★★★

What do the ages of the first humans in the Bible mean? Could people really have lived that long? Leonard Timmons has found an ancient calendar hidden in these numbers, and feels this discovery is key to understanding the Bible.

Timmons’s calendar is constructed by charting, on a timeline, the births and deaths of the men between Adam and Noah, fudging a little here and there to create a few more meaningful points on the timeline, and then discovering that it breaks down into four portions of 364 years plus one 5-year portion. Turn that into days, and you have a 364-day year, plus a 5-day seasonal correction after four years (think of our leap day). 364, for calendar aficionados, is the Jubilees calendar from the Qumran texts, so-liked because it plays nice, dividing neatly into 52 seven-day weeks.

Timmons’s analysis is founded on arithmetic combinations of round numbers (such as 500 or 1000) and of the number seven. Lamech’s age at his death, 777 years, appears to be a clue. For example, 56 is a nice number because it is 7×7+7. 84 is an excellent number because it is 77+7. Seven is recognized as God’s number, a perfect number, the number of days in the week. Readers of Revelation are quite aware of how important seven, and in particular three sevens (777), are in Biblical thinking.

Timmons is correct that numerology was important to the ancients, often used as a means of Biblical enlightenment. Consider the 666 of Revelation, and the miraculous catch of 153 fish by Jesus’ disciples. Timmons takes a stab at solving both of these riddles, which might be a mistake on his part; while no convincing solutions to the second puzzle have been offered, making the 153 puzzle fair game for speculation, scholars are nearly unanimous and surely correct in solving the 666 puzzle. (See http://www.dubiousdisciple.com/2011/01/revelation-1318.html and http://www.dubiousdisciple.com/2011/01/revelation-1318_27.html ) In any case, I would not be surprised at all to discover that there is meaning in the ages of the earliest humans in the Bible. It’s far more likely that the numbers have some sort of meaning to the authors than that people actually lived that long! However, even after reading Timmons’s book, a hidden calendar code seems a bit too conspiratorial for my taste. Timmons may be on the right track with his “meaningful numbers,” but attributing the whole thing to a hidden calendar doesn’t feel right to me.

That is, however, the book’s premise: Not only is there a calendar hiding within the ages of the earliest humans, but it has been purposefully hidden. This is not just numerology, it’s a devised puzzle, and (in my opinion) an inelegant one. The authors were not content just to lay out a calendar; they carefully hid the calendar, purposefully confusing us, swapping the meaningful number 56 here and there with 65 (the reverse of its digits) to confuse us, doubling and halving numbers here and there to bewilder us.

So who imbedded these puzzles? Perhaps collators of the Bible while in Babylonian captivity, or shortly after they returned to Jerusalem? That sounds somewhat believable, but Timmons thinks not; he argues instead that the Bible should be thought of as an ancient educational textbook for the enlightened, a sort of test to divide good puzzle-readers from bad. The Bible is a book of riddles to help the initiate develop his talent for insight. We’re not just talking about the creation stories; the Bible’s authors have encapsulated hidden knowledge in its texts from Genesis to Revelation! An “insight school” that lasted a thousand years! (Timmons actually suggests thousands).

Timmons rejects the Documentary Hypothesis (which proposes that the Torah was written by at least four distinct authors, none of them Moses). I cannot help but think he commits another error by pitting his puzzle theory against the Documentary Hypothesis; it seems far more reasonable to me that the Documentary Hypothesis disproves the ancient textbook idea rather than vice-versa.

Anyway, the hidden calendar is not really the important thing. It’s just a discovery that should prompt us to read the Bible differently; to reveal to us the surprising intellect and understanding of its authors. Free now to explore a deeper meaning in the scriptures than a literal reading, Timmons next launches into his interpretation of the Bible’s themes; how the ancients thought of demons, angels, soul, spirit, faith, even God … and it’s nothing like what we thought they meant. This insight helps Timmons decode stories like the Flood and the Garden of Eden, and he provides two creative and fascinating interpretations. Even Jesus’ parables and Revelation’s mysteries are revealed.

I found the book to be an interesting fringe theory, and fun with numbers (right up my alley), but not something I found convincing. However, my feeling is that there is surely a 4- or even 5-star book idea here, that Timmons’s interpretations are ingenious, but that he overreaches by claiming them to be the correct interpretation … as if the Bible writers actually meant their stories to be read this way.

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

★★★★

Wright begins with the creeds, about Jesus being born of a virgin and dying for our sins, and bemoans the “missing middle.” Christianity today has become too focused on the beginning and end of the Jesus story, and has ignored a primary message of all four Gospels: that God has come back, in the form of Jesus, and reigns today as King.

So who is the Jesus in the middle? A violent revolutionary? A wide-eyed apocalyptic visionary, expecting the end of the world? A mild-mannered teacher of sweet reasonableness? If he was one of the first two, Jesus was deluded. Even if it’s the third case, Jesus was similarly deluded, because most of his followers from that day to this have been anything but sweetly reasonable. Instead, they have busied themselves inventing dogmas (like the virgin birth and the resurrection), writing creeds, and establishing the church.

Thankfully, none of these Jesuses match the Gospels. Wright is sick of scholars and books which portray Jesus as a good Jewish boy who would have been horrified to see a church spring up in his name. He wants us to see Jesus the way the Gospels tell the story, as God coming down to be King of the earth. Wright’s guns are blazing in this book (his passion took me rather by surprise), firing at liberals and feel-gooders. God is no doddering old boss who used to run the company but has since been banished to a cozy upstairs office where he can sit and imagine he’s still in charge. God is king. The story of Jesus is the story of how Israel’s God became king.

Wright’s approach this time is not at all objective. He is a believing Trinitarian, and speaks out against the popular opinion that the high Christology of John is a later development. From the beginning, the Gospel story has been about the divine Jesus, Son of God, God Himself. On Mark’s very first page, the story of Jesus’ baptism, we find “every bit as high a Christology as John’s, though it is a high Jewish Christology.” Wright also discusses Matthew’s viewpoint and Luke’s viewpoint, in each case pointing out the evidence that they considered Jesus divine. Wright never quite nails down his definition of Christ’s divinity … none of this “Jesus is God” direct approach, just as no such claim exists in the scriptures … but we should make the association in some mystical way. For Wright, this verse in Luke says it all:

“Go back to your home,” said Jesus, “and tell them what God has done for you.” And he went off around every town, declaring what Jesus had done for him.

In the end, I am fully behind Wright’s view that the Gospels present Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s return to earth as King, and in my own mystical way I confess to be sort of a Trinitarian, but I simply can’t buy the argument that all of the Gospels contain the same high Christology as John’s Gospel. There are too many opposing arguments that Wright fails to address.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.

by Sheila Deeth

★★★★★

Adorable!

If Sheila doesn’t like this word to describe her book, well, she’ll just have to get over it.

45 big-print, two-page stories introduce 45 characters from the book of Genesis, in a Dubious-Disciple-approved way. Real World, Real People, Real God, the subtitle proclaims. You’ll see what she means as soon as you start reading.

So Cain and Abel made their sacrifices. They made a fire and burned the best of the grain, and meat from the best of the animals for God. Then Cain noticed that the smoke from the meat was much thicker and smelled much nicer than the smoke from the grain. “Is that because God likes Abel more than me?” Cain asked. His mother said it was just because the fat from the meat burns hotter, but Cain wasn’t listening to her. The more Cain thought about it, the less he bothered to listen to anyone.

The book reads like one of those sunny children stories written for adults, the kind that leaves you smiling the whole way through. The back cover calls this a “middle-school reader for book-lovers of all ages, telling stories for all time.” I think that about nails it.