took me a while to get to it, but very worth it: this was very good. it always seemed to me that the picture of the Greeks as rational-metaphysical and the Hebrews as prophetic-mythic was extremely reductive (if nothing else because even Plato attributes so much of Greek knowledge to the Egyptians which are probably the most mytho-poetic society ever). this is a good foot in the door for the bridging. I think these three cultures (Hebrew, Greek and Egyptian) are, in fact, only one - and the separation is really a modern idea more than anything else.
“We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word (in Greek Logos) of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably (according to Logos) are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them...”
and of course, Augustine’s famous statement as to the anterior unity of religions in Truth corroborates your position, “The Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist; from the beginning of the human race until the time when Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed began to be called Christianity.”
regarding testaments to the One True Religion, there are perhaps as many as our intelligence admits of interpretation of, but I would like to identify four:
I think all the myths of the world speak of something similar and they are to be counted among the testaments too. you read the Shabaka stone, for example, and its Genesis (but clearer - as in the Book of Abraham, for example). which came first? I tend to think they all came at the same time. likewise, so many cosmogonies speak of heavenly parents, and of creation by the dismemberment of a god - does this not reminds us of 'the lamb slain from the beginning'? the problem I am becoming awakened to lately is that these are then 'rationalized', interpreted-away by later commentators. I would include in these latter the Upanishads in relation to the early Vedas, the Greek philosophers (some of them at least, or parts of them), the Christian theologians, the Jewish schoolmen, etc. a flight to abstraction. I can't do it anymore. Plato, IMO, inhabited an in-between world of these two scenes. but for my temperament, I find myself more at home in the fragments of Heraclitus. I wish we had the rest - though maybe we do, in the Tao Te Ching.
took me a while to get to it, but very worth it: this was very good. it always seemed to me that the picture of the Greeks as rational-metaphysical and the Hebrews as prophetic-mythic was extremely reductive (if nothing else because even Plato attributes so much of Greek knowledge to the Egyptians which are probably the most mytho-poetic society ever). this is a good foot in the door for the bridging. I think these three cultures (Hebrew, Greek and Egyptian) are, in fact, only one - and the separation is really a modern idea more than anything else.
Justin Martyr wrote, in the 2nd century,
“We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word (in Greek Logos) of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably (according to Logos) are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them...”
and of course, Augustine’s famous statement as to the anterior unity of religions in Truth corroborates your position, “The Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist; from the beginning of the human race until the time when Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed began to be called Christianity.”
regarding testaments to the One True Religion, there are perhaps as many as our intelligence admits of interpretation of, but I would like to identify four:
Old Testament
New Testament
Greek Philosophy
The First Testament, which is The Book of Nature
I think all the myths of the world speak of something similar and they are to be counted among the testaments too. you read the Shabaka stone, for example, and its Genesis (but clearer - as in the Book of Abraham, for example). which came first? I tend to think they all came at the same time. likewise, so many cosmogonies speak of heavenly parents, and of creation by the dismemberment of a god - does this not reminds us of 'the lamb slain from the beginning'? the problem I am becoming awakened to lately is that these are then 'rationalized', interpreted-away by later commentators. I would include in these latter the Upanishads in relation to the early Vedas, the Greek philosophers (some of them at least, or parts of them), the Christian theologians, the Jewish schoolmen, etc. a flight to abstraction. I can't do it anymore. Plato, IMO, inhabited an in-between world of these two scenes. but for my temperament, I find myself more at home in the fragments of Heraclitus. I wish we had the rest - though maybe we do, in the Tao Te Ching.