four arms better

Some of my very best ideas come in the last hours of darkness as I awaken into the new day. This morning's really good idea seems to be a mix of my frustration yesterday when I had to carry a few too many items at once, and my current reading, which is the Second Edition of D B Hart's New Testament, his Introduction and his translation of the Gospel according to Mark. 

I have a fun project in mind regarding Revelation, comparing lectionary passages from the NRSV(UE) that we use liturgically in church, and from Hart, but am not to that yet, still fooling with his Intro and Mark. 

Intro, discussing his translations of Greek, Hart explains that his rendering of a word needs to be flexible, make sense, not come across to the reader as rigidly absurd. He makes an example of the word ἄγγελος (angelos), which means one who brings tidings, news, and may be a human sent with a message or a celestial angel. He mentions John the Baptist as a messenger (angelos) and the angels (angelos) singing in the sky over Jesus' manger.  J the B, who goes practically naked and eats bugs was no angel, and calling the heavenly chorus "messengers" would rob the passage of its beauty and the author's intent. I think Hart points out that calling Luke's angels "messengers" in the sky could be visualized absurdly as bell hops with their little caps rushing around a hotel with notes for guests or Western Union messengers in uniform speeding on bicycles taking yellow envelopes to their destinations, a phase of American history that I remember well and that came to an end with the electronic age.

So anyway, my great idea. I'm thinking of Isaiah's angels each with six wings: "with two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet (a Hebrew euphemism for genitals), and with two they were flying" - - so that's eight limbs, which if we had evolved from arachnids could be four legs and four arms for us (or two legs and six arms), but I detest the thought of being a giant spider, so that's out as far as my idea is concerned. 

But the better idea, it's too late for us but maybe not for populating another planet or Earth After People, is for humans to evolve from insects, specifically ants, with six limbs, two legs and four arms. It's an excellent idea, and it surprises and disappoints me that it wasn't applied for us. I'd have had a lot easier task carrying too many items yesterday if I'd had four arms.

This morning I challenged AI to give me a picture of a human evolved from ants, with two legs and four arms, but AI never got it right. 

As for Genesis 1 saying God created man in his likeness, in his image, it couldn't mean physical anyway, as God has no body; we try not to be anthropomorphic or theanthropic, but we are anyway, we can't help imaging God as a man, look at the Ancient of Days in Daniel 7. So our creation in the image of God needs to be the idea of Being or Soul, not ha-adama, Adam the mud doll, the Earthling. God is not an Earthling, and either the Genesis 1 man or the Genesis 2 man could just as well have had four arms as two. 

Six arms (eight limbs) would be even better if it weren't for the spiders. In George Orwell's terms, two arms bad, four arms good, six arms better.

The ant-man image I pinched online.

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My intended subject this morning was actually to discuss C B Hart's New Testament and his recent NYT interview about theodicy, hopefully being more cogent than what I posted and deleted earlier in the week; but I wandered off topic. Another Time maybe.

RSF&PTL

T90