Week 6 - Seeds

The Triumph of Seeds - Thor Hanson
From the Maccabees to the Mishnah - Shaye Cohen
The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus - Raymond Brown

   Is there a metaphor more important to Jesus than seeds? Than the plant growth process: seed to plant to fruit? Sow and reap? It's such "fertile ground," wonk wonk. Judge a tree by its fruit...Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles?...If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain...The harvest is plenty but the laborers are few...Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a single grain...I am the true vine...tiny mustard seed into mustard shrub...weeds in the wheat...a sower went out to sow...laborers in the vineyard...farmer storing up grain...

   The Triumph of Seeds is a wonderful, fun-loving book with a slightly misleading title. Seeds evolved from spores and are now much more common, and human life and culture depend on seeds. Does this mean seeds have triumphed? 
   "Triumph" implies victory, but as Hanson explains, there is no finish line for an evolutionary race, no summit point where a spectator could stop and declare triumph to a species or strategy.
   "My mistake lay in assuming that seeds had perfected the 'best' methods for storing energy. I wanted to think that natural selection had eliminated the various possibilities until only one or at most several strategies remained, each adapted to a particular environment. The reality is far more complicated and far more interesting, like evolution itself - an endless and elegant articulation of the possible."
   This is a great read! Clear explanations, dramatic anecdotes, mind-blowing stats.

• Seeds are baby plants, in a box, with a lunch. Sometimes they've already eaten their lunch when they open their box; sometimes they've eaten a little bit; sometimes they've yet to eat any.
• Seeds come packed with desiccated cells ready to expand, like a bag of balloons in your pocket. Just add water! Cell division comes later.
• All primates eat fruit. And, evidence of cooking grains goes back hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps before homo sapiens. To what extent, or in what ways, have humans and seed-plants co-evolved?
• The spore grows a gametophyte, which produces both eggs and sperm. The sperm swim off in muddy water toward other gametophytes. A some point plants adapted to produce separate male and female spores, then later adapted to hold onto the female spore and only release the male, like pollen. There's the proto-seed, a fertilized egg right there on the mother plant.
• Gymnosperm - "naked seed"
• Angiosperm - "seed in a vessel" 
• An "inactive" seed just needs water and soil. A dormant seed resists germination until other specific conditions are right - temperature, soil composition, angle of sunlight, fire, time, whatever. Dormancy is crazy! At one point Hanson says something like (I'm having trouble finding it), sometimes the only way to know if a seed is alive or dead is to plant it and wait.
• Hard seed shells and super strong rodent teeth definitely co-evolved.
• Capsaisin, what makes hot peppers hot, developed as an anti-fungal defense.
• Caffeine in plants seems sometimes to ward off pests, sometimes to inhibit the growth of other plants nearby, sometimes to attract and re-attract honey bees. Bees addicted to coffee? Yes!
• "Fruit influences our behavior because it evolved to do so..."
•  I didn't know cotton is basically seed hair - the fibers grow out from the seed. A single seed can have 20,000 fibers, and an average boll contains 32 seeds. If you "lined up [the strands in a boll] end to end, they would stretch more than twenty miles."

    If Jesus was a seed, what was his soil? Shaye Cohen's From Maccabees to the Mishnah can help with that! Another great non-fiction writer! Dad lent this to me to replace Between the Testaments, which he said is good, just old (with old information).
   Just a few notes:

• Hellenization wasn't simply the hellenising of non-Greek cultures; it was the co-evolution of many cultures. Lots of exchange.
• Why didn't sects develop in pre-exilic Israel? Maybe they did? Before the exile, the basic organizational boundary of Israelite religion was tribal. Israel, at least as an ideal, was a big ethnic and political unit. Second Temple Judaism still emphasized family and clan, but "Israel" was less obviously defined.
• "Judaism" became, to some extent, a supra-national and even supra-ethnic religion. For example, many people "converted" to Judaism during the Second Temple period.
• The synagogue developed in different places in different times to fill local needs. Communal prayer and piety, local organization, study of the scriptures. Pharisees and teachers of the law were important members but not usually controlling forces.
• Jews had to figure out how to follow the law even when they weren't in proximity to the Temple. This spurred the development of non-cultic personal piety and the oral law.
• Judaism and other hellenistic cultures believed that they were in a "post-classical age." The standards had been set. It was time to study and interpret. During and especially after the canonization of the scriptures, study of God's Word grew in importance. Scriptural study wasn't seen as being in competition with the Temple cult, but after Herod's Temple was destroyed, the written word basically replaced the Temple as the center of the religion. 
• Most Jews had a push-pull, "love-hate," relationship with the politically powerful priesthood, and by association, the Temple. The Greeks, Maccabees, and Romans all "gave" power to, and demanded power from, the high priest.

   Raymond Brown wrote this short book with a long title, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, in the early 70's, on the verge of what he thought would be a period of "painful assimilation of the implications of biblical criticism for Catholic doctrine, theology, and practice." Is he still alive? What does he think about the past 40 years? In our library here we have his impressive commentaries on the Birth and the Death of the Messiah, so - regardless of what the church has done with biblical criticism - I guess this little book was the beginning of something big for him personally.
   A few questions:

• Are there any good arguments that Paul and the writers of the other epistles knew stories about the virgin birth? Brown mentions a couple possibilities but not arguments.
• Brown mentions the wealth of parallels to the story: God miraculously impregnates mortal woman to birth special son. But he claims that the Christian story is unique in eliminating the sexual nature of the conception. Is that true? And is it fair to call the biblical language non-sexual? "The holy Spirit will come upon you and the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God."
• To Paul and the early Christians, could there have been such a thing as a non-bodily resurrection? Wasn't that a contradiction in terms? I guess what I'm asking is, if Jesus appeared to his disciples while they were normally awake (i.e., not dreaming or in prayer), how else could they have explained it other than "resurrection?" Could they have called it a "vision?"
• Also, did any Jews think the Messiah would resurrect first and then everyone else later? Wasn't judgment day the crucial focus of resurrection? The Messiah first-fruits-of-the-resurrection formula sounds like a disciple coming to terms with 1) I just saw Jesus but 2) the world isn't ending.