Sin, Redemption and Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury wrote a story titled The Man that can be summarized thus:

In its expansion through the galaxy, the human species encounters many extraterrestrial intelligences. The captain of an interstellar Earth ship arrives on a distant planet and hears about something recently happened there. Little by little he discovers that God has become man on that planet and has granted them Redemption, although not in a bloody way. The captain wants to meet him, get in touch with him, but it’s too late: he has left (at least, he thinks so). Then the captain decides to dedicate his life to traveling to other planets in the hope of finding Christ on one of them.

Narciso Ibáñez Serrador adapted this story for the radio, and in doing so he changed a few things: the title, which became The Triangle, and the form of Redemption: they kill the Redeemer by nailing him to a triangle, rather than a cross.

Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives

Pope Benedict XVI

In his book The Spaniard and the seven deadly sins, Fernando Diaz Plaja criticizes what he considers an example of the sin of pride rather common among Spaniards: criticizing a book without having read it. He offers the following example:

Literary judgment is easiest in Spain. I once listened to a radio broadcast where a few writers commented Dr. Zhivago, by Pasternak. The opinions were so hard, sharp and negative, that a lady of the group, with a probably Russian accent, was astonished and asked humbly:

“But how can you say..., where did you read that?” “I have not read the book,” was the astonishing reply. It turned out that, of the four writers who had gathered to discuss the novel, she was the only one who had read it.

November 21st 2012, near the beginning of the Christmas season, was the date of the publication of the book about the infancy of Jesus, third in the trilogy that Pope Benedict XVI dedicated to Jesus of Nazareth (he also signed them in his own name, Josef Ratzinger).

Let’s look at a review issued in a major daily journal in Spain on the same day of the publication of the book:

Dating the birth of Jesus Christ

Copy of Raphael's The Virgin of the Rose, 
by Manuel Alfonseca Santana

I will not enter here into the nineteenth-century debate on the historical existence of Jesus Christ, for after 1926 historical criticism has unanimously accepted his existence, and the persistence of the idea that Jesus Christ did not exist is solely due to ignorance or anti-Christian bigotry.

In the previous post we saw that December 25 might actually have been the date of the birth of Christ, if we follow a tradition that dates back to Irenaeus. Traditionally, the main argument against that date was the unlikelihood of the shepherds being in the fields in winter, watching their flocks. However, other studies disagree with this statement.
The chronological system used today internationally is the Christian era. After the collapse and disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, the Roman era, which counted the years from the founding of Rome, remained in use for about two hundred years, but in the sixth century, the Scythian theologian Dionysius Exiguus introduced the custom of dating historical events from the birth of Christ. Dionisius calculated that Jesus must have been born around the year 754 AUC (Ab Urbe Condita, since the foundation of the town) and called this year 1 AD (Anno Domini, the year of the Lord). Later dates in the Roman era could easily be translated into the Christian era by subtracting 753 from the corresponding Roman date. As for the years before 754 AUC, in the new era they correspond to negative numbers and can be obtained by subtracting the Roman date from 754 and by adding the abbreviation BC (Before Christ). In this system, there is no year zero.