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Culture War or not, I don't know.
I've finished watching the Good Friday service from the Vatican and I want to quote this part of the service, sections of Psalm 21 (which includes the famous "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" quotation which is part of the Seven Last Words from the Cross).
Something which Nietzsche would despise, at least going by the discussions about this we've had on here before. The triumph of the weak. Slave morality. "I am a worm and no man" is not what the Strong, the Aristoi, say of themselves, such types are the ones trampled underfoot and rightfully so, pity being wasted on them.
And yet. And yet. This is the God of all Creation, the Maker of the Universe, the ground of all being, the Power beyond power, the True, the Beautiful and the Good who emptied Himself out, who became a slave and lower than a slave, to die a criminal's death.
Maybe true power is not trampling all others underfoot. The wretch who died the slave's death is venerated and remembered in the most gorgeous, opulent setting. Maybe the Strong look tawdry by comparison in their tinsel crowns.
Something, something. Tickling at my brain, to think about it.
I often see this line of thought from both the pagan right and more progressive Christians, but I'm not sure we -and Nietzche for that matter- aren't reading modern understanding of the world into ancient peoples heads. Jesus was not only literate but had rahbitical training iirc. He was a skilled craftsmen who did carpentry, he never had to grow his own food in a word that was 80%+ illiterate sustenance farmers. I just dont think Jesus was particularly wreched by the standards of the ancient world, although his execution was usually reserved for the less fortunate.
We certainly don’t believe the same way they did thousands of years ago. Few years back I caught by background surprise some YouTube interviews of the OT scholar Joel Baden. He pointed out something I used to have thoughts about but never spent anytime to polish and formalize the notion of.
Back a millennia, the early communities of Judaism absolutely ‘believed’ the ‘Torah’ but they didn’t have modern ideas about it. One of the struggles of dating ancient documents of that time period more generally, is that these books continuously evolved, underwent multiple redactions and revisions, were compiled differently, edited differently, etc. So asking when these documents were “written” is a fallacious question, because these books aren’t singular, unified compositions.
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