Monday Miscellany, 11/25/22

This is especially true for liberal women, reports the UK Daily Mail, which quotes one of the American refugees as saying, “Europe offers a political climate that feels less changed, less divided and generally more tolerant.”  Another said, “Another Trump term is non-negotiable for me.”

But they aren’t joining the rest of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free in the refugee camps.  Another UK publication, the London Telegraph, reporting on their border crisis, has a story entitled  Ultra-wealthy Democrats race to buy London boltholes after Trump win.  The number of Americans seeking to buy British real estate has doubled, according to the article, and they are snapping up homes in the multi-million pound range.  (As of this writing, 1 pound = $1.25.)

A cruise line is offering a less permanent option.  Villa Vie Residences is marketing a way to “skip forward” to 2028 when Trump leaves office by taking a four-year-long world cruise.   The whole 4-year package costs $159,999 per person for a double cabin or $255,999 for a single.

That last option reminds me of Edward Everett Hale’s short story A Man Without a Country, a patriotic classic about a citizen who repudiates the United States to spend the rest of his life at sea, which teaches him to love his country after all.

Election Officials Boast about Disobeying Election Law

The election results came in pretty quickly this time, even though the ballot counting for some congressional races dragged on for days.  In Pennsylvania, as reported by the New York Post, the senate race was finally called in favor of Republican Dave McCormick, who led by 22,000 votes over incumbent Democrat Bob Casey.

But Casey refused to concede, pending the counting of deficient provisional ballots.  That is, mail-in ballots submitted without a signature and a date on the outside of the envelope, plus ballots submitted by unregistered voters.  The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that, according to state law, such ballots may not be counted.  And yet, several heavily-Democratic counties that Casey won–Bucks, Centre, and Philadelphia–voted or publicly declared that they would count those illegal ballots anyway!

The Bucks County Commissioners voted to do that, with County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia making an extraordinary statement:  “I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country.  People violate laws any time they want.  So for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.”

This confession that she was violating the law in ordering the county’s election officials to count illegal ballots wasn’t the only odd statement coming from the Democratic election deniers.  The Casey campaign appealed the court’s ruling that ballots from voters unregistered by Election Day must not be counted.  The appeal stated that it “challenges the rejection of provisional ballots based solely on the Board’s staff’s failure to find voters’ names on registered-voter lists.”

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court sternly ordered election officials to abide by its ruling.  But once the ballots have been counted, it’s impossible to uncount them.  The name and date or the lack thereof, is on the envelope, not the ballot.  And whether or not a voter is registered has to be determined before the ballot is cast and counted.  So those illegal votes, the best I can tell, will be included in the recount, which Casey has demanded.

So it turns out that, in at least some jurisdictions, Democratic election officials are willing to break the law in counting ballots in support of their candidate.  I wonder if the same officials in Pennsylvania were working the 2020 election.

UPDATE:  After the recount, Casey has finally conceded, with McCormick winning by 18,000 votes.

Archaeological Evidence That the Earliest Christians Believed in the Deity of Christ

The “historical-critical” approach to the Bible, a.k.a. “higher criticism,” as practiced by mainline liberal Protestants, takes an evolutionary approach to Christian history.

In this view, the “historical Jesus” was a Jewish prophet who was crucified by the Romans.  In time, his followers gradually added to his legend–that he performed miracles, that he rose from the dead, that his crucifixion was a sacrifice for their sins, and finally, by the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., that He was the incarnation of God Himself.

But archaeological evidence keeps refuting those views.  The assumption that the Gospel of John–which clearly teaches that ” the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1) and that ” the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”  (John 1:1, 14)– was written hundreds of years after the time of Christ was shot down when a fragment of the gospel was discovered that was dated around 100 A.D., which meant that the original text must have been written even earlier.  And since there is internal evidence that John was written later than the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they must have been written earlier still.  It turns out there was not enough time for the New Testament or the doctrines of Christianity to “evolve.”

Now another archaeological discovery confirms that the earliest Christians we have extra-Biblical records of, believed in the deity of Jesus Christ.

On the site of an Israeli prison in Megiddo (also known as Armageddon), archaeaologists have excavated a beautiful mosaic floor, which was evidently made for one of the earliest places of Christian worship we have discovered, with a date of 230 A.D.  On it are inscribed the names of Romans, Greeks, and Jews, including a number of women, showing the mix of ethnicities and genders referred to in St. Paul’s epistles.  And there is this inscription:  ‘The god-loving Akeptous has offered the table to God Jesus Christ as a memorial.”

The Megiddo Mosaics were discovered in 2005, but they have been brought here as an exhibit being shown at the Museum of the Bible, in Washington, D.C., which is why it is getting renewed attention today.

The head of the museum, Carlos Campo, calls the mosaics “the greatest discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls.”  Other museum spokesmen say it is “the most important archaeological discovery for understanding the early Christian church.”  (See this discussion at the Museum website, which includes photographs of the art and inscriptions.)

I don’t think Akeptous’ confession, dating from 230 A.D., is all that early, as such.  But it is presented as a common, already-accepted statement, which shows that, of course, the belief is far earlier and generally-accepted.  The fragment from the Gospel of John is much earlier and, to my mind, is proof that the very first Christians knew Christ as truly God and truly Man.  Of course they did.  The Council of Nicaea didn’t make up that teaching, but defined it over and against the heretical teachings on the subject. And they did so by intensely studying the Scriptures and reflecting on the traditions that they were taught, going back to the Apostles  (2 Thessalonians 2:15).