I'm a nurse and have already been burnt out by 2 years of a global pandemic. Now, with no time off, I'm supposed to decorate, bake cookies, buy and wrap presents and ideally do something charitable too? This is supposed to be the most magical time of the year, but I already feel like I'm drowning and now someone has tossed me a baby. I'm tired of people saying "Just remember the true meaning of Christmas." Jesus? Giving? Nah man. The true meaning is capitalism and spending.
Happy June everyone! Here is a list of variety content to travel back in time to, and I hope it will serve as a helpful resource to conceptualize how much time has really passed. What do you think has changed, been the same, and has been newly invented? Ignoring popularity, who could you see as a judge on SMTM/HSR who has not done a judging role before (some of my pairs below)? Sorry in advance if any of the links are wrong, I am currently preparing for an event for our subreddit, so look forward to that as soon as we launch it :)! Stay π―our lit community, and have great week!π₯π₯π₯
keep reading on reddit β‘For those who don't know, hadith (sayings of the Prophet) transmission involves a tradition of citation. There is a list called isnad, that is a list that comes before each and every hadith that is supposed to list the chain by which that hadith was transmitted. It essentially says, "I heard this from Khalid who heard it from 'Umar who heard it from Abbas who heard it from the prophet, peace be upon him."
This system relies on reliability of each link in the chain and how likely that person is to have transmitted the information correctly, which is based on a judgement of the person's character.
Had this sort of character judgement as a technique to settle disputes (not just in religion but also in other affairs, e.g. trade) been around in Arabia at that time, before Islam? What was the literary and oral culture like?
Let's be clear here, ninjas did exist. Stephen Turnbull in the article here is not claiming ninjas didn't exist. What he's saying is that in the Sengoku Period, ninjutsu was used across Japan, and not solely by a peasant class in Iga or Koka. Ninjutsu was a tradecraft used by many different military personnel. Dr. Turnbull is saying that in the 16th century the identity of ninja wasn't as we think of it today in pop culture. It was an identity of being a military personnel with ninja skills. For example, an agent would sneak into a castle and sabotage a weapons stock. That agent was part of the broader Samurai military complex and not divorced from it. The article points out that ninja, the word shinobi, was a verb. It meant sneaking in/"stealing in". So an agent would shinobi into a castle. If you were a ninja, which did exist, you were an infiltrator. Dr. Turnbull is not saying the ninja didn't exist, he's just saying that the identity of the ninja as seen in pop culture was invented later on. In the article, he points out that Iga and Koka are not the only places where you find ninjutsu. We find ninjutsu across Japan.
In the 1580's the "myth" of the ninja starts to develop. We start to see people in Iga and Koka claiming ninja ancestry and building up this iconic superhuman image. And so since 1580 till today an image has been cultivated that's been blown out of proportion and has gone way too far. The image of the ninja that we have today is a lot different from the image of the ninja in the 16th century. In the Edo Period we had plays and novels about ninja. In the 20th century we got comics, anime, and movies. All this built up a false narrative. Dr. Turnbull tries to breakdown what ninjutsu was originally and he explains that a false image of the ninja has been created. This false image that has been built up doesn't reflect what was actually going on in the Sengoku Period. But there were ninja in the Sengoku Period. This is a very academic article. It's 10,000 words long. But the main points are: Ninjutsu was not practiced by one elite group, but across Japan and across social classes and after the Sengoku Period the ninja dispersed and decreased while myths about them started to increase. But the ninja were real and they did exist, its just that our modern pop culture conception of them is wrong
Even the small amount of Hebrew or Aramaic we find in the NT could have been easily picked up at the synagogue. And on top of that, there's not even anything Semitic about the Greek used in the NT. Not saying any of this is definitive, but how can anyone be certain there's an Aramaic oral tradition or vorlage of Jesus' sayings? It could have all been invented out of thin air in Greek.
