mountainman

The priests were the top of the structure, through which
they themselves had risen in service, of the therapeutae,
the attendants of the temples, shrines, gymnasia, healing
centers, and other related services, which included the
preservation and establisment of libraries.



See Galen. Jeffrey.

He calls himself a theraepeutae of Asclepius.
He receives exemption from military service
under Marcus Aurelius because of the service
he renders to the temples of the Healing God.

The word therapeutae is thought by some to
descend from the sanskrit "son of an elder"
or "son of a monk". It is quite Buddhistic.

Ascetic practices are directly relevant.
Fasting is but one form of the fractal
nature of asceticism. A vow of silence
was another.

It was part and parcel of healing, as the
authors of the gospels narrate with respect
to the portrait of the "Son of the Living God
of the Entire Cosmos (within the Hubble Limit)"




Best wishes,


Pete Brown

Jeffrey Gibson

[QUOTE=mountainman;5088944]Yep, as I expected, the crank's dodge.

Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

[QUOTE=mountainman;5088966]In other words, you have no idea what this text says. Got it.


So much for a specific citation, let alone the provision of a specific text.

.

In which of his works and exactly where within it does he do this?

And what is your evidence that he uses the term to mean "priest"?

Thought by whom, specifically? Please cite your source for this.

And why on earth is this relevant, even if true, and ignoring its appeal to the etymological fallacy, since monks were not priests?

Jeffrey

Amaleq13

Yes, in the story you apparently have still not read.

I already addressed these questions and you failed to offer any response. Repeating them as though they have not been challenged is simply disingenuous. :banghead:

I would assume they wanted their audience to be able to read it.

I would also assume that, if they wanted that audience to ignore the clearly offered Jewish context of the references to Jesus' fasting practices and understand it, instead, within the context of Pythagorean asceticism, they would have simply said so.

As I've already pointed out though you have apparently chose to ignore it, neither are you capable of answering them and the answers don't appear to be relevant to understanding the story as it is written.

No, and you've offered nothing substantive to suggest otherwise. You continue to ignore the text to the detriment of your assumption/conclusion.

mountainman

So at least you here and now admit to
the making of the above assumption.
Do you recognise this as an assumption?


I am discussing the answering of these questions,
and I am of the opinion that while the story and
its plot and languange and theme and textual
criticism is one field of information, it is connected
is a very real sense (in the field of ancient history)
to other fields of information which are relevant to
the understanding of the storyas it is written for
what it is.

These other three things
1) date and place of composition (scriptorium?)
2) authors (language, background)
3) purpose for writing (political propaganda?)

are entirely relevant to my enquiry.



Your own assumption above may prove detrimental.
Have you considered this assumption of yours?

Do you honestly expect me to read the text and then
interpret the text without a political environment in
which the authors wrote, at some place and time in
the Roman empire in the first few centuries of the
common era?

To take the text "at face value" is a childish approach.
The time for a little maturity is long overdue, unless
you can somehow justify your own assumption (above)
that these "gospel authors" were honest and
straightforward.

Your postulate "the gospel stories are honest and are
straightforward" (or something like this, according to
your disclosure above) needs to be acknowledged.

And defended.

Step up to the plate Amaleq and take a swing.

Best wishes,


Pete Brown

mountainman

A passing reference of relevance
to this discussion thread:

FROM APOLLO AND ASCLEPIUS TO CHRIST
Pilgrimage and Healing at the Temple
and Episcopal Basilica of Dor
C. Dauphin

This is essentially largely a detailed archaeological report.
There may be some here interested in reading this subject.
Essentially it tracks the "Basilica at Dor" and finds it has
been "parked next door" to "where the Asclepius temple was"
in a late antiquity demolition, construction and make-over job.
(Architecture and building as political propaganda)

The earlier archaeology (pre-nicene) is all Asclepius.
At the conclusion, the author writes about Asclepius and Christ



Best wishes,



Pete Brown

Amaleq13

I've never denied it. Why do you pretend otherwise? In fact, my entire opposition to your unsubstantiated speculation is that we would find evidence in the text from authors to support it.

Do I recognize that when I use the word "assume" that it is an assumption? This is the sort of inanity your unsubstantiated speculation has left you.

Really? It doesn't appear that way. It seems more like you are slinging red herrings and avoiding the evidence. :huh:

If you had evidence to support your opinion, you would actually have a defensible position.

That is yet more bad news for your assumed conclusion since you haven't got any credible answers to any of them.

Good luck establishing that to be the case. Your efforts to defend your own position do not make me nervous in the slightest that you will even approach success. :devil1:

Yes and it seems entirely reasonable to assume that authors would not choose to explicitly and unambiguously provide a Jewish context for Jesus' fasting behaviors that they did not intend to be accepted as such.

OTOH, I do not find it reasonable to assume that the authors actually meant something entirely different without having some good reason to think so in the text.

I expect you to support your claims with rational arguments and evidence. I have been quite disappointed in that regard so far.

As opposed to the "mature" approach of letting one's imagination run free to engage in unsubstantiated speculation?

A combination of a straw man and shifting the burden. Nice job! I can smell the desperation from here. :rolling:

mountainman

For the sake of this argument I will defend
the position that we cannot say with any
degree of certainty that the gospel authors
were comitted to any specific tradition in
regard to their portrayal of asceticism in
the figures of the gospels, let alone Jewish
asceticism.

We *may* make the assumption that the authors
of the gospels were simple reporters of tradition
who forgot to date their documents, but to
assume they are Jewish or even Hellenised Jews
on the bassis of their writing their stories in the
Greek language, are equally conjectures.

We dont have the evidence at the moment to
decide between these two separate conjectures.
The one that you put forward ...

And my response to this, that seeing that these blokes
wrote in the Greek, then when they thought about the
activities of asceticism (fasting, vows, etc, etc, - its fractal)
they may have been thinking "Pythagorean".

My argument is that we cannot be certain without evidence
by which to distinguish what you conjecture, between what
I am here conjecturing.

Here is what Schaff has to say:

Now where did Origen learn his ascetic practices?
Was his peer-review ascetic named Ammonius Saccas?
The lineage is Pythagorean.

Who flattened the temple of Asclepius at Aegae?
Who executed the chief priests and why?
And why would the good christian emperor BULLNECK
do something like that?

When the author Eusebius tells us of these non-ascetic
actions by Constantine, do you find it reasonable to assume
that the author actually means what he wrote?

Who was the real Healing God of Pre-Nicene Antiquity?
And why did BULLNECK shut down this Hellenic tradition?

Ancient historians have no explanation for these
actions of Constantine at the Asclepia of Aegae.
Robert Lane Fox has made a conjecture ....


Best wishes,


Pete Brown

Amaleq13

Yes, your responsibility is to defend the position introduced by your OP. Why you think it necessary to state this explicitly, I don't know. :huh:

I get the impression you are continuing to assume that this is relevant to my position despite the fact that I have explicitly denied it. Please stop attributing assumptions to me that I have denied are relevant to my conclusion.

Only yours is relevant and we certainly do have evidence against your conjecture from the text, themselves, as has been pointed out repeatedly and you have yet to address. You have offered nothing substantive to suggest why we should ignore what the texts do say in favor of what you suspect may have been in the mind's of the authors. :huh:

Why did the authors present Jesus' fasting behavior in the context of Jewish tradition rather than Pythagorean philosophy?

Authors tend to want their readers to understand what they write. Do you consider that conjecture? I consider it common sense. You have yet to proffer any evidence that suggests the authors meant something other than what they wrote beyond the fact that they wrote in Greek. Surely you can see that this doesn't even remotely approach being sufficient for such a claim? :huh:

They "may" have been but there doesn't appear to be any evidence suggesting that they actually were or, even assuming that they were, that they thought it was relevant to the story they were writing.

I have the evidence of the texts which appears to explicitly deny your OP. You have the possibility that the authors may have been thinking about Pythagorean philosophy when they wrote.

You didn't even bring a knife this gun fight, amigo. I've got what appears to be a fully-loaded gun and you brought the possibility that someone might be thinking about a knife. :rolling:

Too bad you can't say when the stories were written so that what Schaff offers might be considered relevant.

Unless you can show that it was from the Gospel stories, why should I consider it relevant to your OP?

Likewise for the rest of your questions.

Why pretend you are at all interested in what the stories say when you are clearly and entirely dependent upon evidence from elsewhere that has only a conjectural relevance?

schilling.klaus

the ancient forgers said so, and naive mainline scholars
believe that it was so just because it is not supernatural.


Roman Stoic aristocrats,
in the footsteps of Seneca and Epictetus

not before the defeat of Simeon bar Kohba

the language understood best by most intellectuals
of the Mediterranean.

he's just one of those chained by the common post-1950 mentality
that dictates to see Christianity as having started with
a Jewish sect in Palestine in early first century.

Klaus Schilling