The Development of the Bible, Post 1

I recently had a remarkable conversation and learning experience on the nature and development of the Bible.  You would think everyone would know how the Bible came about, but while it intuitively feels we all know, but it’s actually more complicated than you imagine.  For instance, why do Catholic and the other Apostolic Churches have more books in the Old Testament than Protestants?   Protestants claim that Catholics added books, while Catholics claim that Protestants took them out.  This conversation started on a conservative social media I belong to, Ricochet.   The original post was highlighting Hanukkah and made a reference that Bibles don’t even refer to the event from which a number of Catholics retorted that their Bibles most certainly do.  The event of Hanukkah is told in the First and Second books of Maccabees, both of which are part of the deuterocanonical texts contained in Catholic Old Testaments but not in Protestant Old Testaments, and ironically not included in Jewish Bibles, referred to as the Tanakh. 

Why are there books of the Old Testament in Catholic Bibles and not in Protestant and more astonishingly Jewish Bibles?  I explained for to those that didn’t realize, but in the course of the conversation I learned something really amazing.  What we have as the Jewish Bible is not what actually was read (in Hebrew of course) 2500 years ago.  The Hebrew Old Testament is a reconstruction put together some 900 years after Christ died.  We’ll get to all that.

So these series of posts are my portion of an extended conversation on the history of the Bible discussed on the post “Canceling God: Hanukkah and Cancel Culture” at Ricochet.  I’m not sure if no-members can access that post on Ricochet, but perhaps you might.  The post started off innocently enough but unfortunately a couple of us wound up hijacking the conversation.  My main interlocutor is a fellow whose website name is St. Augustine.  Despite his name, St. Augustine is Protestant with a particular love for the writings of the original St. Augustine.  My interlocutor is a scholarly fellow (I thought he had a PhD but I learned otherwise) and from an Evangelical background.  He’s more of an intellectual than a fundamentalist, and scholarly rather than pastoral.  We had a genial and charitable conversation bringing out our two viewpoints.

I am not reposting everything said.  I am mostly focusing on my side of the conversation.  It would be too much to recreate everything, and plus I only feel ownership to my side of the writing.  The actual Ricochet discussion will be in regular font and when I step out of that discussion, such as this, I will be in italics.  I project to complete this in four posts.  I’ll define some terms up front.

 

Septuagint: Greek translation of the Old Testament 200-300 years B.C.

DeuterocanonicalBooks: The Old Testament in Catholic Bibles but not in Protestant.

Vulgate Bible: The Latin translation of the Septuagint & New Testament by St. Jerome in the 4th Century A.D.

MasoreticText: The Hebrew Bible reconstructed by the Masoretes around 900 A.D.

I’m going to start with my comment explaining why the deuterocanonical exist in the Catholic Bibles.

Manny:

Reading through the comments it seems that most people don’t understand how the Bible cannon differences between Protestants and everyone else came about. Catholics are not the only Christian groups that contain what some call the deuterocanonical books. All Christians except most Protestants include them.

 

What is counter-intuitive and I think confuses most people (and it confused me before I learned this) is that Christians actually had an Old Testament cannon before Judaism. There was no Jewish cannon before the second or third century AD. Notice “AD.” Back in the third century BC (notice “BC”) there was a large Jewish diaspora across the Greek speaking world, remnants of Alexander the Great’s empire. In time those Jews wanted a copy of the scriptures they could read in what had become their native Greek language. So across the Greek speaking world seventy rabbis translated as many of the scriptures as possible. This ultimately included the deuterocanonical books. But remember, there was no official Jewish list of Books that had to be included. That Greek translated Bible came to be known as the Septuagint, which stands for the number 70, which was the number of translators.

 

So by the time of Christ a couple of centuries later, the Greek speaking Jews used the Septuagint.  The New Testament authors all traced their quotes from the Septuagint.  When you see Christ quote from the OT in the NT, the phrasing is identifiable to the Septuagint.  Mark, Matthew, Luke and John had the Septuagint available as they constructed their Gospels.  Even in the Epistles, Paul and the other letter writers are quoting from the Septuagint.

 

The Jewish cannon, known as the Tanakh, came about after the diaspora resulting from the destruction of the Temple and Israel in 70 AD by the Romans.  After a couple of hundred years, somewhere in the second or third century AD, they put together an official cannon, and it did not include the deuterocanonical books.  What I learned last week inclusion was based on whether those books were originally in Greek or Hebrew.  That was for Judaism to decide but all Christians at that point had already a cannon.

 

Now, come 1500 years later and Martin Luther in creating a Bible for his new church is faced with a problem.  If he includes the Maccabee books he is faced with the theological problem of praying for the dead. Here’s what 2 Mac 12:42-46 says:

 

42 Turning to supplication, they prayed that the sinful deed might be fully blotted out. The noble Judas exhorted the people to keep themselves free from sin, for they had seen with their own eyes what had happened because of the sin of those who had fallen.

43 He then took up a collection among all his soldiers, amounting to two thousand silver drachmas, which he sent to Jerusalem to provide for an expiatory sacrifice. In doing this he acted in a very excellent and noble way, inasmuch as he had the resurrection in mind;

44 for if he were not expecting the fallen to rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead.

45 But if he did this with a view to the splendid reward that awaits those who had gone to rest in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought.

46 Thus he made atonement for the dead that they might be absolved from their sin.

 

Why is that important?  Luther fought the Catholic Church over Purgatory and praying for the dead.  He could not keep that in or he would have been slammed dunk proven wrong.  Notice what it says, there was a collection of money to be taken for prayers for the dead to Jerusalem.  That’s no different than Catholic prayers for the dead given in churches.  Not only that, it justifies the theological concept of purgatory.  If there is no purgatory, then there is no reason to pray for the dead.  Either you’re already in heaven, and so no prayers are needed, or you’re in hell and no prayers will help.  Indeed, I do not believe that Protestants are theologically supposed to pray for the dead.  So using the excuse that Judaism had excluded these books, Luther dropped them altogether.  But by doing so, he took out the link between quotes from the NT to the old.  But the deuterocanonical books (as well as praying for the dead and the notion of purgatory) were there from the first century. 

### 

Manny:

But remember, there was no official Jewish list of Books that had to be included.

Saint Augustine

There didn’t have to be.  Neither was the NT official until centuries after, or the Deuterocanon/Apocrypha until the Reformation era.

Manny:

The official date of the NT can be traced to 382 at the Council of Rome.  But like most official proclamations in the Church, those official proclamations come quite a bit of time after it was widely accepted.  The 27 books of the NT can be traced to Clement of Alexandria (150-215), though he actually included more than the 27.  But the entire canon was officially declared in 382.  From Wikipedia: 

 

The Catholic Church considers that in the Council of Rome in 382 AD, under the Papacy of Damasus I, was defined the complete canon of the Bible, accepting 46 books for the Old Testament, including what the Reformed Churches consider as deuterocanonical books, and 27 books for the New Testament.[89] Based in this first canon, Saint Jerome compiled and translated the 73 books of the Bible into Latin, later known as the Vulgate Bible version, which has been considered during many centuries as one of the official Bible translations of the Catholic Church. The Synod of Hippo (in AD 393), followed by the Council of Carthage (397) and the Council of Carthage (419), also explicitly accepted the first canon from the Council of Rome; these councils [65] were under significant influence of Augustine of Hippo, who also regarded the Biblical canon as already closed.[66][67][68] The Roman Catholic Council of Florence (AD 1442) confirmed the first canon too,[73] while the Council of Trent (AD 1546) elevated the first canon to dogma.[90]

 

So the Vulgate at the time of Luther already had the deuterocanonical books.

###

Manny:

The common Protestant talking point is that Catholics put them, “added books to the Bible.” That is a lie. The reality is that Protestants took them out.

Saint Augustine:

And yet the Catholics call them the Deuterocanonical because their canonicity was formally recognized later.  It’s not as simple as “The Catholics added them!” Nor is it as simple as your account. No Protestant ever opted to take anything out of the Bible.

Manny:

Yes, of course and to be fair it depends on the spin you accept.  Protestants say he did it because he believed it was the right thing.  (Actually I’m not sure why.  What was Luther’s justification?)  Catholics say he did it to fit his new theology.  But here are a couple of more curious facts.  (1) Luther also wanted to delete four books from the New Testament: James, Jude, Hebrews, and Revelation, all of which contain theology which opposed his.  He wanted to delete four books of the New Testament!  Can you imagine how the Protestant world would go crazy if a pope declared four books of the NT to no longer be canonical?  Whoa.  Luther was prevented.  Remember there were political implications.  He was being protected by various aristocracy of the German city states that wanted a break from Rome.  Deleting NT books would have caused an uproar.  He ultimately didn’t.  (2) Luther wasn’t above manipulating the meaning of his translation.  He added the word “alone” to faith in Romans 3:28.  He insisted keeping it in after it was pointed out, declaring it was implied.  No he altered the text to support his claim of justification by faith alone.  If you look in today’s Protestant Bible translations, “alone” is no longer there.  It has been corrected, but Luther caused so much division.

 

So you can believe whatever spin you like about Luther, but when I look at the totality of his translation decisions, it appears to me he was adjusting it to fit his theology.

Manny:

Where’s the evidence they [NT writers] rejected it?

Saint Augustine:

I don’t know. Occam’s Razor, I guess, plus the grand total of zero quotations from the Apocrypha in the NT. (Or did I miss a quotation?) And the occasional reference to the OT Scriptures in ways that apparently reference the entire Tanakh but not the Apocrypha. (Although I have learned of interesting objections to that last one!)

Manny:

What do you mean that’s all I have?  Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and the others quoted from the Septuagint.  The Septuagint included the deuterocanonical books.  There is no evidence they rejected them.  If anything Occam’s Razor says they accepted them.

Manny:

I don’t know what you’re trying to argue over.  The Church had established all 72 books as canonical at the Council of Rome in 382. In the subsequent couple of decades it was defined in the Eastern side of Christianity as well.  It was accepted by all for the next 1100+ years.  No one in the Christian world disputed using the Septuagint.  Perhaps they disputed what the Septuagint contained, but the Septuagint was the Christian standard.  1100 years is about from Moses to Christ. That’s pretty defined.  That’s as authoritative as it gets in the preprinting press world.

Manny:

OK, so you don’t accept the NT writers all choosing the Septuagint, you don’t accept the various Church councils authorizing the Septuagint (and which other Church Councils do you not accept?), you don’t accept all the Apostolic Churches using the Septuagint as canon, and you don’t accept 1100 years of unchallenged precedent, then where did the Holy Spirit go wrong?  After all Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were all led to the Septuagint.  Christ says “But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth” (Jn 16:13 and elsewhere).  Did the Holy Spirit lead the Gospel writers astray?  After all, the Hebrew texts could have been available to them.  It would not have required heroic effort for them to go to them.  They were available at the Temple.

 

And before you say, it didn’t matter which translation they went to, yes it did.  By directing all four to the Septuagint it established the prayers for the dead and therefore purgatory as dogma.  All four is not an accident.  Did the Holy Spirit after just some twenty to thirty years after Christ’s crucifixion guide the NT writers incorrectly?

Saint Augustine:

But I doubt that the Apocrypha/Deuterocanon actually is part of the Septuagint.

Manny:

Oh I never imagined that’s what you were referring to.  That’s why it kept going over my head.  I have never heard otherwise.  Where do you see anything to suggest they were not part of it?  I’m certainly not a history of the Bible scholar, but I have not come across that anywhere. 

Saint Augustine:

But as for the idea that they weren’t–Ockam’s Razor ain’t a bad place to start. But since the LXX is a translation of Scriptures, and since OT Scriptures are abundantly used in the NT, then we have at least two other reasons of some interest:

 

–the grand total of zero quotations from the Apocrypha/Deuterocanon in the NT. (Or did I miss a quotation?)

–the occasional reference to the OT Scriptures in ways that apparently reference the entire Tanakh but not the Apocrypha. (Although I have learned of interesting objections to that last one!)

This is a transition in the conversation.  While that first part (above) dealt with the canonicity of the deuterocanonical books, this next part dealt with the Masoretic text being reconstructed almost a millennium after Christ. 

Manny:

St A, I’ve been spending all my free time today learning about the history of the various Bibles.  I have to admit to you it is more complicated than I have outlined in this thread.  I’m going to write up the complications in a post, but it may take me a little while and possibly not by tonight. First let me address our questions here. 

 

Yes, there are quotations or references from the Hebrew OT, referred to as the Masoretic Text, but the statistics I found are the following.  Of the several hundred quotes and references in the NT, 20% are in common between the Septuagint and Masoretic.  Of the 80% which are different, 90% are from the Septuagint and 10% are from the Masoretic.  I wonder if the NT writers were sometimes using their memory of a phrase since 10% isn’t all that much.  But it is not exclusively Septuagint.  On that I can see then how you might hold to your position. 

 

As to Occam’s razor, no, I still think Occam’s Razor supports the Septuagint.  There are lots of OT books the NT didn’t quote from.  Because they didn’t quote from the deuterocanonical ones doesn’t mean anything.  The Septuagint was a bundle of all the books, so Occam’s razor would say if they relied on the bulk of that bundle, then the entire bundle was accepted.

Here’s a major fact I learned today which expanded my perception and perhaps alters some of my rationales, but I still believe the Septuagint should be the Christian text of the OT.  In the  third century AD, Judaism only established the canon of books, which books Judaism holds as scripture, not the official text.  But it did not agree on which of the variations of the texts was canonical, and given the loss of Hebrew it made the composition not so easy and straight forward.  The official Hebrew text was fixed centuries later, in the 9th century, known as the Masoretic Text.  What we have as the Masoretic texts were an assimilation of old manuscripts and oral tradition composed hundreds of years later.  So let me work on my comment that brings all this together. 

†

Personal Note: 60!

I don’t know if I’m rejoicing, but I am thankful for having made it this far.

I have been truly blessed.

Sunday Meditation: Not Worthy to Loosen the Thongs

John the Baptist returns today to give more exhortations.

 

“The crowds asked John the Baptist,

“What should we do?”

He said to them in reply,

“Whoever has two cloaks

should share with the person who has none.

And whoever has food should do likewise.”

Even tax collectors came to be baptized and they said to him,

“Teacher, what should we do?”

He answered them,

“Stop collecting more than what is prescribed.”

Soldiers also asked him,

“And what is it that we should do?”

He told them,

“Do not practice extortion,

do not falsely accuse anyone,

and be satisfied with your wages.”

 

Now the people were filled with expectation,

and all were asking in their hearts

whether John might be the Christ.

John answered them all, saying,

“I am baptizing you with water,

but one mightier than I is coming.

I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals.

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

His winnowing fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor

and to gather the wheat into his barn,

but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Exhorting them in many other ways,

he preached good news to the people.”

       -Lk 3:10-18

 

Be prepared.  Jesus is coming and will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire!  Make sure you are part of the wheat and not the chaff.

I found the reflection after the reading of the Gospel passage to be excellent.  Watch to the end.

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, Post #5

This is the fifth and last post on my reading of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory.

You can read Post #1 here.  

Post#2 here.  

Post #3 here. 

Post #4 here. 

 

 

Parts 3 and 4

Summary

Chapter 1

The priest is in safe territory now staying at the house of a married German, Lutheran couple, who though they disapprove of Catholicism give the priest safe haven.  In town, the priest hears confessions, celebrates Mass, and performs baptisms.  He finds this safe life uncomfortable.  Just as he’s to depart for another city he meets the mestizo again, who implores him to go with him back into dangerous territory because the criminal gringo is dying and needs a final confession.  Fully realizing that this is a trap, the whisky priest decides to go.

Chapter 2

The priest and mestizo come to a group of huts, and the mestizo leads him into one where the gringo is actually there and dying.  The priest tries to induce a confession from the gringo who only tells him to go away and to take his knife.  The priest insists on a confession, but the gringo dies. 

Chapter 3

Suddenly the lieutenant comes into the doorway and makes himself known.  The priest realizes it has been a trap.  He offers no resistance and in a way is actually glad his running is over.  The lieutenant is to take him back to the town of his police station to stand trial for treason, but it is raining and so decides to wait for the rain to end.  While waiting the lieutenant and the priest sit by candlelight and talk over their views of Catholicism.  The priest’s humility seems to touch the lieutenant and he appears to feel a certain remorse, and asks the priest for a request.  The priest just wants to say his last confession and be absolved of his sins.  The storm ends and they get on horses for the trip. 

Chapter 4

Back at town, the lieutenant goes to Padre Jose’s house to bring him to the police station to hear the whisky priest’s confession.  Padre Jose is willing to go but his wife refuses to let him go.  The lieutenant goes back to the dark cell where the priest has been placed and tells him he could not get him his confessor.  But he does give him one last bottle of brandy to pass the night.  Alone and drunk he goes through his last sins attempting at repentance, but he thinks of his daughter and the love he feels for her.  He has a dream of being at an altar and partaking a feast where he sees the girl, Coral, who taps out Morse code.  He awakes and it is morning and he feels the regret of not accomplishing more as a priest.

Part 4

Captain and Mrs. Fellows are in a hotel talking about going home.  Mrs. Fellows is sick as usual but wants to return to their home while Captain Fellows does not want to.  From the conversation we surmise that Coral has died, and they recall that priest she protected.

Mr. Tench is working on the bad tooth of the Jefe, and he tells him that his wife has written to him and wants a divorce.  Outside below in the courtyard Mr. Tench hears commotion and looks out the window to see a firing squad getting ready.  A small man is led out and Mr. Tench recognizes him as the priest who had shared brandy with him.  The priest is shot, and the body is dragged away.  The event repulses Mr. Tench and brings over him a feeling of loneliness.

The woman with the children who had harbored the priest tells her children the story of Juan the martyr.  The boy asks if the priest the police shot today was a martyr, and the mother assures him he was.  When the boy goes to bed he has a dream about the priest and his funeral, but a knock on the door wakes him and upon answering it finds it is another priest coming to stay.

###

I’ve been trying to find a way to wrap up this novel, and I admit it’s been a little difficult.  Some have said this is a very depressing novel.  Perhaps that is unavoidable given its topic.  What makes this a great novel, a great Christian novel, and great Catholic novel?  I’ll try to highlight a few points, which I think will lift some of the gloom off the story. 

First off this is a first rate novel because of its crisp narrative, its memorable characters, and its wonderfully suspenseful plotting.  Graham Greene is a master storyteller.  Coupling the central character (the whiskey priest) with a different character not only moves the plot along but creates a suspense for that anticipated conflict with his nemesis, the lieutenant, when the two will undoubtedly meet.  As a story, the plotting is perfection: the whiskey priest, flawed and fallen, resisting the dystopian government that persecutes him.  Can he escape?  Does he want to escape?  Will he survive?  These are all questions that hang in the balance throughout the novel until its climatic end.

What elevates this novel even higher is the psychological portrayal of a very complicated central character.  Above all this is a psychological novel which looks at the world through what I call Christian anthropology, that is, a Christian understanding of man.  Within the whiskey priest are two human impulses that are rooted in a Biblical human nature: “What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.” (Rom 7:15) and “If God loved us, we must love one another” (1 Jn 4:7).  And so the priest is caught in this existential conflict of doing what he cannot help from doing and doing it for love of his fellow man.  Indeed, the whiskey priest can be seen as having the same “thorn in the flesh” that propels him forward to his fate as it did St. Paul, a grace of power from weakness made perfect (2 Cor. 7-10).  The psychological novel came to its height in the first half of the twentieth century, and this novel is among the best and rooted in a Christian worldview.  Even the minor characters have complex psychologies that can be traced to a Christian anthropology. 

Third, this is also a great Catholic novel.  Just about all the sacraments are interwoven through the novel but the governing action of most of the novel is the whiskey priest’s commitment to consecrate the Eucharist and spread it to the faithful.  The whiskey priest is the only man left in this region of Mexico that can and is willing to be the instrument of grace that only a priest can be.  Only a priest has the ability to transubstantiate bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.  And so then one understands why a good deal of the plot revolves around the priest’s search for available wine in a country where all alcoholic beverages have been made illicit.  He risks being caught in order to provide the grace for the common folk to live in Christ: “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him” (Jn 6:56).  The whiskey priest is attempting to sanctify his time and place and the living souls around him through the consecration of the Eucharist, the Mass, the representation of the sacrifice of Christ, and in so doing bring life to the sterility of what has become a dystopian world.

You might consider the priest a failure, having the wine he had on hand thrown out by the mother of his child, and when he finally is able to buy more having it drunk from under him by the authorities.  There are no baptisms in the entire novel, no confirmations, no marriages, no confessions.  Indeed faced with his impending execution the priest cannot even get his own confession heard.  There is no Sacrament of the Eucharist given out.  In the one Mass he is able to celebrate the authorities storm the makeshift chapel right after the consecration, and so the whiskey priest has to hurriedly swallow the consecrated bread and wine before offering it to the congregation.  No priest is given the Sacrament of Holy Orders.  Indeed, one priest, Padre Jose, renounces his Holy Orders.  And finally there are no last rites administered.  The desperado gringo from the United States, shot and dying, refuses them.  No sacrament in the novel is actually fulfilled in the dystopian region.  The priest attempts to provide the graces of the sacraments in the context of a sterile wasteland.  T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” is certainly alluded. 

But is the whiskey priest a failure?  If the priest cannot give graces through the sacraments, he does provide graces through his very being.  As I’ve pointed out the novel is structured where each chapter couples the whiskey priest exclusively with another character.  While this is a really innovative way to move the plot forward it also allows us to see how the priest’s very being effects the other characters.  And in each case the priest provides some sort of grace to the other character.  As the priest interacts with the other, there is some sort of Cor Ad Cor Loquitur, heart speaking to heart.  It’s as if the priest is a living sacrament, offering himself to each person and bringing God’s grace into their lives.  One certainly can see the allusion in the narrative to Christ’s Passion and crucifixion, and certainly the whiskey priest can be seen as a Christ-figure in the novel, but I think it’s more than that.  The priest’s execution is actually a re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice, just like every Mass is a re-presentation of Christ.  And so the priest is not a failure, just as Christ is not a failure.  We see at the end a new priest come—a resurrection of sorts—and now the region has been sanctified by the whiskey priest’s death and the lives he has touched.  Though the novel never reaches further into the future, we know how the dystopia turns out.  Mexico renounces this anti-Catholicism and returns to faith.

This short little novel is one of the giants of the twentieth century.

Sunday Meditation: Make Straight His Paths

I love John the Baptist crying out in the desert: “Make straight His paths!”

 

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the desert.

 

He went throughout [the] whole region of the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah:

 

“A voice of one crying out in the desert:

‘Prepare the way of the Lord,

make straight his paths.  Every valley shall be filled

and every mountain and hill shall be made low.

The winding roads shall be made straight,

and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”

       -Lk 3:1-6

I am also struck with that last line: “and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” 

This is lovely.

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, Post #4

This is the fourth post on my reading of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory.

You can read Post #1 here.  

Post#2 here.  

Post #3 here. 

 

Finally the last paired conversation with the whisky priest that is worth looking at in detail is with the lieutenant.  The lieutenant is perhaps the hardest of the characters to touch his heart, but here too I think the priest’s heart to heart conversation works on the police officer.  The two meet for the final time at the gringo’s death where the whisky priest was trying to give the gringo last rites.  The gringo has died and the lieutenant springing the trap comes into the hut and makes himself known.

 

‘You didn’t expect to see me,’ he said.

 

‘Oh, but I did,’ the priest said. ‘I must thank you.’

 

‘Thank me, what for?’

 

‘For letting me stay alone with him.’

 

‘I am not a barbarian,’ the officer said. ‘Will you come out now, please? It’s no use at all your trying to escape. You can see that,’ he added, as the priest emerged and looked round at the dozen armed men who surrounded the hut.

 

‘I’ve had enough of escaping,’ he said.  (p. 190)

And so the lieutenant gets his first shock, being thanked by the priest.  In fact I think one could look at the conversation between the two as a mini enlightenment, an undermining of his preconceived notions.  The lieutenant says “he is not a barbarian.”  He says it again moments later.  He is not a barbarian and yet he kills priests, those who harbor them, and indiscriminately peasants in order to pressure people to turn them in.  It’s amazing how people can rationalize their evil.  A storm ensues and the two are stuck in the hut and get into a conversation.  In the course of the conversation, the priest lets out he has fathered a child.

 

He [the lieutenant] said with contempt, ‘So you have a child?’

 

‘Yes,’ the priest said.

 

‘You a priest?’

 

‘You mustn’t think they are all like me.’ He watched the candlelight blink on the bright buttons. He said, ‘There are good priests and bad priests. It is just that I am a bad priest.’

 

‘Then perhaps we will be doing your Church a service …’

 

‘Yes.’

 

The lieutenant looked sharply up as if he thought he was being mocked. (191)

The priest’s honesty and humility is another shock to the lieutenant.  The priest shows him magic card tricks, like he wanted to show Brigitta.  It leads to a subject about the parish Guilds, which I take as some sort of religious camp or tent revival that served as a means to preaching.  The lieutenant has bad memories of it recalling some sort of hypocrisy.  The priest actually acknowledges the hypocrisy.

 

The priest said, ‘You are so right.’ He added quickly, ‘Wrong too, of course.’

 

‘How do you mean?’ the lieutenant asked savagely. ‘Right? Won’t you even defend…?’

 

‘I felt at once that you were a good man when you gave me money at the prison.’

 

The lieutenant said, ‘I only listen to you because you have no hope. No hope at all. Nothing you say will make any difference.’

 

‘No.’

 

He had no intention of angering the police officer, but he had had very little practice the last eight years in talking to any but a few peasants and Indians. Now something in his tone infuriated the lieutenant. He said, ‘You’re a danger. That’s why we kill you. I have nothing against you, you understand, as a man.’ (193)

That is the most satanic line of the whole novel: “That’s why we kill you. I have nothing against you, you understand, as a man.”  It disregards the man’s humanity.  And what is it that overrides his innate sense of human compassion?  The conversation continues, the priest disagreeing.

 

‘Of course not. It’s God you’re against. I’m the sort of man you shut up every day—and give money to.’

 

‘No, I don’t fight against a fiction.’

 

‘But I’m not worth fighting, am I? You’ve said so. A liar, a drunkard. That man’s worth a bullet more than I am.’

 

‘It’s your ideas.’ The lieutenant sweated a little in the hot steamy air. He said, ‘You are so cunning, you people.  (194)

 

It’s the ideas he thinks the priest represents.  The priest’s humanity has been devalued because of some abstract ideas.  And priest goes on to explain his life, tries to explain his failings as a priest, tries to explain how he has tried to serve.  He tries to explain the state of the world: “We have facts, too, we don’t try to alter—that the world’s unhappy whether you are rich or poor—unless you are a saint, and there aren’t many of those” (194-5).  The first part of their conversation ends with the priest kindness, “You have listened very patiently,” and the lieutenant responding with “I am not afraid of other people’s ideas” (197).  Has the priest altered something in the lieutenant?  It’s not evident but the lieutenant has now listened to a different point of view.

You can tell that something has changed within the lieutenant because later that evening, having stopped for the night and while the two men are sleeping in the same hut but both unable to sleep, it is the lieutenant who initiates the conversation.  “You’re a man of education,” he addresses the priest.  He wants to understand more.  The lieutenant goes on to explain his views.

 

‘I’ve had to think things out for myself. But there are some things which you don’t have to learn in a school. That there are rich and poor.’ He said in a low voice, ‘I’ve shot three hostages because of you. Poor men. It made me hate you.’(198)

And later he continues, “Those men I shot. They were my own people. I wanted to give them the whole world.”  What a violation of the heart.  He wanted to give them the whole world because he identified with their poverty, and yet he killed them as a result of his ideology.  It all stems not from love but from hate.

But the priest continues in his humility, denying his educated status. 

 

‘I was never any good at books,’ the priest said. ‘I haven’t any memory. But there was one thing always puzzled me about men like yourself. You hate the rich and love the poor. Isn’t that right?’

 

‘Yes.’

 

‘Well, if I hated you, I wouldn’t want to bring up my child to be like you. It’s not sense.’

 

‘That’s just twisting …’

 

‘Perhaps it is. I’ve never got your ideas straight. We’ve always said the poor are blessed and the rich are going to find it hard to get into heaven. Why should we make it hard for the poor man too? Oh, I know we are told to give to the poor, to see they are not hungry—hunger can make a man do evil just as much as money can. But why should we give the poor power? It’s better to let him die in dirt and wake in heaven—so long as we don’t push his face in the dirt.’ (199)

The priest here shows the lieutenant that there are a good intentions toward the poor.  It is not a callus extortion of the poor but something that fits within the priest’s worldview.  The lieutenant recoils:

 

‘I hate your reasons,’ the lieutenant said. ‘I don’t want reasons. If you see somebody in pain, people like you reason and reason. You say—pain’s a good thing, perhaps he’ll be better for it one day. I want to let my heart speak.’

The priest’s logic doesn’t fit into his worldview.  He says he wants “to let his heart speak.”  Now this is where I am convinced that Graham Greene is alluding to John Henry Newman’s motto Cor Ad Cor Loquitur, heart speaks to heart.  Greene is an Englishman and a convert to Catholicism.  John Henry Newman was an Englishman and possibly the most famous Englishman to convert to Catholicism.  Greene is a writer, and Newman was especially known for his exceptional writing, both as a prose stylist and as a Catholic intellectual.  There is no doubt that Greene would have been familiar a good portion of Newman’s writings, and certainly would be aware of Newman’s motto.  I think that heart speaking to heart is at the crux of the novel.

It is fascinating that it is the lieutenant that wants to speak from the heart, but his heart has been altered by fallen world and his ideology.  It is now the priest who recoils.

 

‘At the end of a gun.’

 

‘Yes, At the end of a gun.’

 

‘Oh well, perhaps when you’re my age you’ll know the heart’s an untrustworthy beast. The mind is too, but it doesn’t talk about love. Love. And a girl puts her head under water or a child’s strangled, and the heart all the time says love, love.’(199)

It is the priest who rejects the speaking from the heart.  Speaing from the heart is not enough.  The heart needs to be filled with God, not filled with the world.  To explain the priest practically quotes from John’s first epistle.

 

‘Oh,’ the priest said, ‘that’s another thing altogether—God is love. I don’t say the heart doesn’t feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn’t recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us—God’s love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn’t it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.’ (199-200)

God is love and our heart speaks God’s love if it abides in God.  But this wonderful metaphor must be highlighted: “The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water.”  This recalls what the angel Gabriel addresses the Blessed Virgin, “Hail Mary, full of grace.”  It has been described that Mary, like a glass, is full of grace while we lesser creatures are granted varying amounts of grace.  I’ve jokingly said that while Mary’s glass is full, mine only contains a thimble full.  But Greene takes that metaphor of the glass and has the contents mixed with love—and one can think of it as the grace to love—and ditch water, alluding to the fallen nature in our beings.  That is brilliant. 

Does the lieutenant understand any of that?  No, he gives no indication.  He says that if a man served him like God serves us he would “put a bullet in his head” (200), quite a sacrilegious thing to say.  Finally the priest opens up with sincerity, with empathy, and with communion with his fellow man.

 

‘Listen,’ the priest said earnestly, leaning forward in the dark, pressing on a cramped foot, ‘I’m not as dishonest as you think I am. Why do you think I tell people out of the pulpit that they’re in danger of damnation if death catches them unawares? I’m not telling them fairy stories I don’t believe myself. I don’t know a thing about the mercy of God: I don’t know how awful the human heart looks to Him. But I do know this—that if there’s ever been a single man in this state damned, then I’ll be damned too.’ He said slowly, ‘I wouldn’t want it to be any different. I just want justice, that’s all.’  (200)

And this is a good place to conclude the close look between their conversations.  We see the lieutenant is not intellectually convinced, but his reaction to the priest does change.  He has felt his heart moved.  From there he treats the priest with a certain dignity.  He goes out of his way to offer kindness to the priest.  The priest becomes a human being and not an object of his ideology.  He tries to get the priest a person to hear his last confession; he offers putting him in a cell with others to pass the last night; he gives him a bottle of brandy to ease the nerves.  But he will not let him escape, and he carries out the passion narrative to its conclusion.  We don’t hear of the lieutenant’s future but perhaps the grace experienced from the priest’s heart and his sacrificial death will have a beneficial effect in time.

###

 

Part 2, Chpts 3 & 4

Summary

Chapter 3

In jail the priest is placed in a crowded cell with an assortment of people.  There is even a couple having sex in the dark.  Some in the cell get into a conversation which turns to sin and priests, and in the process the whisky priest admits to being a priest, fully expecting that one of the cell mates will now turn him in for the reward.  In so doing the whisky priest confesses his sins of alcoholism and of fathering a child.  A pious woman in the cell asks him to hear her confession, but he refuses, and she, upset, scorns him bitterly. 

In the morning, fully expecting to be identified as a priest, he is surprised that no one turned him in.  In one of the cells is the mestizo who he had traveled down, but he too does not turn the priest in.  Finally he is confronted by the lieutenant, who does not recognize him, and finally sends him off, even giving him money to get by with.

Chapter 4

The priest, not having anywhere to go, returns to the Captain Fellows house, hoping to get some food from Cora.  He finds the house is mysteriously empty and abandoned, and without any food.  There is only a crippled dog, and the whisky priest fights over and takes a discarded meaty bone. 

He leaves the Fellows house and finds shelter in a village hut.  The village too is abandoned, but there is a mysterious Indian woman who has hung about.  Her actions make him suspicious and he searches the hut and finds hidden a child with multiple bullet holes, bleeding badly.  He tries to save the child but he dies in his arms.  Despite the inability to communicate, he learns the violence was caused by the fugitive American bandit and she learns that he is a priest.  She presses him to go with her to bury her child, and she takes him on several day journey across wilderness and mountains to a place of crosses.  The Indian woman places the body of her child at the foot of the largest cross and begins to pray.  The priest leaves her there, exhausted and delusional from lack of food.  Feeling guilty for abandoning her he returns to find her gone when a man with a gun finds him at the point of death.  He is not the police but a man from the north, who nurses him and takes him north where it is safe to be a priest.

###

I have to say, chapter 4 of Part 2 is one of the best pieces of fiction writing one will ever find.  The passages with the Indian child and mother and the trek to the field of crosses is absolutely heartbreaking but superbly written.  It may not have the purple prose of an Evelyn Waugh or an F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the tone and pacing and detail is of the highest quality.  One should really just appreciate the writing in that chapter.  I think I’ll read it again.

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As I was going through this month’s Magnificat magazine and which overlapped with my reading of The Power and the Glory, I came across this passage which instantly recalled the novel.  Magnificat has a regular feature where it provides a short biography of a saint, and each issue coordinates the saints’ by a topic.  In this issue the topic was “Saints Who Were Leaders.”  I was shocked to find this saint I had never heard of, but was very much relevant to the Cristero War and of course The Power and the Glory.

 

Saint Who?  Saints Who Were Leaders

 

Saint Josè María Robles Hurtado

Martyr († 1927)        Feast: June 26

 

A native in Mascota in Jailisco, Mexico, Josè was ordained a priest at twenty-four and two years later founded the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with a focus on Eucharistic devotion.  After several years in mission work, he was assigned to a parish.  Although a new Mexican constitution outlawed public devotions, Josè went forward nevertheless with a bold plan to erect a giant cross devoted to Christ the King in the geographic center of Mexico.  To announce the laying of the cornerstone, he had signs placed throughout the countryside declaring Christ the “King of Mexico.”

 

After this the authorities began to put increasing pressure on Josè to curtail his work.  He was forced into hiding, but he continued to minister to his parishioners in secret.  On the feast of the Sacred Heart, June 25, 1927, he was arrested when he was about to say a private Mass in a family home.  The next day, he was taken to a large oak tree outside a nearby village and hanged.  Josè placed the noose on his own neck so that none of his executioners would bear the guilt of that act.

 

Shortly beforehand, Josè had penned a poem anticipating his death: “I want to love you until martyrdom…/With my soul I bless you, my Sacred Heart./Tell me: is the instant of my eternal union near?/Stretch out your arms, O Jesus/Because I am your “little one.”

 

Loving Father, through the intercession of Saint Josè María Robles Hurtado, take me at the moment of my death into your eternal embrace.

(p. 80, Magnificat, Aug. 2021, Vol. 23, No. 6.)

That cross Josè built might be the same cross in the fourth chapter of Part 2, the giant cross the Indian woman places her dead child at the foot.