It's a Small World After All

Major Archibald Butt

Despite his unfortunate name, Archibald Butt lived a distinguished life. Born in war-torn Georgia just a few months after the end of the Civil War in 1865, Archie’s uncle was General William Boggs, a Confederate general noted for his defense of Savannah, Georgia, where a fort was named after him.

The Butts were a prominent family in Augusta, Georgia, in the antebellum days preceding the Civil War, but the war cost the family its place in society and by the time young Archie was fourteen, his father died and he was forced to take odd jobs around town to support his mother and siblings.

Heading off to college at age eighteen, he graduated in 1888 and began work as a journalist. He first worked for the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, before transitioning to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a congressional reporter for several southern newspapers. By the late 1890’s, his connections in Washington allowed him to become the secretary to Matt Ransom, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico. Ransom had been a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate army and a veteran of Antietam.

In 1898, when the Spanish-American war began, Archie joined the army as a lieutenant, serving in the Philippines from 1900 to 1904. During his tour of duty there, he took part in the founding of the Military Order of the Caribao, a social organization for military personnel that is still around today and has counted among its ranks people like former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former NASA chairman Sean O’Keefe.

In 1906, Archie was sent to Cuba by President Roosevelt, and two years later he returned to Washington to serve as Roosevelt’s chief military aide. He continued this position under the following president, William Howard Taft, attaining the rank of Major in 1911. During his time serving these two presidents, he wrote numerous letters to his sister in California. These letters are still around today and have proven invaluable to historians for their insights into the private side of the Roosevelt and Taft presidencies.

In the picture below, Archie is standing in uniform to the far left, with President Taft at center, flanked by two British ambassadors.

In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt was considering another run at the presidency, running against Taft, and Archie felt torn between loyalties to the two men. At President Taft’s insistence, Archie decided to take a well-deserved overseas vacation in the spring of that year, in order to recuperate and prepare for the coming election. He took a 6-week trip to Europe, which included delivering a personal message to Pope Pius X from President Taft.

In 1910, Archie had accompanied the president when Taft famously threw out the first pitch of that year’s baseball season for the Washington Senators. Archie again accompanied the president in 1911. In 1912, he was due to return from Europe just in time to accompany Taft a third time to Washington’s Griffith Stadium.

He never made it.

And neither did President Taft. The Vice-President, James Sherman, went in the president’s stead.

Taft was too distraught with grief.

Walter Douglas

Born in Iowa 1861, Walter Douglas was a first generation American, born to a Scottish father and Irish mother. Attending school at the prestigious Shattuck Military Academy in Fairbault, Minnesota, Walter later became a successful businessman, working in the mill industry that would become a hallmark of Minnesota infrastructure. In this endeavor, he followed in his father’s footsteps. His father, George Douglas, owned a large cereal mill in Iowa that, in 1901, would merge with several other grain companies to form the Quaker Oats Company.

After starting several businesses with his brother that grew to great success, and then selling them for windfall amounts, Walter became a partner in a large grain company in Minneapolis in 1899. In that same year, his first wife died, leaving him a widower with two young sons. He remarried in 1907.

In time, he became a well-known businessman in Minneapolis, serving on the boards of several large companies, including his father’s Quaker Oats Company, Empire Elevator Company, and the First National Bank of Minneapolis.

At the age of 50, on January 1, 1912, Walter retired a millionaire. With the children now grown, and a new wife at his side, he wintered in Europe, where he and his wife spent three months finding swank furnishings for their new retirement villa in Lake Minnetonka, Minnesota.

It must have been a magical three months, knowing years of hard work were behind him, and knowing he had an easy and fabulously wealthy retirement ahead.

But he never made it to Lake Minnetonka.

His wife returned there alone.

Father Thomas Byles

Thomas Byles was born in Leeds in 1870, the eldest of seven children to a Congregationalist minister and his wife. Young Thomas showed signs of intellectual curiosity and advancement from a young age, and ultimately graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1894 with a degree in theology, having served as the vice-president of the school’s elite debating society.

While at Oxford, Thomas had converted to Roman Catholicism, and for several years after he attained his degree, he taught at a Catholic boys’ school in Hertfordshire, where he published a book on Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians.

In 1899, Thomas traveled to Rome to study for the priesthood at Gregorian University. Once ordained, he was assigned to St. Helen’s Parish in Essex, where he served starting in 1905.

During his many years of study and travel, a number of his siblings had left England for the United States. In early 1912, his younger brother, William, asked him to come to New York to officiate at his wedding. Thomas readily agreed.

But Thomas never made it to New York.

Another clergyman officiated at William’s wedding.

Jacques Futrelle

Despite his French name, Jacques Futrelle was an American, born in Georgia in 1875. An intellectual and a brilliantly gifted writer, Futrelle attended a series of public and private schools and also learned French and other liberal arts basics from his father, a professor at an Atlanta college.

At the age of 18, Futrelle got his first writing job, working for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he would eventually establish that newspaper’s sports department. From there, his gifts quickly earned him ever increasing notability. He worked for the New York Herald and later the Boston Post.

In 1902, Futrelle moved from journalism into theater, managing a theatrical company in Virginia and splitting his time between production and acting.

In 1904, Futrelle went back into journalism, taking a position with William Randolph Hearst’s Boston American. While writing for Boston American, Futrelle published a serialized novel called The Problem of Cell 13. This book featured as its detective Professor Augustus Van Dusen, who would go on to appear in more than 40 of Futrelle’s short stories. Van Dusen became a famous literary character, well-known for his uncompromising use of logic to solve crimes. The character would later inspire Agatha Christie’s work.

Thanks to the success of the Professor Van Dusen short stories, Futrelle quit his job at Boston American in 1906 to pursue writing full time. He and his wife and their two children moved to a sprawling home called The Stepping Stones in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, on the wind-swept coast of Cape Cod Bay. There, Futrelle wrote seven novels and two short story collections, all of which helped solidify his fame as an emerging mystery writer.

In the spring of 1912, Jacque and his wife traveled to Europe for a 3-week vacation, which culminated with his 37th birthday party in London. On returning home, Jacque expected to publish his latest novel, My Lady’s Garter.

The novel was published, but Jacques didn’t make it home to see it in print.

His wife wrote the book’s dedication.

Michel Navratil

Born poor in Slovakia in 1880, Michel later moved to Hungary and finally Nice, France, where he became a tailor in 1902.

In 1907, he married an Italian woman in London, Marcelle Caretto, and the couple had two boys. Within a few years, however, things began to get rough for the Navratil family. Michel’s business began to fail and he discovered that his wife of five years was having an affair. In early 1912, the couple separated, with his wife gaining custody of the children. Michel was devastated by this.

Granted visitation for Easter that year, Michel was due to meet his estranged wife in Nice so she could pick the boys up. When she arrived at Michel’s house, no one was there and the place looked abandoned.

Michel had taken the boys to London, where they were bunked at the Charing Cross Hotel. His plan was to take the boys with him to America and begin a new life.

The boys arrived in New York as orphans.

Mauritz Adahl

Born in Sweden in 1881, Mauritz grew up in a family of laborers, learning the trade of carpentry and take odd jobs around Sweden during his youth. In 1903, he immigrated to America in hopes of making more money and providing better for his family. In 1906, his fiancé, Emelie, arrived and the two were married in 1907. Two daughters came later, in 1908 and 1910.

Mauritz was finding moderate work as a carpenter and providing a modest living for his family, but his wife began to feel homesick. She returned to Sweden for an extended stay in 1911, and when Mauritz’s father died later the same year, he followed her. Arriving for Christmas, he stayed for several months to help his mother in the wake of his father’s death.

Mauritz’s wife, Emelie, had decided to stay in Sweden for good with the children, but Mauritz intended to return to America to continue working for a few more years so the family could build a home on a piece of property they had purchased in the town of Asarum.

Mauritz never made it back to America, and Emelie and her children never got their dream home.



Irene Colvin

Irene Colvin was born in Utah in the early 1880’s, the daughter of a Mormon bishop. A typical 19th century Mormon housewife, she married a man named Walter Corbett and had three children.

In 1911, moved to enter into the medical field, she traveled to London to study nursing at a Mormon mission, leaving her children behind to stay with her parents. She planned on returning in the spring with several Mormon elders.

She never arrived home.


CONCLUSION

On April 10, 1912, the R.M.S. Titanic sailed from Southampton, England, with 2200 passengers and crew. On the night of April 14, the ship struck an iceberg and sank. Only 700 people survived, most of them women and children from among the 1st and 2nd class passengers.

Millvina Dean, the youngest passenger on the Titanic at nine weeks old, was also the last Titanic survivor to die. She died just last year, May 31, 2009, at the age of 97.

Luke the Evangelist

In Church tradition, the Gospel of Luke (GoL), together with Acts of the Apostles, are two books widely believed to have been written by the same person, a man Church tradition has called Luke the Evangelist (hence, of course, the Gospel bearing his name). This same Church tradition tells us that Luke was both a doctor and a Gentile, meaning that his two volumes, GoL and Acts, are the only books in the New Testament written by a non-Jew. This is more significant than one might suspect at first glance. There are 27 books in the New Testament, so two books might not seem like so much, but in fact those two books are among the longest in the New Testament, and thus make up something like 25% of the entire canon. That makes the author of GoL and Acts the most prolific of the New Testament authors, including Paul (and that’s even assuming that Paul wrote all the letters attributed to him, which is doubted by the majority of scholars).

So as the author of a full one-quarter of the Christian scriptures, the question “Who was Luke?” is an important one for Christians.

The short answer to that question, unfortunately, is that we know hardly anything about Luke, and in fact there are many good reasons to doubt that the historical person known as “Luke the Evangelist” had anything to do with writing either text.

In tackling the question of authorship in regards to GoL and Acts, there are three important questions to ask. First, were GoL and Acts written by the same person? If so, was that person a physician named Luke, a companion of Paul? And finally, was that person also a Gentile?

WERE GoL AND ACTS WRITTEN BY THE SAME PERSON?

All the available evidence suggests strongly that Church tradition is correct in saying GoL and Acts were written by the same individual. The most compelling reason to accept this is that the author himself says as much. Consider the prologues to both GoL and Acts:

Gospel of Luke: “I…write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.”

Acts: “In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught…”

Both books are addressed to someone named “Theophilus” and the opening paragraph of Acts makes it clear that Acts is a sort of second volume to the story begun in the Gospel of Luke. (Theophilus, by the way, may have been an individual, or it may have been a euphemism meant to refer to any Christian reader, since “Theophilus” literally means “Friend of God” and was routinely used in the 1st century as an honorary title rather than an individual name.)

Of course, just because a writer claims that his present book is a continuation of a former book doesn’t mean it’s true. We know that Christian history, after all, is rife with what are called “pseudonymous writers” – that is, scribes writing in other people’s names. Be that as it may, the linguistic characteristics of GoL and Acts – writing style, grammar, word usage – indicate strongly that, in fact, both books were written by the same person. Furthermore, the general theological thrust of the books is similar, again suggesting that we are dealing with a single writer.

WAS LUKE A PHYSICIAN AND COMPANION OF PAUL?

This question can be asked more pointedly like this: “Was the author of GoL and Acts the man known as Luke the Physician in the letters of Paul?”

A man named Luke is mentioned in three letters attributed to Paul the apostle – Philemon, Colossians, and 2 Timothy. In Philemon and Colossians, Luke is mentioned as one of the people with Paul who “sends greetings” to the recipients. In 2 Timothy, which is written as a personal letter from Paul to Timothy, Paul mentions in passing that “only Luke is with me.”

Thus, Luke appears to have been one of Paul’s companions. In Colossians, Paul mentions specifically that Luke is a “beloved doctor,” which has lead, quite obviously, to the conclusion that Luke was a physician, and also has led many to suggest that Luke must therefore have been Paul’s personal doctor.

There are at least two major problems here, however. The first problem is the most obvious: just because Paul had a companion named Luke doesn’t mean this person wrote the Gospel of Luke and Acts. Certainly nothing in the letters of Paul suggests this, nor is there any indication in GoL and Acts about the identity of the author (those books mention the recipient, Theophilus, as we saw above, but make no mention of the author).

So where did the connection to Luke the Companion of Paul come from? Quite simply, it comes from Church tradition, a tradition that first begins appearing in the historical record near the end of the 2nd century. Does that mean the tradition didn’t begin until the late 2nd century? Not necessarily, but we simply cannot know with any kind of certainty when the tradition began. We know by the end of the 2nd century, many Christian groups were connecting GoL and Acts to Luke the Companion of Paul. But we don’t know if that tradition went all the way back to the actual time of composition, or if it was simply an “emerging” tradition – someone was trying to figure out who wrote it, and decided Luke the Companion of Paul was the best choice.

It is significant to point out that many early manuscripts of GoL do not use Luke’s name in the title. While that’s not a “silver bullet” argument against Lukan tradition, it does seem to indicate that the tradition was not known in certain areas of Christendom until much later.

Those who argue that Luke the Companion of Paul wrote GoL and Acts can point to a number of arguments. First, roughly 66% – or two-thirds – of Acts centers on the life of Paul. Paul is the main figure in that text. This would seem to indicate that the writer was especially partial to Paul – thus probably a follower or companion.

Second, there is a portion of Paul’s story in Acts were the writer suddenly, and seemingly inexplicably, switches into a first-person narrative. Instead of “they” and “them,” it suddenly becomes “we” and “us.” A few paragraphs later, the narrative switches back to third-person again, just as abruptly. This actually happens several times throughout the narrative. This occasional switching into first-person has been seen as evidence that, in fact, GoL and Acts were written by a companion of Paul – thus leading the writer to write in the first-person whenever he was actually present during an event he was describing.

This seems to make sense on the surface, and certainly seems to suggest strongly that the Lukan tradition must have a basis in reality – whether it was Luke or not is up for debate, but it seems that these books must at least have been written by a companion of Paul. There is one problem, however. This problem involves literary techniques frequently employed in the ancient world by Greek writers. In Greek literature, it was common for a writer to switch into the first-person when narrating stories involving sea voyages. This may seem odd to our modern literary sensibilities, but it was a well-established poetic technique among Greek writers of the ancient world.

If you read the book of Acts, you’ll find that every time the perspective switches into first-person, the narrative centers on a sea voyage. In fact, every sea voyage discussed in Acts is written in first-person.

Thus, the first-person narratives of Acts may not, in fact, indicate any implication on the part of the writer that he was there himself – that he was among Paul’s companions in these scenes. The writer may simply have been using a tried and true Greek literary technique.

The second major problem regarding the character of Luke from the letters of Paul is that only one of those letters – Philemon – is one of the so-called “undisputed” letters of Paul. Among New Testament scholars, there is wide agreement that at least seven of the thirteen letters attributed to Paul actually came from the historical Paul. Philemon is among these. Three others, however, are widely debated, with some scholars accepting Pauline authorship, and others rejecting it. Colossians falls into this category. Furthermore, there are an addition three letters attributed to Paul on which there is wide consensus that the historical Paul, in fact, did not write the letters, and 2 Timothy is one of these.

Since Luke is mentioned in Philemon, we can be fairly confident that Paul did, in fact, have a companion named Luke (though that tells us nothing, of course, about whether this Luke wrote GoL and Acts). However, the designation of Luke as a physician comes from Colossians – one of the disputed letters. If Colossians was indeed pseudonymous, is there any reason to suppose that its personal data about Paul’s life (such as commenting that his companion Luke was a doctor) can be trusted as historically accurate? Maybe, but also maybe not. In either case, it casts some doubt on the supposition that the author of GoL and Acts was a physician.

WAS LUKE A GENTILE?

Putting aside the questions about whether Luke the Companion of Paul actually wrote the books attributed to him and whether or not this Luke was actually a physician, we move on to the issue of whether GoL and Acts were written by a Gentile.

That these two books were Gentile-authored has been an assumption on the part of scholars and theologians for centuries. But that assumption is primarily based on the presupposition that Luke the Companion of Paul was the author of these books. If he wasn’t, then the remaining discussion is moot. For now, then, we’ll assume that Luke the Companion of Paul wrote GoL and Acts.

Why is Luke called a Gentile? The primary reason is rather convoluted, but it involves an interpretative reading of Paul’s greetings in the book of Colossians. Recall that many scholars doubt Colossians was actually written by Paul. So again, for the moment, we will presuppose that Colossians was, in fact, an authentic letter of Paul.

In Colossians, as we saw above, Paul mentions that Luke is a “beloved physician” and that he sends his greetings to the Christians at Colossae. Prior to this, however, he had mentioned a few other companions, namely Tychicus, Onesimus, Aristarchus, Mark, and Jesus (no, not that Jesus). After mentioning these people, he notes that “these are the only Jews among my co-workers for the kingdom of God.” After this, he names several more people, including Luke. This, therefore, has led to the assumption that Luke, and the others mentioned with him, were Gentiles.

This may seem like an opened and closed case. Luke the physician was a Gentile, according to Colossians. But there is one major issue. Despite the fact that many modern English translations have Paul explicitly say that “these are the only Jews among my co-workers for the kingdom of God,” Paul doesn’t actually use the word “Jew.” Instead, he uses a euphemism that translates to “those of the circumcision.” This is typically a phrase that refers in general to Jews, but more specifically to people who follow Jewish purity laws. A Gentile convert, for instance, would have been “of the circumcision,” even though he wasn’t ethnically Jewish. In the same way, someone could be ethnically Jewish but not be part of the “circumcision crowd” because they didn’t follow Jewish law. Paul himself would be among this group, because he gave up adherence to the Torah.

In the book of Romans, Paul makes his views clear: “Circumcision indeed is of value if you obey the [Jewish purity] law; but if you break the law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision.” He goes on to say: “For a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. Rather, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart – it is spiritual and not literal.”

In other words, in Paul’s view, whether a person is ethnically Jewish (that is, physically circumcised) or not is irrelevant. What makes a person Jewish is that they follow Jewish purity rituals.

In light of this, it is certainly possible that Paul never meant to imply that Luke, and the others listed with him, where actually Gentiles. He may simply have meant that Luke and the others had – like Paul himself – given up adherence to Jewish law, and were thus no longer part of the circumcision crowd. Still ethnically Jewish, but no longer Jews at heart.

The point, of course, is this: the book of Colossians, despite surface appearances, does not explicitly and unquestionably assert that Luke was a Gentile. That may not be what the passage is saying at all. In the end, we can’t know for sure. But if that’s not what the passage was saying, then there is certainly no reason to assume the writer of GoL and Acts was a Gentile.

Some supporters of Lukan tradition will say that even without the evidence of Colossians, GoL and Acts themselves give indication that the writer was a Gentile. The Gospel of Luke, for instance, seems clearly to have been written for a Gentile audience, and this is widely recognized among scholars. However, Mark and John were both written for Gentile audiences too, and no one supposes that those writers were Gentiles themselves. Furthermore, if Luke was a Gentile, he demonstrates a remarkable understanding and familiarity with Jewish customs that one would not expect of a 1st century Gentile from Roman Asia Minor, far removed from the Jewish homeland.

CONCLUSION

There is no question that a reasonable argument can be made to support the Church tradition of Lukan authorship. I want to make this clear, lest I be seen as simply trying to buck the trend for the sheer joy of it. It’s possible that Luke the Companion of Paul wrote GoL and Acts, and it’s possible that this person was a physician and a Gentile. It is not outside the realm of historical plausibility.

However, there are so many question marks in this tradition that I think scholars and theologians should take more care when asserting this conclusion. We do not know when, or why, the tradition of Lukan authorship first arose. We know it was there by the end of the 2nd century, but we have no knowledge of whether it began at composition, or arose later as leaders in the Church attempted to attach familiar and authoritative names to all the various texts floating around the emerging Christian world. It does not take a great leap of faith, nor does it constitute unusual criticism, to suggest that Church tradition might have gotten it wrong when it attached Luke the Companion of Paul to the Gospel of Luke and Acts.

Furthermore, as illustrated above, there are a number of question marks about the details of who Luke was – physician, Gentile, etc. The letter of Colossians, which gives us this information, has a disputed authorship, with some insisting it is authentically from Paul and others insisting it is not. If Paul didn’t write it, there is good reason for doubting its historical accuracy when calling Luke a physician (or a Gentile, for that matter). Furthermore, whether Paul wrote it or not, it is not entirely clear that the author intended to imply that Luke was a Gentile. The implication may have been that Luke, like Paul, was an ethnic Jew who had given up Jewish purity customs. Ultimately, it’s impossible to say for sure, but if the writer of GoL and Acts was a Gentile, he had a remarkably intimate knowledge of Jewish history, traditions, customs, scriptures, theology, and eschatology. It’s hard to imagine that a 1st century Gentile who did not live in the Jewish homeland (Church tradition says Luke came from Troas, in Asia Minor) could possibly have known Judaism so thoroughly and intimately.

Here’s what I think the most likely scenario is. We don’t know who wrote the Gospel of Luke and Acts. It was not a man named Luke. It was not someone who was a doctor. It was not someone who had accompanied Paul on missionary journeys, nor was it someone who probably even knew the historical Paul. Instead, the writer was probably a Jew who lived in one of the cities where Paul had founded a Christian congregation decades earlier (perhaps Ephesus). At some point he had become involved with this congregation, converting ultimately to Christianity. He knew Jewish history and theology so well because he was a Jew. He had a special affinity for Paul’s story because he was a member of a congregation founded by Paul (though, as I said, he probably never knew Paul).

I use a lot of “probably’s” there, and that was done on purpose. Any of those suggestions could be wrong. It may be that the writer did, in fact, know the historical Paul, having been a member of the congregation during Paul’s life. It may be that the writer was, in fact, a Gentile, though if that is true, I think it is likely that he was what many Jewish writers of the 1st century called a “God-fearer.” The God-fearers were Gentiles who did not convert to Judaism (that is, they did not become circumcised), but they had an affinity for Jewish customs and religious traditions, and they were generally looked upon kindly by Jews. The Jews considered them allies, as it were. They were essentially doing in the 1st century what a lot of folks still do today – engaging in buffet-style religion. They were taking the best of all the available religions (in this case, Roman paganism and Judaism) and combining them into a highly personal faith system. They didn’t care much for the pagan gods of Rome and liked the idea of Judaism’s monotheism, but they certainly had no intention of circumcising themselves and sticking to all the difficult purity laws of the Jewish Torah. Instead they worshipped a single God, perhaps took part in Jewish holidays, but also no doubt celebrated pagan holidays, and probably still occasionally burned incense in pagan temples and paid their homage to the emperor. This, of course, made them prime targets for Christian evangelists in the 1st century – they were already nearly halfway there. They liked Judaism’s God and Judaism’s traditions, but they weren’t Jews by birth, had no need for Jewish purity rituals, and likely found Christianity’s easy message of faith and grace quite palatable. Scholar J.D. Crossan, in fact, has argued quite well that Paul’s missionary journeys primarily consisted of converting these “God-fearers” to Christianity rather true Jews or true Pagans.

It’s noteworthy to mention that the book of Acts mentions these “God-fearers” more than a dozen times. It may just be that the writer of GoL and Acts was one of them. I still think it’s more likely, however, that he was a true Jew who became a Jewish-Christian.

In any case, all of these things should cause us to take a bit more care when assuming that the Gospel of Luke, or the book of Acts, was necessarily written by a Gentile, a doctor, or a companion of Paul. Maybe all those things are right. More than likely, however, they are not.

The Bible and the Afterlife

Perhaps no topic in human consciousness has received quite as much “publicity” over the millennia as the concept of life after death. It has been the subject of countless books, films, and theatrical productions. It is part of the core of just about every religion in history. “What happens when you die?” is a question that all human beings ultimately have to ask and search out answers to.

If you go to Google and type in the phrase “what happens,” before you’ve even finished typing the second word, Google populates a list of possible searches, and the first one (and thus, most popular) is “what happens when you die” (the second option, humorously enough, is “what happens when you lose your virginity”).

Google returns about 12.5 million topics on “what happens when you die” (sadly, only about a quarter of a million on virginity). On “afterlife,” the return is about 6.2 million. For “life after death,” the number soars to 55.4 million.

As Internet search engines attest, the afterlife is a popular topic indeed.

Like most religions, Christianity has deeply-entrenched traditions on life after death. For Christianity, in fact, life after death is at the very core of its entire theology – the belief that because Jesus died for our sins and was raised on the third day, we can be forgiven of our sins and be raised to eternal life as well. While it’s true that many branches and forms of Christianity may or may not emphasize this aspect of Christian tradition, there can be no question that it was a primary characteristic of the earliest Christian church, reflected in the New Testament.

In my experience, it seems that most Christians (I might even be inclined to say “the vast majority of Christians”) believe that when you die, your soul goes to heaven. This is reflected in countless ways in society. When a loved one dies, for instance, we might talk about them looking down on us from heaven, or we might imagine them finally meeting God in heaven. Songs reflect this belief, such as MercyMe’s wildly popular song “I Can Only Imagine,” which pictures the singer’s reaction to arriving in heaven and seeing God face-to-face. We tell formulaic jokes about someone dying and going up to meet St. Peter at the gates of heaven.

Indeed, the idea of your spirit or soul going to heaven when you die is certainly one of the most common beliefs among Christians. I’m not even sure that I personally know any self-professed Christian who does not believe that when you die, your soul goes to heaven. This is a belief that I have personally held throughout my entire life. Even when I have struggled intellectually with my personal beliefs, I have never questioned that the basic concept on life after death is that you go to heaven when you die.

What, then, does the Biblical tradition have to tell us about life after death? Surely it supports this view? Many people may be surprised to discover that our modern conceptions of life after death have almost no parallels in the Biblical tradition. A few months ago, I wrote about misconceptions regarding Biblical content. I recognize now that I was remiss in not including a discussion of life after death in that essay. As I have studied this topic in recent weeks, I can only describe my reaction as “dumbfounded.” How has an idea become so deeply ingrained in Christian culture when it has no basis in the Biblical tradition, and is, in fact, contradicted by the Bible’s own theology on life after death? That analysis is beyond the scope of this essay, but I do want to look deeply at what the Bible itself says about life after death and human eternity.

JEWISH BACKGROUND

Before one can understand anything in the New Testament, one must have a contextual framework from Jewish tradition. The earliest Christians, after all, were Jews working within the structure of Judaism. So was Jesus. Thus, to understand what they were talking about, we have to understand first where they were coming from.

To put it simply, the ancient Jews of the Old Testament did not believe in life after death, at least not for the average person. The ancient Jews did not have a concept of a soul or a spirit separate from the human body. The idea of a soul unbound by “the flesh” of the body originated with the ancient Greeks – who came along after most of the books of the Old Testament were written.

The Jews weren’t unique in their beliefs that the soul and body were united as one. Prior to the Greek philosophical revolution, no ancient civilization imagined a soul separate from the body. The Egyptians, for instance, certainly believed in life after death, but it wasn’t the soul that lived forever, it was the whole body. That’s why they mummified themselves and buried themselves with all their earthly possessions – possessions their physical body would need on its journey through the afterlife.

For the Jews and other ancient “pre-Greek” civilizations, body and soul, “flesh” and “spirit,” were inextricable. One did not exist without the other. Thus, for an ancient Jew, the idea that the soul would leave the body upon death and go to heaven would have been foreign and nonsensical. “Soul” and “body” were words that could be used interchangeably because they meant the same thing – they referred to the whole person, not two disparate parts of a person.

The Jews were certainly familiar with Egyptian ideas about life after death. But like so many other theological beliefs that the Jews regarded as hallmarks of paganism, the Jews rejected the Egyptian concept of the afterlife. For the ancient Jews, when a person died, they didn’t go to heaven, hell, or any other divine plane of existence. Instead, they simply went to a place called sheol in Hebrew. That word translates into English as either “grave” or “pit.” Quite simply, when you died, you went into the ground.

This is evidenced throughout the Jewish scriptures.

From Genesis, chapter 3: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

From Job, chapter 7: “As the cloud fades and vanishes, so those who go down to the grave [sheol] do not come up; they return no more to their houses, nor do their places know them anymore.”

From Psalm, chapter 6: “For in death there is no remembrance of you; in the grave [sheol] who can give you praise?”

From Ecclesiastes, chapter 9: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in the grave [sheol], to which you are going.”

The word sheol appears no fewer than 65 times in the Old Testament. Sometimes it refers simply to Jews dying and going into the grave. Sometimes it is used polemically against Jewish enemies in a sense of threatening them with death. Sometimes it is used pleadingly when a person is asking God to rescue them from death and physical destruction (“O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me…you brought my soul up from the grave [sheol]” – Psalm 30:2-3a).

What is clear from the Old Testament is that when people die, they go into the ground. In Jewish tradition, only the greatest of the greats among prophets were given the blessing of going to heaven to be with God for eternity. Elijah being taken up to heaven in a whirlwind is a primary example, and note that in the Elijah story, Elijah doesn’t actually die – his still-living body is taken up to heaven. The reason for that is clear: if he had died, he would have been dead (in sheol) and therefore couldn’t have gone to heaven!

Despite this tradition within the most ancient forms of Judaism, the Jews did, of course, eventually develop an afterlife theology. As best as can be reconstructed from the available texts, this seems to have begun developing in widespread fashion in the middle of the 2nd century, B.C.E. It was during that era, around 160 B.C.E., that the Syrian king Antiochus IV Epiphanes laid siege to Jerusalem and began offering swine on the altar of God inside the Temple. This act was referred to in the book of Daniel (and later mentioned by Jesus in the Gospels) as the “desolating sacrilege” or, in the more poetic words of the King James, the “abomination of desolation.”

In response to this, the Jews revolted, led by a powerful Jewish family known to history as the Maccabees. They succeeded in defeating Antiochus and subsequently set up a Jewish dynasty known as the Hasmoneans, who ruled independently for the next 120 years. That dynasty ended only when Herod the Great came to power in Judea, but even Herod legitimized his own claim to the throne by marrying a Hasmonean princess.

It was during that time of upheaval, revolt, and war that the Jews seem to have begun developing afterlife theology on a widespread basis. Antiochus IV Epiphanes waged a campaign of terror and violence against the Jews. Jews were slaughtered by the thousands for refusing to worship the Greek gods. One story tells of two women who circumcised their children in the Jewish fashion and were punished by first having their children murdered, then parading the women through town with the children strapped to their breasts as though nursing, and ending with the killing of the women themselves by being thrown from the city wall. Another account says: “There was a massacre of young and old, a killing of women and children, a slaughter of virgins and infants. In the space of three days, eighty thousand were lost, forty thousand meeting a violent death, and the same number being sold into slavery” (2 Maccabees, chapter 5).

In the end, of course, the Jews were vindicated. The Maccabees overthrew the violent oppression of the Greco-Syrian Antiochus IV Epiphanes. But what about all those innocent martyrs who died during the occupation? Surely God could not just abandon them to the grave (sheol)?

Thus, the idea of a general resurrection was born in Jewish theology. God would right all the wrongs. God would perform what scholar J.D. Crossan calls “the Great Divine Cleanup” of the world. A great new prophet – called “messiah” or “son of humanity” in Jewish scriptures – would arise to lead the Jews into an eternal earthly kingdom of God’s divine justice; a kingdom of peace and equality opposed to the violent, oppressive kingdoms of the world. When this happened, part of that earthly transformation would include the resurrection of the dead – the vindication of the martyrs.

This resurrection would, by definition, be a bodily resurrection. The dead would physically rise from their graves into newness of life.

THE NEW TESTAMENT

The preceding is the historical context in which the writers of the New Testament, and Jesus himself, lived and worked. This was their religious and theological background.

Ultimately, they did not stray very far from it.

One criticism frequently aimed at the Bible is that it is inconsistent on a variety of theological topics. One topic, however, that the Bible is very consistent on is the topic academics call “eschatology.” That’s just a fancy word that refers to metaphysical ideas about the ultimate destiny of humankind and the end of the world.

In the Gospels, Jesus is frequently found discussing various eschatological topics. True to his Jewish context, Jesus sees the end of the world as God’s “Great Divine Cleanup.” For Jesus, however, this eschatological event has already begun. The kingdom of God – also called the kingdom of heaven – is already present here on the earth. In the Gospel of Matthew alone, there are no fewer than 31 references to Jesus’ vision of “the kingdom of heaven.” The first comes in Matthew’s third chapter, where John the Baptist says: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” In Matthew’s vision, it was Jesus who brought the reality of heaven’s kingdom to earth.

Outside of the Gospels, the various writers of the New Testament continued this vision of God’s kingdom here on earth, and they began to imagine God’s “Great Divine Cleanup” as being an action that would occur in two stages. The first stage had already happened. The kingdom of God had come with Jesus. Now, it is up to Christians to live within that kingdom by emulating Christ. The second stage would come when God consummated the kingdom – when God finished the work, as it were. Jesus would return in a Second Coming and the world would be transformed from a human world of violence and oppression into a Godly world of justice and equality.

This theology forms the entire basis of the book of Revelation, where Jesus – called “the Lamb” – defeats the powers of the world and inaugurates a “new Jerusalem,” which descends down to earth out of heaven. For the writer of Revelation, eternity is here on earth in a world transformed by God through Christ.

Part of this transformation includes the Jewish idea of the resurrection of the dead. Paul talks about this explicitly and in depth in the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished.” In other words, if Christ has not been raised, then neither will anyone else be raised. The dead are still dead. They have no hope. Paul goes on to say:

As all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power.

Christ was raised first, as the “first fruits” of the general resurrection. At his second coming (and not upon their own deaths), the dead in Christ will also be raised. After that, the end of time comes, when Jesus turns everything over to God.

Paul speaks explicitly about this in 1 Thessalonians as well. He starts off saying: “We do not want you to be uninformed…about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.”

Paul’s congregation in Thessaloniki was concerned about their members who had died. What would happen to them? Paul tells them that since they are Christians, they have a hope that others do not share. He goes on to say: “For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.”

In other words, God will save those who have died. They are not lost to the grave. But how exactly will this happen? Paul tells us.

For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first.

Thus, when Jesus returns at the Second Coming to consummate God’s kingdom on earth, the dead will rise first to meet him. This is the “hope for the dead” that Paul gave to the congregation at Thessaloniki. Paul’s hope wasn’t that the souls of the dead go to heaven. His vision was that the dead will be raised at Jesus’ Second Coming.

After the dead are raised, then, according to Paul, “we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.”

So the dead will rise first. Then those still living will meet Jesus in the air as he descends. Then all will live eternally with Christ on a transformed earth.

Some have read this passage to support the notion of eternity in heaven. Those still alive will be “caught up in the clouds” to meet Jesus “in the air.” Surely this implies an ascension into heaven? Yet Paul explicitly says that this will happen when Christ is “descending” to the earth. Christians are simply rising up to meet Jesus in the air, then to descend along with him to live on the divinely transformed earth.

This fits, in fact, with a known historical practice for receiving dignitaries. First, take note that cemeteries in the ancient world sat outside the city limits. Tuck that in the back of your mind.

In ancient Rome, when the emperor or some other important figure visited a city of the empire, the custom was for the population to exit the city walls and meet him on the road. That was proper etiquette. You didn’t sit inside the city waiting for the dignitary to arrive; you met him outside.

Thus, a visiting dignitary to a Roman city would first be greeted by the dead (the cemeteries were outside the city walls), then by the population who came out to greet him on the road. Following that, everyone, dignitary and populace, would continue back into the city.

This is the ancient model Paul surely had in mind when he described Jesus’ Second Coming to the Thessalonians. As Jesus descended in his Second Coming, he would first be met by the dead. Then the living would rise (leave the earth/city walls) to meet him. Then all would return to consummate God’s kingdom.

All of this is perfectly in line with Jewish theology about the “Great Divine Cleanup” and the general resurrection. The dead are dead. In death, they await resurrection at the end of time when God will right all the wrongs.

CONCLUSION

The point in all this, by now, should be fairly clear. The Bible makes clear and explicit its ideas about life after death. The afterlife does not being when you die. When you die, you are simply dead. In the grave (sheol). Dust to dust. The afterlife begins when God, through Jesus, consummates the “Great Divine Cleanup” of the world, a process that has already begun through Jesus’ earthly life. It will be finished when Jesus returns in the Second Coming to rule over God’s transformed earth, and it is at that time that the dead will be raised and thus the “afterlife” will begin for those who have died.

There is simply nothing in all of the Biblical tradition, both Jewish scriptures and Christian scriptures, to indicate that souls ascend to heaven upon the death of the body. The dead are dead. Their hope is in Jesus’ Second Coming and the inauguration of the general resurrection. This is a consistent and explicit theology throughout the New Testament, and consistent with the Jewish context of the Old Testament.

The idea that the soul goes to heaven (or some other plane of existence) upon death, while the body decays in the earthly ground, is certainly a perfectly valid metaphysical belief. A lot of people across many religions share it. In fact, it may very well be 100% true.

But when a Christian accepts this belief, they do so at the expense, and even in contradiction of, the clear theology of afterlife found in the Biblical tradition.

Wyatt Earp: Lawman

Perhaps the most famous name from the “Old West,” and certainly a legendary figure from American folklore, Wyatt Earp lived a life that, by all accounts, was worthy of the legends that later rose up around him.

Born in rural northwestern Illinois in 1848 and named for his father’s commander in the Mexican-American War – which had just ended – Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp came into the world in a an era that is largely forgotten in American history. Perhaps the only event from the 1840’s that still floats in the public consciousness is the California Gold Rush, which is typically associated with 1849. It actually began in 1848, however, when gold was discovered near Sutter’s Mill in January of that year – two months before Wyatt Earp was born. By the summer of his infancy, it was in full swing.

Born into that gold rush environment, it is perhaps little wonder that Earp himself grew to be a man motivated by wanderlust, never able to settle in one place, and in fact frequently driven to new frontiers by the promise of gold and mineral riches.

Much of that tendency, however, must surely have come from his own erratic upbringing.

In 1849, when Wyatt was just a toddler, the family moved from Illinois to a large farm near Pella, Iowa. In 1856, they left the farm and returned to Monmouth. Wyatt’s father, Nicholas Earp, worked as a constable during this second stay in Monmouth, but was then forced to leave again after a conviction for bootlegging.

The family returned to Pella, Iowa, where they lived during the 1860’s and the Civil War. Wyatt’s two older brothers, James and Virgil, and his older half-brother, Newton, all went off to fight, with James (pictured below) returning wounded in 1863. Wyatt, old enough to want to fight, but too young to do it legally, was left to tend the farm in the absence of his older brothers.

The family’s second stint in Iowa did not last long. In 1864, the Earps joined up with a California-bound wagon train. Arriving in late summer of that year, they settled in San Bernadino, in extreme southern California. By now the family had swelled to nine members – Wyatt and his parents, Wyatt’s half brother Newton (who was Nicolas Earp’s son from a previous marriage from which Nicolas had been widowed), Newton’s wife, Wyatt’s older brothers James and Virgil, Wyatt’s younger brothers Morgan and Warren, and the baby of the family, Adelia, who was about three years old when the family headed west.

Adelia was the only daughter of the Earp clan who survived childhood. Nicolas Earp had a daughter with his first wife who died at the age of ten months. A second daughter, two years old when Wyatt was born, died at age nine when the family was in Monmouth. A third daughter, born when Wyatt was about ten years old, died as a toddler in 1861.

One can’t help but wonder if daughters in the Earp family failed to receive the kind of love, care, and attention that was no doubt lavished on the boys – all of whom lived well into adulthood.

In any case, the Earp family stayed in California – as per the established pattern – for only a few years, returning eastward and settling in Lamar, Missouri in 1868. By now Wyatt was twenty years old. While in California, he had worked as a teamster, running cargo throughout southern California. Now in Missouri, Wyatt got work as a constable in Lamar, working close with his father, who had become the town’s justice of the peace.

This was Wyatt’s first job as a lawman.

The following year, in 1870, Wyatt Earp married Urilla Sutherland, a local girl from Lamar. They purchased a house in August of that year, but Urilla apparently died a short time later, though the cause of her death, as well as the exact date, is uncertain. What is known is that Wyatt sold the house in November, making a profit of twenty-five dollars. Urilla had presumably died shortly before Wyatt enacted this transaction.

If 1870 had been a year of joy followed by painful loss for Wyatt Earp, things got even worse in 1871. As constable of Lamar, one of Earp’s duties was to collect fees for various government-issued licenses. These fees were earmarked to help pay for local schools. When some of the money came up missing, the county filed a lawsuit against Constable Earp for stealing the money. This no doubt caused quite a stir in the little town of Lamar.

Two weeks later, perhaps buoyed by the county’s lawsuit against Earp, a townsperson named James Cromwell filed his own suit against Earp. Cromwell had been involved in an earlier and unrelated lawsuit, which had resulted in a small judgment against him. The money he was required to pay to satisfy that judgment was collected by Wyatt Earp in his capacity as constable. The legal paperwork for this transaction, filed by Earp, showed that Cromwell still owed $38 dollars. The court, therefore, seized Cromwell’s lawn mower and sold it to satisfy the remainder of the judgment. Cromwell, however, insisted he had already paid the full amount and that Earp had falsified the documents and taken the extra money for himself. His suit, therefore, alleged not only that Earp had stolen money and falsified documents, but also demanded full repayment from Earp for the cost of the lawn mower.

From there, things continued to go downhill quickly for Earp. Only a few days later, in early April, Earp and two other men, Ed Kennedy and John Shown, were arrested for stealing horses from a local farmer. The wife of John Shown claimed that Earp and Kennedy had gotten her husband drunk and then coerced him into abetting them with the crime. Earp was jailed throughout much of April, but was released after posting a $500 bail.

A short time later, with two lawsuits and a serious criminal charge pending against him (horse theft in the 1870’s was similar to car theft today), Wyatt Earp fled Missouri. Though a warrant was issued for his arrest, it seems that no serious efforts were ever made to apprehend him. One of the men charged in the horse theft ring – Ed Kennedy – was acquitted of any wrongdoing in the case, and the charges against Earp and Shown were eventually dropped, though Earp’s disappearance may have been one of the reasons for that.

In any case, Earp never returned to Missouri. In fact, exactly what he did for the next three years has been the subject of much speculation by historians. It is known that Earp left Missouri sometime in the summer of 1871. It is also known that he began working as a constable in Wichita, Kansas, in late 1874. It’s the period between those dates that has puzzled historians.

Movies and books have frequently depicted Earp heading into the Kansas prairies during this time to gamble and hunt buffalo and generally keep a low profile. This was first suggested by historian Stuart Lake in his 1931 biography of Wyatt Earp. This biography, billed as the only “authorized” biography of the famous lawman, has been criticized almost since the day of its publication for taking great liberties with Earp’s life. Lake did, in fact, have Earp’s blessing to write the book, and Lake even met with Earp and interviewed him extensively as part of his research. Earp, however, conveniently died before the book was published, leaving Lake with more or less free reign to invent whatever he wanted. Lake, of course, denied this to his dying day, but most historians agree that at least some of Lake’s material consists of exaggeration at best, and outright fabrication at worst. Earp’s sister-in-law, Allie Earp, called the book “a pack of lies.”

In any case, while it may be true that Earp spent time hunting buffalo in Kansas, it is now known that he eventually found his way to Illinois, settling down in the town of Peoria, only forty miles from Monmouth, where he had spent much of his childhood. Records in Peoria show that Earp was there by February of 1872, at best a few months after leaving Lamar, Missouri. His reason for going to Peoria is easy to pinpoint – his older brother Virgil (seen below) was working there as a saloonkeeper.

Earp, apparently, had not yet given up on a life of crime. In February, 1872, he was arrested with two other men and four women during a raid on a brothel in Peoria. According to city records, Earp was apparently residing there. One of the other men arrested in this raid was his brother, Morgan. They were tried and convicted for being in a “house of ill-fame” and fined twenty dollars. The courts in Peoria, of course, would have had no idea that Earp was wanted in Missouri.

Despite his conviction and fine, Earp was arrested two more times in 1872 on charges related to prostitution.

Wyatt Earp, apparently, was working as a pimp.

His third arrest came during a bust that actually made the local papers, and of the sixteen people arrested in that raid, Earp was given the largest fine. Newspaper reports of this bust referred to Earp by name and called him an “old offender” and dubbed him the “Peoria Bummer,” a reference to the fact that – aside from pimping – he didn’t have a real job.

After this third arrest, it appears that Earp may have finally started to get his life back in order. The unexpected death of his first wife, after only a few months of marriage, seems to have sent him spiraling into a phase of self-destruction that resulted first in professional misconduct and later much more serious criminal misconduct.

Be that as it may, in late 1872 after his third arrest for pimping, Earp left Peoria and the brothels behind, and this may be when he headed into the plains, taking up jobs hunting and skinning buffalo for the booming fur trade.

In late 1874, Wyatt Earp turned up in Wichita, Kansas, and was officially hired on as a police officer there in early 1875. It was there in Wichita that Earp began to make a name for himself. It seems apparent that whatever criminal misconduct he had been guilty of in the past, he now saw himself as a legitimate and honest officer of the law. In 1875, a local newspaper carried an article about Earp’s arrest of a drunk who was found to be carrying five hundred dollars. The man was kept in jail overnight, then paid his fine for public intoxication the next day and was sent on his way with his stash of money undisturbed. The newspaper commented that this illustrated the “integrity” of Wichita’s police force.

Clearly they had not heard of charges against Wyatt Earp for stealing money earmarked for schoolchildren, or falsifying documents related to civil judgments.

In 1876, Earp was fired from his job in Wichita after getting into a fistfight over a disagreement with a former marshal about hiring his brothers as police officers in town. Though the town council felt that the firing had been too hasty, and were prepared to discuss a new offer, Earp recognized that Wichita was losing prominence in the cattle trade and decided to move to Dodge City, which was a major hub of the Chisholm Trail.

It was in Dodge City, of course, where Wyatt Earp really made his name as a lawman. He served on the police force there off and on until 1878, though it appears that he spent much of 1876 and 1877 simply living there as a private citizen and traveling as a gambler. During those travels he may have gone as far north as the Dakotas and as far south as Texas. It was in Texas in 1877 that Earp briefly met Doc Holliday while gambling his way through the boomtowns.

By 1878, he was back on the police force in Dodge City and living with a woman named Mattie Blaylock, whom he appears to have met several years earlier.

She was a prostitute there, which indicates that Earp still had a propensity for sex-for-hire, though there is certainly no evidence that he was involved in any pimping after his time in Peoria (though he did get charged the minimum fine of one dollar for slapping a prostitute during a dispute in 1877).


















When Wyatt and Mattie left Dodge City 1878, they traveled to Las Vegas, where Wyatt hoped to make money as a card dealer. They didn’t stay long. He soon learned that his brothers James and Virgil had moved to Tombstone, Arizona, where James was tending bar and Virgil was working as a deputy U.S. marshal. Tombstone was a thriving town in the late 1870’s, and Wyatt and Mattie joined his brothers there in late 1879.

It quickly became a family affair. A few months after Wyatt’s arrival, his younger brothers, Morgan and Warren, both arrived with their wives.

Later that same year, Doc Holliday showed up in town, though it is unclear whether he came because he knew the Earps were there, or if the Earps actually asked him to come.

In any case, by this time, Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp had maintained and on-and-off friendship for some three years. After their first meeting in 1877, they had spent time together in both Dodge City and Las Vegas. One account from their time in Dodge City tells of Holliday saving Earp’s life during a barroom brawl when a cowboy pointed a gun at Earp’s back.

Holliday had grown up in the east, being given a classical education and earning a doctorate from a dental school in Pennsylvania (his dental school graduation picture is seen below).

Shortly after opening his first practice, however, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, something he almost certainly acquired from his mother, who had died from the disease a year or two earlier. His doctor’s advice was to move to the southwest, where the climate was drier.

Holliday took the doctor up on his advice. He set up a practice in Dallas, Texas, then later in nearby Denison, Texas. Within a few years, however, as his tubercular cough became more apparent, he found it difficult to keep patients. He began drinking whiskey to soothe his cough and gambling to help support himself financially. In time he found that he could make far more money playing cards than pulling teeth. He began traveling as a gambler and only doing dentistry on the side. His drinking increased. He began, by the necessity of his profession as a gambler, to carry guns. Because of his illness, he began developing a devil-may-care attitude about life, and this only fueled his movement away from his classical education and respectable career. By the time he arrived in Tombstone in 1879, his time has a dentist was already behind him and he was well-known as a gunman and gambler. His last known practice was in Dodge City in 1878 (where he advertised a money-back guarantee in the newspaper).

Contrary to popular assumption, Wyatt Earp did not spend much time working as a lawman in Tombstone. In the summer of 1880, he was named an “undersheriff” (essentially a sheriff’s deputy) to the Pima County sheriff, specifically in charge of Tombstone and the surrounding area. But that appointment did not last beyond the fall election of the same year.

Thus, outside of that roughly 3-month stint as undersheriff, Earp spent most of his time in Tombstone staking claims on silver mines and gambling for a living. His brother Virgil was the U.S. marshal assigned to the Tombstone area, and his younger brother Morgan worked as a deputy under Virgil, but Earp himself was primarily a professional gambler during this time, assisting his brothers only occasionally in a non-paid, temporarily-deputized capacity.

It was in this type of non-official capacity that he conducted himself during the so-called “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.”

The story of this famous gunfight, and all the circumstances leading up to it, is quite lengthy and convoluted, as are the circumstances that followed it. In short, it occurred because of building animosity between the Earps and their friend Doc Holliday, and a group of local ranchers known collectively as the “cowboys.” There were accusations of cattle theft and horse theft, backdoor deals for betraying friends to the authorities, accusations of involvement in stagecoach robberies, and a lot of veiled and not-so-veiled threats. The “cowboys” came to feel like the Earps were out to get them, and the Earps felt that their lives were threatened by these cowboys who were itching for a fight with local lawmen trying to keep the peace.  Ike Clanton, pictured below, was one of the prime players in the feud.

It culminated on October 26, 1881, when about 30 shots were fired at point-blank range in an alley between two buildings, backing up to the O.K. Corral. Virgil Earp took a gunshot to the leg, and Morgan (pictured below) was shot in the back.

Doc Holliday was hit in the hip, but his holster deflected the bullet, leaving only a bruise. Three cowboys – Frank and Tom McLaury, and Billy Clanton – were killed. Wyatt Earp was the only person involved in the fight who was not hit by a bullet.

The bodies of the dead cowboys were prominently displayed in town before burial in Tombstone's Boothill Cemetery.

Virgil and Morgan were not charged in the case because they were working in their professional capacity as lawmen. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, however, working in only a spur-of-the-moment “deputized” fashion, were brought up on charges of murder. Public sentiment was initially against them, following the testimony of cowboy friend Sheriff Johnny Behan (pictured below).

However, after a number of non-biased eyewitnesses gave testimony, and after Wyatt Earp himself testified in his defense, the justice of the peace determined that there was not enough evidence to warrant a jury trial. A grand jury later agreed with that decision and all charges against Earp and Holliday were dropped.

The story, however, was far from over. First, Virgil Earp was shot in the arm by a hidden assailant, and then Morgan Earp was assassinated a few months later while playing pool. These events led the Earp family to flee Arizona for California, where their parents were now living. Wyatt, on the other hand, traveled into the desert to hunt down all the associates of the “cowboys” that he could find, in a situation that has come to be called “Wyatt Earp’s Vendetta Ride.” He managed to kill two associates of the McLaurys and Clantons, then found and killed the veritable “leader” of the cowboy gang, a man named Curly Bill Brocious (pictured below).

Following this, Earp was, of course, forced to leave Arizona for good, as a charge of murder was leveled against him for the first vendetta killing. This, of course, was the second state Earp was never able to return to thanks to outstanding arrest warrants. Even after the Tombstone era of his life was over, he would run afoul of the law several more times, even doing jail time in the mid-1880’s for theft in California.

He continued to live “on the move” for the rest of his life, traveling throughout all the states of the west and even spending time again in Dodge City. He worked primarily as a professional gambler and saloonkeeper in various places, including several years in Alaska during the gold rush there, and supplemented his lifestyle trying to strike it rich with various mineral claims.

In 1882, when Wyatt had sent the rest of the family on to California, he had sent his common law wife, Mattie, along with them. She remained with the Earp family in California for several months, expecting a telegram from Wyatt calling her to come join him. The awaited telegram never came, and Mattie returned to Arizona on her own, where she went back into the prostitution trade. She committed suicide by overdosing on opium in 1888, still using Earp’s last name.

Earp, on the other hand, had replaced Mattie with a woman he knew from Tombstone named Josie Marcus.

Earp had first met Josie when she was the common law wife of his political adversary, Johnny Behan. Behan, evidently, didn’t care much for the concept of monogamy, and in 1881, Josie left Behan and began seeing Wyatt Earp. This caused enough of a stir in town that it was actually reported in the local papers.

Third time proved to be a charm for Wyatt Earp. He and Josie, though probably never legally married, remained a couple for the rest of their lives, and Josie appears to have been his partner in a number of gambling/saloon ventures that they undertook throughout the west.

Unfortunately, there is very little history from this era to analyze. Following the events of Tombstone, Earp seems to have been primarily interested in settling down and striking it rich. He lived mostly under the radar, rarely giving interviews even after he became famous, and more or less staying out of the way as his name became a brand in the early 20th century. There is some evidence that Josie had worked for a time as a prostitute, which would come as no shock considering Earp’s apparent tendency toward women of the night, and according to Earp’s biographer, Stuart Lake, their relationship was frequently rocky and unhappy. Lake’s depiction of their relationship, in fact, led to Josie’s attempt to stop the book’s publication, though she was unsuccessful in this endeavor. A few years later, she also tried to stop the filming of a movie based on the book, but was only able to keep Wyatt Earp’s name out of the movie’s title.

Earp himself died in 1929 at the age of 80. He and his wife were living in their Los Angeles condo at the time. Josie lived another 15 years, dying in 1944. Of the Earps of Tombstone, Virgil’s wife Allie outlived everyone, living through World War II before dying at the age of 98 in 1947.

In the end, for all his fame and legendary status, Wyatt Earp does not seem like a very likeable person. By all accounts, he was a hard and uncompromising man who never had a problem blurring the ethical line between law and outlaw. He was arrested numerous times in his life for various crimes ranging from petty to very serious. He incurred dozens of fines for civic mischief throughout his life (disturbing the peace, slapping a hooker, etc.), and frequently found himself involved in major disputes and feuds. He was tried for murder. He fled from a second murder charge. During his life, there were two different states he couldn’t enter because of outstanding arrest warrants.

When considering the situation in Tombstone and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, including the later “Vendetta Ride,” it seems clear that the victims in that situation were definitely “bad men” who were doing bad things. But that does not excuse taking the law into one’s own hands. And that seems to have been Wyatt Earp’s modus operandi throughout much of his life. If necessary, he was willing to cross the line and be judge, jury, and executioner. That may make for a great movie, and in many people’s minds it may make for a great hero, but in my opinion, it makes Wyatt Earp little better than the criminals he was pursuing.

A Poem

Just to shake things up a little bit, I'm going to post a poem that I wrote. This is the first poem I've written in quite a long time.

things my dad told me

the christmas bonus is a
silver-cloaked dagger
of the capitalist mentality

i’m gonna break that finger

your grandfather died today

look at that rock strata

you can do anything
you put your mind to

basketball is supposed to be
a finesse game

i’m gonna turn you over my knee

it’s not what you want that does you good,
it’s what you get

houston has the tallest building
in the world,
outside of a downtown area

cum is an abbreviation for the word
cummaconium
which is the milk babies drink
from their mother’s breast

eric davis is lazy

the gummi bears show
is for babies

men and women
do it for pleasure,
and because it feels good

Kentucky Wildcats Undefeated? No.

In November, shortly after the start of the college basketball season, I made a prediction that the UK Wildcats men's basketball team could potentially go undefeated.

At the time, they were 6-0, but had achieved that only after a few nail-biters against not-so-great teams, including a win over Miami of Ohio thanks only to a buzzer beater.

After that, UK went on to win all their non-conference games and their first four conference games, good enough to get them to #1 in the rankings and the only undefeated team in the nation, at 19-0. It was the best start a UK men's basketball team has had since the mid-1960's.

Unfortunately, about 30 hours after officially achieving that #1 ranking, they collapsed and lost to South Carolina, who was only 11-8 coming into the game (and had lost three in a row).

Despite my immense disappointment in losing so abjectly such a short time after finally achieving a #1 ranking, I am still fairly happy with how Kentucky has performed this year. When I predicted in November that they would go undefeated, I certainly recognized that the chances of that happening were extremely slim. At that time, I would have been pleased to know that they'd go on to win their first 19 games - certainly more than what most people, even the most optimistic, would have expected from such a young team (three of their five starters are freshman and they have no senior starters).

In that post, I said that for Kentucky to be great this year, they would need to start showing some signs of cohesion and team chemistry - something they showed very little of in those first six games. The Wildcats have done just that, and I believe that's the reason they didn't lose a game until last night. Interestingly, I think it's fair to say that in their loss last night, they looked very similar to how they looked in the first few games of the season - no cohesion, no chemistry. It's as if the pressure and prominence of being #1 caused them to regress. I was struck, in fact, by how they almost looked like they didn't even really want to be out there. They looked lethargic at times, like they somehow weren't in the mood to play ball. Clearly the media attention was getting to them.

I most definitely am not worried, however. They will rebound from this loss, like any good team does, and a loss or two (or three or four) certainly doesn't spell the end of their championship hopes.

I have to admit to a bit of personal disappointment too. In the last few weeks, a lot of people have been talking about UK going undefeated all year. That's to be expected when a team is 19-0 and are the only undefeated team left in college basketball. But in November, when I predicted an undefeated season, and laid out my argument why it was possible, there were most definitely not very many people talking about such things, or taking such talk very seriously. I have to admit the idea of looking prophetic appealed greatly to me - imagine the kind of exposure I might have been able to get if UK had gone on to an undefeated season? Bragging rights to the extreme, and all that.

Oh well. I'm not a prophet. But in any case, it was fun while it lasted.

Eddy's Story

Note: You'll notice rather quickly that this post is written quite differently than most of the things I write. In writing this account, I experimented with a narrative technique pioneered and made famous by Kurt Vonnegut. Readers familiar with Vonnegut's work will no doubt recognize the style, and will also no doubt recognize my efforts as a cheap imitation of that style. So it goes. Still, I chose to write the story like this in order to challenge myself by trying on a different set of literary clothes, and also as a sort of tribute to the genius of Mr. Vonnegut.

Also, for the faint of heart, please note that near the bottom of this post, I have posted a picture in black and white that is extremely gory.

This is a true story.

----------

Eddy was born in 1864.

Eddy, dressed like a girl, together with his proud parents

His father was famous and his grandmother was even more famous. She was known around the world. They even named an era after her. Eddy didn’t know that when he was born, though. To him, she was just the funny old lady who smelled.

Eddy was named after his grandfather, but Eddy never knew him; he was already worm food when Eddy was born. His grandfather had been pretty famous too, but only because he was married to Eddy’s grandmother. They put him on tobacco boxes.

Eddy was born two months early, which is really early. They thought he would die, but he didn’t. Sometimes babies born that early don’t die. This is why people don’t like late term abortions. It’s a real live baby in there, etc.

Look: Eddy and his brother Georgie were only a year apart. Because of that, they were close. Georgie was pretty smart, but Eddy was known as the dummy of the family. A teacher once called him “abnormally dormant.”

Eddy was abnormally dormant, as you can see in this photograph

Doctors and such who specialize in that sort of thing say being born at seven months gestation can cause learning disabilities, etc. Or maybe Eddy just had bad genes. Either way, his family was concerned about how dumb he was.

When he was thirteen, Eddie almost died. He got typhoid, which is caused by ingesting poop. Funnily enough, his grandfather, famous on tobacco boxes, had died from typhoid too. It probably came from bad water. Water in the 19th century often had poop in it. Eddy didn’t die though. He probably wished he had.

When Eddy was sixteen, he joined the navy. His family hoped it might give him some good structure, teach him a thing or two about life, etc. He got to sail all over the world. His brother Georgie was with him. They got tattoos together in Japan, which was a pretty popular thing for sailors to do back then.

When he was 18, Eddy went to college. He was still abnormally dormant, but he got into a prestigious school because his grandmother was famous. They didn’t make him take tests or anything. They just let him go to school there. One of his teachers was a homosexual poet, etc., who later lost his mind and starved himself to death at age 32.

A homosexual poet

When Eddy left college in the 1880’s, he joined the army. He pretty much hated the army, but he did like to play polo. So he joined the cavalry. They let him play a lot of polo, evidently.

Look: Eddy was probably gay. It may have started with the gay-poet-who-would-later-go-crazy-and-starve-to-death tutor, or he may have just been born that way. Doctors and such who specialize in that sort of thing say gay people are born gay. Pastors and such say that’s not true, etc.

In any case, Eddy had a good friend named Arthur. Arthur took care of Eddy’s horses, and maybe a few other things, etc. Arthur got in big trouble in 1889 when police found out that he was paying men to have sex with him. He had to go to France to keep from going to jail. Gay men like France, evidently.

Most people figured Eddy was paying men to have sex with him too.

Lucky for Eddy, his family was rich and powerful, and they kept Eddy from ever getting charged with the crime of homosexuality.

Homosexuality was a crime back then.

Eddy's family was so rich and powerful, they had a painting done of themselves. Eddy is the dandy on the far left.

Eddy decided to get away from the scandal by going to India. He feasted with maharajahs and rode elephants. He also shot a lot of animals with a high powered rifle. Like polo, he really enjoyed killing animals. He found it to be a lot of fun, etc.

While he was in India, he met a married lady and apparently had sex with her. Maybe he was trying to prove he wasn’t a homosexual. In any case, she claimed her son was Eddy’s love child. Eddy’s family said that was preposterous. She later went crazy and died.

By now it was 1890 and Eddy’s family decided it was high time he get settled down and marry. This would ensure that he had children, but it would also make everyone believe he wasn’t gay.

Because Eddy’s family was rich and powerful, they set him up with a rich lady from Eastern Europe. Her name was Alexandra, because all Eastern Europeans in the 19th century were named either Alexander or Alexandra, depending on their genitalia.

This person was Eastern European, and had a vagina, so her name was Alexandra

Eddy asked Alexandra to marry him, but she said no. She probably thought he was gay and abnormally dormant.

Eddy was irritated, but he shouldn’t have felt too bad. Alexandra later got what was coming to her in a bad, bad way.

Look: Alexandra dumped Eddy to marry a rich and powerful man named Nicholas. Nicholas later became the Tsar of All Russia (in Russia, they call their king a “tsar”). Nicholas was really unpopular though, and in 1917, hungry terrorists called Communists overthrew the country. They took Nicholas and Alexandra, and their five children, out into the woods and fired about a hundred bullets at them. One of the bullets tried to take up the same space as Alexandra’s head. It entered above her left ear and exited above her right ear, etc. Then they stabbed her a bunch of times, because it seemed the thing to do. She died.

She probably should have married Eddy.

In any case, Eddy next went after a French girl. Her name was Helene. But she was Roman Catholic and Eddy’s family was Protestant. And in Eddy’s family, you just flat out did not marry a Catholic, because Catholics were idol-worshippers.

Helene was an idol-worshipper, as evidenced by her hat

Helene apparently really, really liked Eddy, though. So she offered to become a Protestant. Eddy’s family thought this was fantastic. But Helene’s family was outraged. They were pretty sure Protestants were going to hell, and no daughter of their family was going to burn with pagans, infidels, witches, and Protestants.

So Eddy was left holding his bag. It’s no wonder he was visiting male brothels. Etc.

In his defense, Eddy doesn’t seem to have been put off too much by all this. Apparently he wasn’t terribly choosy in a wife. Which makes sense if he was a raging homosexual.

Eddy, a raging homosexual

In December of 1891, Eddy finally struck gold. A lady named Mary agreed to marry him. Everybody was really happy. Third time’s a charm and all that. His famous grandmother remarked that Mary was “charming, sensible, and pretty,” which is exactly what any good woman should be.

Under this dress, Mary is wearing sensible shoes

A month later, in January of 1892, Eddy got the flu.

He died.

Mary ended up marrying his brother. Such is life.

Everybody was pretty upset about Eddy dying. He was abnormally dormant, and he liked to have sex with men, but people were still pretty upset. Like all people who die suddenly, everyone pretended that all the bad things had never been said, and instead said nothing but good things about him. It was like that for Michael Jackson too. Guilt is a dirty, dirty thing. Etc.

Michael Jackson, a homosexual pedophile

Eddy had been dead for a long time when the first person said he was Jack the Ripper. Most people who knew about Eddy thought that was preposterous. Sort of like when he said he wanted to marry a Catholic.

Here’s how the theory went: Eddie was a pervert. He liked to have sex with men and women. Doctors and such who specialize in that sort of thing call those people “bisexual.”

Bisexual people have a flag. This is it.

We already know about Eddie and the male prostitutes. Eddie also liked to partake of an occasional bangers and mash with anonymous hookers in London’s Whitechapel district. After one particularly rousing session of sexual intercourse for money, his sperm mated with an ovum, causing a baby to be produced in a prostitute’s womb.

This was a bad thing. So Eddy killed her.

Mary Jane Kelly did not survive this encounter

Problem was, she had some hooker friends who knew his dirty secret. So he killed them too. He discovered that he liked it a lot, etc. He also cut up their bodies and removed some organs, just for the sheer joy of it.

Eddy probably wasn’t Jack the Ripper. But it’s a fun story to tell.

Look: You’re probably wondering who the hell Eddy is.

If Eddy hadn’t died in 1892, he would have become the King of England in 1910.

Prince Eddy, in a photograph that drove the boys crazy

Eddy's brother, Georgie, who got to marry Eddy's fiance' and take Eddy's throne when Eddy conveniently died