Questioning Articles of Faith A re-creation of the history and theology of arithmetic

There are three parts to this article. The first is a very brief sketch of the historical development of numerical notations and arithmetic operations on them. Like many such sketches it reinterprets many features of this development and omits most of them. It corresponds to the sort of folk history that St. Luke may have depended on as he tried to write a seamless biography of an individual whose living memory was even then being lost. Second is an equally brief sketch of an ideological reworking of this historical material into a coherent intellectual narration. St. Luke did not simply write a biography, he wrote a story which gained coherence because of its theology. Finally, some of the assumptions of this ideology are criticized and alternative approaches suggested.