Templar Edification

There’s something inherently ethereal, and indeed a bit eerie, about liminal places. Areas of transition—from light to dark, from east to west, from civilization to wilderness—have fascinated every human culture. America is no exception, given our national obsession with “the frontier,” wherever that happens to be in a given generation. Crossroads and doorways, graveyards and twilight, all thrill us with their ambiguity, their in-betweenness. Unseen things, things just beyond the veil, seem that much closer, that much realer. And October is basically one big liminal space. Autumn proves perhaps the most dramatic of the seasons, replete with pungent aromas: spices and woodsmoke and decaying vegetation. Leaves erupt in one last great riot of color before they wither and fall. In comes the harvest, transitioning from summer’s plenty into winter’s scarcity. The winds shift, heralding the frost and ice that, while not yet arrived, are now well and truly on their way. The days grow shorter; ...

The Bible is a vulgar thing—from the Latin vulgus, meaning “common people.” When St Jerome translated the Christian Scriptures into Latin at the end of the fourth century, he did so because few in the West still spoke Greek. Latin was the common tongue of the common people; thus, Jerome’s Bible came to be known as the Vulgate, regular language for regular folks. The dialect of Greek from which Jerome had worked was koine, which also means “common.” Koine was the language of the Hellenistic world, of all the varied cultures and kingdoms conquered by Alexander the Great. The Gospels were written down in koine, despite Jesus teaching in Aramaic, so that everyone could hear and understand. And what was Aramaic? Why, it was the common Semitic tongue spoken by the Judeans following their return from the Babylonian Exile. We read in the Book of Ezra that most exiled Israelites could no longer understand Hebrew, the language of the Law, and so when the Law was read aloud, learned Levites had t...