Ius-dicere

Samhain and Ius Dicere

Rev dear Rev: Given the tragic death of the skilled human rights court lawyer Patrick Finucane at the end of the so-called Troubles civil war in Ulster in the UK in 1989 while Berlin Walls were being broken up, for which the PM has apologised, is there any comfort for the broken and stricken family concerned, from the pages of the New Testament Bible, speaking as a New Testament Theologian of Human Rights?

Bible, bible, bible. Yes, there is something there. In Luke 1-2, esp Lk 2:42-52. There is something to be said for sitting down in one's front room and picking up the Bible and leafing through it or even as the charismatics and evangelicals do and allowing the pages to fall open and reading randomly from the open book - it is all inspired and touched by angels. There is a beautiful painting in the French church there of The Inspiration of St Matthew by none other than the same Caravaggio whose hitherto long lost Calling of Simon and Andrew in the Queen's collection at Windsor was so recently found therein right under the nose of a spy, the effervescent and ebullient Anthony Blunt, which argues persuasively and beautifully that the gospel writers themselves were inspired in their recollections and allargamenti and errata corrections by the angels of the imagination, that they were divinely illuminated.

Yes, the killing of any man does no one any honour as we like to say in the Kung Fu tradition, but the killing of a lawyer and especially of an advocate to the accused of both sides there in that unhappy and divided kingdom, this is the stuff of grave danger and grave offence even to the pious ears of the gospels themselves, chiefly because for the early christians many went to magistrates themselves often alone with nobody to call on as their defence team except the Parakletos, literally the Spirit that stands beside the accused christian, he who stands beside an accused and defends the accused chiefly from the calumnies of the darkest of them all, the infernal Accuser of the Brethren. But what does the New Testament Jesus say of such matters? Well in the New Testament Writers we note that when Jesus was a boy he was lost from his putative parents for some days while they journeyed home to Nazareth in a camelard caravan. He was lost. To them. But this should tell us something about the boy and the future man. He was evidently known for his freedom and his independence of action. He was markedly different to other children hanging on to mother's apron strings, he was in sum a free spirit. Now the putative parents were also free spirits, they were like a Woodstock couple from once upon a time, from the time of Scott Mackenzie's famous song, "Are We Going to San Francisco?", because they simply assumed he was with the relatives and friends on the caravan, free spirits too. So they returned to recover the boy, and restore him to communion, and retrieve for the caravan.

And where did they find this young messiah? He was standing among the doctors of the law, disquisitioning with these learned experts on weighty matters, and all who heard him were astonished at the bright impress of his mind upon their hearts - as Aquinas calls this early experience - quaedam impressio divinae revelationis in mentem - he was intelligent beyond his years, mature in surprising ways, in astonishing ways - he was a mystery even for the experienced doctors of the law. This is where the young messiah liked to spend his time, he made a beeline for these men, for these experts - there was evidently something to be learned from them. Likewise we should understand that for the young boy Jesus, the lawyer and the advocate were sacrosanct. That should remain the last word. But one more trifle for the budding young New Testament Indianas among you -

As I was working on my Indiana Jones new translation of the New Testament in recent times at Oxford, going back and forth to the City of Dreams on my days off, throughout the timeframe - 2011-2020, I came across something that is very exciting for an Indiana in his own right as I was putting little archaeological discoveries into the footnotes of my new translation of the gospel of Matthew: It can now be revealed at Oxford in a tiny little discovered Fragmentulum of the Writings of the roman historian Tacitus something amazing, that it seems the romans would never have considered firing the entire site of the Temple there in Jerusalem in 70 AD or computed in roman terms in 820 AUC, if they had not discovered that the law was being traduced, that the Israeli judges were indeed corrupt, that the poor were left to their mercy; that in sum the legal system was deeply corrupted by the men in charge of the timeframe. Tacitus reports in this discovered Fragment that the generals with Titus would not have advised the total liquidation of the Jewish people and their women and children sold into grievous slavery, their priests massacred to a man and this was not in the heat of battle, their chief priest paraded up the clivus sacer in Rome and himself sacrificed to the justice of the roman pagan gods and the supreme god of the city, and then the desecration of the Temple mount, the building of an altar to Vespasian there, and the demolition and the destruction of the entire Temple surrounds too, if they had had discovered that the law was being respected by the officials of the people, but helas the pharisees were out to make a fast buck on the necks of the poor - the poor and their cries had come to the romans. Much like the cries of the poor and the working classes of Egypt then in the time of Tiberius. A grievous chorus of serious malpractice complaints against the priests - they had betrayed the poor, they had traduced the widow and even the orphan, that had lied under oaths. Shock. Horror.

Now Notate Bene - the romans had a deep, religious, and supernatural respect for law, any law, and they considered the law to be sacred, surrounded with many offerings and sacrifices - hence the expression from the roman empire which lies like a bombshell in the Codex of the christians at canon 1442 - ius dicit, a prerogative of the emperor - showing that aspects of the old empire did indeed survive that last council in the 1960s and were integrated into the structures of the christians at Rome, so when they discovered the heinous practices of the Israelite officers of the law, they all decided to chip in their sentence, a sentence of their own - Disevectum est - Farnum delendum est - the same words used to cast Carthage and its denizens to the fires of retribution when the romans eventually invaded that unhappy kingdom. And there is more to this sorry tale, as it involves old grievances between neighbours, arab neighbours but not for faint hearts in this website, wishing to spare the people of God the gory details, so I shall not go into it or dwell on this most revealing Fragmentulum - a tremendous discovery nonetheless - looking round over my shoulder in the manuscript room, I made sure that nobody was watching me, and I eased the Fragmentum off the shelves of this forgotten part of the library and bookshop and simply bought the Fragmentum. But there is more, shockingly more of this horrific day in 70 AD - Arabs were called in from the hills to finish off the priests of the Temple with their sharp swords and scimitars - there was a general bloodletting and the hills of Jerusalem outside the temple walls ran red with the blood of thousands of priests. So the early christians knew this to be the case, and they remembered the solemn and sobering words of Jesus prophesying the eventual Fall of the Temple. Sobering stuff. But it reminds us that the romans too, the chief among ancient societies at the time, also had enormous and humungous respect for law, for law officers, for law enforcement generally, for lawyers, and especially for the thankless tasks of the holy advocates - they were indeed servants of the gods, servants of the Spirit - parakletoi. So the crime related above must be recovered, retrieved, and restored, much like the old Herodian Temple itself - it is time it was restored. And indeed, the usually ebullient nay indeed effervescent Westminster Prime Minister, Dr Cameron, himself, did take a solemn opportunity in parliament to apologise profusely and humbly for the killing of the young advocate from Belfast, when he addressed the issue in 2012 in parliament. An ECHR case pending, flowing from the UK-GB Supreme Court case too also pending. Sad times, tough times. Serious matters best left to an eventual Truth and Reconciliation Commission one day in the distant future, as occurred in the healing of old hatreds of the ANC in South Africa eventually too. So the killing of an advocate, especially an even-handed one who represented individuals from both sides of the community, was a great crime from which the province might not yet recover for some time, let us be frank, which the province did not recover from right into modern times. 70 AD is a warning to all individuals involved in such grievous crimes against law, against humanity - Et provincia delenda est.