Another Pun by Jesus

There is a story in the Gospels about Jesus, where He drops a hint that He is God. (Mt. 19:17, Mk. 10:18, and Lk. 18:19.)

He gets asked a question, and the questioner calls him “good teacher.” Jesus does the rabbi thing of answering a question with a question: “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but God.”

This is quoting Ps. 14:1 and Ps. 14:3. “There is no one who does good…there is no one that does good – no, not one.” (St. Paul also quotes this in Rom. 3:12.)

And then Jesus adds, “except God,” in the typical free way that rabbis felt able to quote and then clarify, or quote and then combine quotes. Or to quote a translation in one’s own parallel words, for that matter.

The hilarious thing is that the Gospels use the Greek adjective “agathos” for good, but the LXX psalm translation uses the word “chrestotes.” (As does St. Paul.)

“Chrestos,” the root word, or a Latinized version, “Chrestus,” was often used wrongly as Christ’s name, by non-Christians in early Christian times. The word basically means useful or manageable, but the extended sense is someone good, kind, and excellent. Wine that has fermented pleasantly over years is also “chrestos.”

So “chrestotes” is the quality of goodness, kindness, excellence, and so on.

You easily could take this as Christ punning on the title Christ by implication, as well as dropping the hint that He really is the good God.

Of course, St. Paul mentioning the same thing is also doing wordplay. Of course nobody is as Christ-like and excellent as Christ. Duh.

The apologetics consequence is that St. Paul is not even talking about sinlessness or sin in Rom. 3:12. The topic is adjacent, but that isn’t the point. Freaky.

(The point is that nobody is able to do good things without God assisting. Whatever good is done, whatever person is righteous like St. Joseph, is not doing it by his own effort only, but by cooperating with God and His plan.)

Anyway… In today’s reading from Col. 3:12, “kindness” is also the word “chrestotes.”

(“Heartfelt compassion” is the good old “bowels of compassion,” and “patience” is “macrothymia.”)

Also… in the LXX, there are tons of times that a Bible verse that says that the Lord is good (tob in Hebrew), is translated into Greek as “chrestos ho Kyrios” (like Ps. 33:9/34:8).

So this horrible, wonderful pun was actually built into the Bible, and was sitting waiting for the coming of the Christ for hundreds of years ahead of time! The Lord is the anointed one, the Messiah (Christos) but also the good, kindly one (chrestos).

Goodwill

The Greek word is “eudokia,” and apparently it was coined by Greek-speaking Jews, while translating the Psalms. “Eu-” is good, and the verb “dokeo” is to think, to judge, or by extension to decide something is pleasing, and so on.

It usually translates Hebrew “ratson,” which is one of the words for God’s favor, up to the point of delight.

The English translations of those passages are all over the place. Like Ps. 68:14/69:13, where the English is “acceptable time” or “day of favor,” and the Hebrew is “ratson ‘et.” The Greek is “kairos eudokias.”

So in Luke 2:14, when the angels proclaim “epi ges eirene, en anthropois eudokia,” it is God’s goodwill toward men, or rather, His extreme favor and delight being exercised toward us, by sending His Son to us.

St. Jerome condenses the statement even more. “Eirene,” peace, is a nominative and so is “eudokia.” But he goes with “in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis,” with only “pax” in the nominative.

So it’s “on earth, the peace of [God’s] goodwill toward men.”

(The wording in the Gloria of the Mass is different, and might be from the pre-Jerome Old Latin translation. He also says “in altissimis,” and everybody else says “in excelsis.”)

Romans 10:1 has St. Paul talk about his heart’s “eudokia” toward his fellow Jews, in a context that shows how strong a word it is, in a Greek-speaking Jew’s vocabulary. He also talks about his “deesis” for them, which is a particularly strong and pleading kind of prayer to God.

Bad News from New Mexico

In 2018, when the previous abbot died, the Christ in the Desert Monastery in New Mexico had 72-plus monks and novices.

As of the CBS News Sunday Morning story just run for Christmas viewing, they have 15.

The current abbot has been credibly accused of sexual predation at the monastery. The current guys in charge of the male Benedictine equivalent of novices and postulants, are guys who were previously credibly accused of sexual predation at one or more monasteries or parishes, and who are also accused at this one. There’s apparently a lot of bad stuff going on.

The new abbot also seems to have persecuted monks and novices with medical issues, instead of making sure that they all received adequate and timely care.

The CBS News story makes a big deal of the guy who runs the guesthouse being a black guy who’s made permanent vows. This is weird, since there were ten or twenty black novices before the new abbot came. They came from places as farflung as Kenya, Nigeria, and Gambia. But the new abbot apparently did everything he could to get rid of every single one, as well as credibly being accused of stealing their documentation and doing the sexual predation stuff.

However, the guesthouse guy (who seems to be fine, and is busy helping visitors) had a very lucrative career before joining the monastery. So having a lot of cash as his “dowry” probably helped, and probably predators are smart enough not to mess with what’s feeding them. Still, he has to notice that it’s weird for visitors to outnumber the full-time brothers.

The Lepanto Institute has a report about this situation.

Obviously it would be nice to find out that nothing is wrong, but come the heck on. The numbers speak for themselves.

Matthew’s Patterns

I did a big post on Reddit the other day, so I’ll try and do a quicker version here.

Matthew 1 and 2 set up patterns, so that Matthew can then point out the differences in Jesus’ case.

First Matthew talks about “The record” (biblos, not biblios, meaning a papyrus record) “of the genesis of Jesus Christ,” and then proceeds to talk all about which male ancestor begat (egannesen) which other male ancestor. All the female ancestors mentioned have the added phrase “ek tes [female name],” which in the horse world would be “out of [female name].”

There’s an exception with Solomon, who is “ek tes tou Ouriou,” meaning “out of Uriah’s one.” (Meaning the unnamed Bathsheba, who was Uriah’s wife.) The word “wife” isn’t used. It’s possible that we’re supposed to remember that Bathsheba is also compared in a parable to a pet ewe lamb that belonged to a poor man (Uriah), and who got taken and eaten by a rich man (David). There’s a paschal and Eucharistic meaning to this, too.

The women in Matthew’s genealogy list are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and “Uriah’s.” As many have noted, two of these women are foreigners who married into Israel. Tamar extrabiblically is said to have been an Aramean; or that she was a daughter/descendant of the Aram who was a descendant of Abraham’s brother Nahor, and thus a Mesopotamian. (The latter idea is big in the Book of Jubilees and the Testament of Judah, which are non-Biblical Jewish literature.) One Jewish literary source even identified Tamar as a daughter of Shem/Melchizadek! (The Targum of Ps.-Jonathan.)

Anyway… then we come down to Jesus, and He isn’t “begat” by any listed male. The genealogy says that Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary (ton andra Marias), which is almost the exact opposite of calling Bathsheba “tou Ouriou”. Then it says, “Out of her” (ek hes) “was begotten” (egennethe) “Jesus who’s called Christ” (Iesous ho legomenos Christos).

Weird, eh?

In Matthew 1:18, the text adds that the child in Mary’s womb was “out of the Holy Spirit” (ek Pneumatos Hagiou). Holy Spirit is in neuter gender, but the “ek” is the same used for the feminine ancestors in the genealogy. So that’s kinda weird and pattern-breaking, too.

The “take” that Joseph is told not to be afraid about is the verb “paralambanou,” which means “to receive near” and originally meant “to take by the hand.” It can also mean “to take as a close friend or associate” or “for a disciple, to memorize and internalize the teaching of one’s master.”

Joseph is shortly told by the angel to “take the child and his mother” to Egypt, using the same “paralambanou” verb. And a little later, the Devil “takes” Jesus to the highest part of the Temple roof, using the same word “paralambanou.” So… yeah. This word gets used a lot, and the marital use isn’t its thing.

Joseph in the OT also advised his brothers to “take” their families and their dad to Egypt, btw.

One interesting bit is that Matthew changes the Scriptural reference to Isaiah a bit, or he knows a different version. The Hebrew says, “And she shall call his name Emmanuel,” while the LXX translation says, “And you [King Ahaz] shall call his name Emmanuel.” But St. Matthew quotes Isaiah as saying, “And they”, probably referring to Mary and Joseph. So St. Joseph does have an important part in the story, and by naming Jesus, he acknowledges him legally as his son in the marriage (adopting him), and hence as a male member of the House of David.

Bellisario at Penn State

In 2017, the famous TV producer Donald P. Bellisario, of Belisarius Productions, donated 30 million dollars to Penn State’s college of communications, film and theater, journalism, etc. It then became the Bellisario College of Communications. The money was also used to build the Bellisario Media Center, which is basically studios for student use (very similar to the Hanks center at Wright State).

Bellisario graduated from Penn State in 1961.

I don’t remember hearing a thing about this, albeit I was not participating in any of the Bellisario fandoms at the time of the donation.

I think that’s pretty nice that he was able to do that before he passed away (he’s 90 and still alive but retired, btw), because most donors used to wait to leave money in their wills.

The event pictures show his wife from 1998 on, Vivienne Lee Bellisario, who was previously married to Craig Murray and had Sean and Chad Murray with Craig Murray.

Yes, Sean Murray played McGee on NCIS. Yes, that had to be a weird situation for him. I don’t recall the situation being mentioned in the fandom back in the day, but it doesn’t seem like a nepotism thing; more like a family business thing.

He was a real life Navy brat. But his parents divorced when he was 15, which would have been about 1992? His mom remarried in 1998, when he would have been about 21. NCIS started in 2003.

Chad Murray, his brother, worked as a producer on the NCIS franchise.

Which leads us to the huge Donald P. Bellisario family tree, which is kind of a mess, because he did mess up his married life a lot. (Or vice versa, to be fair.)

His first wife was Margaret Schaffran or Schafran, from 1956 – 1974. When she married him, he was a guy who was in the Marines, and then he got out, used his GI bill to go to Penn State, and got a nice solid job in advertising in Lancaster PA.

His dad, Albert Jethro Bellisario, died suddenly in 1966, about a year after Donald had gotten his copywriting job close to home. (His parents were Giuseppe “Joseph” Bellisario and Maria Luigia Troiani Bellisario.)

In 1966 or so, Donald found a job at a big ad agency in Dallas, where he quickly advanced to senior vice president of his company in 1972.

Margaret had had four kids with him: Joy Bellisario Jenkins, David Bellisario (who was a producer on NCIS and NCIS: LA, and passed away in 2020), Leslie Bellisario-Ingham, and Julie Bellisario Watson (who is a producer under the name Julie B. Watson).

So then what did Donald do? In 1972, he gave up his good job and moved to Hollywood to produce movies and TV instead of ads. In the middle of the crazy Seventies. Did his marriage collapse at some point? Yes.

Bellisario worked under Larson and Cannell, notably on Black Sheep Squadron and Battlestar Galactica. In 1979 (which is a long time after 1974), he married actress/producer Lynn Halpern. They had a son, Michael Bellisario, who played Bud’s brother Mikey Roberts on JAG. They divorced in 1984, right when Airwolf was starting up.

Troian Avery Bellisario was Bellisario’s daughter by his third wife, actress and producer Deborah Pratt from Airwolf and Quantum Leap. She played McGee’s sister on an episode of NCIS, and she is married to that guy from Suits. Her latest series of many was On Call, where she plays a police officer. It aired on Amazon Prime. Good cast, but I don’t know anything about who wrote it. She was apparently named for her great-grandmother’s family, which is nice.

There was also a son, Nicholas Bellisario, who also did some acting and producing. I don’t know much about him. Deborah Pratt divorced Bellisario in 1991.

So again, it’s a long time between 1991 and 1998. And he’s stayed married to Vivienne Bellisario for about 25 years. So hopefully the man has his life together now and has achieved inner peace.

I don’t know anything about the status of his soul and whether he’s reconciled with the Church. I hope he’s getting it together on all fronts, because I’ve always admired his work.

His movie Last Rites apparently is VERY dark, so yeah, don’t pick that one for Catholic movie night, unless you want to see an entire movie about villains being villains! The movie bombed at the box office, but I don’t know if that’s because there’s not a happy ending or because it’s badly done.

There are a TON of Bellisarios in the US. In fact, there’s currently an Archbishop Bellisario up in Alaska. So obviously that’s a legal immigration success story.

** Schaffran is a Jewish surname, usually. It means “saffron.” There are Polish, Slovenian, German, Russian, Croatian, and Yiddish versions of the name. I don’t know if this lady was Jewish, or if it was just a product of the ethnic mishmosh of Pennsylvania mining towns, or what. Bellisario’s own mom (Dana Lapcevic Bellisario) was Pennsylvania Serbian, which I don’t remember coming up in the 1990’s in JAG, but it’s interesting.

They Lived in Infamy

I was at home, so I actually watched CBS Sunday Morning a little. They had a story about the lady who found out her family was a bunch of Nazis, which was why her dad was estranged from them, and that they had spied on Pearl Harbor as lend-outs to the Japanese.

(And yes, of course the Imperial Japanese did as great a job preparing an escape plan for these spies as you’d expect, ie, no plan.)

OTOH, it turned out that most of what this family of spies did, aside from signaling to Japanese subs in peacetime, was within the realm of publically available information. So that was a bit embarrassing.

The woman’s aunt was probably the one doing the most “spy” stuff. She also had slept with Goebbels at the age of 19 (argh, the bad taste of Leftist women!), and then Goebbels had tired of her. (Which was why Goebbels shipped off the entire family to Hawaii as white elephant spies with no experience.) She then spent a lot of time drinking and dancing with US Navy guys instead of Nazi guys, albeit gleaning information too. But yeah, nobody wanted to execute a woman if they could possibly avoid it, so she eventually was spared.

Meanwhile this lady’s dad and his brother were just little kids, running around Hawaii and playing with other kids, and quickly losing all attachment to Germany or Nazi stuff. When they found out what all the grownups had been doing, they were shocked and offended.

Eventually I gather that FDR traded this family back to Germany, in the middle of the war, but this lady’s dad refused to go. He emancipated himself at age 15, worked to become an American citizen, and served honorably in the US Army, fighting at Okinawa.

So this lady wrote a book about all the dirt she dug up and how she (and her dad) dealt with it. It’s called Family of Spies, by Christine Kuehn. It just came out in November. A little pricey for Kindle, but it’s an interesting story.

Snow Day

Yesterday’s snow basically closed down all the schools around here, as well as many businesses. Sadly, today’s kids usually have to go to school online, instead of getting a day off.