gurugeorge

No, but you need to have some background knowledge - which you don't have, and, apparently, are quite proud of not having.

You've just made a confession of ignorance, and that you're happy with it - then you twit me with some talk about "primary texts". Really, all you are doing is taking a stab at what the text (as translated by scholars with a certain viewpoint, mind you) means, based on what you think it rationally ought to mean, given your contemporary knowledge and contemporary usage of English.

If you're happy with that, fair enough. I'm not: I don't feel confident about taking some text that's clearly specialised, and from a very, very long time ago, and saying that I understand what it means on a "barefoot" reading with no background context. I think I have to take some care to figure out what was going on in those days generally, and around the area of religion and philosophy, before I feel confident to interpret a religious and philosophical text.

Yeah, it's kind of like that, except people have previously under-estimated the importance and the all-pervasiveness of magickal thinking in those days. It's probably more important than was thought.

No, that's reason-based philosophy. For example "natural curiosity" does not immediately lead to the question "where do I go when I die", because there have been rationalistic philosophies since ancient times that said exactly what we say today: you don't go anywhere, you just cease to exist. I myself, as a child, never thought anything else. In fact, "I cease to exist" is the OBVIOUS RATIONAL ANSWER, it always has been (even 3,000 years ago in India), always will be. The idea of "life after death" doesn't come from any rational cogitation, it comes from experiences of a seeming "body within the body" (the soul), from dreams and visions, which suggest an alternate kind of reality than the physical, which might be the medium of possible survival after death.

It's like this: some people are rational and have these kinds of experiences, some people are rational and don't have these kinds of experiences. If you'd never had these kinds of experiences, the idea of a "god" as a causal explanation would never occur to you in a million years.

I absolutely agree that in broad brush strokes this is the sort of thing that happens in the history of thought, but remember we are talking specifically about RELIGION, that has ideas of "gods", "spirits", "demons", etc., etc. Those do not come from any rational analysis, they do not naturally recommend themselves to the rational mind as potential explanations of anything; the rational mind, now, in the past, in the future, and always, has, does, and will have, only naturalistic causal explanations for things, with at most some rarified philosophical concept of the Absolute or an Idealistic slant.

As I said, you can see this because in ancient history, there were rationalistic schools like the Indian Carvaka who were totally, purely rationalist and materialist, just as many are today.

No, the novelties that religion brings to the table come from a different source than reason. The only reason such entities as "gods", "spirits", etc., crept into public discourse is because certain kinds of brain phenomena produce events of the seeming-reality of spooky entities that talk to you - and these kinds of phenomena were more widespread and accepted in the past than they are nowadays, as possibly-truth-bearing experiences.

They do both.

Where is the evidence that he had the idea first and confirmed it by a vision? There is no way of telling, from Paul's "letters", whether he'd heard of the Jesus idea from anybody else at all prior to his avowed visionary experience.

Again, this is just a rationalisation that you're pulling out of nowhere.

It was "no big deal" in the sense that he obviously wasn't introducing it as some strange new doctrine or novel teaching.

But again, you're missing something: if you do these practices, and get these kinds of experiences, they are "bigger" than any political or philosophical twaddle. For someone who's had mystical experiences or visionary experiences of talking to God, everything else is relatively trivial in comparison. So, if you know these things happened in these get-togethers at all, you can be sure they were a major source of what they were doing, and while I wouldn't say absolutely everything has to be reinterpreted in that light, things have to be re-weighted, weighted differently, than they would be if there were no evidence of mystical/occult goings-on.

I've already gone through that - but just think about the fact, for a start, that Christianity is actually marked by a lot of scribbling produced in those ancient times, that has been preserved.

(Actually, that induces me to zoom out a bit - in fact there have never been any working/lower class movements or revolutions, all revolutions have been "middle-class". Consider the "Peasant's Revolt", the first true revolution of modern times - those people were not "peasants" at all, but actually artisans, skilled people, i.e. the middle class of the day. The "working classes" and the "lower orders" have always been used as political footballs, but they have never really had much motivation themselves for anything other than the occasional bit of rioting.)

It looks like a broad hypothesis being brought to this context, but actually it's a conclusion that comes from looking at how other religions all over the world have started. True, it might be illegitimate to bring this background idea to this instance of religious startup, it might be different - but let's see what shakes out if we don't apriori think of Christianity as particularly exceptional. Suppose it is just like most other religions.

Well, I'm partly having a laugh of course - but the point is serious. The author may not be writing ghost porn, but he clearly means the reader to believe that there was holy intercourse between this virgin and a spirit - just like the ancient myths of a rambunctiuos Zeus, or mediaeval myths about succubi and incubi, just like modern myths of "alien abduction". In fact, the phenomenon that causes these things is called "sleep paralysis", and is well-known to produce visions of a "seeming other" in the bedroom. There's your rational explanation - and it is not an "explaining away" of the evidence, like your (equally) rational "faith" business is.

Oh, so now, suddenly you have a scholarly understanding of the difference between Greek myths and Jewish messiah stories? Where does THAT come from, given your plea of ignorance up till now?

Well, I'll repeat my rationale (definitely for the last time now, we're starting to go in circles now, as these things do):-

The texts in question were written many hundreds of years ago. Ideas, mores, manners, philosophies, religions, were different in those days. In order to understand the ancient texts, you have to have some background understanding of the climate of thought at the time, and you need to rely on scholars who have an understanding of the language of the day, but who may have their own biases too (although of course as scholars they will be doing their best to remain objective). It also helps to have a general background understanding of the specific phenomenon in question (in this case, religion) in its instances in other times and places in the world.

BEFORE I LOOK AT THE TEXT, I need to have this in place, if I want to find out what the texts meant to people then.

If I don't do that, then all I am doing is reading the text in English translation and making a rational reconstruction of what seems sensible to me, based on my understanding of English words. This is what you are doing - and in a sense there's nothing wrong with it, it's a fun enough exercise - but I don't think it's likely to get us any closer to understanding what the texts meant at the time.

I recommend you look more closely at the word that's translated as "faith" (pistis) and see how its meaning has changed. In really ancient times, it was actually "pledge" or "assurance", based on experience; we have no reason to think the usage for Paul would have been much different, nor even for the early orthodoxy (after all, their trust was in their supposed lineage going back to eyeballers of the cult figure). It's only later (with St Augustine, IIRC?) that it came to mean "belief in things without evidence" (almost the exact opposite of what it originally meant), and it's held that meaning since. If you are using the word in this sense (the sense of trust without evidence, in the sense of a "leap of faith") to interpret, e.g., the virgin birth, and more broadly the whole Christian religion, then I invite you to consider the possibility that you may be barking up the wrong tree.

andrewcriddle

See Hebrews 11 1-3 Andrew Criddle

Elijah

Thanks, I try.
Let's just call it. Good conversation. Here's to next time we chat, it being about something we are in a little more agreement on.

gurugeorge

How about this translation:-

There is a trust which provides the foundation for the existence of that which is hoped for and makes the critical examination of invisible things possible.

IOW, the text is talking about a type of trust, specifically trust in God (i.e. trust in the sense that he will do as promised, not trust in sense that we are recommended to believe the bare proposition of his existence on no evidence). This is clear from the immediately preceding passage (10:39):-

But we will not be the ones who shrink back in fear so that we are destroyed, but the ones who trust him so that our souls are preserved.

IOW, the meaning isn't that you ought to believe any old bollocks about stuff outside your experience, it's that if you follow the arguments for God's existence (principally, the impossibility of a natural causal explanation for the Universe as a whole - "what is seen was not made out of things that are visible") then you will naturally trust that he's as good as his word - that's what folks did in the olden days, etc., etc.

Elijah

I don’t know about John coming first but I do think it paints the most coherent understanding of what is going on compared to the synoptic versions combined. Whoever wrote John seems to have an idea of what is going on with Jesus and the source of the synoptic doesn’t seem to know what is going on but is merely attempting to explain how the faith in him as the messiah started. John is written by someone who seems to think Jesus was the messiah and believed in his promise of eternal life for faith in him.

Like I said I wouldn’t use the bit about him personifying the logos as the passage you interpret the rest of John with. An example would be like someone starting an biography about Obama and in the forward talking about how he is the personification of Change and then goes on to tell how the first black man was elected president in America. You wouldn’t read the story of him becoming president with the idea that it was trying to tell the story of Change/Logos walking in the flesh, you would just recognize that they thought he was the culmination of something that was coming for a while now. It’s like an honorary title for whoever you think is the personification or fulfillment of the world’s wisdom/reason or god’s will.

I think you can kind of see some of this kind of thinking coming from Philo, who was trying to harmonize Greek philosophy with the Jewish thinking of the time.

“Accordingly, it is natural for those who have this disposition of soul to look upon nothing as beautiful except what is good, which is the citadel erected by those who are experienced in this kind of warfare as a defence against the end of pleasure, and as a means of defeating and destroying it. (146) And even if there be not as yet any one who is worthy to be called a son of God, nevertheless let him labour earnestly to be adorned according to his first-born word, the eldest of his angels, as the great archangel of many names; for he is called, the authority, and the name of God, and the Word, and man according to God's image, and he who sees Israel. For which reason I was induced a little while ago to praise the principles of those who said, "We are all one man's Sons." For even if we are not yet suitable to be called the sons of God, still we may deserve to be called the children of his eternal image, of his most sacred word; for the image of God is his most ancient word.” On Confusion of Tongues.

They were already formed by a non military type of king who was of lower class who led a people’s rebellion (escape) against their rulers so another one popping up again should be expected.

“For he was a king, not indeed according to the usual fashion with soldiers and arms, and forces of fleets, and infantry, and cavalry, but as having been appointed by God, with the free consent of the people who were to be governed by him, and who wrought in his subjects a willingness to make such a voluntary choice. For he is the only king of whom we have any mention as being neither a speaker nor one frequently heard, nor possessed of wealth or riches,” Philo On Rewards and Punishments.

I think the difference between Marcion and the orthodox is mainly about calling the god of the OT the devil or some lesser god, instead of being more interpretive with it like Philo or Origen. I think they were both orthodox, in faith in Jesus was the key, he just wasn’t willing to be so interpretive as others were and the rest of the movement was too reliant on the traditions in the OT to say that it was coming from a bunch of people who didn’t know god but were instead worshiping a lesser/evil god.

Sorry I missed your post about Philip, so unsure of the influence there.

Elijah

I’ve discussed this bit with before I think but for others maybe. This passage looks IMO like someone trying to tie faith, which their movement was based on, into being initiated philosophically speaking.

“SOCRATES: Take a look round, then, and see that none of the uninitiated are listening. Now by the uninitiated I mean the people who believe in nothing but what they can grasp in their hands, and who will not allow that action or generation or anything invisible can have real existence.” Plato Theaetetus

Platonic dualism's main thrust was that the unseen eternal was real.

2 Cor 4:18 As we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal

.

spamandham

Having not read the ideas you are referring to, do you know how passages such as teh following are dealt with?

John 16
1"All this I have told you so that you will not go astray. 2They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God.

This is an obvious anachronism if John is dated to ~70. It's an anachronism anytime prior to the Bar Kochba revolt (regardless of priority).

aa5874

These two passages from Philo clearly show that it was not necessary for there to have been a physical character called Jesus Christ to believe that God had a Son. It can clearly be seen that the words Jesus Christ cannot be found in the passages or that anyone named Jesus Christ died for the sins of mankind and that the Laws of God would be abolished including circumcision.

Philo did not ever claim he would commit suicide on behalf of or due to his belief that someone named Jesus Christ who was crucified or committed suicide.

There is nothing in Philo about worshiping a crucified man as a God, in fact Philo was choosen by Jews to argue against the deification of Emperors of Rome and the placing of statues of Emperors in Jewish places of worship.

Philo's son of God was strictly philosophical, not a suicidal man to be deified.

This is found in "On the Embassy" And Philo wrote this See http://www.earlyjewishwritings .com

Philo has clearly demonstrated that his philosophical son of God did not need to be a physical man who committed suicide.

maryhelena

The article is well worth reading....

mod note: direct link here

maryhelena

Agreed, if one works from GJohn the synoptic storyline seems to follow on more logically. First the Logos/Wisdom interpretation, evaluation, then the New Covenent of Mark, then the prophecies and birth narratives of Matthew, then the 're-birth' (6 ce) and the 15th year of Tiberius datestamp of Luke (wisdom, ideas etc - never static...mythology on the move....)Yes, the writer of GJohn thinks Jesus is the messiah - and Mark, Matthew and Luke, later, start filling out the storyline and searching for evidence within the OT. (which is basically what some mythicsts are saying re Paul and his vision - but its perhaps GJohn had the storyline first and Paul joined the party later.....)

Sure, Change does not rest with Obama alone - although it rests upon him now to live up to that earlier perception of him. Something similar with the Logos/Wisdom with the gospel Jesus in GJohn. The Logos/Wisdom picture is far bigger than any one characteristic or personification of it. (My comment, earlier, re the Word became flesh - the idea became reality etc - that's just a modern day take on things....)

Philo is an interesting case - now that would be a turn for the books if Philo had a hand in GJohn - that is aside from a simple influence re ideas...that would at least date GJohn prior to his death in 50 ce. Yes, that’s the general picture of Marcion - but he was also on another mission - that of removing as much as he could get away with re Jewishness of Jesus from his gospel. The Jewish genealogy, the nativity, the cleansing of the temple, Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. Marcion was not going to have his Jesus storyboard confined to being a fulfilment of OT Jewish prophecies. His Jesus ‘came down to Capernaum’ - a bit like the Logos/Word coming down from the Father into the world in GJohn.....