Saturday, December 4, 2021

The inevitable question

Is Christianity a voodoo? a pagan religion with a few terms swapped out?

What looks like polytheism in Trinitarian Christianity wasn't always so "heretical" to the common Judaean before the second-century rabbis laid down their law.

The New Testament consciously sets itself upon the Hebrew Bible in its Greek form - mostly. (I think Paul himself was more Masoretic.) Accordingly we see some citations of Biblical texts as aren't Biblical anymore, like Jude citing the Watchers and Hebrews citing 1 Maccabees. And don't let's get started on the Revelation.

Also we must reread Gabriele Boccaccini on the divisions within Judaism herself some generations before Christ. The Jews had Enoch and Metatron standing in for ascendant Christ; as for Mary, they had the Holy Wisdom.

Christianity has always been consistent that Genesis 1-2 was the true foundation of the Cosmos. I don't see (say) the Greeks' mythos about Cronos and Zeus "reflexed" into (say) Justin Martyr's summary. I do sometimes see takes of the odd god or hero cast into this or that tale of the saints. But Christians as a whole can take 'em or leave 'em; we don't have to accept Saint George And The Dragon. More worrisome is the Gospel demonology, I concede.

UPDATE 12/5: A voodoo in Judaism might look like the earlier Books Of Enoch: Babylonian angelology and cosmology recast in Hebrew with reference to Genesis and certain Psalms, downplaying Torah. Mind you (1) the Enochians preceded Jesus' ministry by many centuries and (2) Jesus himself was a Danielist, never citing Enoch as far as the NT will tell us.

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