The Millennium Shrimp

Interesting article in the Dead-Tree-based Medium of Record:

Ancient Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: July 6, 2008
The writing on an ancient stone may contribute to a re-evaluation of popular and scholarly views of Jesus.

Traditional Christology has emphasized the novelty of Jesus as a suffering messiah - in contrast to the dominant Jewish view of the Messiah as a triumphant King of the line of David. Back in 2000, Israel Knohl, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem argued that the motif of the “suffering messiah” - the idea that the Messiah would die and be resurrected as a necessary step towards the national salvation of Israel - existed within Judaism prior to Jesus. Such a view would seat place Jesus - and the Christian beliefs about his death and ressurection, firmly within at least one stream of Jewish Eschatology. The main problem, however, was that he didn’t have any actual textual sources referencing a suffering messiah prior to the emergence of early Christian documents.

Until now.
(more…)

Friday morning I saw the following article in the NY Times:

Abuse Trails Central American Girls Into Gangs

“I thought it would be like my family,” Benky said of her reason for joining the gang, asking that her full name not be used. “I thought I’d get the love I was missing. But they’d hit me. They ordered me around. They told me I had to rob someone or kill someone, and I did it.”

When she tried to leave the gang five years later, her fellow gang members shot her six times. The scars still visible on her body vouch for her story, as do social workers who visited her during the nine months she spent in a hospital.

Gang initiation was being forced to participate in group sex with the males in the group. She was 14 at the time.