem massacre, they concede it would not have been out of character, and say perhaps the village's tiny size would have kept the act undocumented in the scheme of larger crimes.

At the time of Jesus' birth, Herod would have been an old man in poor health, but in the new film "The Nativity Story," he is portrayed as a vibrant middle-aged ruler overseeing a construction project that had actually been completed decades earlier. Screenwriter Mike Rich explained that he had opted against complete historical accuracy in favor of showing "a composite of his reign." He added scenes showing the building site and Herod's participation in Temple rituals after his first draft to convey more of the character's complexity.

When Herod died of a long, debilitating illness between 4 and 1 B.C.the exact years of both Christ's birth and Herod's death are up for debate -- it seems few mourned him. His kingdom was divided among three of his sons, including Herod Antipas, who is mentioned in the Gospel of Luke's account of Jesus' trial.

Despite the notorious legacy, Herod the Great experts say his misdeeds are simply consistent with despotic behavior across the ages.

They point to England's King Henry VIII -- also fond of executing family members -- Joseph Stalin, and Third World dictators who use force to unite and modernize their countries.

"He wasn't necessarily a nice guy, but he actually did a pretty good job and he lived during a pretty tumultuous political period and both he and Judea survived," said Shaye J.D. Cohen, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University.

"When you have powerful leaders that are in power for a long time, inevitably you're going to have pluses and minuses," he added. "Even Mussolini made the trains run on time."

Trans-Siberian Madness

My wife has her little obsessions. A trip to the music-sampling section of Borders earlier this month led to her seasonal musical obsession with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra (an obsession shared by radio's Sean Hannity).

A man with obviously too much time on his hands in Ohio also loves TSO. See below:



For the full story on his outrageous (and very fun) display, see here.

Jack Bauer's Secret Identity

24th (Christmas parody of

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Christmas Eve Countdown

It's early Christmas morning as I write. Not a creature is strirring except for some silly blogger at the keyboard.

Yesterday was both a Sunday and a Christmas Eve. What was that like?

5:50 AM

Alarm goes off. I punch it once for 8 more minutes. Then shower and dress in the bathroom (to avoid waking my wife, Lynann).

6:30

Check email.

7:00

Breakfast. Cereal, no toast.

7:15

Wake up Lynann.

7:20

Out the door. I arrive at 7:25 (I'm blessed to live nearby). I park at Long Dragon Realty, with whom we have a parking arraingment. Ironically, I actually walk a few steps through the parking lot of the Nazarene church on the way to the Baptist Church. Well, we needed the parking more than they did, and we asked first.

First, I do the "wallk through" of my office. Hmm, no red light on my phone. No surprises this morning. Pick up the digital camera we use to take snaps of guests, the new member certificates and a letter I need to give to a member of the church.

Over to the sanctuary. Stash the camera, put the member certs in place. OK, screen is already down. Turn on the computer and the projector. Yoko Mizuno, our accompanist, is already practicing (she's sure intent--she doesn't even notice I'm here). A couple of updates on the Welcome to Worship PowerPoint we have running when people come in. Later, our worship Director, Matt Cooper will bring up the song program.

OK, things here are fine.

7:45

Out in the courtyard I have a brief chat with Pastor Sam. A couple of details (he's doing annoucements) and some shooting the breeze. Somehow we get on to the difference between Menorahs and Hannahkiahs.

7:50

Some people are already in the Pacesetter class, so I go and visit for a while. A member tells how a grandchild in New York is getting better medical treatment, an answer to prayer. Mostly chitchat and hugs and "Merry Christmas."

8:00

A teacher comes with his wife and sister-in-law. They're celebrating an unlikely joy: the sister-in-law came off probation that week. Jail was the best thing that ever happened to her faith.

His classroom had been painted the day before, and looks great. (It had been the ugliest room on campus.)

8:15

I visit around to other classes. I also stop by the gym where Rock Mountain Baptist Church (Mandarin-speaking) is setting up. I chat with Pastor Calvin Hsu for a few minutes about the service tonight.

8:30

A few minutes of prayer.

8:45

Back in the courtyard. The California chill is coming off. The high on Christmas Eve will be 75F. (Last year is was a bizarre 90F on Christmas Eve). I drop off the letter I mentioned earlier.

8:55

I run into the lady I'm baptizing today. She clutches her bag of items to use for the baptism. Today she is actually finishing her membership class.

9:00

She's the only one in the class, and we don't have much to finish. We meet in my office and finish with what I jokingly call "the grand tour" of the campus. She'd never been in the gym and was amazed at how large it is. We finish in the hall behind the santuary and I show her where we'll be for baptisms.

9:45

I check in with Matt. Everything's OK. Ismael sets me with with my wireless mike and tests me on my miniscule knowledge of Spanish, which is part of his Sunday routine. We do sound checks. I realize we need another mike for the communion table. (The new Indonesian family is doing the last advent candle.) Ish takes care of it.

10:00

A few classes are getting out. I visit with some people in the courtyard, and then head to the men's changing room to get ready for baptisms. I don't like wearing those baptismal waders, so I change into a swimsuit and over that the big black baptismal robe.

10:15

Pastor Angela and I meet with those being baptized. She has four kids and youth, I have the one adult. And Pastor Calvin has one adult being baptized.

10:30

We're all in place. Sam does announcements. I baptize my lady, a woman who had done everything spiritually: from Mormon to Jehovah's Witnesses to New Age and now, she's found her rest in Jesus.

Dash to the changing room, back into the suit. Out in time for the Sulistios doing the "Peace Candle." Singing, prayer, choir, preach. "What Time is Christmas?" is my topic. The offering, more singing, receive new members. We end with everyone, a packed house, standing as we sing "The Hallelujah Chorus."

11:45

I help Brendan put some things in place for tonight. We wheel over the cart with the candles.

12:10

Go home. I change, veg out for a while watching the Patriots take down the Jags in Jacksonville. Lynann and my son dash out to get Chinese food and a crown roast (for tomorrow) from Von's.

1:00

Lunch.

2:00

Nap. Don't nap too well. Excited about tonight. And then a "pastor call" ends the nap.

3:00

Check email. Yes, again.

4:00

Back at the church. The Christmas eve service is at 5:30. We hit a few "tecno-burps" in preparation, but get it resolved. Lotsa of unfamiliar faces.

5:40

After the brass and piano trio finishes, we're off. A song partly in Spanish: "Que Nino este es?" Traditional Christmas eve fair, but "O Holy Night" in Mandarin (Rock Mountain Choir) and a Kachin Christmas song (complete with cymbal and dance!) (We are also home of the Kachin Baptist Church, a Burmese ethnic group.)

My message: "The Purpose of Christmas." Jesus cames to erase misconceptions about God, to show the love of God and to enable us to have a relationship with God. Our choir sings a real show stopper: "Joy, Joy" and Matt has a great solo in it. Silent Night and candles held high. Merry Christmas!

7:15

Home to pick up ham and scalloped potatoes. Oh, and a plate of cookies. Take off the jacket and tie, put on a sweater. Over to my son's girlfiend's house for a Christmas eve dinner. We bow out a little before 9. Lynann sees that both her husband and daughter seem beat.

9:15

We all open one present. Lynann wants to watch "Scrooge" (the 1951 version with Alistair Sim, the best). We have it on DVD, but by 10:15, I'm out before the Ghost of Christmas past can ever show up.



Merry Christmas to all.

Zuzu's Petals

At 66, 'Zuzu' Thinks Life Is Wonderful

By MICHAEL HILL
Associated Press Writer


AP Photo/DAVID DUPREY


At 66, 'Zuzu' Thinks Life Is Wonderful

'Zuzu' Visits Town That Inspired Bedford Falls



SENECA FALLS, N.Y. (AP) -- Zuzu has a cold again. She sniffles and sucks on a cold pill as she signs autographs for fans lined up to the door in a coffee shop.

Karolyn Grimes jokes that she left her coat open, like her character Zuzu Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life." A more likely culprit is the holiday crunch of appearances by the former child actress - from a Victorian festival in Puyallup, Wash., to the Colorado Country Christmas Show and now to Seneca Falls, which claims to be the inspiration for director Frank Capra's mythical Bedford Falls.

Around Christmas, this Finger Lakes village is gussied up like the snowy movie town with white lights and wreaths strung across the main street. And the 66-year-old Grimes has come for a weekend celebration.

Everyone who saw the movie remembers Zuzu. She gets to say, "Every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings." And the petals from Zuzu's rose - stuffed into a pants pocket by Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey as he comforts his sickly daughter - become a symbol of life.

Grimes laughs about the petals getting more screentime than she did. But she has parlayed her six minutes in the beloved 1946 film into a late-life career. After enduring heartaches that make George Bailey's troubles look small, she has become a feel-good ambassador for the film and one of its last living links.

"I'm that little girl and I stand for something those people love," she says. "... For some reason or other, that little girl embodies the image, or maybe the power to make them happy."

People tell her as much all afternoon at the Zuzu Cafe, where she sits with a Sharpie at a table laid out with "It's a Wonderful Life" stuff: DVDs, ceramic ornaments, memory books, her own "Zuzu Bailey's It's a Wonderful Life Cookbook" and scattered rose petals.

"Do you know what a thrill this is? "

"This is my favorite movie!"

"Thank you for giving us so much joy!"

For each person, Grimes neatly signs her name with "Zuzu" in quotes and a little doodle of a bell. She usually adds a message like, "Enjoy life, it's wonderful."

Grimes lives near Seattle, but retains a Midwestern cheeriness. She holds her smile for hours and laughs as she pops up for snapshots. She has a gold "Z" pinned to her blue velveteen jacket.

She lost her nest egg in the 2001 economic downturn and relies on these appearances. As she signs, her husband sits beside her and asks, "Cash or credit card?" It's a job, but she clearly loves being Zuzu. After signing autographs all afternoon, she bumps into a fan at a diner who talks on her cell phone to her father.

Grimes happily accepts the phone.

"Do you know who you're talking to?" she says to woman's father. "You're talking to Zuzu!"

Grimes had already worked with Bing Crosby and Fred MacMurray when she appeared in "It's a Wonderful Life." She grew up in Hollywood and was nudged into the business by her mother. Capra picked her to play Zuzu.

Grimes retains kid-centric memories of the movie: Capra kindly squatted to give her directions. "Mr. Stewart" held her in his arms, take after take, for the end scene and always put her down gently. She loved the Baileys' big Christmas tree.

At the time though, even to a 5-year-old, "it was just another job."

Grimes' movie career waned as her mother became ill. She lost her at age 14. Her father died in a car accident a year later. A court shipped the teenage orphan to Osceola, Mo., to live in a "bad home" with an aunt and uncle.

She liked meeting people outside hyper-competitive Hollywood. She went to college, married, raised kids, became a medical technologist. Zuzu was the past. Her box of clips and pics stayed in the basement until 1980, when a reporter came to her door in Stilwell, Kan., and asked her a question:

"Did you play that little girl in the movie, 'It's a Wonderful Life?'"

Now Grimes stands watching herself on a big-screen TV as a curly-haired pixie from 60 years ago. The little girl asks her dad to fix her flower, and he sneaks the wilted petals into his pocket.

"What do you think? Did I see it?" she asks the audience. Grimes is giving a crowd at the community center a tour of the movie with bits of trivia.

Zuzu's name was inspired by an old brand of ginger snaps, she says. The snow coating Bedford Falls was made of soap flakes and chemicals; that's why it looks sudsy sometimes. Reviewing the flower scene, she suggests Zuzu saw through her father's heartfelt ruse and loves him all the more for it.

"I think what Frank Capra is trying to say is she knows her father isn't perfect," she said.

The film about a suicidal, small-town money lender was a bit of a dud after its December 1946 release. "Wonderful Life" got a second life in the mid-'70s when a lapsed copyright allowed television stations to show the movie for free. The movie gathered iconic status through constant showings.

After the reporter's story, Grimes did local Zuzu events in the '80s and branched out by the '90s.

This was a difficult stretch personally; she knows angels don't always save people. Her 18-year-old son killed himself in 1989 and her second husband died of cancer in 1994 (her first husband was killed in a hunting accident). She kept on.

"You have a choice," she says. "You can drown in your sorrows, be the grumpy old Mr. Potter and be hurt and be in pain ... but I think you need to put that behind you because, my gosh, life is a wonderful gift."

Grimes, one of about seven surviving actors from the movie, says she's had troubled souls approach her sobbing at her appearances. She inspires smiles when she passes out a rose petal.

"I really feel like Zuzu is kind of a mission maybe, I don't know," Grimes says. "I think that there is a higher power at work and that I had to go through a lot of adverse situations in my life to understand other people's pain."

If it sounds like a corny sentiment out of a Capra movie, consider that after a day of "It's a Wonderful Life" autographs and interviews she becomes excited by a small cutout of a bell stuck to a linoleum floor by her chair.

It has meaning, she explains as she walks out to the snowy sidewalks of Seneca Falls, past the decorated windows, the old-fashioned street lights and the wreaths hanging overhead.

"I really feel at home here," she says.

People here argue about the Bedford Falls connection, though it's a circumstantial case. Both places have a "Falls" suffix, and characters in the film mention nearby cities like Rochester and Elmira. Both places have classic American main streets, and the bridge here resembles the one where George Bailey pondered his mortality.

Capra, whose movie village was a set built near Los Angeles, left no evidence to rule out other candidates, like Bedford, N.Y.

And yet the director could have passed through Seneca Falls while visiting an aunt in nearby Auburn. Retired local barber Tommy Bellissima even claims he cut Capra's hair before the movie came out. Bellissima recalls a friendly guy whose name stuck in his head: capra means goat in Italian.

"Sometimes Christmas is what you believe," says county tourism director Maureen Koch at the Zuzu Cafe, "and don't make me prove it."

---

On the Net:

http://www.zuzu.net/

http://www.therealbedfordfalls.com/

Rudloph Meets the ACLU

Rudolph, the pigmentally nose-challenged reindeer
had a very shiny facial appendage.
And if you ever saw him,
you would even say that is is part of his unique and special attributes.

All of the other reindeer
used to laugh and ccommit verbal hate crimes against him.
They never let poor Rudolph
join in any reindeer games, leaving him with self-esteem issues.

Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say:
"Rudolph, under court order to redress your greivances
And bearing in mind your special attributes,
won't you guide my sleigh tonight?"

Then all the reindeer loved him (it was part of the settlement)
as they shouted out with glee,
Rudolph the nose-challenged reindeer,
you'll go down in revisionist history!

A Christmas Note from C.S. Lewis

CS Lewis on "Xmas and Christmas"

Some Lessons from the Barbarian Mists of Niatirb

More than fifty years ago C.S. Lewis published a little essay called, "Xmas and Christmas: A Lost Chapter from Herodotus." In it, he reverses the letters of his home country, “Britain.” One mark of Lewis the sense that he wrote what you read just yesterday, even here in Acirema!

Lewis writes about the strange winter customs of a barbarian nation called Niatirb:

"In the middle of winter when fogs and rains most abound, (the Niatirbians) have a great festival called Exmas, and for 50 days they prepare for it (in the manner which is called,) in their barbarian speech, the Exmas Rush.

"When the day of the festival comes, most of the citizens, being exhausted from the (frenzies of the) Rush, lie in bed till noon. But in the evening they eat five times as much as on other days, and crowning themselves with crowns of paper, they become intoxicated. And on the day after Exmas, they are very grave, being internally disordered by the supper and the drinking and the reckoning of how much they have spent on gifts and on the wine.

"(Now a) few among the Niatirbians have also a festival, separate and to themselves, called Crissmas, which is on the same day as Exmas. And those who keep Crissmas, doing the opposite to the majority of Niatirbians, rise early on that day with shining faces and go before sunrise to certain temples where they partake of a sacred feast.

"But (as for) what Hecataeus says, that Exmas and Crissmas are the same, (this) is not credible. It is not likely that men, even being barbarians, should suffer so many and so great things (as those involved in the Exmas Rush), in honor of a god they do not believe in."

What Lewis wrote about in Britain half a century ago is increasingly true about our own country today. The world has an ingenious ability to attach itself to what Christians believe; tame it, subvert it, and then turn it against the very people who continue to believe. Too many Americans don’t really celebrate Christmas. They may think they do, but they don’t. They celebrate Exmas. The world—left to its own devices — has no room and no use for the birth of Jesus Christ. It has contempt for Christians who seriously strive to be His disciples. So we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by being the Jesus-followers God intended us to be. We can at least seek to be holy by tithing our time to sit quietly with God; by allowing Him to fill our actions and our choices with His Son; and by letting Him shape us into the men and women He needs. We can get up and experience the Christmas dawn in silence as a reminder of what Christmas means. We can prepare ourselves to be alert for the voice of God and to receive God’s word afresh and proclaim it anew.

We need to understand that in many ways America is no longer a Christian culture. But if people really understood and acted on the meaning of Christmas, the world would be a different place.

Advent means “coming.” What’s coming in the reality of Christmas is as an invasion. The world needs the invasion but doesn’t want it. It’s an invasion of human flesh and all creation by the Son of God; by the holiness of the Creator Himself.

All of us in the Church were enlisted to be part of that invasion as well. The doubts, the failures, the mistakes of the past don’t matter. Only our choices now matter. How will we live our Christian faith from this day forward? How will we make our witness an expression of Christ’s coming? For our own sake, and the sake of the people we love, we need to pray that our yearning for God will truly reflect God’s yearning for us. And when it does, then the world will be a different place.

Temple Mount Ramp in Danger of Collaspe

Jerusalem Engineer: Temple Mount Ramp May Collapse 13:30 Dec 15, '06 / 24 Kislev 5767

(IsraelNN.com)

A Jerusalem city engineer warned this week that the ramp leading to the main tourist entrance of the Temple Mount is in danger of total collapse.Part of the ramp, which leads to the Mograbi Gate, collapsed in the winter of 2004. A wooden bridge which was built over the ramp after the mishap is now also in danger of falling apart.Within a few months, said engineers from the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, the bridge will become totally unsafe.Plans for a permanent bridge have been stuck in endless red tape for more than two years.

The Crypto-Jews of New Mexico

You can often find the most fascinating stories at www.ynetnews.com, based in Israel. Such as this unexpected discovery...

'Crypto-Jews' call New Mexico home
They observe Shabbat, defined as Jews, but are they really? Journey into modern research on New Mexico's Crypto-Jews

Associated Press
Published:
12.13.06

Stanley Hordes had only assumed the job of New Mexico state historian for a few weeks when he started receiving some odd visitors. They would enter his Santa Fe office, close the door - and gossip about their neighbors.

"So-and-so lights candles on Friday nights," they would whisper. "So-and-so doesn't eat pork," they would say.

Hordes wasn't the first scholar who had ever heard such things. But as a curious new arrival from Louisiana, the young historian was intrigued. So he began visiting rural villages to interview the "viejitos," Hispanic old-timers whose families had lived in the state for generations, sometimes since the original Spanish settlers came up from Mexico.

He was astounded by what they told him. Though the people Hordes spoke with were clearly Catholic, they reported following an array of Jewish customs. They talked about leaving pebbles on cemetery headstones, lighting candles on Friday nights, abstaining from pork and circumcising male infants.

When Hordes asked why they did such things, some said they were simply following family tradition. Others gave a more straightforward explanation. "Somos judios," they said. "We are Jews."

What was that supposed to mean? Their villages were built around old Catholic mission chapels, not synagogues. The Hebrew scrolls of the Torah were Greek to them. They didn't really know anything about the Jewish faith - and yet, they called themselves Jews.

A quarter-century later, Mr. Hordes has a stirring explanation of how Judaism got to New Mexico.

In the spring of 1492, Jews in Spain were given two choices: Convert to Catholicism or leave the country. Many left, scattering as far afield as Istanbul, London and Cairo. Many others simply abandoned their religion for Catholicism.

But a few of those who converted did so only publicly, continuing to practice Judaism in secret. The Spanish Inquisition sought to identify and punish such false converts.

Modern scholars have found a few communities of so-called "crypto-Jews" that survived in both Iberia and the New World for centuries, hiding their true religious identity from their neighbors and the Catholic Church.

In his 2005 book "To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico," Hordes suggests that many crypto-Jews found their way to the northern frontier of the Spanish colonial empire, where evading the authority of both church and state was an easier proposition.
There, they continued to observe their religion behind locked doors, blending publicly into the monolithic Catholic culture and teaching their children that revealing their true identities could mean death by the Inquisition. "They were invisible," Hordes said.

But the very same secrecy that protected Judaism in the Spanish Southwest eventually doomed it. The people had no synagogue, no Torah, no connection to global Jewish culture. They were immersed in a Catholic culture with its own rich traditions. By the 20th century, Hordes concludes, all that was left were a few suggestive customs and a vague sense among a few viejitos that somehow, they were Jewish.

For Sonya Loya, there's nothing vague about it. She has always felt Jewish. Growing up Catholic in Ruidoso, N.M., Loya was intensely spiritual. But she never identified with Jesus or Christianity. "I never felt whatever I was supposed to feel when I was Catholic," Loya said.

Loya began observing the Jewish Sabbath, Shabbat, six years ago, about the same time that she learned about the secret Jewish past that was being uncovered by Hordes and other scholars. She was thrilled at the possibility that she might actually have Jewish heritage.

"I believe that what drew me back home to who I am is my Jewish soul," Miss Loya said.

In 2004, she went to her parents, asking them to bless her conversion to Judaism, but expecting the worst. Perplexed by their daughter's rejection of Catholicism, they had often reacted badly to such pronouncements.

But this time, it was her turn to be perplexed. Not only did her father give his blessing, Loya said, but he revealed that he had known since childhood that he had Jewish ancestry.

The Rev. Bill Sanchez always felt Jewish, too. But not that Jewish; he's a Catholic priest.

Father Sanchez discovered his own Jewish roots after watching a television documentary on genetics. The show inspired him to have his own genes tested by a Houston-based company called Family Tree DNA. The company determined that he has a set of genetic markers on his Y-chromosome that is also found in about 30 percent of Jewish men.

Since then Father Sanchez has embraced his Jewish heritage. He wears a Star of David around his neck on the same chain that holds his crucifix, and keeps a menorah in his office at St. Edwin Parish in Albuquerque, N.M.

Like Hordes, folklorist Judith Neulander was fascinated by the story of the Southwestern crypto-Jews when she first encountered it as a graduate student in the early 1990s. An American Jew who grew up in Mexico City, she felt like she was the perfect person to write the definitive book on the subject.

"I really in my heart wanted to curate the crypto-Judaic exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York," said Neulander, who is now co-director of the Jewish Studies Program at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Neulander went to New Mexico in the summer of 1992 and began doing interviews. At first, she talked with people who were referred to her by Hordes or other researchers, and then with people she identified herself.

"All of it just doesn't really hold up when you examine it carefully," Neulander said. Aside from the cultural evidence, all Hordes had was a handful of prosecutions against suspected Jews in the records of the Mexican Inquisition and genealogical arguments linking individual New Mexicans back generations to pre-expulsion Spanish Jews.

Neulander wasn't buying it. But if they weren't Jewish, she still had to explain why so many people in the Southwest thought they were.

In 1994, Neulander wrote a paper in the Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review that offered an explanation. During the 1940s an anthropologist named Raphael Patai had discovered a church outside Mexico City whose members considered themselves Jewish, even though they believed in Jesus and knew very little about Judaism.

He concluded that the church must have been founded by evangelical Protestant missionaries from one of several small sects who considered themselves descendants of a lost tribe of Israel.
Though rare today, such Christian groups follow many Jewish traditions while believing in Jesus, and consider themselves the world's only truly chosen people. "There were probably many more sects like this in the early part of the 20th century," Neulander said.

She can't prove it. But Neulander believes Protestant evangelicals, possibly from a group that splintered off the Seventh-day Adventist church, inspired the belief in a Southwestern Jewish past less than a century ago.

Hordes dismisses her theory as outrageous. "Do you think they would have forgotten that they were Seventh-day Adventists?" he asked.

The only serious genetic study that has attempted to find Jewish ancestry among Hispanics in the Southwest reached a different conclusion.

"We just couldn't wait to find all these Jews," said Alec Knight, who was working in an anthropological genetics lab at Stanford University when he saw the crypto-Jew story in an in-flight magazine.

Knight recruited a handful of colleagues for a simple study. They took DNA samples from 139 men in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, most of whom could trace their family trees in the region back to the 17th century.

The results? To use a Yiddish expression, bubkes - almost nothing.

As the 139 DNA profiles came back, it became clear to Knight that the population he had sampled was genetically indistinguishable from the modern population of Spain. There were a few individuals who did have typically "Jewish" profiles, but no more than you would find in Spain, owing to the presence of Jews there before 1492.

Who is that White-Bearded Man?

Let your imagination roam...but that's me with. C.S., not S.C. That's Chuck Souder, the local Santa and part-time politician.

Merry Christmas.

The Gospel at the Mall

The Real Talent

Matt Cooper

Yours Truly, Mouth Open as Usual

A special thank you to all our singers and musicians who participated in the presentation "Christmas 2006" both at the 10:30 AM worship and at the Westfield Santa Anita Mall this last Sunday. It was an amazing experience to go to the town square of 21st century America and present the gospel in this form. All I had to do was talk (narration that border on preaching), so all the credit goes to the singers and our wonderful worship director, Matt Cooper.