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.
If there's a Monad, and also a part-time architect named Samael, I think the title or name Yahweh better describes the Monad
Yaldabaoth is the Demiurge which is Yahweh the God in the OT. AKA the God of the Jews. Yahweh refers to "the self-existent, eternal God" the name God revealed to Moses: "And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you" - Exodus 3:14 Absolutely not the Monad.
Samael is an archangel in Talmudic and post-Talmudic lore; a figure who is the accuser or adversary, seducer, and destroyer. However, in gnostic texts, Samael is one of three names of the Demiurge, whose other names are Yaldabaoth, Saklas and Yahweh. And Yahweh and Yaldaboath/the Demiurge are the same entity. Thus Samael is one and the same with Yahweh. Jews and Freemasons have the same God, Yahweh. Freemasons refer to their god as the "Great Architect of the Universe". Official masonic lore claims that G stands both for “God” and “Geometry”: "By letters four and science five, this “G” aright doth stand, in due Art and Proportion; you have your answer, friend.". The “letters four” stand for “YHWH”, the name of the Great Architect of the Universe (Yahweh). And Geometry is the 5th science, thus the Letter G stands for “Geometry”. In Hebrew, the language Freemason's Bible was originally written in, it is called Gheemel (or Gimel) and has a numerical value of 3. Throughout history, we see reference to the number 3 when we speak of the Supreme Architect of the Universe... no matter which language we speak! Here is more info: https://www.masonic-lodge-of-education.com/letter-g.html
But to the gnostics the Demiurge, the creator God, designed the systematic program to trap us in the illusion of a physical reality where we consume one another in this food chain of entropy. Even the very fact that we must consume food for our survival is a representation of the food chain that comes from this lesser god that feeds off us. Being trapped in the illusion of this reality, we become the battery for the fragmented realm created by the Demiurge. The Saturnian paradigm takes on the god element of the Demiurge through Saturn worship. All three Abrahamic religions have unique variations of worship that feed their life force to Saturn, therefore all three religions then feed their life force through worship into the Demiurge in its expression as Saturnian energy. A clear example of this is the Crusades, where those battling thought they were on the righteous side and that their god was the mightiest when, in truth, the violence on both sides fed into the same “god.” These “gods” can be traced to the degradation form of Yahweh, the malevolent form of Saturnian energy, and therefore the Demiurge of Gnosticism.
So you begin by saying Yaldabaoth = Demiurge = Yahweh = OT God = Jewish God = Self-Existent = Eternal = Mosaic = Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh. I'll agree.
Then you say none of these equal the Monad. How would we determine the truth or falsity of that assertion together?
You say Samael = an archangel = Accuser = Adversary = Seducer = Destroyer = Saklas = Masonic God = Illusion Programmer = Saturn. I'll agree.
Then you say that some of these equal some of the names of Yahweh. How would we determine the truth or falsity of that assertion together?
We agree on there being two concepts, Monad and Samael. You want to put the Yahweh concept onto Samael, I want to put it onto Monad. It's not sufficient for us each to argue that our own desire is self-evidently better. We'd need some common basis for realizing the truth of the things we are talking about. If Monad and Samael exist, it's a matter of truth or falsity whether any Yahweh title does or doesn't apply to either. If we were to agree on nuanced synthesis, neither of us would be dogmatic about putting the Yahweh concept any particular place. But if you sound dogmatic about it not belonging with the Monad you create a binary proposition that can be discussed under agreed rules on pursuing truth. Are you willing to pursue the truth of the matter wherever it leads?
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.
Yaldabaoth is the Demiurge which is Yahweh the God in the OT. AKA the God of the Jews. Yahweh refers to "the self-existent, eternal God" the name God revealed to Moses: "And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you" - Exodus 3:14 Absolutely not the Monad.
Samael is an archangel in Talmudic and post-Talmudic lore; a figure who is the accuser or adversary, seducer, and destroyer. However, in gnostic texts, Samael is one of three names of the Demiurge, whose other names are Yaldabaoth, Saklas and Yahweh. And Yahweh and Yaldaboath/the Demiurge are the same entity. Thus Samael is one and the same with Yahweh. Jews and Freemasons have the same God, Yahweh. Freemasons refer to their god as the "Great Architect of the Universe". Official masonic lore claims that G stands both for “God” and “Geometry”: "By letters four and science five, this “G” aright doth stand, in due Art and Proportion; you have your answer, friend.". The “letters four” stand for “YHWH”, the name of the Great Architect of the Universe (Yahweh). And Geometry is the 5th science, thus the Letter G stands for “Geometry”. In Hebrew, the language Freemason's Bible was originally written in, it is called Gheemel (or Gimel) and has a numerical value of 3. Throughout history, we see reference to the number 3 when we speak of the Supreme Architect of the Universe... no matter which language we speak! Here is more info: https://www.masonic-lodge-of-education.com/letter-g.html
But to the gnostics the Demiurge, the creator God, designed the systematic program to trap us in the illusion of a physical reality where we consume one another in this food chain of entropy. Even the very fact that we must consume food for our survival is a representation of the food chain that comes from this lesser god that feeds off us. Being trapped in the illusion of this reality, we become the battery for the fragmented realm created by the Demiurge. The Saturnian paradigm takes on the god element of the Demiurge through Saturn worship. All three Abrahamic religions have unique variations of worship that feed their life force to Saturn, therefore all three religions then feed their life force through worship into the Demiurge in its expression as Saturnian energy. A clear example of this is the Crusades, where those battling thought they were on the righteous side and that their god was the mightiest when, in truth, the violence on both sides fed into the same “god.” These “gods” can be traced to the degradation form of Yahweh, the malevolent form of Saturnian energy, and therefore the Demiurge of Gnosticism.
So you begin by saying Yaldabaoth = Demiurge = Yahweh = OT God = Jewish God = Self-Existent = Eternal = Mosaic = Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh. I'll agree.
Then you say none of these equal the Monad. How would we determine the truth or falsity of that assertion together?
You say Samael = an archangel = Accuser = Adversary = Seducer = Destroyer = Saklas = Masonic God = Illusion Programmer = Saturn. I'll agree.
Then you say that some of these equal some of the names of Yahweh. How would we determine the truth or falsity of that assertion together?
We agree on there being two concepts, Monad and Samael. You want to put the Yahweh concept onto Samael, I want to put it onto Monad. It's not sufficient for us each to argue that our own desire is self-evidently better. We'd need some common basis for realizing the truth of the things we are talking about. If Monad and Samael exist, it's a matter of truth or falsity whether any Yahweh title does or doesn't apply to either. If we were to agree on nuanced synthesis, neither of us would be dogmatic about putting the Yahweh concept any particular place. But if you sound dogmatic about it not belonging with the Monad you create a binary proposition that can be discussed under agreed rules on pursuing truth. Are you willing to pursue the truth of the matter wherever it leads?