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Post by joustos on Nov 17, 2020 16:07:54 GMT
References: The Nicene Creed, Greek-English; Latin-English: om/2015/05/04/creedof… ,wordpress.com/2019/11...
In 325 A.D., emperor Constantine (who had adopted the Christian faith) called for a council of theologians, because of a controversy that split the Church [the assembly of the believers in Christ] between Arians and Trinitarians [which I am not going to discuss here].The council concluded its disputes by issuing a summary of supposedly true propositions which every Christian (and aspirant to be a member of the Church) should believe and so declare. They are the tenets or dogmas of the Christian faith that characterize a Christian to this day. (Denying any of them implies being an heretic and, in medieval Rome, being subject to capital punishment, such as being burnt alive. In old Catholic England, heretics were baffled, that is, hung by one foot until they died. I will not discuss any further the glories of the Catholic inquisitions in Spain and elsewhere.)
Now, I ask myself, on what basis did those theologians (mostly Greek and some Romans)arrive at their TRUE propositions? They did not say, but, judging from the contents of the Creed, I can see that their basis was: the Gospels (the biographies of Jesus, written in Greek), the Hebrew Bible (which the Christians had adopted and had been translated in Greek and in Latin), St. Paul's letters, the so-called Apostles' Creed (which had been composed probably in the 2nd century A.D.), and, last but not least, some traditional Greek pagan beliefs.{To be continued} |
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Post by joustos on Nov 17, 2020 17:26:37 GMT
[continuation; Page 2] The ancient Greeks believed that when people died and were buried wentto Hades, the underworld kingdom of Hades or of Plutos. Therein, they were judged and sent to either Tartarus [the pit of Hell] or to The Elysium, which, for the Christians was Heaven [the Sky or Paradise, or the Kingdom of God -- after the earth's cataclysm and Final Judgment by Jesus. It isn't clear to me exactly WHAT went to Hades, since the buried body remained in the grave. At least, for the Orphics, death implies the separation of a man's body and soul, wherefore what went to Hades must be the soul. However, in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, he went to retrieve her in her entirety, for, having looked at her, she dropped back into Hades; souls are not visible. Now, after Jesus died and was buried, he went to Hades or "ad inferos" ['among the ones below' as the Latin Apostles' Creed says], but since his corpse remained in the tomb, only his soul must have gone thither, yet he was not judged and dispatched to heaven, for his entire self was resurrected and on his way to Emmaus, he was still so badly injured that he was not recognized by apostles of his; only later on did he ascend to heaven. All this implies that Jesus was truly a man (not a phantom),as he, like other humans, was composed of body and soul. {This was against Arius, but HOLD ON for a moment.} The Greek Nicene Creed I was trying to post does not say that, after burial, he descended to Hades, whereas the Latin Apostles' Creed says that he went ad inferos" {to the ones below -- to Inferno/Hades}. I wander whether the original Greek text has been expurgated and for what purpose. Anyway, the Nicene Creed clearly state that Jesus was God and, hence, both human and divine: He, God's only begotten son, was/is God from God, Light from Light, conceived by he Holy Spirit in virgin Mary. { I think this is an heretical position, as I will explain.} |
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Post by joustos on Nov 17, 2020 22:05:16 GMT
[continuation; Page 3] According to my interpretation of John the evangelist, the Council theologians either misunderstood John or simply did not take his account literally, for the ancient Greek mind had a strong propensity for PROSOPOPOEIA (Personification),that is, for turning abstractions or qualities of a subject into persons. For instance, divine retribution,Nemesis,was conceived as a goddess who held a whip. The gathering of clouds that resulted in thunders, lightnings, and rain was conceived as a god, Zeus. Zeus' wisdom was conceived as a goddess that emerged out of his head (namely Athena). When the Christians replaced Zeus by Yahweh, whom they called simply God -- Ho Theo`s, they simply called His wisdom Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), to which or whom they dedicated a temple in Constantinople. {Meanwhile notice that the gods came into being after humans invented their own language. Anaximander's philosophy became possible after verbal nouns, such as "physis" were forged. We can say that, before anything else, was the Language or the Word. And notice the correspondence between the Latin Personi-fication and the Greek Prosopo(n)-poeia.} Now, John the evangelist unwittingly personifies God's LOGOS, that is, Reason, since he adopted Heraclitus' word (LOGOS), which is the power in the world of flux that organizes the flux, wherefore the world is cosmic rather than chaotic. (You remember the Biblical account: There was chaos, but God set everything in order, separated water from dry land, etc.) As John said hat God created all things through/according to the Logos, Platonic theologians took Logos to mean the Eide/Ideas/Typesof things which were going to be created. Whatever the interpretation, the fact remains that for John the Logos is a Person, not a mere fixture of God. And then he proceeds to say that the Logos was with God, was God, and that the Logos became (human) flesh. Putting two and two together, theologians saw that the Logos as that was incarnated in May -- which an angel announced to Mary. Thus, Jesus of Nazareth inherited his divine nature from his father, and his human nature from his mother. On the contrary, the Nicene Creed declares that the Holy Breath/Spirit [whereby Yahweh had made a statue alive, namely Adam] conceived Jesus in/out of the virgin Mary, not that God or Logos or Spirit became flesh. So, in no sense of the word, was Jesus also a god or divine in nature. Therefore, the attribution of consubstantiality does not make sense, since Jesus was not a divine person and a human person to begin with. The Nicene Creed must be considered heretical, if we accept John's Gospel. [Of course, for the Creed to be able to introduce the Holy Spirit as a divine person, the Biblical God's vivifying Breath had to be personified -- in typical Greek fashion. The Greek Gospels writers, or the Greek writer of a Proto-Euaggelion, also made Jesus at the Last Supper talk in the manner of Dionysos and of the Eleusinian Demeter: … my blood...my body...] // Glory be to the ancient Greeks and their inventions.
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Post by joustos on Nov 18, 2020 4:14:56 GMT
[continuation; Page 4: a linguistic footnote] Above I already pointed to the correspondence between the Greek Proposon--- and the Latin Personi-(fication). However, I should mention that some European linguists traced the Lat."persona" to the Etruscan word "pherson", which means "mask". I do not know which word derived from which word, but I just found these ancient Greek words that can be the direct or indirect bases of the aforementioned Latin and Etruscan words (Cf.: Liddell-Scott Etymological Dictionary): Prosopon [proso-ops-on] = face, visage, countenance; Lat. Vultus (the look of a face). Prosopeion = mask [Italian Ma`skera]; a character/personage of a drama. In my native Magna- Graecian dialect, "i [hoi] ma`shkari" = the masked characters in a carnival celebration. Prosopopeiia [the mentioned Prosopopoeia] = the personification of an abstract idea or of a quality of a substance. In my own extensive studies I found that Latin and Etruscan words can be traced back to ancient Greek, and so can many words of the Indo-European languages and Pre-Semitic Mideastern words. Apparently the Greek race and culture originated in the Fertile Crescent, south of the Caucasus.
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Post by joustos on Nov 18, 2020 21:58:29 GMT
[Page 5; continuation of a linguistic footnote]
So, we know what the ancient Greeks called that which we call Mask or Machera, but certainly "Mask" is not a cognate of Prosopon or Prosopeion. Is "Mask" an aboriginal word, or does it come from some non-Greek word? (The same question applies to the Germanic cognates of "Mask" as well as the Late Latin "Mascha" and its cognates.
I found the spelling of this Latin word intriguing, since a plain C (or K) would have sufficed. Indeed, -CH- was traditionally used to transliterate the Greek letter Chi/Khi, which looks like X. So, I wandered, Is there such a Greek word as *masXa? Back to Liddell-Scott.No luck; however I found some interesting related words:
masXaliaia = an ornament of a column. [It usually was a branch or wreath of leaves, such as laurel leaves.]
masXalion = a basket of palm fronds. In the old days, especially before the age of Pottery, the Greeks constructed wicker baskets, by interweaving fronds or twigs, and mats by interweaving reeds/canes with vertical slices of reeds.
The actors of Greek dramas used to wear masks, but usually they were not simple flexible face-covers; they had a cap that featured hair or, as some mosaics show, leaves. Thus they were actually hemi-baskets and might have been called by the name of MASXALION, rather that simply by PROSOPEION. So, whereas some tribes preserved the use of the latter term, most of more ancient tribes preserved the former term. { Now we know what "masX-" denotes, but we do not know what it originally denoted or meant. Possibly an animal face mask which hunters used to approach a herd of animals so as not to disturb them and to make them easy pray for the bow and arrow. Possibly scary ornaments of battle helmets.} The End.
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