Fencing Bear at Prayer

AHA Session 267 Sunday, January 6, 2013, 11:00AM-1:00PM Roosevelt Ballroom II (Roosevelt New Orleans) Today is the feast of the Epiphany, the manifestation or appearance of God.  Today Christians celebrate the revelation of the Son of the Most High in the person of Jesus Christ.  Traditionally, in the West, the day was marked by the story of the visit of the Magi; in the East, it is marked as the day on which Jesus was baptized in the Jordan by his cousin John.  Both were instances of revelation, of God's becoming present to the world, not mystically or spiritually, but actually, in the body of a baby born of a woman, in the body of a man anointed by the Holy Spirit and acknowledged by a voice from heaven as God's Son. So what?  What does this feast have to do with us, sitting here in this hotel conference room rather than in the pews of a church?  Is it appropriate to call our attention to the fact that in the Christian calendar, today is one of the holie...

"You will recall the belief that in the time of the Messiah five things would be restored to the temple: the fire, the ark, the Spirit, the cherubim and the menorah.  Since the asherah was remembered as a stylized tree, the older translations of the Bible, made before the discoveries at Ugarit revealed the existence of the goddess Athirat, translated asherah as 'grove,' following the Greek.  It was forbidden to plant a grove of trees near any altar of the LORD (Deut. 16.21, AV); Jezebel had 400 prophets of the groves (1 Kings 18.19, AV).  The asherah removed by Josiah would have been a stylized tree, and the only stylized tree associated with the temple was the menorah, the tree of fire which was the tree of life, and therefore a symbol of the Lady who was being removed.  This menorah was remembered as the true menorah.  There was a seven branched lamp in the second temple--it is depicted on the arch of Titus among the loot from the temple which was taken to ...

For those of you wearying of my political commentary, something rousing on the theological side: the Mother of the Lord as Lady of the Temple .