MayorofOysterville
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User ID: 3800
MayorofOysterville
3mo ago
It sounds like an interesting book and I'll definitely take a look at it but is the Mandate of Heaven really that different from the divine right of kings?
MayorofOysterville
3mo ago
I can't really buy this we had Atheist Greeks and Philosophical schools before Christianity. The Enlightment is pretty non Christian. And China was ruled by a secular philosophical school as base value rather than religion. It seems way to much a just so story. The concept of the secular is definitely not unique to Christianity.
MayorofOysterville
3mo ago
I don't know about lectures, but I've heard the vastness of the universe as a kind of awe. I don't think most secularism is sold on miracles anyway and when most people say miracles they are more talking about supernatural feats of wonder.
Regardless multiple faith traditions are filled with people having religious epiphanies indeed many religions have been started based on religious epiphanies so those don't seem very useful in discerning Truth.
MayorofOysterville
3mo ago
Exclusively associated with Catholicism?
MayorofOysterville
3mo ago
This is a very Catholic reading of history. Plenty of secular and most Protestant scholars would dispute the first part. Most secular and a few Protestants would dispute the second. And virtually all Protestants would dispute the fifth. It's a very disputed Catholic timeline. If everyone agreed on this everyone would be Catholic. Which I get you are, but it's kind of like outlining a timeline of history and saying and then God revealed the Holy Quran to his prophet Muhammed. It's not at all agreed upon outside of your faith tradition.
MayorofOysterville
3mo ago
How are Mormons structured like a cult? Their prophet has almost the exact same doctrinal powers as the Pope. He can speak Ex Cathedra but usually doesn't. The rest of their church structure is based fairly closely on the Acts of the Apostles.
MayorofOysterville
3mo ago
I mean that's just a vestige of the culture. By this logic Catholicism is a Greek Pagan heresy since the Catholic Church incorporated a lot of Greek philosophy in it's formation.
MayorofOysterville
3mo ago
If you do there was a breakaway faction that was purged from the main group. They might have more remnants of the old tradition.
MayorofOysterville
3mo ago
I don't think the Unitarians in Hungary have anything to do with American Unitarian Universalists, the universalist does a a lot of work. Though i'm not sure how vibrant a schismatic Hungarian sect is.
MayorofOysterville
3mo ago
As someone who really misses the community of church but really can't will myself to believe anymore. I really really like the idea of the Unitarian Church and think it would have been pretty neat 40 years ago but I've never attended because I suspected it would be exactly as you describe.
As for what is going on literally every old school liberal organization has had the same issue. From The Unitarians to the ACLU it's all the same thing. The intercept had an excellent article about this but it seems to be taken down. Basically Boomer liberal organizations were actually liberal and boomer liberals did believe in principles such as free speech. However, they lacked the antibodies to deal with hardcore woke cadre because they could easily be manipulated by being called racist and out of touch with the youth. During Trumps first term essentially every old school big L liberal organization fell to woke and abandoned it's early high minded principle and the unitarians are no exception. There's a whole blocked and reported episode about it.
MayorofOysterville
4mo ago
I don't mean referencing Paul specifically but but rather the historical scene. Luke tries to give a historical "scene" for his gospels in a way the others don't by bringing up historical evens and timelines. places the census during the reign of Herod the Great. Josephus says the census under Quirinius occurred after Herod Archelaus was deposed, around 6 CE. So about a decade difference Luke also gives a different order for the failed messianic claimants of Theudas, Judas and "the Egyptian." Acts gets many local details right, titles of officials, geography(the sea travel times we mentioned*), Luke definitely tried for as much accuracy as possible. However, when it comes to larger historical events like the census or rebel leaders, Luke’s account diverges from Josephus. Which is why I don't think he used him as a source though they are related. I think the explanation can be Luke writing about widely known historical events or relying on the memory of someone, possibly even himself, who had read the book earlier.
MayorofOysterville
4mo ago
You're right that posting 1 Timothy doesn't convince me as the consensus is it isn't and I don't have any reason to doubt that. I did see a very interesting argument on the Academic Bible subreddit which pretty much convinced me that 2 Timothy is genuine based on AI and Paul's language. Of course it's hard to really know without doing it in the original Greek but that and another article posted in that thread really flipped me on it.
I don't think having other martyred people effects the ending it's quite normal to want a story to have a happy ending even with struggles along the way.
I've always felt like Bart Ehrman has just wildly different intuitions than I do to the point where we are reading completely different New Testaments.
That's a bit how I feel in our discussion haha. I just feel Acts is so obviously part of the romance genre and so obviously written by someone who didn't know Paul, just the fact alone that it denies him his apostleship seems enough to me. well anyway we may just need to agree to disagree on this.
MayorofOysterville
4mo ago
Most of the American far left are willing to condemn Azov in the abstract and I'm sure Azov is willing to condemn them. Both Azov and the American far left are invested in the survival of Ukraine but neither are the most critical part.
Though even in America the "hard left" are against Ukraine, tankies and Communists hate Ukraine and love Russia. Even the DSA was less than supportive early in the war.
I don't want to nitpick those contradictions either my point for including them was about the "lens" Acts is using in comparison to the Pauline letters which I do think shows the author has the gist but not the specifics and is also trying to smooth over controversies in early Christianity.
Now going to Luke's intro, while no one thinks Luke was an eyewitness for gLuke, but don't you think if he was an eyewitness for Acts he would have said something? He's the only Gospel author that acknowledges he is an author including giving a little intro about his methodology. He even uses the phrase eyewitness, but doesn't include himself yes that's for gLuke but in Acts his intro is just basically a line that he's continuing the story of the church. If his methodology changed I think he'd tell us, especially if he was an eyewitness as it would extremely bolster his case. Now there is actually a (semi) synoptic gospel that does tell us it was recorded by an eyewitness the gospel of Thomas. Do you think that was recorded by an eyewitness?
And more importantly why do you think Luke-Acts was written by an eyewitness?
If it's the tense in the "We passages" we have plenty of personal pronoun use in scripture, the Apocalypses of Peter is written in the first person do you think Peter wrote it.
If it's Paul not dying at the end let me quite Bart Ehrman
“The entire point of the book of Acts is that nothing could stop the Christian mission, no one could silence the apostles. The more anyone tried, they less they succeeded. You cannot stop Paul! If you persecute him in one place, he goes to the other; if you beat him up he just moves on; if you stone him (presumably to death) he just gets up and goes to the next town. Nothing can stop these people or silence their message. Acts ends with Paul in Rome under house arrest. Does this stop him from preaching? Not at all: he preaches to Jews in Rome who come to see him. Nothing can keep him quiet.
Luke could not have ended Acts with Paul’s death. That would have stopped him. And for Luke, nothing could stop him"
I think that's very reasonable, all of the Gospels end on a hopeful note and as Acts is a sort of Gospel sequel it seems very reasonable for the author to end it with Paul proclaiming the faith unhindered in the heart of the Empire rather than his execution.
MayorofOysterville
4mo ago
Hasn't virtually every single Democratic politician condemned the shooting? The only exception I can think of is Ilhan Omar, that's a pretty big condemnation from the power structure of the other side. I agree the reaction in places like Bluesly is... concerning. But all the blue tribe leaders are saying the right things Bernie and AOC included.
MayorofOysterville
4mo ago
I don't think Acts was "faked" I think the author did exactly what he said in his introduction, he conducted a investigation as best he could to prepare these documents. I just think that as we know Paul's letters we have better sources than the author and can see his errors. In almost all cases that we can cross reference he gets the gist right but the fine details wrong. He interviewed people collected stories and prepared his account. Acts looks like it should if the author did what he said he did. It looks like a document based on oral sources but not someone's firsthand account or who had access to Paul's letters.
I think that, many days, and three years are a bit more than a minor contradiction but regardless there are a lot more issues. For one the author of Acts carefully omits Paul seeing Jesus. The author of Acts says only that Paul saw a blinding white light and then could see nothing. Whereas Paul states emphatically many times that he has seen the risen Jesus and even uses this to claim his apostleship. Which Acts also denies him as he does not meet the criteria for apostleship given in Acts as well as not being included on the lists of apostles in speeches. In Acts it is the Jews trying to kill Paul and he escapes in a basket, Paul says it was the king, in Acts when Paul goes to Jerusalem he preaches boldly in the streets, in Galatians he writes he only met Peter, James and John. In Acts before his conversion he was going house to house pulling Christians out of their homes and arresting them, in Galatians his persecution is known to the Christians in Jerusalem only by reputation. And these differences are what we would expect if we have primary sources and the author doesn't.
I don't think the ship travel time is a smoking gun either. One of our earliest versions of gLuke whether redacted or not come to us through Marcion who was a mariner and commanded a fleet of merchant ships and would certainly have known all the travel times between the Mediterranean ports of Paul's voyages. Do I think Marcion wrote Acts? No not really but these things weren't state secrets nor particularly hard to find or accurately guess in the well connected world of the Roman Mediterranean. Also the author of Luke-Acts loved facts and tried to ground his scripture in the world much more than the other gospel authors so I'm not surprised that he has accurate ship times.
Finally we just need to take the author at his word, he lists his research process from the beginning, emphasis mine;
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you,
I see no reason to doubt his stated process, and the result seems to me is what you would get with that chain of transmission. If he himself was an eyewitness why not mention it in this introduction or his shorter introduction to Acts? Instead he references collecting handed down accounts and Acts looks exactly like someone who compiled it by doing that. It gets the big details right but messes up the specifics.
MayorofOysterville
4mo ago
I also think working with your hands can be a lot more satisfying it's what we designed to do after all. Sure a lot of farming is backbreaking especially during harvest season. But crafting, sewing, woodworking, fishing? These are all things people do voluntarily in their free time.
I'll grant you that an extremely early copy of gMark is very possible, but I don't think the same is true for Luke-Acts because of the details and purpose of those books. Luke-Acts is interesting because we can cross reference it with several other sources mainly Josephus and Paul to validate it's accuracy. And Luke gets several things wrong that we would expect an eyewitness and companion of Paul to get right. The most basic one being Paul's travel itinerary after his vision which Paul directly tells us about in Galatians. Additionally the author of Luke-Acts knows the Gospels as gLuke is one of the synoptics and essentially no one would say gLuke is the Earliest. It's an extremely tight timeline for the author of gLuke to be introduced to gMark or proto gMathew, after Paul has been sent to Rome but before his execution and as Paul was able to receive visitors and letter in Rome as stated in Acts and confirmed by Romans, it seems unlikely Paul would also not be introduced to one of these volumes.
The author of Luke-Acts is trying to ground his volume in history and does his best to set the the scene but when we look at Josephus there are some contradicting details. I think this enough to prove the author of gLuke wasn't basing his historical knowledge on Josephus but rather a shared understanding of the history being distorted by time. There a lot of hazy details and names that pop up in Acts especially the earlier part which indicate a half remembered history. This could be before Luke met with Paul and so the details are hazy but a lot of it directly concerns Paul and seems it would better match up with Paul's accounts of his exploits if Luke was his traveling companion. When I double checked some thing to write this post I found an intriguing book which argues both are true New Light on Luke by Barbara Shellard;
I shall take it as a working hypothesis for the following study, which accords with the admittedly scanty evidence, that Luke-Acts was written c. 100 CE, probably at Rome, even though the final revision of Acts may have been prevented by the death of the author, who would by then have been in his late sixties, and who was perhaps attached to the fringes of the Pauline mission in his youth...
An interesting hypothesis and I'm definitely going to check it out. But even if the "We documents" are much older and perhaps even first person accounts. I think the bulk of the work as enough correctable errors of an eye witness and contemporary of Paul that it's extremely unlikely to be contemporary. For example Acts criteria for apostleship excludes Paul, and as we can see in his letters Paul emphatically argued that he was an apostle. This seems unlikely for a follower of Paul to omit or write.
If so why does the author leave off the execution of Paul? Well for one gMark leaves out half of the resurrection so ancient authors are not obligated to write texts in a way we would expect. But also think of the audience of Luke-Acts, in my view Luke-Acts was intended for a Roman audience explaining how Christianity went from Judea to them by way of Paul. A big part of it is explaining why their Christianity came from Paul and not one of the apostles, and this is for a Roman audience. Luke-Acts overall is extremely deferential to Rome. The enemies in the book are usually unnamed mobs or Jews. Occasionally the local authorities hassle him but he's almost always able to get out of it by appealing to his Roman citizenship. And he has long friendly dialogues with the Roman rulers of Judea again in comparison to "the Jews" It doesn't stretch the imagination to see why an author appealing to an audience of Romans might end the narrative of Paul triumphantly preaching in Rome rather than his execution. As well as why the author of a sporadically persecuted movement might shave off inconvenient details the Roman authorities wouldn't like and would comfort parishioners. If we assume a post Jewish revolt date as well distancing themselves from the Jews might not seem a bad idea as well and a significant theme in Acts is Paul appealing to the Roman civil authorities against Jewish mobs. Him then being executed by Caesar ruins this narrative.
We can also see from the other Gospels that the author of Luke-Acts was perfectly comfortable editing out or omitting uncomfortable details. He has gone to great lengths to minimize the role of Jesus' family multiple mentions of his brothers and mother in gMark are removed or made non-specific. The narrative in Acts around the Jerusalem council gets incredibly weird and jerky because despite talking about the Church in Jerusalem he has neglected to mention James (the brother of the Lord) until now but can't get around his role in the council so has to add him in. He's working with known facts but weaving a narrative out of them. I actually think that Acts belongs more in the Romance genre ala Pseudo-Clement and I don't think this would be a controversial opinion among believing or secular scholars if it hadn't been canonized it's contradictions with Paul's letters and parallelism between Paul and Jesus would be enough to put it there, if it had been found in a cash of documents in the desert instead of all our Bibles.
Why then is it in all out Bibles? Well I think Acts serves a very useful purpose in Christianity narrative wise but particularly towards a Roman audience, and that is answering how did Christianity come to me?
If we assume an early date than Acts is attempting to chronicle "the story of Christianity up until now" and I just don't think it does that. We can see from Paul's letters that there was a lot of grappling with heresies differing interpretations and that a significant portion of his work was trying to keep early church's on the straight and narrow as he saw it. Even towards the end of his life in Philippians where we see these issues have not been solved and in Philippians especially he comes off rather bitter at points. All of that is omitted in Acts an Christianity is presented as a unified triumphal force with Paul going from town to town in the Roman gaining converts and ending with him preaching in the Empire's capital. This is very much a story of how Paul and Jesus triumphed. Paul's opponents are rarely heretics they are magicians and Jews. And the work of Luke-Acts but especially Acts again and again separates Christians from Jews and features the Roman authorities saving Paul from the Jews and learnedly listening to Paul's teaching on Christianity. Early differences are papered over and instead of denouncements, the have a council where they Holy Spirit moves them and the faith emerges stronger than ever! Which likely did happen to some degree but Philippians shows us it wasn't nearly as wholly agreed upon as portrayed in Acts. Acts works very well as a story of how did Christianity come to me a Roman citizen (or rather my grandfather) and why did it come from this Paul guy and it works very poorly as an exhaustive history of the early church which is not what it is trying to be, which is why I don't think an early date works at all for Luke-Acts.
MayorofOysterville
4mo ago
I'm not arguing that. Just pointing out that women having no children isn't the actual problem.
MayorofOysterville
4mo ago
Yeah I agree with that. I wish more right wing people wrote more theory the way the leftwing does. Progressives try all sorts of hairbrained schemes but so many conservatives just complain without trying to make a positive structure. Well it's better than it was but still not great.
MayorofOysterville
4mo ago
When I said liberal republic I didn't mean a republic based on the Democratic party. Just some kind of open democracy. So far all "Red Caesar" candidates in the West have been elected and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
MayorofOysterville
4mo ago
As far as I can tell yes. But he'd likely say that game theory would eliminated the rape gangs as women would choose to be "owned" and thus safe from the rape gangs that would target "unowned" women. Thus eliminating rape and thus creating utopia.
MayorofOysterville
4mo ago
Yeah I really want to know this too. It'd be wild if he was 80 and still using terms like "facefag" on the internet.
MayorofOysterville
4mo ago
I realize I failed to elaborate and probably should have cut that date or expanded on it. But my initial reason for using those decades specifically was that the US was still above TFR despite that.
There is a Filipino Church called Iglesia ni Christo which denies the trinity. They are fairly large 2.5 million members and do have US churches so you could check them out. Their chief pastor met with Duterte and they are mostly based in the Philippines so I highly doubt they are woke.
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