CNN is reporting about Paul Verhoeven and his “Jesus Seminar.”

Director’s book disputes birth of Jesus
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — Film director Paul Verhoeven has written a book that contradicts the Bible by suggesting that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier who raped Mary.

An Amsterdam publishing house said Wednesday it would publish the Dutch filmmaker’s biography of Jesus, “Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait” in September.

I find the word “realistic” an interesting one to use.

Verhoeven is best known as the director of blockbuster films including “Basic Instinct” and “RoboCop,” but he is also a member of “Jesus Seminar,” a group of scholars and authors that seeks to establish historical facts about Jesus.

Marianna Sterk of the publishing house J.M. Meulenhoff said the book included several ideas that ran contrary to Christian faith, including the suggestion that Jesus could be the son of a Roman soldier who raped Mary during a Jewish uprising against Roman rule in 4 B.C.

The book also claims that Judas Iscariot was not responsible for Jesus’ betrayal, she said.

The movie director’s claims were greeted with some skepticism among those who have dedicated their careers to studying the life of Jesus.

One issue is that there is very little information about the life of Jesus outside of the Gospels. The Gospels as understood by Christians for nearly 2,000 years do not support Verhoeven’s ideas.

William Portier, a professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, in Ohio, said the Jesus Seminar was known for making provocative claims, but “they are real scholars — you have to deal with them.”

However, he said Verhoeven’s ideas sounded “pretty out there.”

So even people who have spent their lives studying the life of Jesus consider Verhoeven’s ideas “pretty out there.” Doesn’t bode well for him, does it?

John Dominic Crossan, a Jesus Seminar founder, agreed. He said that while Verhoeven was a member in good standing, there was little evidence for the view that Jesus was illegitimate.

Crossan said the claim was first reported in a polemic written in the second century against the Book of Matthew, intended for a Jewish audience.

“It’s an obvious first retort to claims that Mary was a virgin,” Crossan said. “If you wanted to do a hatchet job on Jesus’ reputation, this would be the way.”

The most likely scenario for people who don’t accept that Jesus was literally the son of God and had no human father is simply that he was the son of Joseph, Crossan said.

Sterk said the book would be translated into English in 2009. Verhoeven hopes it will be a springboard for him to raise interest in making a film along the same lines, she said.

Verhoeven, 69, has dreamed of making a movie about Jesus’ life for decades, she said.

Asked whether it would be difficult to follow Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” and Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” she said Verhoeven knew he might be somewhat late to market.

“He is painfully aware of that,” she said. “However, he has quite a different angle.”

What we have here is a guy who is desperately trying to make money by creating controversy. His claims are so outrageous and self-serving that they get attention. He’s 69 years old - a turning point age - and he’s dreamed of making a movie about the life of Jesus for many years. He’s desperate, and this is the only way he can get the attention he seeks and make his dream of a movie about Jesus a possibility. And he admits that he hopes his book will be “a springboard” to raising enough money to make the movie.

There’s no surprise then. It all comes down to money - and attention (i.e. fame).

I’m not a Catholic, and so I’m not sure why Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the USA is so touching to me. CNN just had some footage of his visit to St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers. There was a children’s choir singing (at least it sounded like a children’s choir - I couldn’t see it, though), and Pope Benedict was walking among some disabled children and blessing them. The children were on either side of the walkway, and he stopped at each child and gave each child his complete attention at that moment, and touched the child’s head with both hands. It was very tender. Seriously. I had tears in my eyes just watching it. Maybe because it was apparent how much his blessing meant to the adults who were with the children. Pope Benedict seems to be a very good person, and I’ve been impressed and touched by his words and actions during his visit here.

I can’t find a photo of his visit to St. Joseph’s today, but here is a photo of Pope Benedict with some children in Brazil.

My nephew, Benjamin, was able to get a some shots of Pope Benedict XVI when he was in Washington, DC. This first picture was taken on Thursday evening from the Catholic University of America campus where Pope Benedict gave an address at the student center to an audience of Catholic educators. The students were permitted to be on the lawn in front of the student center to greet him from a distance as he entered and exited the building.

This second photo was taken at the Mass that Pope Benedict celebrated at Nationals Ball Park. Tickets for the Mass were distributed to parishes for lottery drawings. Benjamin entered at his parish, and he won a ticket! When the Pope first arrived at the stadium, he rode around the field in the popemobile and waved to everybody. As it turned out, Benjamin was sitting on the second row back from the field, so when Pope Benedict drove by he was only about 15-20 feet away. It felt surreal to Benjamin. He reports that the Mass was beautiful, and that the whole day was full of blessing.

Pope Benedict XVI spoke to a large group of bishops gathered in a Washington, D.C. church today.  I listened to a little of the speech, but found it was too difficult to understand his thick accent. I loved listening to his voice, though.  Here’s part of the story: 

Pope Criticizes Bishops on Abuse Issue

WASHINGTON (April 16) - Feted at the White House on his 81st birthday, Pope Benedict XVI praised Americans for their deep religious beliefs Wednesday but later told the nation’s bishops that the scourge of clergy sex abuse had sometimes been “very badly handled.”

Benedict’s comments, his toughest critique yet of the U.S. church’s worst problem, marked the second day in a row that he addressed the abuse scandal. They came as he addressed the nation’s bishops at the imposing Immaculate Conception shrine.

He also reminded the prelates that religion cannot only be considered a “private matter” without any bearing on public behavior.

The pontiff questioned how Catholics could ignore church teaching on sex, exploit or ignore the poor, or adopt positions contradiciting “the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death.”

“Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted,” he said. Benedict’s remarks came on a day when all of the five Catholic justices on the U.S. Supreme Court approved the most widely used method of lethal injection, and congressional representatives who support abortion rights said they planned to take Holy Communion on Thursday at a papal Mass.

Benedict returned to the clergy sex abuse scandal that has cost the American church more than $2 billion, most paid out to victims in the last six years, calling it a cause of “deep shame.” He decried the “enormous pain” that communities have suffered from such “gravely immoral behavior” by priest.

Benedict addressed clerical molesters in the wider context of secularism and the over-sexualization of America. “What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today?” he asked.

The pope spoke after Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who is the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

George said that the consequences of the clergy abuse scandal “and of its being sometimes very badly handled by bishops makes both the personal faith of some Catholics and the public life of the church herself more problematic.”

More than 400 children - most of them girls - were freed from a polygamist compound over the past few days.  I sure hope the men who held these children and young women - and abused them will pay the price and find out what it’s like to be imprisoned against their will and to be considered no more than some person’s property.  It’s simply another case of men using “religion” to justify and protect their sexual and social deviancies.

More Than 400 Kids Taken From Ranch

By Michelle Roberts, AP

ELDORADO, Texas (April 7) - More than 400 children, mostly girls in pioneer dresses, were swept into state custody from a polygamist sect in what authorities described Monday as the largest child-welfare operation in Texas history.

The dayslong raid on the sprawling compound built by now-jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs was sparked by a 16-year-old girl’s call to authorities that she was being abused and that girls as young as 14 and 15 were being forced into marriages with much older men.

Dressed in home-sewn, ankle-length dresses with their hair pinned up in braids, some 133 women left the Yearning for Zion Ranch of their own volition along with the children.

State troopers were holding an unknown number of men in the compound until investigators finished executing a house-to-house search of the 1,700-acre property, which includes a medical facility, numerous large housing units and an 80-foot white limestone temple that rises discordantly out of the brown scrub.

“In my opinion, this is the largest endeavor we’ve ever been involved in in the state of Texas,” said Children’s Protective Services spokesman Marleigh Meisner, who said she was also involved in the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.

The members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints spent their days raising numerous children, tilling small gardens and doing chores. But at least one former resident says life was not some idyllic replica of 19th-century life.

“Once you go into the compound, you don’t ever leave it,” said Carolyn Jessop, one of the wives of the alleged leader of the Eldorado complex. Jessop left with her eight children before the sect moved to Texas.

Jessop said the community emphasized self-sufficiency because they believed the apocalypse was near.

The women were not allowed to wear red — the color Jeffs said belonged to Jesus — and were not allowed to cut their hair. They were also kept isolated from the outside world.

They “were born into this,” said Jessop, 40. “They have no concept of mainstream society, and their mothers were born into and have no concept of mainstream culture. Their grandmothers were born into it.”

Meisner said each child will get an advocate and an attorney but predicted that if they end up permanently separated from their families, the sheltered children would have a tough acclimation to modern life.

Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Safety, said the criminal investigation was still under way, and that charges would be filed if investigators determined children were abused.

Still uncertain is the location of the girl whose call initiated the raid. She allegedly had a child at 15, and authorities were looking for documents, family photos or even a family Bible with lists of marriages and children to demonstrate the girl was married to Dale Barlow, 50.

Under Texas law, girls younger than 16 cannot marry, even with parental approval.

The church members were being held at Fort Concho, a 150-year-old fort built to protect frontier settlements, to be interviewed about the 16-year-old girl and whether, in fact, the teenager was among them.

DPS troopers arrested one man on a charge of interfering with the duties of a public servant during the search warrant, but it was not Barlow, Mange said.

“For the most part, residents at the ranch have been cooperative. However, because of some of the diplomatic efforts in regards to the residents, the process of serving the search warrants is taking longer than usual,” said DPS spokesman Tom Vinger, who declined to elaborate. “The annex is extremely large and the temple is massive.”

Barlow’s probation officer, Bill Loader, told The Salt Lake Tribune that he was in Arizona. Phone messages seeking comment from Loader and Barlow were not immediately returned Monday.

Barlow was sentenced to jail last year after pleading no contest to conspiracy to commit sexual conduct with a minor. He was ordered to register as a sex offender for three years while he is on probation.

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, headed by Jeffs after his father’s death in 2002, broke away from the Mormon church after the latter disavowed polygamy more than a century ago.

The group is concentrated along the Arizona-Utah line but several enclaves have been built elsewhere, including in Texas. Several years ago it paid $700,000 for the Eldorado property, a former exotic animal ranch, and began building the compound as authorities in Arizona and Utah began increasingly scrutinizing the group.

The compound sits down a narrow paved road and behind a hill that shields it almost entirely from view in Eldorado, a town of fewer than 2,000 surrounded by sheep ranches nearly 200 miles northwest of San Antonio. Only the 80-foot-high white temple can be seen on the horizon.

Jeffs is jailed in Kingman, Ariz., where he awaits trial for four counts each of incest and sexual conduct with a minor stemming from two arranged marriages between teenage girls and their older male relatives.

In November, he was sentenced to two consecutive sentences of five years to life in prison in Utah for being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl who wed her cousin in an arranged marriage in 2001.

The investigation prompted by the girl’s call last week was the first in Texas involving the sect.

Jane at Cozy Reader had  this yesterday, and I loved it.  Click on over and check out all the other great stuff at Cozy Reader.

The Bible in 50 Words!

God made
Adam bit
Noah arked
Abraham split
Joseph ruled
Jacob fooled
Bush talked
Moses balked
Pharaoh plagued
People walked
Sea divided
Tablets guided
Promise landed
Saul freaked
David peeked
Prophets warned
Jesus born
God walked
Love talked
Anger crucified
Hope died
Love rose
Spirit flamed
Word spread
God remained.

I really enjoy our church’s project of packing boxes to ship to our soldiers serving overseas.  Today was our fourth time to gather together to pack boxes.  Today we put together a record of FORTY-EIGHT boxes!  That means that forty-eight soldiers serving in Iraq will receive a package from us within a few weeks.   Each box included a letter, a CD, a box of Girl Scout cookies, a bag of candy, beef jerky, notepad and pens, magazine(s), various toiletries, packages of crackers and granola bars, individual packs of pudding, hot chocolate mix and other goodies. 

I was particularly blessed by how everyone stepped in wherever they were needed - whether it was manning the tape dispenser to put boxes together, packing the boxes, addressing labels, bagging candy or q-tips, gathering up all the trash, writing letters, sealing boxes, matching up box labels with customs forms - and so many other things.  Whatever needed to be done - someone stepped up to do it.  I loved watching the children who so enthusiastically participated.  They were so proud of the boxes they packed - along with the letters they wrote.  Sweet Stuff came to church with us again today so she could help with the boxes.  She has taken a personal interest in doing this project with us.

We will plan to do this again in May.  In the meantime, we will start collecting items again for that next shipment.  We already have enough boxes and customs forms for the next shipment.  So everyone will be looking for sales on items that our soldiers will appreciate. 

I’m getting this down to a science now - knowing the items that ship best, organizing everything so that the packing will go smoothly, and making sure that we have all the supplies we need.  However, obviously I don’t have it down exactly because I thought we’d probably pack around 30 - 35 boxes today - but we wound up with 48 very full boxes by the end of the session.

Oh yes, I also got up early this morning and made a pot of chicken and dumplings, along with a pot of chili - and took them to church with me.  Everyone who helped with the packages had their lunch provided - and there was not a drop of either soups left over.  And that made me feel good, too.

This is a hymn that I heard for the first time just a couple years ago, but now it is among my favorites;

Freely, Freely
Words and Music by Carol Owens

God forgave my sin in Jesus’ name,
I’ve been born again in Jesus’ name,
And in Jesus’ name I come to you,
To share his love as he told me to.
He said, “Freely, freely you have received,
Freely, freely give.
Go in my name, and because you believe,
Others will know that I live.”

All power is given in Jesus’ name,
In earth and heaven in Jesus’ name
And in Jesus’ name I come to you
To share his power as he told me to.
He said, “Freely, freely you have received,
Freely, freely give.
Go in my name, and because you believe,
Others will know that I live.”

Ash Wednesday is one of those days we observe as part of the Christian year, and yet its meaning and significance is not always understood.  Ruth at Ruthlace has written a short but exceptionally clear description of the day and why it is so important to our faith.

When our daughter, Deborah was critically ill at age 2 months, her Daddy and I sat in the waiting room of the hospital where other people with sick children were waiting.

If you have spent many days in a hospital waiting room, you realize how you begin to interact with people. You listen to their story and tell yours. You become concerned about their loved one and appreciate their concern for yours. Each individual patient is precious to someone.

Charles and I were so distraught that someone asked, “Is she your only child?” I replied, “She is our fifth child, but she is our only Debi.”

Jesus came to earth to tell us the amazing news that each individual one of us is precious to God. We each have our own fingerprint, our own voice ascent, our own DNA. God so loved each one of us that he sent Jesus that whosoever believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting life.

The Pharisees thought God rejoiced in the death of “sinners.” In Luke 15 , Jesus tell us there is joy in heaven when each one of us repents of our wandering and believes this greatest Good News the world has ever heard!

Ash Wednesday begins Lent and the believer’s journey to Holy Week and Easter. It is a journey of individual repentance and prayer. In the Service of Ashes, we kneel at the altar and the pastor marks the sign of the cross in ashes on our forehead.

The ashes are to remind us that our physical body is dying. The sign of the cross is to remind us that we are more than our physical body. What we call” death” does not have the last word over what God calls “life.” It is Ash Wednesday but Easter is coming!

Prayer: Father, during this Lenten season help each one of us to kneel at the cross in humility and to arise in the strength of knowing who we are in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

The season 7 premier of AMERICAN IDOL starts at 7:00 p.m. Central time tonight! Yeah! Join some of The Cotillion ladies to chat about the crazy characters, Simon’s antics. Will Paula do anything crazy (well, of course she will!). How many times will Randy say “dog?” Come on in and join the party.