From Day of St. Matthew to Bilbo's and Frodo's Birthday

Creation vs. Evolution: From Day of St. Matthew to Bilbo's and Frodo's Birthday · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Were Old Texts Very Clouded by Figurative Language as Opposed to Literal? — No.

Yesterday was the feast of an Apostle and an Evangelist, who before that had been a Levite and therefore a trained scribe. And then misused the competence as a tax collector. It was when he was forgiven and paid back that he was made a disciple, chosen among the twelve, became a witness to the Resurrection that evening when St. Thomas was lacking and one of the first bishops having authority to forgive sins by sacramental absolution. Within the following decade he composed a Gospel which was described as "a collection of the Lord's sayings" and which has therefore been denied identity with the Gospel we have. I have rebutted this by observing, even if the Gospel contains so much action that one would spontaneously feel that the words of Our Lord were just 25 % of the Gospel (my initial expectation), if you actually use word documents to do word counts, first full text of each chapter, then omitting everything that's not from Our Lord's mouth, it adds up to the sayings being 56 % of the Gospel. The text we have pretty well matches the description by Papias, except the Hebrew original is lost.

Today is Hobbit Day. One September 22 in Hobbiton, Bilbo was eleventy-one years old and Frodo 33 years old. They held a long-expected party which I found so boring at the first reading that I had to restart the Lord of the Rings once again at age 13. I probably wouldn't have if I hadn't around age 9 restarted Karl May's Winnetou I* since at first reading I found the details about the author persona** acting as Geodesist for a railway company near Apache country boring. I mean, in that chapter we have no Apaches, no fights, no danger, no nothing ... I returned to the book and didn't regret it, and I repeated the operation with the Long Expected Party. In case some are not aware or are not aware that I am aware, the Lord of the Rings is a novel. It is fiction.

The use of the Gospel is pure truth. On every level. And truths necessary for salvation, some parts are universally necessary for salvation, other parts are recurringly necessary for some, though not for others. The use of a novel is entertainment, and if any level of truth, that's limited to moral, but not complete historic truth, and in this case not any historic truth at all.***

Is it appropriate? I think it is. Once truth is revealed and we have a firm measure on how to assess moral truth in the Gospel and in Church Tradition, we can allow ourselves to play around with moral truth in purely fictional settings. Peter Pan belongs to the world of Peter, not to the world of Pan. Not that Kensington Gardens is the equivalent of Hobbiton. But this freedom is relatively safe (if exercised by Christians and Tolkien was a better one than James Barrie, he made some indirectly somewhat wry remarks on Peter Pan), if, and only if, we first have a truthful guide to morality. I wouldn't trust George Lucas to invent a correct one. I don't trust Siddharta Gautama with having done so, any more than Epicure. Homer and Virgil are better, since they deal with real events (at least important parts of the epics), though they saw them in the light of false gods. But they aren't adequate.

Now, truth in one sense came when God became Man. But in another sense is far older than that. St. Matthew traces the genealogy of the Godman back to at least Genesis 12 or the last few verses of Genesis 11. St. Luke, following a different line (the genealogies are not both at the same time patrilinear and biological, but by convention adoptions and inlaws could be expressed as patrilinear filiation) traces it back to Genesis 5 and therefore to Genesis 2, with a fairly clear identification of the Adam of Genesis 2 with the man of Genesis 1.

Some have suggested, as a serious° theological proposal, that we should take Genesis 1 through 11 as edification without facthood. As "allegory, much like Lord of the Rings" (which precisely isn't an allegory, and well did Tolkien know that, and clearly did he tell). Once someone has stated such a thing, he need not be taken seriously on literary matters ever again. But I also don't think he deserves any respect in theology. You see, the problem of the Pharisees rejecting Jesus was not lacking a moral guide, the problem was having and heavily misapplying one. Moses. Whose work begins at the very beginning, which is a very good place to start. I e, Genesis 1 through 11 is part of the moral guide that already existed in Jesus' time.

That is a very excellent reason to deny the suggestion it is pious and edifying but nevertheless fiction. Simeon and Anna, Joseph and the doctors in the Temple already had a guide before recognising Jesus. Indeed, Abraham had a guide before recognising the voice of God, the very same person. That guide consisted (at least in important part) of the factual accounts given by Adam and Eve, of Noah and his son Shem, of Heber in the time of Babel, of the genealogists who told their ancestry to their children, in other words, Abraham's revelation didn't start totally from scratch, it started with a moral guide which was also sound history, and still is. Enjoy Tolkien, but don't take James and Matthew or even Moses for James Matthew Barrie! Or even for John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
XVIII Lord's Day after Pentecost
22.IX.2024

* The Winnetou novels so titled are three. A volume called sometimes Winnetou IV is now best known as Winnetous Erben (Winnetou's heirs).
** Who certainly is implied as carrying the name Karl May, as being the later on writer in his earlier years, but isn't the actual life of Karl May.
*** Or very little. It would seem that archaeologically there was a time when the British Isles were not separate from the Continent, there was no English Channel, perhaps not even any North Sea, and as we have no historic records from this part of the world from then, any society able to make such would be one lost to us. Tolkien provides more than just one such lost society. From his imagination. And without the usual "prehistoric men led tough lives that must be depicted as incessant labour" schmuck one finds in so many prehistory novels.
° On their view.