And in Antioch the disciples were for the first time called Chrestianous

 

 And in Antioch the disciples were for the first time called Chrestianous [χρηστιανους].

So says the original hand responsible for most of the New Testament in Codex Sinaiticus at Acts 11:26, where the first Greek iota [I] in Christians [Χριστιανούς] is replaced by Greek eta [H], a much more common itacism of the second hand of this same codex but in the prophetic books of the LXX. You will observe that the attempt of the corrector of Sinaiticus to erase part of the eta (above in line four from the top) to turn it into an iota was not entirely successful.

 

Chrestianon and Chrestianos are used respectively in Acts 26:28 and I Peter 4:16 in Sinaiticus, and similarly undergo subsequent correction.

These three instances of the only uses of the word Christian in the New Testament are not mistakes of this original hand's eye or ear in the scriptorium which produced Sinaiticus, but instead are deliberate reproductions of evidence which it had before it, no doubt of Roman origin, which long previously had mistaken χρηστός (useful, handy, often of slaves) for Χριστός (Christ). 

The Roman historian Tacitus and the biographer Suetonius in the early second century have evidence of this misunderstanding at Rome.  

... quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Chrestianos appellabat.  auctor nominis eius Christus ...

... whom, hated for their shameful deeds, the commons called Chrestians. Christus, the source of this name, ...

Tacitus, Annals 15.44

The text of Tacitus implies that the Christians are Christianos from Christus, not Chrestianos from Chrestus as popularly [vulgus] misunderstood. 

Suetonius, who mentions the Christiani correctly in Nero 16, in Claudius 25 nevertheless had referred to a Jewish expulsion from Rome under Claudius impulsore Chresto, at the instigation of Chrestus:

 Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis Roma expulit. 

He expelled from Rome the Jews constantly making disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus.

(Like Tacitus who seems quite ignorant of these details in his previous Histories, Suetonius also seems to have come up to speed by the time he composed his Nero.)

One of these Jews, Aquila, and his wife, who had been compelled to leave Rome, show up independently in Acts 18:2, connected there explicitly to the expulsion of the Jews from Rome in 49 A.D., and also to Paul the apostle of Jesus Christ.

Codex Sinaiticus' connection to Rome is highlighted by its preservation of The Shepherd of Hermas, which the Muratorian Fragment indicates was composed in Rome by the brother of Pope Pius I sometime in the second century. 

 

Socratic philosophy as a form of madness

Magnum Force 1973

Socratic philosophy as a form of madness

 

... ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ ...

... the unexamined life is not worth living for a man ...

 

-- Plato, Apology of Socrates 38a 

The unexamined life is not worth living, so you examine it, but subsequently more life happens which requires further examination, so you examine it, only to find that you were mistaken about the results of your previous examination. 

Wash, rinse, repeat ad infinitum. It's like bailing out a boat with a sieve and it drives you crazy, but if you are lucky you realize that you are not the measure of all things.

You have died to the self. Like Sergeant Schultz, you know nothing.

You might as well be a Lutheran then, practicing the Socratic elenchus on yourself by drowning the ignorant Old Man daily in the waters of your baptism:

Baptizing with water indicates that the Old Adam in us should by daily contrition and repentance be drowned and die with all sins and evil desires, and that a new man should daily emerge and arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever. 

-- Martin Luther, The Small Catechism, "The Sacrament of Holy Baptism" 

Better to die daily than to die forever.

Paul described this variously, including by underscoring the contingency of human nature, and therefore the possibility of its passibility:

ἑαυτοὺς πειράζετε εἰ ἐστὲ ἐν τῇ πίστει ἑαυτοὺς δοκιμάζετε ἢ οὐκ ἐπιγινώσκετε ἑαυτοὺς ὅτι Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς ἐν ὑμῖν εἰ μήτι ἀδόκιμοί ἐστε

Examine yourselves to see if your faith is genuine. Test yourselves. Surely you know that Jesus Christ is among you; if not, you have failed the test of genuine faith.

-- II Corinthians 13:5

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

-- Philippians 2:12  

Perhaps what the Delphic oracle was really trying to get at (Γνῶθι σεαυτόν) after all, as seems to be the earliest interpretation, is that there really is nothing infinitely deep in man, but that man has his limits indeed and must come to know them.

Unlike Briggs.

 

The saying Γνῶθι σεαυτόν: ‘know yourself’, is of heavenly origin,

It should be fixed in the memory, dwelt on in the heart, whether

You’re seeking a wife, or aim for a place in the sacred Senate;

Thersites had no wish to win the contest for Achilles’ armour,

That breastplate in which Ulysses made an exhibition of himself.

If it’s you who affect to defend a difficult and highly important

Case, then take counsel with yourself, ask yourself what you are,

A powerful orator, or merely a windbag, like Curtius or Matho?

You must know your measure, and be conscious of it in great

Things and in small, even for instance when you’re buying fish;

No point in desiring mullet, if your purse only runs to gudgeon!

Think of the fate that awaits you, as your wallet grows leaner

While your appetite increases, when you’ve sunk your paternal,

Inheritance, your property, your silver plate, all of that heavy

Stuff, with all your fields and herds, in your spacious stomach.

With spendthrift lords the last to go is the Roman knight’s gold

Ring, after which Pollio ends by begging with a naked finger.

It’s not a premature demise, an early funeral, the extravagant

Should fear, but old age, that is more to be feared than death. 

-- Juvenal, Satire 11, 26ff.

Paul is a pickle

 Jesus is a cucumber.

 

 

Peter Thiel thinks with Benedict XVI that the Antichrist's slogan will be peace and safety

The Pope and the Antichrist

Peter Thiel & Sam Wolfe First Things

 

Unfortunately Jesus never imagined an Antichrist.

 

Jesus was an eschatological prophet for whom there was hardly enough time left to repent, follow him, and escape the imminently coming last judgment, let alone enough time for any more history to unfold and a figure to arise such as an Antichrist, or even a Paul to predict an Antichrist's coming.

 

Jesus' son of perdition was Judas (John 17:12).

 

But Peter Thiel would rather talk about Paul's son of perdition, a fantastic boogeyman from II Thessalonians 2:3, whose ticket to power, amusingly, will be the promise of totalitarian peace and safety (I Thessalonians 5:3 lol), as if the world has never had any of either, and as if Paul wasn't already living and thriving in such a period of peace and safety of his own when he wrote those very words, a totalitarian one even.

 

We Americans hardly know or care about the 100-year Pax Britannica of 1815-1914. We were too busy with Manifest Destiny and Civil War and The Gilded Age.

 

Most have never heard of the 300 years of peace in East Asia known as the Confucian Peace of 1598-1894, let alone of the 200 year Pax Romana from 27BC to 180AD.

 

A more reflective Paul might have expressed what a gift the latter had been to the success of his own Christian missionary activity, but instead he was consumed with visions and revelations of the Lord.

 

Like Jesus Paul misread his own time as the end of the world, as most people misread their own times, when its peace still had roughly another 130 years left in it.

 

The Lord is at hand.

 

-- Philippians 4:5 

 

Paul was writing when the Pax Romana was in its 78th year. The Enlightenment Peace of 1715-1789, another one we know nothing about, and are damn proud of it, too, lasted only 74 years.

 

No Antichrist brought these periods of peace and safety to the world, and when they ended the world did not end.

 

Our own Long Peace since 1945 matters less and less to us with every passing year, consumed as we are with our own prosperity and decadence. But it is in its 81st year. The odds that it won't last much longer are pretty good considering that human nature doesn't change.

 

But American institutions are notable for curbing human nature, and for dividing power so that no single one can have its way for very long. Any radical change to them means the odds of the peace ending only increase. A president who flouts their standards is particularly troubling, even more so when his party does nothing about it, and even more so yet when an opposition party openly runs on dismantling the institutions.  

 

You don't have to be a religious fanatic to figure out that our days are numbered. You just have to pay attention.

 

But the world will still be here, pace Thiel. 

 

And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.

 

While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

 

-- Genesis 8:21f.   

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 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

Paul's interpretation of his experience is what people today might call his truth

 

Have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord?

-- I Corinthians 9:1

And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.

-- I Corinthians 15:8  

The salient points in the three accounts of Paul's conversion in Acts are that he could not see who was talking to him because he was blinded by the light, and that he did not recognize who it was that was speaking to him:

And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: ... Who art thou, Lord? ... And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink. 

-- Acts 9:3, 5, 8f.

And it came to pass, that, as I made my journey, and was come nigh unto Damascus about noon, suddenly there shone from heaven a great light round about me. ... Who art thou, Lord? ... And when I could not see for the glory of that light, being led by the hand of them that were with me, I came into Damascus.

-- Acts 22:6, 8, 11

At midday, O king, I saw in the way a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, shining round about me and them which journeyed with me. ... Who art thou, Lord? 

-- Acts 26:13, 15.

Nevertheless he calls it "seeing" the Lord. 

Meanwhile the witnesses in Acts 9 heard only a voice, and saw no one.

In Acts 22 the witnesses saw only the light, and heard nothing.

In Acts 26 Luke has Paul say that he and the witnesses were knocked to the ground after being enveloped by the light.

Most notably there, Luke has Paul summarize the whole experience explicitly as a heavenly vision, which is the experience through which Paul says elsewhere that he received his gospel (II Corinthians 12:1, 7; Galatians 1:12, 16; 2:2; Romans 16:25; Ephesians 3:3, 5), whereupon the governor Festus pronounced Paul a madman.

No one "saw" the Lord in the Acts accounts, but in the final analysis Paul's claims to have seen the Lord are unfalsifiable because they are heavenly and beyond our ken. They are as a result self-insulating and self-authenticating.

Paul hastily wrote off humanity, unlike the Psalmist who knew better

 

Let God be true, but every man a liar.

-- Romans 3:4

I said in my haste, All men are liars.

-- Psalm 116:11 

Paul's private experience of resurrection faith lead him to an excess of presumption and of despair

 

And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

-- I Corinthians 15:17ff.

Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one--I am talking like a madman--with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death.

-- II Corinthians 11:23

 

Are not all or most evangelical virtues and graces in danger of extremes? As there is, God knows, too often a defect on the one side, so there may be an excess on the other: may not hope in God, or godly sorrow, be perverted into presumption or despair?

-- Thomas Sprat (1635-1713) 

Doug Wilson inverts the reasoning of Paul the Apostle in alignment with the reasoning of his secular opponents who believe reason and science are making the world a better place

 

Doug Wilson practices a casuistry worthy of a Jesuit when he says that the world is gradually getting better because of the leaven of the gospel, whereas the originator of the leaven analogies, Paul, argued that the world is already very bad and getting worse because of the leaven of sin.

 

In fact, Paul says that enthusiasm for the Jewish law, which is basically what Doug Wilson's "theocracy" is all about, is itself an insidious leaven which speeds up the ruination of the whole lump. 

 

This is because Paul's main objection to enthusiasm for the Jewish law is that it revives sin and kills us.

 

But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead. For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me. 

 

-- Romans 7:8ff.

 

Doug Wilson and his ilk are basically the equivalent of Paul's opponents, the Judaizers. 

 

What is more, Paul is also an apocalyptic and eschatological thinker still emphasizing imminent divine judgment, and Doug Wilson is most certainly not that, either. Paul is concerned with keeping the Christian community in Christ under those dire circumstances, not with making the world a less offensive place for your children's children. 

  

 Doug Wilson’s political project to “stop making God angry.”

  

... Basically, what I want to do is agree with you about the part where the Kingdom of God is like yeast that is dropped into the loaf, and it gradually works through the whole loaf, permeating the whole. So when Paul preached the Gospel in Rome, the gladiatorial games didn’t end the following week — it took centuries. But the yeast worked through the loaf, such that the gladiatorial games were ended eventually, slavery was ended eventually, concubinage was ended eventually — all of which was good Gospel progress and postmillennial. That’s the way it works. ...

 

Yeah, none of that is from Paul, obviously.

 

Paul's view of living in the world is extremely negative. Wilson's is optimistic, like any good American's, which is the main problem with Doug Wilson.

 

To Paul, both Judaism's enthusiasm for the law and the world's enthusiasm for sin are dangerously infectious but are made obsolete because of Christ's victory over sin, death, and the Devil. But because human nature remains evil even Christian people are still susceptible to both leavens at the same time. And so Paul is vigilant against the corrupting leaven of them both.

 

Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators ... them that are without God judgeth. Therefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person. 

 

-- I Corinthians 5:6ff, 13 

 

But this I say, brethren, the time is short ... the fashion of this world passeth away.

 

-- I Corinthians 7:29, 31  

 

Ye did run well; who did hinder you that ye should not obey the truth? This persuasion cometh not of him that calleth you. A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. 

 

-- Galatians 5:7ff.

 

And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. 

 

-- Romans 13:11f. 

 

See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, Redeeming the time, because the days are evil. 

 

-- Ephesians 5:15f.