Bully's Blog

or the Covenanto-Architecturo-Historico-Grammatico-Muso Method

“A seal is meant to be broken.”

During the first of his recent lectures in London, James Jordan tore a page out of his Bible. It was the page announcing the New Testament as a separate book with its own pagination. It is one thing to interpret the New Testament in the light of contemporary literature and history, but their importance pales in comparison to the texts being recognized as a continuation of the Scriptures.

Continue reading

“One tessera at a time, painstaking, laborious, such is the truth of mosaic art. Opus Veritas.” – Massimiliano Salviati

The confusion about women’s roles in Church is not confined to one side of the modern debate. Neither side seems to have much idea at all. Both sides suffer from a theology consisting of disjointed facts filed in little boxes. They think in elements rather than processes, snapshots rather than movies. The problem is the result of a lack of a whole-Bible, Covenant-sensitive approach to the matter, one which James Jordan excels at, one which traces the roots of the problem to the (pretty much) wholesale jettisoning of centuries old liturgy, failure to see Old Covenant worship fulfilled in New Covenant worship, and the ridiculous classification of early Genesis as a polemic against ancient paganism, rather than the foundation of all worship, liturgy, sacred architecture and history. This means if one says anything about the issue publicly, one is likely to be misunderstood.

Continue reading

or What Was A Nazirite?

“A defiled Nazirite is an Adam or an Eve who has failed at holy war and thus cannot enter into God’s rest.”

Since I rave on about structure so much (and how wrong it is that we moderns regard it as merely an ornamental option rather than as the label on the tin) the fractalicious* Covenant structure of Numbers 6 should give us some clues as to what the Nazirite vow actually was in the big picture.

Continue reading

“With this theory of the joke in mind, the final chapter of Nehemiah is holy and hysterical.”

In his book, Deep Exegesis, Peter Leithart speaks of the biblical text as many things, but none is more confronting than his viewing the text as a “joke.” His explanation, however, makes perfect sense. What makes a joke funny? It is either prior knowledge to which not everyone is privy, or a confounding of expectations (which are also based on prior knowledge to some degree). The Bible is full of such jokes, and realizing one is in on the joke is immensely satisfying.

Continue reading

Here’s a visual representation of the literary structure of the Bible. Of course, not every book identical in structure, but the use of literary “coordinates” is made plain. The subject matter of each line is thus a multi-faceted symbol, a relationship between the subject of the line, the subject of the stanza which contains it, the subject of the passage which contains the stanzas, and the books which contains the passages.

Continue reading

Structure of Psalm 91, with comments on Matthew 4:6

For the tools to make sense of the parsing below, get the Bible Matrix books. Book 1 describes the sevenfold Creation pattern. Book 2 describes the fivefold Covenant pattern from which the sevenfold pattern is derived (and how both of them are derived from the threefold Trinity).

T R A N S C E N D E N C E

Strangely, the RSV does a better job of the flow on this one than the NKJV or ESV. Here is where literary structure helps translation of Hebrew! Line 5 does not begin a new sentence.

Continue reading

An excerpt from Bible Matrix III:

Just as Esau was the line of Cain rolled into one, so Jacob was a true son of God. In fact, being blameless as Noah was, the Lord granted him a vision of the true Gate of God, a tower reaching to heaven.

In Bible Matrix, we mentioned the significance of Jacob’s “ziggurat” vision as it relates to the mountain of God. [1] Jacob was laid out on the ground like Adam. His slumber brings a “Bridal” vision.

Continue reading

or Bible SatNav

The adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” refers to the notion that a complex idea can be conveyed with just a single still image. It also aptly characterizes one of the main goals of visualization, namely making it possible to absorb large amounts of data quickly. (Wikipedia)

It struck me this morning, as I read one of my regular theology blogs, that theologians don’t much use diagrams. The blog post in question used over a thousand words to describe something that is inherent in the architectures (both literary and spatial) found in the Bible.

What this means is that, for the most part, the way we communicate theology is foreign to the way our God does it.

Continue reading

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

Sacred Geometry and Marked Men

Chapters 35-36 bring us to the end of this structural analysis of the book of Numbers. The position of this final cycle is in red.

Overview of Numbers

Continue reading

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

We have reached the sixth cycle of Numbers, which seems to include chapters 30-34. Seeing as it has been a while since we looked at Numbers, here’s the overview again, with this next cycle in red.

Overview of Numbers

Continue reading