Chili

Let me finish this post and say that religion must only be responsible to lead 'sinners' to the point in their life when they intuitly know it is time to spin their own cocoon and there undergo the transformation of their life wherein they move from the lower house to the upper room.

Albrecht Duhrer made a woodcut on this sentiment here: http://www.alchemylab.com/melancholia.htm

In essence they move from the TOK wherein their world existed as real to leave behind and totally abandon, so they can move into the TOL as a 'Room with a View' that they raise into their own Ivory Tower for which they need a mermaid to go down into the depth of their own soul that is as deep as wide waters are wide and for this the 'manger' in needed as the only connection to nurse the long lost Son of Man so that the nerves can be re-routed from the TOK to the TOL, and hence the TOK must be pierced to die without pain while yet the old Adams apple remains in function to now bypass emotion in a Stoic kind of way and speak Pure Reason only, and so also transform glossolalia to the higher gift of Interpretation (not of the gibberish but perception itself as seer).

The manger here is provided by the 'mystery religion' to serve the 'secret agent' as insurrectionist to empty the TOK and upload its richess where only beauty and truth can be tied down (and now the actual gold is left behind just to make Pete happy, or is it Peter?). This so is the 'winnowing fan' to loose and retain and is how 'house is cleaning' is 'iconic' and so is religion specific as seen by the 'Lamb of God' as insurrectionist and not Son of Man who is the survivor at the foot of the Cross later, and is handed 'her' as a bouquet to decorate his own mansion with 'local beauty' and so Mary is always seen as the 'perfect image of mortal beauty' by the visionary around the world, while yet her home is in Rome (James Joyce).

This then is where the Church is not just like a sheep rancher but also an apiarist who send the Jesuits around the world to place their 'queen bee' into local hives and imputed iconic images of her into their minds where love instead of war would be their agent within, to emerge down the road free and clear with a mind of their own that in the end they see connected with Rome while still yet have a home of their own . . . wherefore there is said to be milk and honey in that same land.

aa5874

Again, your statements are completely illogical. The teachings in the Canonised Pauline Epistles MUST be compatible with the teachings of the Church that Jesus was crucified under Pilate in Jerusalem some time around the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius.

In the Pauline writings, it is claimed Jesus DIED for OUR SINS not for the sins of people in OUTER SPACE.

Galatians 3:13 KJV Please IDENTIFY the LAW and TREE in OUTER SPACE.

Doug Shaver

That is what Christians have said ever since Eusebius's time. I'm surprised you're so willing to take their word for it.

la70119

Thanks for the pdf! :wave:

I noticed that David W Chapman does not like the implications of the Greek ἀνασκολοπίζω (verb - impale, fix on a pole) and σκόλοψ (noun - anything pointed) when it comes to crucifixion. Yet ALL the examples he cites cannot prove to me that the verb and the noun can mean anything but what the lexica tell us they mean, despite Philo, Lucian, etc., using them as cognates for crucifixion and cross (torture-execution-suspension-pole, not tropaeum).

Epigraphy shows in Southern Italy, a torture-execution-stake was equipped with a crossarm and a spike that impaled any crucified person who would sit on it. If ancient writers outside Southern Italy used language connoting impalement for crucifixion, then it is obvious the Romans exported that model to their provinces.

And he does the same thing with the Hebrew verbs TLH and TSLB (to hang, impale), its noun / adjective TSLWB (stake, gallows / impaled, hanging), the Aramaic verb ZQF (hang, impale), its nouns ZQWFH & ZQIFA (pole, stake / one hanged or impaled / hanging, impalement) and the Hebrew verb YQ' (display with broken limbs, dislocate, impale, hang, execute, expose, display). Now of course all these (except maybe the last) were used to describe Roman crucifixion. This and the Greek and the epigraphy lead me to believe that the Latin cruci figere had an additional element to the English idea of "to crucify."

And where does Mr. Chapman come from?

Of course. And this is the problem with academic scholarship on the subject of crucifixion. The field is dominated by Christians and in the English-speaking world, evangelical Christians! So when you believe a human Jesus who was also a child of a ghost was nailed to a simple cross that looks like a frame of a tropaeum, you are going to interpret things wrong and spread all this false information. :huh:

But outside that belief system's influence, one is free to straightforwardly interpret all these words!

Scholarly consensus on the existence of Jesus is influenced by the same belief system and leads to the familiar pitfalls and roundabout of circular reasoning we all know about.

maryhelena

Your welcome re the pdf......

As I wrote earlier - Greek is beyond me - so would you be so kind as to make all of the above very simple? What exactly is the issue here re the Greek words for crucifixion - stake, pole etc - and what are the implications for the gospel JC crucifixion story.

la70119

What it boils down to is that the New Testament uses five words to describe the suspension of the NT Jesus: the noun σταυρός, and the verbs σταυρόω, κρεμάννυμι, προσπήγνυμι, ἀναιρέω, ἀνασταυρόω.

The issue here is that the present-day church definitions do not match the secular society and street definitions of the day.

The implication here is that the NT Jesus, who is presented as an historical person therein, not just the mythical child of a ghost, was subjected to a regular Roman Crucifixion, despite gLuke and Acts saying right out he was crucified by the Jews. And the way the Romans usually did it, was they suspended someone from a gallows shaped like a "T" and provided him a kind of a projecting seat (acuta crux, sedile, cornu) to support him with. But once he's on the seat, he ends up impaling / screwing himself. Sorry, there's no way to say it that isn't rude.

aa5874

I am surprised that you agree with Eusebius that Paul wrote Epistles before the Fall of the Jewish Temple c 70 CE.

maryhelena

Thanks, la70119, for the clarification of the issues re crucifixion. Putting the christian ideas aside - what remains re Roman crucifixion is whether, giving JC a 'life' for a minute or two, the sedile had a spike in it.

Crucifixion

Interesting - but since the gospel JC was not historical no more than that. As to Roman crucifixion - survival was possible - re the friend of Josephus who survived crucifixion.

As to the issue of whether it was the Jews or the Romans who did the deed - again, if the gospel story is not historical - its purely a debating issue.

However, if that gospel JC crucifixion is based upon a historical event - if there is a historical model which has been drawn upon, then perhaps the issue can become clearer.

I've posted many times re Antigonus - one thread asking if Antigonus was that historical model. Run with the idea for a moment: Herod the Great gives the Roman Marc Antony a great deal of money to have Antigonus killed. So, Rome is the hired assassin. That, if Josephus is to be trusted, is history. Now, take that history and work it into a pseudo-historical story that one is creating. Who gets the blame for the crucifixion? It could go either way depending upon ones creativity in devising plot structure. Of course, both the hired assassin and the conspirator are guilty of crime. So, the Romans did it - and in the NT the Jews did it. But don't be taken in by the storyline, the symbolic recreation. It is Herod the Great who was the conspirator. That is the Jew, the Herodian Jew, that paid for the death of Antigonus, the last King and High Priest of the Jews, in 37 b.c. Yep - read gJohn in that light also - clever stuff going on right under our noses - Jews? read Herodian Jews and things can begin to look very different....

la70119

Correction: that was six words. The NT also uses the phrase ἐπὶ του ξύλου.

With a genetive noun denoting a place or support and a verb of rest, ἐπὶ means upon.

του is an article, singular masculine / neutral genetive, meaning the, the one, who, which, that.

ξύλου is the genitive of ξύλον, which is something made out of wood, like cut logs, beams, timbers, firewood, instruments of punishment, the last of which could be a club, a cudgel; a wooden collar, stocks, a combination of both, a gallows, a tree, a cross (Roman execution pole), and an impaling stake. And a patibulum.

So ἐπὶ του ξύλου could mean upon a tree, upon a gallows, upon an impaling stake, upon a Roman execution pole = galliows equipped with an impaling spike.

So the implications I posted immediately above still apply.

la70119

Before Antigonus was beheaded, he was tied to a whipping post, with or without crossarm (Cassius Dio doesn't say which, he uses σταυρῷ = to a post or type of 'cross') and brutally scourged.

And the Gospel of Peter has Herod Antipas ordering Jesus to be crucified, and soldiers under him carry it out.

And it isn't just the death of Antigonus that the Christians got their ideas from.

There is also another historical event which is the funeral of Julius Caesar. During the services as his body was laying in a bier modelled after the Temple of Venus Genetrix, it was surrounded with wooden columns made from poles. Of course, that meets one of the definitions of σταυρόω (fence in with pales but poles will do). At the same time there was a wax image of his body, modelled complete showing the 23 stab wounds, attached to a cruciform frame of a tropaeum, that is, a cross. Obviously a mannekin does NOT need an impaling spike to stay on its cross! Julius Caesar, I might add, was accused of wanting to make himself king and he was already made Pontifex Maximus (greatest high priest) of the Roman state religion.

The third source of inspiration was Homer's Odysseus where the protagonist and his crew have to sail through a waterway past the sirens. Odysseus has his crew stop up their ears with wax and tie him to the mast of the boat, so that they won't hear the Sirens and steer toward them and crash their ship on the rocks. And yes, they resist the Sirens and keep a safe distance from the rocks in the waterway. Now, boats back then had a strong beam in the bottom of the boat to keep the mast secure, to keep it from tipping over. This, of course, would serve as Odysseus' suppedaneum (foot rest). Compare with the NT stories particularly gMark and gMatthew, and with the Alexamenos Graffito.

I'm sure there's more.