Adhoc Theology Flashcards
Easter origin
Old High German: *Ôstara) is a West Germanic spring goddess.[4][5] By way of the Germanic month bearing her name (Northumbrian: Ēosturmōnaþ; West Saxon: Ēastermōnaþ; Old High German: Ôstarmânoth), she is the namesake of the festival of Easter in some languages.
Ēostre is attested solely by Bede in his 8th-century work The Reckoning of Time, where Bede states that during Ēosturmōnaþ (the equivalent of April), pagan Anglo-Saxons had held feasts in Ēostre’s honour, but that this tradition had died out by his time, replaced by the Christian Paschal month, a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus.
By way of linguistic reconstruction, the matter of a goddess called *Austrō(n) in the Proto-Germanic language has been examined in detail since the foundation of Germanic philology in the 19th century by scholar Jacob Grimm and others. As the Germanic languages descend from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), historical linguists have traced the name to a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn *H₂ewsṓs, from which descends the Common Germanic divinity at the origin of Ēostre and Ôstara. Additionally, scholars have linked the goddess’s name to a variety of Germanic personal names, a series of location names (toponyms) in England, and, discovered in 1958, over 150 inscriptions from the 2nd century CE referring to the matronae Austriahenae.
Theories connecting Ēostre with records of Germanic Easter customs, including hares and eggs, have been proposed. Particularly prior to the discovery of the matronae Austriahenae and further developments in Indo-European studies, debate has occurred among some scholars about whether or not the goddess was an invention of Bede. Ēostre and Ostara are sometimes referenced in modern popular culture and are venerated in some forms of Germanic neopaganism.
If you had a spaceship that traveled at the speed of light, it would take you over 150 Billion years to travel the observable universe from one side to the other.
Proves universe didn’t start 6,000 years ago like Bible says.
43% of Americans believe in ghosts.
Ref. Guy Harrison book under my brain studies.
2021 edit
Jesus, is a victim of identity thief!
If he existed at all, he was a Jewish Rabbi. If there is any truth about him, he was an apocalyptic missionary along with his cousin, John the Baptist.
In all of recorded history of the first two centuries, there is absolutely no mention of him, his disciples or his friends and family.
To learn the truth read the books “Jesus misquoted” and “ Jesus interrupted” by Bart D. Erhman.
If asked about God, reply “Don’t you understand that God is a cultural inheritance?”
If you never heard of God or any theology in your life, people would never convince you in today’s world of science and intelligence.
You only believe in God because you were tattooed from the cradle with religious beliefs. Plus you have been surrounded your whole life by other people that are victims of confirmation bias just like you.
You have lived your entire life in a civilization that strongly supports belief in the Christian religion. Had you been born in India, your God would be Buddha. If you were born in the Middle East your God would be Allah. If you were born in Egypt your God would be a genie, or Jinn. Gods are geographical. No matter where you were raised, your civilization’s culture is what determines which Gods you believe in. Everyone on Earth is the same way. The God you believe in is simply your cultural inheritance!
America in 2021, most people do not go to church. Ref. Gallup polling
A snake was the symbol for Zeus. REM snake for Hermès. Snake in hospitals, emergency rooms, ambulances, healthcare centers and Rex medicines.
REM Moses used a snake symbol for healing. Make a report on this topic.
‘Bible’ Definition
The English word “Bible” comes from bíblia in Latin and bíblos in Greek. The term means book, or books, and may have originated from the ancient Egyptian port of Byblos (in modern-day Lebanon), where papyrus used for making books and scrolls was exported to Greece.
I follow facts wherever they lead me. This is not popular with most people. Most people believe what their itching ears want to hear. They don’t do background checks and historical research.
The BIG problem is that theology has no FACTS at all. What theology has is a crowd pleasing hearsay!—BN 2021
Religion is like a Ponsi scheme. Give your money and time going “All In” for it to end up dying because it was all a fairy tale. –BN
Religion is a primitive superstition. Ancestors knew nothing about physical science and they thought that Gods controlled everything. Example: Poseidon controlled the seas and could sink or save ships.
Belief in the Metaphysical world is a mental disorder. Example Metempsychosis is the word psychologists use to describe a believer that thinks they are going to die in this body and just step right into a new glorified body. The fact is they aren’t going to step into anything but nonexistence! Proof? Everything a person is conscious of goes through their Thalamus. Since your Thalamus dies when your body dies, you cease to exist! Without a Thalamus alive and well, you are not aware of anything because you are dead as a doornail!
For centuries, the governments ruled by the Christian church put innocent people in jail and countless people were tortured and executed using SPECTRAL EVIDENCE. Example: a person just has a feeling that person is guilty.
Another horrible justice system was TRIAL BY ORDEAL. They were forced to pick up red hot metal objects. Then in three days, the priest would examine their hand. If it looked like it was healing well, the person was innocent. If it looked like the hand was ruined and would not heal fast enough, then the person was guilty. He was tortured until he confessed. It didn’t matter if he was innocent or not. The priest decided after exanimating the burnt hand.
Quote: “People have a hard time facing harsh realities.” Ref. Better call Saul
Why are other religions polytheistic while Christian religion is Monotheistic? Using syncretism captured nations were forced to worship their gods merged with the conquering army’s god. This happened for thousands of years! This is why all the gods were credited for doing the same miracles, saying the same witty sayings from popular gods, most gods and saviors born on Christmas, most saviors having the virgin birth. Hercules was the first savior of the world.
But Christians and Jewish civilizations could only remain monotheistic one God. So instead of Christians having dozens of Gods, the Romans merged all the good miracles and quotations of Roman Gods into the person of Jesus! This was force upon the Jews, but they still rejected Jesus.
Check it out. Everything Jesus is credited for was said and done before previously by another popular imaginary God.
The Great Code – Northrop Fyre
MN: Stories are frequently used as concrete illustrations of abstract arguments, IE, words as allegories.
We can also have myths within myths, like the parables of Jesus.
Northrop Frye–28 Honorary degrees and top literary critic of the 20th century.
The gospels cannot be taken as literal truth but only as romatic symbolism.
MN: The Bible is the largest book of plagiarisms I have ever seen. Syncretisms!
MN: The Bible is not a book. It is a library of poetry mostly telling stories about people that didn’t even exist. It plagerized popular religious stories from other ancient religions, but they changed the names and location to invent Christianity!
Bible or Biblio means BOOKS! The Bible is a collection of themed books, commonly called “Books of the Bible”
There are millions of Gods today and throughout history. The Bitle itself says so: “Thou shall not have any Gods before me!”
The Bible also believes in Witches and Wizards!
Prayer doesn’t work. Pope Francis asked the whole world to pray for the dying Pope Benedict XVI on 1/1/23. The next day Pope Benedict XVI dies!
That’s not what Jesus promises! Jesus says multiple times that He will toss mountains in the sea for believers!
It never happens. Prayer does not work. Prayer is nothing more than a giant placebo pill to pacify believers that God has got this handled. Baloney! Prayer does not make miracles happen. God does not heal amputees! God does not bring back the dead. Jesus said Ask anything in my name and I will do it for you.
“Marketing the Messiah (Prime Video)
“Paul wrote his letters 20-30 years before the gospels appeared.
Paul doesn’t mention anything about all the miracles that Jesus has been credited. Paul claims the ghost of Jesus talked with him (His Vision) on the road to Damascus! Paul never met Jesus.
Many of Paul’s Epistles are pseudepigrapha. This Jesus ghost tells Paul to forget all the laws and teachings of the Old Testament. No more circumcision, no more animal sacrifices. Basically Paul says to forget all the Jewish laws and traditions!
People are shocked to discover that Mark was written before Matthew. They also are shocked that Paul’s writings (Epistles) were written before the Gospels and that Paul never met Jesus!
Mark 4:11 - Where Jesus explains why he teaches in parables so the others won’t understand, thus they will not be forgiven for their sins! Thus they cannot be saved!
Barabbas first name is also Jesus.
Both Jesus & Barabbas are “Saviors” . Barabbas saved Jews by trying to overthrow the Romans in rebellion of 66CE. Jesus is a pacifist savior of people. So which savior gets released? (This is typology)
Leviticus 16:5, MN: copy and paste of two goats: One set free, the other is sacrificed!
This is the whole ritual of Yom Kippur. A whole atonement story. Yom Kippur in English is “Day of atonement ceremony.”
Leviticus 16:8 “and Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats: one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for Azazel.”
So one goat is sacrificed while the other goat is set free! (MN: The origin of SCAPEGOAT)
This whole story is an Allegory, representing in history that humans were sacrificed. The Jewish changed sacrifice to identical goats. Then when crowd decides which savior to save, they choose Barabbas!
Mark 14:32-42 Jesus goes to garden of Gethsemane and prays not to be sacrificed? But denied!
Confusing since Jesus is a third of the trinity, Jesus is begging himself not to kill himself.
Marks gospel, Some of these standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power!
The end of the world as we know it. Jesus was talking about Armageddon, which never comes. Jesus and John the Baptist were apocalyptic missionaries.
Jesus was not interested in saving gentiles. Matt. 15:24-26. Jesus commands disciples to not go to the gentiles, just stick to the Jews! Matt. 10:5-6,
“The gospels, especially John is a literary creation.” John is only gospel raising Lazarus from dead. In synoptic gospels, Jesus is always saying, don’t tell anyone. Keep this a big secret. But in John, he tells everyone that he is God.
John’s gospel contains no parables, no last supper, no sermon on the mount. The other gospels were destroyed by Imperial decree about 400CE.
In 1945, the discovery of 12 CODICES (Books) found in a jar in a cave in Egypt.
Gnostics-Someone claiming to have knowledge.
The Christian religion went from obscure to inescapable! It became Roman law to be a Christian and this lasted until 560CE. Date when Rome falls.
(MN: Religion is “phycological conditioning”.
Religious conservatives, like many people, cannot stand the idea that what they have believed their whole life just may be wrong, so they go to great lengths to convince themselves of their baseless doctrines. The difference between me and them is that when I realized the evidence was against me, I changed my beliefs. I went where the evidence led whether I liked it or not, yet they stick to their dogma at all cost. They push skeptics like me aside as people who are “just bitter,” or who have an axe to grind, or are living in sin and blinded by the Devil.” — All That’s Wrong with the Bible: Contradictions, Absurdities, and More by Jonah David Conner https://a.co/2a6hWP5
Bn
Why would such a god not have spoken clearly to all from the beginning, in all languages? Why would we need to translate or copy anything at all? Imagine how convincing it would have been if the American Indians and Chinese had all received the same message of Jesus, and when missionaries showed up, they had responded “well, we already knew all of that!” It appears, then, that many believers genuinely do not care about evidence. Religion gives them meaning and fulfillment and whether or not science and history validate the data is irrelevant.
Bn
Yahweh wants women to be silent in church and call their husbands “Lord.” I Cor.14:34,35; I Pt.3:6.
If you really want to do exactly what the Bible says to do, then women, call your husband LORD. 1Peter, 1:6
Scholars typically date the New Testament Gospels to the latter part of the first century. Most everyone would agree that Jesus died sometime around 30 CE. Mark was the first Gospel to be written, probably around 65–70 CE; Matthew and Luke were written about fifteen to twenty years after that, say, 80–85 CE; and John was written last, around 90–95 CE. What is significant here is the time gap involved. The very first surviving account of Jesus’s life was written thirty-five to forty years after his death. Our latest canonical Gospel was written sixty to sixty-five years after his death. That’s obviously a lot of time. If the authors were not eyewitnesses and were not from Palestine and did not even speak the same language as Jesus, where did they get their information? Here again, there is not a lot of disagreement among critical scholars. After Jesus died, his followers came to believe he was raised from the dead, and they saw it as their mission to convert people to the belief that the death and resurrection of Jesus were the death and resurrection of God’s messiah and that by believing in his death and resurrection a person could have eternal life. The early Christian “witnesses” to Jesus had to persuade people that Jesus really was the messiah from God, and to do that they had to tell stories about him. So they did. They told stories about what happened at the end of his life—the crucifixion, the empty tomb, his appearances to his followers alive afterward. They also told stories of his life before those final events—what he taught, the miracles he performed, the controversies he had with Jewish leaders, his arrest and trial, and so on. These stories circulated. Anyone who converted to become a follower of Jesus could and did tell the stories. A convert would tell his wife; if she converted, she would tell her neighbor; if she converted, she would tell her husband; if he converted, he would tell his business partner; if he converted, he would take a business trip to another city and tell his business associate; if he converted, he would tell his wife; if she converted, she would tell her neighbor . . . and on and on. Telling stories was the only way to communicate in the days before mass communication.
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The stories were being told by word of mouth, year after year, decade after decade, among lots of people in different parts of the world, in different languages, and there was no way to control what one person said to the next about Jesus’s words and deeds. Everyone knows what happens to stories that circulate this way. Details get changed, episodes get invented, events get exaggerated, impressive accounts get made even more impressive, and so on. Eventually, an author heard the stories in his church—say it was “Mark” in the city of Rome. And he wrote his account. And ten or fifteen years later another author in another city read Mark’s account and decided to write his own, based partially on Mark but partially on the stories he had heard in his own community. And the Gospels started coming into existence. Those are the Gospels we now have. Scholars for three hundred years and more have studied them in minute detail, and one of the assured results of this intensive investigation is the certainty that the Gospels have numerous discrepancies, contradictions, and historical problems.2 Why would that be? It would be better to ask, “How could that not be?” Of course, the Gospels contain nonhistorical information and stories that have been modified and exaggerated and embellished. These books do not contain the words of someone who was sitting at Jesus’s feet taking notes. They are nothing like that. They are books that are intending to tell the “good news” of Jesus (the word gospel means “good news”). That is, their authors had a vested interest both in what they were telling and in how they were telling it. They wanted to preach Jesus. They were not trying to give biographical information that would pass muster among critical historians living two thousand years later who have developed significantly different standards of writing history, or historiography. They were writing for their own day and were trying to convince people about the truth—as they saw it—about Jesus. They were basing their stories on what they had heard and read. What they had read was based on what the authors of these other writings had heard. It all goes back to oral tradition.
Blank Here I can give only a brief summary of the methods that New Testament scholars have devised for dealing with sources of this kind. I should stress that the Gospels are in fact virtually our only available sources.4 We do not have any accounts of Jesus from Greek or Roman (pagan) sources of the first century, no mention even of his name until more than eighty years after his death. Among non-Christian Jewish sources we have only two brief comments by the Jewish historian Josephus. We do have other Gospels from outside the New Testament, but these were all written later than the New Testament Gospels and as a rule are highly legendary in character. There are a couple of Gospels that may provide us with some additional information—such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter, both discovered in modern times—but at the end of the day they actually do not give us much. And so we more or less have our four Gospels. Nearly everyone agrees that even though these canonical Gospels are highly problematic as sources for the historical Jesus, they nonetheless do contain some historically accurate recollections of what he said, did, and experienced amid all the embellishments and changes. The question is how to ferret out the historically accurate information from the later alterations and inventions.
The Divine Pyramid INSTEAD OF A CONTINUUM, possibly it is helpful to understand the ancient conception of the divine realm as a kind of pyramid of power, grandeur, and deity.18 Some ancient people—for example, some of those more philosophically inclined—thought that at the very pinnacle of the divine realm was one ultimate deity, a god who was over all things, who was infinitely, or virtually infinitely, powerful and who was sometimes thought to be the source of all things. This god—whether Zeus, or Jupiter, or an unknown god—stood at the apex of what we might imagine as the divine pyramid. Below this god, on the next lower tier, were the great gods known from tales and traditions that had been passed down from antiquity, for example, the twelve gods on Mount Olympus described in the ancient myths and in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, gods such as Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Athena, Mercury, and so on. These gods were fantastically powerful, far beyond what we can imagine. The myths about them were entertaining stories, but many people thought these myths were just that, stories—not historical narratives of things that actually happened. Philosophers tried to “demythologize” the myths, that is, to strip them of their obvious literary features to see how, apart from a literal reading, they told deeper truths about the world and reality. At any rate, these gods were worshiped as the most powerful beings in the universe. Many of them were adopted by cities and towns as their patron gods; some were acknowledged and worshiped by the state as a whole, which had clear and compelling reasons to want the mighty gods to look favorably upon it in times of both war and peace.
But they were not the only divine beings. On a lower tier of the pyramid were many, many other gods. Every city and town had its local gods, who protected, defended, and aided the place. There were gods of every imaginable function: gods of war, love, weather, health, childbirth—you name it. There were gods for every locale: gods of forests, meadows, mountains, and rivers. The world was populated with gods. This is why it made no sense to ancient people—apart from Jews—to worship only one God. Why would you worship one god? There were lots of gods, and all of them deserved to be worshiped. If you decided to start worshiping a new god—for example, because you moved to a new village and wanted to pay respect to its local divinity—that did not require you to stop worshiping any of the other gods. If you decided to perform a sacrifice to Apollo, that didn’t stop you from also offering a sacrifice to Athena, or Zeus, or Hera. This was a world of lots of gods and lots of what we might call religious tolerance. Below these levels of gods there were still other tiers. There was a group of divine beings known as daimones. Sometimes this word gets translated as “demons,” but that word as we think of it today gives the wrong connotation. Some of these beings could be malevolent, to be sure, but not all of them were; and they were not fallen angels or wicked spirits that could possess people and make them do hurtful things such as fling themselves in harm’s way or twist their heads 360 degrees or projectile vomit (as in the movie The Exorcist). The daimones instead were simply a lower level of divinity, not nearly as powerful as the local gods, let alone the great gods. They were spiritual beings far more powerful than humans. But being closer in power to humans, they had more to do with humans than the more remote great gods and could often help people through their lives, as in the famous daimon that the Greek philosopher Socrates claimed guided his actions. If displeased, they could do harmful things. It was important to keep them happy by paying them their due in reverence and worship. In the divine pyramid a yet lower tier, near or at the bottom, would be inhabited by divine humans. This is where the “pyramid” analogy breaks down because we should not think that these divine humans were more numerous than the other deities above them. In fact, it was relatively rare to run across people who were so mighty, wise, or gorgeous that they must in some sense be divine. But it did happen on occasion. A great general, a king, an emperor, a great philosopher, a fantastic beauty—these could be more than human. Such people could be superhuman. They could be divine. Maybe their father was a god. Maybe they were a god temporarily assuming a human body. Maybe because of their own virtue, power, or physical features they were thought to have been accepted into the divine realm. But they were not like the rest of us lowly humans.
Jesus and the Divine Realm THIS VIEW OF THE divine realm did not change significantly until later Christians changed it. It is hard to put a finger on when exactly it changed, but change it did. By the time of the fourth Christian century—some three hundred years after Jesus lived, when the empire was in the process of converting from paganism to Christianity—many of the great thinkers of the Roman world had come to believe that a huge chasm separated the divine and human realms. God was “up there” and was the Almighty. He alone was God. There were no other gods and so there was no continuum of divinity. There was just us down here, the lowly sinners, and God up there, the supreme sovereign over all that is. Jesus himself eventually came to be thought of as belonging not down here with us, but up there with God. He himself was God, with a capital G. But how could he be God, if God was God, and there were not a number of gods, not even two gods, but only one God? How could Jesus be God and God be God and yet there be only one God? That, in part, is the question that drives this book. But the more pressing and immediate question is about how this perception started in the first place. How did Jesus move from being a human to being God—in any sense?
Jesus became God in that major fourth-century sense. But he had been seen as God before that, by people who did not have this fourth-century understanding of the relationship of the human and divine realms. When we talk about earliest Christianity and we ask the question, “Did Christians think of Jesus as God?,” we need to rephrase the question slightly, so that we ask, “In what sense did Christians think of Jesus as God?” If the divine realm is a continuum rather than an absolute, a graduated pyramid rather than a single point, then it is the sense in which Jesus is God that is the main issue at the outset. It will become clear in the following chapters that Jesus was not originally considered to be God in any sense at all, and that he eventually became divine for his followers in some sense before he came to be thought of as equal with God Almighty in an absolute sense. But the point I stress is that this was, in fact, a development. One of the enduring findings of modern scholarship on the New Testament and early Christianity over the past two centuries is that the followers of Jesus, during his life, understood him to be human through and through, not God. People saw Jesus as a teacher, a rabbi, and even a prophet. Some people thought of him as the (very human) messiah. But he was born like everyone else and he was “like” everyone else. He was raised in Nazareth and was not particularly noteworthy as a youth. As an adult—or possibly even as a child—he became convinced, like many other Jews of his time, that he was living near the end of the age, that God was soon to intervene in history to overthrow the forces of evil and to bring in a good kingdom here on earth. Jesus felt called to proclaim this message of the coming apocalypse, and he spent his entire public ministry doing so. Eventually Jesus irritated the ruling authorities during a trip he made to Jerusalem, and they had him arrested and tried. He was brought before the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, and after a short trial he was convicted on charges of political insurgency: he was claiming to be the Jewish king when only the Roman overlords who were in charge of Palestine and the rest of the Mediterranean could appoint a king. As a political troublemaker he was condemned to a particularly ignominious death, by crucifixion. And as far as the Romans were concerned, that’s where his story ended.
I didn’t have a single thought of putting that development in relationship to what was going on beyond the bounds of the Christian tradition. And then I read an inscription lying outside a temple in Priene. The inscription referred to the God (Caesar) Augustus. And it hit me: the time when Christianity arose, with its exalted claims about Jesus, was the same time when the emperor cult had started to move into full swing, with its exalted claims about the emperor. Christians were calling Jesus God directly on the heels of the Romans calling the emperor God. Could this be a historical accident? How could it be an accident? These were not simply parallel developments. This was a competition. Who was the real god-man? The emperor or Jesus? I realized at that moment that the Christians were not elevating Jesus to a level of divinity in a vacuum. They were doing it under the influence of and in dialogue with the environment in which they lived. As I said, I knew that others had thought this before. But it struck me at that moment like a bolt of lightning. I decided then and there to reconceptualize my book. But an obvious problem also hit me. The first Christians who started speaking about Jesus as divine were not pagans from Priene. They were Jews from Palestine. These Jews, of course, also knew about the emperor cult. In fact, it was practiced in some of the more Greek cities of Palestine during the first century. But the first followers of Jesus were not particularly imbued with Greek culture. They were Jews from rural and village parts of Galilee. It may be the case that later, after the Christian church became more heavily gentile, with pagan converts making up the majority of its members, the heightened emphasis on Jesus as God (rather than the emperor as God) made sense. But what about at the beginning? So I started thinking about divine humans within Judaism. Here was an immediate enigma. Jews, unlike their pagan neighbors, were monotheists. They believed in only one God. How could they say that Jesus was God and still claim there was only one God? If God was God and Jesus was God, doesn’t that make two Gods? I realized that I needed to do some research into the matter to figure it out.
how is it possible to imagine that Jews could have something like a divine pyramid? Within the pagan system it was possible to imagine not only that divine beings temporarily became human, but also that humans in some sense could be divine. But if there is only one God, how could that be possible? In this chapter I argue that it was in fact possible and that Jews also thought there were divine humans. Before going into detail about how this could happen, however, I need to make two general points about Jewish monotheism. The first is that not every ancient Israelite held a monotheistic view—the idea that there is only one God. Evidence for this can be seen already in the verse I quoted from the Torah above, the beginning of the Ten Commandments. Note how the commandment is worded. It does not say, “You shall believe that there is only one God.” It says, “You shall have no other gods before me.” This commandment, as stated, presupposes that there are other gods. But none of them is to be worshiped ahead of, or instead of, the God of Israel. As it came to be interpreted, the commandment also meant that none of these other gods was to be worshiped alongside of or even after the God of Israel. But that does not mean the other gods don’t exist. They simply are not to be worshiped. This is a view that scholars have called henotheism, in distinction from the view I have thus far been calling monotheism. Monotheism is the view that there is, in fact, only one God. Henotheism is the view that there are other gods, but there is only one God who is to be worshiped. The Ten Commandments express a henotheistic view, as does the majority of the Hebrew Bible. The book of Isaiah, with its insistence that “I alone am God, there is no other,” is monotheistic. It represents the minority view in the Hebrew Bible.
