Catching Up from Thanksgiving

And I'm back. I took a break during, well, the break from school. Said break consisted of me driving up to Oklahoma, spending the holiday with my family, and driving back on Sunday.

Had I been posting regularly, I'd likely have covered the following topics, each of which formed part of my mental blogging:

Bacon-wrapped turkey: we attempted this, lured by our love of bacon. It replaced our standard herb-butter rub. The verdict? Not impressive. Some of the bacon was crispy (as bacon should be); other parts were that kind of sad-floppy ham one gets when bacon is essentially boiled instead of fried or broiled. Some possibly related, possibly unrelated temperature weirdness (the thermometers read underdone, underdone, underdone--and then suddenly waaaaay too done!) combined with the unappetizing bacon to make this a low turkey year. Back to herb rub for Christmas.

Popup shops and local stores in Oklahoma City: OKC never gets enough credit, I think, for being a surprisingly cool town. It has a thriving arts scene, a robust independent food culture, and a lot of neat offerings for folk interested in Okie-made stuff. Yay, Oklahoma.

Knives Out: We saw this mystery movie from Rian Johnson in OKC with my sister and brother-in-law. It's quite fun, with a stellar cast. There's a fascinating racial/colonial subtext: whiteness eating itself. The final shot, with [SPOILER REMOVED] sipping from a coffee mug reading "My House," is the perfect button on that statement.

The Protoevangelium of James: I had to rush back home from OKC Sunday in time to prep a 7 AM Monday morning Advent lesson. We're using Amy-Jill Levine's Light of the World. Levine is a Jewish professor at Vanderbilt Seminary who writes a lot of books for Christians about Christian scriptures. It's an impressive feat of ecumenical empathy, watching her shift into the mindspace of a believing Christian. I'm enjoying it thoroughly and learning a lot.

I was teaching Chapter 2 about the annunciation of Mary and the Mangificat. Among the insights Levine shares is a reference to the Protoevangelium of James (aka The Infancy Gospel of James, The Nativity of Mary, and The Gospel of James), an apocryphal book from the second century. Though the early church by the third and fourth centuries had recognized the work as pseudepigraphic and rejected it from canon, its narrative proved popular enough to infuse Christian thought.

Levine analogies the text to midrash, a practice of (as she puts it) "filling in the blanks" left by scriptural accounts. In my reading (I sought out and read the whole thing--it's pretty short), it seems more like a fan fiction prequel to the Gospels: All About Mary. It's from this work that practically all the non-biblical stuff we hear about Mary (especially in Catholic and Orthodox traditions) comes. The Protoevangelium gives Mary two parents, Joachim and Anna, who after years of infertility, finds herself blessed with an angelic annunciation: she's to have a special child. It's here that we find fully expressed the idea that Joseph must have been elderly, a widower with sons of his own (these become Jesus's brothers mentioned in the canonical gospels).

It's here, also, that we get the idea that Mary was a perpetual virgin--before, during, and after Jesus's birth. The nativity narrative is fascinating. Mary and Joseph find refuge in a cave, not a manger. Joseph goes out to look for a Jewish midwife. All of creation stands still, but he finds a midwife. The midwife witnesses the miraculous birth (kind of a divine C-section: Jesus just appears) and fetches another midwife, Salome, to check whether Mary is still intact.

That's right, folks: the Protoevangelium of James contains the first recorded gynecological examination, described in fairly graphic detail. Salome inserts her digit into Mary only to find that (1) Mary is miraculously still a virgin, and (2) the hand that did the testing burns and whithers (it's later healed).

Wild stuff.  That led me to do a bit of research about the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity. I found to my surprise that, historically, most Christians have affirmed this bit of non-biblical theology (including John Wesley). Only with the Calvinists did this idea fall out of favor with Protestants. It remains important to Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians. I can't quite figure out why it's significant that Mary be imagined as perpetually virginal, but I'm content to remain happily agnostic. (Of course, the virginity of Mary is itself somewhat contested, especially since the Isaiah passage often cited as prophesying Jesus's birth to a virgin represents something of a mistranslation from the Hebrew. Almah in Hebrew just means "young woman of marriageable age," where as the Greek parthenos means "virgin" specifically.)

Anyway--it makes for a fascinating discussion in Advent class.

And that's what I would have been blogging about had it not been for the holiday.