You talk as though analysis of conspiracies is automatically invalid. But the Bible is based on conspiracies. It is fallacious to attempt to discredit analysis through guilt by association, the idea that because some conspiracies don't exist none do.Flann 5 wrote: You apply another conspiracy theory to try explain this rejection of paganism throughout the old testament.
The Bible itself explains its conspiracies quite transparently. For example Moses explains that the first of the real ten commandments at Exodus 34:13 is “Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherah poles.” This illustrates that these pagan practices were prevalent in Israel at the time, and that God was allegedly instructing the Jews to carefully conspire with each other by excluding their enemies from their confidence, saying “be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land where you are going, or they will be a snare among you.”
The relation between monotheism and polytheism is hard to reconstruct by taking the Bible as a primary reference. Jewish polytheism was rampant, given how the prophets so rudely compare polytheism with prostitution:Flann 5 wrote: 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.
There is a famous episode in Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell where Winston Smith helps to rewrite documents to prove that Oceania always has been at war with Eastasia. This is a parable, applying the Big Brother principle that "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." Totalitarian regimes have always sought to control history, and the Bible is no different. Just because the surviving version of the Bible are rigidly monotheistic, that tells us nothing about how this meme evolved. In fact, Genesis is not among the “oldest Jewish writings”, but was put together after the Babylonian exile, as indicated by the Documentary Hypothesis.The Bible wrote:Judges 2:17 Yet they would not listen to their judges but went a whoring after other gods, and bowed themselves unto them
Exodus 34:16 sons commit adultery against me by worshiping other gods.
Judges 8:33 the Israelites again ... chased after other gods - the Baals
Hosea 4:12 My people consult a wooden idol, and a diviner's rod ...... Longing after idols has made them foolish. ... They commit adultery by giving themselves to other gods. ... caused them to err, and they have gone a whoring
Hosea 1:2 prostitute by turning against the LORD and worshiping other gods.
The purpose of religion in a context where there is no separation between church and state is to provide political support for the belief in the divine right of kings, to ensure stability of law and order by upholding the sense of moral purpose for the whole political community. The king or emperor or pharaoh was a religious figure, as in the example of the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar who was also Pope of Rome for twenty years (Pontifex Maximus).Flann 5 wrote: You constantly talk about a conspiracy between throne and altar. What does that mean?
The interesting thing in Christian origins is that the Western invasions of the East made continuity of previous beliefs regarding the political role of religion rather difficult, for example with the Greeks requiring the Egyptians to humanise their animal Gods in the form of Serapis, an important precursor to Jesus Christ. Starting off with the Blessed Virgin Mary calling for the bringing down of the mighty in her famous hymn the Magnificat at Luke 1:51-2, Christianity imagined an inversion of the social order, following the Psalmist vision that the ‘stone the builder refused is become head of the corner’.
This early Christian sundering of the traditional supportive role of the loyal established cult did not last long except in a thoroughly neutered form. As Christianity grew, it found that accepting the power of the king was essential to enable it to operate without persecution. Hence Christendom established what David Strauss in his 1835 radical book The Life of Jesus Critically Examined called the union of throne and altar as its core principle, with conventional dominant conservative ideas such as ‘God is in heaven and all is right with the world’.
Despite my interest in these radical analyses of the Bible, I personally regard political stability as a key ethical value, so I am presenting these critiques as a way to understand how the original authors such as Paul actually thought. One interesting source on this union of throne and altar question is from the Gifford Lecture at Aberdeen in 1970 – [url=
http://www.giffordlectures.org/books/cr ... t-divinity]Critique of Heaven[/url] by Arend.
This ‘mystery’ quote is 1 Cor 2:7:Flann 5 wrote: 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.
It is absolutely untrue that this mystery “is plainly stated to be the gospel.” The Gospels had not been written when Paul penned his letters, so to anachronistically assume Paul is talking about a historical Jesus of Nazareth, a title he never uses, requires the invalid church convention of reading the Epistles through the prism of the Gospels.“we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.”
The predestination concept in Paul’s theory of divine mystery actually accords perfectly with the ancient Gnostic interest in precession of the equinox, which provides the ‘as above’ model’ of the slow motion of the sun that was imagined as being reflected in the ‘so below’ story of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, which in Paul’s letters is described as a pure spiritual allegory rather than a historical event. The historizing through the Nazareth Gospel story only came later, as people sought to explain this complex Gnostic mystery in a form that could catch the popular imagination.
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. [/quote]Yes. The problem was that the observation of the sky was fundamental to ancient religion, but Bible politics required that the public religion of Judaism interpret the sky as made by a single God outside the universe. So when the ancient seers saw the universe as providing the structure of time, this observation had to be carefully encoded and concealed. That is why the seven days of creation came to be understood as allegory for the 7000 years of history, in a way that makes perfect scientific sense from the ancient perspective on the slow movement of the stars caused by precession. This movement was definitely known and measured by the Greeks two centuries before Paul, and was probably well known in Babylon well before Genesis was put together.Flann 5 wrote:
As I mentioned earlier, the early Church Father Clement of Alexandria discussed how the Gnostics interpreted Christ and the twelve apostles as allegory for the sun and the twelve months of the zodiac. The Jewish focus on the zodiac was central, using it as the basis of the breast plate of the high priest in the holy of holies.Flann 5 wrote: 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?
My mention of the sorceror’s apprentices was not a reference to the orthodox, but rather to the Gnostics themselves. The point is that the original Gnostics had both a secret esoteric cosmic teaching and a public exoteric political teaching about Jesus Christ. They imagined they could control the public teaching to serve their secret doctrine which was reserved for initiates, rather like Scientologists snaring naïve newcomers.Flann 5 wrote: You just assert that the true meaning was suppressed and forgotten by the sorcerers apprentices but now the astro-theologists today have deciphered this.
But as in Disney’s Fantasia, the mop (ie the public story) took on a life of its own, and the apprentices (ie the Gnostics) could no longer control it. Against this allegory the return of the sorcerer to undo the spell equates to the second coming of Jesus Christ to explain the errors of the church.