Final Text of Covenant Released; ECUSA Will Walk Apart

The full text is available at this link. The letter transmitting it to the Churches in the Anglican Communion is here. The Archbishop of Canterbury has accompanied it with a four-minute introduction, in which he makes these points:

The last bit of the Covenant text is the one thats perhaps been the most controversial, because that's where we spell out what happens if relationships fail or break down. It doesn't set out, as I've already said, a procedure for punishments and sanctions. It does try and sort out how we will discern the nature of our disagreement, how important is it? How divisive does it have to be? Is it a Communion breaking issue that's in question - or is it something we can learn to live with? And so in these sections of the covenant what we're trying to do is simply to give a practical, sensible and Christian way of dealing with our conflicts, recognising that they're always going to be there.

So what happens next? This Covenant is being sent to all the member Churches of the Anglican Communion. Each church will, within its own processes, decide how to handle it, and by the next meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council in three years time we hope that many provinces will already have said yes to this and adopted it into their own understanding and identity. Clearly the process won't all be over by then, but we're hoping to see some enthusiasm, some general adoption of the principles. We hope to see a new kind of relationship emerging. We hope to see people agreeing to these ways of resolving our conflicts.

Beyond that, what's going to happen? It's hard to say as yet, but the Covenant text itself does make it clear that at some point it'll be open to other bodies, other Ecclesial bodies as they're called, other Churches and communities to adopt this Covenant, and be considered for incorporation into the Anglican Communion. Meanwhile, it's open to anybody that wishes to affirm the principles of the Covenant - to say that this is what they wish to live with.

Here is a video of the Archbishop's talk:

And here is the text of Section 4 of the Covenant as it relates to who may join it (the Standing Committee's analysis of the changes it made may be read here):

(4.1.4) Every Church of the Anglican Communion, as recognised in accordance with the Constitution of the Anglican Consultative Council, is invited to enter into this Covenant according to its own constitutional procedures.

(4.1.5) The Instruments of Communion may invite other Churches to adopt the Covenant using the same procedures as set out by the Anglican Consultative Council for the amendment of its schedule of membership. Adoption of this Covenant does not confer any right of recognition by, or membership of, the Instruments of Communion, which shall be decided by those Instruments themselves.

(4.1.6) This Covenant becomes active for a Church when that Church adopts the Covenant through the procedures of its own Constitution and Canons.

At the same time, the Covenant spells out that commitment to it does not "represent submission to any ecclesiastical jurisdiction":

(4.1.3) Such mutual commitment does not represent submission to any external ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Nothing in this Covenant of itself shall be deemed to alter any provision of the Constitution and Canons of any Church of the Communion, or to limit its autonomy of governance. The Covenant does not grant to any one Church or any agency of the Communion control or direction over any Church of the Anglican Communion.

Nevertheless, the Standing Committee may make recommendations to the Instruments of Communion concerning the "relational consequences" for Churches who, having signed the Covenant, then carry out a "controversial act" against the declared wishes of the Standing Committee:

(4.2.5) The Standing Committee may request a Church to defer a controversial action. If a Church declines to defer such action, the Standing Committee may recommend to any Instrument of Communion relational consequences which may specify a provisional limitation of participation in, or suspension from, that Instrument until the completion of the process set out below.

(4.2.6) On the basis of advice received from the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates’ Meeting, the Standing Committee may make a declaration that an action or decision is or would be “incompatible with the Covenant”.

(4.2.7) On the basis of the advice received, the Standing Committee shall make recommendations as to relational consequences which flow from an action incompatible with the Covenant. These recommendations may be addressed to the Churches of the Anglican Communion or to the Instruments of the Communion and address the extent to which the decision of any covenanting Church impairs or limits the communion between that Church and the other Churches of the Communion, and the practical consequences of such impairment or limitation. Each Church or each Instrument shall determine whether or not to accept such recommendations.

And this is the clincher: if you do not sign the Covenant, you do not participate in the deliberations of the Standing Committee or of the Instruments of Communion with respect to those "relational consequences":

(4.2.8) Participation in the decision making of the Standing Committee or of the Instruments of Communion in respect to section 4.2 shall be limited to those members of the Instruments of Communion who are representatives of those churches who have adopted the Covenant, or who are still in the process of adoption.

The Statement previously released by the Standing Committee with respect to the election of the Rev. Canon Mary Glasspool may thus be seen as the first warning shot across the bow of ECUSA:

Resolved that, in the light of:

1. The recent episcopal nomination in the Diocese of Los Angeles of a partnered lesbian candidate
2. The decisions in a number of US and Canadian dioceses to proceed with formal ceremonies of same-sex blessings
3. Continuing cross-jurisdictional activity within the Communion

The Standing Committee strongly reaffirm Resolution 14.09 of ACC 14 supporting the three moratoria proposed by the Windsor Report and the associated request for gracious restraint in respect of actions that endanger the unity of the Anglican Communion by going against the declared view of the Instruments of Communion.

ECUSA will never sign on to the Covenant, because it would have to extend the moratoria recommended by the ACC, and it will never go back on what it decided at GC 2009 with regard to abandoning those moratoria when it felt like it, and not because the rest of the Communion pleaded with it not to do so. Also, by not signing the Covenant, it will not subject itself to a declaration by the Standing Committee that its confirmation of the Rev. Canon Glasspool to the episcopate would constitute an "act incompatible with the Covenant."

Nevertheless, the other Churches that do sign on to the Covenant can still take steps that will have "relational consequences" for ECUSA if it goes ahead. And by not signing on to the Covenant as a Church, ECUSA opens up two cans of worms: (1) as the ABC makes clear, the Instruments of Communion may well invite individual Dioceses to sign on to it (as I showed in this earlier post, the individual Dioceses will have to make the decision in any event); and (2) the way will then be clear for ACNA to sign on to it.

ECUSA is choosing its own path to walk apart. This will all play out in accordance with the path it is choosing for itself.

Friday TED Talk: Jonathan Zittrain on What Makes the Internet Work

There will not be any TED talk published next Friday, which is Christmas. (Instead I will have a special post about the Nativity and the Star of Bethlehem.) And the next talk will be on New Years Day in 2010. For this last talk of 2009, therefore, I have chosen one which is on a subject most near and dear to all of us involved with blogs (writing them, or reading them -- it does not matter), and that is on what makes the Internet work. How does a medium that is so susceptible to interference and deliberate sabotage manage to deliver its goods so much of the time? Have you ever thought about that?

Jonathan Zittrain teaches on Internet law at Harvard, and is co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society there. He has done extensive study on the social forces behind the Internet -- both those that prop it up and those that would undermine it. (Among the latter are what he calls "tethered" devices, from iPhones to Xboxes, which limit your use of the Internet to specific channels and areas of access, as well as the recent proliferation of spyware, spam and just plain old bad legislation.) In the talk below, he brings out the fascinating positive character of the Internet, and what it says about society -- for example, its thousands and thousands random acts of kindness:

You may read more about Prof. Zittrain at this page, and here is a link to his fascinating site which is well worth your visit: The Future of the Internet. You may watch the talk in high-resolution video from this link, and download his talk in that and other formats from this page.

When Herod Ruled - Resolving the Dates

As we approach the Feast of the Nativity, I want to take up a topic which we are also addressing in our church forum: was there a real Star of Bethlehem, and if so, just what was it? Last year, I did some posts on some of the points in Prof. Frank Tipler's amazing book, The Physics of Christianity. (If the legal disputes of the Church ever give me more time, I hope to return to the book and continue where I left off.) One of the chapters I took note of, but did not blog about, was about his theory that the Star of Bethlehem was a supernova that occurred at just the right time in the nearby Andromeda Galaxy.

I mentioned this to one of my friends who sometimes comments here, and got back the immediate response: "Oh, no -- the Star was not a supernova. You need to get up on the latest findings -- let me send you a DVD about it." The DVD arrived, but it had to wait until I could get a free hour to watch it. When I did, I was astonished by how the astronomical research fit together. I began to do some research of my own, to find out why this theory of the Star was not better known.

What I found was the usual scholarly blockade -- several generations of Biblical scholars who circle the wagons around a consensus formed more than a century ago based on the best evidence then available, and who resist anyone who rejects the consensus, or who undermines it with arguments based on new evidence. Thus it has ever been in academia. However, readers of this blog already know that no outdated consensus will form any stumbling block to where the truth may take us. So I have decided, in this series of posts leading up to December 25, to walk through the controversy, to examine the consensus and the problems with it, and to show how the new evidence makes a better fit with both what we know of Jewish chronology and custom in first-century-B.C. Palestine.

Solving the problem of the Star of Bethlehem requires that we arrive at a decision on the reign of Herod the Great. We know from Matthew's second chapter that Herod was alive when Jesus was born, because Matthew reports that Herod gave orders, in an attempt to prevent the usurpation of his throne by a new King of the Jews, to slay all the male children in Bethlehem of age two years or less. (Whether or not the order is an historical fact is much debated, because there are no other accounts which have survived of it. Then again, as another scholar has pointed out, given the population of Bethlehem in the years just before the Christian era, and applying standard demographics to that figure, there could have been at most about two dozen infants who met the criteria.) Shortly after this, it is reported that Herod himself died (while the Holy Family was in Egypt). From this, therefore, we know that Jesus was born a year or more before Herod died.

The date of Herod's death thus fixes a terminus ad quem -- a date certain before which Jesus must have been born. But when did Herod die? Ah, now that is the question. All historians of Herod's reign pretty much have to rely on the first century Jewish historian Josephus for that information. Josephus took part in the Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in A.D. 66, but was captured by the Romans shortly afterward. He rose to sudden favor in the Roman camp when a prediction he made came true in A.D. 69 that the Roman general leading the siege against Jerusalem, Vespasian, would become the emperor of Rome. He observed the final fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 from the Roman lines, and then was granted a palace in Rome by a grateful Vespasian. There he began to translate into Greek an earlier account he had written (in Aramaic) of the "Jewish wars" he had just experienced. His narrative began with the events of 170 B.C., when Antiochus Epiphanes took Jerusalem by force. After relating the events which are described in the Maccabean books of the Apocrypha, he took up briefly the life and reign of Herod before focusing on the chain of events that led to Jerusalem's downfall.

His first-person account, shaded to make Vespasian more of a hero than he was, proved very popular in Rome, and Josephus flattered himself into thinking that there was a demand for a comprehensive history of the Jewish people, from the creation of the world to A.D. 66 -- where his Jewish Wars took over. The result, called the Jewish Antiquities in twenty volumes, included a second account of the life and reign of Herod.

The two accounts, written perhaps fifteen to twenty years apart, are maddeningly inconsistent in details of dates. (The inconsistencies were exacerbated by the error of a sixteenth-century copyist in writing "20" for what Josephus had written as "22" in dating the death of Herod's son -- an error that unfortunately was carried over into all the major editions of Josephus currently in print.) For example, in the Jewish Wars, Josephus states that Herod began work on rebuilding the Temple at Jerusalem in "the fifteenth year of his reign", while in the Antiquities Josephus asserts that the work on the Temple began in Herod's eighteenth year. But in the Antiquities (and not in the Wars), Josephus gives one objective clue to the date of Herod's death: he notes that a lunar eclipse occurred shortly beforehand, and that Herod's funeral took place before Passover.

Now this is a fact that astronomically determines which years are eligible, and which are not. All of the lunar eclipses which occurred just before A.D. 1 may now be calculated with precision. Here is a table of the ones that occurred between the years 5 and 1 B.C.:

Date/(Type of Eclipse)/Days before Passover

March 23, 5 B.C. (total) 29 days

September 15, 5 B.C. (total) 7 months

March 13, 4 B.C. (partial) 29 days

January 10, 1 B.C. (total) 92 days

Most scholars have rejected the dates in 5 B.C., because of the inability to fit what Josephus elsewhere says were thirty-seven years of Herod's rule, beginning in 40 or 39 B.C. when the Roman senate confirmed him as King, into a reign that ended in that year. But 4 B.C. just fits, if one assumes that he was confirmed in 40 B.C. (Josephus is again ambiguous in giving us the markers for the Senate's proclamation), not 39, and if one counts both the first and the last year as part of the total of thirty-seven (yielding a reign of actually thirty-six years, according to normal methods of counting).

The same majority of scholars rejects the date of 1 B.C. as being too late to fit with Josephus' other data. However, that date does fit remarkably well with Josephus' statement that Herod was about seventy years old when he died, and that he was 25 years old when his father named him Governor of Galilee (in 47 B.C.). But the main difference between these two candidates -- 4 B.C. and 1 B.C. -- lies in the number of days between the eclipse and the Passover in that year.

In 4 B.C., there were just 29 days; in 1 B.C. there were 92 days. Now look at all of the events which Josephus says surrounded Herod's death, beginning with the lunar eclipse:

1. The day before the eclipse (Josephus reports), Herod had two celebrated rabbis burned alive for ordering their students to remove a golden eagle he had erected over the Temple's eastern gate.

2. The day after the eclipse, Herod's health worsened, and after his physicians tried many remedies to no avail, he decided to leave Jericho and go to bathe in the mineral waters at Calirrhoe, east of the Dead Sea.

3. The waters having also failed to improve his health, Herod then returned to Jericho.

4. On his return, and seeing that his death was imminent, Herod formed a monstrous plan to give the Jewish people no cause to celebrate after he was dead: he had the most prominent elders of the Jews summoned to Jericho from all over the country. When they arrived, he gave orders that they were to wait for him in the arena there. He planned to confine them in the arena until his death, and then have them all massacred -- so that Judea would really have something to bewail and grieve about. (Fortunately, Herod's son Archelaus refused to carry out his orders.)

5. The elders in due course arrived, and had just been confined to the arena, when news arrived from Rome that Herod had permission to execute yet another of his sons, Antipater, for having allegedly poisoned his uncle Pheroras (Herod's brother), and engaged in other treasonous acts. (In giving his imperial permission, Augustus is supposed to have remarked that it was safer to be a pig on Herod's farm than it was to be a member of his family.) Herod had the execution take place immediately.

6. Five days after executing his son, Herod himself died.

7. Herod had arranged for a slow and massive funeral procession to carry his bier from Jericho to his final resting place at Herodium, some twenty-three miles away. First all the crown jewels had to be brought from Herod's palace in Jerusalem, and spices to anoint the body (carried by some 500 slaves) assembled. Then the procession, accompanied by soldiers, notables and drummers, slowly marched off. It is estimated it would have taken at least a week to reach its destination.

8. After the funeral, the customary Jewish seven-day period of mourning was observed. Then there was a feast, following which Herod's son Archelaus (with whom Herod had begun to share power some years earlier) assumed the kingship and made some immediate promotions in the military.

9. Finally, after all these events, Josephus reports that the Passover festival came, after which Archelaus left for Rome to have his authority confirmed by the Emperor Augustus.

There is simply not time enough for all of the events which Josephus relates to have occurred in the twenty-nine days between March 13, 4 B.C. and Passover in that same year. In a recent study by Professor Andrew E. Steinmann, the author estimates that allowing for the shortest possible time for each event, a minimum of 41 days would have elapsed after the eclipse, and that allowing 92 days for all the events to have occurred would be much more reasonable.

Thus, Professor Steinmann concludes, against the majority consensus of all the scholars, that Herod most probably died in 1 B.C., and not in 4 B.C. as has always been assumed. He adduces many more arguments to support his conclusion in his paper; I have summarized here only his major argument.

The clincher, in my view, that proves Herod died in 1 B.C. consists of the astronomical events which modern computers can show occurred in the skies over Babylon and Jerusalem in the years 3-2 B.C., and which bear out in wonderful detail the story of the magi which Matthew relates in chapter 2 of his Gospel. There are no comparable events to be found in the same skies in the years before 4 B.C. -- unless one goes all the way back to 7 B.C., when a rare triple conjunction occurred between Jupiter and Saturn. However, nothing else of moment could be observed in the months before or afterward (unlike the events in 3-2 B.C., which I shall describe in a later post), and the behavior of the triple conjunction in 7 B.C. does not provide as close a match to the description of the star of Bethlehem in Matthew chapter 2.

[UPDATE 12/22/2012: Note that His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, in his latest volume on the life of Jesus, relies on the same translation mistake from Josephus. He sides with the traditional death date of 4 B.C., and moves the date of the Nativity back from there. As we shall see in the next post, the astronomical events of 7-6 B.C. are not as good a fit to Matthew's account as are those of 3-2 B.C.]

Thus if we throw out the consensus, and look at the evidence with fresh eyes, it becomes possible to fix the date of Jesus' birth with astonishing precision. And that will be the topic for my Christmas post.