You were the one to make the claim, so it's on you to provide the evidence. — baker

To provide you with convincing evidence, I would need to have an idea of the type of evidence that would be likely to convince you. I suspect none whatsoever.

it's not clear that "all religions" call for forgiveness and redemption, or what they actually mean by them. — baker

It is never clear to him who doesn't want to see.

When "forgiveness" becomes a channel for contempt — baker

I trust you will forgive me for it.

the view directly challenges Augustine placing the revelation of the 'Israelites' above the fruits of Athens. — Paine

Okay, a bit of a "who said it first?" question.

My money is on Greeks having heard of monotheist cults from afar very early.

Is there anything I said you disagreed with, or are you just trying to be obnoxious for no reason?

In any case, it is clear from the NT text that, in Christianity, Jesus had the external appearance of a human, but in reality he was the Son of God manifested by the power of the Holy Spirit. — Apollodorus

If you believe in it, I suppose. But what if one does not believe in the idea that gods have actual, literal offsprings on earth? What if one was to read "He will be called the son of God" as meaning: "that is a phrase or a title people will use to speak of him"?

As self-evident as the fact that Jesus the man was of his time and place, an individual not a universal. As such, even if he read Plato, which I seriously doubt for reasons I explained, he would have interpret it within his own cultural framework. It's impossible to extract him from his cultural context.

As he sees it, the revelation of divine knowledge goes through Plato to Plotinus to Jesus. Conspicuously absent is the revelations of the Jewish prophets. — Fooloso4

So it's an attempt to arianize Jesus. To un-Jew him.

Personally, I have no particular interest in demonstrating Greek influence on Jesus beyond language, as I believe that different cultures have sufficient elements in common as to not necessitate external influence in all cases. — Apollodorus

Ok, so it doesn't matter. Likewise, one could go on and on with the hypothesis that Plato was influenced by Jewish monotheism, but it doesn't actually matter. It changes nothing whatsoever. Plato would still be Plato.

Olivier for one seems to find the idea "amusing". :smile: — Apollodorus

I'm trying to understand why it matters. What would change, or what's the implication if Jesus had read Plato? Why do you find the idea seducing? What perspectives would it open, dinning manners aside?

from then on until forever, "forgiveness and redemption" are going to be as powerless as they've always been. — baker

It makes life bearable. You should try it one day.

What evidence can you present that people wouldn't be killing eachother if they had "forgiveness and redemption"? — baker

I am not sure what kind of evidence would satisfy you. I imagine one could plot murder rates in various places vs some indicator of the prevalence of forgiveness in society. The latter indicator would be hard to develop though. Or one could appeal to faith: all religions call for it. Or to logic: hatred breads only more hatred, so how else can one break the cycle than through forgiveness?

What sort of evidence are you looking for?

Do you have actual real-life examples of that? — baker

Afghanistan. Somalia. The US.

I followed Rachid Taha's career since the beginning, always liked him. He was a bit lazy, never produced a lot of albums but he was a provocateur... He started with a cover of Douce France by Trenet, an ode to France, a monument of chanson française, that he orchestrated using North African instruments and musicians... That was funny, and also touching. He got a lot of airtime for that. He then did a few songs per decade, often with antiracism as a theme.

A cover of Clash and another of his songs posted earlier.

Derrida was born in Algeria, I guess. Maybe also as a guru of post-colonial studies? Taha shouldn't be taken too seriously though, he liked to joke a lot.

But the kind spirit of the man, that's another thing altogether. — Amity

That's what I meant. I'm not a catholic anymore, but I still like a few guys in that church.

Who was I pleasing and why? — Amity

God, maybe, or your vision of Him. Parents, often. Your self-esteem too, perhaps.

There are worse saints than Francis, if you ask me. He is interesting as an early supporter of ecology and animal rights. Current pope Francis chose his papal name in reference to Francis of Assisi, for this very reason. St Francis is modern, in this sense, as the patron saint of ecology.

Not many folks would understand Renaud's verses here. It's not even standard French...

This may be a bit easier to follow. Must be the only pop song mentioning Derrida.

Je suis africain - Rachid Taha

Je suis Africain
Africain du Nord au Sud
Je suis Africain
Dedans comme dehors

Je suis Africain
Je n’ai pas le rythme dans la peau
Je suis Africain
Un albinos afro

Africain
J’aime, j’aime l’Afrique
Africain
Fantasmagorique
Africain
De New York au Congo
Africain
Dieu a la même peau

Je suis Africain
De Paris à Bamako
Je suis Africain
Du Fuji au Kilimandjaro

Mandela ?
Africain !
La Kahina ?
Africain !
Malcom X ?
Africain !
Kateb Yacine ?
Africain !
Jimi Hendrix ?
Africain !
Jacques Derrida ?
Africain !
Angela Davis ?
Africain !
Frantz Fanon ?
Africain !
Lumumba ?
Africain !
Sankara ?
Africain !
Bob Marley ?
Africain !
Hampâté Bâ ?
Africain !
Aimé Césaire ?
Africain !
Rachid Taha ?
Africain !

This raises the possibility or probability that the participants in Jesus’ last supper, for example, took their meal in a “Greek-style”, reclining position rather than sitting on chairs. — Apollodorus

So it's important in terms of the history of furniture?

In effect, Renard is Renaud's demon.

The French text is much better than my translation, BTW. He writes in thick Parisian slang, and I learnt English in books. I don't speak any English slang.

I was somewhat less interested in ecclesiastic history when I visited Assisi than I am now. I remember the basilica was beautiful. A missed opportunity for my spiritual education I guess.

Renaud wrote about his own two sides in the following song, implying that we are all part Dr Jekyll, part Mister Hyde. He has indeed two distinct styles: one ultra-sarcastic, and one very romantic.

"Renard" means "fox". "Gainsbare" is a nickname for Gainsbourg's seedy side. Dominique is Renaud's ex-wife.


Doctor Renaud, Mister Renard

As there were Gainsbourg and Gainsbare
There's Renaud and the Renard
Renaud drinks only water
While the Renard runs on Ricard.
One side white, one side black
No one is just ugly or beautiful
Half angel, and half asshole
That's what we gonna see...

Renard is a hellish drinker
Renaud is as sober as a sparrow
When Renaud goes to bed
Renard collapses in the gutter.
Renaud is afraid of smoking joints
Because they make you stupid
Renard rolls them up just fine
To blow away his skull.

Renaud tries - it's his job
To write nice little stories
To touch his audience
And amuse the kids.
At the tip of his pen,
Renard only finds clichés
Dark thoughts inspired by gloom
And paranoia.

Renaud suffers all the ills
Endured in this barbaric world
He carries them
Like a cross on his back.
But the biggest injustice
Only makes the cynic Renard laugh.
He snides at this whole mess
If the whole world would die tomorrow
Renard would rather rejoice.

Renaud chose the guitar
And poetry and words
As somehow ridiculous weapons
To castigate all the bastards.
Renard - it's his anarchist side
Spits on all the ideals
He can't care less
For the most beautiful deed

Renaud should be praised
Because in love - and that his pride
He is as tender as a lamb
For one single story.
Renard rubs himself against all flesh
And only has one-night stands
With the ugly and the cute
Renard is quite the little pervert.

As they both turned 50,
Despair is growing and
Renard is bound to take over Renaud.
Today, he lost his love
His beautiful Dominique
She leaves the villain Renard
But will always love Renaud.

People, including Jews, communicate and share ideas, beliefs, and customs. A Jewish artisan from Nazareth could perfectly well have discussed things with his Greek patrons in the nearby town of Sepphoris — Apollodorus

This assumes quite a lot, for instance that Greeks were likely to patronize Jewish carpenters at the time, in spite of all the hatred and prejudice on both sides.

And what is the advantage of this hypothesis? What does it explain better than the "zero hypothesis" that our favorite Galilean carpenter spoke only his mother tongue? What does a polyglot Jesus bring to the table?

Don't you just love being both? :halo: et :naughty: — Amity

You know me well...

I visited Assisi once but I know very little about St Francis, still.

Not if he had no business with the Kittim. You learn a language for a reason. Jews in the diaspora had very good reasons to learn Greek, but not those in Palestine.
— Olivier5

What? You did say that there were Greek-speaking Palestinian Jews, didn't you? — Apollodorus

No, I did not say any such thing. But I suppose those Palestinian Jews who needed to learn Greek for their dealing with the Greeks might gave gone through the trouble of learning it.

People don't learn languages for no reason, you see? How many languages have you learnt just because you could?

he could have been one of them — Apollodorus

Not if he had no business with the Kittim. You learn a language for a reason. Jews in the diaspora had very good reasons to learn Greek, but not those in Palestine.

I don't know why people keep on looking for Greek influences on Jesus. A more useful line of analysis takes a longer historical view, and look at the influence of the Persian Zoroastre on Jewish religious development, from the times of Cyrus to the 1st century.

Consider the "two powers in heavens" heresy within Judaism. In a now famous book, Alan Segal demonstrated that this belief was widespread among Jews and even some rabbis by the first century, and may have been a catalyst for the Jewish rejection of early Christianity, when ultimately the rabbis rejected "Binitarianism". In this view, god has two sides: a good one and a bad one. In other similar views, the demiurge or prince of this world is not the god who created the world (who is good), but a bad god. Like Sheitan if you prefer. This maps well with Jesus' tendencies to reject this world as inherently corrupt, and the Devil as dwelling in it.

if there were Greek-speaking Palestinian Jews in the 2nd century, there is no reason why there couldn’t have been Greek-speaking Palestinian Jews a few decades earlier, in the time of Jesus. — Apollodorus

Of course there were. But it does not follow that Jesus was one of them.

Without judgment social structure would crumble. I do keep to the law, because I fear the punishment after breaking it. — god must be atheist

I am all for the law and its application. Attempts at self-righteous lynching is what I object to.

If Aramaic was the sole (or even main) language spoken and written in Roman Palestine, why would anyone turn to the Greek LXX instead of Aramaic or Hebrew texts? — Apollodorus

They wouldn't, not in 1st century Palestine, but a century later, when Greek speakers wrote the story, they used the LXX to check that they had the quotes right.

The scrolls used by religious leaders during that period of time were always in Hebrew, not Aramaic. It would have been sacrilege to any Jew to "quote" scripture only after translating it into the common tongue. Even today Yiddish is used to speak but Hebrew is used in prayer and worship. — SkyLeach

That is simply not true. Targumin existed for a reason, and they were not sacrilegious. Or not too much, not anymore than the Septuagint...

Jesus read the Tanak in Aramaic. Like everybody at the time.

Note that modern Israelis speak Hebrew. Nobody speaks Yiddish anymore.

don't think somehow that forgiveness and redemption could be enforced. It is great to have it. My uncle has it — god must be atheist

It's great to have if you want to be able to move on, and not let your life get dragged by endless grudges.

Small damages are forgiven, large ones are punished... — god must be atheist

And once punished, large damages too are forgiven. Otherwise, people's life is finished as soon as they are found guilty of one single offence.

Justice is somewhat different from your average mob viciousness. It's imperfect, complicated and slow, because it must consider the rights of the accused.

Literally every time he quoted scripture. You do know that all the gospels are written in Greek? Every time Jesus quoted the Torah it was a word-for-word quote from the Septuagint. — SkyLeach

Right. But that could be simply because the writers checked on the source they had access to while writing the gospels.

There is no evidence (at least that I'm aware of) that he ever quoted Hebrew.

He spoke Aramaic.

It is perfectly fine to discard views you don't like, as long as you know why you don't like them. We all do that. You can't force me to listen to Trump. But what defines cancelling is the attempt to prevent access to the public space to views we don't like. Or if you prefer, it is an attempt to stop other people than oneself from listening to views that they might like, but one doesn't like. If I was foolish enough to try to silence Trump, that'd be an attempted cancelling.

Hence the cancelers would lack the capacity to suffer that opinions they don't like will be expressed publicly.

The question is whether or not all opinions should have access to the public space, or do some opinions deserve to be shunned? If yes, where do you draw the line?

I would think that, whereas public opinion can sway and is easy to influence, the law of the land ought to define unambiguously which opinions can be expressed, and which cannot, and for what reasons.

Why should there be charity? Can you provide an argument for charity? — baker

Because nobody's perfect. Errare humanum est. When YOU make a mistake, do you prefer it not when people show a little charity? Or do you prefer to be treated without mercy?

Judge not, least you be judged.

Another argument is that, without things like forgiveness and redemption, societies tend to accumulate hatred until people kill one another.

Yeshua quoted the septuagent — SkyLeach

Where?

Social media definitely makes the shunning much easier, like an acceleration of social dynamics — InvoluntaryDecorum

Yes, it makes lynching quite tempting, even righteous.

think people are more and more actually organising. Unions, activism etc. And we can look at separate cases and find fault with some of them but I'm pretty confident that by-and-large what is happening is for the good. — Benkei

I don't know. What I see is a lot of folks getting a kick out of behaving all judgmental on others, and doing so in a mindless mob-like manner. What I miss is a sense of charity.

Granted that there are millions of assholes out there. Granted that it's a market of ideas and that we consume what we want to. I 'cancel' a lot of people myself that way: I don't watch movies with Steven Seagal, I don't listen to Beyonce, I don't read Naipaul or Heidegger, etc. They are dorks in my book. But I don't go around campaigning against them. I am not wearing my canceled list on my sleeve as a badge of honor.

I suppose the problem with throngs of folks angrily pursuing social justice over the interwebs is that things are often more complicated than most people think.

Take the curious case of the cancelation of Victor Arnautoff's murals at San Francisco's George Washington High School. The murals portray George Washington as a slave owner and a colonialist. They were made by a communist painter during the New Deal. They have historical, political and esthetic value. But the “Life of Washington” was hidden behind solid wood panels because it 'triggered' someone...

By and large, so-called cancel culture only concerns people with a significant social media exposure, who tend to care for their online or public profile, who gamble on twitter. If you don't care too much for these things it does not affect you. It's perfectly possible to cancel the cancelers. That's what Woody Allen has done for years.

Welcome back, man. I liked that!

Blick Bassy - Mpodol



Heard this song and found it real nice. Though I don't have the lyrics, it seems pretty deep. Below is an interview the author gave about it.


With the album 1958, Blick Bassy worked on the historical figure of Ruben Um Nyobè, known as Mpodol, the central figure of the UPC (Union des Populations du Cameroun). This political party was founded in 1948 and banned in 1955. It opposed the colonial organisation and then the governance favoured by the French state which, under the guise of independence, organised a system, later called Françafrique, in which it retained its political and economic interests. Resistance fighters and their supporters were fought with terror, lies and blood.

What motivated you to work on this subject?

Blick Bassy: I was born and raised in Cameroon. In our school books it was said that Ruben Um Nyobè was a terrorist, but when I went back to my village, close to Boumnyebel where he was killed [on 13 September 1958], everyone claimed his heritage. Between the terrorist in the school books and the village where he was an example for everyone, it was complicated for me. My mother lived for two years in the forest with my grandfather. They lived a few kilometres from Boumnyebel, in the area where the maquisards were. As all the adults were tortured because they were suspected of knowing where they were, they fled. When my mother told this story, it was like a kind of tale for me and when I grew up I wanted to make a tribute.

I felt a kind of unease too, wondering what it meant to be from Cameroon because Cameroonians never thought of this. All their political, economic, cultural or educational models have nothing to do with their reality, their traditions or even their ecosystem. I grew up in this space where everything is conditioned so that when you become an adult, you want to go and see the original model, because the environment is a kind of a fake little France, made up in a hurry. Moreover, it's a kind of prison from which, if you want to get out, you need a visa, which you can't be sure of getting even if you have the necessary money. When you look closer, you realise that the port or the airport are managed by foreigners and that the president of Cameroon is also protected by foreigners. We are told that this is our country, but it is the foreigners who live best in this space that is supposed to be the place of our emancipation.

I realised that all the people of my generation or those before me felt a kind of malaise, almost an identity crisis. Who are we really? It is very complicated because we are in a kind of machine in which we try to have an existence that has nothing to do with reality. While asking myself these questions I thought that I had to go back to the source to understand what was going on and I stopped on this character of Mpodol. It reminded me of everything that had happened with my mother's story, knowing that my father was on the other side because he was in the police force with the French, so he took part in the hunt for those who were called maquisards. This family situation was complex.

When I went back up, I discovered all this, I went to question many people in Cameroon, my grandfather told me about it in a whisper because he was still afraid that they would come and get him.

Beyond the fact that Ruben was fighting to be free, he was already raising issues that are still very present today, whether it be gender equality, equal pay, the right to work and to be paid as one should. He also spoke about segregation and even about what some people call anti-white racism, or about tribalism which is very strong in Cameroon today. He was someone who had an amazing vision and intelligence. In my own way, I had to bring this story back to the table, because we Cameroonians still haven't come to terms with it all. We have not stopped, we have always continued to move forward in this sort of corridor in which the colonial power put us, and we are moving forward without knowing where it all leads.

https://www.auxsons.com/focus/lhistoire-longtemps-cachee-du-cameroun-contemporain/

Daniel Wallace has praised Ehrman as "one of North America's leading textual critics"

He is considered one of the best specialists of that period in the English-speaking world.

When exactly was the Jewish Canon actually formalized or closed? I’ve heard that the Council of Jamnia in the 2nd century was the official date but some scholars debate this. — Dermot Griffin

Yes, the canon was set in Jamnia, which is widely seen as the birth date of modern rabbinical judaism. But the text itself in a fully vocalized and punctuated version (the masorah) was only finalized in the 10th century.

My naked body on the floor
I’ve hurt myself for years
My hand on my eyes
Don't want to remove it
Yet there’s no place for the weak
There's no place for regrets
My heart on the floor
Stand up, don't be a fool

I've got those noises in my head and I want it to stop but in vain oooh
I open my eyes a little, colors, photos come back to me oooh
All these noises in my head must stop

I lost my mind
Where is the way home?
Come what may
I will find the keys to reason
I lost my head
Where is the way home?
Come what may
Come what may...

I don't care if people stare at me
Who are they to judge me?
Father forgive me, yeah
Insolent, I was
In my brother's eyes
My slaps, he received more than once
And on my mother's cheeks
Rivers flowed...

I've got those noises in my head and I want it to stop but in vain, oh
I open my eyes a little, colors, photos come back to me, oh
All these noises in my head must stop

I lost my mind
Where is the way home?
Come what may
I will find the keys to reason
I lost my head
Where is the way home?
Come what may
Come what may...