The Silence in Holy Week

What I read

Let me set the terms. This is not an argument about doctrinal correctness. It is one reader's account of what the text can be made to yield. I am going to leave the ending open on purpose.

The first time I read this passage I understood nothing at all. I carried that incomprehension around for years, and then one afternoon it turned slightly, the way a key turns, and something opened. What follows is an attempt to describe the turn.

Following the context

A short detour. There is a passage elsewhere with the same shape though no direct connection, and setting them next to each other makes the writers' different concerns visible.

Now set it back into its own century. What was the community that first heard this actually worried about? Simply imagining that changes the temperature of every line.（アモス書 8:14）

A word about ordinary life. I think about this passage in the kitchen and on the train, almost never in a pew. I have come to suspect that is not accidental.

A word about ordinary life. I think about this passage in the kitchen and on the train, almost never in a pew. I have come to suspect that is not accidental.（Q資料 4:11）

（ユディト記 第9章）

This is where I stopped. I could not go forward, so I stayed with the same few lines for a long time. I have come to think the staying was the point.

Put the translations side by side and the same verse arrives differently each time. One is soft, another is severe, and the original is a third thing that is neither. That difference is itself a way in.（マカバイ記二 8:28-30）

1You did well, silencing the unmentionable doctrines of the Carpocratians. For these are the prophesied stars straying from the narrow path of the commandments into a bottomless abyss of fleshly and bodily transgressions. For being inflated as to “knowledge,” as they say, “of the deep things of Satan,” they overlook that they cast themselves into the deepest gloom of falsehood, and bragging they are free, they have become slaves of servile lusts. These, therefore, must be opposed in each and every way. For, even if they say something true, nevertheless, one who loves truth must not agree with them. For not everything actual is the truth, nor is what appears to be true according to human opinion to be preferred over the real truth according to the faith.

秘密のマルコの福音書 2:1（Zinner 訳（英語））