Culture and Christianity
NOprophet_NØprofit
Shipmate
in Purgatory
I'm reading a book about the classical Greek and Roman cultures, their development, and then the placement of Christianity within those societies. The book isn't important, what is, is the argument / position that Christianity's development within those cultures is highly influential.
One example, John's gospel: "In the beginning was the Word..." where "word" may be understood as Reason, which is a very Greek idea. This is different than my prior understanding of this, quite unconsidered, that God "spoke" and things happened.
I'm also thinking of some local indigenous understanding that suggests "intent" or purpose versus talking creation into existence.
This leads me to wonder about the significance of cultural interpretation and considering that there is no more validity to a Latin, Russian or English understanding that an Dené, Cree or Saulteaux. Through accident of history only, Latin/Roman became dominant for much of us, with Greek having historical equality I suppose. And our subsequent derivatives all showing that influence, and the influence of local culture. Why would any of these have more validity than others? This isn't about the Renaissance or RC versus Protestants.
One example, John's gospel: "In the beginning was the Word..." where "word" may be understood as Reason, which is a very Greek idea. This is different than my prior understanding of this, quite unconsidered, that God "spoke" and things happened.
I'm also thinking of some local indigenous understanding that suggests "intent" or purpose versus talking creation into existence.
This leads me to wonder about the significance of cultural interpretation and considering that there is no more validity to a Latin, Russian or English understanding that an Dené, Cree or Saulteaux. Through accident of history only, Latin/Roman became dominant for much of us, with Greek having historical equality I suppose. And our subsequent derivatives all showing that influence, and the influence of local culture. Why would any of these have more validity than others? This isn't about the Renaissance or RC versus Protestants.
Comments
With regard to the broader questions, I don't think it's a matter of validity of one culture over another. I think it's more that we have a set of texts and stories, and those texts and stories come out of a specific cultural context and are best understood within the framework of that context. (And I would argue that Greek and Latin and subsequent cultural domination has at times obscured the original cultural context.)
That is not to say that with a grounding in the original cultural context, there isn't value in looking at the texts through the lenses of other cultural contexts. It can be both/and, not either/or, if that makes any sense.
The idea that the text is the pure utterance of God outside of interpretation is profoundly mismatched with the observed fluctuations in expression. This will be true of any religion that flows across cultures.
Otherwise, we are only arguing how much influence from which cultures.
Human cultures are not just "underlying influences" ... but are part-parcel of the message itself ...
Our Judeo-Christian Tradition is all about real world real life "stuff" -- people (with names), events (with dates attached), that are tied to places (on the maps, so can be visited even today) ...
This is a deep aspect of the "scandal of particularity" ... God IS/WAS ... "there" ... "then" ... and even today has BEEN "Really Present" on thousands of altars globally, as gifts of bread and wine "become for us The Body and Blood of our lord and Savior, Jesus Christ" ...
and also EVERY year in the Passover Seder when the presiding adult proclaims, "TONIGHT G-d saved US from slavey in Egypt ..." ...
Yes. This is what I understand. The implications are something I don't understand.
There are actual places and some history, but a lot of that didn't happen, but is actually a metaphor and such.
The metaphorical/mythological fuzziness blur is part of the universality, which is all mixed up in the particularity, hence another layer of the scandal ...
Rudy Bultmann tried so very hard to unpack it all in his groundbreaking seminal work, "Kerygma and Myth" ... emphasis on "tried" ...
Joe Campbell worked on this too -- "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" ... Great book, intriguing and engaging ...
One of the more interesting examples of this is the Christian idea of monogamy. This doesn't come from any scriptural source. Indeed, there are scriptural sources that indicate that plural marriage is okay (for men, at least) in both the First and Second Testaments.
But Christianity, as has been noted in the OP, "grew up" in the world of the Roman Mediterranean and the Romans had ideas about monogamy that very closely mirror those of subsequent Christianity (i.e. each person can have at most one spouse at any given time). Most Christians regard monogamy as an integral part of their faith, despite its pagan cultural origins.
Aboriginal Australian mythology is probably the area of mythology I am least familiar with (other than those I am wholly ignorant of) but I believe the concept of talking things, or more accurately, singing them into existence lies at the root of their beliefs.
As regards belief and culture as a whole, one of the problems faced by ethnologists investigating a native culture's religion and beliefs is that they usually arrived after the fighting men who conquered the natives they were investigating and after the missionaries who had (tried to) convert them to Christianity. The result was that the native culture had already absorbed foreign material/elements into its belief system before the ethnologists arrived!
We can see this syncretism in the accepted version of the King Arthur story which now carries elements from pagan Irish and Welsh belief, via Norman-French troubadour tropes, Medieval chivalry, English Civil War patricidal and fratricidal disputes, and German opera!
The Romans were perhaps the culture that co-opted beliefs most overtly as they happily Romanised many Ancient British deities into their extended pantheon.
So it's hardly surprising if Christianity hasn't gone through a similar syncretic process.
And ... without a trace of irony ... the western practice of divorce and remarriage has essentially become "serial polygamy" ...
/
Seeing scripture as divine utterance is itself a culturally influenced way of engaging with the text, owing much to the way the medieval church in Western Europe wielded influence, let alone its sola scriptura offshoots. It is also a deeply abusive way to read scripture, doing violence to the enormously varied literature we consider scripture.
The problem with your prior understanding is that you stopped the quotation where you did. The full sentence was "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." It's also not in accordance with verse 14: "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth." I can't reconcile either of these with your concept that it means that God spoke.
Both quotations are KJV.
Are you sure about this? I did a quick search through my e-sword copy of the Septuagint and got no hits for logas, but an awful lot of hits for logos.
. . . which is very Roman. As is the notion that a woman can divorce her husband.
Mark's (audience's) culture. Not Matthew's.
AFAICT this is incorrect. The Septuagint used λόγος (logos - masculine) and ῥῆμα (rhema - neuter) interchangeably to translate the Hebrew דָּבָר (dabar - masculine).
It may be right that John opts for λόγος because the masculine form lends itself easily to moving on to talk about Jesus, though one needs to be careful about the semantic significance of grammatical gender.
λόγος Is already being considered as a concept in Greek philosophy (according to Wikipedia) arguably as early as the fifth century BCE, and certainly by the fourth century. (The first Greek translations of the Pentateuch are believed to date from the mid third century BCE.) It is likely, therefore, that the currency of λόγος discussion in Greek and Hellenistic Jewish circles make it a particularly apt choice for the author of John’s Gospel.
@Crœsos if you're going to assert so unequivocally that monogamy is of something Christianity acquired from the Romans, an assertion isn't enough. You need to substantiate that. You'll also need to explain how monogamy is also taken for granted by both Nicene and Oriental Orthodoxy.
Nor do I think you are correct in saying that monogamy isn't in scripture. For a start, it's difficult to construe Jesus's words at Matt 19:4-6 any other way (this from the WEB to avoid copyright issues, Culture informs and influences how people within cultures interpret the Christian faith. I don't think anyone disagrees on that. However, that also happens the other way round. Many cultures have been so markedly influenced by Christianity that it is often a legitimate question to ask of someone who is attempting to argue against something almost universally accepted on the grounds of its being an interpolation from an extraneous source, what are they trying to justify doing, and why.
Another one which I find interesting from past experience contextualized by what I'm reading. Some time in the 1980s we went on a Marriage Encounter, which is an international program started by RCI believe, but adopted by the Anglicans (at least in Canada). Notwithstanding my understanding and beliefs are not the same from 40 years ago, they had various slogans, among them "love is a decision", which led me to the understanding of "charity" - acting kindly - was often changed to "love" in English. It's very different to command "love one another" than "be kind to one another as I have been kind/acted charitably unto you". Which also changes the "loving enemies" doesn't it? We don't actually have to feel things, we have to act in the way we should if we did love. Which then also tells us about the Christian process of conversion being a "growing into" versus more cataclysmic.
And when I write this, I think this is an additional issue for culture: whether things change by slow and steady growth and change, of if there are sudden dramatic shifts. I see these two trends, which my geologist father called from his discipline " uiniformitarianism and catastrophism.
Not claiming sophisticated understanding of these matters. But I wonder about sudden changes into Christian, like Paul and his Damascus, and for so many of us, the substantial lack of drama in our lives. God may suddenly talk things into existence in one version of myth, and reason (implies planning to me) in another.
(If I'm meandering in confused ways, scold me, and redirect the topic.)
I thought creation made sense, and them humans effed it all up. Then later we get Christ to fix it up.
Both those traditions originated within the Roman Empire and were subject to centuries of Roman cultural influence. In fact, most of the important early church councils relevant to those two traditions took place within the Roman province of Bithynia et Pontus.
That passage concerns divorce (as traditionally interpreted). There's nothing there that forbids a man from having multiple concurrent wives. (Or a woman from having multiple concurrent husbands, but that's something that was never regarded as traditional within Judaism.) That reference to Genesis was never considered a prohibition against plural marriage by Jews of the Second Temple period (or prior). None of the patriarchs seem to get criticized for having multiple concurrent wives.
As Josephus had to explain to his (presumptively Roman) audience in Antiquities of the Jews (XVIII.1.2-3)
You'll note that Josephus is himself writing around the time the various parts of the Second Testament are being written and this particular passage relates to a time around the birth of Jesus.
In other words, current Christian ideas about monogamy don't come from Jewish sources. Nor is it necessarily a characteristic of the earliest church. For example, 1 Timothy would not have to include the instructions that deacons should have only one wife if polygamists were not present within the ranks of the faithful.
In other words, it seems perfectly plausible that as Christianity started to see itself as something distinct from Judaism and primarily composed of converts from Roman or Greek backgrounds, those Romans and Greeks imported their disdain for plural marriage with them until it simply seemed an organic part of Christianity.
EVERYBODY who lived and moved and had their being in the Mediterranean region in the First Century CE "lived in a Roman world" ...
Yes ... That word, "logos" has meaning beyond a simple translation of "word" ... It also means "discourse; reason" ... In modern sense, it can be "the Initial Conditions of The Big Bang" (see: Job 38: 1ff, e.g.) ... Consider: the self-organization of Matter, Energy, Space and Time, i.e., there is a "Reason" for The Universe as It Is ...
One of the things logos means is something akin to “underlying reason,” or “cause.” Normally when Plato uses logos he’s using it in that sense, which he derived from earlier pre-Socratic thought, in particular Heraclitus. Suffice it to say the idea was quite old before John’s gospel got penned.
And again, indeed ... Too many would-be interpreters go with a one*word*to*one*word "translation," this ironically missing the actual meaning of the "word" they hope to explain/elucidate/preserve ...
True but not what I was talking about.
Okay. Define Tao.
(While you're at it, why does it start with T but people say you have to say it with a D?)
"Tow-MAY-toe" ... "Tow-MAH-toe" ...
Can you give me some places to look to verify this? I looked at a number of places in the LXX and could not find logos given a feminine declension.
God can reason without words? I certainly can't. Perhaps He's a geometer?
AFAIK, There are two, primary, means of transliterating Chinese orthography into Latin (English) orthography. One renders the Chinese character in question as representing a dental plosive (t), the other as an alveolar plosive (d). The dental and alveolar refer to where the tongue rests in the making of the sound. Basically, there's not a phonetic difference between the (t) and (d), in Chinese, AFAIK.
Ancient Greek is an inherently polysemantic language. A single Ancient Greek word can have multiple, varying, and sometimes contradictory, meanings. The precise shade of meaning will depend on what part of speech it is, the context it is used in, and what the author is intending. Logos, in Ancient Greek, means so many different things and is supposed to mean all of those. I don't believe, from my study of the texts, that Logos should mean anything less than five different words. How that's rendered into English, I can't say. Perhaps a Celan-esque mashing of words would accomplish it.
That's why I cleave to English.
The way. But it's something that clearly doesn't translate into any simple concept. As I understand it, T and D are pronounced with the same shape of the mouth except that D is voiced (you use your vocal chords, which you don't with T) and (if I've got it the right way round) usually aspirated at the start of a word (you let a lot of air out as you say it). The sound in Taoism in Chinese is IIRC voiced but not aspirated, or the other way round; anyway, like T in one respect and like D in another.
And I think your position should be sanctioned.
I like it.
... which (1) drives the translators nuts and (2) sometimes results in horror, as when English translations of The Gospels have "the Jews" ('oi Ioudaioi) persecuting Jesus, when the actual conflict was between "Jesus the Galilean" and "the Judeans" ('oi Ioudaioi) ...
(as if The Lord Jesus Nazareth was NOT a "Jew," but instead a Swedish Methodist from Iowa ...)
[/quote]
Fixed quoting code and removed duplicate posts. BroJames, Purgatory Host
Who is this "we" of whom you speak? Indeed, on whose behalf you speak.
Mathematicians?