Doug Shaver

So am I.

ph2ter

Rachia, a thorn-bush upon which the wool of a goat sent into the wilderness was put, the thicket in the region of Moria in which a ram was caught and the burning bush in a desert of Horeb/Sinai in which Yahweh appeared to Mosses are similar objects. They are probably inspired by the ancient practice of sacrifice in which the sacrificing victim was put on a stack of wooden branches at the top of some hill, killed and then burned in a bonfire spectacle. It was believed that such devouring/consuming fire comes from God himself, as Exodus 24 says: "the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel." and Deut 4:24: "For the LORD your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God."

If Jesus was modeled according to sacrifice described in Leviticus 16, it should not surprise us then that he was crowned with thorn-bush.
The crown of thorns put on Jesus head was by Clement in Paedagogus chapter 8 also connected with the burning bush of Moses:
"He having borne on His head, the princely part of His body, all our iniquities by which we were pierced. For He by His own passion rescued us from offenses, and sins, and such like thorns; and having destroyed the devil, deservedly said in triumph, "O Death, where is your sting?" (1 Corinthians 15:55) And we eat grapes from thorns, and figs from thistles; while those to whom He stretched forth His hands— the disobedient and unfruitful people— He lacerates into wounds. I can also show you another mystic meaning in it. For when the Almighty Lord of the universe began to legislate by the Word, and wished His power to be manifested to Moses, a godlike vision of light that had assumed a shape was shown him in the burning bush (the bush is a thorny plant); but when the Word ended the giving of the law and His stay with men, the Lord was again mystically crowned with thorn. On His departure from this world to the place whence He came, He repeated the beginning of His old descent, in order that the Word beheld at first in the bush, and afterwards taken up crowned by the thorn, might show the whole to be the work of one power, He Himself being one, the Son of the Father, who is truly one, the beginning and the end of time."

Here Clement also as Irenaeus argues about Jesus being one. But all that insistence on Jesus being one probably has its origin in the two goats sacrifice. The goats were two, but they were supposed to form a single sin-offering.

As a digression, what really surprised me was the sentence from the same chapter of Paedagogus which says:
"I know that the woman brought to the sacred supper "an alabaster box of ointment," and anointed the feet of the Lord, and refreshed Him;"

Does Clement here connect the supper at the Simon the leper/Lazarus house in Bethany with the Last Supper?