Posted on 08/09/2008 9:09:34 PM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
MELBOURNE: It is possible that cricket, a game venerated all over the Commonwealth, is older than currently thought.
In fact, Jesus may have played the game (or a similar bat-and-ball combination) as a child, according to an ancient Armenian manuscript.
Long before the English launched cricket some 300 years ago, similar games were being played as early as the 8th century in the Punjab region, Derek Birley writes in his Social History of English Cricket.
But an Armenian scholar says there is good reason to believe that similar games were played in the Middle East long before that time.
Dr Abraham Terian, recently a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Humanities, points to a rare manuscript as his source.
Terian notes that in the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, translated into Armenian in the 6th century from a much older lost Syriac original, a passage tells of Jesus playing what may well be the precursor of cricket, with a club and ball.
Terian, who discovered the manuscript more than a decade ago at the Saint James Armenian Monastery in the Old City of Jerusalem, says he has now identified the same passage in a couple of other manuscripts of the same gospel of which some 40 copies exist in various archival collections in Europe and the Middle East, including the oldest copy now in Yerevan, the capital of the Armenian Republic.
The latter manuscript is dated 1239, whereas the undated Jerusalem manuscript is considerably later.
Quoting from his Armenian source, Terian says the gospel relates how Jesus, at the age of nine, had been apprenticed to a master dyer named Israel in Tiberias, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
"Jesus is instructed to watch Israel's house and not leave the place while the master goes away on a tour to collect clothes to be dyed. But no sooner has Israel left the house, than Jesus runs out with the boys," The Daily Telegraph quoted Terian, as saying.
"The most amazing part of the story of the nine-year-old Jesus playing a form of cricket with the boys at the sea shore, is that he would go on playing the game on water, over the sea waves," he added.
He gives the following translation: "He (Jesus) would take the boys to the seashore and, carrying the playing ball and the club, he would go over the waves of the sea as though he was playing on a frozen surface, hitting the playing ball.
It's only intended to make you thinkMission accomplished, then! Just look at all the proverbial ink we've spilled over a simple medieval English folk song. :)
although I think that Medieval Man was thinking that it was only justice, along the lines of the "They Needed Killing" defense (which is still good in certain Southern states)In the intrest of the continuance of the currently friendly North-South relations, this damn Yankee's not going to touch that one! :)
Imagine what St. Athanasius would think of our borrowing and lending money at interest!!!Imagine, indeed! Given the epidemic of personal debt, perhaps that's something we should rethink as well.
What is the "fair" cost of renting money? Secured? Unsecured? Bad credit risk? How will construction contractors get their money before the concrete's in the ground?
It's easy to say you'll outlaw pawnshops and payday loans, but there are improvident folks who rely on them to get from paycheck to paycheck. Nobody wants 'em to starve or get thrown on the street.
And, of course, when medieval beliefs forbade lending at interest, they got around it by importing Jewish moneylenders. The Treasure and the Law
By the way, that's the last story in Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, ostensibly a children's book but, as Kipling himself admitted, actually written for grownups.
I can spill an enormous amount of ink over almost anything!
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Note: this topic is from August 2008. |
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Of course not.
It was baseball. : D
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