church's language isn't so wrong that it requires our opposition
With the Church is not about right or wrong. Just think about, you can't pray (how religion teaches) to the Monad because it's not separate from you to receive prayers. You can't disappoint it because it has no expectations. You can't be judged by it because it's not a judge. It's the very awareness within which the concepts of judgment arise and pass away. This understanding was and is absolutely terrifying to church authorities. And they should be scared. If ultimate reality has no personality, no commands, no specific will that needs interpreting, then what's the point of priests and religious institutions? What's the purpose of institutions claiming to speak for God? The entire structure of religious authority collapses when people realize that the deepest truth isn't a being you need intermediaries to reach, but the very awareness you already are. The political implications are staggering.
A personal god, Yawheh or El or Theos, who gives commands requires interpreters, hierarchies, institutions to manage divine will. But the Monad, it's not giving commands because it's not separate from what is. It's not ruling the universe. It's the consciousness within which the universe appears like a dream in an infinite mind. So, it's not about the language Church uses... it's about people waking up from their sleep. Once that happens the Power (church & empire) fall apart.
If the Monad is Father and Pleroma, what difference does it make if we call it our El or Theos as well, or if we don't?
IMO, the difference is by association. In the Apocryphon of John I shared with you what John revealed, there exists a reality so fundamental that even Yahweh, the biblical creator, is merely a distant shadow of it. The text calls this ultimate source the Monad, describing it as the invisible spirit that stands infinitely above every deity, every spiritual hierarchy ever recorded. Now, let's take a look at the Gospel of the Egyptians which goes further, explaining that all creator gods, including the one who made our physical universe, are just source. There exists a hierarchy, God at the top, angels below, humans at the bottom. Even those exploring ancient wisdom and the church accept this basic hierarchy.
John reveals "before anything existed, the Monad was.". Not in the beginning, God created... But before beginning itself, before existence, before the very possibility of creation, there was this. Because the Monad isn't a being at all. It's not a person, not a deity, not some cosmic grandfather with beard. Genesis gives us a God who speaks, who walks in the garden, who gets angry, who makes plans. But, the Monad doesn't speak because it's the silence from which all words emerge. It doesn't create because it is the space within which all creation unfolds. Are you beginning to see the difference between the Monad and El?
Let me go a bit further; have you ever questioned how thoughts arise in your mind? Where do they come from? many would say there is this aware, infinite space. I would argue this is consciousness that's present before any thought appears, during the thought and after it disappears. Thoughts don't create this awareness. They manifest within it. Now imagine that awareness without any thoughts at all, without any content whatsoever, infinite and eternal. That is the Monad. It is invisible, it is infinite (not just big, but beyond any boundaries), illimitable since there is nothing before it to limit it. But, the most important characteristic of the Monad, it's unknowable. Furthermore The gospel of the Egyptians states it's not something we can or will ever know. In other words it is the invisible light. Not darkness, not ordinary light, but the light that makes all seeing possible while remaining itself unseen. It's the awareness within which all experiences of light and dark appear.
Imagine yourself looking into a perfectly still pond. And for the first time, you see your own reflection. But imagine that reflection isn't separate from you. It's you becoming aware of yourself in a completely new way. You just discovered the Monad yet it's still unknowable. There's no divine command, no big bang, no let there be light moment. Instead, something far more mysterious occurs. You realize that you don't serve the Monad in the way a created being serves a creator. Not the way the Church and every religion on earth teaches. We're witnessing the natural overflow of infinite consciousness recognizing itself in ever-expanding ways.
it's not separate from you to receive prayers. You can't disappoint it because it has no expectations. You can't be judged by it because it's not a judge. It's the very awareness within which the concepts of judgment arise and pass away.
This is very close to "apophatic theology", which I define as talking about Being via what it is not. There's a second way of talking about Being ("cataphatic"), namely how it reconciles spectra of things that are. In the first way, the Monad isn't even a monad or a plurality because those are words for emanated things: it is both undivided and unmixed. It's not separate from us, and it's not joined to us. It's not expecting, and it's not failing either. It's not judging and it's not judged. It's not awareness and it's not lethe. In the second way of talking, we do use words like this recognizing that they describe aspects that are transcended and harmonized, and that form of speech is common and valid as well.
What bothers churchmen is that speaking of the attribute of impersonality carries a risk that we demote the attribute of personality. Ultimately this need not be done, but so many have created an impersonal god in their own imaginations and gone far astray in everyone else's judgment that there is a warning against it. Francis Schaeffer took the bull by the horns by writing Beyond Personality to awaken Christians to this reality; he might interest you!
What's the purpose of institutions claiming to speak for God? The entire structure of religious authority collapses when people realize that the deepest truth isn't a being you need intermediaries to reach, but the very awareness you already are. The political implications are staggering.
Good human institutions only survive because they humbly refuse to speak for God. "Nature" speaks for itself, though we call it impersonal, and all revelation works the same way. Yet people who can't get the experience of monism right ("general revelation") need not to be too assertive when describing an experience of "special revelation".
there exists a reality so fundamental that even Yahweh, the biblical creator, is merely a distant shadow of it.
I would say instead that "Creator" and "Yahweh" and "Reality" and "Fundament" and "Distance" are all shadows that only approximate; no merely human word is final. Our always striving to know reality better allows our words to be sufficient and actionable without being exhaustive. But what's happened (and it started with Jews inventing "Ein Sof" or "Infinity" IMHO) is that people who find one label insufficient for one purpose then put their trust in ... another label. I kept seeking the root of it all and realized I could never apprehend the root and remain myself. I then started using all the words as shadows of various states of being, and I recognized that they fit together into many different isomorphic structures. In the structure you posit above, "Reality" is Fundamental and "Yahweh" and "Creator" are Distant, which might be true in many applications, but the words could be rearranged several ways to yield many truths in other applications, and all the arrangements have nuanced meaning and value without contradiction.
Now, let's take a look at the Gospel of the Egyptians which goes further, explaining that all creator gods, including the one who made our physical universe, are just source. There exists a hierarchy, God at the top, angels below, humans at the bottom.
That is indeed Near East divine-council theory, but it seems like it cuts against the idea that we never use the word "God" for the "Top". Whatever is revealed to us is mediated by our incompleteness and so in one sense we can never know what is beyond and in another sense we can know "God" or any "Thing" with sufficient, actionable substance.
John reveals "before anything existed, the Monad was.". Not in the beginning, God created.
I don't see a contradiction, they both sound like John 1:1-3.
Genesis gives us a God who speaks, who walks in the garden, who gets angry, who makes plans. But, the Monad doesn't speak because it's the silence from which all words emerge. It doesn't create because it is the space within which all creation unfolds. Are you beginning to see the difference between the Monad and El?
No, in the fundamentals I don't. By calling it Monad and Silence and Space you're applying labels that simply put it at a different pole of the spectrum of being than calling it God and Speaker and Creator. Genesis uses a lot of personal language (because personality came from somewhere and isn't a power that creatures have over the Monad), but it doesn't lead to contradiction, but paradox (i.e. something resolvable via nuance). For instance after the general introduction we are told that the Spirit broods (silently) before a Word is said (audibly). But the word for brooding and the word for speaking both come down to the same phenomenon, vibration in waves, expressed differently. So silence and speech are set by the text as a paradox, and we now have a scientific ("gnostic") way of resolving the paradox with nuance.
I would argue this is consciousness that's present before any thought appears, during the thought and after it disappears. Thoughts don't create this awareness. They manifest within it. Now imagine that awareness without any thoughts at all, without any content whatsoever, infinite and eternal. That is the Monad.
Okay, the experience is real, and the imaginative extrapolation is useful to a point, but not to all points. To say the Monad "is" awareness without thoughts is merely to apply a perceived experience to the whole of reality, which falls short because the map is never the territory.
beyond any boundaries
Yeah, I discovered that if there are boundaries they are indiscernible.
the invisible light
Use of paradox then, which is not monad but dyad and synthesis.
There's no divine command, no big bang, no let there be light moment.
Well, when we look at history there's an origin to spacetime, but there are still lots of views about that (including denying it).
you don't serve the Monad in the way a created being serves a creator. Not the way the Church and every religion on earth teaches. We're witnessing the natural overflow of infinite consciousness recognizing itself in ever-expanding ways.
Here the paradox is that if we were to teach how the Monad is served we would be just another religion. So in one sense the Monad cannot be served, but in another sense you truly imply we do serve the Monad somewhere between the Me (experience) and the Myself (reflection). That is because we could say the Monad "is" the Me and "is" the Myself and "is" the service. That gets us back to all relative words having a natural pattern of active, inactive, action (lover, beloved, love). That pattern is, however, isomorphic with the pattern of All being One. So, having beheld the Monad, and having beheld the Other (reflection) that is Self that have a relationship (reflective surface), we rejoice in the beholding, but when we come back to speaking English to our fellow man we end up using words that are like those already spoken, sometimes better and often worse. And all those words have sufficiency and substantiality without needing perfection or exhaustiveness. And that's what we build bridges on.
With the Church is not about right or wrong; Good! That allows bridge-building
I don’t know what’s “good” or “bad” in the Church, nor do I care. And I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “bridge-building”. You claim to be a messianic gentile, someone who believes in the NT, but at the same time who puts a lot of weight on jewish tradition and the OT law. In other words you strongly believe in Yahweh, some scholars refer to as the jewish "God", and you also believe are called to lead people into a personal relationship with Jesus, to convert others to Christianity, for them to be saved. Anyway this is my take from your messages so far. It’s not what I believe. And my issue with the Church is its teachings. Actually it’s more that, the Aramaic speaking Christians of the Middle East, the direct descendants of Jesus's own community, practice a version of the faith that looks nothing like Western Christianity of today. Many scholars who study historical linguistics have been sounding the alarm for decades. Yet the Western Church did nothing to correct this.
Sure, something is always lost in translation. And sometimes that loss is simply unavoidable. But part of it wasn't innocent at all. In fact IMO it was deliberate. And it’s not a fringe interpretation I’m referring to. This is what the Aramaic actually says. And Aramaic is what Jesus and all his disciples spoke. This is what the Aramaic Peshitta New Testament said before being translated into Greek. Many people don’t even know what Aramaic Peshitta is, and think the original NT was written in Greek, but scholars know better. And this is what scholars of ancient semitic languages have been trying to tell us. This is what the Eastern Christian traditions, the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Amorites have reserved in their liturgies, meantime the Western church built an elaborate institution on mistranslations (and deliberate wrong translations).
I’ll give you a couple of examples. Since we have been discussing hell, let me start with that. Throughout the four Gospels included in the NT, Jesus warns about hell, or so we're told. The English translations use words like hell, eternal fire, and everlasting punishment. These translations have terrified billions of people into compliance, created entire denominations built on fear of the afterlife and justified unspeakable violence in the name of saving souls from eternal torment. But Jesus never used the word hell. The Aramaic word that appears in the earliest manuscripts is Gehenna. And Gehenna wasn't a spiritual concept at all. It was a physical location, the valley of Hinnom just outside Jerusalem. It was the city rubbish dump where fires burned continuously to consume waste. It was a place of decay, of transformation, of things being broken down and returned to their elements. When Jesus warned about Gehenna, he was using a vivid immediate metaphor that his audience would have instantly understood. He was talking about wasted lives. He was saying, “Don't throw your life away. Don't become rubbish.”. The Greek translators used Gehenna, maintaining the reference to this specific location. But by the time medieval translators got to it, disconnected from the geographic and cultural context, they transformed it into hell, a word borrowed from Norse mythology referring to hell, the realm of the dead. The mistranslation was complete. A metaphor about wasting your life became a doctrine about eternal conscious torment. And here’s my point, no word in Aramaic corresponds to the modern Christian concept of hell. None. The language Jesus spoke didn't have a framework for eternal punishment. It had consequences. Yes, it had natural results of destructive behavior, but the idea of a loving God maintaining an eternal torture facility, that's not in the Aramaic. That came later. You could say this was accidental, but I don’t believe so. I think it was deliberate and done by some very clever people.
The other example I’m going to give you is a very commonly used term in KJV “the Son of Man” which is ὅ ὑιὸς τοῦ ἀνθρόπου in Greek. The Aramaic "Bar Nasha" or "bar enash". Jesus frequently uses it to refer to himself. In English, it sounds like a claim to humanity, perhaps a humble counterpoint to “Son of God”. But in Aramaic, Jesus called himself Bar nasha. And that doesn’t mean son of man in the genealogical sense. It's an idiom that means the human being. Or more accurately, the human one, the representative of humanity, the fully realized human being, the prototype of what humanity can become. Jesus wasn't claiming to be uniquely divine in a way that separated him from the rest of humanity. He was claiming to be fully human in a way that revealed what all humans could become. He was the pattern, the template, the prototype. When he said the Bar nasha has authority to forgive sins, he wasn't claiming exclusive divine power. He was demonstrating human potential when fully aligned with the divine. This understanding transforms the entire gospel message. Every time Jesus said Bar nasha, he was pointing to human potential, not divine exclusivity. When he asked what do people say the Bar nasha is, he was asking what humanity could become, what the fully awakened human being looks like. The tragedy is that by mistranslating this phrase, Christianity created a Jesus who was fundamentally different from you and me rather than a Jesus who was fundamentally like you or me, only fully realized. One interpretation keeps you dependent and small. The other invites you into the same transformation he embodied. Was the mistranslation accidental, IMO it wasn’t.
Bridge-building is finding agreements between people of diverse experiences.
Your take on me is accurate enough in so many words, but part of the bridge-building involves recognizing that what I mean by Yahweh is not what you've come to believe Yahweh is. If there's a Monad, and also a part-time architect named Samael, I think the title or name Yahweh better describes the Monad. You seem to have become so familiar with assuming that Samael is automatically Yahweh that when I seek to remove that obstacle so as to lay a firmer foundation it may not come naturally at first. But think about it and it might. I don't give Samael any more credit or title than he deserves.
If you like Aramaic Christians (like Tewahedo) or Assyrian Christians (like Church of the East) or especially Orthodox, we can use them as good ground of agreement too.
Many people don’t even know what Aramaic Peshitta is, and think the original NT was written in Greek, but scholars know better.
I have a nuanced synthesis on this scholarly problem too, but it's usually not necessary for me to object to Peshitta primacy because it doesn't result in any useful distinctions.
The language Jesus spoke didn't have a framework for eternal punishment.
My joke is I've been through hell very thoroughly and now I can go in and out anytime I please. Yes, Jesus spoke often of Gehenna, and, yes, sheol-hades is very different from Norse nastrond-hell. I have a nuanced synthesis there too, where the most important point is that it's relatively useless to argue about eternal states since we basically have forever to learn about them.
Jesus wasn't claiming to be uniquely divine in a way that separated him from the rest of humanity. He was claiming to be fully human in a way that revealed what all humans could become.
Porque no los dos? I agree that Bar Enosh (my spelling) is paradigmatic humanity as you say, but the nature of divinity in Jesus was in fact unique compared to the the nature of divinity in the rest of us, and so that calls for very exact technical language. I have my last month's study on Bar Enosh sitting around here with the OT and Apocryphal references that indicate a number of supernatural scopes to it, all of which are compatible with fully realized human nature.
So the upshot is that I agree there are forces in traditional Christianity that suppress people and potential via misunderstandings such as Gehenna and Bar Enosh. What I mean above is that also in traditional Christianity are the seeds that can reawaken these original understandings anytime they are watered, and (considering what human potential means) the church potential is unspeakably vast.
So I appreciate your clarifying things so that I can see our positions in a map where we aren't too far apart. That leaves me without an immediate followup question. If you're willing to suffer me in my interpretation of the true meaning of "Yahweh", or if you're willing to disabuse me of some errors I may make about it, please feel free. I certainly encourage you to post or comment more about the unblurred entities that are doing the manipulation all along; that's what this forum is for, and I've dropped links to other forums where similar thoughts are welcome.
With the Church is not about right or wrong. Just think about, you can't pray (how religion teaches) to the Monad because it's not separate from you to receive prayers. You can't disappoint it because it has no expectations. You can't be judged by it because it's not a judge. It's the very awareness within which the concepts of judgment arise and pass away. This understanding was and is absolutely terrifying to church authorities. And they should be scared. If ultimate reality has no personality, no commands, no specific will that needs interpreting, then what's the point of priests and religious institutions? What's the purpose of institutions claiming to speak for God? The entire structure of religious authority collapses when people realize that the deepest truth isn't a being you need intermediaries to reach, but the very awareness you already are. The political implications are staggering.
A personal god, Yawheh or El or Theos, who gives commands requires interpreters, hierarchies, institutions to manage divine will. But the Monad, it's not giving commands because it's not separate from what is. It's not ruling the universe. It's the consciousness within which the universe appears like a dream in an infinite mind. So, it's not about the language Church uses... it's about people waking up from their sleep. Once that happens the Power (church & empire) fall apart.
IMO, the difference is by association. In the Apocryphon of John I shared with you what John revealed, there exists a reality so fundamental that even Yahweh, the biblical creator, is merely a distant shadow of it. The text calls this ultimate source the Monad, describing it as the invisible spirit that stands infinitely above every deity, every spiritual hierarchy ever recorded. Now, let's take a look at the Gospel of the Egyptians which goes further, explaining that all creator gods, including the one who made our physical universe, are just source. There exists a hierarchy, God at the top, angels below, humans at the bottom. Even those exploring ancient wisdom and the church accept this basic hierarchy.
John reveals "before anything existed, the Monad was.". Not in the beginning, God created... But before beginning itself, before existence, before the very possibility of creation, there was this. Because the Monad isn't a being at all. It's not a person, not a deity, not some cosmic grandfather with beard. Genesis gives us a God who speaks, who walks in the garden, who gets angry, who makes plans. But, the Monad doesn't speak because it's the silence from which all words emerge. It doesn't create because it is the space within which all creation unfolds. Are you beginning to see the difference between the Monad and El?
Let me go a bit further; have you ever questioned how thoughts arise in your mind? Where do they come from? many would say there is this aware, infinite space. I would argue this is consciousness that's present before any thought appears, during the thought and after it disappears. Thoughts don't create this awareness. They manifest within it. Now imagine that awareness without any thoughts at all, without any content whatsoever, infinite and eternal. That is the Monad. It is invisible, it is infinite (not just big, but beyond any boundaries), illimitable since there is nothing before it to limit it. But, the most important characteristic of the Monad, it's unknowable. Furthermore The gospel of the Egyptians states it's not something we can or will ever know. In other words it is the invisible light. Not darkness, not ordinary light, but the light that makes all seeing possible while remaining itself unseen. It's the awareness within which all experiences of light and dark appear.
Imagine yourself looking into a perfectly still pond. And for the first time, you see your own reflection. But imagine that reflection isn't separate from you. It's you becoming aware of yourself in a completely new way. You just discovered the Monad yet it's still unknowable. There's no divine command, no big bang, no let there be light moment. Instead, something far more mysterious occurs. You realize that you don't serve the Monad in the way a created being serves a creator. Not the way the Church and every religion on earth teaches. We're witnessing the natural overflow of infinite consciousness recognizing itself in ever-expanding ways.
Good! That allows bridge-building.
This is very close to "apophatic theology", which I define as talking about Being via what it is not. There's a second way of talking about Being ("cataphatic"), namely how it reconciles spectra of things that are. In the first way, the Monad isn't even a monad or a plurality because those are words for emanated things: it is both undivided and unmixed. It's not separate from us, and it's not joined to us. It's not expecting, and it's not failing either. It's not judging and it's not judged. It's not awareness and it's not lethe. In the second way of talking, we do use words like this recognizing that they describe aspects that are transcended and harmonized, and that form of speech is common and valid as well.
What bothers churchmen is that speaking of the attribute of impersonality carries a risk that we demote the attribute of personality. Ultimately this need not be done, but so many have created an impersonal god in their own imaginations and gone far astray in everyone else's judgment that there is a warning against it. Francis Schaeffer took the bull by the horns by writing Beyond Personality to awaken Christians to this reality; he might interest you!
Good human institutions only survive because they humbly refuse to speak for God. "Nature" speaks for itself, though we call it impersonal, and all revelation works the same way. Yet people who can't get the experience of monism right ("general revelation") need not to be too assertive when describing an experience of "special revelation".
I would say instead that "Creator" and "Yahweh" and "Reality" and "Fundament" and "Distance" are all shadows that only approximate; no merely human word is final. Our always striving to know reality better allows our words to be sufficient and actionable without being exhaustive. But what's happened (and it started with Jews inventing "Ein Sof" or "Infinity" IMHO) is that people who find one label insufficient for one purpose then put their trust in ... another label. I kept seeking the root of it all and realized I could never apprehend the root and remain myself. I then started using all the words as shadows of various states of being, and I recognized that they fit together into many different isomorphic structures. In the structure you posit above, "Reality" is Fundamental and "Yahweh" and "Creator" are Distant, which might be true in many applications, but the words could be rearranged several ways to yield many truths in other applications, and all the arrangements have nuanced meaning and value without contradiction.
That is indeed Near East divine-council theory, but it seems like it cuts against the idea that we never use the word "God" for the "Top". Whatever is revealed to us is mediated by our incompleteness and so in one sense we can never know what is beyond and in another sense we can know "God" or any "Thing" with sufficient, actionable substance.
I don't see a contradiction, they both sound like John 1:1-3.
No, in the fundamentals I don't. By calling it Monad and Silence and Space you're applying labels that simply put it at a different pole of the spectrum of being than calling it God and Speaker and Creator. Genesis uses a lot of personal language (because personality came from somewhere and isn't a power that creatures have over the Monad), but it doesn't lead to contradiction, but paradox (i.e. something resolvable via nuance). For instance after the general introduction we are told that the Spirit broods (silently) before a Word is said (audibly). But the word for brooding and the word for speaking both come down to the same phenomenon, vibration in waves, expressed differently. So silence and speech are set by the text as a paradox, and we now have a scientific ("gnostic") way of resolving the paradox with nuance.
Okay, the experience is real, and the imaginative extrapolation is useful to a point, but not to all points. To say the Monad "is" awareness without thoughts is merely to apply a perceived experience to the whole of reality, which falls short because the map is never the territory.
Yeah, I discovered that if there are boundaries they are indiscernible.
Use of paradox then, which is not monad but dyad and synthesis.
Well, when we look at history there's an origin to spacetime, but there are still lots of views about that (including denying it).
Here the paradox is that if we were to teach how the Monad is served we would be just another religion. So in one sense the Monad cannot be served, but in another sense you truly imply we do serve the Monad somewhere between the Me (experience) and the Myself (reflection). That is because we could say the Monad "is" the Me and "is" the Myself and "is" the service. That gets us back to all relative words having a natural pattern of active, inactive, action (lover, beloved, love). That pattern is, however, isomorphic with the pattern of All being One. So, having beheld the Monad, and having beheld the Other (reflection) that is Self that have a relationship (reflective surface), we rejoice in the beholding, but when we come back to speaking English to our fellow man we end up using words that are like those already spoken, sometimes better and often worse. And all those words have sufficiency and substantiality without needing perfection or exhaustiveness. And that's what we build bridges on.
I don’t know what’s “good” or “bad” in the Church, nor do I care. And I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “bridge-building”. You claim to be a messianic gentile, someone who believes in the NT, but at the same time who puts a lot of weight on jewish tradition and the OT law. In other words you strongly believe in Yahweh, some scholars refer to as the jewish "God", and you also believe are called to lead people into a personal relationship with Jesus, to convert others to Christianity, for them to be saved. Anyway this is my take from your messages so far. It’s not what I believe. And my issue with the Church is its teachings. Actually it’s more that, the Aramaic speaking Christians of the Middle East, the direct descendants of Jesus's own community, practice a version of the faith that looks nothing like Western Christianity of today. Many scholars who study historical linguistics have been sounding the alarm for decades. Yet the Western Church did nothing to correct this.
Sure, something is always lost in translation. And sometimes that loss is simply unavoidable. But part of it wasn't innocent at all. In fact IMO it was deliberate. And it’s not a fringe interpretation I’m referring to. This is what the Aramaic actually says. And Aramaic is what Jesus and all his disciples spoke. This is what the Aramaic Peshitta New Testament said before being translated into Greek. Many people don’t even know what Aramaic Peshitta is, and think the original NT was written in Greek, but scholars know better. And this is what scholars of ancient semitic languages have been trying to tell us. This is what the Eastern Christian traditions, the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Amorites have reserved in their liturgies, meantime the Western church built an elaborate institution on mistranslations (and deliberate wrong translations).
I’ll give you a couple of examples. Since we have been discussing hell, let me start with that. Throughout the four Gospels included in the NT, Jesus warns about hell, or so we're told. The English translations use words like hell, eternal fire, and everlasting punishment. These translations have terrified billions of people into compliance, created entire denominations built on fear of the afterlife and justified unspeakable violence in the name of saving souls from eternal torment. But Jesus never used the word hell. The Aramaic word that appears in the earliest manuscripts is Gehenna. And Gehenna wasn't a spiritual concept at all. It was a physical location, the valley of Hinnom just outside Jerusalem. It was the city rubbish dump where fires burned continuously to consume waste. It was a place of decay, of transformation, of things being broken down and returned to their elements. When Jesus warned about Gehenna, he was using a vivid immediate metaphor that his audience would have instantly understood. He was talking about wasted lives. He was saying, “Don't throw your life away. Don't become rubbish.”. The Greek translators used Gehenna, maintaining the reference to this specific location. But by the time medieval translators got to it, disconnected from the geographic and cultural context, they transformed it into hell, a word borrowed from Norse mythology referring to hell, the realm of the dead. The mistranslation was complete. A metaphor about wasting your life became a doctrine about eternal conscious torment. And here’s my point, no word in Aramaic corresponds to the modern Christian concept of hell. None. The language Jesus spoke didn't have a framework for eternal punishment. It had consequences. Yes, it had natural results of destructive behavior, but the idea of a loving God maintaining an eternal torture facility, that's not in the Aramaic. That came later. You could say this was accidental, but I don’t believe so. I think it was deliberate and done by some very clever people.
The other example I’m going to give you is a very commonly used term in KJV “the Son of Man” which is ὅ ὑιὸς τοῦ ἀνθρόπου in Greek. The Aramaic "Bar Nasha" or "bar enash". Jesus frequently uses it to refer to himself. In English, it sounds like a claim to humanity, perhaps a humble counterpoint to “Son of God”. But in Aramaic, Jesus called himself Bar nasha. And that doesn’t mean son of man in the genealogical sense. It's an idiom that means the human being. Or more accurately, the human one, the representative of humanity, the fully realized human being, the prototype of what humanity can become. Jesus wasn't claiming to be uniquely divine in a way that separated him from the rest of humanity. He was claiming to be fully human in a way that revealed what all humans could become. He was the pattern, the template, the prototype. When he said the Bar nasha has authority to forgive sins, he wasn't claiming exclusive divine power. He was demonstrating human potential when fully aligned with the divine. This understanding transforms the entire gospel message. Every time Jesus said Bar nasha, he was pointing to human potential, not divine exclusivity. When he asked what do people say the Bar nasha is, he was asking what humanity could become, what the fully awakened human being looks like. The tragedy is that by mistranslating this phrase, Christianity created a Jesus who was fundamentally different from you and me rather than a Jesus who was fundamentally like you or me, only fully realized. One interpretation keeps you dependent and small. The other invites you into the same transformation he embodied. Was the mistranslation accidental, IMO it wasn’t.
Bridge-building is finding agreements between people of diverse experiences.
Your take on me is accurate enough in so many words, but part of the bridge-building involves recognizing that what I mean by Yahweh is not what you've come to believe Yahweh is. If there's a Monad, and also a part-time architect named Samael, I think the title or name Yahweh better describes the Monad. You seem to have become so familiar with assuming that Samael is automatically Yahweh that when I seek to remove that obstacle so as to lay a firmer foundation it may not come naturally at first. But think about it and it might. I don't give Samael any more credit or title than he deserves.
If you like Aramaic Christians (like Tewahedo) or Assyrian Christians (like Church of the East) or especially Orthodox, we can use them as good ground of agreement too.
I have a nuanced synthesis on this scholarly problem too, but it's usually not necessary for me to object to Peshitta primacy because it doesn't result in any useful distinctions.
My joke is I've been through hell very thoroughly and now I can go in and out anytime I please. Yes, Jesus spoke often of Gehenna, and, yes, sheol-hades is very different from Norse nastrond-hell. I have a nuanced synthesis there too, where the most important point is that it's relatively useless to argue about eternal states since we basically have forever to learn about them.
Porque no los dos? I agree that Bar Enosh (my spelling) is paradigmatic humanity as you say, but the nature of divinity in Jesus was in fact unique compared to the the nature of divinity in the rest of us, and so that calls for very exact technical language. I have my last month's study on Bar Enosh sitting around here with the OT and Apocryphal references that indicate a number of supernatural scopes to it, all of which are compatible with fully realized human nature.
So the upshot is that I agree there are forces in traditional Christianity that suppress people and potential via misunderstandings such as Gehenna and Bar Enosh. What I mean above is that also in traditional Christianity are the seeds that can reawaken these original understandings anytime they are watered, and (considering what human potential means) the church potential is unspeakably vast.
So I appreciate your clarifying things so that I can see our positions in a map where we aren't too far apart. That leaves me without an immediate followup question. If you're willing to suffer me in my interpretation of the true meaning of "Yahweh", or if you're willing to disabuse me of some errors I may make about it, please feel free. I certainly encourage you to post or comment more about the unblurred entities that are doing the manipulation all along; that's what this forum is for, and I've dropped links to other forums where similar thoughts are welcome.