But We Preach Christ Crucified

What a clunking, painful effort is the Jerusalem Bible's rendition of the Ten Commandments, heard at Mass this morning. The RSV, which goes to considerable lengths to retain phrases that have passed into everyday speech, also manages to lose "the sins of the fathers", although at least it keeps "the third and fourth generation". Further on, there is no loss of the splendid words "manservant", "maidservant" and "ass". That last retention should be set in the context of the RSV's American provenance. (There are two negatives in Hebrew, one far rarer and far stronger than the other, and that one is used in the Ten Commandments. So "Thou shalt not" might be said to convey to modern ears the unusual force of the original. Then again, perhaps it is better not to go there.)

Again I say that the RSV Edition of the Missal, for which authorisation has never been withdrawn, ought to have been reissued to coincide with the new, accurate translation of the Mass itself. Again I say that it ought still to be reissued. Again I say that in the meantime, readers should read the appointed passages from the invaluable Ignatius Study Bible. And again I say that if the Ordinariate were anything that it is cracked up to be, then the RSV Missal would never have gone out of print. Might it even be possible to bring it back through something like lulu? I haven't really the time for that, but someone reading this must have.

Don't get me started on people who would sincerely never wish to hear the readings at Mass, but would rather revert to the late and aberrant practice of having them read inaudibly in a foreign language by a man with his back to the people being addressed. The Eucharistic Prayer, for example, is addressed to God. But the readings aren't.

However, none of this is really the point of this post, which is Saint Paul's "a scandal to the Jews and a folly to the Greeks", a point, it must be said, at which the RSV does not exactly distinguish itself. It is vitally important to emphasise how utterly transformed are all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire in their recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church.

A crucified Messiah remains anathema to Judaism, one of the two great Semitic reactions against that recapitulation. In its unfulfilled Messianic hope and expectation, together with its denial of Original Sin, Judaism is the root of all manner of coercive utopianism based on the theory of human nature as perfectible by its own efforts alone and in this life alone. Islam, the other such reaction, holds that Jesus was virgin-born, blowing out of the water the lazy assertion that that is a Hellenistic interpolation. But Islam has always denied outright that the Crucifixion ever occurred.

Meanwhile, those who would look to some sort of Classical tradition ostensibly unsullied by the Christianity that in fact saved all trace of the Classical world from the forces of barbarism, continue to dismiss Christ Crucified as ridiculous. In so doing, they have consistently left themselves open to the catastrophic expressions of Judaism's unfulfilled Messianic hope and of its failure to recognise the depravity of fallen human nature. They may yet prove to be leaving themselves open to Islam, too. At the very least, they are undeniably leaving open to Islam the wider culture and society in which they exercise such influence.

For example, if the parties to marriage need no longer be of opposite sexes, then why need they be precisely two in number? Why not permit reversion to either or both of unrecapitulated Semitic polygamy (never formally abolished in Judaism) and unrecapitulated Hellenistic pederasty? After all, neither was ever a product of Original Sin, of the Fall from the original and pristine order that required to be restored in and as the Redemption in and by Christ Crucified. Was it?