{"id":228,"date":"2012-05-27T19:37:30","date_gmt":"2012-05-27T13:37:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/intelligent-torvalds.74-208-171-134.plesk.page\/?p=228"},"modified":"2023-09-19T08:39:27","modified_gmt":"2023-09-19T13:39:27","slug":"jesus-artifacts-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/?p=228","title":{"rendered":"Jesus’ Artifacts, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m not fooling anyone.\u00a0 There is probably a strong suspicion that I\u2019m going to shape things in such a way that I can come to the conclusion that Jesus is a pretty good carpenter.\u00a0 A typical approach would be for me to establish the criteria\u2014a good carpenter does A<\/em>, B<\/em>, C<\/em>\u2014and then examine some samples of Jesus\u2019 carpentry, and say, look, Jesus’ carpentry shows A<\/em>, B<\/em>, C<\/em>, and so I conclude that Jesus is a good carpenter.\u00a0 Few would believe that I had actually established the criteria before I looked at the samples.\u00a0 And, frankly, I don\u2019t want to put myself in the position of being the judge of Jesus\u2019 carpentry.\u00a0 But the real rub is, and this was a little bit of a surprise, I searched the internet and didn\u2019t find even one disputed artifact that anyone claimed was the handiwork of Jesus.<\/p>\n

In the second century Justin Martyr claimed that Jesus made plows and yokes.\u00a0 If He specialized in working tools for working people, it might not be so surprising that these necessary items were used for their intended purposes rather than preserved for posterity.\u00a0 And it occurred to me that my surprise may be little more than an illusion created by looking back through the lens of Roman veneration of holy relics.\u00a0 Jesus\u2019 customers were descendants of Israel, with many centuries of cultural training in the evils of idolatry. \u00a0The owners of Jesus\u2019 artifacts, whether they were his followers or not, may not have had the instinct for, in fact may have had a counter-instinct to, preserving those artifacts.\u00a0 At any rate piety and practicality embrace each other here and demand that I infer what kind of carpenter Jesus is from other things He has made.\u00a0 But where will I find these other things?<\/p>\n

Here I have what scholars call an embarrassment of riches.\u00a0 The Apostle John described Jesus like this (John 1:1-3 NET):\u00a0 In the beginning was the Word<\/em> (\u03bb\u1f79\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2<\/a>), and the Word <\/em>(\u03bb\u03cc\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2) was with God, and the Word <\/em>(\u03bb\u03cc\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2) was fully God. \u00a0The Word <\/em>(\u03bf\u1f57\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2<\/a>) was with God in the beginning. \u00a0All things were created by him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created<\/em>.\u00a0 This is the Word<\/em> that became flesh and took up residence among us<\/em>1<\/sup><\/a> as the Lord Jesus.\u00a0 So the whole world, the whole universe, the entire cosmos and everything in it is an artifact left by Jesus and fit material for my consideration.\u00a0 The real question was, what shall I choose?<\/p>\n

I let Matt Ridley<\/a>, the author of GENOME<\/a><\/em>, choose for me.\u00a0 \u201cIn the beginning was the word,\u201d he wrote.\u00a0 \u201cThe word proselytized the sea with its message, copying itself unceasingly and forever.\u00a0 The word discovered how to rearrange chemicals so as to capture little eddies in the stream of entropy and make them live.\u00a0 The word transformed the land surface of the planet from a dusty hell to a verdant paradise.\u00a0 The word blossomed and became sufficiently ingenious to build a porridgy contraption called a human brain that could discover and be aware of the word itself.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The word for Matt Ridley is not Jesus in this quote, but RNA, specifically the \u201cchemical substance that links the two worlds of DNA and protein.\u201d\u00a0 So, I want to consider the interactions of RNA, DNA and proteins as an artifact of Jesus\u2019 creation.<\/p>\n

Now with my porridgy brain I only grasp the function of a very small percentage of the DNA molecule.\u00a0 And so, obviously, I will be considering that very small percentage of the whole.\u00a0 The level of detail present in that portion of DNA is such that it only allows one to distinguish between human beings and chimpanzees by a very small percentage of difference.\u00a0 The far larger mass of the DNA molecule\u2014called junk DNA, presumably because no one yet has a clue how it works or what it does\u2014is where the level of detail that will convict a man of a crime in a court of law (while at the same time exonerating his father, his brother and his son) is found.<\/p>\n

I assume most of us are familiar with the spiral staircase shape of the DNA molecule<\/a>, its double helix structure deduced by James Watson<\/a> and Francis Crick<\/a> in 1953.\u00a0 The business end of the molecule, as far as we know, the stairs, are constructed of pairs of four chemicals:\u00a0 adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G) and cytosine (C).\u00a0 And these chemicals comprise the four letter alphabet of the genetic code.<\/p>\n

In his book DNA<\/em>3<\/sup><\/a> James Watson described how RNA makes the link from the code stored in bone marrow DNA to the production of the protein hemoglobin.\u00a0 First, the hemoglobin gene, a segment of bone marrow DNA, unzips as it were.\u00a0 The chemical pairs making up the stairs separate from each other.\u00a0 One strand, one half of the stairs, is copied with the help of an enzyme called RNA polymerase.<\/p>\n

Well, the process is actually called transcription.\u00a0 And you don\u2019t really get an exact copy, it\u2019s more like a mirror image.\u00a0 You see, adenine (A) and thymine (T) always pair up together, and guanine (G) and cytosine (C) always pair up together.\u00a0 So in the process of transcription wherever the strand of DNA contains cytosine (C), for example, the RNA polymerase strand will contain guanine (G); wherever the DNA contains thymine (T) the RNA will have adenine (A) and so forth.\u00a0 When transcription is complete the resulting messenger RNA is an exact copy, not of the strand of DNA it was paired up with, but of the other strand, the one that had unzipped from that strand where all the action seemed to take place.<\/p>\n

And I must apologize, it\u2019s not an exact copy of that strand either.\u00a0 RNA is not entirely the same language<\/em> as DNA.\u00a0 In the language of RNA uracil (U) is substituted for thymine (T).\u00a0 So, where adenine (A) occurs in the DNA strand, uracil (U) rather than thymine (T) occurs in the messenger RNA.\u00a0 Then the messenger RNA is exported from the nucleus into the cell, and the DNA in the nucleus zips itself up again.<\/p>\n

In the cell outside the nucleus the process of translation begins.\u00a0 The recipe encoded in the messenger RNA is literally translated into an actual string of amino acids called a protein.\u00a0 Now, this is not chemistry in the sense that the chemicals adenine, uracil, guanine and cytosine transported as messenger RNA combine in various ways to produce the twenty amino acids that make up proteins.\u00a0 It is language.\u00a0 The translator, if you will, is a molecular machine called a ribosome, which is itself composed of RNA and protein.<\/p>\n

\u201cAmino acids are delivered to the scene,\u201d Watson wrote, \u201cattached to transfer RNA\u201d (pg. 78).\u00a0 The amino acid is attached to one end of yet another kind of RNA, and three letters of the genetic code (some triplet of adenine, uracil, guanine and cytosine) are attached to the other end.\u00a0 If the messenger RNA triplet inside the ribosome reads GUU, for instance, a transfer RNA molecule with CAA at one end and the amino acid valine at the other will lock in place.\u00a0 Why? \u00a0Because guanine (G) is always paired with cytosine (C) and uracil (U) is always paired with adenine (A).\u00a0 If the messenger RNA reads AAG then a transfer RNA molecule with UUC at one end and the amino acid lysine at the other will lock in place.\u00a0 Remember, adenine (A) is always paired with uracil (U) and guanine (G) is always paired with cytosine (C).<\/p>\n

The two amino acids (valine and lysine) are glued together to begin a chain.\u00a0 The ribosome continues down the length of the messenger RNA, reading coded triplets.\u00a0 The appropriate transfer RNA with the appropriate amino acid attached at one end is locked in place.\u00a0 The new amino acid is glued to the growing amino acid chain.\u00a0 This process continues 141 or 146 times and the end result is one of the four chains of protein that fold together into a complex three dimensional shape with an iron atom in the center of each twisted chain to make hemoglobin.<\/p>\n

Pretty cool, huh?\u00a0 The thing that caught my attention when I first heard about it was that the protein, hemoglobin in this particular case, was predetermined by the segment of DNA that unzipped.\u00a0 So what made that particular segment of DNA unzip?<\/p>\n

Jesus’ Artifacts, Part 3<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
Back to Jesus’ Artifacts, Part 4<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
Back to Jesus’ Artifacts, Part 7<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
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1<\/sup><\/a> John 1:14 (NET)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

2<\/sup><\/a> Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, Copyright 1999 by Matt Ridley, published by Harper Perennial, October 2000, pg. 11<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

3<\/sup><\/a> DNA: The Secret of Life, James D. Watson with Andrew Berry, Copyright 2003 by DNA Show LLC, published by Knopf, a Borzoi Book, August 2004<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m not fooling anyone.\u00a0 There is probably a strong suspicion that I\u2019m going to shape things in such a way that I can come to the conclusion that Jesus is a pretty good carpenter.\u00a0 A typical approach would be for … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,5],"tags":[2726],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jesus-artifacts","category-what-kind-of-carpenter-is-jesus","tag-john-11-3"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21869,"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions\/21869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}