No Hell

[Pure]

I do see your point, Colly, that 'witnessing' (proclaiming the Gospel) could have adverse effects (i.e., the receiver ends up damned for rejecting it).

One could argue that you're merely increasing the stakes by your act: He'll either be gloriously saved or ignominiously damned. Valhalla or the electric chair, one might say.

The problem, however, is that this 'official position' allows that, *if he hears nothing* he may receive executive clemency (and get to heaven).

You might say, then, that he's only up on a 'jaywalking' charge when you appear, and that he'll get off with a wrist slap and a free Valhalla pass by default.

By raising the stakes so that 'eternal punishment/separation/death' may ensue [as one possibility] you are arguably doing a disservice. The only exception being where you are absolutedly sure that your message will be received and acted upon.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

I do see your point, Colly, that 'witnessing' (proclaiming the Gospel) could have adverse effects (i.e., the receiver ends up damned for rejecting it).

One could argue that you're merely increasing the stakes by your act: He'll either be gloriously saved or ignominiously damned. Valhalla or the electric chair, one might say.

The problem, however, is that this 'official position' allows that, *if he hears nothing* he may receive executive clemency (and get to heaven).

You might say, then, that he's only up on a 'jaywalking' charge when you appear, and that he'll get off with a wrist slap and a free Valhalla pass by default.

By raising the stakes so that 'eternal punishment/separation/death' may ensue [as one possibility] you are arguably doing a disservice. The only exception being where you are absolutedly sure that your message will be received and acted upon.

that was always my perception. My witness puts someone in the position of no longer having the excuse of never having heard. It always seemed to me that that put a huge amount of responsibility on me to really sell Jesus. that's a responsibility I didn't want and one I didn't ask for when I was saved.

By default then, I am not very apostolic and have always been the one who heavily questions her religion and its tenets. My religion, in return, has morphed into something more personal and heartfelt than anything I ever gained at revival.

In a roundabout way, this leads back to the original question. I would never have started down the path to this comfortable place if I had not been scared of hellfire and eternal damnation. those things are no longer the focus of my belief, but they were the genisis and for that reason, I don't have the problem with hell some do.

AS i mentioned to lucky, I'm not a good speaker for the need for hell, since my own religion is bound up by the concept as primary mover in me finding religion in the first place.

 

[Pure]

Is Hell necessary?

The gospel assembly commentary whose url was posted by English Lady has some important, and I think true points:

Ancient Israel conceived of a place called Sheol, a dark and gloomy place, to be sure, but no elements of punishment were attached to it. […]

The modern Western understanding of hell derives from the latest period in ancient Israel's history, and it was more fully developed by early Christianity. The chief suggestion of such a place in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) is a brief reference in Daniel. The place reserved for the wicked dead was called Gehenna by Jews. Early references depict it as a place of temporary punishment, similar to the Roman Catholic purgatory.

By the time Christianity was established, it had become a permanent abode. The torments inflicted there were largely imaginative projections of the worst tortures devised in this world. Eternal fire is the most common punishment, though perpetual cold also has been accepted.

There is no fully developed teaching about hell in the New Testament, though there are frequent mentions of it. Only in the course of later church history was it elaborated into official church doctrine. Today the New Testament statements and their later explanations are taken literally by some Christians, regarded as allegory or myth by some, and denied altogether by others.

----
My comment: So it's clear the the whole OT framework of law, as in the 10C (Exodus) and the other laws of Deuteronomy and Leviticus was not linked to a 'hell' concept--an afterlife place of eternal punishment. One might ask, why?

IT may be simplistic, but one answer may be that it was thought that, in general, those who follow God's laws have a good life, or at least an honorable death.

Certainly there are abundant examples, in the prophets, e.g., Isaiah, of (Israel) 'straying' from God's commandments and ending in dire straits, defeat in battle, captivity or desolation.

Second, it's clear there is more focus on Israel as a corporate body, than on the individual. IOW while occasionally a Joseph Cohen (Blow) does rather poorly, the nation as a whole flourishes in following God's commandments.

The doctrine's main support comes from a passage in Daniel, a late book. And there is intertestamental literature like the book of Enoch.

It follows that, what Jesus has to work with and to quote --HIS scripture-- is not very much based on hell. OR, to the degree it was, 'hell' (gehenna) was a temporary place of torment for the worst offenders, so far as we can tell.

"By the time Christianity was established", of course, must refer to 300 or so years later that Jesus' time. In any case, the writer is clear on the difference between 'church doctrine' and what's actually in the NT ("no fully developed teaching").

 

[dr_mabeuse]

My comment: So it's clear the the whole OT framework of law, as in the 10C (Exodus) and the other laws of Deuteronomy and Leviticus was not linked to a 'hell' concept--an afterlife place of eternal punishment. One might ask, why?

IT may be simplistic, but one answer may be that it was thought that, in general, those who follow God's laws have a good life, or at least an honorable death.

The oldest parts of the OT were never intended to teach ethics or morality. They were purely nationalistic documents written down to give Israel a sense of history and foster the idea of nationhood and specialness as God's chosen people. That's why the harshest penalty for breaking God's laws in the OT is not damnation, but banishment from the Kingdom of Israel. That's also one of the reasons why there's so much blatant immorality in the OT that goes unpunished. They weren't concerned with morality. They were concerned with Hero stories.

The oldest authors of the OT are known as the Yahwist (called 'J') and the Elohist (E). they can be distinquished by differences in style and subject and by whether they refer to God as Yahweh or Elohim. J wrote from Israel, probably in Jerusalem, and E wrote from Judah, probably in Shechem. They wrote the same basic stories, but each tried to make the other look bad by insulting the other's special heros, which is another reason why you see immoral and insulting behavior so frequently in the OT (Noah being drunk and naked in front of his children, Jacob swindling Esau, etc. etc. J and E were basically playing "Yo' Mama".) The two versions were combined or redacted around 440 BCE when the Jews came back to Jerusalem, and that's why there are so many duplications in the OT--2 stories of the creation, 2 versions of the 10 Commandments, etc. One's Israels' version and makes them look good, the other is Judah's and makes Judah look good.

The morality stuff was added later by two more authors: The Deuteronomist (D) and the Priestly source, or P. D put in al the pedigrees and 'begats', and P was concerned with maintaining the power and pretige of the Jewish priestly class and so has all this minutiae about ceremonies and rituals, which are intended to insure that the worshipper will have to go hire the services of a Priest if he ever wants to do things right.

The Old Testament Jews had no conception of an afterlife or heaven and hell. It just never occurred to them. Their idea of the Messiah was a military leader who'd restore the Kingdom of Israel on earth, not raise the dead. As I siad, their ultimate punishment was being cut off from the house of Israel. They borrowed the idea of an afterlife from the Greeks and Egyptians after the return from the Babylonian Captivity, and so it doesn't show up in any biblical texts until after about 400 BCE when Jews came in contact with classical Greek culture and others returned to the Holy Land from where they'd been hiding in Egypt. That's why you only see it in the later prophets like Daniel. Helenism had a profound effect on Judaism and the Jews incorporated a lot of Greek ideas into their religion, including reincarnation, which orthodox Judaism rejects but which is still present in certain Jewish mystical traditions, like Kabbalah.

The idea of an afterlife was a hot topic by the time of Christ though. Early Christianity's big rivals were Mithraism and the Cult of Isis, both of which were mystery religions promising an afterlife. It was natural that the early church fathers would incorporate these ideas into their fledgling religion, even though the gospel's endorsement is rather ambiguous at best.

 

[rgraham666]

P was concerned with maintaining the power and pretige of the Jewish priestly class and so has all this minutiae about ceremonies and rituals, which are intended to insure that the worshipper will have to go hire the services of a Priest if he ever wants to do things right.

Sounds like the computer world.

The computer is God. You, the user, do not talk to God. You talk to a priest (tech support, programmer etc.) and they talk to God on your behalf.

But you're not properly trained to understand the mysteries of God. And the priests like it that way.

 

[Sex and Death]

Them Bones

The oldest parts of the OT were never intended to teach ethics or morality. They were purely nationalistic documents written down to give Israel a sense of history and foster the idea of nationhood and specialness as God's chosen people. That's why the harshest penalty for breaking God's laws in the OT is not damnation, but banishment from the Kingdom of Israel. That's also one of the reasons why there's so much blatant immorality in the OT that goes unpunished. They weren't concerned with morality. They were concerned with Hero stories.

The oldest authors of the OT are known as the Yahwist (called 'J') and the Elohist (E). they can be distinquished by differences in style and subject and by whether they refer to God as Yahweh or Elohim. J wrote from Israel, probably in Jerusalem, and E wrote from Judah, probably in Shechem. They wrote the same basic stories, but each tried to make the other look bad by insulting the other's special heros, which is another reason why you see immoral and insulting behavior so frequently in the OT (Noah being drunk and naked in front of his children, Jacob swindling Esau, etc. etc. J and E were basically playing "Yo' Mama".) The two versions were combined or redacted around 440 BCE when the Jews came back to Jerusalem, and that's why there are so many duplications in the OT--2 stories of the creation, 2 versions of the 10 Commandments, etc. One's Israels' version and makes them look good, the other is Judah's and makes Judah look good.

The morality stuff was added later by two more authors: The Deuteronomist (D) and the Priestly source, or P. D put in al the pedigrees and 'begats', and P was concerned with maintaining the power and pretige of the Jewish priestly class and so has all this minutiae about ceremonies and rituals, which are intended to insure that the worshipper will have to go hire the services of a Priest if he ever wants to do things right.

The Old Testament Jews had no conception of an afterlife or heaven and hell. It just never occurred to them. Their idea of the Messiah was a military leader who'd restore the Kingdom of Israel on earth, not raise the dead. As I siad, their ultimate punishment was being cut off from the house of Israel. They borrowed the idea of an afterlife from the Greeks and Egyptians after the return from the Babylonian Captivity, and so it doesn't show up in any biblical texts until after about 400 BCE when Jews came in contact with classical Greek culture and others returned to the Holy Land from where they'd been hiding in Egypt. That's why you only see it in the later prophets like Daniel. Helenism had a profound effect on Judaism and the Jews incorporated a lot of Greek ideas into their religion, including reincarnation, which orthodox Judaism rejects but which is still present in certain Jewish mystical traditions, like Kabbalah.

The idea of an afterlife was a hot topic by the time of Christ though. Early Christianity's big rivals were Mithraism and the Cult of Isis, both of which were mystery religions promising an afterlife. It was natural that the early church fathers would incorporate these ideas into their fledgling religion, even though the gospel's endorsement is rather ambiguous at best.

Doc,

This is good sociological history, but it is socio-politically biased, as is its due. But why go no deeper?

My "historical" bias lies in the primacy of the (human) imagination. Show me the evidences of a people's imagination and I will show you what that people are conscious of and unconscious of, and what a people fear and what they love. But what a people believe or do not believe is no evidence of what is in the soul of a people. And what is in the soul of a people, the psyche of a people, is present whether a people acknowledge or recor dit or not.

It seems to me that the earliest burial remains of humans (6000+ years old), in which the skull and the long bones of the legs are painted with red ochre and crossed in an "X" either under the skull or through the eyes sockets of the skull, at least suggest, if not provide more than solid imaginal evidence, that the human imagination has long perceived something outside of, even greater than, material life. From a socio-political perpsective it may serve a particular culture or religion to either highlight or supress that bit o' the human soul (an afterlife), but whether an image is suppressed or is in the cultural consciousness (of which socio-political history is a record) doe snot impact the existence of an image (which we seem to be calling "ideas," in this case, Hell).

SD

 

[Pure]

Hi doc! (note to S&D)

doc said,

mab: The oldest parts of the OT were never intended to teach ethics or morality. They were purely nationalistic documents written down to give Israel a sense of history and foster the idea of nationhood and specialness as God's chosen people. That's why the harshest penalty for breaking God's laws in the OT is not damnation, but banishment from the Kingdom of Israel. That's also one of the reasons why there's so much blatant immorality in the OT that goes unpunished. They weren't concerned with morality. They were concerned with Hero stories.

The oldest authors of the OT are known as the Yahwist (called 'J') and the Elohist (E). they can be distinquished by differences in style and subject and by whether they refer to God as Yahweh or Elohim. J wrote from Israel, probably in Jerusalem, and E wrote from Judah, probably in Shechem. They wrote the same basic stories, but each tried to make the other look bad by insulting the other's special heros, which is another reason why you see immoral and insulting behavior so frequently in the OT (Noah being drunk and naked in front of his children, Jacob swindling Esau, etc. etc. J and E were basically playing "Yo' Mama".) The two versions were combined or redacted around 440 BCE when the Jews came back to Jerusalem, and that's why there are so many duplications in the OT--2 stories of the creation, 2 versions of the 10 Commandments, etc. One's Israels' version and makes them look good, the other is Judah's and makes Judah look good.

The morality stuff was added later by two more authors: The Deuteronomist (D) and the Priestly source, or P. D put in al the pedigrees and 'begats', and P was concerned with maintaining the power and pretige of the Jewish priestly class and so has all this minutiae about ceremonies and rituals, which are intended to insure that the worshipper will have to go hire the services of a Priest if he ever wants to do things right.

Reply: I was not mainly referring to the 'oldest parts', but to Deuteronomy and Leviticus. I am concerned with the 'morality stuff' (not the various mythic stories of Genesis) . If you wish to postulate a 'Deuteronomist' who put together Deuteronomy, fine.

I asked why this stuff isn't backed up with some kind of hell or afterlife penalty. My answer was posted, and I'd like to hear yours. Although there are minutiae of observance, granted, there are lots of good moral precepts in these books (and some not-so-good ones, e.g., against homosexual acts by men).

The 'two great commandments' Jesus mentions as summarizing or including all the others are simply taken from well known passages of Deuteronomy.

I would have to review some sources, but my impression agrees with the 'gospel assembly' writer's. There not a clear doctrine of 'hell' in the NT, and in Jesus teachings in particular. There is talk of 'hell', but as far as I can remember, no talk of a hot place of eternal punishment/torture (IOW, the later Christian Hell, as found in Dante).

Hence I proposed that Jesus likely agreed with the common Jewish conception of Gehinnon, a place reserved for the extremely wicked, and not necessarily permanent. To use an NT image, some persons are seeds that find the fertile ground, and the kingdom of heaven. Some fall on hard barren ground and do not root or sprout; they die. Such a negative consequence is enough to found the Xtian morality. Hell was developed out of some doctrines in works around the time of Christ, but developed and elaborated in the hundreds of years following. In a word, as the gospel assembly writer indicates, Christians' "Hell" is more Dante-esque, than strictly NT based.

That there are in the world some elaborated moral systems without a 'hell'--a place of eternal punishment-- shows that the concept is not a *necessary* motivator, though it provides drama. Further, as I've argued, though it *seems* to increase the stakes, all the hellfire seems to make little difference in motivating, for example, evangelical Xtians--who 'sin' at about the same rate as anyone else.
---

Note to S&D,
you make some good points, but I'm not claiming no concept of afterlife.
it's just that the ancient Jews, like the Greeks, had it be--if anything-- a sort of ghostly pallid existence (like the original Hades) in a kind of shadowland. not particularly fun, but no punishment or torture either, and the destination of all, or almost all persons.

 

[Sex and Death]

From Primordial Soup to Nuts

Pure,

You said Hell seems to increase the stakes.

I agree, It increases the stakes for those at a certain level of spiritual development. When I growl at my dog as he approaches the edge of the rug on which he likes to chew, he backs off.

All life moves through stages of development, and life in the spiritual arena is no different. Hell is a motivator for those that need it to be.

The stage of fear-based motivation is quite an early stage of development in any arena.

We each have areas where we are quite advanced and areas where we are basically still single-celled organisms swimming in the primordial slime simply eating and excreting.

Ain't life grand!

There but for the grace of God...

SD

 

[Sex and Death]

Pure wrote:
Note to S&D,
you make some good points, but I'm not claiming no concept of afterlife.
it's just that the ancient Jews, like the Greeks, had it be--if anything-- a sort of ghostly pallid existence (like the original Hades) in a kind of shadowland. not particularly fun, but no punishment or torture either, and the destination of all, or almost all persons.


Me:
Pure, thanks for the shoulder tap. This is an enjoyable dialogue.

If the fate of an ancient Greek soul was to be a shade in Hades forever, then I would agree with you, but...

Doc made a point about reincarnation being part of the ancient Greek psyche. Hades, for the ancient Greeks, was not simply a repository for souls whose bodies had expired. It was a kind of resevoir (Does that make Cerberus a Resevoir Dog?) where the shady soul-substance pooled until it was poured into another mold. Prior to being remolded, the soul-shade went before the 3 Fates, the Morai, to recieve it's worldly calling, or, to the Greeks, it's "virtue," in the form of a being called a "daimone" which lived in people's heads and did whatver was necessary to make people follow their calling and stick to their virtue. Finally, the refurbished soul was slipped through Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness, where memory of it's worldly calling was washed clean, and then sent onward to its new birth and life, its place, parents and body already having been chosen for it (the Greek idea of "fate" is quite different than our contemporary idea of fate as predestination without choice).

By the way, isn't it enthrallingly fun and interesting that "shade" and "Hades" share the same letters!

SD

 

[Colleen Thomas]

The oldest parts of the OT were never intended to teach ethics or morality. They were purely nationalistic documents written down to give Israel a sense of history and foster the idea of nationhood and specialness as God's chosen people. That's why the harshest penalty for breaking God's laws in the OT is not damnation, but banishment from the Kingdom of Israel. That's also one of the reasons why there's so much blatant immorality in the OT that goes unpunished. They weren't concerned with morality. They were concerned with Hero stories.

The oldest authors of the OT are known as the Yahwist (called 'J') and the Elohist (E). they can be distinquished by differences in style and subject and by whether they refer to God as Yahweh or Elohim. J wrote from Israel, probably in Jerusalem, and E wrote from Judah, probably in Shechem. They wrote the same basic stories, but each tried to make the other look bad by insulting the other's special heros, which is another reason why you see immoral and insulting behavior so frequently in the OT (Noah being drunk and naked in front of his children, Jacob swindling Esau, etc. etc. J and E were basically playing "Yo' Mama".) The two versions were combined or redacted around 440 BCE when the Jews came back to Jerusalem, and that's why there are so many duplications in the OT--2 stories of the creation, 2 versions of the 10 Commandments, etc. One's Israels' version and makes them look good, the other is Judah's and makes Judah look good.

The morality stuff was added later by two more authors: The Deuteronomist (D) and the Priestly source, or P. D put in al the pedigrees and 'begats', and P was concerned with maintaining the power and pretige of the Jewish priestly class and so has all this minutiae about ceremonies and rituals, which are intended to insure that the worshipper will have to go hire the services of a Priest if he ever wants to do things right.

The Old Testament Jews had no conception of an afterlife or heaven and hell. It just never occurred to them. Their idea of the Messiah was a military leader who'd restore the Kingdom of Israel on earth, not raise the dead. As I siad, their ultimate punishment was being cut off from the house of Israel. They borrowed the idea of an afterlife from the Greeks and Egyptians after the return from the Babylonian Captivity, and so it doesn't show up in any biblical texts until after about 400 BCE when Jews came in contact with classical Greek culture and others returned to the Holy Land from where they'd been hiding in Egypt. That's why you only see it in the later prophets like Daniel. Helenism had a profound effect on Judaism and the Jews incorporated a lot of Greek ideas into their religion, including reincarnation, which orthodox Judaism rejects but which is still present in certain Jewish mystical traditions, like Kabbalah.

The idea of an afterlife was a hot topic by the time of Christ though. Early Christianity's big rivals were Mithraism and the Cult of Isis, both of which were mystery religions promising an afterlife. It was natural that the early church fathers would incorporate these ideas into their fledgling religion, even though the gospel's endorsement is rather ambiguous at best.

Wow

Doc, if you weren't just pulling that from memory, do you mind letting me know where you got it? PM will do, I just find the history in those few passages fascinating

 

[mismused]

delete

 

[Selena_Kitt]

(Does that make Cerberus a Resevoir Dog?)

*groan*

Punny... very punny...

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Doc,

This is good sociological history, but it is socio-politically biased, as is its due. But why go no deeper?

My "historical" bias lies in the primacy of the (human) imagination. Show me the evidences of a people's imagination and I will show you what that people are conscious of and unconscious of, and what a people fear and what they love. But what a people believe or do not believe is no evidence of what is in the soul of a people. And what is in the soul of a people, the psyche of a people, is present whether a people acknowledge or recor dit or not.

It seems to me that the earliest burial remains of humans (6000+ years old), in which the skull and the long bones of the legs are painted with red ochre and crossed in an "X" either under the skull or through the eyes sockets of the skull, at least suggest, if not provide more than solid imaginal evidence, that the human imagination has long perceived something outside of, even greater than, material life. From a socio-political perpsective it may serve a particular culture or religion to either highlight or supress that bit o' the human soul (an afterlife), but whether an image is suppressed or is in the cultural consciousness (of which socio-political history is a record) doe snot impact the existence of an image (which we seem to be calling "ideas," in this case, Hell).

SD

For the record, the ideas I cited in my rambling discourse on the OT are lifted from a truly fascinating book called "Who Wrote the Bible?" by a professor at USC (I believe) named Friedman or Freidkin. He's a mainstream scholar and the book is a state-of-the-art summary of what we know and how we know it. I can't recommend it highly enough. A fascinating and jaw-dropping read if you;re a histoyr-of-religion freak.

Another good book is "The River Of God" that looks at the religious and philosphical ideas that were floating around the Holy Land at the time of Jesus' birth. The idea of an afterlife in which one was rewarded or punished was a hot topic then, and was really shaking up the religious establishments, not just the Jews, but Roman and Persian too.

So was the idea of the duality of good-evil/God-Devil, which seems to have come from Persian Zoroastrianism. We take it so much for granted now that it's hard to imagine there was a time when it was revolutionary. But that's another topic.

I hear what you're saying, SD (perfect name too, by the way ) and I agree. The idea of the continued existence of the soul after death seems pretty universal, and certainly goes back to the paleolithic, but I don't think you'll find much scroptural support for it in the OT. (In fact, I don't think the Jews had much to say about the whole idea of having an immortal soul as something existing apart from the body. I think that came later, but I might be wrong.)

The Jews borrowed a lot of their theology from the Masopotamians--Akkadians and Sumerians and Babylonians--and as far as I know, theses people were'nt big on an aftrelife either. I believe they had some sort of "realm of shades" underground, kind of like the Greeks, but there was no reward or punishment for one's earthly behavior. The Mesopotamians believed that man was created to be the gods' slave, and once you were too old to work, out with you. They had a very ugly theology if you ask me.

As an object lesson in the Jews' non-belief in heaven, I would cite the fact of the favorite Jewish prophet whose name I fucking forget! Jeremiah? Ezekial? (He's the one we leave a cup of wine for on the table during Passover for when he stops by.) The reason he's so important is because the OT specifically says that God took him up into heaven while he was still alive, and so it's presumed he's still up there with God, acting as a go-between. He's the only one in the OT t make it into God's presence.

If there were a Jewish afterlife, you'd think we'd be communing with Moses and Abraham and David and Solomon, Jewish heros and holy men who certainly would have earned a space up there on God's right hand, but we don't. They're all dead and gone and they aren't coming back, and so there's no sense waiting for them. That's pretty good de facto proof of the Jewish attitude concerning life after death. If Moses didn't make it to heaven, what are the odds the average Joe Cohen (to use Pure's term) would?

(By the way, Freidman's book also explains God's unconscionable treatment of Moses--having him die within sight of the promised land without letting him set foot in it, all because Moses hesitated when God told him to strike a rock with his staff to bring forth water. It seems Moses as ntional hero was resented by the Judahite priesthood, who favored their boy Aaron.)

Of course, things have changed now, and modern Jews commonly believe in heaven and hell, but back in OT times, no, I don't think they were much concerned with that.

And Rob, you hit it right on the head with the Jewish priests trying to turn themselves into sacred technicians. The Destruction of the temple in Jerusalem put them out of work and so they scrambled to survive by trying to turn themselves into a high-tech business. The Priestly texts in the OT are bewildering for a reason, just like computer manuals are today. They wanted to control the uplink to God to keep those offerings and shekels rolling in. "Need God? Call a Priest!" was their motto, the same attitude that Jesus came out against.

One last thing-- We should remember that Christ's divinity was not fully established until 325 AD at the Council of Nicea. Before that there was a lot of argument and disagreement over whether Jesus was a man who became divine, or whether he was created by God as a father creates a son, or whether he always existed along with God, or what.

The Arian heresy (which wasn't heresy at the time) held that Jesus was a man that became divine. They believed that if he was divine from the start then his suffering was only play-acting and had no meaning. The Arian heresy also had political ramifcations, as it meant that, like Jesus, man could have a direct link with God and bypass the Church hierarchy altogether. Needless to say, this wasn't a popular idea with churchmen.

The bishops Constantine assembled in Nicea had no trouble in declaring Arius a heretic and deciding that Christ was co-existent with the Father and Holy Spirit and always had been, and from that decision comes our modern ideas on Christ's divinity and the nature of the Trinity, ideas codified in the Nicean Creed.

Of such things are our religions made.

PS!! The prophet God took up into heaven alive was Elijah! Elijah. (Had a little brain fart there, I guess.) He's the one Jews treat as a messenger between God and man.

 

[hurricane64]

This is a fascinating thread. Lots to ruminate on.

The prophet taken up to heaven was Ezekiel, by the way.

 

[rgraham666]

Doc, your citing the birth of the Holy Trinity made me think of my favourite authour.

HOLY TRINITY - CHRISTIAN A pre-alchemist alchemist concept developed by early Christian administrators to soften the hard-edged simplicity of straight monotheism.

The three in one/one in three mystery of Father, Son and Holy Ghost made tritheism official. The subsequent almost-deification of the Virgin Mary made it quatrotheism. Twelve Disciples made it sextusdecitheism. Finally, cart-loads of saints raised to quarter-deification turned Christianity into plain old-fashioned polytheism. By the time of the Crusades it was the most polytheistic around with the possible exception of Hinduism. This untenable contradiction between the assertion of monotheism and the reality of polytheism was dealt with by accusing other religions of the Christian fault. The Church - Catholic and later Protestant - turned aggressively on the two most clearly monotheistic religions in view - Judaism and Islam - and persecuted them as heathen or pagan.

The external history of Christianity consists largely of accusations that other religions rely on the worship of more than one god and therefore not the true God. These pagans must therefore be converted, conquered and/or killed for their own good in order that they may benefit from the singularity of the Holy Trinity, plus appendages.

John Ralston Saul - The Doubter's Companion

I love his ironic attitude.

He also wrote on the post Christian Holy Trinity; organisation, technology and information.

And the late 20th Century Holy Trinity; competition, efficiency and the market-place.

In much the same vein.

 

[Pure]

good posting, mab,

the good folks die, and that's it, or alternatively live as shades in "Sheol"
(also translated as 'hell' in KJV).

so if some 'hell' (as hot place of eternal torture) ideas were around in Yeshua's time (in Daniel and the Book of Enoch), what is his conception of it? he speaks of hell's fire, if Mark, Matt, and Luke can be trusted.

possibly, then, he 'bought' the idea of Gehinnon (Gehenna in Greek, translated 'hell' in KJV). this was a place where the extremely bad folks 'went', as it were, and were burnt up--i.e., destroyed. the idea of eternal punishment in burning without being consumed is more an idea of later Christians. that is my speculation. what is yours?

----
ADDED: Regarding Elijah. There is at least one other ancient person said NOT to have died--Enoch. (Note: I gather the Muslims believe that Jesus did not die on the cross, but was taken up into heaven.)

Gen 5:18 And Jared lived an hundred sixty and two years, and he begat Enoch:
5:19 And Jared lived after he begat Enoch eight hundred years, and begat sons and daughters:

5:20 And all the days of Jared were nine hundred sixty and two years: and he died. Jared lived 962 years.
5:21 And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah:

5:22 And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters:
5:23 And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years:

5:24 And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.

 

[mismused]

delete

 

[hurricane64]

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II Kings, 2:11 refer Elijah.

The Chariot is most likely from Ezekiel, but Ezekiel's had no horses that I can remember. Don't think Ezekiel was taken up, but I could be wrong.

No, you're right. It was Elijah. The chariot memory threw me.

So much for my memory and my recollection of Bible history from my early days.

Nice catch.