But these are written that ye might believe . . .

 That paltry story is untrue,

And forg'd to cheat such gulls as you. 

 

-- Samuel Butler, Hudibras 

William Law, the Christian Chuang tzu

 When a right knowledge of ourselves enters into our minds, it makes as great a change in all our thoughts and apprehensions, as when we awake from the wanderings of a dream.

-- William Law 

Blast the man who owes his greatness to his country's ruin

 Oh ! Portius, is there not some chosen curse,

Some hidden thunder in the store of heaven,

Red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man

Who owes his greatness to his country's ruin?

 

-- Joseph Addison 

The times, they are not chang'd at all

 A man can hardly pass the streets, without having his ears grated with horrid and blasphemous oaths and curses.

-- John Tillotson 

 

There's an anti-Samaritan Jesus in both Matthew and Luke, despite the so-called Good Samaritan Jesus of Luke 10

 

These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

-- Matthew 10:5f.

In Luke 17 Jesus himself practices what he preaches in Matthew 10, avoiding Samaria.

He takes the route south from Galilee after his ministry in Galilee, passing through the Valley of Jezreel which runs between Galilee and Samaria from northwest to southeast.

He does this to get over to the Jordan Valley, where John had baptized him like everybody else (Luke 3:21; 4:1) and which runs straight south to Jericho (Luke 18:35). Once in Jericho, he literally goes up to Jerusalem from there (Luke 18:31; 19:28) to meet his fate, a climb of as much as 3,700 feet in elevation.

Note that for their part the Samaritans in Luke's telling also avoid Jesus (Luke 9:52f.), because he's headed to the rival religious center in Jerusalem. The bad feelings are mutual.

But by the time we get to Luke 17 we are met with at least one thankful leper whom Luke says is a Samaritan but Jesus merely calls a foreigner:

On the way to Jerusalem he was passing along between Sama'ria and Galilee. ... "Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner [ἀλλογενὴς]?"

-- Luke 17:11, 18

Were the ungrateful nine healed lepers in the story also Samaritans?

The text does not say.

Luke does not have the saying found in Matthew, Many are called, but few are chosen (Matthew 20:16; 22:14), but it might not be wrong to say that he is illustrating that in every tribe and tongue most people really suck, but not all of them.

Such men as he never be at heart's ease, whilst they behold a greater than themselves

 

Trump Posts New AI Image of Himself Embracing Jesus

D. Stableford, Yahoo News 

 

 

Slaves bury the dead

 

 Henry is dead, and never shall revive:

Upon a wooden coffin we attend,

And death's dishonourable victory

We with our stately presence glorify,

Like captives bound to a triumphant car.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1, Act 1, scene 1  

So Jesus' hate-filled threat to wipe out his entire generation for the blood of Abel on down, which his generation had nothing to do with, trivializes genocide and is outside the bounds of justice, according to Christianity Today

Threatening Profound Evil Trivializes That Evil 

Justin R. Hawkins, Christianity Today

... You don’t need an exhaustive knowledge of just war theory to know that genocide is well outside its bounds. This threat merits the most strident and serious moral condemnation, for the very act of threatening such profound evil trivializes that evil. ...

 

You can always count on CT to give you the Jesus whom they wish they had, not the one we've got.

 

Unlike Ezekiel, Jesus was a spiritual determinist "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me." And none of what he predicted happened, either:

 

There were present at that season some that told him of the Galilaeans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And Jesus answering said unto them, Suppose ye that these Galilaeans were sinners above all the Galilaeans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.

 

 -- Luke 13:1ff. 

 

Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city: That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation.

 

 -- Matthew 23:33ff. 

 

Woe unto you! for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them. Truly ye bear witness that ye allow the deeds of your fathers: for they indeed killed them, and ye build their sepulchres. Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they shall slay and persecute: That the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation; From the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple: verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation. 

 

-- Luke 11:47ff. 

I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore

 

  Global Jewish population at 15.8 million, still below pre-Holocaust levels...

I thought Pope Francis died?

 

Adam was made a living soul, kin to God and God's bright ray

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Then is the soul from God; so pagans say,

Which saw by nature's light but heavenly kind,

Naming her kin to God, and God's bright ray,

A citizen of Heav'n, to earth confin'd.

 

-- John Davies 

 

 

It is common to mark the beginning of the introspective conscience of the West in the life of Augustine of Hippo

... Augustine made the inner life legible in a way it had rarely been before. He showed that faith ... is a struggle ... The “Confessions” ... taught believers that the interior life matters — that what happens in the private conversation between a person and their conscience is not a footnote to the religious life but its very center. In some ways, this was more revolutionary than anything in scripture itself. ... Augustine made interiority a theological category. Western Christianity has not been the same since. ...

Discussed here.

And yet Augustine arguably is the product of an introspective Western wave which itself had been many centuries in the making.

One could say that the turn to the inner life in the West actually began under the prosaic circumstances of the collapse of the Athenian Empire in 404 BC. 

If Hellenic is the ideal which was lost and Hellenistic its Nachleben and personalization, there are centuries of preoccupation with the experiences of individuals under various aspects which follow after the collapse of classical Athens. These arguably add up to interiority as the rule of the subsequent West, not the exception.

The advent of disorder in the world ended up provoking a broad search for order in the soul, which ultimately worked to the greatest advantage for Christianity.

Notable evidences of this search would have to include, for example, Plutarch's biographical interest in the personal morality of his subjects, or Hellenistic philosophy's general retreat from concern with public life to the vicissitudes of the inner life, as seen in the developments of Epicureanism and Stoicism.

The latter in particular came to dominate elite conviction for centuries, from East to West in the Mediterranean, from Seneca's Letters in the mid-first century evincing his struggle of the will to Marcus Aurelius' self-critical Meditations a century later, a Stoic analogue to Augustine's Confessions later popular in the Greek East.  

The early great Christian authors are nothing if not children of this past, sometimes quite beyond their ken or control, which was surely not the case with Augustine, who was inspired from a young age by Cicero's love of wisdom. While completing his Confessions in 400 Augustine self-consciously borrowed from the Neoplatonist Plotinus, in whom he found the idea of the immaterial soul liberating from the materialism of the Manichaeans.

Combining this abstraction with the allegorical interpretation of the Bible which he embraced from Ambrose of Milan, one could say Augustine was equipped with the spiritual tools necessary for not just his interior project, but for surviving a civilizational collapse which he saw coming in his own time.

The Gothic invasion of the Roman Empire had begun years before the Confessions, in 376, when Augustine was still a very young man of 22. But by 410 Rome had been sacked, in the wake of which he composed The City of God, in which he provided Christians with a rationalization of the catastrophe and an inner retreat from the horrible new reality, an invisible, spiritual city where God was still in control. 

Augustine is nothing if not a spokesman for the experience of everyman from every age, for the little lives of people who turn inward to protect who they are when all is falling down round about them, while some, and even now just like Strelnikov, simply choose to die on the inside before they must die on the outside:

Thomas Paine grasped that Christianity implied the suicide of God long before the God is Dead theologians of the 1960s came along

Somewhere in Texas, out of which nothing good comes

... A man is preached instead of a God; an execution is an object for gratitude; the preachers daub themselves with the blood, like a troop of assassins, and pretend to admire the brilliancy it gives them; they preach a humdrum sermon on the merits of the execution; then praise Jesus Christ for being executed, and condemn the Jews for doing it. ...   So many wild and blasphemous conceits have been formed of the Almighty. The Jews have made him the assassin of the human species, to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself, and the founder of a new religion to supersede and expel the Jewish religion. And to find pretence and admission for these things, they must have supposed his power or his wisdom imperfect, or his will changeable ...

-- Thomas Paine, Age of Reason

Thomas Paine on the fanatical character of Paul

 

 The character of the person called Paul, according to the accounts given of him, has in it a great deal of violence and fanaticism; he had persecuted with as much heat as he preached afterwards; the stroke he had received had changed his thinking, without altering his constitution; and either as a Jew or a Christian he was the same zealot. Such men are never good moral evidences of any doctrine they preach. They are always in extremes, as well of action as of belief.

-- Thomas Paine, Age of Reason

Philosophers haunt rich men

I will give you wisdom.

 

  

Diogenes was asked, in a kind of scorn, What was the matter that philosophers haunted rich men, and not rich men philosophers? He answered, Because the one knew what they wanted, the other did not.

 

--  Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 

But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel

 True hope is swift, and flies with swallows wings;

Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act 5 Scene 2 

New Testament scholar and Christian atheist Bart Ehrman amusingly boils down authentic Christianity to selling everything and giving it to the poor

This isn't amusing because it's wrong. 

The evidence for it is all over the place in the New Testament and early Christianity, and we talk a lot about the primacy of that evidence in this blog.

Some notable texts include Luke 14:33, Luke 12:33, and the narratives about the rich man inquiring how to have eternal life in Luke 18:18ff, Matthew 19:16ff., and Mark 10:17ff., over which so many interpreters in rich, Western civilization stumble generation after generation. 

It is amusing because Ehrman imagines that a good follower of Jesus today would sell everything and give it to the poor. He thinks of this as an ethical ideal when it was the primary example of Jesus' negation of ethics. Jesus' eschatological imperative to repent to escape imminent judgment meant abandoning all social conventions, at the heart of which is economic life.

The implications of Jesus' message for the economy of Judea were devastating, and his opponents grasped them better than any of his followers since. He was crucified because if everyone followed him tribute to Caesar would dry up (Luke 23:2) and the Jewish elites would lose their place of preferment (John 11:48). His death was beneficial for the maintenance of the status quo. Whether it was really necessary is another question, given the difficulty of following Jesus quite apart from what might have happened when his predictions failed to materialize. Hope in what he predicted ironically was kept alive by his speedy demise. 

Schweitzer long ago taught us that Jesus' eschatology theologically meant the negation of ethics. In keeping with this Jesus' imperatives take a negative form involving renunciation of the world and all its ways. The world is passing away, and threatens to take you with it.

Therefore Jesus' imperatives are not a description of the way to lead a Christian life, because there is no such thing as a Christian life. The end of the world is coming so quickly that there won't be time to lead such a life, not even time enough, for example, properly to bury one's dead, or properly bid farewell to one's family. Jesus' "ethics" are if anything negative ethics. They are instruction in how to lose one's life, the life of this world, not save it.

The imminent eschaton makes the very idea of the Christian life beside the point, same as it does the resurrection. We must remember, as Ehrman helpfully does in the podcast, that Acts 1 tells us that the resurrected Jesus hangs around with the now-styled apostles for forty days but all they can seem to think about is not the astounding wonder of this resurrected man in their midst, but whether he will "at this time restore the kingdom to Israel". The coming of the kingdom is what the historical Jesus had drilled into their heads, not the Pharisees' (and Paul's) doctrine of the resurrection of the dead.

The eschatological theology of Jesus was proven wrong by history twice, once by Jesus' death and the failure of the kingdom to come, and a second time by the Jerusalem community when it mistakenly adopted the eschatological imperatives as a way of life, in particular when they had all things in common (Acts 2:44; 4:32).

Not long after the death of Jesus the Jerusalem community was plunged into such abject hunger and poverty by the famine of 44-48 AD that it had to compromise with Paul and accept his law free gospel to the Gentiles and ask him to remember their poor on his travels among them (Galatians 2:10), which inspired Paul's collection for the saints in Jerusalem (Romans 15:25f., 31). Much of earliest Christianity revolves around this collection as a remedy to the failure of so-called eschatological ethics.

You could say that the eschatology certainly failed also a third time in early Christianity, when its reinterpretation as the apocalyptic theology of the Parousia, the second coming, in Matthew 24 and in Paul, went unrealized before the death of the last of The Twelve (Mark 9:1). The kingdom did not come before they all died either, with power or otherwise, nor after the death of Paul.

All that eschatological energy then petered-out, so to speak, as the decades rolled on and Christianity reinvented itself on The Rock in compromise with the world, in compromise not so much because the Church wanted that but because reality is intractable.

 Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? A Debate. A ‘Christian Atheist’ joins Ross Douthat.

The podcast runs 1:24:23.