Clivedurdle

Like the morphing of Jesus in John 20....

I am wondering if the translations we are most familiar with are having a major effect on these debates. For me it is NEB, RSV and KJV. Reading Earl's excellent post above my mind is going to a myriad sermons on these matters, and in fact my experience is that what Earl argues has been implicitly argued by preachers over the centuries and the idea of fully god fully man is an implicit acceptane of the mythicist position

Spanky

Thank you for your posts Earl, there is a lot there to digest. You write thoughtfully and present your case very well. I do not know why you do it here, though, you will never get the same level of discourse. You are definitely a lightning rod! I do want to add my 2 cents about what you said, though:
This clearly, with an open mind or not, does not say that Jesus was never on earth. This is written in the present tense, not the past. This, according to the theology, puts Christ in the heavens NOW, who sits on the right hand of God, interceding for us. A high priest in heaven, if you will. Not one set up by man, but one in the heavens. The writer is just giving his sales pitch that Jesus did away with the law. So, if Jesus were now on earth he would have to offer up gifts according to the law, like a priest. But, because he is in heaven, he is a super duper heavenly priest, one who is not subject to the law. This approach is what the writer undoubtedly had in mind. I think you are trying to read your thesis into this. It doesn't pass in this instance, though.




Hebrews 8 (King James Version)
King James Version (KJV)

gstafleu

So "kata sarka" was a terminology needed to bring the highly mystical "kata pneuma" concepts of the epistle writers a bit more down to earth. But how come these writers had landed themselves into this pickle in the first place, what strange corner had they painted themselves into? In this posting I will put forth some ideas about that, set against the larger background of general mythology. What I will posit can be simply summarized: that the rather mysterious kata sarka--kata pneuma dichotomy is in fact an instance of a well known dichotomy that can be observed throughout much of mythology: that of immanent versus transcendent deities.

In order do this I'll have to go back a little in the development of mythologies, and hence my posting will start out in territory well before the usual haunts of BC&H. So this posting is rather lengthy, for which I apologize, be it slightly insincerely: I simply do not want to assume that all BC&H readers are already familiar with the material in question. This is also not an attempt to hijack this thread. Diversionary as much of this posting may seem, I really do think that it will throw some light on the issue at hand: the strange and often perplexing kata pneuma-kata sarka dichotomy we see in the epistles. Finally, I don't want to wave any false flags, so I'll state up front that most of this comes from reading Joseph Campbell's works, specifically his Masks of God series.

In the old days, when humans made their living from hunting and gathering, there was a very close and immediate relation between nature and its processes on the one side, and humanity on the other. As a result, these people were very aware of a rather basic fact in nature: in order for one organism to live, another has to die. It is not just that predatory animals live on other animals or herbivores on plants (also living organisms), but plants grow on the mulch of other, dead, plants, and we humans, in order to live, need to eat, and hence kill, both plants and animals.

These days we call this the cycle of nature, and the ancient hunter-gatherers were very aware of this cycle. This had of course serious consequences for their mythology, which was formed around this cycle. I have given some examples of these mythologies in my infamous food plants thread, I will refer to some items of the OP without repeating them here. To summarize, the deities of these mythologies were very much a part of nature. Hainuwele for example was a symbol of the whole cycle: she lived and then died, only to reappear as a food plant.

The type of deity who, like Hainuwele, resides in nature, is part of nature, is called an "immanent" deity. Immanent deities were for a long time the norm, not surprising given the very direct relation between humans and nature. This has an interesting advantage: when your deities are immanent, reside in nature all around you, you can study them by studying nature. And, using the principle of sympathetic magic, you can influence them by imitating nature. Hence the festival of Chicomecohuatl, which I relate under "An Aztec Rite" in the food plants posting. Here the cycle of nature is imitated in a rite: the corn goddess is killed so that she, and hence the corn, can rise again.

The hunter-gatherers were thus very aware of what we call these days recycling. And that awareness certainly included the fact that they, the people, were an intimate part of the cycle. The prevalent mood therefore was one of one-ness: the people, the gods, nature, were all part of one great cyclical process. Hence the sharp difference between life and death that we are used to was not felt then. It was in those days not "dust to dust," but rather (old) flesh to (new) life. Neither were the deities separate from nature or humanity, rather they were one with it.

This started to change with the advance of civilization. Once agriculture and farming was mastered, once society was split into guilds of specific competence (farmers, blacksmiths, administrators, priests...), at least some of the people had time to look up from the earth and into the sky. There they discovered an even greater cycle: that of the movement of the heavenly bodies. The movement of these bodies stands in a clear relationship to the cycles of nature on earth: the earthly seasons correspond to the movement of the heavenly bodies, specifically of that of the sun against the background of the fixed stars.

The concept of the all encompassing cyclical process thus expanded from the down-to-earth realm of biology to the mathematical majesty of the astronomical domain. It now was the order of the heavens that was seen to be the source of, and hence the ruler of, the earthly processes. Everything in nature was still part of one great set of cycles, but the emphasis had shifted from the earth we inhabit to the skies above. This had consequences for the deities.

The new deities were now heavenly and no longer earthly. (Not that the earthly deities completely disappeared, but they were relegated to a decidedly secondary rank: there status became that which we now call demons, although not necessarily with all the negative connotations that this term now implies.) This meant that the new ruling deities were now separated from the humans: the humans were still on earth, but the deities, who in the old system also resided on the earth, now were in heaven. This posed a problem: how do we connect to our gods?

The Sumerians, who first invented this heavenly system, solved this problem with a bit of technology: they built ziggurats, pyramids that reached into the sky. These ziggurats featured a big staircase leading from the ground to the top. Via this staircase the deity could come down to earth and the humans could climb up to the deity. This structure thus reduced the newly created distance between the gods and humanity.

But, reduced by technology or not, the separation was still there. The gods, though still an immanent part of the great cosmic nature, were no longer as much a part of the goings-on of earthly life. In other words, the gods had started to become "transcendent." A transcendent god is one who, in contrast to the old nature deities, is not part of nature but stands outside and above it. The new heavenly gods were not completely transcendent yet, but they had made the first steps.

Complete transcendence probably arrived, at roughly 1000 BC, with the religion of Zoroastrianism. This religion, which started in the Levant, for the first time saw the principles of good and evil as autonomous forces. In the old immanent religions good and bad things of course happened, but they were seen as part of the great cycles, as complements of each other, not as autonomous and opposed forces. In Zoroastrianism this changed: The principle of good was embodied in the god Ahura Mazda, the principle of "bad," or evil as it is called in English, in his counterpart Angra Mainyu. and as these two principles were now opposed and hence no longer complementary in a great ever ongoing cycle, it was now necessary to posit a battle between the two, a battle that, at the end of times, would be resolved in favor of good.

This let to a cascade of mythological novelties. Removing good and evil as innate parts from the cosmic cycle put them outside this cycle. Hence the two gods that represented these forces, and specifically the "good" god Ahura Mazda, now also resided outside the cosmic cycle. In other words, the gods had now become completely transcendent. Another consequence was that time, which was previously conceived as an ever ongoing cycle, now had a definite "end," something that opened the door for the later ideas of apocalypse.

The most complete form of a transcendent deity can no doubt be seen in monotheistic Judaism. (BTW, I'm following Campbell here in assuming that Zoroastrianism arrived before monotheistic Judaism. Even if this will turn out to be wrong, because Judaism preceded Zoroastrianism or was a parallel development, this will not impact the gist of the story here presented.) Here the god is so transcendent that one cannot even utter his name.

Let us look at two examples of the transcendent versus the immanent as it relates to monotheistic Judaism. First, let us compare the creation myths of the Sumerians (immanent) and the Jews (transcendent). In the Sumerian version the primal deity is Nammu, the sea goddess. She creates Heaven (An) and Earth (Ki), who then go on to create everything else. Specifically humans are created from mud, that is from the earth. This is similar to what we see in Genesis, with one important difference: in the Sumerian version the earth is a god(dess), in the biblical version it is not. Hence for the Sumerians we are all part of the deity and the deity part of us (and of nature in general), while in the Bible we are separate from god. This is further symbolized in the Bible via the fall of man, which describes the separation between man and god. Genesis 3:22 is quite specific about the whole thing: "And the LORD God said, 'The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.'" In other words, man had to be stopped from reaching a state of complete divinity, god had to be separate from man, had to be transcendent. Of course in the Sumerian, immanent, version, man's divinity was implicit from the very start.

Another example will point out the difficulties that arose from this way of viewing the divine. While the Sumerians could solve their relatively small separation from the deities by building ziggurats, such a solution is not allowable when the deity is completely transcendent. Hence we find in the Bible the story of the tower of Babel, where the idea of the ziggurat, and hence of finding a direct contact with the deity, is vilified. But this leads to an interesting problem: once you have reduced your ziggurats to rubble, how do you contact your deity?

To put it differently, a completely transcendent god is pretty useless. Such a god is so far removed from everything earthly, and hence from everything human, that he can't even touch it, so to speak. This was the problem that faced the Jews around the turn of the era. There was at that point really only on solution: somehow the deity had to be brought back closer to earth, somehow he had to regain some of that lost immanence. An that is what Christianity set out to do.

But such a task is far from straightforward. In Jewish conception the deity was completely transcendent, completely spiritual, completely kata pneuma. We humans on the other hand suffer from some obvious fleshiness and live a lot of our lives in a kata sarka manner. So now we are finally back to the subject matter of this thread; what we see in the epistles are the first attempts to reconcile the two: how do we bring the transcendent kata pneuma world back into contact with the earthly kata sarka one? The epistles really don't offer a solution as to how to do that, they just state that somehow it was done, and you had better believe it. In other words "Saying it makes it so," a form of that good old sympathetic magic.

What we see next is a fascinating dance of the kata pneuma and the kata sarka principles, a dance that never really stopped. We see the old idea of the gods walking the earth returning in the literal descent of Jesus to lower spheres. But such a development in thought takes time, and in the epistles he never quite makes it down to earth. Even after he reached the earth, in the gospels, the dance still continued. We see for example the later development of the Maria cult, where the old mother goddess sort of returns, and we see the introduction of many other much more earthly, much less transcendent and much more residing-in-or-near-this-world deities in the form of the Catholic saints. But the two concepts, that of transcendence and immanence, remain difficult to join, which let to twisted concepts like the trinity, which solved the problem of joining the two by simply stated that the transcendent aspect of the deity (the father) and the immanent one (the son, we'll ignore the holy ghost here) were in fact one, and don't ask how.

So here we have it. Christianity is the attempt to reintroduce immanence, or at least aspects thereof, back into a mythology that had become so transcendent that it had lost most of its earthly usefulness. The terms used for immanence and transcendence, or at least approximations thereof, in the early literature are kata sarka and kata pneuma respectively. But these concepts remain opposites and can therefore never be joined seamlessly. So seams remain visible, and it is these seams that cause so much perplexity, confusion and debate.

I want to end this posting on a very local note, and that is to congratulate Earl on the title "Dancing with Katie Sarka Under the Moon" he gave to the 2005 thread. The symbol that the old immanent religions usually gave to the concept of the cycle of nature is the moon, whose appearance is also cyclical. It waxes, then wanes, much like life, it then dies and remains dead for three days, only to rise again, reborn. The analogy with the cycles of nature, where plants and animals grow and die only to rise again as new instances of themselves, should be obvious. Plus, the rhythm of the womb, which, by coincidence or not, matches the lunar rhythm, probably had also not escaped the ancients. We can add to this that nature, the eternal birth-giver, was usually seen as female, as the term "mother earth" indicates. So indeed, the dance of concepts we see in the epistles is one with the old female (Katie) idea of the deity immanent in mother earth (Sarka), a dance that can only take place under her symbol of the ever waxing, ever waning, ever dying and ever rising moon. Well done!

Gerard Stafleu

Solo

The Davidic descent, if it were meant as a physical identifier of the Messiah, would clash violently not just with Galatians 3; it would all but demolish Paul's paradoxical structure ("nobody on earth - the highest name in heaven") which underlies all of his theology and which exploded his cult into a popular religion: God chose "a nobody" as a promise that I (another nobody) am accounted for, and cared for, and will live forever ! Romans 1:3 was not written by the same man who wrote Gal 3 and 1 Cr 1:18-31. Worldly standards meant nothing to Paul.

Jiri

Ben C Smith

Your recent postings have been very long, Earl, so let us take things one step at a time. First, a request for sources.

Please name the sources you are referring to here. Thanks.

Second, on one of our passages.

In Romans 9.7 Paul says that not all of those who are the seed of Abraham are actually children of Abraham. Here seed of Abraham is quite clearly literal: Paul is saying that literal physical descent from Abraham is not enough.

In Romans 9.8 Paul says that children of the flesh are not mutually interchangeable with children of God. Again, the children of the flesh are quite literal here; they are obviously ethnic Jews. Paul wants to include gentiles, too. How does he do this? By creating a new category, children of the promise. That is a figurative use of children.

All of this supports the notion that phrases like children of the flesh or seed of Abraham mean physical descent.

Let me render these verses for you, placing ethnic Jews in every place where one of these expressions occurs:

Neither are they all children because they are physical descendants of Abraham, but rather: Through Isaac your physical descendants will be named. That is, it is not the physical descendants of Abraham who are children of God, but rather the children of the promise are regarded as physical descendants.

Paul knows that seed of Abraham means physical descendants; this is why he says that the gentiles are regarded as the seed of Abraham. The word regarded is your contextual clue. It is the same as saying: I regard you as a brother. I know what brother means, and I know that you are not really one of mine.

This passage offers absolutely no support for regarding these physical phrases as applying to purely nonphysical beings; in fact, it refutes such an attempt.

Ben.

EarlDoherty

For the moment...

I just noticed that I got my wires crossed in one statement:

Romans 1:3 and Galatians 3 are, of course, not in the same epistle!

Earl Doherty

gstafleu

Maybe the ideas sketched in my lengthy posting above can be of some help here. In the old immanent-with-addition-of-the-heavens religions, the grand cosmic cycle and its ruling principles had a name. In Egypt that name was "maat," in Sumeria it was "me" (pr: may), in India it is "dharma" and in China it was/is "tao." We even find it in Greek mythology in the form of moira and its embodiment in the fates, to whom even Zeus had to submit. These were the names of the "rules" that everything and everybody, including the gods, lived under.

Once the deity becomes transcendent and is no longer part of nature, the nature of the rules changes as well. Rather than universal principles that also apply to the deity, the rules are now handed out by the deity. We are no longer part of the rules, as the rules are part of us, rather the rules are imposed on us from the outside. At that point, presuming one can still reach the deity, the best one can do is to try and strike a deal, a covenant, with the deity. And because the deity has already set the rules, the best such a covenant can hope to achieve is to describe how the rules should be interpreted in human life, how we should apply them. This is the Jewish "law:" a purely local, how do we humans live set of rules rather than some great cosmic design.

But the rules, be it in there immanent version of "maat" (I'll user the Egyptian version here to avoid confusion with the egocentric pronoun) or as the Jewish attempt of a covenant with the transcendent deity, are a kata sarka thing. The kata pneuma version, which only arises when the deity is transcendent, are the immutable rules for the cosmos established by god at the time of creation, not the down-to-earth rules of the "law."

So when we consider “born of woman, under the Law,” we see again an attempt to bring the deity, in the shape of the Son, down to the kata sarka level of earthly immanence. "Born of woman" is of course by itself a very earthly, kata sarka, concept, even if it doesn't apply to a real, earthly woman. The idea here is just to add some earthliness, some kata sarka aspect, to the Son, not necessarily to introduce a real woman into the equation. Remember that in the old, immanent, purely kata sarka days nature was seen as female, so in that sense everything was "born from woman." I'm not suggesting that Paul was completely returning to that mythology here, but the image is, so to speak, a "natural." Add to this that the Jewish "law" is, first,an earthly, kata sarka, thing, and, second, that it can be seen as the earthly, kata sarka, reflection (be it a poor man's one) of the grand overall kata pneuma design of the transcendent god, and we see once again a (dual) attempt to bring the deity back to earth.

Gerard Stafleu

gstafleu

I assume you have by now waded your way through my lengthy posting? I'll answer in its, err, spirit . So what state was Jesus raised from? A "dead" state, sort of, a death that was caused by the crucifixion. But that does not necessitate that Jesus was a flesh and blood being. Gods can die too. The whole idea here was to bring down the deity from its purely transcendent level. That could not be done using purely Jewish concepts, as it was these concepts that were the problem. Hence kata sarka, earthly, elements were brought in from the outside, there was no shortage of them all around. Don't forget that at the time Judaism was the only (ignoring Zoroastrianism) completely transcendent religion. The rest were immanent, and that includes all these mystery cults. So we may or may not be able to pinpoint exactly where they got the idea, but there were lots of examples around of dying and rising gods. And these gods were not historical in the modern scientific sense, what I have called real(H) previously, but only in the mythological sense (real(M)).

It is not clear if, in the mythologically fluid times of the epistles, Paul had any clear idea of the exact status of Jesus. All we know is that mythogenesis had started to bring the deity down to earth, and that in the epistles the deity hadn't quite reached it yet.


Provided that Paul was sufficiently schooled in linguistics, and that he didn't just see Adam as a name. Second, the whole idea was that the second Adam should in fact take on more earthly aspects to get around the problem of super-transcendence, so calling him "earthly" was exactly the idea. But at the time of Paul, Jesus was still on the way from kata pneuma to kata sarka, and was thus a being with both aspects, not a purely kata sarka human. That came only later.

Yes and no. If Adam was the epitomy of anything it is of the separation between god (transcendent, kata pneuma) and man (earthly, kata sarka). What we see in Jesus is kata-sarkaness added to the kata-pneumaness with the goal of bringing man and god closer again. Given the (immanent ) principle of "as above thus below" this is of course a two-way street, and so Jesus can indeed be seen as man's spirituality. But the reverse holds as well, and in fact the reverse is what the goal was.

Gerard Stafleu

Clivedurdle

And does not John 20 then become a very interesting example of ziggurat building - transforming kata sarka back to kata pneuma? Makes a stronger structure if you build it both ways!

gstafleu

Yes, if "Israel kata sarka" were a way of saying "the people of Israel" (as the NIV translates it) that would be odd. But is it? Let us first consider the bit just above this verse (NIV):
Here we again see an example of bringing aspects of the old immanent way of looking at things into the transcendent religion of the time. First, transcendent gods don't have blood, so you can't participate in it. Christ, who is supposed to mediate between the super-transcendent deity and the world of fleshiness, does have blood, as a kata sarka attribute: if he didn't (or wasn't in some other way more kata sarka than his dad) he couldn't mediate and would be just as useless as daddy. In 17 we then see an almost full-blown return to the immanent view: everything is one because it all partakes of the same divine element.

When Paul then goes on and asks us to look at Israel according to the flesh, he doesn't so much refer to just the people of Israel, rather he wants us to look at them in their kata sarka ways. Because although the deity of these people was transcendent, the people themselves were still firmly stuck in the kata sarka world. These poor souls made a rather inefficient attempt to connect with their deity via sacrifices (fleshly, very kata sarka), and Paul compares that attempt to the similar but much better way in which his believers could communicate with Christ. The original attempts were rather inefficient because a transcendent deity can't be influenced by sacrifices: these are a way to influence immanent deities via sympathetic magic. What Paul is saying, though, is that at least the Israelites gave it a try. But Paul's way is much better, communicating with an at least partly earthly, immanent, kata sarka Christ.

Gerard Stafleu