Recent Forum Topics › Forums › The Public House › For WV (and anyone else, of course): On context.
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Billy_T.
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March 7, 2018 at 10:18 am #83554Billy_TParticipant
As mentioned, I’ve recently been doing a lot of rereading from my own home library. Several subjects, trying to group books together. Currently doing this with early Christian history and the Roman Empire.
Started with Elaine Pagel’s Adam, Eve and the Serpent, then on to Jonathan Kirsch’s God Against the Gods, then When Jesus Became God, by Richard E. Rubenstein, and now Lost Christianities, by Bart Ehrman.
One of the biggest takeaways from all these books is how much of what most people think we know about the bible and Christianity is dead wrong, incredibly limited, and based primarily on winners telling the tale, and just the winners. There really is no more stark example of missing context that this.
Contrary to general assumptions, the level of disagreements during the first three centuries of Christianity, especially, was so high, competing theologians, bishops, priests actually tried to kill each other over what seem like minutia. They accused each other of heresy, demonized each other, started riots in various cities over differences in dogma . . . and the eventual winners tried to, and largely succeeded, in destroying the works of the losers. We have very little left of all the other sides of the endless debates, because the winners made sure we never would.
In some cases, however, like the discovery in Nag Hammadi (1945), the world lucked out and some of those censured voices reappeared. So we have some responses to the winners and their one-sided version of events. But by and large, we only have the views and visions of the people who finally won control and decided what books to include in the NT and what to ban, destroy, trash, etc. Luckily, even within those “orthodox” works, there are plenty of contradictions to lend more weight to the fact that “consensus,” even among the “proto-orthodox,” as Ehrman terms it, was hard to come by.
Anyway . . . . to make a long story shorter, our lack of context in news reporting is horrible. But it pales in comparison to Christian history and the history of ancient cultures in general. Oh, and the burning down of the great libraries of Alexandria by Christian rioters (390) didn’t help, either. The losses of the finest Greek, Roman and other pagan literature, along with a host of Christian writings is almost unfathomably tragic.
March 7, 2018 at 10:32 am #83555Billy_TParticipantIOW, so many people assume there was this agreement about what Jesus said, did, meant, and how he should be worshiped. In reality, scholars have discovered, especially from the Enlightenment to the present, there was incredible diversity of thought and vision for centuries, including debates about his divinity . . . Was he human, and not divine? Was he divine, and not human? Was he both? Was the son lesser than the father? Were they the same in essence or just similar? Even into the 4th century, after Constantine had become the first Roman Emperor to (at least nominally) accept the Christian faith, riots were started over “same essence,” “similar essence” visions. The so-called Arian Heresy . . . where one single letter in Greek might be the difference between excommunication or worse.
Another key: This didn’t happen as some “natural” evolution of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. This wasn’t some kind of hashing out of disagreements, and then everyone decided they can get on board with X, Y and Z. This was mostly a matter of violent suppression of opposing views . . . both by the competing church factions and brutal state suppression.
It’s also amazing to think about the lost context regarding various “saints.” Many of them were among the most vicious when it came to these doctrinal disagreements . . . and none of this even touches upon how Christians, once in power, went after pagans.
And that seems to always be the thing: Power. History teaches us most of the people who hold it, abuse it, with tragic consequences. Exceptions exist, of course. But they’re rare.
March 7, 2018 at 5:08 pm #83580
wvParticipantDitto.
Agreed.
Massive accord.
…btw, I have always been partial to the Gospel of Vermeil.
As far as this: “…from my own home library. Several subjects, trying to group books together….”
I do that from time to time too. But to no avail. I got too many books, BT. I think I’m a book-hoarder. I got way too many. More than I will ever have time to read.
If i ever achieve true enlightenment I think I’ll know it coz I’ll give all my books away, and empty out my house, and I’ll just chop wood and drink tea, and watch the moon.
w
v
Gospel of Eve
From Wikipedia:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_EveThe Gospel of Eve is an almost entirely lost text from the New Testament apocrypha, which may be the same as the also lost Gospel of Perfection.
The only known content from it are a few quotations by Epiphanius (Panarion, 26),[1] a church father who criticised how the Borborites used it to justify free love, by practicing coitus interruptus and eating semen as a religious act. While certain libertine Gnostics held that, since the flesh is intrinsically evil, one should simply acknowledge it by freely engaging in sexual acts, the majority of the Gnostics took the opposite view of extreme asceticism.
TextGnostics typically wrote on multiple levels, imbuing texts with complicated mystical esoteric meaning, rather than intending a base interpretation. It is possible that Epiphanius failed to realise this and only read into the text a simple literal interpretation. The quotation Epiphanius claims is a reference to semen is:
I stood on a lofty mountain and saw a gigantic man, and another, a dwarf; and I heard as it were a voice of thunder, and drew nigh for to hear; and He spake unto me and said: I am thou, and thou art I; and wheresoever thou mayest be I am there. In all am I scattered [that is, the Logos as seed or “members”], and whencesoever thou willest, thou gatherest Me; and gathering Me, thou gatherest Thyself.
— From the Gospel of Eve, quoted by Epiphanius, Hæres., xxvi. 3.[2]While this second passage from their “apocryphal writings,” says Epiphanius, was meant to represent the menstrual cycle (it is unclear if he is quoting Revelation 22:2):
I saw a tree bearing twelve manner of fruits every year, and he said unto me, This is the tree of life …[3]
Interpretation
According to the Naassenes, this reflected the “Seeds disseminated into the cosmos from the Inexpressible [Man], by means of which the whole cosmos is consummated.”[4] The scattering of the Logos and its subsequent collection recalls the myths of Osiris and Dionysus. A similar theme of Osirification is present in a Gospel of Philip, quoted by Epiphanius in the same chapter:
I recognised myself, and gathered myself together from all sides; I sowed no children for the ruler, but I tore up his roots, and gathered together [my] limbs that were scattered abroad; I know thee who thou art, for I am from the realms above.[5]
March 8, 2018 at 8:56 am #83639Billy_TParticipantThe Gnostics were fascinating. It was a great thing that at least some of their writings were recovered in 1945 in Egypt.
Diverse though they were, there does seem to be some basic commonality among them. That the secret teachings of Jesus were what mattered, not his death and resurrection. They had elaborate and often beautiful myths to describe fallen worlds, fallen beings, and the difference between our true home and this (living in a) material world. Escaping from it to go back to that original realm was key. Gnosticism seems to have some things, at least tangentially, in common with Hinduism and Buddhism in that sense.
Books: I’m running out of space for mine too. But I love them. I love looking at them, picking them up, flipping through the pages. E-books will never come close to giving me that kind of pleasure.
March 8, 2018 at 9:05 am #83640Billy_TParticipantAnother pattern that seems to come out from reading about this era again . . . and then projecting it onto others:
With exceptions, the “winners” were the folks who were best organized, and went for the jugular. It was rarely the case that they were ever “Oh, we’re cool with whatever you do. Live and let live. The more the merrier.”
In almost all cases, the “losers” were the folks who wanted a “live and let live” dynamic, or more broadly, society. Which is my preference. I think “the left” often ends up on the losing end because we do in general champion openness and diversity, a vibrant exchange of ideas, pluralism, etc. etc. We do think “live and let live” is better than “crush all your opponents without mercy.”
But the latter attitude tends to win the day, and that causes even more problems down the road, because to maintain power, that attitude often must become the rule and the Way. The more adamant a group is in their “our way or the highway,” the more forceful they have to be to keep that going. It tends to snowball.
So in the case of the various factions in early Christianity, it seemed that the ones who were okay with serious diversity and lots of different visions and versions . . . ended up losing to the proto-orthodox who weren’t okay with that. Same thing happened with the battle between polytheists and monotheists.
March 8, 2018 at 1:58 pm #83654wvParticipantWith exceptions, the “winners” were the folks who were best organized, and went for the jugular. It was rarely the case that they were ever “Oh, we’re cool with whatever you do. Live and let live…” .
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Yeah, i think about that dynamic a lot.
w
vMarch 9, 2018 at 12:42 pm #83738
PA RamParticipantI was just talking at work last night with a guy who told me about a co-worker who is a Seventh Day Adventist who celebrates the Sabbath on a Saturday because that’s how it is supposed to be–that the Romans had just decided to make it Sunday instead because of the pagans who worshiped the sun God as they were were forced to become Christians. I told him that I thought most of the traditions were handpicked by men and that you could not separate man’s influence on this.
But it’s interesting how one sect will accept some things while some accept others and they all believe they’re practicing the TRUE religion.
Everyone thinks they don’t want a theocracy–unless it’s in their own tradition–but even within that they’d get outraged over things that did not line up to their personal beliefs.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. " Philip K. Dick
March 9, 2018 at 5:13 pm #83749wvParticipantBut it’s interesting how one sect will accept some things while some accept others and they all believe they’re practicing the TRUE religion.
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Well in my faith, we only practice False religions.
We’re still workin on our big symbol, btw. So far its looking like it will be a Malayan Tapir with a stack of raisin toast on his head.
w
vMarch 10, 2018 at 11:36 am #83797Billy_TParticipantI was just talking at work last night with a guy who told me about a co-worker who is a Seventh Day Adventist who celebrates the Sabbath on a Saturday because that’s how it is supposed to be–that the Romans had just decided to make it Sunday instead because of the pagans who worshiped the sun God as they were were forced to become Christians. I told him that I thought most of the traditions were handpicked by men and that you could not separate man’s influence on this.
But it’s interesting how one sect will accept some things while some accept others and they all believe they’re practicing the TRUE religion.
Everyone thinks they don’t want a theocracy–unless it’s in their own tradition–but even within that they’d get outraged over things that did not line up to their personal beliefs.
One of the biggest internal battles in early Christianity was between Jewish Christians and those who followed Paul, directly or indirectly, and wanted to sever all ties or most ties from Judaism. There were many factions and degrees of this. Jesus, of course, was born and raised a Jew, and said often enough that he never had any intention of changing the Jewish Law. Scholars, including Ehrman, have noted the contradictions and changes in the gospels and NT in general that reflect this battle, and the movement away from Jewish conceptions over time. Certain parts are downright anti-Semitic, and dangerously so. It’s not a leap to say that antisemitism started with the NT and that shift, the prime rationale being that the Jews supposedly had killed the Christian god, not the Romans.
Complexities galore, of course. Cuz even the “gentile” movements of Christians wanted to appropriate the antiquity of the Jewish faith, knowing it was a hard sell to start something brand new. How much better to show a tradition that goes back, at least via myths and legends, before Homer? But they also knew that circumcision and the strict dietary laws were a deal-breaker for millions of pagans who might convert, so the proto-orthodox did their best to split the difference.
Almost finished rereading Lost Christianities, and into the part that he talks about forgeries and copies of copies of copies, which I have always found interesting. We have NO original texts for the NT, and the only fully complete NT copies are from the 4th century. And because they were copied by hand, they’re filled with alterations, errors, divergences, etc. etc. Basically, no two copies are the same . . . and scholars have basically agreed that there are from 200,000 to 300,000 differences in the main 5400 copies.
We’re not reading anything close to the “original” manuscripts.
March 10, 2018 at 11:48 am #83798Billy_TParticipantI’m basically an atheist, with caveats. As in, I don’t think there is a supreme being of any kind, but I’m not going to stick with that belief if actual “proof” arrives. Not just as a personal revelation. I don’t trust those. But if it’s the kind of proof millions and millions of people can see at the same time . . . and agree that they’re seeing the same thing at the same time.
I first decided against Christianity as a kid, after reading a ton of mythology and then studying the myths themselves. A light just came on for me that if we’ve had thousands of different iterations of the divine, with thousands of different stories, then there can be no “one true god.” The sheer overwhelming mass of diversity renders that impossible in my view. For me. I fully accept that others feel differently.
As I got older, I tried to refine that, and soon enough came to the conclusion that the Christian god is no more likely than Zeus, Thor, Isis, Krishna, the Dagda or any god from any mythology. So while I might have a caveat that prevents me from being a rock-solid, permanent, never-changing atheist, I am rock-solid, permanent and never-changing in my belief that no human being knows, and no religious/mythological tradition can possibly represent “reality.” From that rock I can’t move. Which is why these church histories are so fascinating, and so tragic at the same time. People actually died for their beliefs and faith that they had been told the truth when no human can know. Church leaders actually killed one another over minute theological differences, riots broke out, wars were launched, basically because one mythology clashed with another.
Life is far too short for that shit, IMO. Live and let live. If people want to believe in the divinity of Reese’s Peanut Butter cups, I couldn’t care less. As long as they don’t corner the market on them and share.
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