Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Robert Tulip · 02-04-2013, 12:09 PM

Frankly, Toto and Stephan are wrong about the Jewishness of the Therapeuts.

Yes the Therapeuts had strong interest in Judaism, and probably many Jewish members, but their actual roots are Buddhist, in the Theraputta missions sent by Ashoka from India in the third century BC. The ancient Greek term Therapeut was linked with the Theraputta, who brought the Buddhist monastic tradition into the Mediterranean world, as Therapeuts. The genetic origin of Christian monasticism is Buddhist.

DM Murdock explains this Buddhist origin of Christian monasticism well in her review of Michael Lockwood's book, Buddhism's Relation to Christianity, which Stephan mentioned earlier in this thread but it appears he has not read. I highly recommend this short review as a way to see the ancient links between east and west manifested in the Buddhist Theraputta missions which produced the Therapeut movement.

It is interesting here to also note, without endorsing it as genetic, the apparent similarity between the terms Serapis and Therapist.

Robert Tulip · 02-04-2013, 06:15 PM

The Therapeuts were Buddhist. Here is evidence from Murdock's review of Lockwood. Please read the full review to place these quotes in context.

Quote:

Lockwood’s anthology includes a survey of Ashokan texts... in which the emperor clearly states, referring to the “conquest through Dharma” or Buddhist practices:
And such a conquest has been achieved ... [in the realms of] Antiyoka, ... Tulamaya, Antikeni, Maka and Alikasundara ... “Antiyoka” is Antiochus II (fl. 261-246 BCE), the Greek ruler of the Seleucid Empire, and “Tulamaya” is Ptolemy II Philadelphius (fl. 285-247 BCE) of Egypt, while “Antikeni” is Antigonas Gonatas of Macedonia (fl. 277-239 BCE), “Maka” is Magas of Cyrene (fl. c. 288-258 BCE), and “Alikasundara” is Alexander II of Epirus (fl. 272-255 BCE).

Quote:

In the subsection on monasteries, Lockwood (90) remarks: "The earliest, pre-Christian monasteries in Egypt and the Holy Land…almost certainly were evolved from those introduced by Emperor Aśōka’s missionary monks."

Quote:

the term “theraputta” came to be applied to Buddhist monks in a monastery under the leadership of a Mahā-Thēra (“Great Elder”). “Thēraputta” (Pāli) is a compound of the two words: thēra—elder, and putta = son(s)... Emperor Aśōka’s medical missionary monks who arrived in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 3rd century BCE and their followers and converts were to be known by this name, which, to the Greeks, would sound like “therapeutai.” These monks’ skill in healing the sick, both physically and spiritually, would enhance a medical connotation of the Greek term, “therapeutai,” and its later English offshoots, “therapy,” “therapeutics,” etc.

Quote:

Lockwood goes on to discuss the Therapeuts in greater depth, along with presenting views assigned to Christ in the New Testament that reflect Buddhist monasticism. Lockwood’s assessment of the Therapeuts as Theraputta appears to have been staring us in the face for quite some time, since it has been known for decades that there are figures in Buddhist lore called “Theraputta,” both as a name and as a title.

Quote:

this source of the Greek name for this group of monastics described by ... Philo ... explains how so much Buddhist doctrine ended up in the Christian effort, which is clearly a combination of Judaism and Paganism, including and especially Buddhist and Egyptian religion. Here we find these two major influences dovetailing in precisely the area and the era in which much of Christianity was evidently founded.
The term Theraputta as meaning “son of the elder” makes sense also in consideration of the Therapeutan hierarchy as described by Philo, who discusses younger acolytes serving their elders. The most logical conclusion here is that Buddhist monks did indeed travel to Egypt, as stated in Ashoka’s inscriptions, to establish monastic communities, the “descendants” of one of which were the Therapeutai, who were largely Hebraic and Judaic in ethnicity by the time of Philo. In this scenario, their allegorical works as described by Philo and later identified by Eusebius as the early forms of the gospels were Jewish-Buddhist texts.

Interestingly, we find this Therapeutan network not confined to Alexandria but also named as such in other locales, such as on the Greek island of Delos

Quote:

Lockwood (101) further states that by the first to second centuries BCE the Buddhist supernatural hierarchy of the godman above the devas or “angels” and bodhisattvas or “saints” was already being formulated, such that this structure takes priority over and likely influenced the Christian supernatural hierarchy of Christ above the angels and saints.

Quote:

Lockwood (104) describes a Buddhist text from Sri Lanka, the Mahâvamsa, which records the journey in 140 BCE of some 30,000 monks from a city called “Alexandria” to an important Buddhist council on that island. According to the text, the gathering drew 1.436 million monks from around the known world, not counting those already on Sri Lanka. Also according to the Mahâvamsa, these Alexandrian monks were led by a Greek named “Thera Maha-Dhamma-rakkhita.” Here we learn that there existed a massive Greco-Buddhist presence in the second century BCE at a city named Alexandria!

Quote:

As Lockwood demonstrates, New Testament scholars in general remain uninformed in studies of the broader milieu in which the Christian effort originated. Hence, while their criterion for a scholar to be “respectable” is the unscientific and uncritical acceptance of Church doctrine and history, we would define “respectable” scholars as those who look outside of the Bible and possess a more complete picture of world at the time, particularly the very many potential and probable influences on Christian origins, including and especially Buddhism.
A longstanding complaint in the field of Buddhist studies, is, in fact, the seemingly willful ignorance of these external influences and the derogation of those who have raised them as “disrespectable” and “non-scholars.” In other words, the field of NT scholarship has been set apart in an arrogant bubble of untouchability

Toto · 02-04-2013, 09:35 PM

I suggest that the Buddhist influences be a separate thread.

I think the question is intriguing, and there clearly were cultural contacts between India and Greece going back to the time of Alexander, but I am not persuaded by statements like "The earliest, pre-Christian monasteries in Egypt and the Holy Land…almost certainly were evolved from those introduced by Emperor Aśōka’s missionary monks."

I might have some time to look into this later this week.

But this is a serious question, unlike the idea that the Therapeutae were pagan healers.

Robert Tulip · 02-05-2013, 08:53 PM

I don't understand why people are presenting this debate in such a polarised way.

It seems obvious that the Therapeuts would have included many Jews among their number, as otherwise you would not expect them to take such interest in Jewish scripture as Philo describes.

But nor is there any basis I can see for Stephan's apparent insistence that Jews would have denied capable gentiles entrance to the therapeut club because of Philo's supposed bigotry.

The Therapeuts were a movement whose core was probably Hellenistic Jews with an interest in syncretising diverse contemplative sources, including from the Buddhist Theraputta, but also from Jewish and Greek texts. I think it makes sense on this basis to infer that the Therapeuts were the community who produced the Gospel story.

Toto · 02-06-2013, 01:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Robert Tulip

I don't understand why people are presenting this debate in such a polarised way.

It seems obvious that the Therapeuts would have included many Jews among their number, as otherwise you would not expect them to take such interest in Jewish scripture as Philo describes.

But nor is there any basis I can see for Stephan's apparent insistence that Jews would have denied capable gentiles entrance to the therapeut club because of Philo's supposed bigotry.

The Therapeuts were a movement whose core was probably Hellenistic Jews with an interest in syncretising diverse contemplative sources, including from the Buddhist Theraputta, but also from Jewish and Greek texts. I think it makes sense on this basis to infer that the Therapeuts were the community who produced the Gospel story.

I agree that this group was probably Hellenistic Jews. I think they are too early to be the source of the gospel story.

Robert Tulip · 02-06-2013, 01:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stephan huller

I find it hard to reconcile someone writing a master's thesis on Heidegger and the slavish devotion you display to an insignificant New Age thinker. Would it be possible for us to have a discussion about Heidegger by private message or outside of the forum? I just can't believe this is a graduate student or better. Heidegger is great thinker and deserving of serious attention. Acharya S - not so much. It just doesn't make sense.

Who were the Therapeuts? The consensus appears to be that they were contemplative attendants on the divine. Beyond that, even their healing role as some sort of Socratic midwives of the soul seems uncertain. And yet their position as enlightened thinkers within the syncretic location where Christian theology was born in Alexandria gives them an alluring and intriguing status.
The similarity of their name to the Buddhist Theraputta contemplative missionaries sent by Ashoka illustrates how little we really know of ancient culture.

Today, looking for midwives of the soul, the modern psychopomp able to help us give birth to our innate knowledge, Martin Heidegger certainly stands high with his axiom that care is the meaning of being. My thesis on The Place of Ethics in Heidegger's Ontology explored how this existential ontology of care provides a coherent basis for ethics grounded in connectedness, an idea closely aligned to attendance on the divine.

The central place of knowledge within Heidegger's system of thought gives him something of an affinity with Gnosticism, a school with some contact with the Therapeuts. Heidegger's central question in Being and Time is taken from Plato's Sophist, "For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression "being." We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed." This lack of knowledge of the meaning of being is a central problem in Heidegger's work, and yet his view that the answer is care suggests something simple and innate, a sort of restorative atonement.

This questioning of the meaning of being is closely allied to the Therapeut task of attendance on the divine. Such attendance cannot be a matter of exclusive dogma, but requires a phenomenological openness, allowing the things to reveal themselves. Openness to the whole is then an intrinsically healing process. The existential psychology of writers such as Binswanger and May indicates how openness to the whole can be a source of modern epiphany.

Looking today for those who apply such a therapeutic openness to being as a whole, I put Acharya S in the first rank. It does not faze me that Stephan fails to read her work with respect, because at the centre of the Heideggerian attitude is a sense of paradigm shift, a vision that our culture has some wrong assumptions at its base, but that a new framework can be constructed. Murdock is a courageous pioneer in constructing a new evidence based framework for religious experience, rather like Heidegger in building upon atheism but recognising that religious heritage is a source of meaning and identity.

My interest in both Heidegger and Murdock was inspired by study of precession of the equinox as the structure of terrestrial time. I remember when I first picked up my copy of Heidegger's Being and Time in Macquarie University bookshop in 1983, and thought, wow, this is the book. My study of time since then led me to an interest in the real temporal structures seen by astronomy, and how these visible phenomena are encoded in myth. I firmly believe this knowledge is a great source of spiritual and social healing, and was recognised as such by the ancient therapeuts, but our society is still under the spell of the fall from grace, alienated from a real understanding of time. The truth will set you free.

stephan huller · 02-06-2013, 10:02 AM

Quote:

The central place of knowledge within Heidegger's system of thought gives him something of an affinity with Gnosticism, a school with some contact with the Therapeuts

But it is precisely these wild leaps of logic that I find so troubling from someone with a master's degree. I know at least a dozen professors and graduate students in Australia. They have a wonderful university system. I find it impossible to reconcile your rash jumps of logic with someone who studied Heidegger or any serious scholar or thinker. How can you say with certainty that the Therapeutai "had some contact" with gnosticism? It's possible but by no means certain. Similarly with respect to the idea that the Therapeutai were Buddhists. Indeed you introduce so many ideas, one after the other with an air of absolute certainty, that it becomes comical.

At best you could say that the gnostics MIGHT be related to the Therapeutai. With respect to degrees of certainty we can say that the Therapeutae ARE related to the Essenes somehow, that the Therapeutai MIGHT be related to early Christianity somehow, and that under the umbrella of that 'maybe' that the link with a specific Christian sect like the gnostics there is an ever decreasing likelihood - something like from maybe to 'less than maybe' for any direct relationship. All the other things that you bring up and give tacit support - Buddhism and the like - is 'probably not' true given that we have no precedent for such a syncretic Jewish sect which was mainstream and influential enough to have the support of Philo, a prominent leader in the Jewish community in Alexandria in a period when he was in a particularly grumpy with respect to Greek religion.

But again I am still interested in your claim to be Robert Tulip. Do you actually have any familiarity with the German language? I would think this would be essential for studying Heidegger with any degree of seriousness. Indeed I would think it would be impossible to write anything substantial about this important thinker without having read his writings in German. I had a friend who was pursuing a PhD in philosophy and he was studying Heidegger's writings and he was taking German. I also can't help but notice that the 'Dave35' guy has conveniently disappeared after his identity was being questioned (i.e. that myself and others were suggesting it was really 'Acharya S' coming to the forum under an assumed identity).

I am beginning to wonder the same about you, quite frankly.

stephan huller · 02-07-2013, 07:42 PM

A picture of the formerly Jewish kindgom of Aksum and its relation to the Nile and Alexandria:

http://wrldhistory.4t.com/aksum.jpeg

stephan huller · 02-07-2013, 07:45 PM

There was also apparently a small enclave of Buddhists in Aksum, 'Robert.' FYI

stephan huller · 02-09-2013, 12:57 PM

If we could go back to the beginning of this idiotic debate. I think that even among the dissenters there is agreement that the Therapeutae are Jewish in some form. I can only go so far in my effort to plumb the depths of irrationality, but my sense is that:

Shesh acknowledges that the group thought of themselves as Jewish or could be considered in some form Jewish but because they spoke Greek they were 'corrupted' by Hellinism and thus impure and disgusting.

Robert Tulip wants to find Buddhist origins for Christianity and so wants to see this community as 'Buddhistic' owing to general similarities between Buddhist monks and the description in the Contemplative Life (the same reckless methodology which makes Jesus Osiris, and any pagan god that bears a resemblance to the Christian Savior)

mountainman wants to identify the Contemplative Life as a forgery or by another Philo or another writer (once again to open the door to forgery). The reason here is that Eusebius can't be demonstrated to use pre-existent source material

tanya is just causing mischief. She/he has no real purpose.

aa is aa.

The rest of us (Toto, spin, myself and any rational individual) assumes that Philo wrote the Contemplative Life, that 'Philo the Jew' was Jewish, that the group he extols and connects to the Essenes were Jewish like him.

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02-04-2013, 12:09 PM	#11
Robert Tulip Senior Member Join Date: Mar 2012 Location: Canberra, Australia Posts: 635	Frankly, Toto and Stephan are wrong about the Jewishness of the Therapeuts. Yes the Therapeuts had strong interest in Judaism, and probably many Jewish members, but their actual roots are Buddhist, in the Theraputta missions sent by Ashoka from India in the third century BC. The ancient Greek term Therapeut was linked with the Theraputta, who brought the Buddhist monastic tradition into the Mediterranean world, as Therapeuts. The genetic origin of Christian monasticism is Buddhist. DM Murdock explains this Buddhist origin of Christian monasticism well in her review of Michael Lockwood's book, Buddhism's Relation to Christianity, which Stephan mentioned earlier in this thread but it appears he has not read. I highly recommend this short review as a way to see the ancient links between east and west manifested in the Buddhist Theraputta missions which produced the Therapeut movement. It is interesting here to also note, without endorsing it as genetic, the apparent similarity between the terms Serapis and Therapist.

02-04-2013, 09:35 PM	#13
Toto Contributor Join Date: Jun 2000 Location: Los Angeles area Posts: 40,549	I suggest that the Buddhist influences be a separate thread. I think the question is intriguing, and there clearly were cultural contacts between India and Greece going back to the time of Alexander, but I am not persuaded by statements like "The earliest, pre-Christian monasteries in Egypt and the Holy Land…almost certainly were evolved from those introduced by Emperor Aśōka’s missionary monks." I might have some time to look into this later this week. But this is a serious question, unlike the idea that the Therapeutae were pagan healers.

02-05-2013, 08:53 PM	#14
Robert Tulip Senior Member Join Date: Mar 2012 Location: Canberra, Australia Posts: 635	I don't understand why people are presenting this debate in such a polarised way. It seems obvious that the Therapeuts would have included many Jews among their number, as otherwise you would not expect them to take such interest in Jewish scripture as Philo describes. But nor is there any basis I can see for Stephan's apparent insistence that Jews would have denied capable gentiles entrance to the therapeut club because of Philo's supposed bigotry. The Therapeuts were a movement whose core was probably Hellenistic Jews with an interest in syncretising diverse contemplative sources, including from the Buddhist Theraputta, but also from Jewish and Greek texts. I think it makes sense on this basis to infer that the Therapeuts were the community who produced the Gospel story.

02-07-2013, 07:42 PM	#18
stephan huller Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: seattle, wa Posts: 9,337	A picture of the formerly Jewish kindgom of Aksum and its relation to the Nile and Alexandria: http://wrldhistory.4t.com/aksum.jpeg

02-07-2013, 07:45 PM	#19
stephan huller Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: seattle, wa Posts: 9,337	There was also apparently a small enclave of Buddhists in Aksum, 'Robert.' FYI

02-09-2013, 12:57 PM	#20
stephan huller Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: seattle, wa Posts: 9,337	If we could go back to the beginning of this idiotic debate. I think that even among the dissenters there is agreement that the Therapeutae are Jewish in some form. I can only go so far in my effort to plumb the depths of irrationality, but my sense is that: Shesh acknowledges that the group thought of themselves as Jewish or could be considered in some form Jewish but because they spoke Greek they were 'corrupted' by Hellinism and thus impure and disgusting. Robert Tulip wants to find Buddhist origins for Christianity and so wants to see this community as 'Buddhistic' owing to general similarities between Buddhist monks and the description in the Contemplative Life (the same reckless methodology which makes Jesus Osiris, and any pagan god that bears a resemblance to the Christian Savior) mountainman wants to identify the Contemplative Life as a forgery or by another Philo or another writer (once again to open the door to forgery). The reason here is that Eusebius can't be demonstrated to use pre-existent source material tanya is just causing mischief. She/he has no real purpose. aa is aa. The rest of us (Toto, spin, myself and any rational individual) assumes that Philo wrote the Contemplative Life, that 'Philo the Jew' was Jewish, that the group he extols and connects to the Essenes were Jewish like him.

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