Here is a good example of what history of christianity (or exegesis, or theology) is not or should not be: assertions without foundations, crazy reasoning (especially when it invokes evidence from mental hospitals), use of unexamined textual sources, moronic comparisons (the tomb empty of Jesus = a cave, vs Muhammad’s cave), there is no end to it. The mode of speech reminded me of business advertisement: loud, repetitious, and obnoxious.
Category Archives: Early_Christianity
Early texts, iconography, social aspects, ideology
Another trinity
We can dream of what the notion of the trinity could have become if Syriac and Aramaic had overrun the Mediterranean, rather than Greek and Latin. A clue is given by the beginning of Ode of Solomon 19, a text usually dated to the 2d c. CE:
1. A cup of milk was offered to me,
And I drank it in the sweetness of the Lord’s kindness.
2. The Son is the cup,
And the Father is He who was milked;
And the Holy Spirit is She who milked Him;
3. Because His breasts were full,
And it was desirable that His milk should be ineffectually released.
4. The Holy Spirit opened Her bosom,
and mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father.
[…]
(translation by J. Charlesworth, The Odes of Solomon, Scholars Press, 1977, p. 82). I would have translated 3: “and there was no doubt that his milk would be poured out in sufficiency”. Still a Father doing everything in life and sustaining life, and a Son transmitting power, but at least a female Spirit. Alas, the constraints of translation were such that the LXX writers had chosen way before this text to have neuter Greek πνευμα for feminine Hebrew רוח: not ψυχή, the nightly-visited goddess. From neuter pneuma to masculine spiritus, what other option was there?
Of words (Christianity)
Can one say with Peter Brown that “the new way of thinking that emerged in Christian circles in the course of the second century shifted the center of gravity of thought on the nature of human frailty from death to sexuality” (Body and society, p. 86)? The comment is quoted approvingly by B. Williams in Shame and necessity, p. 12, where I find the remark in the context of a discussion of the course taken by history (intellectual history?), and the “formative influence of Christianity” in it. The use of these words has become strange to me, even as shortcuts, as I can’t conceive of history as a category of thought, or of christianity for that matter. Would these “phenomena” have a force all their own, a magic, and carry influence or force? Something else, behind or “below” these words, does, and I fear even philosophers here are trading in adulterated merchandise.