Clivedurdle

Xianity, the expression of a classical human existential crisis of being in the now, able to look back and to look forward, moulded in the context of powerful empires, and expanded to the whole universe.

http://www.glasgowmuseums.com/venue/...id=4&itemid=68

juergen

This is a very interesting analysis, I have never thought of it like this. At first reading, I thought it seemed far fetched, but reading it over again today it's starting to make sense. The Father had the starring role in the OT, and has been since before the beginning, then the Son shows up, whom, through his work is given everything for ever without end, and the Spirit is here making sure we make it from past to future.

Fascinating indeed.

In what way would this view be accepted psychology?

Clivedurdle

See the above link to Games People Play.

In fact it is getting more interesting, as the latest brain research is that we as humans use the same brain circuits for the past and the future!

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...ough-time.html

RareBird

Thanks. You made it worthwhile. IF you let it resonate a little more you may see as I that this has nothing whatever to do with a god. It has only to do with the human being. A person calls upon the past for cues, examines the future for implication and acts in the present. If he or she makes up a poetic expression or applies some caricature to the the saying and teaches it to others, those others may not understand the figurative nature of it and may begin to suspect that the idea is to "beg" a literal personage instead of calling upon the whole of the human past for inspiration. That unfortunate leap becomes wholly defeating--the change from seeking message from human actions for inspiration to take human action to merely surrendering responsibility to an intercessor to take over. But of course, there is a subordinating power to institutionalizing the model which calls upon a personage of god rather than the inspiration of venerable ancestors. This I believe to be likely no accident but somewhere along the line a technique for subordinating people en masse to believe that they are low and their decisions meaningless and inept. To all those who have immersed themselves in study of all this and think I'm all wet, I say, enjoy your view from inside the box. This is what I feel and see and you won't dissuade me.

lpetrich

IIRC, some Hellenistic or Roman Jews used "Holy Spirit" also. It's a bowdlerization of "Spirit of God"; Jews have a long tradition of avoiding saying God's name directly.

Yahweh may not even have been God's original name; it likely means something like "the being". But like many euphemisms, getting used a lot made its users think of a euphemism for it, so it became, "the Holy One", "the Holy Name", shorted to "the Name", etc. In particular, YHWH came to be written with the vowels of Adonai ("Lord"), for the purpose of indicating that pronunciation; this caused it to misunderstood as "Jehovah", and often translated as "the Lord".

One can see this bowdlerization in the New Testament also, where Matthew uses "Kingdom of Heaven", while Mark, Luke, etc. preferred to use "Kingdom of God". Matthew is the most Jewish of the Gospels, and bowdlerizing "Kingdom of God" to "Kingdom of Heaven" fits very well with that.

As to pneuma meaning "breath", lots of words for "ghost" or "spirit" or "soul" originally mean "breath"; it was widely imagined that breath is some sort of vital force. English "ghost", German Geist, Latin spiritus, Greek pneuma, Slavic dukh, Sanskrit atman, Hebrew ruach and nephesh, etc.

Thus, the Holy Spirit is literally the Holy Breath.

Solo

I really can't speak to Rarebird's comments overall. The actual theological development of the Trinity concept proceeded from a very different angle, which had nothing to do with the schema that Rarebird proposes. In one aspect I agree, and that is the Trinity represented a concept of Divinity relating to humanity and deeply "committed" in the relationship. This aspect of immediate accessibility of God (by larger mass of humanity) appears to have been a prominent feature of the Apocalyptic period in which Jewish mysticism and gnosticism abounded. In the sectarian, communal search of God, which this era popularized, the 51st Psalm probably played a great role in shaping the thinking about and devotion to the Holy Spirit:


Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden [part] thou shalt make me to know wisdom.

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Make me to hear joy and gladness; [that] the bones [which] thou hast broken may rejoice.

Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.

Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me.

Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me [with thy] free spirit.

Psalm 51:5-10


Within the early Christian milieu, the Holy Spirit of course was the agent through which Jesus and the truth of the gospel were revealed to the ones God favoured (1 Cr 12:3). In the adoptionist Mark's narration the Spirit descends on Jesus like "a dove" on his baptism, and then drives him into the wilderness. Holy Spirit, the early Christians believed, gave them (or some of them) extraordinary capacity for doing miraculous deeds, healing, prophesizing, and speaking in foreign languages without having to learn them. When Simon Magus, the archsorcerer, sees what people can do when Peter puts the Holy Spirit into them, he wants the recipe (Acts 8). Peter rebukes him but this still does not resolve the mystery of Simon wanting something which obviously has some utility other than being an altar boy goody twoshoes.

So what was it in modern terms ? Could a community agree on some pure abstract "invention" which had no reference to their lives ? No, sir.

I agree with the late professor Maccoby that the Jesus-professing movement would have been dead and buried soon after Jesus had its leadership not suceeded in popularizing the manifestations of the Spirit, and convincing a large audience that they vouched for the coming end of ages. This is roughly the meaning of Pentecost in Acts 2. In the modern medical view, the Spirit would be seen as manic excitement and beliefs about the same. Whether the spirit would be judged holy or unclean would depend on the outcome of the hypermanic episode. (1 Cr 10:4-5) Paul was coming out ok from of his bouts of furious madness (Gal 4:13, 1 Cr 2:1-5 would refer to the depressive agitation), so people believed - seeing the man whole again - that the mystery of the Spirit and the Christ Body seen by it was for real. You see, when Paul was coming back , he seemed completely normal and sounded strangely wise. Not only was he not ashamed of his condition that made him seem like a foolbut he even went so far as making it a warranty of God's wisdom (! 1 Cr 20/27).

Here are the NT (and GT) allusions to the "drunken" mien of agitated manics relating to the Spirit

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(4) Elation -> Appearance of intoxication
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note: the appearance of intoxication, in a subject not ingesting an intoxicating substance, is often a diagnostic clue for presence of spontaneously elevated serotonin levels. Serotonin has been called the body’s natural psychedelic drug.

Lk 1:15 For he will be great before the Lord and he shall drink no wine nor strong drink and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit…

Acts 2:14-17 But Peter, standing with the eleven, lifted up his voice and addressed them ‘Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and give ear to my words. For these men are not drunk, as you suppose since it is only the third hour of the day; but this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: And in the last days, it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams

Jn 2:3-10 And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘they have no wine’. Jesus said to her, ‘Woman what have I to do with thee, my hour has not yet come…Jesus said to them, ‘fill the jars with water’. And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, ‘now draw some out, and take it to the steward of the feast’. So they took it. When the steward of the feast tasted the water now become wine and did now where it came from (though the servants…knew), the steward of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, ‘Every man serves the good wine first; and when men have drunk freely; then the poor wine; but you have kept the good wine until now.’

1 Cor 10:4 For they drank from the supernatural Rock which followed them, and the Rock was Christ.

Eph 5:18 And do not get drunk with wine, wherein is excess but be filled with the Spirit

Th (13) Jesus said, ‘I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring which I have measured out.

Th(108) Jesus said, ‘He who will drink from My mouth will become like Me. I myself shall become he , and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.

Jiri

Clivedurdle

So the breath of god, thought to be the life force, becomes slowly transmogrified into a holy spirit and then a Third Person.

A new sect thinks it has had the breath of god come amongst them at Pentecost.

Might Pentecost be the real beginning of xianity, with the Jesus stuff a later add on to join up the dots between heaven and earth and explain why the Holy Spirit had come?

Huon

John 3,5 (NAS)
Jesus answered (to Nicodemus), "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God."

from Catho Encyclopedy :
from wiki :
Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), was a German theologian and church historian. Though the four gospels have been regarded as canonical since Irenaeus in the 2nd century, Harnack - like earlier German scholars - rejected the Gospel of John as without historical value regarding Jesus' life:

"In particular, the fourth Gospel, which does not emanate or profess to emanate from the apostle John, cannot be taken as an historical authority in the ordinary meaning of the word. The author of it acted with sovereign freedom, transposed events and put them in a strange light, drew up the discourses himself, and illustrated great thoughts by imaginary situations. Although, therefore, his work is not altogether devoid of a real, if scarcely recognisable, traditional element, it can hardly make any claim to be considered an authority for Jesus’ history; only little of what he says can be accepted, and that little with caution. On the other hand, it is an authority of the first rank for answering the question, What vivid views of Jesus’ person, what kind of light and warmth, did the Gospel release?"

A late addition to John 3 ?

lpetrich

Von Harnack's conclusion reminds me of what Isaac Asimov said in the New Testament volume of Asimov's Guide to the Bible. He stated that one could think of John as something like one of Plato's Dialogues, where Plato used Socrates and other real people as literary sockpuppets. But by comparison, he seemed to think, the Synoptics have much more of the historical Jesus Christ.

Since he was likely expressing the conventional wisdom of the more secular sort of Bible scholars when he wrote, that makes me wonder how common this viewpoint is.

Although Jesus mythicism is rare, it would appear that the conventional wisdom among such Bible scholars is that the Gospels are rather intimate mixtures of fact and fiction. Is that a reasonable assessment?

That would make Jesus Christ like such notables as Socrates and Pythagoras, about whom our primary sources also have intimate mixtures of fact and fiction. Is that also a reasonable assessment?

Some people may find it surprising how skeptical historians sometimes are, because we usually don't see the sources that they work from. Romulus and Remus are nowadays dismissed as mythology by most people, but ancient historians like Livy and Plutarch treated those twin brothers as real, historical people, even if modern ones don't.

Cesc

Hello, here's what I think the Holy Ghost is:

It is first and foremost:
- the "shekinah" concept of the OT in its broadest form. But especially the particular "Spirit/Presence/Glory of God" which normally travels in a physical cloud and dwells in the temple, tabernacle or mountain.


which comes from:
- the general pagan 'catalyst force of Generation/creation'. Regarded as the external force which encompassed some or all of these concepts, phenomena and symbols:
Photosynthesis (the life-giving power of sunlight as they understood it), sexual attraction, fertility, Amor/Cupid, love, feminine beauty, bird, dove, wings, the love/fertility goddess, the creators consort, feminine aspect of the creator, serpent, ankh, wisdom and sometimes word, breath or voice of the creator. Typically embodied in the beauty of the moon and especially the planet Venus, it can dwell within water and in wombs: the moon, the earth, arks, caves and caverns and in sun- and moonbeams (heavenly light).


and later:
- the concept of light as the physical and intellectual enlightening presence/force of the "Divine Wisdom" of the creator


and finally interpreted in relation to:
- the hellenistic concept of Logos ('word', 'reason', 'rational action', where 'logic' comes from), the abstract force of rationality that governs the universe.
Interpreted by Philo Judaeus (20 BC - 50 AD) as the intermediary between God and man spoken of in the OT as Gods Word, Spirit or "Gods Presence" in the temple that the prophets lament the absence of and awaits the return of.

The Holy Ghost in the NT is various "modern" theological interpretations of the shekinah from the "old religion" (which was slowly and surely being surplanted by the new rationalist and humanist ideas which had saturated the hellenistic hegemony) including God's Word, Spirit, Glory, Presence, Voice, Breath, Finger, Face and Gods Wisdom. God's (long awaited) intermediary with the world. This Logos scripture interpretation by the hellenistic Jewish allegorists particularly in Alexandria was unpopular with mainstream Judaism, especially as formulated by Philo (whose writings Paul can only have been familiar with).

The Platonic "presence of the good" (see "Sun Metaphor") is an early cornerstone in the later Holy Ghost/Jesus, I think. Where Jehova becomes "the good" (God) who's intermediary is light, rationality, the Logos, Jesus.
The author of I John proclaims that "God is light". You might even say that a 1000 years before Plato and 1500 years before the author of I John, Akhenaten seemed to have had the same idea (as the Rosicrucians believe).

So the Greek allegorists and stoicists shaped the rational enlightening philosophy and the "Logos" which Philo made into Jehova's intermediary which in turn Paul and John made into the messiah/passover sacrifice redeemer of sins, through whose resurrection you could be initiated/resurrected/reborn into the mysteries of Gods kingdom and saved when the world was going to come to an end within 20-30 years or so.
The "firstborn son of God" I think Philo called the Logos. It seems that Jesus became the flesh and blood Logos (which not only means 'word' but also an 'action' or 'utterance') and the Holy Spirit remained largely as the shekinah and the pagan concepts of the divine fertility force of love/life/joy described as the dove. I dont know, but as far as I understand there's quite a bit of confusion even in the NT as to the exact nature of the Holy Spirit, the different authors seem to have different ideas. And even more confusion comes from the early church. I dont know but I think the truth is somewhere in between all this.