hawkwing_lb (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hawkwing_lb) wrote2009-02-05 11:09 pm
hawkwing_lb) wrote2009-02-05 11:09 pm
(no subject)
It has been very strange here, this week. There is snow: so much snow, in fact, that this week the first known mountain rescue requiring the use of skis in this country took place in Wicklow. So much snow, in fact, that this afternoon we had a snowball fight in front of the Old Library, at least a dozen people, out there on the grass for half an hour, throwing snowballs.
This much snow only happens once every dozen years, if that. The last time we had serious snow was in the eighties.
It's making me sleepy and hungry. And strangely thrilled.
So I was sitting there for a long while this afternoon, waiting for a lecture on the crucifixion. Trying not to fall asleep, and trying work on my essay. I have three short pages of notes, now, concerning identity and assimilation in Roman Britain: my plan is to assess first Iron Age identities and Roman-British contact after Caesar; then military, urban, and rural identities post-conquest, paying attention to the decline of urbanism in the fourth century. The interesting thing about identity is how little of it we can actually reconstruct: we can reconstruct responses to imperial power, but not, necessarily, the reasons those responses occurred. There, we're limited to supposition, in the absence of literary evidence.
Speaking of literary evidence...
In the end, the lecture on the crucifixion was by a scholar from Edinburgh, one Helen Bond. Despite the title ("Why Was Jesus Crucified?") it was a historically-oriented presentation, centering around what we know of Josephus Caiaphas, the high priest at the time, and the prefect of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, and how and why the trial and execution recounted differently in the different gospel sources took place.
It was extremely interesting, in fact, although not ground-breaking in terms of serious scholarship: it's rather been a tenet of (non-Biblical-scholarship) historical treatments of the death of Jesus of Nazareth that he was executed by the Romans for being a (potential) trouble-maker: Bond's presentation was a cogent summary of how that conclusion is arrived at.
Alas, the question period brought the theologicals out of the woodwork, with one woman accusing Bond of ignoring the 'big picture' of the theological significance of the Christ event (so not what the lecture was about), and one bloke trying, in a very confused way, to represent her as accusing the gospel-writers of conspiring
to lie to their audiences (so not what she said). And after I asked a question and the next person to ask a question referred to me as a 'gentleman' (yeah what?), I left.
Because theology and history, they need to be separate things. Theological types can get rather... crazy when you do not say what they want (expect) to hear, and that is inimical to the critical method. Seriously.
Last night at lead climbing was fun. Up on the horizontal, no toprope, just me and the clip - I didn't send the route, or even figure out how to get from the horizontal overhang back onto the vertical, but man, that was fun.
her life is like the moment
after
the match's strike, the light
after
midnight's chimes have struck -
stuck -
rife with silences, rimed
white
with frozen meaning.
her life is like the snow
after
nightfall, the flurried rows
after
the moon's shadow rises, clouded
driven -
after starlight comes, passes, is gone,
long gone,
out into the frozen dark
her life is the silence
her life is the spark
This much snow only happens once every dozen years, if that. The last time we had serious snow was in the eighties.
It's making me sleepy and hungry. And strangely thrilled.
So I was sitting there for a long while this afternoon, waiting for a lecture on the crucifixion. Trying not to fall asleep, and trying work on my essay. I have three short pages of notes, now, concerning identity and assimilation in Roman Britain: my plan is to assess first Iron Age identities and Roman-British contact after Caesar; then military, urban, and rural identities post-conquest, paying attention to the decline of urbanism in the fourth century. The interesting thing about identity is how little of it we can actually reconstruct: we can reconstruct responses to imperial power, but not, necessarily, the reasons those responses occurred. There, we're limited to supposition, in the absence of literary evidence.
Speaking of literary evidence...
In the end, the lecture on the crucifixion was by a scholar from Edinburgh, one Helen Bond. Despite the title ("Why Was Jesus Crucified?") it was a historically-oriented presentation, centering around what we know of Josephus Caiaphas, the high priest at the time, and the prefect of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, and how and why the trial and execution recounted differently in the different gospel sources took place.
It was extremely interesting, in fact, although not ground-breaking in terms of serious scholarship: it's rather been a tenet of (non-Biblical-scholarship) historical treatments of the death of Jesus of Nazareth that he was executed by the Romans for being a (potential) trouble-maker: Bond's presentation was a cogent summary of how that conclusion is arrived at.
Alas, the question period brought the theologicals out of the woodwork, with one woman accusing Bond of ignoring the 'big picture' of the theological significance of the Christ event (so not what the lecture was about), and one bloke trying, in a very confused way, to represent her as accusing the gospel-writers of conspiring
to lie to their audiences (so not what she said). And after I asked a question and the next person to ask a question referred to me as a 'gentleman' (yeah what?), I left.
Because theology and history, they need to be separate things. Theological types can get rather... crazy when you do not say what they want (expect) to hear, and that is inimical to the critical method. Seriously.
Last night at lead climbing was fun. Up on the horizontal, no toprope, just me and the clip - I didn't send the route, or even figure out how to get from the horizontal overhang back onto the vertical, but man, that was fun.
her life is like the moment
after
the match's strike, the light
after
midnight's chimes have struck -
stuck -
rife with silences, rimed
white
with frozen meaning.
her life is like the snow
after
nightfall, the flurried rows
after
the moon's shadow rises, clouded
driven -
after starlight comes, passes, is gone,
long gone,
out into the frozen dark
her life is the silence
her life is the spark