Early meaning of 'cross' and 'crucify'
Quentin David Jones
I suspect that one of the reasons Paul is so hard to follow is his
non-standard way of using some terms - especially the key words "cross" and
"crucifiy".
Consider some of Paul's usages :
Gal. 2:20 "I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I that
live, but Christ living in me. That life which I now live in the flesh, I
live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me. "
This can hardly mean a literal crucifixion.
Now, consider this fascinating tid-bit from Philo (Allegorical
Interpretation I, (108)) :
"Well, therefore, did Heraclitus say this, following the doctrine of Moses;
for he says, "We are living according to the death of those men; and we have
died according to their life." As if he had said Now, when we are alive, we
are so though our soul is dead and buried in our body, as if in tomb. But if
it were to die, then our soul would live according to its proper life, being
released from the evil and dead body to which it is bound."
(The context is one where he distinguishes between the death of the body,
and the death of the soul.)
Note that he specifically allegorizes the soul as dead and buried in our
body, and he traces this back through Heraclitus and Moses (?) - this theme
also turns up in the Naassenne psalm, and also Plato punning sema (tomb)
with soma (body), and the Dream of Scipio by Cicero : "in very truth, they
still live, those who have flown forth from the body as from a prison, for
indeed what is called your life, is but a death".
So, the idea of a soul, 'dead' in our 'life' was a common theme, known
before and contemporarily to Paul.
Now consider this, albeit later, fragment from the Miscellanies (Stromata)
of Clement (the most Gnostic of all the orthodox) :
' "For the minds of those even who are deemed grave, pleasure makes waxen,"
according to Plato; since "each pleasure and pain nails to the body the
soul" of the man, that does not sever and crucify himself from the passions'
Plato is cited as specifically seeing the soul as 'nailed' to the body by
passions, and that to 'crucify' means to separate or sever oneself from the
passions.
So, possibly Paul merely took the idea of the soul as dead in the body one
step further by preaching as follows :
* the Logos is called "Christos Iesous"
* this Christos is 'those men' ensouled or nailed in all humans
* the "crucifixion" means rising above the passions
When Paul says "we preach Christ crucified" - he may not mean a man Jesus
Christ was actually literally crucified.
Rather he seems to be PREACHING a spiritual conception (with some find hard
to accept - a stumbling block or folly).
The conception he is preaching is that 'Christ is in you' - the Logos is
nailed in each human to become its soul and/or that one may rise above the
passions and thus be crucified.
Paul explicitly describes himself as being 'crucified with Christ' - which
seems to mean he also has risen above the passions in his rise to the 3rd
heaven - i.e. the Christos or soul in him rose out of the body, taking him
to the 3rd heaven. In that sense both he (Paul) and Christos (Paul's soul)
were crucified or lifted out of the passions of physcial life.
Paul says that to 'crucify' means rise above the passions :
Gal.5:24 : "Those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its
passions and lusts. "
Now consider this later fragment from the Miscellanies (Stromata) of Clement
(the most Gnostic of the orthodox) :
" For if you would loose, and withdraw, and separate (for this is what the
cross means) your soul from the delight and pleasure that is in this
life..."
These are the only statements I have seen by early Christians as to what
'cross' or 'crucify' actually means - Clement is suggesting that the 'cross'
means overcoming the passions - which matches what Paul said of
'crucifixion'.
I think we need to be very careful about these words 'cross' and 'crucify'
for Paul appears to be using them in a sense different to the literal
meaning. Only later were these references seen to refer to an actual
crucifixion.
Quentin David Jones
Mako
<quen...@iinet.net.au> wrote:
>Consider some of Paul's usages
Paul of Tarsus, Or Christianity and Jewry
Savitri Devi
If there is a single fact which anyone who seriously studies the history of
Christianity cannot help but be struck by, it is the almost complete absence of
documents regarding the man whose name this great international religion bears
-- Jesus Christ. We know of him only what is told to us in the New Testament
gospels, that is, practically nothing; for these books, though prolix in their
descriptions of miraculous facts relating to him, do not give any information
about his person and, in particular, about his origins. Oh, we do have, in one
of the four canonical gospels, a long genealogy tracing his ancestry from
Joseph, the husband of Jesus' mother, all the way back to Adam! But I have
always wondered what possible interest this could have for us, given that we are
expressly told elsewhere that Joseph had nothing to do with the birth of the
Child. One of the many apocryphal gospels -- rejected by the Church --
attributes the paternity of Jesus to a Roman soldier, distinguished for his
bravery and accordingly nicknamed "the Panther." This gospel is cited by Heckel
in one of his studies on early Christianity. Yet accepting such evidence would
not entirely resolve the very significant question of Christ's origins, because
we are not told who his mother Mary was. One of the canonical gospels tells us
that she was the daughter of Joachim and Anne, although Anne had passed the age
of maternity; in other words, she too must have been born miraculously, or could
perhaps have been simply a child adopted by Anne and Joachim in their old age,
which hardly clarifies matters.
But there is something much more disconcerting. The annals of an important
monastery of the Essene sect, located only about twenty miles from Jerusalem,
have recently been discovered. These annals deal with a period extending from
the beginning of the first century before Jesus Christ to the second half of the
first century after him, and they refer, seventy years before his birth, to a
great Initiate or spiritual Master -- a "Teacher of Righteousness" -- whose
eventual return is expected. Of the extraordinary career of Jesus, of his
innumerable miraculous healings, of his teaching during three full years in the
midst of the people of Palestine, of his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, so
brilliantly described in the canonical gospels, of his trial and his crucifixion
(accompanied, according to the canonical gospels, by such striking events as an
earthquake, the darkening of the sky for three hours, and the rending of the
veil of the Temple in two) -- of all this, not a single word is spoken in the
scrolls of these ascetics, eminently religious men who would surely have taken
an interest in such events. It would seem, according to these "Dead Sea Scrolls"
-- I recommend, to anyone who is interested, John Allegro's study in English --
either that Jesus did not make any impression on the religious minds of his
time, as avid for wisdom and as well informed as the ascetics of the monastery
in question appear to have been, or else ... that he, quite simply, never
existed! As troubling as this conclusion is, it must be placed before the
general public and, in particular, before the Christian public, in light of the
recent discoveries.
With regard to the Christian Church, however, and Christianity as an historical
phenomenon, and the role it has played in the West and in the world, the
question has much less importance than might at first appear. For even if Jesus
lived and preached, he was not the true founder of Christianity as it presents
itself in the world. If he really lived, Jesus was a man "above Time" whose
kingdom -- as he himself, according to gospels, told Pilate -- was "not of this
world," a man whose every activity and every teaching aimed to reveal, to those
whom this world could not satisfy, a spiritual path by which they could escape
from it and could find, in their own internal paradise, in this "Kingdom of God"
which is in us, God "in spirit and truth," whom they were seeking without
knowing it. If he actually lived, Jesus never dreamed of founding a temporal
organization -- and especially not a political and financial organization --
such as the Christian Church so quickly became. Politics did not interest him.
And he was so determined an enemy of any interference of money in spiritual
affairs that some Christians have, rightly or wrongly, seen in his hatred of
wealth an argument proving, contrary to the teaching of all the Christian
Churches (except, naturally, those, like the Monophysites, that deny his human
nature absolutely), that he was not of Jewish blood. The true founder of
historical Christianity, of Christianity as we it know in practice, as it has
played and still plays a role in the history of the West and of the world, was
not Jesus, of whom we know nothing, nor his disciple Peter, of whom we know that
he was a Galilean and a simple fisherman by vocation, but rather Paul of Tarsus,
who was Jewish by blood, by training and by temperament, and, what is more, was
a literate, learned Jew and a "Roman citizen," in the same way that so many
Jewish intellectuals today are French, German, Russian, or American citizens.
Historical Christianity -- which is not at all a work "above Time" but well and
truly a work "in Time" -- was the work of Saul called Paul, that is, the work of
a Jew, just as Marxism would be two thousand years later. So let us examine the
career of Paul of Tarsus.
Saul, called Paul, was a Jew and, furthermore, a Jew both orthodox and learned,
a Jew imbued with a consciousness of his race and of the role that the "chosen
people" must, according to Jehovah's promise, play in the world. He was the
pupil of Gamaliel, one of the most famous Jewish theologians of his time, a
theologian of the Pharisees, precisely that school which, according to the
gospels, the Prophet Jesus, whom the Christian Church would later elevate to the
rank of God, most violently combated on account of its pride, its hypocrisy, its
practice of theological hair-splitting and of putting the letter of the Jewish
Law above its spirit -- above, at least, what he believed to be its spirit; on
these points we can assume that Saul was a typical Pharisee. Moreover -- and
this is crucial -- Saul was a learned and conscious Jew born and raised outside
of Palestine in one of those cities of Roman Asia Minor that succeeded
Hellenistic Asia Minor, while retaining all its essential characteristics:
Tarsus, where Greek was everyone's lingua franca, where Latin was becoming
increasingly familiar, and where one could meet representatives of all the
various peoples of the Near East. In other words, he was already a "ghetto" Jew
having, in addition to an intimate knowledge of Israelite tradition, an
understanding of the world of the goyim -- of non-Jews -- which would later
prove invaluable to him. Doubtless he thought, like every good Jew, that the goy
exists only to be dominated and exploited by the "chosen people," but he
understood the non-Jewish world infinitely better than did the majority of the
Jews in Palestine, the social environment that produced all the earliest
believers in the new religious sect which he himself was destined transform into
Christianity as we know it today.
We know from the "Acts of the Apostles" that Saul was initially a fierce
persecutor of the new sect. After all, did not its adherents scorn the Jewish
Law, in a strict sense of the word? Had not the man that they recognized as
their leader and that they said had risen from the dead, this Jesus, whom Saul
himself had never seen, set an example of non-observance of the Sabbath, of
negligence of fast days, and of other highly blameworthy transgressions of the
rules of life from which a Jew must never deviate? It was even said that a
mystery, which could portend nothing good, surrounded his birth; perhaps he was
not entirely of Jewish origin -- who knows? How not to persecute such a sect, if
you are an orthodox Jew, a pupil of the great Gamaliel? It was necessary to
preserve the observers of the Law from scandal. Saul, who had already shown
proof of his zeal by being present at the stoning of Stephen, one of the first
preachers of this dangerous sect, continued to defend Jewish Law and tradition
against those whom he regarded as heretics, until he recognized, finally, that
there was something better -- much better -- to be made of it, precisely from a
Jewish point of view. This he recognized on the road to Damascus.
History, as the Christian Church tells it, would have us believe that it was
there that he suddenly experienced a vision of Jesus -- whom he had never, I
repeat, seen in the flesh -- and that he heard the latter's voice saying to him:
"Saul, Saul, why dost thou persecute me?," a voice he could not resist. He was,
moreover, supposedly blinded by a dazzling light and thrown to the ground. Taken
to Damascus -- according to the same account in Acts -- he met one of faithful
of the sect that he had come there to combat, a man who, after restoring his
sight, baptized him and received him into the Christian community.
It is superfluous to say that this miraculous narrative can only be accepted, as
it stands, by those who share the Christian faith. Like all narratives of this
kind, it has no historical value. Anyone who, without preconceived ideas, seeks
a plausible explanation -- convincing, natural -- of how events actually
transpired, cannot be satisfied with it. And the explanation, to be plausible,
must take into account not only the transformation of Saul into Paul -- of the
fierce defender of Judaism into the founder of the Christian Church as we know
it -- but also of the nature, content and direction of his activity after his
conversion, of the internal logic of his career; in other words, of the
psychological link, more or less conscious, between his anti-Christian past and
his great Christian enterprise. Any conversion implies a link between the
convert's past and the remainder of his life, a profound reason, that is, a
permanent aspiration within the convert which the act of conversion satisfies; a
will, a permanent direction of life and action, of which the act of conversion
is the expression and the instrument.
Now, given all that we know of him, and especially what we know of the rest of
his career, there is only one profound and fundamental will, inseparable from
the personality of Paul of Tarsus at all stages of his life, that can provide an
explanation of his Damascene conversion, and that will is the desire to serve
the old Jewish ideal of spiritual domination, itself the complement and crowning
culmination of the ideal of economic domination. Saul, an orthodox Jew, a
racially conscious Jew, who had fought against the new sect on the assumption
that it represented a danger to Jewish orthodoxy, could renounce his orthodoxy
and become the soul and the arm precisely of so dangerous a sect only after
having recognized that, revised by him, transformed, adapted to the requirements
of the wider world of the goyim -- the "Gentiles" of the gospels -- and
interpreted, if it were necessary, so as to give, as Nietzsche would put it
later, "a new meaning to the ancient mysteries," it could become, during the
centuries that followed and perhaps even in perpetuity, the most powerful
instrument of Israel's spiritual domination, the means that would accomplish,
most surely and most definitively, the self-professed "mission" of the Jewish
people to reign over other peoples and to subjugate them morally, all the while
exploiting them economically. And the more complete the moral subjugation, it
goes without saying, the more the economic exploitation would flourish. Only
this prize was worth the painful effort of repudiating the rigidity of the old
and venerable Law. Or, to speak in a more mundane language, the sudden
conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus can be naturally explained only if it
is admitted that he must have had a sudden glimpse into the possibilities that
nascent Christianity offered him for the profit and the moral influence of his
people, and that he would have thought -- in a stroke of genius, it must be said
--: "I was short-sighted in persecuting this sect, instead of making use of it,
whatever the cost! I was stupid to stick to forms -- mere details -- instead of
seeing the essential issue: the interests of the people of Israel, of the chosen
people, of our people, of us Jews!"
The entirety of Paul's later career is an illustration -- a proof, insofar as
one can think of "proving" facts of this nature -- of this brilliant reversal,
of the victory of an intelligent Jew, a practical man, a diplomat (and whoever
says "diplomat" in connection with religious questions really says deceiver)
over the orthodox, learned Jew, concerned above all with problems of ritual
purity. After his conversion Paul indeed gave himself up to the "Spirit" and
went where the "Spirit" suggested, or rather ordered to him to go, and he spoke
the words which the "Spirit" inspired in him. Now, where did the Holy Spirit
"order" him to go? Was it into Palestine, among the Jews who still shared the
"errors" that he had just publicly abjured and who would seem the first to be
entitled to his new revelation? Never! That's the one thing he won't do! It is
instead in Macedonia, as well as in Greece and among the Greeks of Asia Minor,
among the Galatians, and later among the Romans -- in Aryan countries, or at any
rate in non-Jewish countries -- that the neophyte preaches the theological dogma
of original sin and of eternal salvation through the crucified Jesus, and the
moral dogma of the equality of all men and all peoples; it is in Athens that he
proclaims that God created "all nations, all peoples of one and the same blood"
(Acts 17.26).
In this denial of the natural differences among the races, the Jews themselves
had of course no interest, but it was from their point of view very useful to
preach it, to impose it on the goyim in order to destroy in them those national
values which had, hitherto, formed their strength (or rather simply to hasten
their destruction; for, since the fourth century before Christ, they had already
been declining under the influence of the "hellenized" Jews of Alexandria). No
doubt Paul also preached "in the synagogues," that is, to other Jews, to whom he
presented the new doctrine as the outcome of prophecies and messianic
expectations; no doubt he said to the sons of his people, as well as to the
"fearers of the Lord" -- to the half-Jews, like Timothy, and to the Jewish
quarters that abounded in Aegean seaports (as in Rome) -- that Christ crucified
and resurrected, whom he announced, was none other than the promised Messiah. He
gave new meaning to Jewish prophecies just as he gave new meaning to the
immemorial mysteries of Greece, Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor: a meaning that
ascribed to the Jewish people a unique role, a unique place and a unique
importance in the religion of non-Jews. For him it was simply the means of
ensuring for his people spiritual domination in the future. His genius -- not
religious, but political -- consists in having understood this.
But it is not only in the field of doctrine that he can demonstrate such
disconcerting flexibility: "a Greek with the Greeks, and a Jew with the Jews,"
as he himself says. He has a keen sense of practical necessities, as well as
impossibilities. He is himself, although initially so orthodox, the first to
oppose any imposition of the Jewish Law on Christian converts of non-Jewish
race. He insists -- against Peter and the less conciliatory group of the first
Christians in Jerusalem -- that a Christian of non-Jewish origin has no need of
circumcision nor of Jewish dietary regulations. In his letters he writes to his
new faithful -- half-Jews, half-Greeks, Romans of doubtful origin, Levantines of
all the ports of the Mediterranean: to everyone without race, to all those he is
in the process of shaping into a link between his immutable people and their
traditions, and the vast world to be conquered -- that there does not exist, for
them, any distinction between what is "clean" and what is "unclean," that they
are permitted eat whatever they please ("whatever is sold in the market"). He
knew that, without these concessions, Christianity could not hope to conquer the
West, nor could Israel hope to conquer the world, through the intermediary of
the converted West.
Peter, who was not at all a "ghetto" Jew and was thus still unfamiliar with
conditions in the non-Jewish world, did not see things from the same perspective
-- not yet, in any case. It is for that reason that we must see in Paul the true
founder of historical Christianity: the man who formed, from the purely
spiritual teaching of the prophet Jesus, the basis of a militant organization
"in Time" whose goal was, in the deep consciousness of the Apostle, nothing less
than the domination of his own people over a world morally emasculated and
physically bastardized, a world wherein a misunderstood love of "man" leads
directly to the indiscriminate mixture of the races and the suppression of all
national pride -- in a word, to human degeneration.
It is time that the non-Jewish nations finally open their eyes to this reality
of two thousand years, that they grasp all its poignant topicality, and that
they react accordingly.
Written at Méadi (near Cairo) on June 18, 1957.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First published as Paul de Tarse, ou Christianisme et juiverie (Calcutta:
Savitri Devi Mukherji, 1958). Trans. Irmin; the original French text is also
available. Devi, almost certainly writing from memory, makes two small factual
errors in the preceding essay: (1) the account of Mary's parents to which she
refers appears in the apocryphal Gospel of James, not in the New Testament; (2)
the rumor that Jesus' father was a Roman legionary nicknamed Panthera was
reported by the pagan philosopher Celsus in his anti-Christian polemic True
Doctrine. It does not appear in any of the apocryphal gospels, as Devi
mistakenly suggests. Variations on the story can be found in the Jewish Talmud.
Tlwinslow
fiction. There was no more real Jesus Christ than there was a real Noah or
Adam. Why, then, do you insist that Paul is real? Why wouldn't all of Jesus'
disciples and apostles be fiction also? Whoever writes fiction this serious
must deliberately cover his tracks. Therefore, he must surround the fictional
man with more fictional men and women. That way the leads all go nowhere.
Ciao,
T.L. Winslow
www.tlwinslow.com/fabfict.html
www.tlwinslow.com/timeline/
Mako
Somebody is responsible for the spread of Christianity. It didn't just happen.
Quentin David Jones
"Mako" <Ma...@3oaks.com> wrote in message
news:vpi2hu0i7ce0c6dsj...@4ax.com...
> Somebody is responsible for the spread of Christianity. It didn't just
happen.
Yup,
Paul and others like
Marcion, Tatian, Irenaeus etc..
There is no need for a historical Jesus to explain the spread of
Christianity - else how do you explain the spread of Mithraism without
Mithras?
And when we look at the evidence we see:
* No contemporary evidence for Jesus
* Gospels appearing much later than the events
* Gospels much changed to argue dogma
* Early Christian arguments about whether Jesus cam in the flesh
* Mythic elements throughout the Gospels
In short,
the evidence strongly suggests there was no historical Jesus.
Quentin David Jones
http://members.iinet.net.au/~quentinj/
Mako
But it doesn't rule out the historical existence of Paul aka Saul.
Mako
<quen...@iinet.net.au> wrote:
>Greetings Mako,
>
>"Mako" <Ma...@3oaks.com> wrote in message
>news:vpi2hu0i7ce0c6dsj...@4ax.com...
>
>> Somebody is responsible for the spread of Christianity. It didn't just
>happen.
>
>Yup,
>Paul and others like
>Marcion, Tatian, Irenaeus etc..
Qui bono? What advantage did these men gain from the rise of this religion?
Christianity was a designed religion to conquer the might of the Roman
Empire. Christianity, with it's message that one should "offer the other cheek"
or "If thy eye offends thy, pluck it out", and a host of other suicidal advice,
was designed to destroy an empire from within. Men like Paul (Saul) and the
other Jewish disciple were instrumental in spreading this doctrine to the
Gentiles. Ancient conspiracy theory? You bet, and a grandiose one at that.
That's probably why the Jews so harshly reject it. Of course, this weapon has
back-fired on them from time to time, but in the grand scheme of things, it has
been a tool which has allowed them to conquer. It's so different from their own
religion which preaches that one should always be faithful to their race. Read
the stories of Esther, and Joseph with this theme in mind, and you will see that
what I say is true. Think about it.