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Commentary on Romans 8

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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Flann wrote:
This is more applying of astro-theology interpretively. The ancient Israelites were well aware of the natural seasons and the connection with the sun and moon. In Genesis the sun and moon are said to;"divide the day from the night" and to be "for signs and seasons and for days and years."
This was well understood, but pagan worship of nature is condemned throughout despite your attempt to explain this away as political shenanigans.
These are excellent points, Flann. And you are correct: readily available to the Israelites were ancient texts (authoritative texts) which setforth and distinguished natural phenomena from the divine.
In order to make the astro theology thesis fit in this case, the scripture you refer to needs to be ignored.
It once again becomes necessary to conjure up both speculation and false narratives that lack any evidence to grant them soundness.

Anything can be explained away when one engages in conspiratorial magic tricks.

It seems that Robert's primary task is to advance astro-theology and the religion of scientism.

Astro theology does away with theology.
The religion of scientism replaces the absence of religion.
If you do not accept the astro theological explanation, then you reject science. - non sequitur.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Robert wrote:Christians today are just as stubborn and recalcitrant as the disciples and others described in the Bible who failed to see the meaning of miracles such as the loaves and fishes. The fact is that all miracle stories are allegory, and it takes a peculiar stiff-necked blindness to fail to see this.
This reminded me of Alvin Platinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism. His argument was that since natural selection does not necessarily favor the truth, our beliefs wouldn't be truthful. Therefore, it's unlikely naturalism is truthful.

I do think he was on to something. Our tendency to believe things doesn't usually follow the truth of things. Unless we outsource the filter of our knowledge to processes that sustainably lead to truthful conclusions(science and logic), arriving at the truth is a shot in the dark.

Up until we've developed these processes, beliefs have ranged all over the places, with gods and miracles and ghosts and fantasies all across history in all cultures.

Our earliest attempts at constructing worldviews were bound to be flawed, as Platinga suggests. We may be able to apply proper method in hindsight, but I'm still skeptical that the ancients could as easily sort truth from fiction. I still think they mixed things up together, believing the concoction entirely.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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DWill wrote: the motive for concealment is a puzzle, as is from whom the message is being concealed. Why would Paul conceal the secrets from the very people he is trying to instruct?
Hi DWill, these are great questions to raise.

The essential hypothesis that I am supporting in this thread builds on the analysis of Dr Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, whose early book The Gnostic Paul explores how the prominent theologians of the early church read and understood Paul’s writings in a very different way from orthodox dogma.

As I say in the opening post, “My view, following Pagels, is that Paul had some grasp of the allegory in his letters, but carefully concealed this to make his message palatable to a mass audience.” My review of Pagels’ book The Gnostic Paul is at http://www.amazon.com/review/R2803T62V90MTR There I say “Pagels explains how Valentinus and other Gnostic theologians read Paul as speaking at two levels. The Gnostics say that Paul's letters distinguish between a secret spiritual or `pneumatic' level of teaching aimed at initiates and a popular simplified `psychic' version for ignorant newcomers. As in other mystery philosophies who provided esoteric spoken instruction within their schools and exoteric written material for the general public, the Gnostics claimed that Paul had secret teachings that are explained in code in his public writings such as the letters to the churches in Rome and Corinth.”

My view is that the Gnostic reading of Paul as explained by Professor Pagels is vastly more plausible than Orthodox literalism, as I explain in my review.

What does this say about the motive for concealment of Gnostic cosmology? Essentially, the social context of the rise of Christianity was the building of a mass movement within the turmoil of the Roman Empire. As Christianity grew through the second and third centuries, this context included a very strong Roman ban on sedition, and the rather bullying context that Rome had completely obliterated Israel from the face of the earth as a demonstration of Rome’s might and intolerance.

Now, if the Paul school had associations with a range of mystery religions, and wished to use ideas emerging from these sources to create a new mass movement based on the idea of the presence of the prophesied Jewish messiah in history, then we have a good explanation for the motive for Paul’s epistles to speak at two levels, for the initiates and for the public.

The public message is that Jesus Christ has appeared in history, while the initiate message is that this public story is a simplified version of a cosmic myth. This reading of Paul aligns to the observation that his Epistles have almost no details about the Historical Jesus, and that as Christianity evolved these details were filled in through the imaginative construction of the Gospel story in Mark.

The motive for concealment therefore is that a claim to be discussing a real God is far more efficacious than admitting your God is invented. So if Paul invented features applying to the Jewish messiah as Jesus Christ, then the church found that concealing this fictional method gave these beliefs far more political traction.

It is similar to how believers want to insist that Adam and Noah are real, because the moral teachings associated with them become more pertinent and easy to convey when they are wrapped up in a magical theory of God walking on the earth. The initiates understand that this story about a real presence of God is to be understood allegorically, but they must conceal this reading from the masses in order to avoid confusing the simple believers.
DWill wrote: And there are no church authorities, besides possibly Paul himself and colleagues. to worry about. The Romans? On the off chance that they cared about obscure writings and would somehow get a hold of them, astrotheology wouldn't be any more offensive to them than what is evident on the surface of the epistles (maybe even less offensive).
It appears likely that the shift from “Jesus the Nazarene” to “Jesus of Nazareth” may well have occurred for precisely this reason, to avoid Roman persecution. If the Nazarenes were a proscribed illegal sect, then for the church to say “Nazarene” meant “from Nazareth” provided a convenient alibi. This coheres with the observation that there is no archaeological evidence of Nazareth before a century after Christ.

The real main issue regarding concealment is the agenda of the early church to build a mass movement that would enable it to subvert the Roman Empire in a context where military methods had failed. With Jesus Christ of Nazareth considered as Lord and Saviour of a New Age, orthodox Christianity is far more subversive than the esoteric cosmic blueprint that the founders used to construct the myth. "Lord" admits of no rival, but this is precisely what Christianity presents.

In order for the political subversion of Rome to be effective, it had to be believed within the church that Jesus Christ was a historical individual, so the story of invention had to be carefully concealed within the church. But what then happened was that the walking mop of literal faith escaped from the control of the Sorceror’s Apprentices, as the original basis of faith was concealed, forgotten, suppressed and denied, because of the compelling emotional and political power of the story they had invented.
DWill wrote: I don't take Robert for a Da Vinci Code fan, but he is enamored of coded messages, cabals, conspiracies, and general secrecy stuff.
You know my claim, originally presented and developed here at Booktalk, that I have solved the Da Vinci Code by proving that Leonardo used his method of close natural observation and his theory that man is the image of the cosmos to design The Last Supper by using visible patterns of the stars as his template and blueprint for the stances of the twelve apostles and Christ in the upper room. This explanation is entirely obvious to anyone capable of looking at The Last Supper without emotional baggage, but I have observed that such baggage is so intense that people are simply incapable of engaging with this simple empirical observation.

The decision of Leonardo to use this naturalistic composition method, which coheres strongly with the Gnostic Hermetic ideas that had just established the Florentine Renaissance, and the fact no one has noticed for half a millennium, illustrate to me that these questions of Gnosticism in Paul’s epistles touch on deep cultural pathologies. Just as few today can see the stars, so too in the ancient world, the popular mentality was ignorant and deluded, and as Paul said, had to be fed on baby milk.

I am only interested in secret information that has a simple coherence with scientific knowledge. I know there are moronic bigots out there who will try to distort and malign the discussion of such topics, but I prefer to ignore the hypocrites and focus on scientific analysis.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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http://www.booktalk.org/post140976.html#p140976
Flann 5 wrote: a solar deity would be right at home in the Roman world and no ground to punish anyone who would not have a reason to refuse divine worship to Caesar.

Your point here is another good reason why the solar framework for Christianity would have been concealed. I view early Christianity against the context of the Jewish War. Christianity emerged as a way to reject Roman imperial pagan idolatry. As you have noted, Paul makes that abundantly clear in Romans 1. The construction of Jesus Christ as Lord was directly seditious towards the Roman view that we have no Lord but Caesar, the line that the Jews allegedly shout in response to the query from Pilate during the trial of Christ in the Gospel. Paul does not want to be at home in the Roman world, but wants to transform that world to make it at home with God.

Christianity in its enlightened origins had a deep commitment to truth, and this led to some tension apparent in the Bible regarding how to respond to pagan beliefs. The very ancient traditions of worship of nature within paganism could not be simply rejected, but had to be reimagined. So the device of converting pagan memes into a new anthropic framework proved the great successful genius idea of Christianity, as seen in texts such as Paul’s letter to the Romans. The ethical values of human rights could be affirmed through the idea of the word made flesh, God incarnate in human form, while the cosmology grounded in observation of the heavens could place this human story in an accurate scientific framework.
Flann 5 wrote: it would be the "ignorant masses" who would fall foul of Imperial Rome on this issue [of sun worship], and they are supposed to be in cahoots with the Emperor. Talk about unintended consequences!
You might like to expand on that comment Flann. I don’t regard the masses of the ancient world as ‘in cahoots’ with the Emperor, since there was a clear view that the Empire existed for the benefit of a tiny elite who aimed to pillage and oppress the masses in order to live a life of idle luxury. The critique of hedonism in Paul’s letter to the Romans supports this popular resentment towards the Empire. As imperial faith evolved from Jupiter to the invincible sun as its focus, the mythic focus within sun worship on pitiless imperial stability became a severe problem due to its lack of compassion, love and mercy, its inhuman face of evil oppression. And yet, the fact is that the sun is the biological and physical source of light and life and grace for humanity. The problem therefore emerged of how this observation of the central place of the sun in life that had been co-opted by empire could be wrested away to serve the interests of humanity.

Christianity solved this problem of reconciling truth and ethics in masterful style by anthropomorphising the sun in the person of Jesus Christ. Christology, the science of Christ, traditionally explores the problem of how faith sees a unity between the historical Jesus of Nazareth and the eternal Christ the King. These two natures, human and divine, are imagined as fused in one person, Jesus Christ. This model, the integration of time and eternity, builds directly upon astronomical observation of the sun, which combines just these features of existing within time and constantly changing, but also having an eternal stability.
Flann 5 wrote:
If the conspirators were that clever why would they invent someone who insists on strict mono-theism as when Jesus cites the first commandment in the gospel?
Monotheism is broadly compatible with sun worship, as seen in the solar cult of Akhenaten in Egypt, widely viewed as a main precursor to Jewish belief in Jehovah. My sense is that a part of the Jewish genius was a recognition that the security, unity and identity that emerge from recognition of the centrality of the sun to life have to be humanised by attributing personal features to the Sun God, and that eventually these features evolved to have no need of the original natural source that gave them their structure.
Flann 5 wrote: If they wanted Jews totally compliant with Rome why include that? and the emperors were already claiming divinity and demanding worship even then.
Where are you getting this idea about Christians wanting compliance with Rome? Certainly not from me. My reading is that Christianity accepted the apocalyptic vision of Rome as the image of evil, what the Paulines in Ephesians called the empire of the present darkness.
Flann 5 wrote:
Ultimately if one sticks with the conspiracy explanation almost nothing can un-glue it.
That is a foolish and ignorant comment on your part Flann. The term “conspiracy theory” tends to be used by apologists as a way to protect the Roman Catholic Church from historical analysis by saying that all its critics are insane. If you think that Orthodoxy did not suppress Gnosticism, which is really all that the conspiracy amounts to, how do you explain the imperial edicts which for a thousand years made possession of heretical material a capital crime?
Flann 5 wrote: It can be seen though in practice that zodiacal interpretation is surreal and comical and is unlikely to sweep the planet in the near future.
Nice try Flann, but this is something of a Canute-like effort on your part to stop the tide of natural reason. You can see the zodiac if you look at the sky on any clear night. The zodiac ‘sweeps the planet’ every day, every year and every Great Year. I appreciate that True Believers in supernatural fantasy need to deny the facts before their eyes, and it is indeed ironic that you use the terms surreal and comical when these are an apt description of the effort to sustain a hollow miraculous worldview. Once Christians are able to read the Bible without scales on their eyes, they will see, for example, that the Tree of Life is direct allegory for the zodiac stars, and that the fall from grace is precisely defined in the Bible itself in its discussion of the Tree of Life in Genesis and Revelation as the separation of human culture from understanding of the zodiac.
Flann 5 wrote: To be fair Robert makes a good attempt at trying to give it a coherent message of ecological salvation, but that's dubious at best, I think.
Romans 8 includes the magnificent ecological hymn at verse 21 “the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” To expand on my commentary from the opening post, it is clear to me that this verse is about a message of ecological salvation. Far from being dubious, as Flann asserts, placing the concept of salvation within a scientific framework is our only hope.

The current ‘Sixth Extinction’ context means that life on earth will not be saved in the twinkling of an idea by true believers being raptured up to an imaginary heaven, but rather by scientific knowledge. Indeed, the rapture dogma from Christian fundamentalists is central to the evil of alienation from nature that is at the root cause of mass extinction today. Rather, we have to go back to the Christian sources, such as this idea in Paul about the delivery of the creation from bondage, and see that this bondage is directly caused by false human belief in transcendental miraculous worldviews, and that liberty is only possible when our values shift to becoming based on facts, through a reformation of Christianity to restore and renew and revive its real enlightened origins.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Robert Tulip wrote: The essential hypothesis that I am supporting in this thread builds on the analysis of Dr Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, whose early book The Gnostic Paul explores how the prominent theologians of the early church read and understood Paul’s writings in a very different way from orthodox dogma.

As I say in the opening post, “My view, following Pagels, is that Paul had some grasp of the allegory in his letters, but carefully concealed this to make his message palatable to a mass audience.” My review of Pagels’ book The Gnostic Paul is at http://www.amazon.com/review/R2803T62V90MTR There I say “Pagels explains how Valentinus and other Gnostic theologians read Paul as speaking at two levels. The Gnostics say that Paul's letters distinguish between a secret spiritual or `pneumatic' level of teaching aimed at initiates and a popular simplified `psychic' version for ignorant newcomers. As in other mystery philosophies who provided esoteric spoken instruction within their schools and exoteric written material for the general public, the Gnostics claimed that Paul had secret teachings that are explained in code in his public writings such as the letters to the churches in Rome and Corinth.”
I haven't read The Gnostic Paul, Robert, though I want to. I find it easy to accept that an interplay of forces was involved in the development of Christianity, and that Gnosticism (maybe that should be the gnosticisms) was a major player. We say that orthodoxy won and in fact as the victor did its best to wipe out the literary traces of the heretics, but that was quite far on. It's likely that our imagining of two opposed camps in the first few centuries isn't quite the way it was. Thus there is contribution from gnosticism even in the final, dominant religion that triumphed as an institution. The Book of John is one example, a gnostic-flavored work that Pagels believed was canonized only because it said that salvation could come only through Christ. That was the type of restrictive statement that sat well with both the church leaders and the masses, but the rest of the book could lead one to different conclusions.

There is another good review of Pagels' book that I'll quote toward the end. It gives a more detailed synopsis than your Amazon review was intended to do.

I now assume my usual role, pointing out boring realities. First, how Paul was interpreted by Gnostics is just that, a use that they made of his writings. That they discerned two levels doesn't mean that Paul was writing for two audiences, cloaking his meaning in order to reach out to the Gnostics who were his true constituency. That would be a historical claim and is not warranted. It doesn't mean that here we have the original intent of what Paul did. Again, I haven't read Pagels' book, but I just ask you to please be careful about attributing to her an assertion that Paul was writing for two different audiences in a duplicitous fashion I'm fairly certain from reviews I've read that she does not claim that, despite the book's title Paul was a Gnostic, so I would be surprised if this scholar commits herself to the view you hold yourself.

A comparison may help. Some of the English Romantics claimed that Satan was the hero of Paradise Lost. They interpreted the work in this way because of Satan's indomitable spirit against an oppressive God. But it's clear from the work as a whole that Milton's artistry is what engendered this assessment. Satan indeed has the courage of a hero, but it is very clear that Milton views his cause as criminal, and that he progressively degrades Satan as the poem goes on.
My view is that the Gnostic reading of Paul as explained by Professor Pagels is vastly more plausible than Orthodox literalism, as I explain in my review.

What does this say about the motive for concealment of Gnostic cosmology? Essentially, the social context of the rise of Christianity was the building of a mass movement within the turmoil of the Roman Empire. As Christianity grew through the second and third centuries, this context included a very strong Roman ban on sedition, and the rather bullying context that Rome had completely obliterated Israel from the face of the earth as a demonstration of Rome’s might and intolerance.

Now, if the Paul school had associations with a range of mystery religions, and wished to use ideas emerging from these sources to create a new mass movement based on the idea of the presence of the prophesied Jewish messiah in history, then we have a good explanation for the motive for Paul’s epistles to speak at two levels, for the initiates and for the public.
The "rather bullying" example of Rome's destruction of Israel--I should say so! But I see nothing in what Paul wanted to say according to you that would have increased the heat on Christian sects. There was, after all, little interest in politics in gnosticism, which was all about individual spiritual fulfillment. What was threatening about Christianity was that it was separatist, a private cult rather than a civic institution as Roman religion was. "Orthodox" Christianity, though that didn't exist yet, was a threat in itself, whereas exoteric doctrines would not add to the threat and would not need concealment. The existence of many gnostic writings from the time attest to the openness of expression by Gnostics. Why didn't those documents use similar cloaking mechanisms?

Your analysis also misconceives the literary form of the epistle, a form by which the writer addressed a particular audience. That Paul would have used this this form to write to other factions, outside of the churches at Rome or Corinth, to which the letters are addressed, makes no sense. I wish that sometime you would read all the Pauline letters in sequence merely as a reader and think that you would see that the preponderance of the content relates unambiguously to Paul's mission, even if precisely what Paul means isn't clear in these letters supposedly dictated to a scribe. Proportionality is very important in judging any literary work, and in my view you sometimes distort meaning and intention by inferring the entirety of both from isolated passages.
The public message is that Jesus Christ has appeared in history, while the initiate message is that this public story is a simplified version of a cosmic myth. This reading of Paul aligns to the observation that his Epistles have almost no details about the Historical Jesus, and that as Christianity evolved these details were filled in through the imaginative construction of the Gospel story in Mark.

The motive for concealment therefore is that a claim to be discussing a real God is far more efficacious than admitting your God is invented. So if Paul invented features applying to the Jewish messiah as Jesus Christ, then the church found that concealing this fictional method gave these beliefs far more political traction.
The lack of biographical detail on Jesus isn't a serious argument that Paul believes Jesus is the expression of other myths. His purpose in the letters is crystal clear, to meld into a single unit the fractious groups that claim Christ as their god. It is natural that he would not be interested in telling about "Jesus in the flesh." That he regarded Jesus as having lived is not in doubt, in my opinion, as well. The whole argument about Jesus is what kind of being he was. Even Gnostics or figures like Marcion who said he was pure spirit refer to someone who appeared along with other regular mortals. There is no school that claimed Jesus didn't assume personhood. Even the Romans, who of course ridiculed Christianity for several centuries, didn't say that this man-god never existed, only that the god-part was false. Of course, I have no idea what supposed details about Jesus' life were circulating during Paul's time. And Paul may have had little interest in them, perhaps partly because of the tension between him and those apostles who claimed to have known Jesus.
It is similar to how believers want to insist that Adam and Noah are real, because the moral teachings associated with them become more pertinent and easy to convey when they are wrapped up in a magical theory of God walking on the earth. The initiates understand that this story about a real presence of God is to be understood allegorically, but they must conceal this reading from the masses in order to avoid confusing the simple believers.
There isn't a parallel case with Paul, no fables he tells. And are you really saying here that in an Old Testament context, the assertion of the "magical God", Yahweh, was consciously done by an elite in order to--well, for what conceivable purpose I couldn't possibly say. This theme of a controlling, elite cabal persisting over centuries is getting old. In the words of the old Yardbirds song, "When will it end, oh when will it end?"
The real main issue regarding concealment is the agenda of the early church to build a mass movement that would enable it to subvert the Roman Empire in a context where military methods had failed. With Jesus Christ of Nazareth considered as Lord and Saviour of a New Age, orthodox Christianity is far more subversive than the esoteric cosmic blueprint that the founders used to construct the myth. "Lord" admits of no rival, but this is precisely what Christianity presents.

In order for the political subversion of Rome to be effective, it had to be believed within the church that Jesus Christ was a historical individual, so the story of invention had to be carefully concealed within the church. But what then happened was that the walking mop of literal faith escaped from the control of the Sorceror’s Apprentices, as the original basis of faith was concealed, forgotten, suppressed and denied, because of the compelling emotional and political power of the story they had invented.
Robert, you're confusing me with all this concealment. After the first concealment by Paul, hiding from the Romans his true intended message, we now have the early church in effect concealing the concealment? It decides it's better to go with the pedestrian account it knows is false, for marketing reasons. But you're right that in the esoteric stuff there would be little to worry the Romans. That isn't what you said initially about this, however. Also, I don't think you're on solid ground historically in supposing that in the 100s and 200s there is some massive resistance against the sometimes faltering empire by diaspora Jews.
I am only interested in secret information that has a simple coherence with scientific knowledge. I know there are moronic bigots out there who will try to distort and malign the discussion of such topics, but I prefer to ignore the hypocrites and focus on scientific analysis.
This is not meant to offend, but your always bringing science into this is the strangest part of your thinking. Certainly, whether we're talking about either orthodox or gnostic Christianity, the supernatural plays a huge role. It's as though you're doing a cut and paste, with regard to your beliefs of the present and the people of the ancient world.

Oh, yes, an excerpt from a review of Pagels' book by Dan Geddes. I believe that if Geddes is accurate, Pagels is very judicious in her appraisal of the reasons that Christianity had to reject gnosticism in order to become a world faith. Gnosticism died a natural death. When its texts were suppressed, it was already on the mat. It does seem too bad it had to be this way, but so it does go.
Conclusion

In her Conclusion, Pagels recounts how the Gnostic/orthodox debate was a fierce one, and that there was nothing inevitable about the orthodox victory. In fact, their victory still frames all debates within Christianity. The orthodox “won” because their theories and practices lent themselves to mass religion; the Gnostics’ did not. Gnostics focused on the internal quest for gnosis; orthodoxy focused on relations with other people, and established rituals to mark the milestones of life: “the sharing of food, in the eucharist; sexuality, in marriage; childbirth, in baptism; sickness, in annointment; and death, in funerals” (176).

Pagels sees the rigor of orthodoxy as a prime reason for its survival, but laments the complete banishment of Gnostic ideas from orthodoxy. Orthodoxy’s inability to please all inquisitive minds is seen in the work of: Jacob Boehme, George Fox, Swedenborg, Blake, Rembrandt, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, and so many others who studied Jesus incessantly. Pagels believes that the central question in this debate is: “What is the source of religious authority?” The Gnostic Gospels helps show that religious authority is often grounded in the acceptability of its teaching; its ability to provide satisfying answers to the fundamental questions of life, as well as the strength of the institutions claiming authority.
Evaluation

The Gnostic Gospels' central thesis—that political factors shaped the form of orthodox Christianity—seems well established. Too often we assume that the history of ideas is a debate between differing ideas, and that the strongest (most valid) idea necessarily survives. Instead, we see here how the strength of ideas is measured by the ability to create and sustain institutions, rather than ideas’ philosophical sophistication. The informality and egalitarianism of the Gnostics did not support the establishment of enduring institutions. Nor did it answer clearly the fundamental questions that people want answered; instead it offered only the means to conduct an arduous search (and perhaps futile) within the individual soul.
Importance

The Gnostic Gospels serves an important reminder that spiritual authority is forged in the crucible of worldly problems. Religious leaders must always adapt their teachings to accommodate the problems of the moment; otherwise it holds few adherents. The Gnostics deprecated the flesh and the things of this world, focusing more on the discovery of the esoteric gnosis. The orthodox, while also stressing the preferability of the hereafter to worldly existence, did offer its members some spiritual sustenance for the events of this world.

The Gnostic Gospels also serves a good introduction to Gnosticism. More people (and especially Christians) should be aware of the debates that shaped the early church.

6 June 1999
http://www.thesatirist.com/books/GnosticGospels.html
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Robert Tulip wrote:Christianity in its enlightened origins had a deep commitment to truth, and this led to some tension apparent in the Bible regarding how to respond to pagan beliefs. The very ancient traditions of worship of nature within paganism could not be simply rejected, but had to be reimagined. So the device of converting pagan memes into a new anthropic framework proved the great successful genius idea of Christianity, as seen in texts such as Paul’s letter to the Romans. The ethical values of human rights could be affirmed through the idea of the word made flesh, God incarnate in human form, while the cosmology grounded in observation of the heavens could place this human story in an accurate scientific framework.
Hi Robert.
The ancient traditions of worship of nature were rejected in Judeo-Christian literature very pointedly. This included prohibition of graven images for idolatrous purposes of anything in creation whether in the heavens earth or sea.
In fact sun, moon and star worship are ancient and we find that Abraham's father and some relatives practiced moon worship but Abraham himself rejected this. http://www.biblehub.com/commentaries/joshua/24-2.htm
Neither Judaism or Christianity are pantheistic in any sense but the creator is transcendent and separate from the creation.
They are reminded that they saw no form or image and Jesus states that God is spirit in John's gospel. which you claim is gnostic but the Logos is not part of creation but the creator.
You apply another conspiracy theory to try explain this rejection of paganism throughout the old testament.
Robert Tulip wrote:Monotheism is broadly compatible with sun worship, as seen in the solar cult of Akhenaten in Egypt, widely viewed as a main precursor to Jewish belief in Jehovah.
Egyptian religion was polytheistic and the oldest Jewish writings like Job and Genesis are clearly monotheistic and again distinguish sharply between the creator and the creation. If some Egyptians regarded the sun as some sort of top dog deity this did not prevent others having other gods also.
Robert Tulip wrote: I don’t regard the masses of the ancient world as ‘in cahoots’ with the Emperor, since there was a clear view that the Empire existed for the benefit of a tiny elite who aimed to pillage and oppress the masses in order to live a life of idle luxury.
You constantly talk about a conspiracy between throne and altar. What does that mean?
Robert Tulip wrote: If you think that Orthodoxy did not suppress Gnosticism, which is really all that the conspiracy amounts to, how do you explain the imperial edicts which for a thousand years made possession of heretical material a capital crime?
I don't dispute that the Catholic church as it evolved did later suppress Gnosticism but Paul's letters are early and are clearly pro-historical and supernatural Christ, as in his passage on the resurrection and post death appearances of Christ in 1st Corinthians 15.
And again the reliance on Imperial Rome to promote Christianity is not found in these writings but the contrary that it is a spiritual kingdom to be spread by preaching the message, which is exactly what Paul is doing in Romans.
And Romans is early, at least first century, so the idea that he is overwhelming these Christians with his "literalist" gospel while concealing esoteric Gnosticism is laughable.
The "mystery now revealed" in 1 Corinthians is plainly stated to be the gospel, and not esoteric Gnosticism.
Your theory simply refuses to allow the obvious statements to be just that, and therefore nothing contained in them can falsify this as you simply claim that it's part of the "concealing" process.
Robert Tulip wrote:Nice try Flann, but this is something of a Canute-like effort on your part to stop the tide of natural reason. You can see the zodiac if you look at the sky on any clear night. The zodiac ‘sweeps the planet’ every day, every year and every Great Year. I appreciate that True Believers in supernatural fantasy need to deny the facts before their eyes, and it is indeed ironic that you use the terms surreal and comical when these are an apt description of the effort to sustain a hollow miraculous worldview. Once Christians are able to read the Bible without scales on their eyes, they will see, for example, that the Tree of Life is direct allegory for the zodiac stars, and that the fall from grace is precisely defined in the Bible itself in its discussion of the Tree of Life in Genesis and Revelation as the separation of human culture from understanding of the zodiac.
You want to say that politically minded redactors weeded out all the pagan stuff and yet that this zodiacal stuff is still there in Genesis for example.
Where is this zodiacal interpretation found in the gnostic "gospels?" Don't tell me.It's concealed there too.Where is this interpretation found historically? You just assert that the true meaning was suppressed and forgotten by the sorcerers apprentices but now the astro-theologists today have deciphered this.
I still maintain that astro-theological interpretation is absurd with it's calming of the sea in Cancer the crab and the parables and miracles can be moved into any house of the zodiac if you subjectively pick an aspect of one.
Robert Tulip wrote:Romans 8 includes the magnificent ecological hymn at verse 21 “the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” To expand on my commentary from the opening post, it is clear to me that this verse is about a message of ecological salvation. Far from being dubious, as Flann asserts, placing the concept of salvation within a scientific framework is our only hope.
Undoubtedly the restoration of the creation is envisaged as part of Christ's redemptive work but the main emphasis in Romans is on man's alienation from God due to the fall and sin and vicarious atonement as the solution. But this is precisely what you want to avoid and what Paul plainly teaches.
Needless to say the writings of Tacitus,Suetonius and Josephus are more conspiratorial work in your mind, but in the early centuries Christians had no way of doing this as they simply did not have that kind of power and Tacitus is actually describing the persecution of Christians by Nero.
Neither Jesus or Paul promote sedition against Rome's rule and state plainly that taxes should be paid for example.
There are examples of Jewish political resistance movements but Christianity was not one of them, and the obvious clash on worship of Caesar was inevitable given the anti-pagan stance of Christianity but this was not advocating violent subversion but patient endurance of persecution.
Gnosticism itself is more about self salvation through gnosis than any ecological vision, and the creation is the botched job of the deluded demiurge in their thinking.
As I said Robert,at this stage we are simply repeating these arguments and you obviously are convinced you are right and nothing is going to persuade you otherwise.
Last edited by Flann 5 on Fri Apr 24, 2015 1:42 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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DWill wrote:The impression I've gotten is that, despite the word astrotheology, the people promoting this as the belief surreptitiously woven into the Bible writings are thinking not of god-worship, but of some metaphorical or allegorical appreciation. In other words, the ancient astrotheologists weren't literalists like the rest, not really believing in supernatural mumbo-jumbo. This seems to where the claim comes from that the symbolism is actually "scientific." There is the strong print of presentism there, I suspect. Was such thinking any significant part of the ancient world? I'm sure that examples from intellectuals such a Philo could be produced to support the view that allegorical interpretation of the scriptures existed, but he said nothing about the zodiac as far as I know.
Philo and Josephus both mentioned that the breast plate of the Jewish high priest consisted of twelve jewels which symbolised the twelve signs of the zodiac. This is extremely important to understand the connection between the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ, the twelve jewels of the Holy City, and the zodiac one to twelve relation between the sun and moon as the physical order of the universe and natural structure of time.

For astrotheology, the analytic deconstruction of surviving texts involves the supposition that their meaning originates in natural observation. This is plausible simply because natural observation is universal in agrarian societies which rely on the cycles of the seasons for their existence. The natural cycles are universal, whereas the rising and dying saviour motif which many societies used to symbolise nature in ritual involve diverse myths. Patterns of fertility are deeply engrained into society through the common times to plant and reap, as Ecclesiastes famously notes in the lines quoted by the Byrds.

Astrotheology is primarily a psychological and political and philosophical theory to provide a scientific coherent explanation of the evolution of myth. Astrotheology posits that simple literal explanations of complex ideas are useful for a mass illiterate audience, and that the nature of mythical evolution is that the simple literal mass versions of the story gradually evolve to overwhelm their complex source which is understood only by a priestly astronomer elite.

You could think of astral meaning of myth in a parable of a strangler fig, which uses a tree for support but then slowly and gradually grows above to take the light from its host and kill it. By this time, the parasitic strangler is so strong that it can stand by itself, leaving the original tree around which it grew as manifesting only in absence. We find no trace of the original tree except a cylinder surrounded by vines where the tree used to exist before it died and rotted away.
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DM Murdock, also known as Acharya S, has advanced breast cancer and would welcome your thoughts and prayers and support. Readers here will recall that Acharya is the modern founder of astrotheology, and participated actively in the discussion of her book Christ in Egypt here at Booktalk.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Robert Tulip wrote:DM Murdock, also known as Acharya S, has advanced breast cancer and would welcome your thoughts and prayers and support. Readers here will recall that Acharya is the modern founder of astrotheology, and participated actively in the discussion of her book Christ in Egypt here at Booktalk.
Hi Robert, I wasn't aware of D.M.Murdock's health problems with cancer. Hopefully it's still treatable even though it's advanced unfortunately.
Robert Tulip wrote:Philo and Josephus both mentioned that the breast plate of the Jewish high priest consisted of twelve jewels which symbolised the twelve signs of the zodiac. This is extremely important to understand the connection between the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ, the twelve jewels of the Holy City, and the zodiac one to twelve relation between the sun and moon as the physical order of the universe and natural structure of time.
I'd like to see the actual quotes from Philo and Josephus here stating that the twelve jewels symbolise the 12 signs of the zodiac. Can you provide these references?
More obviously these represent the twelve tribes of Israel and the role of the high priest was to offer atoning sacrifices for the sins of Israel and to make intercession for them with God.
This makes no sense in relation to the signs of the zodiac.
Most of the other points have been answered in one way or another, and there's not much more to be added as far as I can see.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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DM Murdock, also known as Acharya S, has advanced breast cancer and would welcome your thoughts and prayers and support. Readers here will recall that Acharya is the modern founder of astrotheology, and participated actively in the discussion of her book Christ in Egypt here at Booktalk.
Very sad.
My heart goes out to her and all her loved ones.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Josephus the astrotheologist! From Antiquities Book III:

7. Now here one may wonder at the ill-will which men bear to us, and which they profess to bear on account of our despising that Deity which they pretend to honor; for if any one do but consider the fabric of the tabernacle, and take a view of the garments of the high priest, and of those vessels which we make use of in our sacred ministration, he will find that our legislator was a divine man, and that we are unjustly reproached by others; for if any one do without prejudice, and with judgment, look upon these things, he will find they were every one made in way of imitation and representation of the universe. When Moses distinguished the tabernacle into three parts, (15) and allowed two of them to the priests, as a place accessible and common, he denoted the land and the sea, these being of general access to all; but he set apart the third division for God, because heaven is inaccessible to men. And when he ordered twelve loaves to be set on the table, he denoted the year, as distinguished into so many months. By branching out the candlestick into seventy parts, he secretly intimated the Decani, or seventy divisions of the planets; and as to the seven lamps upon the candlesticks, they referred to the course of the planets, of which that is the number. The veils, too, which were composed of four things, they declared the four elements; for the fine linen was proper to signify the earth, because the flax grows out of the earth; the purple signified the sea, because that color is dyed by the blood of a sea shell-fish; the blue is fit to signify the air; and the scarlet will naturally be an indication of fire. Now the vestment of the high priest being made of linen, signified the earth; the blue denoted the sky, being like lightning in its pomegranates, and in the noise of the bells resembling thunder. And for the ephod, it showed that God had made the universe of four elements; and as for the gold interwoven, I suppose it related to the splendor by which all things are enlightened. He also appointed the breastplate to be placed in the middle of the ephod, to resemble the earth, for that has the very middle place of the world. And the girdle which encompassed the high priest round, signified the ocean, for that goes round about and includes the universe. Each of the sardonyxes declares to us the sun and the moon; those, I mean, that were in the nature of buttons on the high priest's shoulders. And for the twelve stones, whether we understand by them the months, or whether we understand the like number of the signs of that circle which the Greeks call the Zodiac, we shall not be mistaken in their meaning. And for the mitre, which was of a blue color, it seems to me to mean heaven; for how otherwise could the name of God be inscribed upon it? That it was also illustrated with a crown, and that of gold also, is because of that splendor with which God is pleased. Let this explication (16) suffice at present, since the course of my narration will often, and on many occasions, afford me the opportunity of enlarging upon the virtue of our legislator.
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