Olde Fashioned Story Telling (Pabasa) and Judas Blogging

This is the Christian Holy Week, the season of live crucifixion and self-flagellaton in the Archipelago, where recalling the Passion of Christ is taken to literal extremes. Less carnal, the Pabasa or the Reading and chanting of long biblical passages in the most exotic tones and dialects is a less famous but more widespread practice of devotion during Lent in the Philippines -- in the big cities, as well as provincial towns and village churches. Regular readers may note that MP3s are big on Philippine Commentary, as they are all over the Philippine blogosphere because of Garci and Song Hits. So I've wondered about the potential on the Web for olde-fashioned story-telling, for poetry reading and other bits of spoken language, literature, and tradition. Stuff that doesn't get out much on commercial television and radio broadcast media, or aren't seen as fit content for them. Here are some early experiments (right click to open in a new tab or window):
Rizalist reads the story of Nokomis, Wenonah, Iagoo and the childhood of Hiawatha (MP3)
and the first experiment at this:
Picture-writing (MP3).
In the About section is still
Rizalist and I
(an adaptation of something Jorge Luis Borges wrote.) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, (the American author of the very long and world-renowned poem from which the first two above are recited) is, like José Rizál, a Nineteenth Century poet and writer. But it wasn't until I discovered WHO Hiawatha is supposed to be that this long, hypnotic song became one of my all-time favorites.

[Update: I don't mind sharing this answer to a recent email: my first real job in America was as a math and statistics tutor to six American Indians for the Equal Opportunity Program of the Univ. of California in Berkeley, California, 33 years ago. All passed with at least a D-minus instead of getting kicked out. (Party animals!) All became my "little red brothers" for life, and me their "lil brown brother"...]
Now speaking of José Rizál, coming soon is a Pabasa of a famous chapter of the El Filibusterismo: Sic Itur Ad Astra! (where we meet Simoun, whom the frailes on board the Tabo claim is an American mulatto or a British Indian. Others say he is Crisóstomo Ibárra returned from the Noli Me Tangere. I'm not so sure...)

But of course these are thoroughly modern stories, not very olde at all... Here is an interesting literary find from the 3rd or 4th century Anno Domini which everyone has heard of by now because of National Geographic...

GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JUDAS: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are not the only examples early Christian Gospel writing, many good Roman Catholic Filipinos discover with great surprise. Most are not aware of the so-called Apocryphal Gospels that did not make it to the official canon called the Holy Bible. But it is not surprising that there should be testimonies of Jesus' life and times from the other people in his life, such as the Gospel according to Mary, His Mother, and his other apostles, such as my favorite, the patron saint of scientists, St. Thomas the Skeptic (sometimes misnomered, Thomas the Doubter). But follow the link at the beginning of this paragraph to a restoration and translation of an ancient manuscript, 1700 years old, purported to be the Gospel According to Judas. The surprising payload is a claim that Judas was only acting on orders from his Jesus who may actually have regarded Judas, as His truest and most faithful disciple! WARNING: These claims have been considered heretical by the Church since around the time of St. Ireneus in the 2nd century AD. You can pick up on the "Orthodox Christian" attack on Gnosticism here at my favorite legal website: the Volokh Conspiracy ("...It is as if in 3800AD they announced that Benedict Arnold was actually George Washington's most loyal general.") and the Gnostic retort is here at Fantastic Planet.

Also available online direct from National Geographic are the Coptic and English language texts of the Gospel of Judas, here and here. (PDF) -- so you don't have to buy the upcoming book.

Did Jesus walk on frozen water? Well since the topic is heresy... the Discovery Channel has this brief on research published by the Journal of Paleolimnology (the study of ancient lakes) --

Jesus may not have actually walked on water: he may have skated on an isolated, hard to see piece of ice, according to a study on the weather and water conditions in northern Israel in Jesus' time. Doron Nof, professor of Oceanography at Florida State University, and colleagues report in the April issue of the Journal of Paleolimnology (the study of prehistoric lakes), that a rare combination of water and atmospheric conditions in northern Israel could have led to the formation of "springs ice" on the surface of the Sea of Galilee, now known as Lake Kinneret.

Two thousand years not olde enough or far enough in the past for ye? Take a look at what they found in Utah...

Boing Boing: Giant turkey-like dinosaur discovered -- This item takes us back to Jurassic Times (65 to 70 million years ago). If I didn't become a physicist early in life, I would surely have become a paleontologist. There is neat artist's rendition of the newly discovered seven foot tall velociraptor is from the University of Utah. (The gorilla shown is from contemporary times. Ouch.)

400 MILLION YEARS AGO...THE MISSING LINK Now for something really old. Scientists think they have found the fossils of an animal that comes from the time of the first migration -- from the primordial seas of life to dry land!

In addition to confirming elements of a major transition in evolution, the fossils are widely seen by scientists as a powerful rebuttal to religious creationists, who hold a literal biblical view on the origins and development of life.

Several well-preserved skeletons of the fossil fish were uncovered in sediments of former stream beds in the Canadian Arctic, 600 miles from the North Pole, it is being reported on Thursday in the journal Nature. The skeletons have the fins and scales and other attributes of a giant fish, four to nine feet long. But on closer examination, scientists found telling anatomical traits of a transitional creature, a fish that is still a fish but exhibiting changes that anticipate the emergence of land animals — a predecessor thus of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans.

Beware though. This is not the 'Missing Link' of popular 20th century lore, which usually referred to a supposed ancestor of Man that evolved from the apes. Of course no such link exists since men and apes are descended from a common ancestor, and NOT, as an old misconception goes, that men are descended from the apes. Of course data such as these, has also found an important political and intellectual purpose, in the ongoing debate over Intelligent Design, a topic for a future post. There seems to be a lot of interesting current topics in religion: the Da Vinci Code (probably in the realm of apostasy!) and in the Philippines itself: idolatry in public life, and that secret mission received bv Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales from Pope Benedict XVI.

Perhaps Rizalist will blog San Pedro de Cutud barangay in Pampanga this week, with fifteen live crucifixions scheduled on Good Friday...

UPDATE: Check out Ed Lacierda at San Juan Gossip Mills: Jesus in the Time of GMA