Freethought & Rationalism Archive

hatsoff · 09-25-2006, 04:27 PM

I've been investigating the history of the Trinity doctrine, which is usually (in my experience) Scripturally held up in two parts: 1) the divinity of Christ; and 2) the linking of the Father and the Son to the so-called "Holy Spirit." My first hunch was that the latter was a Christian invention, but there are two passages which I needed to check out before settling on that conclusion: Psalm 51:11 and Isaiah 63:10-11. In each case, and especially for Psalm 51, it seems that "holy spirit" means more or less the hand of God, not a separate person but just another manifestation of the diety himself.

Regardless of what the original authors intended, however, there was plenty of time between these passages' composition and Jesus' alleged resurrection for a Jewish myth to creep up. Are there any other notable Jewish references to a "Holy Spirit," or something similar, prior to c. AD 50?

To any veterans out there, what's your take?

Thanks!
--Ben

09-25-2006, 06:40 PM

Greetings,

Philo Judaeus mentions the Holy Spirit several times. I think he was the first.

Quote:

Whenever, therefore, he was possessed by the Holy Spirit he at once changed everything for the better, his eyes and his complexion, and his size and his appearance while standing, and his motions, and his voice; the Holy Spirit, which, being breathed into him from above, took up its lodging in his soul, clothing his body with extraordinary beauty, and investing his words with persuasiveness at the same time that it endowed his hearers with understanding.

From On The Virtues, 217

He also mentions the Logos, and "son of God" - see here:
http://www.socinian.org/philo.html

Peter Kirby's site has Philo's writings :
http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/philo.html

Iasion

Clivedurdle · 09-26-2006, 09:41 AM

Freke and Gandi in Jesus and the Goddess have an interesting discussion about Sophia. Is it possible its sex changed? (Where does the idea of the Holy Spirit being male come from? Because he impregnated Mary?)

(And is Jesus and Venus a possible opposite sex change?)

Spirit is breath or life of course. As women and females have always obviously been the bearers of life, is the holy spirit coming on Mary actually some kind of magical belief about how a very special baby might have been born?

Clivedurdle · 09-26-2006, 09:52 AM

What is thew connection with Sophia?

Is the Holy Spirit actually male or is that an assumption because of a certain birth?

Toto · 09-26-2006, 10:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

What is the connection with Sophia?

Is the Holy Spirit actually male or is that an assumption because of a certain birth?

Sophia, or Wisdom, is a female idea in the Hebrew Scriptures. AFAIK Philo was the first to change her sex, because men ruled in those days, and it wouldn't do to have a female spirit.

Clivedurdle · 09-26-2006, 12:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto

Sophia, or Wisdom, is a female idea in the Hebrew Scriptures. AFAIK Philo was the first to change her sex, because men ruled in those days, and it wouldn't do to have a female spirit.

But was the sex actually changed? The quote above says "it". Is the Holy Spirit's sex defined in Greek? I thought the alleged change to patriarchy was thousands of years earlier.

Is there an assumption of maleness because of the conception - but the holy breath is quite capable of creating a homunculus without male female sex!

Clivedurdle · 09-26-2006, 01:12 PM

Quote:

How did second-century Christians vie with each other in seeking to produce an authoritative discourse of Christian identity? In this innovative book, Denise Buell argues that many early Christians deployed the metaphors of procreation and kinship in the struggle over claims to represent the truth of Christian interpretation, practice, and doctrine. In particular, she examines the intriguing works of the influential theologian Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-210 c.e.), for whom cultural assumptions about procreation and kinship played an important role in defining which Christians have the proper authority to teach, and which kinds of knowledge are authentic.

Buell argues that metaphors of procreation and kinship can serve to make power differentials appear natural. She shows that early Christian authors recognized this and often turned to such metaphors to mark their own positions as legitimate and marginalize others as false. Attention to the functions of this language offers a way out of the trap of reconstructing the development of early Christianity along the axes of "heresy" and "orthodoxy," while not denying that early Christians employed this binary. Ultimately, Buell argues, strategic use of kinship language encouraged conformity over diversity and had a long lasting effect both on Christian thought and on the historiography of early Christianity.

Aperceptive and closely argued contribution to early Christian studies, Making Christians also branches out to the areas of kinship studies and the social construction of gender.

Making Christians (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Toto · 09-26-2006, 01:19 PM

Why do I feel like I've had this discussion before?

Sophia Where Art Thou? seems relevant, but I remember more. [Note on that thread: Amos = Chili]

Quote:

Originally Posted by spin

Sophia is heavily grounded in Hebrew <grin>wisdom</> tradition. For example, Prov 2:6, "the Lord gives wisdom: out of his mouth comes knowledge and understanding", Prov 9:1ff, Wisdom built her house and invited guests to come to her. In fact wisdom was with God at creation, Prov 8:22 tells us that she was the first creation and was present for all the rest.

The Apocryphal book Wisdom of Solomon tells us that Wisdom is "the fashioner of all things" (7:22), she is "the breath of power of God" (7:25), Wisdom "protected the first-born father of the world" (10:1), etc.

Wisdom (HKMH or HKMWT), is anthropomorphized and interacts with the world in Hebrew tradition. She walks the streets and whoever hears her is blessed. As you can see she is feminine just as the Greek Sophia.

Wisdom is what comes forth from the mouth of God and is the equivalent of the word of God, so, at some stage, the metaphor jumped sex and became male and is one influence in the wisdom character of Jesus, who was the word which became flesh and lived among us -- as wisdom did.

I think therefore that Wisdom is the initial idea behind the wisdom Jesus. This of course doesn't mean that the wisdom tradition wasn't recycled as the holy spirit as well, but I think that would have been more under Greek influence and Gnosis.

spin

Also Prov 9.

Clivedurdle · 09-26-2006, 01:21 PM

Quote:

Another example of this mixture of observation and inference is in the area of conception theory. Galen says in his treatise, On Seed,

These things have been said by me because of some of the philosophers who call themselves Aristotelians and Peripatetics. I, at least, would not address these men so, they being so greatly ignorant of the opinion of Aristotle that they think it is pleasing to him that the sperm of the male being cast into the uterus of the female places the principle of motion in the katamenia (the female seed) and, after this is expelled, the principle of motion in the katamenia and, after it is expelled, does not any part become the corporeal substance of the fetus. They have been deceived by the first book of the Generation of Animals that alone of the five they seem to have read. These things are written there, "As we said, of the generation of the principles we may say that chiefly there are the male principle and the female principle. The male offers the motive principle and the efficient cause of generation while the female offers the material principle" [Galen quoting Aristotle, G.A. 716a 5]. These are not far after the beginning: in still later parts of the tract he writes as well, "But this may be well concluded that the male provides the form and the principle of motion and the female provides the body and the matter just as the example of curding milk. Here the body is the milk and the fig juice contains the principle that makes it curdle" [Galen quoting Aristotle, G.A. 729a 10; Kühn IV, 516-517, my tr.]. The biological accounts of human reproduction in the ancient world offer excellent examples of the interaction between observation and inference. There are a number of issues involved in this issue that pre-dates even the Hippocratic writers. The one that is mentioned here is the issue of whether there is one seed (the male's only) or two (the male's and the female's). In the above example Galen seems to be saying that the first reading of Aristotle in which the male provides the efficient cause and the female provides the material cause, simpliciter, is a misreading of Aristotle. Instead, the event (conception) is depicted as a more involved process in which principles of both parents come into play. These principles revolve around the empirically observable facts that children as often as not resemble the mother as much as the father. The "one seed" theory in which the father's seed, alone, fashions the child can only account for such an outcome by calling it a sort of mutation (agone, para physin). But regularity counts for something. It is odd when an event that may approach or exceed 50% is called a mutation. This turns the entire idea of mutation (a statistical anomaly) on its head.
Galen approaches the issue with a balanced approach beginning with anatomical observations. Galen did some of the most extensive work in the ancient world on the study of the female anatomy (albeit mostly upon apes, On Anatomical Procedures, I.2). Galen's observation of a fluid in the horns of the uterus (Kühn IV, 594, 600-601) were the basis of his (mistaken) view that he had discovered female seed. However, in the midst of this mistake he was on the right track in viewing the ovaries as analogous to the male testes.

The point in this second example is that Galen wanted to combine his observations gained in dissections of apes to his pronouncements vis-�*-vis the debate concerning "one seed conception" vs. "two seed conception." This commitment to integrating observation and theory contributed to making Galen a towering figure in medicine and the philosophy of science.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/g/galen.htm

Has anyone worked out what theory of conception Matthew and Luke might have been using and what this means for understanding the holy ghost?

Does it help date the gospels?

Clivedurdle · 09-26-2006, 01:27 PM

Quote:

I think therefore that Wisdom is the initial idea behind the wisdom Jesus. This of course doesn't mean that the wisdom tradition wasn't recycled as the holy spirit as well, but I think that would have been more under Greek influence and Gnosis.

But why duplicate wisdom as Jesus and the Holy Spirit? If Jesus is wisdom, why introduce this third party? Is it a result of trinitarianist, arianist arguments? Jesus could not lie with Mary and create himself?

09-25-2006, 04:27 PM	#1
hatsoff Senior Member Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Rockford, IL Posts: 740	what is the origin of the "holy spirit"? I've been investigating the history of the Trinity doctrine, which is usually (in my experience) Scripturally held up in two parts: 1) the divinity of Christ; and 2) the linking of the Father and the Son to the so-called "Holy Spirit." My first hunch was that the latter was a Christian invention, but there are two passages which I needed to check out before settling on that conclusion: Psalm 51:11 and Isaiah 63:10-11. In each case, and especially for Psalm 51, it seems that "holy spirit" means more or less the hand of God, not a separate person but just another manifestation of the diety himself. Regardless of what the original authors intended, however, there was plenty of time between these passages' composition and Jesus' alleged resurrection for a Jewish myth to creep up. Are there any other notable Jewish references to a "Holy Spirit," or something similar, prior to c. AD 50? To any veterans out there, what's your take? Thanks! --Ben

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09-26-2006, 09:41 AM	#3
Clivedurdle Contributor Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: London UK Posts: 16,024	Freke and Gandi in Jesus and the Goddess have an interesting discussion about Sophia. Is it possible its sex changed? (Where does the idea of the Holy Spirit being male come from? Because he impregnated Mary?) (And is Jesus and Venus a possible opposite sex change?) Spirit is breath or life of course. As women and females have always obviously been the bearers of life, is the holy spirit coming on Mary actually some kind of magical belief about how a very special baby might have been born?

09-26-2006, 09:52 AM	#4
Clivedurdle Contributor Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: London UK Posts: 16,024	What is thew connection with Sophia? Is the Holy Spirit actually male or is that an assumption because of a certain birth?

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