Precious

video credit: Rob Harcourt

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Even in the house it was LOUD.  Probably the loudest thing I have ever experienced but at a normal, predictable interval.  You would begin to time your sentences with little pauses with the rest of the lighthouse crew so you would talk like this while making your………..HORN…………. tea and then carry on talking because you knew when it would go off.  It rattled the walls and the dishes in our cabinet.

At least one girl had died there. They kept photos of her everywhere “in honor of her sacrifice” because she had decided to take the winter watch alone and died in a storm where bounders the size of mini vans had been lifted out of the ocean and left scattered across the island, to say nothing of the ice chunks.  People weren’t allowed to be alone on the watch after that.

One day a dead moose washed up on shore and it took my entire crew all day but we managed to rig up a line to hang it up to dry because we thought having a moose skeleton in the house would really spice the living room up a bit.  It did.  Weird shit happens when six of you are left alone, like ALONE ALONE, no cell reception, no wifi, just a radio to contact the real world and not a lot of reason to do that.  People don’t go on lighthouse jobs if they want to stay connected, I’ve found.

Now, it's definitely true that the story is used in an antisemitic way to talk about how Christ (who was, you know, Jewish) defeated the greedy, sinful Jews. That's a definite problem, but unfortunately, people have always used religion to justify their own bigotry. All we can do is educate and call it out when we see it.

One really unfortunate thing in the New Testament in particular is language that calls out Jews. It's used a LOT to justify antisemitism. But the writers of the New Testament were Jewish. There was no distinction between Christians and Jews back then; the word "Christian" is only used a few times because followers of Christ were just a subset of Jewish people. When people are called out as Jews, it's usually in the context of "You were the ones that did this--you, who are supposed to be on our side, not our Roman oppressors." It's like saying that racism is American: "This is not what we want from our people, whom we love and value, but this is the reality we're living with."

Are there Jewish texts translated into or written in Greek? Absolutely! Do I find it deeply suspicious that, during a time period that deeply focused on wiping Judaism off the map, during Hadrian's extreme and terrifying destruction of the Second Temple, we have pieces of text surfacing that justify erasure and removal of Jewish life? Definitely. Hadrian erected a temple to Jupiter on the former site of the second temple, by the way. When I say "there was a focus on wiping Judaism off the map", I mean it literally.

By 167, there were already persons identified as Christian Bishops. This is also the year that one of them, Melito of Sardis, accused Jewish people of deicide. It took between forty and seventeen years between the estimated recordings of the earliest known pieces of Christian literature for the idea of blood libel and Jews being at fault for the killing of Christ, Christ as a separate being from the Jewish g-d, and Christians being fundamentally different and separate from Jews, to become prominent.

Why, during a time of blood libel and horror, would a Jew write text that implies that Jewish people are at fault for the death of Jesus? Who is a Jew writing about a Jewish Messiah in Greek in Egypt during the 2nd century CE, writing to? If they wanted to convert Jews, why not write in Hebrew?

The story we're talking about here, the one with the table flipping and money changing, is from John, from either the Sinai Bible or one of the copies of the Gospel of John (specifically Uncial 0162), which is contemporaneous to the Sinai Bible. Both were written at some point during the 4th century, and none of the fragments prior to this contain this story. I also specify the Sinai Bible vs the Gospel of John, because the gospel calls the temple a "house of trade", while the Sinai Bible uses the term "den of thieves", and the Gospel of John may be about three decades older than the Sinai Bible, provided the earliest estimated date for the Sinai Bible is accurate. By the point that these pieces of text were both definitely in circulation, intermarriage between Christians and Jews was banned in the Roman Empire and punishable by death, the First Council of Nicaea had decided that Easter would no longer be calculated by the date of Passover (because Jews killed Jesus. No, really, that's the justification), and Constantine I banned Christians from converting to Judaism. Christianity at this point is recognized by the ruling world powers in its own right distinct from whatever Jewish roots it may or may not have had, and it is STAUNCHLY anti-Judaism.

christmas special: sherlock goes on a bender where he hallucinates a victorian-era case, the episode ends with moriarty seemingly returning via social media and mycroft making a cryptic reference to “the other one.” oh, also any consequences from sherlock committing murder are immediately negated.

series 4: HOO BOY.

episode 1: mary is killed due to her assassin past, but no one really cares since she’s only been in the show for all of four episodes. she keeps coming back as a recorded voice/hallucination.

episode 2: john goes to a new grief counseler. also he keeps hallucinating mary. sherlock is told to solve a murder by the murderer’s daughter, but it turns out that while the murderer has a daughter, it’s not the woman who gave him the case to solve! eurus, sherlock and mycroft’s sister, has simultaneously masqueraded as john’s grief counseler and the murderer’s daughter and a random woman who keeps following sherlock because she’s a master of disguise! (to be fair, this is a legitimately cool reveal and I genuinely didn’t see it coming)

episode 3: HOO. FUCKING. BOY. eurus is sherlock and mycroft’s sister who’s been in a prison for the criminally insane for decades. mycroft has withheld this knowledge from both sherlock and their parents by claiming she died in a fire she started. turns out she’s able to hypnotize people with ???? her superior intellect ???????? and so even talking to her makes people want to do things for her like commit murder ????????? and so she’s somehow able to do things like escape from her scary island prison and then take herself back, blow up baker street, kidnap multiple people, and then pull Saw-esque morality problems on Mycroft and Sherlock and John where she just murders people for funsies with no apparent motive. IT IS DURING THIS SEQUENCE THAT IT IS REVEALED THAT SHERLOCK HAD A HUMAN BEST FRIEND THAT EURUS MURDERED BUT REWROTE HIS OWN MEMORIES TO IMAGINE IT WAS A PET DOG WHO DIED.