Clivedurdle

I'm arguing women also were freshly stained!

There are obviously two contradictory forces here - the be fruitful and multiply one and the be ye perfect one. We need to work out the tensions this causes, how they co-evolve.

Clivedurdle

And we have so much anthropological evidence here it is ridiculous.

As already mentioned, Jacob and the angel, the fact of circumcision, the fact of fgm. The fact of castrati. The ideal of the celibate priest.

The perfect ones.

Augustine.

It is a simple problem. What is the relationship between god and sex?

And there have always been a myriad solutions proposed, including cutting off bits to make oneself holy and pure.

And again the Essenes look very important.

What is this either or stuff that is happening here? We are looking at how we humans work here. And maybe we need to get Freudian about it and say hmm maybe sex and purity are worth looking at.

Clivedurdle

The classic tripartite Cathedral, for example in Florence and Pisa has a baptistry, the main building and a campanille.

The xian life is writ large in these buildings - a journey - a beginning, a middle, an end.

Different people have always taken their personal pilgrimages at different rates, some have become eunuchs for the Kingdom of God.

The Albigensian Perfect Ones are another example.

aa5874

The fact is you made a bogus claim.

This is what you claimed which has turned out to be completely false.

I read every SINGLE word in "Against Celsus" 1.9, 1.19, and 3.16 and there is ZERO on castration practices among Christians.

charles

Clive Durdle

I whole heartedly agree and that no one noticed all the evidence. I was thinking also that the line

For the time will come when you will say, 'Blessed are the barren women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never gave suck!' Luke 23:29

agrees with your theory about women. Why is Jesus drawing attention to a woman's 'paps' as they used to be called in my day? What would prevent them from 'giving suck'? I think we are back to the Skoptsy!

aa5874

The key phrase in the passage is "For the time will come when you will say, "Blessed are the barren women......."

Barren women were not considered "blessed" when Luke 23.29 was written.

Barren women will be considered "blessed" when the "mountains FALL on us."

Luke 3.28-30 These are the SOON COMING conditions under which a barren woman would be called "blessed".

Those conditions are STILL COMING SOON. Barren women will just have to wait.

stephan huller

AA,

As I said in another thread, this isn't Dr. Seuss. You can't just take the words on a page and assume that what is being said is reflective of what was true at the time Luke or anyone else wrote the/their gospel.

All reasonable interpretations of the gospel imply that the writer(s) lived AFTER the fulfillment of the destruction of the temple BUT the gospel narrative itself was written AS IF 'we' the readers are standing alongside Jesus in the period BEFORE the destruction.

In this way your reference to 'fiction' is quite appropriate. The gospel isn't a verbatim 'recording' of what happened in 37 CE or whatever date people think Jesus was crucified (or 'imagined' to have been crucified). In this sense it could loosely be identified as having a fictitious quality.

There was an original author - we will call him Mark (but you can pick whatever name you want here). Mark wrote a narrative AFTER the destruction of the temple (or alternatively at the very earliest ONCE HE 'KNEW' that the Roman forces had decided to capture Jerusalem and destroy the temple). This document however was SET in the period BEFORE the destruction of the temple so ultimately both he and Jesus (and the reader who was living in the post-destruction environment) all 'know' what is about to happen.

In this way the gospel unfolds like a play from Euripides where someone comes out in front of the audience and tells them exactly what is going to happen.

The point is that when Jesus is saying 'having no breasts for suck is a good thing because all you morons are going to have your lives transformed by the impending apocalypse' it follows a pattern in the gospel narrative. Look at the use of Daniel 9:24 - 27. Look at all the warnings about the temple not standing.

The point is that the reader already knows 'what is about to happen' including as we might assume the idea that there were these women with their breasts lopped off and men with their penises (or testis) lopped off acting the part of 'priests' in a new religious order likely based in Alexandria (the home of the last temple left standing).

Clivedurdle

http://www.blavatsky.net/magazine/th...lbigenses.html

Fascinating comment about rejecting marriage.

We are looking at a heavily censored allegedly heretical xianity here - but remember it is the winners who define heresy - all xianities are actually authentic, except probably those that claim the truth loudest!

I think what has happened is that no one has asked what precisely does being a pure one entail and what does that mean for institutions like marriage, when even Paul says it is second best for those who burn.

Think of those asexual scifi beings we get regularly - this is the angelic ideal of xianity, and it is definitely part of its rootstock.

stephan huller

And Clive to understand how scholars typically work, you have to understand the selfish, self-centered reinforcement of the human ego.

Most scholars of early Christianity as you know are products of what we might call 'late Christianity' i.e. a European liberal understanding of Christianity as a 'teaching' of Jesus to make everyone 'love one another' or to 'be nice to each other.'

Ugh!

But this is what they know and so when they start going through the ancient literature filled with all these kooky references to Christians 'rejecting marriage' and 'cutting off their genitals' and 'dressing as women' they scratch their heads and think 'this must all come from heresies and heretical leaders who had ideas pop into their head and changed the original beliefs of MY ancestors.'

This happens time and time again. The arguments of Irenaeus designed to keep the simple-minded in tow work on sophisticated scholars who should know better.

Why so?

Because human beings are selfish creatures. They want to be the center of the universe. They want their beliefs and inherited presuppositions to have a sense of permanence and 'truth.' And so all those 'kooky references' are marginalized and connected with individual 'kooks' rather than them seeing the obvious pattern which emerges from actually looking at the evidence from a macroscopic view.

i.e. that Christianity began as a 'kooky religion' of freaks and only GRADUALLY became 'normal' (or reflective of bourgeois 'middle class values' in the mid to late second, third and fourth centuries.

arnoldo

The psuedoepigraphical Pauline writings does support the concept that the ideal state for man was not an outward circumcision but an inner spiritual circumcision (see Romans 2:28-29)

The author(s) of the Pauline writings may've been hellenized jews living in Alexandria who drew upon the allegorical interpretation of scripture established by Philo of Alexandria.