"In the beginning..." (Christology and Randology)


Ellen Stuttle

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People of the Book

Misquoting Jesus, by Bart D. Ehrman, 2005

Introduction

pp. 19-20

For modern people familiar with any of the major Western religions (Judaism, Christinity, Islam), it may be hard to imagine, but books played virtually no role in the polytheistic religions of the ancient Western world. These religions were almost exclusively concerned with honoring the gods through ritual acts of sacrifice. There were no doctrines to be learned, as explained in books, and almost no ethical principles to be followed, as laid out in books. This is not to say that adherents of the various polytheistic religions had no beliefs about their gods or that they had no ethics, but beliefs and ethics - strange as this sounds to modern ears - played almost no role in religion per se. [....]

Judaism was unique in that it stressed its ancestral traditions, customs, and laws, and maintained that these had been recorded in sacred books, which had the status, therefore, of "scripture" for the Jewish people. [....]

[....] Eventually, some time after Christianity began, a group of these Hebrew books - twenty-two of them altogether - came to be regarded as a sacred canon of scripture, the Jewish Bible of today, accepted by Christians as the first part of the Christian canon, the "Old Testment."

These brief facts about Jews and their written texts are important because they set the backdrop for Christianity, which was also, from the very beginning, a "bookish" religion. [...] already, at the start of Christianity, adherents of this new religion, the followers of Jesus, were unusual in the Roman Empire: like the Jews before them, but unlike nearly everyone else, they located sacred authority in sacred books. Christianity at its beginning was a religion of the book.

Ellen

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The wife of the analyst who's program director of the Connecticul Association for Jungian Psychology is an artist. She mainly paints or does intriguing collage sorts of things, but occasionally she does clay figures.

One of those is of a book lying open at the center, with the words "People of the Book" - and a snake crawling out.

Ellen

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I don't care either way if there was an historic person.

We’re on the same page, but I like to watch a good intellectual scrap; I suppose the part of the brain that’s stimulated when most people watch sports is getting its stimulation for me this way. I usually tell people I’m just not wired that way when they ask me what I thought of the game, and they look bewildered when I admit I don’t know that, say, the Heat played last night.

What interests me most of all is the development, with its intricate transformations, into so major a religion. For instance, the idea of the Trinity, and how that developed. The idea of transubstantiation.

A Pet Theory: any variation on a mystic doctrine that can arise, will arise. From there the question is will it survive, and if it did, can you explain why. What features made it more likely to spread, or at least less likely to be wiped out by outside forces. Dawkins’ meme concept is useful here.
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[...] I like to watch a good intellectual scrap; I suppose the part of the brain thats stimulated when most people watch sports is getting its stimulation for me this way. I usually tell people Im just not wired that way when they ask me what I thought of the game, and they look bewildered when I admit I dont know that, say, the Heat played last night.

I don't even know what - or is it who? - "the Heat" is.

What interests me most of all is the development, with its intricate transformations, into so major a religion. For instance, the idea of the Trinity, and how that developed. The idea of transubstantiation.

A Pet Theory: any variation on a mystic doctrine that can arise, will arise.

A nicely untestable theory. :smile: First, you'd have to have an unambiguous way of discriminating "a mystic doctrine" from any other form of "doctrine," and then you'd have to be able exhaustively to list every possible variation of a "mystic doctrine" that could arise.

I'd rather not get into "Dawkins' meme concept," which I think wasn't a good theory to begin with, when Dawkins sort of playfully suggested it, and then was turned into an unfortunate mess by Susan Blackmore in her The Meme Machine.

Ellen

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The "Heat" is a basketball team whose home court is Hell. It's hot down there so they call themselves "The Heat." Having made a deal with the Devil they are the champion team.

--Brant

crime might not pay, but that Devil sure does

(sign me up!)

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I don't even know what - or is it who? - "the Heat" is.

Apathetic as I am, even I can't say that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNzJrCDd6eY

A nicely untestable theory. :smile:

Ellen

Like I said, it's a pet theory. I can take it out for a walk and get some exercise myself while I'm at it. If I were Peikoff I could turn it into a book and have plenty of sycophants praise my incredible integration of the whole of history.
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Like I said, it's a pet theory. I can take it out for a walk and get some exercise myself while I'm at it. If I were Peikoff I could turn it into a book and have plenty of sycophants praise my incredible integration of the whole of history.

If you were Peikoff, yes, you could - thus illustrating Randology, Second-Generation, the mantle of authoritative writ passing to the likes of Peikoff.

Ellen

PS: I have heard, vaguely, of LeBron James and maybe, come to think of it, even more vaguely of "the Miami Heat" as being some sort of basketball team. But I'm not a guy, so I'm not required to recognize such references in order to classify as human.

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time is running out

Right.

Meanwhile, I see that you've suggested on another thread - here - that "The philosophy [of Objectivism] needs a religion [...]."

In reading about the many variant versions of Jesus and his status during the early years of Christianity, I've noticed parallels, among other parallels, to the multiple analyses/beliefs among Objectivists or near-Objectivists on the question "What's gone wrong?" The idea that Something has gone wrong seems frequent, a feeling that Objectivism should have made bigger cultural "inroads," and a looking for causes of the Problem.

For instance, part of this recent SOLO thread concerns such issues. Apparently Perigo is working on a new off-shoot philosophy of his own, tentatively titled "Authenticism." One of the posters, a fairly new one though an old-timer, who uses the screen name RationalMan, mainly blames repression, moralism, and Leonard Peikoff. Most are pretty disgusted with both TAS and ARI. But I didn't notice any of them singing the tune, which I used to hear sung by some in such discussions, "If only the break [the Rand/Brandens break] hadn't happened."

Ellen

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If you read the Bible it's obvious Jesus spoke English.

--Brant

King James

That is not the Bible. That is the KJV, and it is a crappy translation of the Hebrew, the Aramaic and the Koine.

I will give you a sure fire test of an English translation. Turn to Isaiah 7:14 If you find the word "virgin" there, toss it it into the flames. That is not what the Hebrew says at all.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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If you read the Bible it's obvious Jesus spoke English.

--Brant

King James

That is not the Bible. That is the KJV, and it is a crappy translation of the Hebrew, the Aramaic and the Koine.

I will give you a sure fire test of an English translation. Turn to Isaiah 7:14 If you find the word "virgin" there, toss it it into the flames. That is not what the Hebrew says at all.

Ba'al Chatzaf

I have two Bibles. One has the word "virgin" there and the other is in hiding.

--Brant

"devirginize" is one of my fav words

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Another book worth reading is The Historical Jesus: Five Views.

It contains an essay by myther Robert Prices and responses. Jimmy Dunn's response is the best debunking of anything I've read.*

-Neil Parille

*Next to The Passion of James Valliant's Criticism, of course.

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I will give you a sure fire test of an English translation. Turn to Isaiah 7:14 If you find the word "virgin" there, toss it it into the flames. That is not what the Hebrew says at all.

But it is what the Septuagint says. Since that's what influenced the writers (in Greek) of the New Testament, you shouldn't be surprised if that's the translation they use. 70 pre-Christian Jewish scholars picked 'parthenos', who are you to say they weren't 'inspired'? :tongue:

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I will give you a sure fire test of an English translation. Turn to Isaiah 7:14 If you find the word "virgin" there, toss it it into the flames. That is not what the Hebrew says at all.

But it is what the Septuagint says. Since that's what influenced the writers (in Greek) of the New Testament, you shouldn't be surprised if that's the translation they use. 70 pre-Christian Jewish scholars picked 'parthenos', who are you to say they weren't 'inspired'? :tongue:

The use of the Greek "parthenos" is a limitation of the Greek language. Hebrew has more than one word for an unmarried yet fertile female of marriageable age. Philo who was the leading Jewish intellectual in Alexandria brought much woe to the Jews. It was Philo who deployed the concept of Logos when speaking of G-D. That is how the Protestants got to calling Jesus the Word of God.

It was our Philo of Alexandria that opened the way to the nonsense of Paul and John. The worst enemy of the Jewish people are Jews.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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A Pet Theory: any variation on a mystic doctrine that can arise, will arise.

who are you to say they weren't 'inspired'? :tongue:

To communicate a little better how my Pet Theory works, mystic doctrines are not derived by reason based on observed, demonstrable facts. Read up on what early Christian services consisted of: people speaking in tongues and prophesying. They may as well have been hippies on acid. One couldn't debate rationally about what came out of their mouths, hence, a multitude of variations arose. The suppression (see Montanus) of this early form of Christian service didn't put an end to the process, so I'm only offering it as an effective example.

I feel like I might be making the most banal point ever, so I'm going to stop here.

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Philo of Alexandria and Logos

This is from a site for questions and answers about the Bible:

http://www.gotquestions.org/Philo-of-Alexandria.html

The multiple stylistic glitches are as written.

[....] It is during Philo's earlier years that his interest and knowledge of Stoic and Platonic thought grew and began to construct, what he declared, a clearer understanding of the Septuagint (being the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible). Philo believed it was a history of his people and God that demanded the reader to perform an allegorical interpretation. Philosophy was an important aspect of Philo's train of thought, becoming a tool from which he used to establish a clearer interpretation of the theology that both he and his ancestors had been apart of for several centuries. During an allegorical reading of the Septuagint, Philo's fundamental interpretation was that Hebraic Scriptures and Greek philosophy were not only compatible, but revealed the superiority of Jewish ethics. For Philo did not believe that all the stories in the Septuagint were literally real, but were constructed in the same manner as Greek texts such as The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Since Philo wrote several books, we can formulate several major doctrines that emerge from the body of his work. One would be the doctrine of Moses, in which it is evident that Philo regards Moses as not only a real historical figure who authored the first five books of the Old Testament, but a heavenly figure because of his role in distributing the law to the Jewish people directly from God. Philo wrote a considerable amount on Moses and interpreted him as the ultimate philosopher from which all philosophy, in particular Greek, originated from. Another would be the doctrine of Creation, in which Philo enforces biblical creationism in a Greek context. Philo planted the seeds of what would later evolve into the concept of creation ex nihilo, a concept implicitly stated in Hebrews 11:3. Then there was the doctrine would be that of the logos

In reading the way God dictates in Genesis 1 (in particular saying 'us' in Genesis 1:26) and foreshadowing John 1 in which the 'Word' (the Greek translation being logos), Philo is adamant that creation was created by logos, which while apart of God's being, is individualistic. Although his celebrated idea of logos was not entirely new, Philo personified the term. Philo believed that logos made God known, as cited in Questions in Exodus 25.22. The doctrine of man is also evident. Philo was not adverse to dualism and that man's material and immaterial nature was conclusive (as also believed by Plato) and that through God this union will be both peaceful and was intentional. This also enforces the conclusion that, as the serpent in Eden corrupted the physical, mankind's focus should be on the spiritual (and intellectual) relationship with God.

[....]

Read more: http://www.gotquestions.org/Philo-of-Alexandria.html

Ellen

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Read up on what early Christian services consisted of: people speaking in tongues and prophesying. They may as well have been hippies on acid. One couldn't debate rationally about what came out of their mouths, hence, a multitude of variations arose.

Uneducated blatherers didn't write the texts, which have coherence and rationale. Just because something's "mystical" - by which I'm interpreting you to mean including elements of the supernatural - doesn't make it a hodge-podge where anything goes.

Ellen

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Uneducated blatherers didn't write the texts, which have coherence and rationale.

Are you saying the blathering of the uneducated was what, never written down? Of course it was. I don't read Greek, but I'm reminded here of Nietszche's complaint that the New Testament has God speaking bad Greek. Let me point you to the opening of Galatians, where Paul claims to have gotten his doctrine from revelation (direct from Jesus), not from witnesses such as Peter and James, whom he met years later. One can infer that he (and his audience) preferred a doctrine that had been arrived at this way.

As I said before, the question is whether (and why) the variations survive and spread, not that they arise, I don't even regard that part as controversial.

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Paul says in Galatians 1:17-19 that he met with James & Peter. This was probably in 35-36, close to Jesus' death, not "years later."

Three "years later", to be exact. I'm not going to bother copying and pasting in the text, since anyone can look it up with just a few keystrokes. He preached for three years in Arabia and Damascus before meeting Peter and James, preaching what he learned through direct revelation. Or do you have an alternate interpretation? For my part I think he heard enough of the doctrine when he was a persecutor, and according to Acts he was present at the martyrdom of Stephen, which of course had a quite verbose prelude. Be that as it may, for my purposes it suffices that his audience considered him more authoritative for having learned his spiel via revelation.
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