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Douglas Main details a new paper from Yale University’s Dale Martin suggesting that it might have been because his disciples were carrying weapons:

The biblical books of Mark and Luke both state that at least one (and probably two or more) of Jesus’s followers was carrying a sword when Jesus was arrested shortly after the Last Supper, at the time of the Jewish festival of Passover. One disciple, Simon Peter, even used his sword to cut off the ear of one of those arresting Jesus, according to the Gospel of John. This militant behavior almost certainly wouldn’t have been tolerated by the Romans, led by the prefect Pontius Pilate, Martin tells Newsweek. For example, historical documents show that it was illegal at the time to walk about armed in Rome and in some other Roman cities. Although no legal records survive from Jerusalem, it stands to reason, based on a knowledge of Roman history, that the region’s rulers would have frowned upon the carrying of swords, and especially wouldn’t have tolerated an armed band of Jews roaming the city during Passover, an often turbulent festival, Martin says.

“Just as you could be arrested in Rome for even having a dagger, if Jesus’s followers were armed, that would be reason enough to crucify him,” says Martin, whose analysis was published this month in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament.

Reactions to the paper have been mixed. Bart Ehrman told Main that “it’s making me rethink my view that Jesus was a complete pacifist.” But not everyone is convinced:

Paula Fredriksen, a historian of ancient Christianity at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, says Martin’s paper has several holes “that you could drive trucks through.” For one, she doesn’t think it’s legitimate to assume that since carrying arms was illegal in the city of Rome, the same laws necessarily applied in Jerusalem. Control of the city wasn’t too tight, she argues, and the Roman prefect visited only during Passover, to help keep the peace. And during this time it probably would’ve been impossible to police the thousands of Jews that spilled into Jerusalem.

“I can’t even imagine what a mess it was,” she says. Furthermore, she says, the Greek word used in the Gospels that Martin interprets as sword really means something more akin to knife. And these could be easily concealed, she adds. “Only professionals,” like soldiers, “carried swords,” she says.

(Image: Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, 1602, via Wikimedia Commons)

Ezra Glinter looks at sex and intimacy in the work of Leonard Cohen:

Cohen’s rawness, and the honesty with which he displays his own vulnerabilities, sometimes leads him to extreme positions, granting sex a primacy that it doesn’t deserve. In his view “there is a war between the man and the woman” as well as “a war between those who say there is a war and those who say that there isn’t” (“There Is a War”). He has written, “a friendship between a man and a woman which is not based on sex is either hypocrisy or masochism.” And he has concluded, “when I see a woman’s face transformed by the orgasm we have reached together, then I know we’ve met. Anything else is fiction.”

For me, that’s the voice of a less mature self, for whom deprivation is not just the mother of poetry but of exaggeration.

… Usually those emotions, even when we can admit them to ourselves or share them with our closest friends, have to be covered up in polite society. We can’t walk around constantly in the throes of our own private maelstroms. More important, maturity—and good sense—demands that we view each other as human beings who suffer from basically the same problems, not as enemies in a never-ending war of the sexes. We are the perpetrators of pain as well as its victims, we reject and are rejected, desire and are desired. But that knowledge doesn’t lessen the joy and suffering of our innermost selves. It doesn’t diminish the feelings of delight and anger that seem as though they had never been felt before. Only time diminishes them, along with experience, repetition and age.

Except, it seems, for Leonard Cohen. In his work, the bite of those feelings is still sharp. In his albums and novels, memories of love and heartbreak stay on the surface, bobbing up and down. In his poems and songs there is always, as Wordsworth put it, “The glory and the freshness of a dream.” Reading and listening to Leonard Cohen it is always, and forever, the first time.

The Economist praises Then She Fell, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that blurs boundaries between spectator and participant:

Staged in the creaking, intimate rooms of the Kingsland Ward at St John’s [in Brooklyn], “Then She Fell” provides the illusion of free-range exploration even as it carefully ushers and shepherds its explorers. All the elusiveness and illusiveness you would expect from the world of smoking caterpillars and rogue playing cards, but in a surprisingly cohesive package. Visitors variously find themselves perusing the contents of drawers and file cabinets, observing breakneck dance sequences, brushing Alice’s hair, gulping down watered-down alcoholic drinks and trying on headgear with a Mad Hatter, all the while piecing together the fragments of a story—sometimes literally, as with the scraps of a torn-up love letter. That story revolves around Lewis Carroll, the author of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, and his child-friend Alice Liddell, the model for his story’s innocent heroine. Inspired by historical speculation and incriminating evidence—the Liddell family abruptly cut contact with Carroll and pages of his diaries were removed, for example—the production surmises that, for Carroll, Alice may not only have been a muse, but an unhealthy obsession.

“Then She Fell” does what the best retellings set out to do: it offers a new framework through which to contemplate a familiar story. It may be too much to say that after watching it you’ll never see “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” the same way again, but at last Carroll’s creations felt curiouser and curiouser once again.

In a review of the show last year, Tara Isabella Burton offered another glimpse into the experience:

Audience members are separated and ushered into different spaces (commanded, by an imperious looking nurse, not to open any closed doors), led in threes, twos, and finally solo into various, increasingly intimate, scenes with Carroll’s novels’ most famous denizens, and with the tormented Carroll himself. (Not all audience members are allowed to witness all scenes – as I realized with some disappointment, as I spotted the Hatter’s tea party taking place in a room I was not permitted to enter). Each audience member’s experience, [co-director and performer Zach] Morris tells me, is structured: though we each view scenes in different orders, in a non-linear fashion, our own emotional arc is tightly choreographed: as we, scene by scene, are invited to develop our own stories of nostalgia and loss. Thus did I follow one of the two Alices (one, a note in the Hatter’s room hints, for each side of the looking glass), into a room with an empty mirror frame, through which I served as her reflection. Thus did I follow the White Rabbit into a closet of of freshly-painted white roses, watching him perform a virtuosic – and unsettlingly close by – dance with a butcher’s knife. Thus – ultimately – did I piece together these fragments of the Kingsland Ward’s take on Wonderland, and invented for them – in the absence of linear narrative – my own story.

That, hints Morris, is precisely the point.

The show runs through December 28th in Brooklyn.

Wesley Hill laments that “intimate, vowed forms of Christian friendship” have been consigned to “the rubbish heap of history” – that friendship lacks the permanence and formal commitment of marriage::

In the ancient East up until today, a rite exists—adelphopoiesis, “brother-making”—in which friends make promises to each other and solidify their commitment by sharing in the Eucharist. (Although it was primarily men who exchanged these vows, the rite was open to women as well.) In the West, 12th-century English writer Aelred of Rievaulx upheld a similar ideal. Speaking primarily of friendships between monks, Aelred writes that we call such people friends “to whom we have no qualm about entrusting our heart and all its contents.” But he goes further: “See how far love between friends should extend; namely, that they be willing to die for one another,” unmistakably echoing Jesus. Dying for one’s friends is the apex of love.

We might want to write off Aelred’s vision of “spiritual friendship” as pious idealism. But his model of devoted friendship bore noticeable fruit. In the centuries following his death, pairs of Christian friends were buried together to signal their love. Looking forward to the bodily resurrection of the dead, the shared tombs ensured for each friend that “the first figure his awakened eyes will see will be [the other friend],” notes historian Alan Bray. With that belief, 19th-century Catholic John Henry Newman was buried next to fellow cleric Ambrose St. John. After St. John’s death, Newman lamented, “I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband’s or a wife’s, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one’s sorrow greater, than mine.”

Matthew Lee Anderson hesitates at this, suggesting that friendship, as a form of love, is distinctive in transcending obligation and duty:

[I]t’s possible to think that friendships do not have or need vows because they are a lesser form of union, and that the lack of public recognition is tied to their weakness. It is also possible, though, that explicit vows and promises create obligations, and that friendship moves us into a realm beyond these. The high point of the Gospels, in my opinion, is the moment when Jesus tells his disciples that they are no longer disciples, but that they are now friends. I’m not prepared to speak of the obligations on God which exist because of the covenant established with man in creation: but it is clear that even if there were obligations, they could not possibly include that. Nor does it seem right to me that such a moment could generate obligations the ways that vows unquestionably do: what duty could bind Jesus’ friendship with us? What obligation might provide the shape to the unmerited gift of his grace? To be friends with God is to participate in a form of charity which is not incompatible with vows per se—lest we deny marriages any form of participation in it as well—but the vow-less, obligation-free character of friendship illuminates the unrestrained nature of charity in a way that a life mediated by vows and promises might not.

https://twitter.com/SaeedKD/status/514798826537091072

Haleh Esfandiari mulls the mixed signals Rouhani sent this week while in New York:

In an interview with NBC’s Ann Curry, President Rouhani questioned U.S. motives in moving against ISIS; he called the U.S.-led coalition “ridiculous” and pooh-poohed the effectiveness of an air campaign. President Rouhani asserted that the U.S. is bringing together the very countries that had funded, supported and armed ISIS militants in the first place. He did not specifically endorse Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but both he and Mr. Zarif have said that ISIS could not be defeated without the Syrian government’s cooperation, and both have described Mr. Assad’s opponents as terrorists. As to prospects for better Iranian-U.S. relations, Mr. Rouhani suggested that this might occur not on his watch but under his successor or his successor’s successor.

Yet in a breakfast with journalists in New York on Tuesday, President Rouhani seemed to adopt a different tone. He said that airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria lacked “legal standing,“ but he did not press the point. (The Syrian government said that the U.S. had informed it of the intended airstrikes, making its official position more moderate than Iran’s.) President Rouhani also predicted that Iran-U.S. relations would change dramatically if a nuclear agreement is reached, and that things “will not go back to the past” even if an agreement is not reached.

Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, Rouhani said that a nuclear deal would “open the way for broader international collaboration” on ISIS. But Tom Rogan is pessimistic about Iran joining the fight against ISIS:

Some suggest that Iran could be enlisted in the fight against the Islamic State. Practically and in the short term, they’re right. But the underlying reality renders this idea absurd. Iran’s leaders have no interest in cooling the sectarian conflict that fuels the group’s jihad. Rather, Iran’s security forces seek to expand Ayatollah Khamenei’s power, a cause completely at odds with Sunni empowerment, let alone a functional Iraq.

Laura Rozen reports on the nuclear negotiations:

Limited progress has been made in narrowing differences towards reaching a final Iran nuclear accord, but significant gaps remain, a western diplomat said here Friday. Reaching a final deal by the November 24 deadline is “doable, but difficult,” he said. “On the core issues, we remain pretty far apart,” the western diplomat at the talks, speaking not for attribution to discuss the sensitive negotiations, told a small group of journalists Sept. 26 after eight days of talks here between Iran and six world powers. “On enrichment, we are not there yet,” the western diplomat. “There are significant gaps, but we are still expecting significant moves from the Iranian side,” he said. The diplomat’s comments came amid conflicting signals about whether Iran and the six world powers had begun to slightly narrow differences on the key issue of the size of Iran’s enrichment capacity in a final nuclear accord.

Bloomberg View’s editors remain hopeful:

Obviously the gap in expectations is vast. But it’s a mistake to focus so intently on the centrifuge numbers, turning them into destructive measures of victory or defeat, when “breakout” depends not only on producing fuel for a bomb, but also on assembling and testing the delivery mechanisms and warheads, as an excellent new paper from the Washington-based Arms Control Association explains. To prevent Iran from developing a clandestine program that could put together the whole package, the U.S. and its allies mainly need an intrusive inspection program.

A potential phased agreement that would satisfy both sides could, for example, give Iran some of the centrifuges it wants but require that it stockpile uranium in powder, rather than gas, form so as to expand the breakout period. Other creative solutions have been floated, too. Where the P5+1 should not compromise is in requiring on-demand access to Iranian facilities, including military ones, to conduct inspections.

Paul Richter’s dispatch doesn’t inspire confidence:

While officials insisted that the discussions have yielded some new ideas, there is less agreement now than there was in July on some issues, such as how Iran will limit output from the heavy-water nuclear facility at Arak. The two sides disagree not only on sticky political issues, but also on matters of basic nuclear physics, said one participant in the negotiations.

Alireza Nader argues that Iran’s leaders badly need a deal:

Iran’s unemployment rate keeps rising, despite reports of reduced inflation and greater investor confidence. Many Iranians are anxious for Rouhani to produce results, but will they blame the United States if Rouhani walks away from the negotiations? Despite his campaign promises to reduce repression, the human-rights situation in Iran is as bad as it was under Rouhani’s predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Washington Post’s correspondent in Iran, Jason Rezaian, has disappeared and is reported to be undergoing “interrogation,” though it is unclear why. The Rouhani government has demonstrated its inability to prevent increased government repression. Of course, Rouhani does not deserve all the blame, though he is the one who promised change. A failure in nuclear negotiations will not resolve Iran’s political division and could make the economy even worse than before.

At best, many Iranians could lose any sense of hope they felt when Rouhani was elected. And, as Iranian history has shown over and over again, the Iranian people tend to see civil disobedience, street protests and even violent insurrection as possible alternatives to fruitless participation in electoral politics.

Also, during his visit, Rouhani ducked questions about human rights abuses in Iran, including the arrest of several young people who appeared in an online tribute to Pharrell’s “Happy.” Ronald Bailey elaborates:

[Fareed] Zakaria asked Rouhani about the prosecution of six Iranian youths who put together a YouTube dance video to the tune of Pharrell William’s song “Happy” as part a fad sweeping the globe. The seven youths were initially sentenced to six months in prison and 91 lashes for their offense, but those punishments have been suspended on condition that they commit no more offenses in the next three years. Oddly, at the time of the arrest Rouhani’s twitter account noted, “Happiness is our people’s right. We shouldn’t be too hard on behaviors caused by joy.” Rouhani responded to Zakaria that Iran has an independent judiciary, and if what the youths did was legally not allowed in Iran, then they broke the law. “What happened, happened,” said Rouhani.