The blog about things that should not be forgotten
~ Wednesday, April 7, 2021 ~
When Judas Iscariot left the apostolic circle — whether at the moment of the betrayal or earlier in the narrative, depending on which gospel’s chronology one follows — there was a period, however brief, during which the circle stood at eleven. The urgency with which Acts moved to correct this tells us, without ambiguity, why the number twelve was never incidental.
~ Monday, March 22, 2021 ~
There is a Roman milestone in the collection of the Opava Museum that was found not where milestones belong.
~ Sunday, January 24, 2021 ~
Six cathedral labyrinths were removed from French churches between 1690 and the 1820s. In most cases, the reason given was the same: children were playing on them during services and disturbing the liturgy. This is probably true. It is also, as explanations go, worth sitting with. These objects had been in their cathedrals for four or five centuries before the canons decided they were furniture.
~ Saturday, October 17, 2020 ~
About 12.85 metres from one edge to the other, the labyrinth fills the nave of Notre-Dame de Chartres almost from pillar to pillar. It was laid in white limestone from the Berchères quarries and dark stone from Senlis, sometime in the early thirteenth century. No document from the chapter of Notre-Dame records why it was built, or what it was for, or what its builders called it.
~ Monday, September 28, 2020 ~
Before December 1945, the argument that the early church had systematically suppressed competing apostolic traditions was a theological inference drawn from the shape of the canonical record — from what the canon excluded rather than from any surviving evidence of the exclusion. After a sealed earthenware jar was opened in the Egyptian desert near the town of Nag Hammadi, the inference became a documented finding.