Jesus Christ crucified; Lady Gaga too?

Somewhere on AOL yesterday it was argued that Lady Gaga has finally gone too far. She wore a bikini to a baseball game, then became upset when it made her the object of attention. Finally, she flipped off the fans. All of which makes us say: THAT is going too far? But using Catholic imagery in a poor fashion is not insulting, not over the top, not just plain rude and inconsiderate? What we have here is another example of alack of perspective in the mainstream media. Be rude to Christians, but not to baseball fans. It's simply ridiculous.

A Swedish scholar has reported that Jesus Christ likely did not die of crucifixion. His death was probably still gruesome, but Gunnar Samuelsson, a theologian at the University of Gothenburg, believes that it was not necessarily through being hung on a cross. There isn't enough evidence, he asserts. This comes after his study of ancient Greek.

We won't bore you with the details, but, ultimately, they aren't particularly important. If Christ is the Son of God sent to save us and had to be executed in order to accomplish that, then any type of humiliating death would fit the bill, and Samuelsson still believes that to be the case. Yet the real trouble here is that he risks causing a rift in the Christian world already torn asunder by other and, quite frankly, more important questions.

We are willing to take him on his word that he only wants the truth. We will even concede that his interest is genuinely scholarly. But the fact is that most other scholars disagree, and tradition does as well. Especially when he uses phrases such as, "So the device described in the Gospels could have been a cross, but it could also have been a spiked pole, or a tree trunk, or something entirely different.", which are not very useful to any understanding of the situation. As they translate into that he may very well have been nailed to a cross anyway, it seems to mean little even academically. Why stir the pot without solid evidence rather than conjecture, even such as may be considered a decent educated guess? Christianity has enough enemies in the world without our own members bringing even the slightest doubt to it. His announcement doesn't really seem to serve a useful point.

We intended to be more generally crabby today, but as our second item went on father than we intended, we'll let it go at these two morsels of insight. Until tomorrow...