10-29-2021, 07:58 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-29-2021, 08:51 AM by RiverNotch.)
Stuff that stuck out off the top of my head:
1) Actually, the Israelites had ritual bathing long before even King David -- one example is in Leviticus 15.16. "And if the flow of seed go out from a man, then he shall bathe all his flesh in water, and be unclean until the even." For a lot of these things, it's a good start to look at Jewish tradition, which tends to be very Biblical: look up "mikveh".
2) Christians still do anointing. It was anointing, after all, that Mary of Bethany did to Jesus in the house of Simon the Leper (see Matthew 26).
3) Biblically, before 30, Jesus was born in the manger, presented at the Temple, then he taught at the Temple as a kid. There are a lot of traditions about Jesus's childhood which are about as old as the Bible, or at least which existed at around the time the New Testament canon was formalized in a universally accepted way by Saint Athanasius, about three to four hundred years after Christ's birth.
4) He taught the apostles how to be Jews, though Jews in a way that even by his own account invalidated much of Jewish tradition. I think even the most virulently anti-semitic Orthodox scholar would admit this.
5) Apostolic comes from "apostolos", which means one who is sent. At least, that's what it meant in Koine, the dialect of Greek during and for some time after Jesus's ministry on earth. The Greek language is a continuum from Ancient to Koine to Medieval to Modern, and the later the Greek, the more intelligible it is to the average speaker, though because of the Greek church's insistence in continuing to use Koine in its epistolary, the Bible is still generally understood there in a colloquial sense.
6) Constantine did not abolish the Sabbath. Jesus allowed for an observance of the Sabbath less protective than that of the Rabbinical Jews (perhaps closer to the observance of the Karaite Jews, who still exist?). St. Ignatius of Antioch, a contemporary of the twelve, allowed for its non-observance. Christians meeting for worship during the first day of the week, called the "day of the Sun" since the Babylonians hundreds of years before, was apparently mentioned in Acts (that, I'm going strictly off wikipedia for), but at any rate the traditional explanation for Constantine making Sunday a Christian holiday is because Christ rose again on a Sunday, the eighth day, the Lord's day. Consideration for pagans was not implied by the day being called the "day of the Sun", but I'll grant that it could have influenced Constantine's decision. More important to this is the anxiety already present during St. Paul's time, about Christians Jews allowing Gentiles into the fold, and later about Christians separating themselves from the Jews.
Related to this is what I consider to be the shameful attribution to "pagan tradition" of things the Christians actually stole from the Jews, a trend which as far as I can tell became prevalent from the European Renaissance onwards, when Western writers were anxious to associate themselves with a Greco-Roman heritage their ancestors had rejected, and were growing especially spiteful of their Jewish contemporaries. Christmas, for instance, is not related to Saturnalia. Epiphany, called by the Eastern Church Theophany, was once the feast that celebrated the Birth of Christ, his recognition by the Magi, and his baptism all at once. Later it Christmas and Epiphany were separated, or as I like to think of it (and perhaps some scholars, ancient and modern, do indeed see it; this detail is mostly due to my intuition) they tried to outdo the Jews by making their holy winter days 12+1 rather than eight. Because Theophany was explicitly a take on the Jewish Festival of Lights, ie Hanukkah, whose story, while extrabiblical to both Jews and most Protestants, is still older than Jesus by around a hundred years. Just as Easter, known to the Eastern Church as Pascha, is the Christian Pesach (Passover), or Pentecost....well, the Jews literally have Pentecost, or the Festival of Weeks.
7) Pontifex Maximus is not a title associated with the sun.
More notes forthcoming. Should I do citations?
8) Constantine's time was complicated. Christianity wasn't organized, and from what I remember, the date for Passover, Christian *or* Jewish, wasn't as clear-cut as we'd like to think it was. However advanced the Romans were, they didn't have, say, mechanical clocks or a proper theory of celestial mechanics to make these things easy. But on Christian organization: the Nicene Council was more a deliberation on which dominant strain of Christianity the Empire was to follow, either the Nicene one that survives in most Christian denominations today, or the virtually extinct Arian one. There was certainly some violence in its implementation, but, not to excuse Christians, that's pretty much par for the course of any widespread sociopolitical movement.
An aside: St. Nicholas of Myra, what many consider Santa Claus, was a member of that council. Supposedly he punched one of the Arians. Hey, who said "I came not with peace, but with a sword" applies only to Jewish tradition? xD
9) By Jewish and Ecclesiastical reckoning, Jesus died on Friday and rose again after three days -- counting days was inclusive then, so he rose again on Sunday. By modern reckoning, Jesus died on Thursday night and rose again Saturday night or Sunday morning (I don't remember if the exact time of day is specified).
10) I like your point about Christmas, because that's sort of what I think much of Protestantism -- yes, not just the cults -- boils down to. "Personal choice". Whatever isn't specified in the Bible can be disposed of. Which I honestly think is kinda stupid, because, at the most, idk, literal level, most people are not expected to learn Greek and Hebrew. Rabbinical Jews are very Biblical -- every thing they do is tied to a citation of the Torah -- but, in tacit acknowledgement of this dilemma, most people are educated in a specific way of reading the Bible, one which is informed in the right historical context, or at least the sort of historical context whose survival determined its rightness. It's the same exact thing with the Eastern Orthodox, the Oriental Orthodox, and the Catholic Church. It becomes a little shakier with High Church Protestants, like the Anglicans or the Lutherans, who were so bent on correcting the excesses of their originals they started to ignore this essential basis on tradition, and utter pandemonium strikes thereafter.
Religion, by definition, is based on tradition. I have grown skeptical of any movement that claims to be a true religion by dispensing wholesale of the traditions of a preexisting one. A theological, and emotional, flashpoint for me here is the Eucharist: most post-traditional sects of Christianity claim that it is not the real blood and body of Christ we consume during said rite. And it is kind of ridiculous, that we consider it the real blood and body of Christ, even when it tastes nothing of flesh. But the Greek term "symbolos" was a far more loaded term in Koine than it is in English, to the point that most Christians, up until the 15th century, were insistent about this realness. And, perhaps more importantly, Christians died because of this insistence. If it were really just "symbolic", then it would not have been so prevalent an excuse for the Romans, that we were cannibals.
Of course, this is complicated by what Jesus actually did, which was to dispense of Jewish tradition. Again, "I come not with peace". But those very words were written down years after Christ's death -- about a hundred, according to secular scholarship -- and the prevalent interpretation is that when he spoke of tradition, he spoke of Jewish *oral* tradition, and not of the written down traditions that constitute Scripture. And that interpretation is itself passed down through tradition. Oy vey.
Maybe all religions are just cults. Maybe the term religion refers to cults that have lived past a certain age. Or maybe it's useless to refer to religions, as opposed to, say, religious traditions, and just determine whether one thing or another is the *true* religion if that is the religion you believe was actually revealed, instead of merely developed out of history. Maybe the true religion is something that is revealed to *you*.
Which just circles back to that whole post-traditional dilemma. Another way I look at it is that God must have revealed himself to as many people as he could, not just to the few, and so many people couldn't have been wrong, so many people couldn't have been misled. So then it's a matter of cold statistics?
Me, I try to reconcile that with the examination of logical consistency that is the look at tradition, plus my personal history of when I remember to have received some sort of revelation from God, and I have my choice. Which probably satisfies only the people who subscribe to the same choice (and, even then, not all of them), as well as me. And, hopefully, God.
Or maybe one can determine the correctness of a tradition by its beauty. And, let's be real, Andrei Rublev's icon of the Holy Trinity outstrips any other visual representation of God in that department. xD
(written hastily while groggy and fresh out of sin. pardon any misses xD)
1) Actually, the Israelites had ritual bathing long before even King David -- one example is in Leviticus 15.16. "And if the flow of seed go out from a man, then he shall bathe all his flesh in water, and be unclean until the even." For a lot of these things, it's a good start to look at Jewish tradition, which tends to be very Biblical: look up "mikveh".
2) Christians still do anointing. It was anointing, after all, that Mary of Bethany did to Jesus in the house of Simon the Leper (see Matthew 26).
3) Biblically, before 30, Jesus was born in the manger, presented at the Temple, then he taught at the Temple as a kid. There are a lot of traditions about Jesus's childhood which are about as old as the Bible, or at least which existed at around the time the New Testament canon was formalized in a universally accepted way by Saint Athanasius, about three to four hundred years after Christ's birth.
4) He taught the apostles how to be Jews, though Jews in a way that even by his own account invalidated much of Jewish tradition. I think even the most virulently anti-semitic Orthodox scholar would admit this.
5) Apostolic comes from "apostolos", which means one who is sent. At least, that's what it meant in Koine, the dialect of Greek during and for some time after Jesus's ministry on earth. The Greek language is a continuum from Ancient to Koine to Medieval to Modern, and the later the Greek, the more intelligible it is to the average speaker, though because of the Greek church's insistence in continuing to use Koine in its epistolary, the Bible is still generally understood there in a colloquial sense.
6) Constantine did not abolish the Sabbath. Jesus allowed for an observance of the Sabbath less protective than that of the Rabbinical Jews (perhaps closer to the observance of the Karaite Jews, who still exist?). St. Ignatius of Antioch, a contemporary of the twelve, allowed for its non-observance. Christians meeting for worship during the first day of the week, called the "day of the Sun" since the Babylonians hundreds of years before, was apparently mentioned in Acts (that, I'm going strictly off wikipedia for), but at any rate the traditional explanation for Constantine making Sunday a Christian holiday is because Christ rose again on a Sunday, the eighth day, the Lord's day. Consideration for pagans was not implied by the day being called the "day of the Sun", but I'll grant that it could have influenced Constantine's decision. More important to this is the anxiety already present during St. Paul's time, about Christians Jews allowing Gentiles into the fold, and later about Christians separating themselves from the Jews.
Related to this is what I consider to be the shameful attribution to "pagan tradition" of things the Christians actually stole from the Jews, a trend which as far as I can tell became prevalent from the European Renaissance onwards, when Western writers were anxious to associate themselves with a Greco-Roman heritage their ancestors had rejected, and were growing especially spiteful of their Jewish contemporaries. Christmas, for instance, is not related to Saturnalia. Epiphany, called by the Eastern Church Theophany, was once the feast that celebrated the Birth of Christ, his recognition by the Magi, and his baptism all at once. Later it Christmas and Epiphany were separated, or as I like to think of it (and perhaps some scholars, ancient and modern, do indeed see it; this detail is mostly due to my intuition) they tried to outdo the Jews by making their holy winter days 12+1 rather than eight. Because Theophany was explicitly a take on the Jewish Festival of Lights, ie Hanukkah, whose story, while extrabiblical to both Jews and most Protestants, is still older than Jesus by around a hundred years. Just as Easter, known to the Eastern Church as Pascha, is the Christian Pesach (Passover), or Pentecost....well, the Jews literally have Pentecost, or the Festival of Weeks.
7) Pontifex Maximus is not a title associated with the sun.
More notes forthcoming. Should I do citations?
8) Constantine's time was complicated. Christianity wasn't organized, and from what I remember, the date for Passover, Christian *or* Jewish, wasn't as clear-cut as we'd like to think it was. However advanced the Romans were, they didn't have, say, mechanical clocks or a proper theory of celestial mechanics to make these things easy. But on Christian organization: the Nicene Council was more a deliberation on which dominant strain of Christianity the Empire was to follow, either the Nicene one that survives in most Christian denominations today, or the virtually extinct Arian one. There was certainly some violence in its implementation, but, not to excuse Christians, that's pretty much par for the course of any widespread sociopolitical movement.
An aside: St. Nicholas of Myra, what many consider Santa Claus, was a member of that council. Supposedly he punched one of the Arians. Hey, who said "I came not with peace, but with a sword" applies only to Jewish tradition? xD
9) By Jewish and Ecclesiastical reckoning, Jesus died on Friday and rose again after three days -- counting days was inclusive then, so he rose again on Sunday. By modern reckoning, Jesus died on Thursday night and rose again Saturday night or Sunday morning (I don't remember if the exact time of day is specified).
10) I like your point about Christmas, because that's sort of what I think much of Protestantism -- yes, not just the cults -- boils down to. "Personal choice". Whatever isn't specified in the Bible can be disposed of. Which I honestly think is kinda stupid, because, at the most, idk, literal level, most people are not expected to learn Greek and Hebrew. Rabbinical Jews are very Biblical -- every thing they do is tied to a citation of the Torah -- but, in tacit acknowledgement of this dilemma, most people are educated in a specific way of reading the Bible, one which is informed in the right historical context, or at least the sort of historical context whose survival determined its rightness. It's the same exact thing with the Eastern Orthodox, the Oriental Orthodox, and the Catholic Church. It becomes a little shakier with High Church Protestants, like the Anglicans or the Lutherans, who were so bent on correcting the excesses of their originals they started to ignore this essential basis on tradition, and utter pandemonium strikes thereafter.
Religion, by definition, is based on tradition. I have grown skeptical of any movement that claims to be a true religion by dispensing wholesale of the traditions of a preexisting one. A theological, and emotional, flashpoint for me here is the Eucharist: most post-traditional sects of Christianity claim that it is not the real blood and body of Christ we consume during said rite. And it is kind of ridiculous, that we consider it the real blood and body of Christ, even when it tastes nothing of flesh. But the Greek term "symbolos" was a far more loaded term in Koine than it is in English, to the point that most Christians, up until the 15th century, were insistent about this realness. And, perhaps more importantly, Christians died because of this insistence. If it were really just "symbolic", then it would not have been so prevalent an excuse for the Romans, that we were cannibals.
Of course, this is complicated by what Jesus actually did, which was to dispense of Jewish tradition. Again, "I come not with peace". But those very words were written down years after Christ's death -- about a hundred, according to secular scholarship -- and the prevalent interpretation is that when he spoke of tradition, he spoke of Jewish *oral* tradition, and not of the written down traditions that constitute Scripture. And that interpretation is itself passed down through tradition. Oy vey.
Maybe all religions are just cults. Maybe the term religion refers to cults that have lived past a certain age. Or maybe it's useless to refer to religions, as opposed to, say, religious traditions, and just determine whether one thing or another is the *true* religion if that is the religion you believe was actually revealed, instead of merely developed out of history. Maybe the true religion is something that is revealed to *you*.
Which just circles back to that whole post-traditional dilemma. Another way I look at it is that God must have revealed himself to as many people as he could, not just to the few, and so many people couldn't have been wrong, so many people couldn't have been misled. So then it's a matter of cold statistics?
Me, I try to reconcile that with the examination of logical consistency that is the look at tradition, plus my personal history of when I remember to have received some sort of revelation from God, and I have my choice. Which probably satisfies only the people who subscribe to the same choice (and, even then, not all of them), as well as me. And, hopefully, God.
Or maybe one can determine the correctness of a tradition by its beauty. And, let's be real, Andrei Rublev's icon of the Holy Trinity outstrips any other visual representation of God in that department. xD
(written hastily while groggy and fresh out of sin. pardon any misses xD)