GakuseiDon

On what basis??? I am GakuseiDon! Defender of Truth and Liberal Christianity! Friend of the evil JP Holding (at least, according to Toto)! Slayer of the evil Earl Doherty (at least, according to me)! And, er, btw, I'm quoting what the NT actually says. If that means anything.

If, as many nowadays believe, we should place Paul in a Jewish context, then "Son of God" has quite a different meaning than many modern Christians and mythicists believe. And that includes the evil Holding and Doherty.

You are one weird puppy, aa5874; a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Personally, I think you are before your time, just like Galileo. The term "troll" is not enough to do you justice. You fall into some new category, one which is still to be named, much less defined. Something akin to the Turing Test I suspect, but stretching into the dimension of annoyance. E.g. if a robot can be as annoying as a human, does that mean it displays intelligence?

I see the future of FRDB and internet forums, and the future is... aa5874!

arnoldo

Perhaps there is something similar between the origin of Christianity and the alleged Roswell UFO incident in the 1940′s. Both incidents were meant to be taken metaphorically but somewhere this message got lost in translation and began to be taken literally. Your analysis on the metaphorical message of Christianity is certainly thought provoking. Using this poetical/metaphorical analysis towards the Roswell UFO event may shed light on this subject as well. My current hypothesis is that this was actually a theatrical event meant to illustrate that over-dependence on technology will eventually lead society to “crash.” In turn, the finding of alien bodies also was meant to illustrate the danger of technology dehumanizing mankind. A prime candidate for one of the instigators of this theatrical event may have been the French sociologist, Jacques Ellul, who later went on to write “The Technological Society.”

In addition, Christianity may have been constructed as a dialectical deconstruction of Judaism. The pseudepigraphical Pauline writers frequently used an allegorical method to argue that various judaic laws was abolished. For example, Galatians 4:21-31 illustrated the allegorical, rather than literal interpretation, of the earlier Judaic writings.
Philo of Alexandria correctly interpreted Judaism via a metaphorical, rather than literal filter and possibly influenced at least one or more of the pseudepigraphical Pauline/Gospel writers. A rather obvious influence that Philo had upon the New Testament writers was Philo’s utilization of the Logos. With Philo’s understanding of Judaism in mind, the writer(s) of the texts which eventually became to be known as the New Testament began to write the Gospels and various Epistles. In like manner, the instigators of the Roswell UFO incidents built upon the earlier “War of the Worlds” radio show broadcast in 1938. This radio broadcast was not meant to be taken literally, but was actually meant to be a metaphorical commentary on the Native American experience towards the “invasion” of European immigrants.

aa5874

You DEFEND truth? Then JUST tell me the TRUTH about the Sons of God and Jesus.

You DEFEND truth? What TRUTH is that? Show me the truth in gJohn.

Why are you not DEFENDING the truth now? Did you not just say that You DEFEND the truth?

You have STOPPED DEFENDING the truth? Answer the question.

Do you NOW possess the POWER to be a POTENTIAL GOD or a SON of ONE based on John 1.12?



And you still claim you are the DEFENDER of the TRUTH?

What is the truth, DEFENDER?

What is the TRUTH about how the JESUS CULT started?

You have the potential POWER to become like the resurrected JESUS, the Son of God.

TELL US THE TRUTH, DEFENDER.

aa5874

What you say about Philo appears to be ERRONEOUS. Philo did believe that the God of the Jews did ACTUALLY exist and did ACTUALLY create heaven and earth, including Adam and Eve, as stated in Hebrew Scripture.

Philo did write about "Creation"

On the Creation" XXV Philo did BELIEVE the God of the Jews ACTUALLY and LITERALLY created the UNIVERSE.

And you must SHOW that gJohn was AWARE of Philo or mentioned Philo and show that there were NO other writer who could have influenced the author of John.

And further, in ALL the extant writings of Philo not one mention is made of Jesus, a Jesus cult, or a Logos cult anywhere but he mentioned Pilate.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Avi,

Thanks for the post. I have been thinking about it for a while.

I think my point that Christianity begins with a metaphor works just as well with the translation "The God."

See John 1:1, where he distinguishes two Gods: 1) God/Yaweh/World Creator and 2) the Word of God

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.

The specific God that the author has in mind is "the Word of God"

So the author would be saying that "word of God" is like the God (Yahweh) only unique and different from other gods.

The Jews had a God that was not made of wood, iron, bronze, silver or gold. Their God was made of words. Since people think that their Gods are anthropomophic as they are, they would imagine that the words used by their God was a special case, a second God, another God or metaphorically speaking, like a "Son of God." This is true even if they referred to him as The God (meaning the Jewish God made of words).

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

aa5874

But, is not gJohn a later version of the Jesus story?

The author of gJohn ELEVATED his Jesus to be the CREATOR, EQUAL with and was God but in the earlier gospels there was NO mention of Jesus being the Creator and being equal to God or God himself.

The Jesus story appears to have started with supposed prophecy of the coming of the Son of Man who will come in the clouds of heaven.

By the time gJohn Jesus was ELEVATED be God himself, it was believed that the Son of Man of the earlier gospels would NO longer COME in the clouds of heaven in his generation.

Not one mention is made about the signs of the second coming in gJohn as was done in the earlier Gospels.

Justin Martyr up to the middle of the second century STILL did not YET elevate Jesus to be the Creator, and equal to God.

"Dialogue with Trypho" 7 Dialogue with Trypho" LXII Justin did NOT say that the OFFSPRING was and EQUAL to the FATHER.

The Offspring was made GOD after the the middle of the 2nd century.

The metaphor was LAST or later.

avi

Thanks, Jay. Again, my point may be completely wrong, so please disregard my comments, if so.

I am going to rewrite your sentence, using VERY awkward English, English in fact, which seems to us, or at least to me, to be unusable. Yet, this obtuse English, is exactly how, I imagine, the Greek ought to be regarded.

Most likely, I am wrong.

What this shows, (me at least!), is that JC, could not have been equated with the God. JC was NOT the "word", only "the" God, was the "word", not his son, not the holy ghost. Else, one can not employ "the".

Of course, I am so ignorant of Greek, maybe του θεου, can also be translated as "of a God", instead of "of THE God", as I have written.

Thank you aa, always a pleasure to read your very instructive posts. Well done, as usual.

John seems so very different from the synoptics, to my uneducated eye. Have you a theory on when it was created, based upon its contents? Could such a date support Jay's thesis of metaphor:

?

avi

arnoldo

Philo of Alexandria did not take the Genesis account of creation literally, but rather as a text giving us deeper allegorical truths. It’s possible that Mark was a student of Philo’s while living in the city of Alexandria and applied this paradigm to his writings. When viewed in this manner, “Jesus” is symbolic of the nation of Israel as a “suffering servant” at the hands of internal and external foes. The cruci-“fiction” of Jesus was in fact an allegorical account written by Mark sometime after the destruction of Jerusalem by Romans. Certainly no one in the early first century had interpreted 53:3 as being a prophetic account of any particular person.

It was only later, perhaps sometime after Constantine allied the Roman Empire with Christianity, that an actual person was thought to have been crucified by the Romans. Interestingly, only after Constantine’s time, were religious symbols of crosses commonly found with the body of Christ.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Avi,

My thinking is that there was original John material. In it, he was the word of God or Son of God. That is why he denies that he was the Christ or Elijah or the Prophet. Some people rewrote the material so he became the Christ, some people rewrote the material so he became Elijah and some people rewrote the material so he was just a prophet of the Isaiah or Ezekiel type.

people realized that it was all messed up and confused, so they decided to have a another go at it with a new lead character named Jesus. This created a new mess of confused ideas which are still around today.

I would compare it to an experience that I had as a child in 1961, when I was a fan of a comic book super hero called "The Fly". I went to the mom and pop family store where I usually bought the comic. I bought an issue of Amazing Fantasy #15, which I thought contained an adventure with "The Fly". It turned out that it contained a new super hero who looked a bit like "The Fly" called "Spiderman"

It is only recently that I learned of the connection between "the Fly" and "Spiderman" from Spiderfan.F.A.Q.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

spin

There is no "of". του means "the" (in the genitive case).


spin