Hegel and Schopenhauer were Pantheists from the Hermetic tradition of Alchemy. No other religion gets infiltrated and manipulated by political charlatans. There’s a reason secular progressives have chosen Christianity to destroy…because it produces stability and progressives HATE stability.
Seriously, just leave Christians alone. If you don’t believe…then don’t believe. But this whole thing where romantic existentialists infiltrate Christianity and try to appropriate it for secular purposes just isn’t working. Its clear what you’re doing. Nobody is fooled anymore. You’ve taken all the churches you’re going to get.
That’s essentially correct. This essay points us precisely towards the misdirection of history; history which appears to start just a few thousand years ago (i.e. recorded history) rather than our actual history which emerged over hundreds of thousands of years. In other words, i accuse the author and those to whom he pays (too much) homage: Leibniz, Hegel, Schopenhauer et al, of historical myopia.
If we in the West are now suffering from revisionism, i maintain it’s precisely because this myopia is no longer of any use to us. The learnedness which the author evinces takes us precisely nowhere. Who cares, for instance, whether Hegel maintained that “history is a rational process”? What does that actually mean, from the perspective that Hegel was able to muster, albeit with immense sophistication? Does that help us, right now, in finding our way through the present?
At least one thing is correct: that we’re all participants. We could do so much better than to concern ourselves with whether Hegel’s view is optimistic or Schopenhauer’s pessimistic. Again, i maintain that neither has relevance now. They’re examples of human characteristics but both are incomplete and reductive. History, if we’re going to discuss it with relevance to ourselves, has no such characteristics.
It is always interesting to see non-Christians fumbling and grasping like the blind with the eternal truths that whisper at them from all around… John ch. 1: Christ is the organizing principle of the universe, which “became flesh” in order that he might suffer injustice and die for us — and through his resurrection, conquer the great burden of human existence, the terrible weight of eternal meaninglessness. This Easter weekend, even Hegel hears the echoes, “He is risen” — “He is risen indeed!”
Actually his death was atonement for sin. Adam, the federal head of humanity, in an act of cosmic treason believed the deceiver and sought to be like God. So according to the covenantal probation, the day he ate that fruit he would die. God could have justly killed him and Eve then and there, but out of sheer mercy interceded and clothed them with animal skins. However death has hung over humanity since then. Christ however was the promised seed of the woman. He came and fulfilled all righteousness under the law in our nature. He therefore succeeded where Adam failed. He also died for our sins. He as the federal head of a new creation humanity died in our place as a substitute sacrifice, but even more he is a substitute in the performance of all righteousness, securing an indecfectable status of righteousness before the judgement seat of God for all who believe.
Christ’s death was not atonement for sin.That is a distortion introduced by Paul, who was obsessed with personal sin. Christ died for two reasons. Firstly to show us that when truth and goodness is being systematically defiled, as it was by the priests of the Temple, we must take a stand and its consequences. He recognised that it was time to stop sheltering in Galilee and stand up to the evil at the centre. And, of course, he died and rose from the dead to demonstrate that ‘death hath no dominion’.
It’s worth remembering that Christian tradition holds that the final resting place for Adam’s bones was Golgotha and that Christ was crucified right over Adam’s grave. The skull that appears at the foot of the cross in many paintings is Adam’s.
Maybe some self reflection is in order so as to avoid transference…
M James
1 month ago
Thank you for this reflection on the meaning of sacrifice. Sacrifice literally means “to make holy”. As Leonard Foley wrote, it is an act of love through total self-offering. History has not ended. It will die and rise again continually until the end of time at God’s will. Each death is a response to a selfish and hypocritical world order. Each rising is to closer union with God through Christ.
That’s interesting – did not know that. Though it’s still worth noting that in the Hebrew that is not the case as the word denotes drawing near. And, of course, the discussion of Jesus as sacrifice has the Hebrew practice primarily in view (as per John, Romans and Hebrews among others).
Charles Stanhope
1 month ago
If Leibniz, Hegel, Schopenhauer & Co had paid a little more attention to Pliny* and Julian** none of this nonsense would have troubled either or us them, and we might have been on the Moon by 1492***.
(*The younger.)
(**The Apostate.)
(*** To use Christian chronology but really 2245 AUC.)
Are you sure? Proper science in the modern sense only arose in the context of Christendom because only Christianity provided the expectation that the world is intelligible. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…” wasn’t quite enough, and neither paganism even at its most refined as Hinduism nor atheism whether pure or supplemented by the Buddha’s insights provides any such assurance, only with “In the beginning was the Logos (reason) and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God…” Somehow even though Taoism was a good start, Chinese science never fully developed. Islam got a good start, but killed off its scientific flourishing because it wasn’t Islamic enough — better the occasionalism of al Ghazali as a defense of the absolute sovereignty of Allah — an an intelligible world governed by rationally discernable laws.
Yes I’m sure.
Christ and his cronies would not have lasted thirty seconds in Plato’s Academy for the simple reason that Christianity is the antithesis of Logos.
If you had read all four Gospels with your full attention, or even one of the synoptic three, you’d have less contempt for Jesus and his teachings. Get out your Vulgate. Put aside some of your vulgarity.
They are a combination of truth and invention or rhetorical appeal to different contemporary populations, namely Jews, Romans, and Gentiles more broadly. I’ve read the Gospel Of Thomas (sayings only, no narrative) and parts of several non-canonical gospels, most of which are extant only in fragments. Have you?
I take no position on any supernatural or otherworldly claims found in any Life of Jesus: I don’t think that’s where the power dwells.
I deliberately left them unmentioned because I don’t think the majority of that work holds a candle to Mark, Matthew, Luke, or even the more abstract and symbolic text of John.
I’m not saying the rest of the New Testament is minor–but it ain’t gospel. The Life and Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth–not his symbolic role as a Messiah–are of primary importance and urgency to me.
Hanne Herrman
1 month ago
Thanks David Dusenbury for a wonderful and compelling essay about Jesus Christ. Hanne Herrman
Arthur King
1 month ago
Jesus’ sacrifice was voluntary. History’s sacrifices rarely are. This is an important distinction.
Not entirely, certnot always true. In many cases the innocents refuse the opportunity to deny their opposition evil and instead, voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way when they might well have saved themselves.
A sacrifice by a human has to be voluntary or it is just a misfortune.
Elizabeth Bowen
1 month ago
“What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.”
“Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.” – Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
I seem to recall Frankl crediting Nietsche with the phrase..
AC Harper
1 month ago
I expect many Christians will be cheered by this article of important ideas strung together.
But if you are a nontheist like me, or a believer of a different faith, the whole article is merely language games, meaning different things in different contexts.
I don’t think the writer said much different.. merely offered a particular interpretation but in a very thoughtful way.. that is valid surely? Your assessisunduly negative and a tad biased.
No, actually Christians ought to reject much of this piece, because there are no Biblical supports for contentions, and because the whole point of suffering (created by human sin!) is ignored thus misunderstanding Jesus’s sacrifice.
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
John 3:17
Rev 3:21
Nicholas Taylor
1 month ago
The story of Schopenhauer seems that of a thinker on the brow of modernity still clinging to a religious framework of explanation. By virtue of the rapidity of change in the 19th century, this became as irrelevant as attempts to justify young earth ‘theories’ in geology and biology. The facts of cycles of human suffering remain, and put paid to ideas of linear ‘progress’. You must ask “cui bono?”. In the case of Jesus (and no doubt other unrecorded Sons of Man) on the one side it would be the reputation, stability and profitability of the Roman Empire, on the other the survival or revival of a Jewish state, rooted partly in pre-Babylonian myth (as it still is today – you can edit out that bit if you consider it too sensitive), to do (rebel) or die (apocalypse). The human suffering in the 20th century beggars imagination, and that in earlier centuries is only what we know about. Yet at the same time wonders have been achieved. Nuclear arsenals and Putin notwithstanding, I don’t feel I am living in a dark age of ignorance and chaos. Humanity-through-history and all the geographical factors in which it is embedded is a complex dynamic system, and behaves accordingly.
Liam O'Mahony
1 month ago
This is a different take on the concept ofJesus taking, not all the sins of the world. but taking all the suffering of the world, at the hands of all the evil in the world.. exemplifying the endless struggle in which the wrongdoers always seem to win ..at least in a materialistic way.
It also shows that suffering and dying aren’t the worst thing that can happen but ultimately, they might be instead the triumph of good over evil in the most paradoxical way possible.. Obviously, to accept that case one must believe death is not the end. It is curious that today we have the unimaginable suffering and death of innocents at the hands of the most wicked, degenerate, evil beasts in the slaughter of Palestinians at the hands of merciless IOF brutes… in the same place, the same Golgotha as Jesus was crucified.
One needn’t believe in an afterlife proper to believe that our deeds and living examples may outlive us–for good or ill.
You seem like a passionate and well-intentioned person overall, but you go beyond fair criticism when you talk of the “most wicked, degenerate, evil beasts”. You’ve veered into “they are sub-human” and “they are uniquely wicked” talk that raises the haunting specter of outright, violence-ready antisemitism. Please reconsider what you are saying and how you’re letting it fly. Happy Easter.
Animated Stardust
1 month ago
.
AJ Mac
1 month ago
Happy Easter everyone. Has the author ever uttered those words?
What a grim written performance of head detached from heart, Mr. Dusenbury! The Easter message is one of triumph and renewal, not skeletal grimness or unrelieved bloody death.
There should be much more respect for the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, among believers and non-believers alike. Put aside the abstract symbology and supernatural debates more often. All least read the message and consider it in your heart before rejecting it or turning your inner sights toward a far-off Heaven. Today is about life and enduring hope, not “virtuous fatalism” or naive optimism. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you (Golgotha too).
I’ll be happy to visit my local Presbyterian church later this morning, and take in their offerings, not begrudging them the symbolism on this holiday. They have quite good music, with singalongs, and the pastor tends to focus on emulating Jesus in this life, to the greater extent that nearly all of us can and should.
Happy Easter everyone!
Linda O'Keefe
1 month ago
The political death of Jesus is very significant, compelling and necessary to the reading of world history. But, more crucial is the perspective from which John, self professed beloved disciple of Jesus, records in his gospel which is very different than the synoptic gospels and is recorded much later. Jesus’s life and death as a fulfillment of ancient scripture is the heart of the matter because His divinity becomes undeniable, all other readings are usually just of mastery of knowledge & exchange of historical record which are limited to behavioral modification. John who also wrote The Revelation and several short epistles brings the times of Jesus Christ from the brain into the heart and THAT is where the poverty of the human spirit begins to happen and transformation begins. God died for us. It is true, friends.
Jürg Gassmann
1 month ago
For Hegel…
Well, starting off, there’s your problem.
Hegel saw better than most what was coming in his century…
I would say that Hegel was instrumental in procuring that outcome.
David Brown
1 month ago
Wittgenstein had the perfect riposte to these 19th century purveyors of largely unintelligible metaphysics: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’
Hugh Thornton
1 month ago
Jesus would indeed have known and been able to speak Aramaic. However, I am reading a scholarly work entitled “Did Jesus Speak Greek?” by G. Scott Greaves. He concludes that Jesus would also have known and spoken Greek, which was basically the lingua Franca of Galilee at that time. The author builds a very solid case and I certainly cannot outline all his arguments here. I would just note that on a few occasions in the Gospels, Jesus is quoted as saying something in Aramaic. That would hardly be worth a mention if he said everything in Aramaic. The Bible also mentions that Pontius Pilate examined Jesus. Pontius Pilate would not have know Aramaic but would have known Greek. There is also a proliferation of Greek names in the Bible, such as Andrew and Philip. I find that exciting because it means that Jesus’s words recorded in the Koine Greek New Testament may be his actual words.
It doesn’t seem likely to me that a prefect would bother to learn the language of a minor people, especially if Greek was already well known in the area.
Hendrik Mentz
1 month ago
Thrilling, expansive and useful as I’m struggling to understand and relate to Christianity. Thank you.
Mark Melvin
1 month ago
‘Emmanuel Kant was a real p**sant who was very rarely stable
Heidegger Heideggar was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table
David Hume could out consume Schopenhauer and Hegel’… I couldn’t get any further than that I’m afraid.
Hegel and Schopenhauer were Pantheists from the Hermetic tradition of Alchemy. No other religion gets infiltrated and manipulated by political charlatans. There’s a reason secular progressives have chosen Christianity to destroy…because it produces stability and progressives HATE stability.
Seriously, just leave Christians alone. If you don’t believe…then don’t believe. But this whole thing where romantic existentialists infiltrate Christianity and try to appropriate it for secular purposes just isn’t working. Its clear what you’re doing. Nobody is fooled anymore. You’ve taken all the churches you’re going to get.
That’s essentially correct. This essay points us precisely towards the misdirection of history; history which appears to start just a few thousand years ago (i.e. recorded history) rather than our actual history which emerged over hundreds of thousands of years. In other words, i accuse the author and those to whom he pays (too much) homage: Leibniz, Hegel, Schopenhauer et al, of historical myopia.
If we in the West are now suffering from revisionism, i maintain it’s precisely because this myopia is no longer of any use to us. The learnedness which the author evinces takes us precisely nowhere. Who cares, for instance, whether Hegel maintained that “history is a rational process”? What does that actually mean, from the perspective that Hegel was able to muster, albeit with immense sophistication? Does that help us, right now, in finding our way through the present?
At least one thing is correct: that we’re all participants. We could do so much better than to concern ourselves with whether Hegel’s view is optimistic or Schopenhauer’s pessimistic. Again, i maintain that neither has relevance now. They’re examples of human characteristics but both are incomplete and reductive. History, if we’re going to discuss it with relevance to ourselves, has no such characteristics.
It is always interesting to see non-Christians fumbling and grasping like the blind with the eternal truths that whisper at them from all around… John ch. 1: Christ is the organizing principle of the universe, which “became flesh” in order that he might suffer injustice and die for us — and through his resurrection, conquer the great burden of human existence, the terrible weight of eternal meaninglessness. This Easter weekend, even Hegel hears the echoes, “He is risen” — “He is risen indeed!”
Actually his death was atonement for sin. Adam, the federal head of humanity, in an act of cosmic treason believed the deceiver and sought to be like God. So according to the covenantal probation, the day he ate that fruit he would die. God could have justly killed him and Eve then and there, but out of sheer mercy interceded and clothed them with animal skins. However death has hung over humanity since then. Christ however was the promised seed of the woman. He came and fulfilled all righteousness under the law in our nature. He therefore succeeded where Adam failed. He also died for our sins. He as the federal head of a new creation humanity died in our place as a substitute sacrifice, but even more he is a substitute in the performance of all righteousness, securing an indecfectable status of righteousness before the judgement seat of God for all who believe.
Christ’s death was not atonement for sin. That is a distortion introduced by Paul, who was obsessed with personal sin. Christ died for two reasons. Firstly to show us that when truth and goodness is being systematically defiled, as it was by the priests of the Temple, we must take a stand and its consequences. He recognised that it was time to stop sheltering in Galilee and stand up to the evil at the centre. And, of course, he died and rose from the dead to demonstrate that ‘death hath no dominion’.
It’s worth remembering that Christian tradition holds that the final resting place for Adam’s bones was Golgotha and that Christ was crucified right over Adam’s grave. The skull that appears at the foot of the cross in many paintings is Adam’s.
I’ve never seen the basis for that. What is clear is that David brought the skull if GOLiath of GATH to a hill outside of Jerusalem.
The symbolism there is still rich and in line with the intent of what you mention.
It is amazing to heat Xstians so smug. Or maybe one Christian. I really don’t think any religion can solve the mess we are in.
Maybe some self reflection is in order so as to avoid transference…
Thank you for this reflection on the meaning of sacrifice. Sacrifice literally means “to make holy”. As Leonard Foley wrote, it is an act of love through total self-offering. History has not ended. It will die and rise again continually until the end of time at God’s will. Each death is a response to a selfish and hypocritical world order. Each rising is to closer union with God through Christ.
Sanctify means to make holy.
The English word “sacrifice” derives etymologically from a Latin term that means “make sacred.” per Oxford Bibliographies, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780195393361/obo-9780195393361-0109.xml
That’s interesting – did not know that. Though it’s still worth noting that in the Hebrew that is not the case as the word denotes drawing near. And, of course, the discussion of Jesus as sacrifice has the Hebrew practice primarily in view (as per John, Romans and Hebrews among others).
If Leibniz, Hegel, Schopenhauer & Co had paid a little more attention to Pliny* and Julian** none of this nonsense would have troubled either or us them, and we might have been on the Moon by 1492***.
(*The younger.)
(**The Apostate.)
(*** To use Christian chronology but really 2245 AUC.)
We would still be suffering and dying, though. Still fighting hate-filled wars.
Getting to the Moon hasn’t helped us one iota.
And if you applaud space travel as a great achievement of Physics, you must applaud the Hydrogen Bomb likewise.
Thanks to the Nazarene & Co we ‘wasted’ a thousand years in search of ‘the holy grail’.
At least getting to the Moon was a step in the right directIon.
The triumph of Reason over Faith if you like.
I’m still wonder what was ir IS the point of going to the Moon? ..if indeed any human ever did? I say the jury’s still out on that one!
It has the potential to be a great Penal Colony just as America and Australia were in the ‘good old days’.
The search for the holy grail was invented by a 12th century French poet.
For Christians, what is inside the grail – the redeeming Blood of Christ – is of infinitely greater importance.
Human achievements like getting to the Moon, are worthy of applause – but they don’t make anyone even fractionally better or happier.
Nor have anything to say in the face of Death.
There is nothing to say in the face of death as after death there is nothing, and thus it is illogical to fear nothing.
Are you sure? Proper science in the modern sense only arose in the context of Christendom because only Christianity provided the expectation that the world is intelligible. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…” wasn’t quite enough, and neither paganism even at its most refined as Hinduism nor atheism whether pure or supplemented by the Buddha’s insights provides any such assurance, only with “In the beginning was the Logos (reason) and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God…” Somehow even though Taoism was a good start, Chinese science never fully developed. Islam got a good start, but killed off its scientific flourishing because it wasn’t Islamic enough — better the occasionalism of al Ghazali as a defense of the absolute sovereignty of Allah — an an intelligible world governed by rationally discernable laws.
Yes I’m sure.
Christ and his cronies would not have lasted thirty seconds in Plato’s Academy for the simple reason that Christianity is the antithesis of Logos.
Do you, like Julian. worship the sun as a deity ?
Only on Sundays.
I disagree with your underlying premise but a good joke is a good joke!
Thank you.
As my dear ol’ mum would say: Charlie, you never lost* it, did you?
* grew out of thar unfortunate trait!
If you had read all four Gospels with your full attention, or even one of the synoptic three, you’d have less contempt for Jesus and his teachings. Get out your Vulgate. Put aside some of your vulgarity.
And if you read all the discarded gospels, you would realise how unlikely it is that the four that were retained might be true.
They are a combination of truth and invention or rhetorical appeal to different contemporary populations, namely Jews, Romans, and Gentiles more broadly. I’ve read the Gospel Of Thomas (sayings only, no narrative) and parts of several non-canonical gospels, most of which are extant only in fragments. Have you?
I take no position on any supernatural or otherworldly claims found in any Life of Jesus: I don’t think that’s where the power dwells.
Yes I have
And if you read all the discarded gospels, you would realise how unlikely it is that the four that were retained might be true.
… not to mention Acts and Paul’s epistles
I deliberately left them unmentioned because I don’t think the majority of that work holds a candle to Mark, Matthew, Luke, or even the more abstract and symbolic text of John.
I’m not saying the rest of the New Testament is minor–but it ain’t gospel. The Life and Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth–not his symbolic role as a Messiah–are of primary importance and urgency to me.
Thanks David Dusenbury for a wonderful and compelling essay about Jesus Christ. Hanne Herrman
Jesus’ sacrifice was voluntary. History’s sacrifices rarely are. This is an important distinction.
Jesus is God as well as human being.
That’s the underlying distinction.
Not entirely, certnot always true. In many cases the innocents refuse the opportunity to deny their opposition evil and instead, voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way when they might well have saved themselves.
A sacrifice by a human has to be voluntary or it is just a misfortune.
“What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.”
“Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.” – Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
100% Your comment has me reaching for Frankl’s book
Those are the words of NIetzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality.
I seem to recall Frankl crediting Nietsche with the phrase..
I expect many Christians will be cheered by this article of important ideas strung together.
But if you are a nontheist like me, or a believer of a different faith, the whole article is merely language games, meaning different things in different contexts.
I don’t think the writer said much different.. merely offered a particular interpretation but in a very thoughtful way.. that is valid surely? Your assessisunduly negative and a tad biased.
It’s not only the article above to which your comment applies. Substitute “World” for “article” and your comment above has even more truth in it.
No, actually Christians ought to reject much of this piece, because there are no Biblical supports for contentions, and because the whole point of suffering (created by human sin!) is ignored thus misunderstanding Jesus’s sacrifice.
John 3:17
Rev 3:21
The story of Schopenhauer seems that of a thinker on the brow of modernity still clinging to a religious framework of explanation. By virtue of the rapidity of change in the 19th century, this became as irrelevant as attempts to justify young earth ‘theories’ in geology and biology. The facts of cycles of human suffering remain, and put paid to ideas of linear ‘progress’. You must ask “cui bono?”. In the case of Jesus (and no doubt other unrecorded Sons of Man) on the one side it would be the reputation, stability and profitability of the Roman Empire, on the other the survival or revival of a Jewish state, rooted partly in pre-Babylonian myth (as it still is today – you can edit out that bit if you consider it too sensitive), to do (rebel) or die (apocalypse). The human suffering in the 20th century beggars imagination, and that in earlier centuries is only what we know about. Yet at the same time wonders have been achieved. Nuclear arsenals and Putin notwithstanding, I don’t feel I am living in a dark age of ignorance and chaos. Humanity-through-history and all the geographical factors in which it is embedded is a complex dynamic system, and behaves accordingly.
This is a different take on the concept ofJesus taking, not all the sins of the world. but taking all the suffering of the world, at the hands of all the evil in the world.. exemplifying the endless struggle in which the wrongdoers always seem to win ..at least in a materialistic way.
It also shows that suffering and dying aren’t the worst thing that can happen but ultimately, they might be instead the triumph of good over evil in the most paradoxical way possible.. Obviously, to accept that case one must believe death is not the end. It is curious that today we have the unimaginable suffering and death of innocents at the hands of the most wicked, degenerate, evil beasts in the slaughter of Palestinians at the hands of merciless IOF brutes… in the same place, the same Golgotha as Jesus was crucified.
One needn’t believe in an afterlife proper to believe that our deeds and living examples may outlive us–for good or ill.
You seem like a passionate and well-intentioned person overall, but you go beyond fair criticism when you talk of the “most wicked, degenerate, evil beasts”. You’ve veered into “they are sub-human” and “they are uniquely wicked” talk that raises the haunting specter of outright, violence-ready antisemitism. Please reconsider what you are saying and how you’re letting it fly. Happy Easter.
.
Happy Easter everyone. Has the author ever uttered those words?
What a grim written performance of head detached from heart, Mr. Dusenbury! The Easter message is one of triumph and renewal, not skeletal grimness or unrelieved bloody death.
There should be much more respect for the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, among believers and non-believers alike. Put aside the abstract symbology and supernatural debates more often. All least read the message and consider it in your heart before rejecting it or turning your inner sights toward a far-off Heaven. Today is about life and enduring hope, not “virtuous fatalism” or naive optimism. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you (Golgotha too).
I’ll be happy to visit my local Presbyterian church later this morning, and take in their offerings, not begrudging them the symbolism on this holiday. They have quite good music, with singalongs, and the pastor tends to focus on emulating Jesus in this life, to the greater extent that nearly all of us can and should.
Happy Easter everyone!
The political death of Jesus is very significant, compelling and necessary to the reading of world history. But, more crucial is the perspective from which John, self professed beloved disciple of Jesus, records in his gospel which is very different than the synoptic gospels and is recorded much later. Jesus’s life and death as a fulfillment of ancient scripture is the heart of the matter because His divinity becomes undeniable, all other readings are usually just of mastery of knowledge & exchange of historical record which are limited to behavioral modification. John who also wrote The Revelation and several short epistles brings the times of Jesus Christ from the brain into the heart and THAT is where the poverty of the human spirit begins to happen and transformation begins. God died for us. It is true, friends.
Well, starting off, there’s your problem.
I would say that Hegel was instrumental in procuring that outcome.
Wittgenstein had the perfect riposte to these 19th century purveyors of largely unintelligible metaphysics: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’
Jesus would indeed have known and been able to speak Aramaic. However, I am reading a scholarly work entitled “Did Jesus Speak Greek?” by G. Scott Greaves. He concludes that Jesus would also have known and spoken Greek, which was basically the lingua Franca of Galilee at that time. The author builds a very solid case and I certainly cannot outline all his arguments here. I would just note that on a few occasions in the Gospels, Jesus is quoted as saying something in Aramaic. That would hardly be worth a mention if he said everything in Aramaic. The Bible also mentions that Pontius Pilate examined Jesus. Pontius Pilate would not have know Aramaic but would have known Greek. There is also a proliferation of Greek names in the Bible, such as Andrew and Philip. I find that exciting because it means that Jesus’s words recorded in the Koine Greek New Testament may be his actual words.
Pilate had been Prefect of Judea for about seven years by the time of the Crucifixion, plenty of time to have learnt Aramaic had he so wished.
It doesn’t seem likely to me that a prefect would bother to learn the language of a minor people, especially if Greek was already well known in the area.
Thrilling, expansive and useful as I’m struggling to understand and relate to Christianity. Thank you.
‘Emmanuel Kant was a real p**sant who was very rarely stable
Heidegger Heideggar was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table
David Hume could out consume Schopenhauer and Hegel’… I couldn’t get any further than that I’m afraid.
The Ku Klux Klan as an intro picture? Really?