Tomorrow the cardinals go into their conclave and before the week is out, we should know the identity of the new pope. Who will it be? Well, I don't know. But the candidate the cardinals choose will tell us something about what they see as the priorities and major challenges to the church.

If they pick a European liberal, then they will see secularism as the biggest obstacle and will be trying to re-engage a Europe that has lost interest in serious faith. Before the child abuse scandals, an American might have done as well but that is now too dangerous a choice. If the cardinals decide that the evangelisation of the Third World is their top priority then expect a South American. Likewise, if poverty is top of the list, a third world crusader for the poor is the most likely outcome. Finally, if they decide the maintenance of sound doctrine is important then a figure like Ratzinger might have a chance, but frankly, I doubt it. Whoever the successful candidate is, he will also have to be a good administrator who is willing to knock the Curia into shape and engage in areas where John Paul had no interest (for instance the liturgy).

My prediction: Cardinal Hummes of Sao Paulo covers the most bases. I think a Vatican insider is unlikely and I also think that the cardinals will be keen to appoint a non-European. Still, more likely is someone we have not heard of who the Holy Spirit has already decided on. Ideally, the Cardinals should keep their own thoughts at the back of their minds and stay open to the direction from God.

A new blog in town. Ken Olsen, a darling of the Jesus Myth tendency because he believes Eusebius forged the Testamonium Flavium, has a new blog. His theory about Josephus was badly mauled by Chris Price but he is basing his PhD on it, so we will have to wait and see what new ideas he has turned up.

His second article is supposed to be a parody of conservative scholarship: : Top 10 Reasons to Accept the Infancy Gospel of Thomas as Historically Reliable. I think he has missed the boat entirely. The fact he fails to mention is that no one has ever called the Infancy Gospel genuine. It appears in no ancient lists of canonical writings and is never referred to by the fathers. This makes all the other criteria irrelevant as we only bother apply them when we have ancient authors telling us to take a particular document seriously. Why does Olsen think all the fathers accept the four Gospels and reject any others? The reason is that they had very good reasons for trusting those four and not the others. True, liberal scholars have tried to expand the list of genuine writings to include non-canonical Gospels like Thomas's. No conservative is silly enough to do this as we realise that Thomas's Gospel was not accepted as genuine by the early church who were in a much better position to know than we are. Thus, Olsen's real target must be the Jesus Seminar rather than sensible scholars for whom the Infancy Gospel never even reaches the start line.

Unsurprisingly, secularists are beginning to fight back against the wave of regard for the late, great John Paul II. (See two opinion pieces in today's Guardian). This is especially to be expected in England where a certain group of people have always regarded the Catholic Church with unmitigated loathing. This isn't just your usual busy bodies with a bee in their bonnet about religion in general but is specifically aimed at Catholics. Partly, this is cultural. Until very recently, properly educated English men and women learnt that our history was a desperate struggle to keep Papism off our shores. More recently, the IRA have done their best to ensure that the image of Catholics as enemies at the gates of civilised society was maintained. When I speak about the anti-Catholic prejudices of any properly brought up Englishman, I am not quite joking.

Today, Catholic bashing is no longer quite politically correct. This was partly because the Prime Minister is married to one, partly because they edit half the press and partly because the late Cardinal Hume was generally recognised as a saint. But the biggest change has been that the evangelical wing of the Church of England (the only wing that matters outside Oxford and Cambridge colleges) has embraced the Catholic Church as a vital ally. Alpha courses are now run out of both. When, five years ago, the rector of Holy Trinity Brompton described the Pope as "that most holy man of God" I almost fell out of my chair. Even ten years ago such language would have been unthinkable from a evangelical Protestant. But now evangelicals see Catholics as allies on the question of woman priests and homosexual acts, and that has overcome the old animosity.

When it comes down to it, the argument between secular society and the Church is about sex. Secular society is dominated by sex and can talk of little else. The aim of life is a great shag and almost everything is subsumed in pursuit of this goal. We are made to feel grossly inadequate if we are not sexually fulfilled at all times. In contrast, the Church rarely talks about sex unless it is asked by journalists or those with an agenda. (Admittedly, this happens a lot because many people want to preserve the myth that the Church thinks about sex as much as they do). This mutual incomprehension is likely to continue but I do expect some relaxation, in practice at least. Expect condoms to be allowed among married couples if one or other is HIV positive. Expect some relaxation on clerical celibacy. Eventually expect some movement on the state of divorcees. But do not expect the slightest change on abortion , homosexual acts or women priests. The Church should not end up being forced to endorse secular society's priorities. Part of John Paul II's greatness was his refusal to do this. If only Rowen Williams was as strong.

Michael Turton has gone to a great deal of trouble to show how Mark's Gospel follows a chiastic structure.

Chiasmus is a rhetorical device whereby the author arranges his work such that phrases or words are placed in a structure where the initial use of terms is reversed in both position and meaning to give greater contrast. Here’s an example from Cicero:

“Romans hate private luxury but public display, they love.”

The contrast is between hate and love; private and public wealth. The word chiasmus comes from the Greek letter chi, which is a cross. You can invent phrases that exhibit this easily enough. Generally speaking, in an inflected language, like Greek and Latin, where you can alter word order freely, producing this sort of thing is even easier than in English. Around the turn of the last century, when critical editions of the classical poets were still up in the air, chiasmus was one of the things debated ad infinitum in august journals such as the Classical Review. If a chiasmus was alleged that didn’t quite work, then scholars would suggest another reading on the strength of it.

So the two central features of a chiasmus structure are the inverted order and the opposite meaning. You can do it with phrases too:

“John entered the room;
He sat down at the table;
He got up from the table.
He left the room.”

This is pretty clumsy and ugly and underlines just how hard a rigid phrase driven chiasmus is going to be. To make it look nice, you would have to relax the rules but that means your chiasmus is not going to be recognised easily and there is absolutely no point in doing it. Worse, interpreters can also relax the rules and start finding chiasmus all over the place where they don’t really exist. A common way to relax the rules is to expand from the normal ABBA structure to ABCCBA or ABCBA or even ABCDCDCBA. Another way to do it is to allow the different clauses to be radically different lengths. Finally you can completely relax the meaning of antithesis.

Here’s an example, plucked at random from The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse (1991), page 321:

A: Fond of delight,
B: A satyr standing by gave it a kiss
C: as it like sweet had been
C: Feeling forthwith the outward burning power Wood with the smart,
B: with shouts and shrieking still He sought his ease in river, field and bower
A: But for the time his grief went with him still.

Ok, so I’ve destroyed the scansion but that is not a problem in prose. Likewise the clauses are not equal, but that is OK too according to the relaxed rules. But I’m pretty pleased with the antitheses between ‘delight’ and ‘grief’, ‘standing/kiss’ and ‘shouts and shrieking’ and ‘sweet and ‘burning’. If all this seems a bit feeble, bear in mind that there really is no chiasmus here, I have just invented it.

Let me now to the alleged chiasmus structure in Mark’s Gospel, presented by Michael Turton. He has had to relax the rules quite considerably more than I did above to create his chiastic structure. So much so that no one before him as unravelled it. This is immediately a huge red flag. Are we to believe that Mark has gone to all this trouble to create something that no one prior to Turton has noticed?

All the rules have been relaxed. First we have ABBA, ABCCBA right the way up to ‘L’. We also have a few ABCDE(AB)F(AB)DCBA type structures which must break a record for complications. Turton needs to produce at least a dozen different patterns to get Mark’s Gospel to fit and even then he admits to being stumped by a few passages. As we are dealing with prose, metre is not an issue so Turton can break lines up as he pleases. There is nothing wrong with him doing this, but it does mean we lack a control we would have in poetry. We also have sections in a single chiastic structure that vary in length from less than ten words to almost eighty. In the whole piece, phrases go from five words to over a hundred. This massive variation in the length of his phrases means Turton has been able to avail himself of the near infinite number of permutations that he could have split Mark’s Gospel into. Given such a vast sample, it would be surprising if he could not come up with some sort of pattern, especially as he allows himself to use lots of different patterns in quite a short piece of prose.

Finally, we note that Turton interprets ‘antithesis’ in an extremely wide way. We are asked to believe that (to pick an example at random) “They began to be sorrowful and to say to him ‘Is it I?’” is the antithesis of “And he said to them ‘This is the blood of the covenant which is poured out for many’”. Or “When they had sung a hymn they went out to the Mount of Olives” is the antithesis of “And they went to place called Gethsemane” despite the fact that Gethsemane is on the Mount of Olives. I could go on, but the point is easily illustrated by picking things at random and asking if they can be described as antitheses. Remember, these phrases have been picked out by Turton from the near infinite number of permutations possible, and still the effect is feeble.

In short, it is clear that Turton has done nothing except split Mark’s Gospel up into lots of sections without actually managing to produce the promised chiasmic structure. His method is to find two statements that might be said to be antitheses and then shoehorn everything else in to create the desired pattern. Given the flexibility he allows himself, this cannot be all that hard to do. All his effort simply forms a terrible warning that, as the Good Book does not say, “He who seeks for patterns, will find them”.

The questions of personal identity have been keeping philosophers happy for centuries. It does seem to me that we need to answer this question before we can speculate on which part of us might survive death. Lots more questions are raised by the teleportation thought experiment, but I was merely suggesting that if you don't mind being teleported, then you can have no logical problem with an afterlife even without a soul.

For the rest of us, maybe it is easier to ask what we are not. We are not just the particular atoms that make up our brains. We know this because these atoms are replaced by different ones quite regularly (as radioactive material injected into our system has demonstrated). Neither are we wholly detached from our bodies as shown by many neurological experiments. They show we need a body to be conscious and interact with the world. This means the Bible is probably right to say that the afterlife will have to involve our having new bodies. John Polkinghorne suggested that we are a pattern that presently just happens to be made out of material atoms but could, in theory, also be contained in another medium. This is quite close to materialism and he also goes on to say that immortality might be being remembered in the mind of God.

On the other side of the equation is the brute fact of freewill. I have previously shown how freewill is a necessary quality of consciousness. If we cannot will then we cannot do anything. And if we are not doing anything then we don't exist. This is what some people admit when they say consciousness is an illusion. In other words, they go even further than Descartes when they say that they even doubt their own existence. This leaves me feeling that materialism, that has no room for freewill, is inadequate as an explanation for mind.

I think that Thomas Aquinas gives us the best answer when he describes the immortal soul as growing with the body and giving it the capacity for freewill. The soul is an enabler and catalyst that needs the body in order to fulfill its potential. Deprived of sense experience and the machinery of thought it can do very little. So perhaps we should step back from Cartesian dualism and return to Aquinas's more subtle analysis. It is worth noting that Aquinas also rooted the emotions and desires firmly with the body and not the soul. Thus he would have been unperturbed by research that shows the brain doing a lot of what Descartes might have reserved for the soul. Also, he accepted that the body/soul relationship was a two way process and that the soul is formed from its experience in our earthly body. It grows and adapts as we grow and adapt. When we die, it is our ability to will that survives and which is given a new body. The mystery that Aquinas leaves us with is how to connect the body and soul. This mystery remains and I welcome suggestions!

The sad death of the Holy Father this weekend showed how he was in control right until the end. Previously popes were always said to be well right up until they were dead. But John Paul II wore his ailments with pride and his handling of his last few days was also intended to teach an important lesson.

When old people die they are expected to do so in private without disturbing the peace of mind of the rest of us. Shut away in hospices, the final days of incontinence, feeding tubes, organ failure and infection can all take place without anyone else having to worry about it. Then the undertakers move in and illusion of a serene passing is maintained. Life and death are not like that. John Paul II was not going to let us imagine some beatific vision of a saint passing on (although some of the media did try to cling to this image). Rather the Vatican's health bulletins pulled no punches and every detail of the last days of a dying man was starkly public. This, he said to us, is how we die and no amount of trying to ignore it will change that. Only faith can offer us hope beyond a dreary end in a hospice with a crowd of relatives wishing we would just hurry up and get on with it.

Here is a famous thought experiment. Imagine a teleport machine that reads the precise make-up of your body and then beams the information to another machine on Mars which reassembles a perfect copy of you. Unfortunately, the original you is destroyed by the reading process although you don't feel this happen. Would you be happy to step into the teleporter? Neurologist Paul Broks says almost all his colleagues would have no problem. They are materialists and as we are only an arrangement of matter, we remain the same person even if the matter is arranged somewhere else. Certainly, they say, the new you on Mars would not realise anything had happened beyond their appearing in a different place.

But this means something else. Materialists can also have no logical problem with an afterlife. We Christians believe we will be resurrected after death in new bodies. This is done by God who, we presume, will have no problem remembering how to fit the bits together (the advantage of omniscience). He can even make the necessary adjustments to maintain our personalities while also curing them of Alzheimer's or any other mental illness. While the new me will not have any direct link to the old me, the new me will feel they are the same person. So as far as Brok and his colleagues are concerned, a purely material mind can be resurrected without problem. If God exists, all the discoveries of neuroscience interpreted in a materialistic way, have no impact on the doctrine of the afterlife.

For us Christians there is something slightly dodgy about this. We do think there is some sort of continuity between our earthly selves and the resurrected self after death. But then, we are not the ones saying that science makes life after death absurd. Clearly, it does not.

Of course, my thoughts and attention are directed towards Rome this morning. I find myself praying that the Pope is comfortable and without fear. He, at least, has no reason to be afraid.

Thank you to Hugo Holbling for his kind mention of my post on history at his blog here. He also asks how 'all history if fiction' can be a foundation of post modernism. I should have been clearer. What I meant is that it is often assumed to be some osrt of foundation by those who do not understand what it means.

On a rather less erudite level, I'm debating the history of science and Christianity with a poster over at Ebla. It remains to be seen if my opponent is open to new ideas but I was most impressed by how sure he was about so many things that are just dead wrong. The myth of the flat earth and the great conflict between science and religion live on!

Thanks for the comment from Jack about John Philoponus. Another important earlier thinker in mechanics was John Buridan who was a natural philosopher at the University of Paris in the fourteenth century. He developed impetus theory, considered the rotation of the earth and suggested inertial motion. His works continued to be printed and published through the 16th century and Galileo would certainly have come across them. Today he is forgotten, together with all the other important medieval students of nature.

When I was an investment banker, we used to have to set up special companies for our finance deals. It was always fun to invent good names for them and I called one Buridan Finance Limited in honour of the forgotten genius of Paris. We used to challenge other parties to the deal to figure out the relevance of the name but sadly Google has made that a bit too easy nowadays. Still, I feel it was the right thing to give John Buridan a bit more recognition.

"All history is fiction." This is often held out as a foundation of post modernism, although I've never been able to find out who actually coined the phrase. Conservative historians, we imagine, can get a bit hot under the collar when they hear it and will insist that history is about what really happened and they are not just making it up. Actually, you will find it quite hard to find a professional historian who does still believe that his craft is to find out what really happened. Rather, they are trying to link together facts into some sort of narrative that explains and enlightens.

I suggest the post modernists might have a good point. You see, history is not just a collection of facts and figures. People who just try and sort out the facts are usually called 'antiquarians' who are supposed to be a bit inferior to real historians. Also, a record of events that is just "one damn thing after another" is called a chronicle and not a history. The chroniclers are also felt to be a rather lowly breed compared to the true man of history. So it is the explanatory, analytical and narrative elements of a historical work that mark it out as a member of that illustrious genre. And it is the case that you can analyse, explain and narrate in many different ways. The facts can be fitted together to produce radically different pictures. So in what sense is the historian's creation not fiction? Based on a true story perhaps? Dependent on the facts but not determined by them? The only historian I know who thinks he is engaged in a selfless search for the "Truth" is Diarmaid MacCulloch.

If you don't believe me, here is a current example. We have all heard of the scientific revolution which took place between 1543 and 1687 when modern science was born out of the rediscovered ashes of ancient Greece. The concept of the scientific revolution is so entrenched in the historiography of science, that questioning it is rather hard to get away with. I've been supervising some students (and very good they were too) who had been to some lectures by an iconclastic historian, Andrew Cunningham. He thinks the scientific revolution is an idea invented in the twentieth century for political reasons. It is, not to put too finer point on it, fictional. Now, Dr Cunningham has his own story that science was born around 1800 in the aftermath of the French and industrial revolutions. He has been roundly criticised by such luminaries as Peter Dear and Edward Grant but it is hard to escape the conclusion he is no less right than everyone else.

The scientific revolution really is a twentieth century concept. That is unarguable. The only question is whether it represents a true picture of what was happening in the seventeenth century. Put like that the concept becomes much harder to defend because we are just arguing about how to describe a past event that we all agree is being fitted into a modern strait jacket. Of course, Cunnigham's alternative picture suffers from the same problems and so we are forced to admit that if both fit the evidence then both are valid. So too are other models like my own favourite which sees the seventeenth century as continuous with the Middle Ages. But they can't all be true to we must accept that they are, in a very real sense, fictions. So what do we believe? In the end, I think we believe what seems right to us. And that is largely based on our political preferences and how well given ideas have been explained to us. If you can make an idea sound good, as Dr Cunningham undoubtedly does, then people will be impressed by your rhetoric and believe you.

Another example will illustrate what I mean by political preferences. What caused the collapse of the Soviet Empire? If you are a conservative, the answer is because Reagan and Thatcher stood up to the Russians and they realised they could never win. If you are a leftie, it is because of the internal problems inherited from Stalinism. Reagan and Thatcher only risked the USSR collapsing in flames rather than peacefully. And finally, if you are a Catholic, it was because of the moral witness of the Pope and the indomitable spirit of Poland forcing the Soviets to let go of its Empire. I'm not about to argue about which of these is right. I merely point out than even events that most of us can remember well are subject to fictionalisation as soon as we try to explain them.