Saturday 19 April 2003

Pic of the day: These bushes don't work neither on the Sabbath nor the Sunday, but God clothes them in pretty green anyway. Still, I wouldn't change places with them ...

Sabbatical thoughts

As for the unorthodox title, as it were: No, I am not quitting my job to take a year off, tempting as it may be. Nor have I suddenly turned Jewish. And as such I don't "keep" the Sabbath. In fact, I went to town and bought groceries and a packet of writable DVDs. That would have been a very bad thing to do for a Jew, I dare say. But what I personally do is one thing. Quite another thing is what some guys here in Norway did when they decided to translate the Gospel according to Mark into SMS-speak.

Here in Scandinavia (and increasingly the rest of Europe) it is common to send short text messages between mobile phones. This is called SMS, short message system. Unlike e-mail, it is available on almost any mobile phone, both for sending and receiving. It is cheaper than a long talk, and you get to say what you meant to say without having to talk about the weather. Also you don't need the other person to react right there and then, so it is more like e-mail only it is mobile. Anyway, due to the lack of a good keyboard, people tend to write very short and also abbreviate words. It is like ICQ-speak only worse. And now some people found out that the Gospel according to Mark was particularly well suited for this. I guess as gospels go, they got that right.

I haven't actually read the translation, I only read a brief report on it. In addition to mangling grammar and spelling, they have also cut out lots of detail that didn't seem essential. That's impressive, given that Mark seems to have done the same too, if you compare to the others. But they go further. Since people shouldn't need to be Christians to read a gospel, they decided to replace words that weren't used outside that religion. So disciples become students (not too early, I say) and synagogue becomes church (hmm...) and Sabbath becomes Sunday ...
Sunday??

That's where I go "What the HELL!?!" I mean, I don't think humans were created for the Sabbath, quite the opposite. But the Sabbath is and always was Saturday. Even though the sun stood still in the sky for a long time in order to help the Israelites win a decisive battle back in the days of Joshua, they never lost track of which day was which. It's one of the foremost things that make their religion stand out. When Christianity stopped being a persecuted cult and aspired to become a state religion, it ditched the Jewish Sabbath and adopted the holy day of Mithra and the Invincible Sun, as worshiped by the Roman legions.

I don't have any trouble with that, as such. To me, days are the same, except sometimes I have to go to work and sometimes not. But Jesus wasn't a Christian who went to church on Sunday. Jesus was a Jew, and if you can't accept that then just turn your back on him, don't try to modify him. I can live with the church thing, actually, because anyone able to read can understand that Jesus couldn't possibly go to a Christian church. I mean, he was supposedly the Christ so there wasn't any Christian church yet. But how can people know that he kept the Sabbath if they are told that he kept the Sunday?

It's not the blasphemy that bothers me. I can live with blasphemy. It's the anti-Semitism. God can fend for himself; but the Jews have it hard enough these days without people trying to pull the Sabbath out from under them.

There's also a few Christians who try to keep the 10 commandments. (I'm not one of them ... I only try to keep one. "Do unto others what you'd want them to do to you." And I regularly fail even at that.) Even if you choose not to keep the Sabbath, you should still know that it's Saturday and not Sunday. There is absolutely nothing to gain from trying to pretend that Saturday is Sunday. Sunday will come soon enough, don't you worry.