Jeffrey Gibson

Yes, you've stated this. But you haven't shown that it is anything but a move to limit the data which would falsify your claim about the date of the origins of Christianity or why we should accept this move as legitimate given that one of its purposes is to provide evidence that Christianity was part of a program on Constantine's part to wipe out and denigrate "paganism".

But you don't. And you spent god knows how much time trying to show that it shouldn't be accepted.

And these "key" resources are what? Certainly not LSJ nor TDNT nor DDD nor BDAG. It's only by misreading them and misunderstanding what these resources say, and selectively quoting from them, that you could make the claim about them that you do.

Have you looked at the relevant article in The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology?

Which is what you should have done in the fisrt place before you made the uninformed declaration that you did in the OP.

In any case, there's nothing in your summary of the data as you stated it in the OP which is underpinned by these citations. They falsify it.

Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

Since summaries are being pointed to as evidence, here's a portion of the entres on Demon and Demoniac from the New Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible:


Jeffrey


See, too:

Plutarchus Biogr., Phil., Quaestiones convivales (612c-748d)
Stephanus page 706, section E, line 1

ὥσπερ γὰρ οἱ μάγοι
τοὺς δαιμονιζομένους κελεύουσι τὰ Ἐφέσια γράμματα πρὸς
αὑτοὺς καταλέγειν καὶ ὀνομάζειν, οὕτως ἡμεῖς ἐν τοῖς τοιού-
τοις τερετίσμασι καὶ σκιρτήμασι (Pind. fr. 208 = 70a9, 10)

’μανίαις τ' ἀλαλαῖς τ' ὀρινόμενοι ῥιψαύχενι σὺν κλόνῳ’

τῶν ἱερῶν καὶ σεμνῶν ἐκείνων γραμμάτων ἀναμιμνησκό-
μενοι καὶ παραβάλλοντες ᾠδὰς καὶ ποιήματα καὶ λόγους
† κενοὺς οὐκ ἐκπλαγησόμεθα παντάπασιν ὑπὸ τούτων οὐδὲ

Pseudo-Plutarchus, De fluviis
Chapter 16, section 2, line 3

Γεννᾶται δ' ἐν αὐτῷ λίθος κυάμῳ παρόμοιος,
ὃν ἐὰν κύνες ἴδωσιν, οὐχ ὑλακτοῦσι· ποιεῖ δὲ [ἄριστα]
πρὸς τοὺς δαιμονιζομένους· ἅμα γὰρ [αὐτὸν] προστε-
θῆναι ταῖς ῥισὶν, ἀπέρχεται τὸ δαιμόνιον.
Go to Context


Flavius Josephus Hist., Antiquitates Judaicae
Book 8, chapter 47, line 1

ὁ δὲ τρόπος τῆς θερα-
πείας τοιοῦτος ἦν· προσφέρων ταῖς ῥισὶ τοῦ δαιμονιζομένου τὸν
δακτύλιον ἔχοντα ὑπὸ τῇ σφραγῖδι ῥίζαν ἐξ ὧν ὑπέδειξε Σολόμων
ἔπειτα ἐξεῖλκεν ὀσφρομένῳ διὰ τῶν μυκτήρων τὸ δαιμόνιον, καὶ
πεσόντος εὐθὺς τἀνθρώπου μηκέτ' εἰς αὐτὸν ἐπανήξειν ὥρκου, Σολό-
μωνός τε μεμνημένος καὶ τὰς ἐπῳδὰς ἃς συνέθηκεν ἐκεῖνος ἐπιλέγων.
Go to Context


Cyranides, Cyranides
Book 1, section 24, line 43

κουφίζει δὲ καὶ σεληνιαζομένους καὶ δαιμονιζομένους.


Cyranides, Cyranides
Book 1, section 13, line 21

Ἐὰν οὖν τὸν δακτύλιον τοῦτον προσενέγκῃς δαιμονιζομένῳ, πάραυτα
ὁ δαίμων ἐξομολογησάμενος ἑαυτὸν φεύξεται.
Go to Context


Cyranides, Cyranides
Book 2, section 31, line 5

Ἐκ τοῦ ὄνυχος αὐτοῦ τοῦ ἐμπροσθίου δεξιοῦ ποδὸς εἰ ποιήσῃς δα-
κτύλιον ἢ κρίκιον καὶ δώσῃς φορεῖν δαιμονιζομένῳ, σωθήσεται.
Go to Context


Pseudo-Ptolemaeus, Fructus sive centiloquium
Section 70, line 2

Ἐπὶ τῶν ἐνθουσιώντων οὐ συνάπτει ἡ σελήνη τῷ Ἑρμῇ
οὐδὲ ἑκάτερος τῷ ὡροσκόπῳ, ἐπὶ τῶν δαιμονιζομένων
πρὸς τούτῳ τῷ σχήματι ἐπίκεντρος ἔσται ὁ Κρόνος νυ-
κτός, ὁ δὲ Ἄρης ἡμέρας, καὶ μάλιστα ἐν τῷ Καρκίνῳ καὶ
τῇ Παρθένῳ καὶ τοῖς Ἰχθύσι.

mountainman

"A Most Strange Doctrine." Daimon in Plutarch by Frederick E. Brenk

The Classical Journal
Vol. 69, No. 1 (Oct. - Nov., 1973),






εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

mountainman

New Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (or via: amazon.co.uk)

A product of "contemporary biblical scholarship".


The LJS entry states "more probably the Root of δαίμων (deity) is δαίω to distribute destinies;; cf. Alcm.48.)"

Which is more or less how Edwards reads Plotinus' idea on the daimon in the Enneads.


The Greek "daimon" [δαίμων] in the Enneads


Two Episodes in Porphyry's Life of Plotinus by M. J. Edwards


So it would seem that Plotinus in his Enneads brings the Greek concept of the "daimon" full circle back to Plato at the end of the 3rd century.

The "daimon" in the Enneads is not some "evil devil".







εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Jeffrey Gibson

Selective quotation th that gives a wrong impression about what this article claims regarding Plutarchs view of what a δαίμων was and a confusing of what Plutarch eventually came to use the word δαίμων to represent with what he says others in the pre BCE Greco Roman world believed a δαίμων was:

In other words, if you are presenting this as some kind of proof that Plutarch himself did not think that δαίμων daimon meant evil spirit, let alone he never used it with this meaning and, more importantly, that other "pagans" before him did not as well, you've both misread and misunderstood and misrepresented what Brenk has said.

Anyone who wants to see the full text of the article may write me off list to request a copy of it.

Jeffrey

Horatio Parker

I put a hold on David Brakke's book on gnositicism, and next to it in the listings, was "Demons and the Making of the Monk" so wtf.

A couple of things:

Plato's definition of daimons from the Symposium:

Brakke also says:

However, in the context of the Christian monastic tradition, demons were "unambiguously evil". This view was inherited from the apocalypticism(if that's a word) of early Christianity. While the sense of the impending end of the world receded, the struggle with the demonic forces did not.

Jeffrey Gibson

Which you have not shown is wrong in what it says. <snip>

But put your money where your mouth is, Pete, and write to Graham Twelftree, the author of the article, to tell and show him why he is wrong.


LSJ says this??


BTW, Pete. Are you aware that both Liddel and Scott were ordained ministers? Scott served as Dean Ireland's Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at Oxford (a position my "doctor-father", George Caird, also held), from 1861 to 1870, So their work is also a product of Christian scholarship.

Are you actually saying that Plato never thought that a δαίμων was an evil spirit? And to be precise -- which you are here not being -- what Plotinus is doing here is only to employ what Plato said in Rep. 620 about δαίμων through the lens of a doctrine in the Timaeus.

In the entirety of the Enneads, or in just this section of it which, according to your source (which, typically, you seem to have misread, is only discussing Plato's use of the δαίμων in Republic 620 (ἐκείνην δ' ἑκάστῳ ὃν εἵλετο δαίμονα, τοῦτον φύλακα συμπέμπειν τοῦ βίου καὶ ἀποπληρωτὴν τῶν αἱρεθέντων.) Do you know? What has Plotinus to say about Plato's use of the word in the the Symposium?

And even if it is in the entirety of the work, so what? How is this evidence that daimon was not used with the sense of evil demon by other non Christian authors?

And what becomes of your previous claim that after Christianity, the word was invariably used by non Christians to mean "evil spirit"?

Jeffrey

Robert Tulip

An interesting linguistic commentary on the mutual demonisation of devas and ashuras is at http://piereligion.org/pandemonium.html

It appears to show Zoroastrian roots for the demonisation of the devas.

mountainman

Thanks for this Horatio Parker.



AFAIK Jeffrey has not yet acknowledged this distinction.


Another way of saying this is that ...

Behind the Christian nation there was Christ,
just as the devil was behind its enemies.

εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

mountainman

What may be clearly demonstrated about this source is that it is focussed only upon those sources that are directly or indirectly related to the Bible with the understanding that such a restriction is warranted in this specific exercise in determining what the ancient Greeks wrote and believed in regard to their concept of the "daimon".


You know, don't you, that I could accuse you of the same "crime" in the sense that you have tendered a decidedly and exclusively "Christian Biblical Scholarship" source in an attempt to poison the well of what the ancient Greeks thought and expressed about their concept of the "daimon".



The author conflates the two distinct concepts of "daimon" and "daimonion" into one entry which are distinct and separated in the Liddel and Scott lexicon.


In your "Biblical Scholarship" treatment the list of relevant sources is exceedingly restricted, whereas in the LSJ treatment the list of relevant sources as outlined in Perseus Collection of Greek and Roman Materials is not so restricted. In the LSJ the biblical material is but one small subset of the whole list of documentary sources, as can be immediately perceived.

What other type of scholarship was there in this field in the 19th century? As Momigliano noted: "We sometimes forget that Eduard Meyer was, at least in Germany, the first non-theologian to write a scholarly history of the origins of Christianity, and this happened only in 1921.






εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia