Clivedurdle

Contemplation and how to conduct ones' self in life are of course past times of Hindus and Buddhists, both of them the bloke who the place Philo lived in is named after had met, and the second group was carrying out evangelical missions then....

Clivedurdle

Chorus is a Greek idea. The Kos Odeon had international singing, music and poetry competitions.

This sounds very Greek!

Robert Tulip

Outhouse, I'm not sure you have read the thread very carefully. Stephan made some strong claims early on about Jewish exclusivism among the therapeuts from which he has backtracked. And I wonder if Stephan ignored the point MountainMan made about the diverse use of the term therapeut among the Greeks?

Toto

Where did Stephan backtrack? He has always held that the Therapeutae described by Philo were Jewish, and that the term itself has a broad meaning.

stephan huller

A close analogy (very close) is the word 'minister.' As a verb it can mean just about anything. In Canada or the United Kingdom it means someone who has an official role in the government. It can also describe someone in who is given the authority to teach or run a religious service in a Christian Church. But just because of its religious connotations there have been many Jewish 'ministers' in the Canadian and British parliament. I don't get the obsession with the shared use by pagans and Jews of the same Greek terminology.

The fact that Jews adopted Greek in the early centuries of the Common Era does not mean they stopped being Jewish any more than Jews today when they or their ancestors adopt English. Think of how many Jews have exclaimed 'Jesus Christ!' or 'Christ!' when something bad happens to them. It doesn't mean they converted.

outhouse

The hellenistic nature and wide diversity of Judaism in the first century is highly understudied.

I think it was as diverse as ones imagination, can place on these different sects.

God-Fearers and Gate Proselytes are for the most part a large portion of hellenistic Judaism, and even then they had diversity within themselves.

stephan huller

I am really disappointed in you Robert. I can understand that average people (or uneducated people) at this forum have an idée fixe which they can't let go. But you are an educated man. Surely in order to have written something on Heidegger you had to learn German and have done some thinking about the nature of language. But on a more mundane level for the moment, just look at all the Jews who learned and wrote in German. Language isn't idolatrous in itself. The Jewish religion doesn't punish individuals for speaking or adopting a foreign language. Indeed the Pentateuch is replete with Persian and Aramaic loanwords.

Clearly the Jewish religion even borrowed pagan 'scientific' conceptions. But the unshakable notion at the heart of the religion was that the god of their ancestors 'owned them' like a master owned slaves. They were purchased at the Exodus and a heavy yoke was placed around the necks of the people. At the top of the list of demands was a complete prohibition on the veneration of other gods. There is absolutely no way around this.

While it is true that Philo and the Alexandrian tradition took the names 'Elohim' (= theos), 'Yahweh' (= kurios), Adonai (= despotes) as hypostases to some degree, the underlying idea was still the same. Philo does talk about a mystical understanding of those formerly held by kurios being 'purchased' or 'transferred' over to theos (a concept also found in the gnostic tradition) it is impossible that he or any other leading figure in the Jewish community of this city or any other city and of this age or any other age tolerated the transgression of the first commandment - or at least how that utterance was interpreted in that community. In no community at any time, at any place would 'Asclepius' or 'Sarapis' be tolerated.

My analysis of Philo has been very thorough. He is not talking about a pagan religion. He specifically condemns 'demi-gods' (= Asclepius) and contemporary 'Egyptian religion' (= Sarapis).

aa5874

Again, what you imagine is NOT actual evidence--it is just idle speculation.

Please name your sources of antiquity for the things you have imagined??

stephan huller

Just to make clear 'therapeutae' was used to describe a Jewish group and meant 'attendants' not 'healers'

Does the mountainman fan club want to read this as 'healers of God' or that Philo is referring to a massive Asclepius cult in Palestine? Come on, pleeease. Pete, you don't need to make a fool of yourself any longer. This isn't even critical for your theory. This is like a dog that can't help lick himself. You are just being compulsively obsessed with 'exposing' Eusebius. And Robert, I don't know what kind of spell Acharya has on you but you better splash some cold water on your face. This is getting embarrassing.

But notice that Philo is admitting the short-comings of the Greek language. They are called Essenes but 'this is not an accurate form of Greek language.' But the point is - the sects were given names and Philo was left dealing with what had already been established. My guess is that the original term 'Essaioi is something in Hebrew or Aramaic - perhaps 'the silent ones.'

Robert Tulip

I'm sorry Toto, I have checked again, and it seems I misread a later post as indicating that Stephan accepted that the therapeuts, as Greek speaking Jews who lived in Egypt and embraced a contemplative life, incorporated some ideas from Greece and Egypt in their views. I have reviewed the thread and see I must have been wrong - Stephan sticks resolutely to his original story of the therapeuts as Torah fundamentalists, who ignored their cultural context to maintain the purity of their religious heritage. Sorry for my mistake.

I still have not heard from Stephan why he thinks Philo says the therapeuts came from all over, practiced Bacchic revels, and appear to have worshipped the sun at dawn (#192), none of which appear to be enjoined by the Torah.

Perhaps Stephan would say the word Therapeut and its other forms appears more than 30 times in the Gospels by coincidence, and not as Eusebius implies because of the influence of the therapeuts. According to a source which may be too old to be reliable, Arthur Lillie, Eusebius, St. Jerome, Sozomenes, and Cassien all maintained that monasteries in Christendom were due to the Therapeut converts of St. Mark.

Perhaps Stephan will say that these therapeuts who came 'from all over' actually were exclusive Jews who maintained strict Torah tradition in Philo's time, and only abandoned their Jewish rule later. Whatever, it seems implausible that the therapeuts did not include non-Jews among their number in view of Philo's cosmopolitan description of them.

At #102 Stephan maintained that the therapeuts were Jewish, and at #83 that the therapeuts were part of a "law abiding culture" who would not abandon Jewish law from the Pentateuch.