The Ethiopian Bible

[Ravenlocke]

(Posting this here, if there is a better thread where this might belong, Mods please remove, Thank you.)


The Ethiopian Bible is the oldest, original and most complete bible on earth. Written in Ge’ez an ancient language of Ethiopia, it’s nearly 800 years older than the King James Version and contains 81-88 books compared to 66.

Written on goat skin in the early Ethiopian language of Ge’ez. It is also World’s first illustrated Christian Bible. It includes the Book of EN0CH, Esdras, Buruch and all 3 Books of MACCABEE, and a host of others that was excommunicated from the KJV.

The Ethiopian bible dating analysis dated Garima 2 to be written around 390-570, and Garima 1 from 530-660. During the Italian invasion fire was set in the monastery in the 1930s to destroy the monastery’s church nevertheless the Bible survive.

The original Christianity of Egypt was established by the apostle Mark in AD 42 in Ethiopia (Coptic Church--Coptic Orthodox Christianity) where it spread to Europe and some part of Asia. Today We have been told Christianity came from Rome.

The Catholic Church begin with the teachings of Yeshua (Yehōshu'a) who lived in the 1st century CE in the province of Judea of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile by AD 313, the Roman Empire Catholic Church faced persecution and christianity was not openly practice, the Coptic Orthodox Christianity was flourishing in the Aksumite Empire now in Ethiopia.

Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion Axum Ethiopia, houses the Ark of the Covenant, bears a design similar to that of Eastern Orthodox churches in Europe. Its most recent building, reconstructed in the 1950s, has a dome similar to the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. It is heavily guarded.

Lalibela is a holy town most famous for its churches carved from the living rock, which play an important part in the history of rock-cut architecture. Its buildings, built in the 11th and 12th centuries, are considered symbolic representations of biblical Jerusalem.

For early Christians, the risk of persecution from the Romans sometimes ran high, forcing them to practice their beliefs in private, posing a challenge for those scholars who study this era.

The King James Version Bible New Testament which is said to be translated from Greek, and the Old Testament from Hebrew and Aramaic, and the Apocrypha from Greek and Latin, All were originally translated from the Ethiopian bible. original Greek Bible was written around AD 1500.

It is also known that Ancient Afrikans of Old Egypt (Kemet) studied this bible in their temple which was known as the "The Book of the Coming Forth by Day and Night". The original Bible was produced by Black Afrikans approximately 3,400 years.

Before the Old Testament and more than 4,200 years before the New Testament, and countless versions of it have been written and published. Different scholars also translated the bible to their local languages during their studies in Kemet.

Your comments on this

https://x.com/AfricanHub_/status/1821552175241126036

1821552175241126036

[Ravenlocke]

https://x.com/Africax5/status/1574101587848560641

1574101587848560641

https://x.com/Xtreme20X/status/1814154782527180944

1814154782527180944

[Ravenlocke]

Text:
The Ethiopian Bible, believed to be the world's first illustrated Christian Bible, was written on goat skin and created around the early 5th Century CE. Named after the monk Abba Garima, who is said to have copied the text in a single day with divine assistance, the Garima Gospels are beautifully illustrated and well-preserved. The Ethiopian Heritage Fund has contributed to conserving this remarkable relic, which has been kept in the Garima Monastery near Adwa in the Tigray region of Ethiopia ever since its creation.

https://x.com/historyinmemes/status/1739856393958457607

1739856393958457607

[Jim_Duyer]

Nice thread. One part I can add to:
The original Christianity of Egypt was established by the apostle Mark in AD 42 in Ethiopia (Coptic Church--Coptic Orthodox Christianity) where it spread to Europe and some part of Asia. Today We have been told Christianity came from Rome.-------

Actually, Seba, aka Sheba, Queen of Ethiopia and Yemen (aka Seba), brought back the Old Testament in Hebrew-Aramaic in 930 B.C., and copies went to both Ethiopia and Yemen.
S with diacritical markings over it, like the Sumerian, Akkadian, Aramaic, was taken into Hebrew as Sh, their Shin.

Have you mastered Ge'ez by any chance?

[Ravenlocke]

“ Have you mastered Ge'ez by any chance?”

I don’t know anything about this language.

[Jim_Duyer]

“ Have you mastered Ge'ez by any chance?”

I don’t know anything about this language.

Well it seems complicated and I don't know it either.

[shaberon]

Actually, Seba, aka Sheba, Queen of Ethiopia and Yemen (aka Seba), brought back the Old Testament in Hebrew-Aramaic in 930 B.C., and copies went to both Ethiopia and Yemen.


Is there any physical evidence of this?

Or, rather, I would say that is entirely impossible.

Sheba was an associate of Solomon.

It is only after them that Elijah "discovered" Yhwh, ca. 900 B. C.E., and most of the Old Testament was accreted after this.

The first complete New Testament is Codex Sinaiticus (ca. 325-340), which contains a very embarrassing edit.

If you are interested in Apostolic Succession, then you better look at Mark--Africa and Thomas--India. Coptic and Eastern Christianity are rather vacant of the complications that befall churches in other societies.

In the OP concerning the "Ark", that is always pushing it, and you can't "excommunicate" the Apocrypha. The line about "Kemet" is even more farfetched. Saying the "Greek Bible" comes from 1500 circumvents the issue that Jesus began his ministry by quoting a Greek scroll of Isaiah. I'm not sure anyone has looked in to this?

In the 1500s, then-European explorers of India were baffled and amazed to find evidence of the Romans and Christianity. So we can't credit that branch with being too particularly wise about the Succession.

What went on with Ethiopia is perhaps rather interesting, but any kind of assertion should be met with further scrutiny.

[Tintin]

Actually, Seba, aka Sheba, Queen of Ethiopia and Yemen (aka Seba), brought back the Old Testament in Hebrew-Aramaic in 930 B.C., and copies went to both Ethiopia and Yemen.

What went on with Ethiopia is perhaps rather interesting, but any kind of assertion should be met with further scrutiny.

Yes, I tend to agree here: I'd rather see some evidence. I also do think the content in the OP is maybe somewhat speculative.

[Jim_Duyer]

The Kebra Nagast, var. Kebra Negast (Ge'ez: ክብረ ነገሥት, kəbrä nägäśt), or The Glory of the Kings, is a 14th-century[1] national epic of Ethiopia, written in Geʽez by the nebure id Ishaq of Aksum. In its existing form, the text is at least 700 years old and is considered by many Orthodox Tewahedo Christians to be a historically reliable work.[2] It is considered to hold the genealogy of the Solomonic dynasty, which followed the Orthodox Tewahedo Church.

The text contains an account of how the Queen of Sheba (Queen Makeda of Ethiopia) met King Solomon and about how the Ark of the Covenant came to Ethiopia with their son Menelik I (Menyelek). It also discusses the conversion of Ethiopians from the worship of the Sun, Moon, and stars to that of the "Lord God of Israel". As the Ethiopianist Edward Ullendorff explained in the 1967 Schweich Lectures, "The Kebra Nagast is not merely a literary work, but it is the repository of Ethiopian national and religious feelings".[3]

There are other works that confirm this idea. The Ark of course held the Torah, as it always did.

[ExomatrixTV]

Am not asking this question to diminish the importance of The Ethiopian Bible (https://rumble.com/search/all?q=The%20Ethiopian%20Bible) ... but how much of all wisdom & insights they collected are actually (partly copies or translations/interpretations) from much older scripture coming from ancient: India, Egypt, Babylon, Summer, Assyria, other parts of Asia etc. etc.


And how much are actual new original authentic "stand alone" texts?

Or is it wrong to think like that?

We all know UFOs have been sighted/witnessed/interacted throughout human existence, almost like we are a "Zoo" of some kind ... and some of these ancient UFOs may "tweak" humanities progression here and there and time-travel to the future to see the results of their interventions.

If this is the case, the "base story" the ancient UFOs injected in to humanity since the beginning>>> may not that different, unless humans decided to change the "messages from God" for their own benefits & having power/influence over millions.

cheers,
John 🦜🦋🌳








(https://rumble.com/search/all?q=The%20Ethiopian%20Bible)

[ExomatrixTV]

K_w-mhs0-64
2,508,056+ views

Above video tries to explain why certain things are banned from The Ethiopian Bible (https://rumble.com/search/all?q=The%20Ethiopian%20Bible)using a mixed bag of: "logic", conjecture, "reason", assumptions, beliefs, "wanting things to be like that" to make "more sense" etc. etc.


My thoughts about that are quite simple:

How sure are you that all "assumed lies" are actual lies? ... And let's say, it is "only" possible to sift thought the (possible) lies & (possible) truths seeking "similarities" between different "trusted authorities" investigating separately coming to almost "the same conclusion" is FOR ME not real "evidence" but rather just some authoritative people who have similar upraising, conditioning, beliefs, unchallenged assumptions & own BIAS https://projectavalon.net/forum4/images/smilies/wink_animated.gif

It often does the opposite: "seeking what fits their point of view" ... And some of it may be correct, but in my view: not everything! (...)

And having doubts is not really encouraged if you are a "believer" ... That is why "doubting Thomas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubting_Thomas)" is used as an example how the herd should see & treat people like that! (...)

We are not encouraged to question how Thomas was/is represented & framed ... if he would be still alive and set the record straight using the most advanced "lie detection" equipment like a "live brain scanner" he may show the world the mechanism of demonization of anyone questioning so-called "authorities"... This issue is has always been with us throughout human history!

I have no "empathy" nor endorse "doubting Thomas" >>> because I do not know who he really is nor do I know how good he was ... I DO NOT KNOW to make an honest "judgment call" ... But I do know how he is used in a mass psychological (symbolic) way!

--o-O-o--

ps: "(...)" means "think about that" ... or "let that sink in for a minute".

cheers,
John 🦜🦋🌳


@ereketnigussie5531 (https://www.youtube.com/@bereketnigussie5531) quote:

"As Ethiopian and also as a deacon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, I would like to inform you that our bible has 81 books not 88. And Christianity came to our society not in the 4th century but around 34 A.D when the eunuch of candace of the Ethiopians came back to Ethiopia. Acts chapter 8" unquote

[Jim_Duyer]

Am not asking this question to diminish the importance of The Ethiopian Bible (https://rumble.com/search/all?q=The%20Ethiopian%20Bible) ... but how much of all wisdom & insights they collected are actually (partly copies or translations/interpretations) from much older scripture coming from ancient: India, Egypt, Babylon, Summer, Assyria, other parts of Asia etc. etc.


And how much are actual new original authentic "stand alone" texts?

Or is it wrong to think like that?

We all know UFOs have been sighted/witnessed/interacted throughout human existence, almost like we are a "Zoo" of some kind ... and some of these ancient UFOs may "tweak" humanities progression here and there and time-travel to the future to see the results of their interventions.

If this is the case, the "base story" the ancient UFOs injected in to humanity since the beginning>>> may not that different, unless humans decided to change the "messages from God" for their own benefits & having power/influence over millions.

cheers,
John 🦜🦋🌳








(https://rumble.com/search/all?q=The%20Ethiopian%20Bible)


Am not asking this question to diminish the importance of The Ethiopian Bible ... but how much of all wisdom & insights they collected are actually (partly copies or translations/interpretations) from much older scripture coming from ancient: India, Egypt, Babylon, Summer, Assyria, other parts of Asia etc. etc. I don't feel it diminishes anything - every single region, time period and peoples borrowed from one another in the Middle Eastern sphere. Even the Bible and the Ethiopian Bible and the Mandaean Bible and the Vedics and the Zarasthruans.


Or is it wrong to think like that? I don't think it is wrong to question anything that we read or see.

And how much are actual new original authentic "stand alone" texts? Even these were not original according to the ancient Rabbi = there were hints about Sheba bringing the Ark and about the conversion of Ethiopians to Hebrew beliefs prior to Christianity - they are found in the commentaries. There were also Hebrew hints that the Ark might have been brought to Ethiopia.

As far as UFOs go - the earliest, and by that I mean the writing done in symbols that existed Prior to cuneiform, or from the time of Gobekli Tepe until 3000 BC when cuneiform arose, speak very clearly, in much detail, and with much repetition, of aliens who were their brutal masters and who took some of the locals back to their home worlds as slaves to the stars. If you use a template to translate the Book of Job to Sumerian, which I have made (much as there is a template made by Jewish scholars to translate Aramaic to Hebrew characters) then you will find the same laments about the aliens in that text as well.

I find it difficult not to believe the vast volume of words that they wrote down in respect to this. And they claim that they looked like us, except for the fact that their skin was rough or chapped - perhaps due to the effects of different suns. And of course both the Sumerian Texts and Job tell us that we did not originate on Earth but were brought here.

[shaberon]

"As Ethiopian and also as a deacon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, I would like to inform you that our bible has 81 books not 88. And Christianity came to our society not in the 4th century but around 34 A.D when the eunuch of candace of the Ethiopians came back to Ethiopia. Acts chapter 8"



Here is where we are at loggerheads.

I would not call that remotely reliable.

Why not? Because Acts of the Apostles is a complete forgery.

Suspending disbelief for a moment, you couldn't import "Christianity" in year 34 because it had not been invented.

Acts did that, by distorting Paul.


So, ok. In Ethiopia, they have a text that *may* be from around the year 400, although that is the extreme end of the range of possibilities.


What is going on that makes it?

Well, we don't think there are any kind of written records until at least the 100s. Not of the scripture, but there is Nag Hammadi. Modern thinking suggests this was a library from Jerusalem which was hidden when the Romans got destructive.



By most accounts, Mark is considered the first Apostle. The Coptic Church of Alexandria, and some Rosicrucians, attribute their origin to Apostle Mark the Lion (https://orthodoxwiki.org/Apostle_Mark). This part is probably physically accurate:


...being the founder of the see of Alexandria in the first century...

This is the lore:



His house was the first Christian church, where they ate the Passover, hid after the death of the Lord Christ, and in its upper room the Holy Spirit came upon them.

Mark accompanied Paul and Barnabas in their missionary journeys, preaching the gospel in Antioch, Seleucia, Cyprus, Salamis, and Perga Pamphylia, where he left them and returned to Jerusalem. After the apostolic council in Jerusalem, he went with Barnabas to Cyprus.

After the departure of Barnabas, St. Mark went to Afrikia, Berka, and the five Western cities. He preached the gospel in these parts, and on his account many believed. From there, he went to Alexandria in 61 A.D.


In the story, it is important that Mark is with Paul.

If we turn for outside corroboration, of anything, we could say that Mark made an establishment in Alexandria around 61, and that Thomas did so in India by 52.

They couldn't have had Bibles.

It gets a little weird. I just know this is a tradition in Orthodoxy (https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2019/10/06/102885-holy-glorious-apostle-thomas#:~:text=According%20to%20Church%20Tradition%2C%20the,earned%20him%20a%20martyr's%20death.):


Apostle Thomas founded Christian churches in Palestine, Mesopotamia, Parthia, Ethiopia and India.


According to Tewahedo (https://eotcmk.org/e/st-thomas-the-apostle/):


Some of the apostolic missions of St Thomas that recorded in the Ethiopic Synaxarium are summarized as follows: St. Thomas went to his apostolic diocese, India and Kantara...


It's silent about him appearing in their country. The Assyrian Church remembers Thomas perfectly well.


Hrm. So we notice in the irregularities of the canonical books:


Matthew specifically identifies John the Baptist as Elijah's spiritual successor, the gospels of Mark and Luke are silent on the matter. The Gospel of John states that John the Baptist denied that he was Elijah.


In Matthew 17:11–13, Jesus speaking calls him Elijah; in John, John's own words deny he is anything special.


John the Baptist was Mandean. It seems likely to me there was a historical Jesus in the Order of Melchizedek of Psalm 110 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melchizedek). He began by pointing to the section on Deror (https://www.jstor.org/stable/23612465) in Isaiah, from the later, redacted part. It is only found in Exile texts because it is cognate to Babylonian Andararum.


But that is not what our attention is drawn to by these contradictory scriptures. From the view that they are Piso (https://www.henryhdavis.com/post/the-gospel-of-mark-why-does-the-name-piso-as-in-calpurnius-piso-appear-within-key-statements) satire:


The gospels of 'Mark' and 'Matthew' are not written in the first person, i.e., spoken by the author, anywhere in the text. Instead, both narratives are told in the third person. That is why scholars doubt and have concluded that the author is not relating personal experiences.



So for example if we agree there was a person, Mark, that says nothing about a gospel attributed to this person.



The oldest layers of Nag Hammadi are Sayings Gospels, which are entirely different from the biographical narratives. Not thought to be by the Apostle, the Gospel of Thomas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas) has no narrative; it is almost completely sayings:



Several authors argue that when the logia in Thomas do have parallels in the synoptics, the version in Thomas often seems closer to the source.

In saying 13, Peter and Matthew are depicted as unable to understand the true significance or identity of Jesus.

According to Meyer, Thomas's saying 17 – "I shall give you what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard and no hand has touched, and what has not come into the human heart" – is strikingly similar to what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 2:9, which was itself an allusion to Isaiah 64:4.


It was condemned by Cyril; scholars speculate that the works were buried in response to a letter from Bishop Athanasius declaring a strict canon of Christian scripture.


So, there is an intra-textual argument about what constitutes "authentic Paul", while there is in fact a pile of external evidence as well. This falls in the view called:


Marcionite Priority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas)



That is to say, "Marcion's Gospel" is thought likely to be "original" or quite close.


Now, if you leave off from Acts and use a few other dates determined about Paul, the most likely explanation is that he left Jerusalem about six months before Jesus started preaching.

Paul never met Jesus.

Likewise, Marcion never met Paul. However, their message is pretty emphatically identical. Marcion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcion_of_Sinope) was excommunicated by the church of Rome around 144:


Marcion preached that God had sent Jesus Christ, who was distinct from the "vengeful" God (Demiurge) who had created the world. He considered himself a follower of Paul the Apostle, whom he believed to have been the only true apostle of Jesus Christ

The example of what he was working with may be called Apostolicon (https://sites.google.com/site/inglisonmarcion/home/paul/marcions-apostolicon-the-pauline-epistles):


Galatians, First Corinthians, Second Corinthians, Romans, FirstThessalonians, SecondThessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon, Philippians, and Laodiceans (fragment)



Or (https://www.quora.com/If-Gospel-is-fake-and-made-up-then-why-did-the-apostles-of-Jesus-give-up-their-lives-for-it):



The apostle Paul never met Jesus in life...


...the stories (with the exception of 8 letters written by Paul) were not written by the people to whom they are attributed (they’re forgeries), and c) the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, & John) weren’t written by anyone who had first-hand knowledge of Jesus (hear-say, if not outright made up), as the first book was written between 30 and 35 years after Jesus was supposed to have died.



Seven letters (with consensus dates)

considered genuine by most scholars:

First Thessalonians (c. 50 AD)
Galatians (c. 53)
First Corinthians (c. 53–54)
Philippians (c. 55)
Philemon (c. 55)
Second Corinthians (c. 55–56)
Romans (c. 57)

The letters on which scholars are about evenly divided:

Colossians
Second Thessalonians

The letters thought to be pseudepigraphic by about 80% of scholars:

Ephesians
First Timothy
Second Timothy
Titus

Finally, Epistle to the Hebrews, though anonymous and not really in the form of a letter, has long been included among Paul's collected letters, but most scholars regard it as not written by Paul.


Going through the seven or eight more reliable articles, you don't get anyone who was a "converted Saul".

However there will be an intense problem with everything I am saying. That is the contents of these letters. They purport to show a date range of alleged primacy, but we hit this difficulty with Paul (https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2022/03/part-2-reassessing-pauls-timeline-by.html):


If Paul wasn’t writing in response to a historical Lord Jesus Christ, how are we to understand his constant references to this character? Or was he?



You can't look it up in the Bible. You can't use critical editions of the texts. You have to have original manuscripts.

It's quite similar to questions about Masoretic Hebrew, except it means Paul never heard of Jesus:



...fourth century textual families where some render XS as Christos and some as Chrestos. It is evident that those copyists were engaged in some type of guesswork.

Marcion’s manuscripts contained the Nomina Sacra abbreviations. And we can be equally certain that he didn’t understand all of them in the same way as later copyists.

Marcion filled in the missing letters in some of the abbreviated terms differently than did the later copyists.

All evidence points to the following differences:

Abbreviation....Traditional Spelling....Marcion’s Spelling

ΧΣ Χριστός (Christos/Christ).... χρηστός (Chrestos)
ΙΣ Ἰησοῦς (Iesous/Jesus).... ΙΣ (IS)


The earliest (Christian) inscription is from a Marcionite church building in Lebada, Syria near Damascus, ca 318, was dedicated to “IS Chrestos”.

Other early fathers also used Chrestos, and called his followers Chrestianoi, including Clement of Alexandria who wrote, in Book II of the Stromata, “All who believe in Chrestos both are, and are called, Chrestianoi, that is, good men.”


Suddenly we are looking at authentic Paul up through later Marcionite churches, who are talking about IS Chrestos.

That is exactly what we will see, on the *original* Codex Sinaiticus manuscript, which has been edited.

We can imagine around the 300s, some kind of enforcement was coming out, leading to the murder of Hypatia around 414, in Alexandria. Does that represent authentic Mark?

That is what made me curious about the Ethiopian Bible, except I am quite leery of the forces emanating from Cyril and Athanasius. It seems odd to quote Acts while being unaware of the mission of Thomas. I'm kind of thinking it is unable to fill these gaps.



In the early 100s, Hadrian wrote of Alexandria and the Serapis Christians (https://sacred-texts.com/gno/gar/gar23.htm). Serapis had been deliberately spread by Ptolemy Soter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serapis). I listed it that way because of the standard Biblical Greek:


sōtḗr (a masculine noun, derived from 4982 /sṓzō, "save") – properly, the Savior, Jesus Christ who saves believers from their sins


I'm not thinking the Ethiopian version can say much about the linguistics or history. It probably is a remarkable example of how long something can survive in favorable conditions. And, at least, it is out of the grip of Rome. Perhaps until they get attacked in the 20th century.

If we bend Hadrian's spelling, it is more likely "Chrestos" was a term from the Serapis cult, and that Paul, an Aramaic Jew, spoke this vernacular, like soldiers and slaves. It is possible Paul's name was magnified to blot out Apollonius of Tyana. It is practically certain it was to over-write him and make his life read differently.

If seen this way, Paul and Jesus are speaking against Yhwh, and so by accretion, a literary circle is drawn around them.

Oddly, it's not physically possible to show that Paul ever heard of Jesus. Usually all you will get is someone's interpretation saying this is so.

[shaberon]

- every single region, time period and peoples borrowed from one another in the Middle Eastern sphere. Even the Bible and the Ethiopian Bible and the Mandaean Bible and the Vedics and the Zarasthruans.


Or is it wrong to think like that? I don't think it is wrong to question anything that we read or see.

And how much are actual new original authentic "stand alone" texts? Even these were not original according to the ancient Rabbi = there were hints about Sheba...


I think there is a way to compare apples to apples here.

The Sheba of Yemen originates at about the 12th century B. C. E.. And so we are going to take on the issue of spoken tradition versus texts. The Mandeans possess no type of book much older than the Koran. But it is possible for the following events around 1,000 B. C. E. in the version that is Mandean (https://livingwaterbooks.com.au/review-of-authentic-mandaean-stories-and-fairy-tales/):


The particular Solomon and Sheba tale also refers to the mirror pool as found in the Quran sura 27 but not Jewish or Christian literature; nevertheless it is not a tale derivative from Islam but a separate Solomonic tradition.



Okay. "Sheba" is equal to "Sabian". John the Baptist was considered the southern branch of "something". Mandeans say that the Jews are the same people, who decided to follow Moses, whom they rebuke. Those three all lead to Harran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harran):



Harran is situated at an important geographical crossroad, both between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and at the border between the ancient Mesopotamian and Anatolian cultures. The earliest known settlements in the region surrounding Harran date to 10000–8000 BC and settlements in its close vicinity are known to have existed by 6000 BC. The region initially shifted between the control of the Sumerians and Hittites before being occupied by ancient Semitic-speaking people around 2750 BC. The earliest written records concerning Harran suggest that the city itself was founded c. 2500–2000 BC as a merchant outpost by traders from the Sumerian city of Ur.

Harran was later incorporated into the Mitanni kingdom in the 16th century BC.

Further treaties signed that invoke Sin of Harran include a 14th-century BC treaty between Šuppiluliuma I of the Hittites and Shattiwaza of Mitanni.

This continues at least through Kassite Babylonia:


Since Harran was the sacred city of the moon-god, many Mesopotamian kings travelled there to receive the blessing and confirmation of their rule from the city's religious officials and in turn renovated and expanded Harran and its temples.


The term "Sabian" continued to be used for "astronomer" through the Caliphates. Harran remained pagan until the 1200s.

The Nabatheans were Sabians, and what is interesting is that they domesticated the horse about the same time as the Pontic Steppe, around 2,200 B. C. E.; the horses spoken of in ancient India are this Arabian horse, having thirty-four ribs.

Such Nabatheans must have traded to Sri Lanka, and this is where Islam and Mandeism both say Adam lived.

That's not what is said in Sri Lanka.

The Mittani treaty includes Indian deities. What happens is that local deities from twenty or thirty places are summoned to witness, and Sanskrit jumps out very boldly with Mitravaruna, Indra, Nasatyas. That means there was an Indian village here, near Aleppo.

Those are Vedic deities, and what we notice is the Veda has no Adam story.

What you might call the Babylonian pre-cursors of the Old Testament Adam and Flood myths are not from India, rather, they are imported there perhaps as early as the 200s. To a great extent we can tell which way these arrows are pointing.

An eschatological Savior at End Times is not Indian, either, it is so Zoroastrian, it is what Zoroaster said of himself personally, Soioshant -- *I* shall return and defeat evil. This is different from a "Messiah", because Cyrus the Great *was* the Messiah. Taking in with this the Greek soter, which I think was a medical term, and you get the expectation of a future Messiah *or* the role being filled by Jesus, once, and again. This type of doctrine is not really Indian either.

On the other hand, Genesis and Exodus are Exile material. That is why they look like Babylonian Flood myths. My suggestion is that "Moses" was not a historical figure, but, an attempt at Law rebuilt into a new system--particularly Ezra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra) c. 457 B. C. E..

Wood panel Ezra ca. 3rd century B. C. E.:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Ezra_Reads_the_Law_l.jpg



That looks like some influence.

If Saul, David, and Solomon never heard of Moses or Yhwh, they were not exactly Jewish, in the normal sense. Part of what Mandeism shares in common with Israelite scripture is Psalms, which are generally considered Davidic.



It may have been unplanned that we make the discovery in Ugarit 1928 (https://lost-history.com/baal_hadad.php):


Hadad also calls the king of the gods, El the Bull, father as well. He can probably be equated with Ba'al-Zebul, or Beelzebub, the god of Ekron mentioned in 2 Kings.


Because that is where Elijah and Yhwh come out. It's a definite moment. It's against an established medicine deity. Hadad is a developed enough literature that it is probably not literal (https://godsofcanaan.wordpress.com/baal-hadad/):


The Ba’al Cycle is therefore an allegory for how kings should behave, more than it tells anything about Ugarit’s agricultural cycle.



Approximately 1,500 texts and fragments have been found to date, all of which have been dated to the 13th and 12th centuries BC.


Again we can tell which way influence went.

Jesus only referred to El. There is no immediate answer why Yhwh would be carried forward. There are however schools of thought that say it should not be. If not, there would be no Ark to look for.

[Ravenlocke]

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[Ravenlocke]

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[Ravenlocke]

Note: I am not familiar with the Book of Enoch so the following descriptions are unconfirmed as to accuracy of the contents.


Text:
The Book of Enoch, or portions of it, has been discovered in several locations, but one of the most significant discoveries was made in Ethiopia. The most complete version of the Book of Enoch, known as 1 Enoch, is found in Ge'ez, an ancient Ethiopian language. This version is often referred to as the "Ethiopian Enoch" or the "Ethiopic Enoch."

The Ethiopian Enoch was discovered in the 18th century in the Ethiopian monastic community. It was already known to Ethiopian Christians for centuries and had been preserved in their religious texts. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church considers the Book of Enoch to be part of its biblical canon.

The Book of Enoch is an ancient religious text attributed to Enoch, a figure from biblical and apocryphal literature. It's not considered part of the canonical Bible but holds historical and cultural significance. This text is divided into several sections, with the most well-known being the Book of Watchers.

In the Book of Watchers, Enoch describes a series of visions and revelations he experiences. He is taken up to the heavens and encounters angelic beings known as the Watchers. These angels reveal hidden knowledge, both celestial and earthly, to Enoch. They also disclose the fallen angels' transgressions, who descended to Earth, taught forbidden arts, and caused corruption among humans.

Enoch's visions include descriptions of cosmic phenomena, such as the luminaries (sun, moon, stars), their courses, and the secrets of the heavenly realms. He also receives divine instructions on morality, justice, and the impending judgment of the wicked.

The Book of Enoch is known for its vivid descriptions of the celestial realms, the hierarchy of angels, and the consequences of human choices. It emphasizes the importance of righteous living, humility, and devotion to God. Enoch is often regarded as a prophet who foresaw the eventual judgment of both angels and humans.

Text:

The Book of Enoch provides an extensive hierarchy of angels, presenting a detailed account of the celestial beings and their roles in the divine order. While this hierarchy is not standardized across all versions of the Book of Enoch, it often includes various classes of angels, each with specific duties and functions. Here is an overview of the hierarchy of angels as described in the Book of Enoch:
1. Watchers (Grigori): The Watchers are a group of angels who are sent to Earth to watch over humanity. However, they become corrupted when they descend to Earth and intermingle with human women. They are responsible for teaching forbidden knowledge and are eventually punished for their transgressions.
2. Holy Ones (Irin): The Holy Ones are angels of higher rank who remain faithful to God. They serve as heavenly guardians and participate in heavenly councils. They are associated with maintaining the order of the cosmos.
3. Cherubim: Cherubim are angelic beings often depicted as powerful and majestic. They are associated with the throne of God and are considered to be protectors of divine mysteries.
4. Seraphim: Seraphim are angelic beings described as having multiple wings and a fiery appearance. They are closely associated with divine worship and are often depicted as praising and glorifying God.
5. Ophanim: Ophanim, also known as "wheels" or "thrones," are angelic beings associated with divine chariots or heavenly wheels. They are described as having many eyes and wings.
6. Archangels: Archangels are high-ranking angels with specific roles and names. They often serve as messengers or intermediaries between God and humanity. In some versions of the Book of Enoch, notable archangels include Raphael, Uriel, Gabriel, and Michael.
7. Angels of Punishment: These angels are responsible for executing divine judgments and punishments upon the wicked. They carry out God's decrees, ensuring that justice is meted out.
8. Grigori (Fallen Watchers): As mentioned earlier, the Grigori are the Watchers who descend to Earth, become corrupted, and teach forbidden knowledge to humans. They play a significant role in the narrative of Enoch.
9. Guardian Angels: Some versions of the Book of Enoch suggest the existence of guardian angels assigned to individuals, guiding and protecting them throughout their lives.

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[Ravenlocke]

Text:
Enoch's ascent involves traversing through a series of celestial realms, each known as a distinct heaven. These heavenly realms are characterized by unique attributes, inhabitants, and revelations.

In the first heaven, Enoch observes the celestial bodies, gaining insights into the precise order and movements of the universe.
The second heaven introduces Enoch to angels who oversee the elements and natural forces of the Earth. Here, he acquires knowledge about the winds and atmospheric phenomena.

Moving to the third heaven, Enoch encounters the heavenly storehouses of blessings and curses. He witnesses the recording of human deeds and their corresponding consequences.

The fourth heaven unveils the realm of stars and celestial luminaries. Enoch learns about the intricate motions and purposes of the stars and planets.

In the fifth heaven, Enoch comes into contact with powerful angels responsible for the souls of both the righteous and the wicked. He gains insights into the judgment and fate of these souls.

The sixth heaven is home to angels who maintain the cosmic order. Here, Enoch beholds the divine throne and the glorious beings who encircle it.

The seventh heaven represents the culmination of Enoch's journey. It is the dwelling place of God Himself, where Enoch stands in the immediate presence of divine majesty. In this celestial realm, Enoch receives profound revelations about the nature of God, divine secrets, and the ultimate destiny of humanity.

Having completed this awe-inspiring journey and having acquired profound knowledge, Enoch returns to Earth as a chosen messenger of God. He is entrusted with the sacred task of sharing his revelations and teachings with humanity. This includes prophecies concerning future events, divine judgment, and the consequences of leading lives marked by righteousness or wickedness. Enoch's journey, therefore, emerges as a symbol of spiritual enlightenment, divine communion, and the transmission of sacred wisdom for the betterment of humanity.

The "Apocalypse of Weeks"

The "Apocalypse of Weeks" is a section of the Book of Enoch, specifically found in the Book of Dreams (also known as the Book of the Luminaries). In this apocalyptic text, Enoch receives revelations about the future in a structured framework of "weeks," each representing a period of time.

The Apocalypse of Weeks outlines the historical events and spiritual developments that will unfold over the course of 10 weeks, offering a prophetic vision of the future. Here is a brief summary of some of the key themes in this section:

Week 1-7: These initial weeks describe the course of human history, including periods of righteousness followed by wickedness. Enoch predicts the coming of a Messianic figure who will bring judgment and righteousness.

Week 8-9: These weeks depict the judgment of the fallen angels (Watchers) who had corrupted humanity and taught forbidden knowledge. Enoch foresees their imprisonment and punishment.

Week 10: This final week represents the ultimate culmination of history, marked by the resurrection of the righteous, the final judgment of the wicked, and the establishment of God's eternal kingdom.

The "Apocalypse of Weeks" provides a prophetic framework for understanding the progression of time, the cycles of righteousness and wickedness in human history, and the ultimate triumph of divine justice. It reflects themes of eschatology, the end times, and the coming of a Messianic figure.
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[meat suit]

Here is an online version of the book of Enoch

https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/index.htm

[Irminsül]

Hello shaberon! I've been reading your posts and the level of depth of the research you carry out is noticeable. Which is excellent and I congratulate you for that

It seems that you have a lot of knowledge when it comes to Christianity, the study of the Bible and related subjects. So I wanted to ask you the following questions:


Can it be known if there is anything in the Nag Hammadi texts that reflect the original and authentic teachings of Jesus of Nazareth? Or are they (as many say) a distorted and modified version of his teachings?

Can it be identified throughout the New Testament, which books have been the least modified?

Are there apocryphal gospels that are of more "value" than the canonical ones in terms of being more likely to have been written by people who lived with Jesus and knew him directly?

In order to have a more complete vision, the ideal would be to read the Codex Sinaiticus, the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Alexandrinus? Or is there one of those three manuscripts that stands out above the others in terms of the quality of its content?

[shaberon]

Hello shaberon! I've been reading your posts and the level of depth of the research you carry out is noticeable. Which is excellent and I congratulate you for that

It seems that you have a lot of knowledge when it comes to Christianity, the study of the Bible and related subjects. So I wanted to ask you the following questions:


This is good, it reflects how a "forum" ought to work. Like a debate, questions followed by questions, milling it down so we understand each other better.

We are bound to disagree on a few minor points -- the issue is, can we have "minor disagreements" and still function harmoniously on the planet? I would say "yes" -- there is a lot of value in that.

If it goes too far, there are red lines -- if this is your serious belief, then we are only going to fight.

Now, something has recently come to my attention. As I have said, I am a "friendly visitor" to Orthodoxy. I specifically lack exactly what is required to participate in the faith, which is directed at Theological Jesus. There is more to it. I had thought that End Times Resurrection was a type of extremist fascination with the Book of Revelations, and I never thought about it. But I am reminded it is part of the Nicene Creed, and it is just that since the scientific revolution in the 1700s that it receded from every church's focus. I don't remember hearing it at any of the Orthodox services, and it is correct that although Revelations is in the canon, it has never been used as a reading by Orthodoxy.

I don't have a problem with it. If that's what someone chooses to believe, at least it is relatively harmless, and because I know most of the rest of what they are about, the conclusion is I would at least like to maintain a friendly relation.

Artificially restoring the Jews to the Temple, etc., as in Zionism is absolutely not part of Orthodoxy (it's not even Catholic).

On the other hand, the analysis I have seen virtually obliterates the New Testament. Nevertheless, I am willing to speculate there was a historical Jesus, I probably would have tried to be his friend too, which makes me particularly interested in Apostles and what actually happened to the recordings of it. This will be rather harsh, however, it need not diminish anyone's view of Jesus personally, I have nothing that suggests he was not at least a spiritual healer.


To unlace it I'm going to move up your last question:



In order to have a more complete vision, the ideal would be to read the Codex Sinaiticus, the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Alexandrinus? Or is there one of those three manuscripts that stands out above the others in terms of the quality of its content?

Yes, exactly.

That is the key to the whole thing.

Codex Sinaiticus (ca.325-350) was written using the vocabulary of Paul.

The slightly later Codex Alexandria is composed in the Orthodox language.

Here, we get the opportunity to dissect Wikipedia and see how mind blanking works. They post the basically correct information -- these texts lack most names because they are written in a code called Nomina Sacra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticus) but what is wrong with this picture:


ΙΣ (Ιησους / Jesus) ΧΣ (χριστος / Christ)


It's in Orthodox language.

That's an interpretation, it's not what the CS says.

The Pauline spelling is that of the Marcionites, who started the first known "church" as its own stone building and it is inscribed there from ca. 220.

In no case do they ever spell out IS. Marcion *does* have the name Jesus Barabbas, so, he was capable of using such a name where appropriate.

Moreover, Pauline XS is "Chrestos".

He's speaking the language of Serapis, a vernacular that would have been known to the military and to slaves. It would have worked everywhere in Egypt.

Now, compare the locations -- Sinai is the desert, the source of Hesychasm, whereas post-350 Alexandria is a coalescence of heretic hunters. You can look at the CS manuscript and see where someone scratched out the "e" out of "Chrestos" in order to write "Christos".

In perspective, Serapis is Ptolemaic, so a discussion on "Chrestos" would have been relevant everywhere it expanded in the Greek-speaking world. That suggests a motive for forcing it "out of print".

Additionally, the expression "of Nazareth" is misleading because it is "the Nasorean", Mandaic for "priest" because he was initiated by John the Baptist, a Mandaean Nasar. Later the "St. Thomas Christians" retain the name "Nasrani".




Can it be known if there is anything in the Nag Hammadi texts that reflect the original and authentic teachings of Jesus of Nazareth? Or are they (as many say) a distorted and modified version of his teachings?


The first reaction from textual analysis would mean that such a thing as a Sayings Gospel is simpler, more original or authentic, than a Biographical Gospel.

Because everyone knows the Synoptics veer off and conflict each other's biographies, let's hold off on that aspect.

I'm willing to ask Orthodoxy, what are some of those teachings, and see what doesn't emerge from the common ground of Twenty Parallels (https://www.reddit.com/r/religion/comments/9z0ryb/jesus_and_buddha_parallel_sayings_obviously_there/) to Theravada Buddhist texts.

Anyone is welcome to guess and then check the link afterwards.

We're looking at someone with about a three-year career, which is enough time to say an awful lot of things, when the value of writing would already be obvious.

Of course, if he had a lot to say, I'm sure it would be imparted gradually. I have a lot of experience training or raising human beings in various ways, and three years is just a green season if they are getting into something significant.


I think this is a very good question, and, I find myself on the "asking" side. I would say it might be a beneficial activity, to compare and contrast what the actual "teachings" are (if any) in these various texts. One of them is the Gospel of Thomas, which is spurious in the sense it is probably not by Apostle Thomas, but someone else with the same name. As we found in this thread, Apostle Thomas probably *did* go to Ethiopia, *and* they lost memory of it until Orthodoxy was introduced to them.

Thomas is very interesting, but the more pressing question is probably about whether the Mark that went to Alexandria is of the same nature as the "newfangled" Codex scribed there. It is probably impossible to derive any information about Thomasene churches before they were inculcated into Orthodoxy. They are Nicene but not Chalcedonic like western churches.


One of the likely "closest" people to Jesus was James the Just, and, it is now generally held that the "Essene" texts found at Qumran were actually the Library of Jersualem. The problem for Orthodoxy as the religion of Jersualem was that the temple was shut down, and James was martyred quite early, ca. 44, and no Christians re-establish an assembly there until about 135. That may, indeed, have something to do with why there is a certain hole in things, and these questions of reliability.

The complication with this Nicene Resurrection belief is that, in perspective, that actually *was* the main gate through which heretics were expelled. Anything that spoke of an "aerial body" automatically got you kicked out. And, if John, presumably the oldest surviving disciple, is found to have followers that went to both camps, then, maybe we ought to stop stressing it so hard, that is, in terms of censorship and even executions that reduced the knowledge base to the Orthodox view. I would say some very wrong things were done. To their credit, Byzantine philosophy eventually wiped out the extremist policy, and in return for that, I will at least say that some of the Orthodox views on the deity and Communion are valid. I think they have something, but because I deny their theological requirements, I obviously have the heretical view on "aerial body".


Do I know if Thomas or Pistis Sophia represent his actual words, no. I don't know if I can prove anything like that. I do, however, think the Qumran Melchizedek text is telling. If Paul was Serapis, Jesus was Melchizedek. The mission would have been to replace the Levites. That is what remains by extracting Orthodox scripture from the parts considered to be redactions or interpolations. Even in the most boiling acid bath conjured straight from hell, I still wind up with Melchizedek and the first "teaching" of Jesus quoting Babylonian Trito-Isaiah on Aphesis which is Debt Cancellation. He's speaking using educated Babylonian Jewish Greek to remind these people about a word that is actually in Leviticus, but, we do not have a record of it actually being practiced in Judea.

Let's say, if I were Greek or Jewish in that area, that probably would convert me.

Melchizedek becomes King by offering a Jubilee.

That's what I've found, by grinding it down, unintentionally, it just makes this spear point under intense scrutiny. If it was mainly about those two kinds of things coming together, I would be more interested. The problem is, this quoting Isaiah thing actually *is* a fundamental doctrine of every church, *and* they lose the meaning of "Aphesis" as just being "liberation from sin". But the context of "sin" in that language means exactly some type of blow or collision, a situation with liability, and the specific meaning here is Debt which is the duty of kingship.

Then it would universally match other languages. It is a non-western, very opposite definition of "king".

If I were not Greek or Jewish in that area, then I would probably commonly know about, if not experience, such an occasion.




Can it be identified throughout the New Testament, which books have been the least modified?


Probably.

If Jesus was similar to the above, it would not really threaten the Roman Empire, but it would be of great concern to the local authorities. He would have become a King, colloquially a Messiah. The difficulty with words about him "returning" in some mystical future manner, would have generally been understood as "during my lifetime", and that was not found soon or shortly thereafter, which mandated a special strategy to be able to convert Jews. Obviously, this runs in a different direction than the problem of converting Greek pagans, who probably spoke Paul's language.

In the NT itself, because the Gospel of John is so different from the Synoptics, you get the hard question of whether it is the most authentic because from the closest, oldest, and wisest person, or is it a late comeback that is the most wildly imaginative because it is trying to employ a complex rollout strategy?

If half of his disciples become Gnostics, or, the majority of local "Christian Gnostics" are Johannines, we're back to a gray area on that.

Aside from the Gospels, yes, because the conglomerate is framed around Pseudo-Paul.

That's going to delete a few Epistles and render Acts full of errors, if not an outright forgery.

The complications of Roman supremacy are fairly damaging to Peter, who among other things was probably a cover-up by way of demonizing Simon Magus.

Everything lines up worse for them, and, as we see, Rome did not ameliorate its violent ways any time soon, causing effectively a Dark Age in Europe.






Are there apocryphal gospels that are of more "value" than the canonical ones in terms of being more likely to have been written by people who lived with Jesus and knew him directly?


I'm not sure there is such a thing.

We had a family Bible from around the 1880s which was rather interesting, because it was gigantic, fairly good quality, and included a few Apocrypha.

It is a "genre", in the sense that these are not banned "heretical" books, but are "obscure, of dubious origin". By comparison, *all* primeval codices contained apocraphya, *and* they were accepted as valid by several prominent proto-Orthodox Fathers even in Alexandria.

The most interesting starting point that I know on them, would be The Book of Enoch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Enoch).

I'm not aware if they include any gospels.

In other words, nothing non-canonical offers up much "biographical" information on Jesus, it is all mostly Sayings, or a type of meditation or communion in gnosticism.


Now, let's say Melchizedek is a regency similar to Serapis; independence, like a Peace Treaty with Egypt.

What was the Alexandria of Mark's time?

Well, it is recorded by Philo probably during the lifetime of Jesus as a "Mecca" for the Therapeutae.

Scholars have generally contended this was a minor "Essene sect" or something, however he is saying these people come from everywhere in the Greek and the barbarian worlds. At one point they are also understood as "Christians", and then in the 400s almost generically as "monks" of any religion. It has a root meaning of "devotee, servant (of a deity)", and, because a primary trait of these meditators was "healing", that comes to overtake the meaning as it sounds to us today.

That's like a cutoff, they are not heard from again.




In the scripture, we find the Greek suddenly uses "daimon" in the sense where only "kakodaimon" would be appropriate.

The Greek knowledge base, and, particularly, healing oracles, relied on a strand of medical daimons. Moreover, several other kinds are "obscure or of dubious origin" in the very values that comprise the NT.


The reason for taking the Nicene Creed is faith, which is Pistis, a Daimon.

Used in the classical sense, it has the meaning of "convinced, persuaded", which leads to "trust". At the moment, I am unable to muster this for the requisite Nicene Creed, but the basics of healing monks running around Melchizedek's kingdom has a certain resonance.


If I look at why Jesus utters Trito-Isaiah, it is because he says the Spirit is with him; and we find in other areas, he says that when he is gone the Spirit will be with "us", or, i. e., the receivers of the apostolic succession.

If I endure medieval censorship, looking for the Spirit in further exegesis, I will find it reduced to a technical term, a dead letter without any life. It is supposed to have to do with "truth, wisdom". Of course, I would be interested in spiritual experiences of wisdom, but that's not being environmentally reflected to me.

Now if I go to places where the Greek maybe makes sense, one of the most complete Gnostic texts is Pistis Sophia. What is this. Well, it is a kind of meditation and spiritual path, with Sophia, the Holy Spirit, a female.

When I personally see that, I react out of further interest, since it begins to resemble my own system.

For me, most of what I see in forbidden gnostic texts is more interesting, whereas whether it is more authentic is irrelevant.

A more detailed review to rank "authenticity" of various Gospels based from their own internal evidence is not something I have attempted, but it may well be worth doing, I don't see why not.

[shaberon]

That is good it appears there is some interest in the fact it is the Book of Enoch that is complete in Ethiopia.


Here's the intrigue.

According to the Mandeans, Enoch was operating through John the Baptist. The baptism he was transmitting was Aramaic -- Iranian. However this is not transmitted by the church. Therefor they assert the church has killed the ritual. Due to this, there are some later polemics that rather bluntly reject Jesus. However they have nothing that describes any active or current dispute with him personally in his career.

On the other hand, Enoch is not an "author" but rather a junior non-Jewish literary tradition from ca, 200 B. C. E, which probably *is* relevant to the Essenes, and has several parts not liked by rabbis such as:


...the absence of references to terms of the Mosaic covenant (such as the observance of Shabbat or the rite of circumcision), as found in the Torah


which is para-Mandaic. They are slightly similar although still for the most part, Enoch is closer to Judaism or employing a great deal of its milieu. Nevertheless, it is enhancing with something that is otherwise slack in any scriptures.

Part of that is in the lines of Persian Dualism which is being developed in an excessive way, in my view, I do not really hold these same fixations on Big Evil, as it were. However, the text does present some universal ideals, such as a Tree of Life and a realm of Seven Heavens.


On this if we just run through it with the corresponding doctrines of our system:


In the first heaven, Enoch observes the celestial bodies, gaining insights into the precise order and movements of the universe.


[a near-copy of earth presided by beings similar to Watchers]


The second heaven introduces Enoch to angels who oversee the elements and natural forces of the Earth. Here, he acquires knowledge about the winds and atmospheric phenomena.







Moving to the third heaven, Enoch encounters the heavenly storehouses of blessings and curses. He witnesses the recording of human deeds and their corresponding consequences.

[Beauty]


The fourth heaven unveils the realm of stars and celestial luminaries. Enoch learns about the intricate motions and purposes of the stars and planets.


[Yama heaven or moral judgment of the dead]



In the fifth heaven, Enoch comes into contact with powerful angels responsible for the souls of both the righteous and the wicked. He gains insights into the judgment and fate of these souls.


[All Wishes Granted by Thought]


The sixth heaven is home to angels who maintain the cosmic order. Here, Enoch beholds the divine throne and the glorious beings who encircle it.

[All Wishes Granted by Others]



The seventh heaven represents the culmination of Enoch's journey. It is the dwelling place of God Himself, where Enoch stands in the immediate presence of divine majesty. In this celestial realm, Enoch receives profound revelations about the nature of God, divine secrets, and the ultimate destiny of humanity.

[Wishlessness or Pure Land; stability and perfection; throne of the deity; secret of formlessness]



Enoch is, at least, somewhat similar.

In Mandeanism, he is taken as a re-incarnating divine light of salvation. That is to say, a profound emphasis in their practice. This Book of Enoch was far more common, with unusual quotes of it stemming as far out as to Sir Walter Raleigh. To make a few recognizable spiritual ideas available to Jewish people, it is perhaps necessary to retain a large amount of the corresponding lore, and you get a kind of "Mandeanism lite".

The value of it, is that it at least describes a spiritual experience that a person could have. Some strands of Gnosticism have no goal other than to Behold the Throne. Isn't that bringing in the Spirit where otherwise it is barely discussed at all? This is not even a scripture with any Orthodox doctrine to consider violating, it's an art work, and so if I selectively follow the philosophy of the author(s) who portrayed the heavenly aspect, have I broken any of my vows?

If you isolate this, it's not Christian, it isn't Jewish, and it's not Mandean. It's a suggestion about Enoch and a reality of other-worldliness.

If that makes a Mandean specialty palatable to Jews and Christians, so be it.

If they are correct that he is the enlightening impulse, and, they don't accept converts, what, then, would one do?

So you see, my fair response to most religions is that I actually believe that they may have "a" way to Heaven, where each becomes at fault for claiming "the" way to Heaven. Because it seems to me there is actually more value in *parts* of Enoch than are found in the majority of any of the scriptures that I am aware of.

If you look into why it seems to be important in Ethiopia, and, put that in an arc from Alexandria, it may make sense. Not just the Bible but Ethiopian Jews as well.

It means Enoch is nearly identical in function to who: Hermes -- Thoth.


For me to be able to effectively interface with [I]any Canaanite traditions, Enoch is vital.

Last time I checked, there is nothing that prevents me from viewing him as a Wisdom Being who attempts these spiritual bursts among humanity if I want to do that. It doesn't mean I have to believe everything that is in a multi-generational accreted compendium.

And, you know what, it works with something else that is non-denominational, or, more important if we take it to have become misunderstood.

That is to say, King Solomon was pre-Judaic and associated with Melchizedek. To explain Masonry somewhat, it has to do with a meditation described as Building the Temple of Solomon. It is made of one's moral and spiritual qualities. You are combining that with the idea of justice and so forth, it is after all named "Salem" for "Place of Peace", and, we know that shortly after Solomon, this has not been true on earth. I could be an atheist, and if I just started looking at this objectively and the ordeal of how it has to be really true in all of us before it is on "earth", you could totally ignore the spiritual aspect and yet still derive benefit.

Solomon is reducible to mundane terms if need be, whereas Enoch has a primarily spiritual meaning.

It may be interesting that no rabbis accepted it as scripture, and then most of the early church fathers did not question it. After all, it is Messianic. I hope it makes sense those two actually work for anyone. As someone who is not in theological agreement with many standard doctrines produced out of scripture, I find it more accurate and more useful.

[Irminsül]

Excellent, shaberon! Thank you very much for such extensive answers. I don't know many of the things you talk about. So after I process and research the matter, I will continue to respond to you

[shaberon]

Here is one more caveat why I would say to take "demonology" such as in Enoch with a grain of salt.


I started noticing that "demons" in Christianity did not make sense in Greek.

The sense of Greek "daimon" being shifted to "Evil" is not original to the New Testament -- it comes from the "fallen angels" of Enoch and from the Septuagint, perhaps around 300 B. C. E.. What this means is that it is a Jewish adaptation.

Why, in their minds, they did this, is not as important as simply knowing it is a change that stuck.

I, personally, would not take everything that is Enoch literally, but, the simple fact that it includes a personal experience of the divine environment is extraordinary.

[Michel Leclerc]

"As Ethiopian and also as a deacon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, I would like to inform you that our bible has 81 books not 88. And Christianity came to our society not in the 4th century but around 34 A.D when the eunuch of candace of the Ethiopians came back to Ethiopia. Acts chapter 8"



Here is where we are at loggerheads.

I would not call that remotely reliable.

Why not? Because Acts of the Apostles is a complete forgery.

Suspending disbelief for a moment, you couldn't import "Christianity" in year 34 because it had not been invented.

Acts did that, by distorting Paul.


So, ok. In Ethiopia, they have a text that *may* be from around the year 400, although that is the extreme end of the range of possibilities.


What is going on that makes it?

Well, we don't think there are any kind of written records until at least the 100s. Not of the scripture, but there is Nag Hammadi. Modern thinking suggests this was a library from Jerusalem which was hidden when the Romans got destructive.



By most accounts, Mark is considered the first Apostle. The Coptic Church of Alexandria, and some Rosicrucians, attribute their origin to Apostle Mark the Lion (https://orthodoxwiki.org/Apostle_Mark). This part is probably physically accurate:


...being the founder of the see of Alexandria in the first century...

This is the lore:



His house was the first Christian church, where they ate the Passover, hid after the death of the Lord Christ, and in its upper room the Holy Spirit came upon them.

Mark accompanied Paul and Barnabas in their missionary journeys, preaching the gospel in Antioch, Seleucia, Cyprus, Salamis, and Perga Pamphylia, where he left them and returned to Jerusalem. After the apostolic council in Jerusalem, he went with Barnabas to Cyprus.

After the departure of Barnabas, St. Mark went to Afrikia, Berka, and the five Western cities. He preached the gospel in these parts, and on his account many believed. From there, he went to Alexandria in 61 A.D.


In the story, it is important that Mark is with Paul.

If we turn for outside corroboration, of anything, we could say that Mark made an establishment in Alexandria around 61, and that Thomas did so in India by 52.

They couldn't have had Bibles.

It gets a little weird. I just know this is a tradition in Orthodoxy (https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2019/10/06/102885-holy-glorious-apostle-thomas#:~:text=According%20to%20Church%20Tradition%2C%20the,earned%20him%20a%20martyr's%20death.):


Apostle Thomas founded Christian churches in Palestine, Mesopotamia, Parthia, Ethiopia and India.


According to Tewahedo (https://eotcmk.org/e/st-thomas-the-apostle/):


Some of the apostolic missions of St Thomas that recorded in the Ethiopic Synaxarium are summarized as follows: St. Thomas went to his apostolic diocese, India and Kantara...


It's silent about him appearing in their country. The Assyrian Church remembers Thomas perfectly well.


Hrm. So we notice in the irregularities of the canonical books:


Matthew specifically identifies John the Baptist as Elijah's spiritual successor, the gospels of Mark and Luke are silent on the matter. The Gospel of John states that John the Baptist denied that he was Elijah.


In Matthew 17:11–13, Jesus speaking calls him Elijah; in John, John's own words deny he is anything special.


John the Baptist was Mandean. It seems likely to me there was a historical Jesus in the Order of Melchizedek of Psalm 110 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melchizedek). He began by pointing to the section on Deror (https://www.jstor.org/stable/23612465) in Isaiah, from the later, redacted part. It is only found in Exile texts because it is cognate to Babylonian Andararum.


But that is not what our attention is drawn to by these contradictory scriptures. From the view that they are Piso (https://www.henryhdavis.com/post/the-gospel-of-mark-why-does-the-name-piso-as-in-calpurnius-piso-appear-within-key-statements) satire:


The gospels of 'Mark' and 'Matthew' are not written in the first person, i.e., spoken by the author, anywhere in the text. Instead, both narratives are told in the third person. That is why scholars doubt and have concluded that the author is not relating personal experiences.



So for example if we agree there was a person, Mark, that says nothing about a gospel attributed to this person.



The oldest layers of Nag Hammadi are Sayings Gospels, which are entirely different from the biographical narratives. Not thought to be by the Apostle, the Gospel of Thomas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas) has no narrative; it is almost completely sayings:



Several authors argue that when the logia in Thomas do have parallels in the synoptics, the version in Thomas often seems closer to the source.

In saying 13, Peter and Matthew are depicted as unable to understand the true significance or identity of Jesus.

According to Meyer, Thomas's saying 17 – "I shall give you what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard and no hand has touched, and what has not come into the human heart" – is strikingly similar to what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 2:9, which was itself an allusion to Isaiah 64:4.


It was condemned by Cyril; scholars speculate that the works were buried in response to a letter from Bishop Athanasius declaring a strict canon of Christian scripture.


So, there is an intra-textual argument about what constitutes "authentic Paul", while there is in fact a pile of external evidence as well. This falls in the view called:


Marcionite Priority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas)



That is to say, "Marcion's Gospel" is thought likely to be "original" or quite close.


Now, if you leave off from Acts and use a few other dates determined about Paul, the most likely explanation is that he left Jerusalem about six months before Jesus started preaching.

Paul never met Jesus.

Likewise, Marcion never met Paul. However, their message is pretty emphatically identical. Marcion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcion_of_Sinope) was excommunicated by the church of Rome around 144:


Marcion preached that God had sent Jesus Christ, who was distinct from the "vengeful" God (Demiurge) who had created the world. He considered himself a follower of Paul the Apostle, whom he believed to have been the only true apostle of Jesus Christ

The example of what he was working with may be called Apostolicon (https://sites.google.com/site/inglisonmarcion/home/paul/marcions-apostolicon-the-pauline-epistles):


Galatians, First Corinthians, Second Corinthians, Romans, FirstThessalonians, SecondThessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon, Philippians, and Laodiceans (fragment)



Or (https://www.quora.com/If-Gospel-is-fake-and-made-up-then-why-did-the-apostles-of-Jesus-give-up-their-lives-for-it):



The apostle Paul never met Jesus in life...


...the stories (with the exception of 8 letters written by Paul) were not written by the people to whom they are attributed (they’re forgeries), and c) the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, & John) weren’t written by anyone who had first-hand knowledge of Jesus (hear-say, if not outright made up), as the first book was written between 30 and 35 years after Jesus was supposed to have died.



Seven letters (with consensus dates)

considered genuine by most scholars:

First Thessalonians (c. 50 AD)
Galatians (c. 53)
First Corinthians (c. 53–54)
Philippians (c. 55)
Philemon (c. 55)
Second Corinthians (c. 55–56)
Romans (c. 57)

The letters on which scholars are about evenly divided:

Colossians
Second Thessalonians

The letters thought to be pseudepigraphic by about 80% of scholars:

Ephesians
First Timothy
Second Timothy
Titus

Finally, Epistle to the Hebrews, though anonymous and not really in the form of a letter, has long been included among Paul's collected letters, but most scholars regard it as not written by Paul.


Going through the seven or eight more reliable articles, you don't get anyone who was a "converted Saul".

However there will be an intense problem with everything I am saying. That is the contents of these letters. They purport to show a date range of alleged primacy, but we hit this difficulty with Paul (https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2022/03/part-2-reassessing-pauls-timeline-by.html):


If Paul wasn’t writing in response to a historical Lord Jesus Christ, how are we to understand his constant references to this character? Or was he?



You can't look it up in the Bible. You can't use critical editions of the texts. You have to have original manuscripts.

It's quite similar to questions about Masoretic Hebrew, except it means Paul never heard of Jesus:



...fourth century textual families where some render XS as Christos and some as Chrestos. It is evident that those copyists were engaged in some type of guesswork.

Marcion’s manuscripts contained the Nomina Sacra abbreviations. And we can be equally certain that he didn’t understand all of them in the same way as later copyists.

Marcion filled in the missing letters in some of the abbreviated terms differently than did the later copyists.

All evidence points to the following differences:

Abbreviation....Traditional Spelling....Marcion’s Spelling

ΧΣ Χριστός (Christos/Christ).... χρηστός (Chrestos)
ΙΣ Ἰησοῦς (Iesous/Jesus).... ΙΣ (IS)


The earliest (Christian) inscription is from a Marcionite church building in Lebada, Syria near Damascus, ca 318, was dedicated to “IS Chrestos”.

Other early fathers also used Chrestos, and called his followers Chrestianoi, including Clement of Alexandria who wrote, in Book II of the Stromata, “All who believe in Chrestos both are, and are called, Chrestianoi, that is, good men.”


Suddenly we are looking at authentic Paul up through later Marcionite churches, who are talking about IS Chrestos.

That is exactly what we will see, on the *original* Codex Sinaiticus manuscript, which has been edited.

We can imagine around the 300s, some kind of enforcement was coming out, leading to the murder of Hypatia around 414, in Alexandria. Does that represent authentic Mark?

That is what made me curious about the Ethiopian Bible, except I am quite leery of the forces emanating from Cyril and Athanasius. It seems odd to quote Acts while being unaware of the mission of Thomas. I'm kind of thinking it is unable to fill these gaps.



In the early 100s, Hadrian wrote of Alexandria and the Serapis Christians (https://sacred-texts.com/gno/gar/gar23.htm). Serapis had been deliberately spread by Ptolemy Soter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serapis). I listed it that way because of the standard Biblical Greek:


sōtḗr (a masculine noun, derived from 4982 /sṓzō, "save") – properly, the Savior, Jesus Christ who saves believers from their sins


I'm not thinking the Ethiopian version can say much about the linguistics or history. It probably is a remarkable example of how long something can survive in favorable conditions. And, at least, it is out of the grip of Rome. Perhaps until they get attacked in the 20th century.

If we bend Hadrian's spelling, it is more likely "Chrestos" was a term from the Serapis cult, and that Paul, an Aramaic Jew, spoke this vernacular, like soldiers and slaves. It is possible Paul's name was magnified to blot out Apollonius of Tyana. It is practically certain it was to over-write him and make his life read differently.

If seen this way, Paul and Jesus are speaking against Yhwh, and so by accretion, a literary circle is drawn around them.

Oddly, it's not physically possible to show that Paul ever heard of Jesus. Usually all you will get is someone's interpretation saying this is so.

Great overview Shaberon.

Three questions/points:

(1) Greek sōtèr is indeed “saviour” (the verb "to save” IS even, Indo-Europeanly speaking, the Greek verb sōz-): which with added -tèr suffix expresses any "do-er", the last consonant of the radical, z (of sōz-) being lost before -tèr; the point I would like to add is that, whereas sōtèr and "sav-iour" are "do-er" verb-based nouns, there are of course also verbal present participles (in English ending with -ing): in Greek that is done by ending -ōn, genitive -ont-os, hence sōzōn, sōzont-os: you can immediately see that that is an exact cognate of the Persian shayoshyant-, these Greek and Persian present participles both meaning "the saving one";

(2) you are aware of the fact that Mani's father was said to be a Mandean?
(2 bis) with this man(d)- root in Mandean we are definitely exiting Semitic and into the Indo-European root stock (i.e. Persian); would this mixture of the two language families not point to late developments (for the Mandean religion that is), i.e. not later than the Baptist-- considering also that Mani's "gospel" was definitely syncretistic (and, hence, all this casting the darkest shadows on Augustine’s belief positions (gnostic puritanism mixed with old-testamentarian literalism);

(3) could you give some reference for that superb wood-panel depiction of Ezra of the third century Before the Common Era.. where does it come from, Alexandria? Thank you in advance..

p.s.: dumb me: I did not mean “not later than he Baptist”, but "not earlier than the Baptist” --- obviously. Ah, the difference between what it means and what one means!

[Michel Leclerc]

“ Have you mastered Ge'ez by any chance?”

I don’t know anything about this language.

Well it seems complicated and I don't know it either.

It is Semitic, Jim, and hence not so distant from Aramaic which you know already.. the script may create a few obstacles..

[Michel Leclerc]

(...)

In order to have a more complete vision, the ideal would be to read the Codex Sinaiticus, the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Alexandrinus? Or is there one of those three manuscripts that stands out above the others in terms of the quality of its content?
[/LIST]

Irminsül, if I may intrude into your dialogue and drop here I guess useful advice for you and all interested members...

For thirty years now, when reading the Gospels, I have been using an edition which combines and compares the gospels, and is what is called a variorum edition clearly specifying the differences; it is in Greek and English and is called: Synopsis of the Four Gospels and published originally by the German Bible Society Stuttgart. It is not too expensive and definitely worth your money: this is its Amazon reference (https://www.amazon.com/Synopsis-Four-Gospels-Kurt-Aland/dp/0826705006/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.7B4p20SA_Z3KBiR0zb968Ygd0zZIwRRdYqLOWUJ7QqW6-hSfX-TqurKZCFrnXceFmrNZqQo6Lv13K_ilzC9LfsxiZThO-3Vg8xhrtciP9NVSSW-Ta0oT1Xx58Vs2ARxUyL1Ab9SkTJY-dwwFX33Mn6qa9lgN9iBzXnY820nGNekNaHAv2LREFzFaAi54K0A0U7OnEAzAq82PEht3u1I2EJYIhirh-pdjnFt_Q02Bckw.JqpubRCfBKn_JeRDKmvnajUWfk4ifVqlKYUcGuNAhCM&dib_tag=se&keywords=synopsis+of+the+four+gospels&qid=1735824624&sr=8-1).

Of course – to become specific, you may need to master classical Greek to an extent.

Delving into the texts is very much worth your while. I remember having made a little discovery myself. In the Gethsemane story where it says that Jesus sweats blood, the Greek text refers to this as thromboi, which does not mean, as most translations offer, “blood drops” but (as the word’s relatedness to thrombosis betrays) “blood clots”, and more specifically even (being the first meaning of thromboi) “blood grains”. With bible scholars and philologists I defended then the idea that this encapsulates a reference to the Last Supper itself, where Jesus more or less replaces himself as sacrificial Lamb with his body as flesh and blood symbolised by bread and wine.. but, I must confess, such sophistication attributed to the pen of the gospel author was a little beyond the belief system of those "good Christian text analysers”.. “the gospel author could not have been anything but a simple god-fearing soul” etc. etc.

[Michel Leclerc]

Hello Shaberon, what do you mean by this, or do the Mandeans mean by:

The baptism he was transmitting was Aramaic -- Iranian.

Aramaic hence Iranian? A mixture if Aramaic and Iranian?
The words, language used? The tradition used? If Iranian then what form of “it” (what?) ?

[Ravenlocke]

Hi Michel,

Thank you for including that helpful information the Synopsis of the Four gospels and the Amazon reference.

Also thank you for “chiming in” on this thread, I was hoping you would comment. I am appreciating reading all the posts in this thread, so also thank you All commenters.

And lastly thank you for asking the above question to Shaberon,

“Hello Shaberon, what do you mean by this, or do the Mandeans mean by:

The baptism he was transmitting was Aramaic -- Iranian.

Aramaic hence Iranian? A mixture if Aramaic and Iranian?
The words, language used? The tradition used? If Iranian then what form of “it” (what?) ?”.



Michel,
I have a question for you,

Can you please clarify your point here for me,

“ Delving into the texts is very much worth your while. I remember having made a little discovery myself. In the Gethsemane story where it says that Jesus sweats blood, the Greek text refers to this as thromboi, which does not mean, as most translations offer, “blood drops” but (as the word’s relatedness to thrombosis betrays) “blood clots”, and more specifically even (being the first meaning of thromboi) “blood grains”. With bible scholars and philologists I defended then the idea that this encapsulates a reference to the Last Supper itself, where Jesus more or less replaces himself as sacrificial Lamb with his body as flesh and blood symbolised by bread and wine.. but, I must confess, such sophistication attributed to the pen of the gospel author was a little beyond the belief system of those "good Christian text analysers”.. “the gospel author could not have been anything but a simple god-fearing soul” etc. etc.”

I’m trying to understand what you are saying, I’m only familiar with the word “thrombosis” because of my grandfather, whose death was diagnosed as “thrombosis of the heart”, in the sixties.

So according to the above point, if I understand this, did Jesus have blood clots and you defended this idea as more accurate translation than “blood drops”?

[Michel Leclerc]

Dear Ravenlocke, if I am not clear to you, to whom would I be.

I suppose that everybody agrees that a correct translation of the Greek text is of the highest importance. After all it is the textual basis of a world religion.

Now, in this passage something strange happens. The word thromboi is used to describe the nature or aspect of the blood that Jesus sweats. And precisely to provide that so precious description (think of the expert opinions expressed by physicians stating that yes, it is possible for humans to sweat blood when in extreme anguish for instance), the author of the gospel does not use stagmata, which is the normal word, referring to the dripping of blood drops (or its variant stalagmata – think of the related word “stalactite") but thromboi, which means "grains”.

The Greek text which we all use says that Jesus sweats blood grains. Grains, clots, crumbs.

For me as a poet, doing such things – using the slightly "off" word to hint at a special, maybe half-concealed, meaning – is standard practice. Well then, what could that meaning be?

When I discovered this odd thromboi instead of normal stagmata, the “concealed meaning” immediately dawned on me. During the preceding Last Supper / Passover Meal, it was Jesus' plea or commandment for his disciples to eat bread and drink wine as symbols, or transsubstantiation products, for his flesh and blood as the sacrificial Passover Lamb. And that his transpiration produces “bloody grains” actually performs a kind of merger, fusion of the two components.

(Moreover in what is called in literature theory a "chiasm", the two components merged are not the two realities (flesh and blood), nor the two symbols (bread and wine) but a merger of reality A (blood) with symbol B (bread), yielding “blood grains”. The corresponding other combination, unexpressed, would be reality B (flesh) with symbol A (wine).. but is it really absent? is it not there in the text, in the idea of sweat, of perspiration itself..? Later on, on Jesus’ road to his death, Veronica wipes off the holy sweat on his face – ...because it is as wine to her?).

Now, going back to my "poetic" sleuth’s work, as I said: such text features are not "naive", they are intentional – and they betray sophistication and mastery of writing. (And because religious preachers oversimplify, this layer of meaning is never taught the faithful). So why is it there?

My interpretation is that it works as a sign of the depth of Jesus’ despair: he has just told his disciples what they are supposed to do (let us not forget: it is not only a reminder, it is the establishment of the central sacrament: the performing of the transformation of matter into divinity: the transsubstantition itself, a premonition also of what the Resurrection will do to Jesus’ corpse) and what happens: they fall asleep – so Jesus "somatises", psychoanalysts would say, – “they didn’t get it” – “Father, take away this cup (of wine-sweat?), I have failed to convince them” – and at the same time, the extremely well-crafted story says to us, the later readers, the disciples of his obtuse, sleepy disciples (they drank too much ordinary wine probably): the Transsubstantiation is and remains the Key message; Jesus is living/dying in real time the Transsubstantiation miracle.

No wonder He saves us.

[shaberon]

(2 bis) with this man(d)- root in Mandean we are definitely exiting Semitic and into the Indo-European root stock (i.e. Persian); would this mixture of the two language families not point to late developments (for the Mandean religion that is), i.e. not later than the Baptist-- considering also that Mani's "gospel" was definitely syncretistic (and, hence, all this casting the darkest shadows on Augustine’s belief positions (gnostic puritanism mixed with old-testamentarian literalism);


Yes! That is the whole point.

Mandeans are such a "meld" that some scholars believed they were simply Iranian/Mesopotamian and "imported" Semitic culture.

The layering of Avestan can very nearly be assigned dates, whereas that of the Mandeans can only be inferred from context.

For instance, in Old Avestan there is "mana" for "soul", a Sanskrit cognate. This also appears with the Mandeans, and is *replaced* by an Aramaic term in later works.

Mandean Baptism is "Aramaic" in the sense of using that language, and, of it physically being practiced in Canaan/Jordan River, according to them. Baptism of what? It's not the Holy Sprit. It is "Iranian" because it is of the following entity:


Sanskrit Vrtrahan --> Avestan Verethagna --> Persian Wahram --> Mandaic Bahram.


That suggests a "central figure" of Indo-Iranian myth.

Moreover, this was a syncretic cult from Sogdia to Commagene, until the "Big Religions" of the 300s. It lacks "Enoch".


Now, this has a parallel in the Ethiopian Bible, because Enoch is also layered with accretions.

Aramaic Enoch (https://ia601408.us.archive.org/9/items/MILIKEnochInAramaicQumranCave4/MILIK_Enoch-in-Aramaic-Qumran-Cave-4.pdf) has a Book of Astrology that is reduced to a table in Ethiopia, which has the Book of Parables, which is not found at Qumran.

The Aramaic Astrology is The Year, the same principle of the Vedas, not the Babylonian Zodiac. This, in conjunction with the vision of Heaven, I would say is the "main teaching" detectable everywhere, hard to detail anywhere.

The Enochian Book of Giants is a slightly later work probably by different composers. And it has a very unusual feature:


Curse of Mt. Hermon (https://ia800504.us.archive.org/17/items/LipinskyElsabode/Lipinsky_Elsabode.pdf)


I used to think "Syria" was a Greek name, and never paid attention to it. I was wrong! Syria is the original Aramaic name of Mt. Hermon (siryon). The linked study proposes it as the residence of Ugaritic El, which would give the result El = Baal Syria, if shown in an older form than "Baal Hermon".

The area was taken over by King Joshua for about a hundred years -- along with Ahab, they are considered evil/corrupt/non-Jewish Israelites.

Instead, it was heavily Judaicized in the period from about 150 B. C. E. - 150 A. D., at which point the Romans built a pagan city. During this time, it is thought (but not certain) that Jesus experienced the Transfiguration here.

If the Enochian reference is slightly older, ca. 300 B. C. E., what are they talking about? The neighboring Bekaa Valley was the site of at least six Ptolemaic -- Seleucid battles, so, the border was moving back and forth. The mountain itself is not noted in these imperial struggles.

I haven't figured out how to "see through" this yet.

I can say the Mandeans have merged the Order of Melchizedek with perhaps the most important character of the Zoroastrians, and they reject everything Abrahamic. I don't think they would have been able to define themselves or have an identity before Josiah harassed "non-Jews" in the 600s B. C. E., which may be a dispute about Abraham and Moses before their installation in a written form of Genesis.

I don't know about the wood panel (stock image), we may be able to track it down.

Yes, savior or "soter" in relation to the Avestan term is important. Nothing in the original description is about End Times. The difference between Old Avestan and Sassanian Magism is almost night and day. Most previous scholarship has taken Zoroaster "whole hog", whereas most of those texts trail him by one to two thousand years.

[Michel Leclerc]

(...)

Yes, savior or "soter" in relation to the Avestan term is important. Nothing in the original description is about End Times. The difference between Old Avestan and Sassanian Magism is almost night and day. Most previous scholarship has taken Zoroaster "whole hog", whereas most of those texts trail him by one to two thousand years.

Yes. But let us not forget that into Sassanian times Zoroaster’s (or Zarathustra’s, the same person – (info for puzzled forum readers)) Gathas were (still) read, as the Vendidad was, and the Bundahishn.. Sassanian “Magism” was a kind of syncretism, that ultimately yielded the extraordinary Renaissance of thought and letters that the (islamicised) Persian world produced starting from the 900s.

On the other hand, let us not forget either that Sassanian Zoroastrism had in part re-invented itself after the persecutions their priesthood operated of Mani's religion (Manichaeism) in the 3rd century – but did not do so without absorbing some parts of it (among which a few Christian elements (e.g. "Christianised" (gnostic and non-gnostic) angelology) and (what is lesser known in the “West”) against Middle-Eastern (Syriac) Christianity. That had changed Magism to the point of making it receptive to the less abstruse, radical message of Islam: the Divine is absolute, and he is unique. It then took almost half a millennium to allow Persian multifaceted theology and angelology to overcome and transform that radicality and, joined at the hip to early muslim sufi asceticism, create the mature sufi masterworks of thought exemplified by Ibn ‘Arabî, Sohravardî, Rumi, Attar, Saadi, Hafez and finally Molla Sadrâ in the 16th century.

[Michel Leclerc]

Brief message to Ravenlocke, Shaberon, Irminsül and all other members reading this thread.

Elsewhere on the Forum I wrote how important it seemed to me to start and read the Gospels (that would be my preferred starting-point; except for literary reasons, the Old Testament does not fascinate me that much) in the Aramaic version considered by the Middle Eastern Christians as the original version, which was then translated into Greek (and later, from Greek into Latin). And now I realise that the same might be said of the Ge'ez versions of Ethiopian and Eritrean Christianity. Two Semitic languages.

And as you may see from what I said about the Synoptics in Greek (by the way, Irminsül, I forgot to mention that the Codices the variorum are taken from in that edition are referred), in order to acquire levels of understanding that could respond to our present human needs (instead of, to use the caricature, sticking to the rote-learning bluntness of literalist Bible-babblers and other Witnesses), it is necessary to study and understand the language used thoroughly and humbly.

Now there we have a vast program. Aramean, Ge’ez, Greek, Latin. And maybe also English (the King James Version), the earlier Luther German and the Staten-Bijbel Dutch etc. etc.

The Third Vatican Concile, hosted by Project Avalon.

[Michel Leclerc]

In this context, this is worth while your attention: Wikipedia on Hiob Ludolf (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiob_Ludolf).

[Michel Leclerc]

Shaberon – quoting you:

Mandeans are such a "meld" that some scholars believed they were simply Iranian/Mesopotamian and "imported" Semitic culture.

The layering of Avestan can very nearly be assigned dates, whereas that of the Mandeans can only be inferred from context.

For instance, in Old Avestan there is "mana" for "soul", a Sanskrit cognate. This also appears with the Mandeans, and is *replaced* by an Aramaic term in later works.

Mandean Baptism is "Aramaic" in the sense of using that language, and, of it physically being practiced in Canaan/Jordan River, according to them. (...)

if you allow me – I hereby lift a few paragraphs from my PM to you. I think it provides context, and may prompt you to formulate the arguments given by the defenders of the opposite hypothesis.

Quoting my PM:

In my library, what I have on the Mandeans (20th-century stuff) indeed considers them as an Iranian crowd heavily interested in the Semitic religion(s).

I have to admit that this is seriously underpinned by:

(1) the fact that Mani, who was a Mandean in his youth, indeed created an Iranian type of Gnosticism bathing (Jewish) Christianity in its golden bath so to speak (and by doing that, repeated what Mandeism had done all along; (or so my sources – and I – would interpret the documents),

(2) the fact that (Semitic) Islam considered Zoroastrians as People of the Book,

(3) the fact that much later, in the 1200s, a third merger occurred when Yahya Sohravardi Maqtûl (the "killed" (maqtûl), martyred, Sohravardi (to distinguish him from another, older, Sohravardi)) created his ishrâqî esotericism, in which Zoroastrism and Islam (and even Yezidism (!)) were “metaphysically” merged, which, given the circumstances, implied that he was a secret "esoteric" (post-Mani) Zoroastrian who plunged Islam into his visions and revelations – which, then, had a major influence on Ismaili and Twelver Shia:

(4) or, almost blasphemously stated, the fact that there is such a thing as Twelver Shiism, or in other words Iranian Islam, is only possible because to the 3,000 - 2,500 years of Iranian spiritual self-awareness, only such re"Iranian"-ised Islam would be acceptable (which explains a lot of the present, doesn’t it?); this is fully borne out by the great achievements of Persian (spiritual) literature: to name just a few: Attar, Rumi/Mowlana, Saadi, Hafez, Jami... and of course Sufi philosophy: Ibn Sinâ (Avicenna)’s, Ibn ‘Arabi’s theology cannot be understood without the Persian gnostic horizon, and neither can of course the already mentioned Sohravardi, nor the fourth great mystical metaphysician of Islam: Mollâ Sadrâ – three Persians and one Andalusian (Ibn ‘Arabî)..

Remark: the Arab Ibn ‘Arabî wrote all his writings in Arabic, Ibn Sinâ and Mollâ Sadrâ being Persians/Iranians as well, and Sohravardi wrote the philosophical part in Arabic, the visionary part in Persian. Among the great Persian Sufi theologian poets, all of them wrote their epics and lyrical work in Persian, but some of them, and occasionally, theologian treatises in Arabic.

p.s.: I corrected in red a few counting mistakes..

[shaberon]

Elsewhere on the Forum I wrote how important it seemed to me to start and read the Gospels (that would be my preferred starting-point; except for literary reasons, the Old Testament does not fascinate me that much) in the Aramaic version considered by the Middle Eastern Christians as the original version


The normative view is that the Aramaic New Testament (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe****ta) was translated from Koine Greek in the 400s. It kicked out Revelation.

By "Middle Eastern", do you mean Thomasene? Or is there a credible source for its primacy? An idea it was "spoken in Aramaic, written in Greek"?

The influence of Aramaic was such that:



It had a great missionary influence: the Armenian and Georgian versions, as well as the Arabic and the Persian, owe not a little to the Syriac. The Nestorian tablet of Chang'an shows the presence of the Syriac scriptures in China in the 8th century.


It entered Europe in 1555.


With the Gospels, particularly, there remains the question as to whether it should be about Chrestos (https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/jr5bx/chrestos_in_the_codex_sinaiticus_the_smoking_gun/), not as a spelling change, but as a different meaning.

Nag Hammadi contains gospels, but, it is almost entirely non-canonical, late, of a late period, and "mixed" by apparently containing both Orthodox-themed and Valentinian texts.

Comparatively, Qumran is a near-canonical Old Testament, by way of showing that the scripture was still in flux. It has Aramaic Enoch. And, in terms of importance, notice there is a sub-school associated with this fragment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11Q13):



11Q13, also 11QMelch or the Melchizedek document, is a fragmentary manuscript among the Dead Sea Scrolls (from Cave 11) which mentions Melchizedek as leader of God's angels in a war in Heaven against the angels of darkness instead of the more familiar Archangel Michael. The text is an apocalyptic commentary on the Jubilee year of Leviticus 25.

In the fragmentary passage the term "Elohim" appears a dozen times, mainly referring to the God of Israel, but in commentary on "who says to Zion "Your Elohim reigns" (Isa. 52;7) 11Q13 states that Zion is the congregation of all the sons of righteousness, while Melchizedek is "Your Elohim" who will deliver the sons of righteousness from Belial.


This quote is aimed about ten verses prior to the first scriptural quote made by Jesus, which states the exact same thing, Jubilee. Lo and behold, it comes with a symbolic meaning of "Zion". That is injurious to those who believe in birthright, or, those who might fall from the condition. Does this information work its way in to the final copy? No, but it does reflect a certain point of view. One might not object to "nationalistic Yahweh" if it could be shown that nation was of righteousness. By definition, that would seem to mean not attacking the neighbors just because they are different. It is possible there was a Jewish minority that tried and failed to get the redaction of scripture to line up with this very potent fragment, or, that may have been directly involved with Jesus.






Yes, I personally am aware of the "Mandeans-in-place" concept, which in itself is far less important than the "Jews-in-place", which is a more robust argument since there was far more opportunity for the Egyptians, etc., to record something of it, and the scene is sanitized. In the case of the Mandeans, there are actually two or more Jewish persecutions of non-Jews, which at least superficially matches their story.


As an anecdote to the ailment of human memory, and, the willingness to "explain oneself", let's take the pitiful case of Armenia. Well, it already has pockets of Ice Age refugia. There is no doubt the people lived there, gave rise to agriculture and importantly the Grape, were the source of a wave that settled Aleppo around 7,000 B. C. E., and covered the Arabian Peninsula by around 4,000 B. C. E., represented by the South Arabian language which is extinct, but, influential to Ge'ez around 900 B. C. E., or the time of Solomon.

Like South Arabia, Armenia has a corresponding history of forming a "confederacy" around 900 B. C. E.. This is given in the Lake Van Cuneiform, which has an objective history running to about 600 B. C. E., that is corroborated by external data such as in Assyria.

When Zoroastrianism showed up, they could no longer read it and had no idea what it said.

So they copy/pasted some Zoroastrian history onto their local hero.

Then when Christianity came in during the 300s, they copy/pasted Genesis onto their local hero.

The only thing that can reliably be said about them is by the genetic and agricultural evidence, and that by the powers of modern translation, the cuneiform appears to be correct.

[shaberon]

Some of this stuff I know very well, and some of it is new discoveries...and here is something very simple that says much.


Part of the significance of Enoch is that in Judaism and Christianity, Afterlife is trivial. In Zoroastrianism, Mandeism, and Islam, it is massive. In Ethiopia, Enoch appears to be important to both Jews and Christians. I don't know what they say about it. One of the first people I met was Ethiopian, and I was too young to remember anything he said, but I remember being impressed I thought he was a good quality person, Mesfin. You can't forget that name. Otherwise, all I know is that Hailie Salassie is worth knowing about, plus their problem with Italy starting modern Fascism by unsuccessfully trying to plunder their oil.

I'm not sure that this is in the Bible, but, if one were to combine "Ethiopia" with any idea of "salvation", it would be reasonable. Aside from that, I think we can say it has always been independent, and sort of been able to selectively groom and invite in a way of its choosing. It's not Egyptian, and it's not South African.

Here is the Mandean (https://mandaepedia.miraheze.org/wiki/Enoch) view:



According to the Ginza Rabba (Al-Saadi translation), Enoch is a Mandaean prophet cognate with the soteriological figure Dinanukht.


According to others, we know it is a major Apocryphal tradition, represented in a tiny few areas of scripture:


Genesis, the Gospel of Luke, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and in the Epistle of Jude, the last of which also quotes from it.


Those are all apologetic texts, not original hymns (which refer to Melchizedek). Again, I would strongly suggest you have to read it this way...Melchizedek is an authentic primordial figure, whereas Genesis/Exodus are not Judean, they were produced in the Captivity. That is why they are not historical documents, and cannot tell the truth about the timeline. Genesis and Hebrews are mostly ad hoc, whereas at least parts of Luke, and possibly Jude, may be authentic. If Genesis is not truly "ancient", there is no Enoch in the old books. There must have been a para-Mandean folklore tradition. The accumulated "Enoch" must be almost as big as the whole Bible! And so far, we find its ultimate origin is Aramaic, in terms of Astrology.

That represents around 300 B. C. E., and, we cannot establish that it was the same authors who demonized "daimon". It appears to exclude the Book of Parables. The Book of Giants seems to be around the middle.

Now, first of all, I am going to take John Dee, Golden Dawn, Anton LaVey, and everyone else who has dictated us a system of "Enochian Magic" and put them over there, and say, okay, guys, you go ahead and do that stuff and leave me alone. And quickly crib a few notes from a university in Bhopal (https://www.srku.edu.in/read?s=Dinanukht):


Dinanukht (also spelled Dinanukt or Dananukt; from Persian 'the one who speaks in accordance with the religion')



What? If you are Zoroasatrian, or, like me, know something about it, he just spoke to us. How else would we receive a book entitled Denkard? Prefixes such as den- or dan- are from Avestan "daena", here followed by -ka, -kar, or -kara, which comes from "hand", in the context "maker or doer of", similar to a "creator", and so the Zoroastrian work is quite similarly titled to Mandean Enoch.


Moreover, the Mandeans have the Female Holy Spirit speak to him:


Ruha addresses a speech to Dinanukht, which is similar to "The Thunder, Perfect Mind"


Here is a partial quote:

Ziwa Shahrat Malwasha Nishimta Dinanukht Shishlam Ezlat škina Dmuta Mshunia Kushta Adam kasia Adam pagria



I believe "nisimta" is Aramaic for "mana" or "soul", and then we see the core doctrine QST or "kusut", followed by Secret or Hidden Adam. From another review:



Buckley (2010) suggests a connection between Dinanukht and Nbu.



That means Babylonian Nebu, or Hermes, which would stick us in a configuration of Enoch as *part* of the Parthian syncretic pantheon -- except it is never manifested in this complete form. Again, this is just recent academic perusal, which simply winds up repeating what we have said on an esoteric basis since always. The broad syncretic association is not new -- what is new is being able to find it in objective details, like statuary, and being able to trace almost its entire motion, where nothing Jewish or Hebrew is ever attached to it. As far as I can tell, it could only be done by a sympathetic view towards Enoch.




Now, if we take the rest of the article, it is good, and we'll still give them a free fill-in-the-blank:



However, the Mhatam Yuhana Ginza from Ahvaz, Iran, which Gelbert (2011) is based on, spells it as Dananukt.

In the Book of the Scholion (written c. 792), the Syriac Christian writer Theodore bar Konai briefly mentions Dinanukht, which he spells as Dynnws. 

"Also they speak concerning Dinanus (Dynnws), the scribe of religions, and Little Diṣā."

Story in the Ginza Rabba

Dinanukht, who is half-man (Classical Mandaic: spar, sfar), half-book, unsuccessfully tries to destroy Diṣai, another half-man, half-book, by burning and drowning (Classical Mandaic: țmaštḥ, lit. 'performed tamasha on him') when he is disturbed by his speech. However, Ewath (an epithet for Ruha) soon appears to repeat this speech, which is reminiscent of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic poem The Thunder, Perfect Mind. Torgny Säve-Söderbergh (1949) also noted similarities with Psalms of Thomas 14, in which Hylē provides an answer of co-existing opposites (e.g., "death and life").



Then Ewath, the holy spirit [Ruha ḏ-Qudsha], approached me in my Škīnā and said to me, (u-atat ʿuat ruha ḏ-qudša b-škinatai qaimalia u-amr alia)
"Why did you lie there, Dīnānūkht? (mahu škibit dananukt)
Why did you like the sleep? (mahu šinta hnatalak)
I am the Life that was from time immemorial, (ana hu hiia ḏ-hun mn l-aqadmia)
I am the Kušṭā that was before in the beginning. (ana hu kušṭa ḏ-hua mn qudam briša)
I am the radiance (ziwa), I am the light. (ana hu ziua, ana hu nhura)
I am the death, I am the Life. (ana hu muta, ana hu hiia)
I am the darkness, I am the light. (ana hu hšuka, ana hu nhura)
I am the error, I am the truth. (ana hu ṭʿia, ana hu šrara)
I am the destruction, I am the construction. (ana hu hbila, ana hu biniana)
I am the blow, I am the healing. (ana hu mhita, ana hu asuta)
I am the exalted man, who is older (ana hu gabra iatira ḏ-qašiš)
and was there earlier than the builder of heaven and earth. (mn qudam ḏ-bania ʿšumia u-arqa hua)
I have no comrade among kings, (habrai b-malkia laiit)
and there is no other crown in my kingdom. (u-laiit taga b-malkutai)
There is not a single person who could give me a notice (u-laiit kul ʿniš br anaša ḏ-paršigna naitilia)
in the misty clouds of darkness. (b-rpilia ḏ-hšuka)"

— Right Ginza, Book 6 (Wikisource; Mandaic transcription from Gelbert (2021): 352–353 )

Din Mlikh, an uthra, then leads Dinanukht past six different maṭartas (watch-houses) as he ascends to the World of Light:

the maṭarta of Nbaz-Haila
the maṭarta of Zan-Haza-Zban
the maṭarta of Ewath-Ruha (a compound name combining the epithet Ewath with its synonymous name Ruha)
the maṭarta of Himun
the maṭarta of Ptahil
the maṭarta of Abatur

Each time Dinanukht starts his ascension to one of the maṭartas, the text begins with the poetic refrain:

Winds, winds take Dīnānūkht away, (ziqia ziqia nasbilḥ l-dananukt)
storms, storms drive him away, (ʿudamia ʿudamia mdabrilḥ)
ladders, ladders carry him aloft (siblia siblia sablilḥ)
and make him rise on rungs. (u-ʿl dirgia masqilḥ)

— Right Ginza, Book 6 (Wikisource; Mandaic transcription from Gelbert (2021): 353 )

Dinanukht sees many wondrous things and then returns to earth, where his wife, Nuraita (also the name of Noah's wife in [Book 18]), thinks that he has become insane when Dinanukht tells her that he wants his books to be burned and drowned (see also divine madness). Dinanukht then proceeds to burn and drown the books himself. He continues to live on Tibil for 65 more years as he serves religious duties ordains priests. After Dinanukht's life on earth is over, he finally ascends to the World of Light.



On a theological basis, this is spoken above and beyond the Creator.

Now, take the above, and put together with what is thought to be the oldest Zoroastrian image, that I only found a few weeks ago:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michele-Minardi/publication/353491096/figure/fig4/AS:1118209063297026@1643613224265/Drawing-of-a-wall-painting-fragment-from-Pendzhikent-F-Grenet-adapted-from-Shenkar.jpg





What is peculiar is any reference to "book" is to a time when no corresponding writings have been found.

That image suggests there was a titanic Zend Avesta before any such thing is thought to have been manufactured.

The real significance is that it is the Yazata Sraosa.


Now from my end of things, I have already speculated that Sraosa is the closest thing to a prototype for our Buddhist deities.

In order to do Zoroastrianism, you have to take Sraosa as this type of tutelary deity, and it is primarily he who guides you along the Chinvad Bridge after death. As you can tell, the image above is not a picture, but a re-construction; however, in this area, we notice Sraosa is depicted this way (Chinvad Bridge mode) on some splendid Sogdian Ossuaries produced at least up until the 700s. This pantheon has been found in a limited area with only two sites inside northeastern modern Iran.

What is doubly curious is that a trove of Kushan coinage minted over the course of about two centuries, clearly depicts most of the Yazatas, around twenty or more entities relevant to the Avesta, except Sraosa is concealed in a spectacular manner. So far, I, at least, am not aware of the Mandeans invoking him by name, implying the above is probably intended as the corresponding role.


On the other side or direction opposite the Kushans, Enoch is Mandean doctrine, and permissible in all Abrahamic traditions. They can't tell you anything or teach in an "official" capacity, but as we see, it was a stronger candidate for canon than Revelation, and just didn't make it for some reason. The fact of it being best preserved in Ethiopia probably does represent a two-way contest in Egypt, which is probably why the Nag Hammadi texts were hidden. Qumran was "stored for safe keeping", whereas in Egypt, those were deliberately concealed.

It is different from the Veda or original Avestan, because both of those rejected writing. The significance of the book symbol is the concept that whatever may have been the "special knowledge of the sages" is trying to push its way into everyone's home. This is a tremendous shift from Old Kingdom Egypt, where Heaven was just for Pharaoh. It is self-explanatory in Sukla Yajur Veda. It is the purpose of Sraosa.

I certainly don't have any pre-determined answer here, and can only suggest to consider the pattern, since we are dealing with multiple languages and a widespread distribution in time and space. It can only explain itself on the level of meaning, obviously there is no rolodex on these discoveries.

If this was actually what John the Baptist was baptizing into, and, Jesus did it one time, it wouldn't matter much. If he had come from the Egyptian Therapeutae, it would, for instance, validate him to the Order of Melchizedek. The contention is that his followers disposed of the real baptism, which is weekly. If we were able to stop projecting westernized names on things, the Mandeans might prefer "Subba" or "Subbi", i. e. "baptizers". In their defense, I would allow the Orthodox following to explain "Eucharist" with wine, the Armenian gift, at least in terms of grape wine. Think of it as a reason to blend that with Ethiopian and Yemeni incense. That represents the sphere of influence that we are having a little difficulty dealing with.

Broadly, I would suggest what we are seeing from the Old Testament is multiple schools of Babylonian Jews, which, mostly, were not "Judaic" as it eventually came to mean, after it was re-processed by Roman Jewry, who were mostly of a different alignment. There came to be an influential segment of pro-Roman Jews, concomitant with a different strategy in transmitting knowledge. Cyrus granted them a temple, which was not really all that special because Persian hospitality offered assistance to numerous and diverse cultures. Nobody was sticking their nose in their scribal habits or anything about it. The Mandeans were people who rejected the laws of Moses whenever it was served up to them.

According to them, John would have been effectively baptizing into Vrtrahan -- Verethagna -- Bahram, simultaneously with Enoch -- Dinanukht -- Sraosa and Melchizedek. Further along, he, personally, is of almost no importance, which is placed in the details being summarized. Instead, he is described as the tip of a branch from Harran. On the historical record, one finds that the old highway through Harran fell out of favor due to Bedouin banditry, and attention focused to the more northerly route through Adiabene. Mandeans can't fend off Bedouins. They would have gotten crowded out of the area. After the time of Jesus, they would have faced problems from the Romans and Judeans in Canaan, and then in Syria it would have been the Bedouins. Therefor, it is quite possible there was immigration of thousands in a horseshoe-shape rebounding off Harran and arcing through Persia -- even if "they" were already also there. It may represent more of a "withdrawal" than a transfer wholesale.


This deity being given the function of "The Scribe" is personal and inner, whereas the main thing we are trying to criticize and question is "scribalism" -- such as Levites or Brahmans -- that accomplish a bane with their editorial skills.

[Ravenlocke]

Text:
🇪🇹 Ethiopia Celebrates Orthodox Christmas in Lalibela

Ethiopia, one of the earliest nations to adopt Christianity, saw thousands of Ethiopian pilgrims and international visitors gathered in the historic town of Lalibela to celebrate Orthodox Christmas at its rock-cut churches.

Built in the 12th century during the reign of King Lalibela, these UNESCO World Heritage Sites are carved directly into solid rock and remain.

Orthodox Christmas, known as “Lidet,” is celebrated on January 7th with a three-day festival of religious ceremonies and family gatherings. This year, thousands of worshippers attended services at Lalibela.



https://x.com/ethiopia_a7227/status/1877066546213728485

1877066546213728485

[Ravenlocke]

Dear Ravenlocke, if I am not clear to you, to whom would I be.

I suppose that everybody agrees that a correct translation of the Greek text is of the highest importance. After all it is the textual basis of a world religion.

Now, in this passage something strange happens. The word thromboi is used to describe the nature or aspect of the blood that Jesus sweats. And precisely to provide that so precious description (think of the expert opinions expressed by physicians stating that yes, it is possible for humans to sweat blood when in extreme anguish for instance), the author of the gospel does not use stagmata, which is the normal word, referring to the dripping of blood drops (or its variant stalagmata – think of the related word “stalactite") but thromboi, which means "grains”.

The Greek text which we all use says that Jesus sweats blood grains. Grains, clots, crumbs.

For me as a poet, doing such things – using the slightly "off" word to hint at a special, maybe half-concealed, meaning – is standard practice. Well then, what could that meaning be?

When I discovered this odd thromboi instead of normal stagmata, the “concealed meaning” immediately dawned on me. During the preceding Last Supper / Passover Meal, it was Jesus' plea or commandment for his disciples to eat bread and drink wine as symbols, or transsubstantiation products, for his flesh and blood as the sacrificial Passover Lamb. And that his transpiration produces “bloody grains” actually performs a kind of merger, fusion of the two components.

(Moreover in what is called in literature theory a "chiasm", the two components merged are not the two realities (flesh and blood), nor the two symbols (bread and wine) but a merger of reality A (blood) with symbol B (bread), yielding “blood grains”. The corresponding other combination, unexpressed, would be reality B (flesh) with symbol A (wine).. but is it really absent? is it not there in the text, in the idea of sweat, of perspiration itself..? Later on, on Jesus’ road to his death, Veronica wipes off the holy sweat on his face – ...because it is as wine to her?).

Now, going back to my "poetic" sleuth’s work, as I said: such text features are not "naive", they are intentional – and they betray sophistication and mastery of writing. (And because religious preachers oversimplify, this layer of meaning is never taught the faithful). So why is it there?

My interpretation is that it works as a sign of the depth of Jesus’ despair: he has just told his disciples what they are supposed to do (let us not forget: it is not only a reminder, it is the establishment of the central sacrament: the performing of the transformation of matter into divinity: the transsubstantition itself, a premonition also of what the Resurrection will do to Jesus’ corpse) and what happens: they fall asleep – so Jesus "somatises", psychoanalysts would say, – “they didn’t get it” – “Father, take away this cup (of wine-sweat?), I have failed to convince them” – and at the same time, the extremely well-crafted story says to us, the later readers, the disciples of his obtuse, sleepy disciples (they drank too much ordinary wine probably): the Transsubstantiation is and remains the Key message; Jesus is living/dying in real time the Transsubstantiation miracle.

No wonder He saves us.

Sincerely thank you Michel for your informative, detailed explanation on this. It certainly gave me lots to reflect on about what Jesus said and the Transubstantiation miracle, based on your interpretation of the literature chiasmus.:flower:

I wouldn’t have been bored in catechism class if you had been my teacher:waving:

:focus::focus::focus:

[Michel Leclerc]

Shaberon, a quick reaction to a few points of your latest post.

Dinanukht: the Dinnus version seems a simplification from the time the name was no longer understood. “spoke in accordance with", maybe. I will look at the etymological dictionary of Persian verb roots. The name seems to be a merger, rather of Din (Daena ,yes; the Persian Dharma – absorbed by Islamic Arabic: dīn, plural adyān, religion) and anukh, which looks like the very name Enoch. Then the question is: what does the name Enoch mean? If it is Semitic, then it has an uncanny similarity with the 1rst personal pronoun, anokhi, “I”, …which happens to be Hamitic as well (Egyptian). “The book of the prophet I/Me”... I am who am...

Another point. “Normative” opinion on the precedence of the Greek Gospel your write. That should not be normative for us, should it? Alas, historical criticism and palaeography, scientific though they are, are plagued by one important thing: “the absence of proof is not the proof of absence”. So very often, they use conjectures and probabilities. I will look again in the documentation I have about the Aramean claim. The main thrust of their argumentation is that manuscript copies normally evolve from less to more complex, quality of the copyist remaining the same. I.e.: imagine two copyists A and B, and their works show the same degree of writing quality, document support quality. However document written by B shows text XY, and document written by A shows text XYZ. Then it has to be assumed that the document written XYZ by A is more recent, and that it is if need be based on document XY by A. Most of the time one may find a web of such textual relationships, and ultimately only one order of the copies is the most probable. (A bit like solving Sudoku puzzles.) What I remember from my reading is that the very textual nature (presence of certain adverbs, adjectives, synonyms etc.) is simpler in the Aramaic versions than in the Greek version. Yet, there remains the possibility that once a Greek version existed that was even more simple than the Aramaic version; only we do not have it. The absence of such a version does not prove that there was not a "first" version that was Greek from the start. Actually the reconstruction of the relationship between the Synoptics more or less proves the existence of such a version, only we don't have it.The Aramean Christians (Assyrian Church etc.: the modern denominations) would then say: well this hypothetical first text on which the Synoptics are based, is the Aramaic version.

Now. This state of affairs might be similar for (certain parts of) the Ethiopian Bible. They also might be based on versions older than we possess, and careful examination might show that.

Although I do not share the fashionable "Vatican bashing” and criticism of the Roman Catholic version of Christianity (because I think that Filioque is a vastly significant improvement upon the Orthodox version, Islam etc. – from a theological point of view – it is clear that Rome (but also Constantinople!) has always had enormous interests vested in their primacy. Fighting such “imperialist Christianity” does not necessarily imply rejecting its theology. The sad thing is that it is the other way round. The "imperialists" have the better theology. Those with the more hazardous theology (Orthodox, Islam) are however a lot more sympathique.

p.s.: I corrected in red. Aramean (the nation, the culture maybe) should be clearly distinguished from Aramaic, the language.

(Reminder: Middle Aramaic is also called Syriac, in which a vast Christian religious literature was written, mainly during the second half of the first millennium. A great chunk of classical Greek philosophy and Christian theology, translated into Syriac, was, after, the Muslim conquest, translated from Syriac into Arabic and contributed essentially to the flowering of Muslim science and philosophy. In the European Middle Ages (beginning of the second millennium) it was then again translated from the Arabic of the Arabic kingdoms in North Western Africa and Spain into Latin. At the latest when Constantinople fell and became the capital of the Ottoman Empire in 1453, the Greek thinkers and writers that fled to Italy brought with them the original copies of Plato, Aristotle and other classical philosophers – which launched Humanism and the main phase of the Renaissance.)

[Michel Leclerc]

Text:
🇪🇹 Ethiopia Celebrates Orthodox Christmas in Lalibela

Ethiopia, one of the earliest nations to adopt Christianity, saw thousands of Ethiopian pilgrims and international visitors gathered in the historic town of Lalibela to celebrate Orthodox Christmas at its rock-cut churches.

Built in the 12th century during the reign of King Lalibela, these UNESCO World Heritage Sites are carved directly into solid rock and remain.

Orthodox Christmas, known as “Lidet,” is celebrated on January 7th with a three-day festival of religious ceremonies and family gatherings. This year, thousands of worshippers attended services at Lalibela.



https://x.com/ethiopia_a7227/status/1877066546213728485

1877066546213728485

What beautiful photographs!

[Ravenlocke]

That is really a special place to celebrate Christmas, the church itself, Lalibela church, as I understand was carved out of a single rock in the shape of the cross. Beautiful Christmas celebration! Very comforting visually, love the white dressing and candle lights, as well.

Here are some more Orthodox Christmas celebration photo, videos and singing,

https://x.com/RT_com/status/1876782794333909362

1876782794333909362

https://x.com/Shewalem_Asfaw/status/1876532434776523097

1876532434776523097


https://x.com/KasayeRH/status/1877003782699053389

1877003782699053389

https://x.com/ChristianEmerg1/status/1876979198172020873

1876979198172020873

https://x.com/KnightsTempOrg/status/1876968284592943606

1876968284592943606

https://x.com/coptsg/status/1876928669991514520

1876928669991514520


https://x.com/coptsg/status/1876922274931950056

1876922274931950056

[Ravenlocke]

Text:
In the heart of Ethiopia, nestled amidst the rugged mountains of Lasta, lies the ancient town of Lalibela. It's a place where time seems to stand still, and the air is infused with a sense of mysticism. Lalibela is renowned for its remarkable rock-hewn churches, a UNESCO World Heritage site that captivates visitors from around the globe.

The story of Lalibela's churches begins in the 12th century, during the reign of King Lalibela, a visionary ruler with a deep spiritual calling. Legend has it that Lalibela was inspired by a divine vision, instructing him to create a "New Jerusalem" in Ethiopia. Fueled by this celestial mandate, the king embarked on an ambitious project to build a series of churches carved from solid rock.

Over the course of several decades, Lalibela's architects and artisans carved these magnificent structures into the volcanic rock of the Lasta mountains. The result is an extraordinary collection of eleven medieval churches, each a masterpiece of craftsmanship and engineering. The churches are connected by a network of tunnels and passages, creating a sacred pilgrimage site for Ethiopian Orthodox Christians.

One of the most awe-inspiring churches in Lalibela is Bet Giyorgis, dedicated to St. George. Carved in the shape of a cross and standing free from the surrounding rock, it is a symbol of architectural genius and unwavering faith. Pilgrims flock to Lalibela, especially during religious festivals, to trace the footsteps of their forebears and pay homage to the divine.

As centuries passed, Lalibela's churches became more than mere religious edifices. They evolved into a testament to the enduring spirit of a people and a nation. Despite political upheavals and the passage of time, Lalibela has remained a sacred site, a place where the ancient and the eternal converge.

Today, as visitors explore the underground labyrinths and marvel at the intricately carved interiors, they are transported to a different era. The rock-hewn churches of Lalibela continue to be a living testament to the skill, devotion, and unwavering faith of the people who carved them into existence.

Lalibela stands not only as a UNESCO World Heritage site but as a beacon of Ethiopia's rich cultural heritage. It is a place where the spiritual and the architectural merge, inviting all who visit to contemplate the divine and to marvel at the ingenuity of humanity throughout the ages.

https://x.com/Afrika_Stories/status/1723665208260829235

1723665208260829235

[shaberon]

Dinanukht: the Dinnus version seems a simplification from the time the name was no longer understood. “spoke in accordance with", maybe. I will look at the etymological dictionary of Persian verb roots. The name seems to be a merger, rather of Din (Daena ,yes; the Persian Dharma – absorbed by Islamic Arabic: dīn, plural adyān, religion) and anukh, which looks like the very name Enoch. Then the question is: what does the name Enoch mean? If it is Semitic, then it has an uncanny similarity with the 1rst personal pronoun, anokhi, “I”, …which happens to be Hamitic as well (Egyptian). “The book of the prophet I/Me”... I am who am...



The typical Mandaic spelling is Anush (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anush_(Mandaeism)) -- the Semitic figures are always noticeable. I just discovered that "Iranian equivalent", which is the riddle, how "foreign" concepts are applicable to "our" concepts.



Another point. “Normative” opinion on the precedence of the Greek Gospel your write. That should not be normative for us, should it?


No -- just a starting point. The known Greek texts precede the Aramaic. However, I would add the first known sermon of Jesus is based in a Greek text. Again, yes, of course, there is some trouble filling a two-hundred-year lacuna, when everything that comes out of it is contradictory. Such as:




Although I do not share the fashionable "Vatican bashing” and criticism of the Roman Catholic version of Christianity (because I think that Filioque is a vastly significant improvement upon the Orthodox version, Islam etc. – from a theological point of view – it is clear that Rome (but also Constantinople!) has always had enormous interests vested in their primacy. Fighting such “imperialist Christianity” does not necessarily imply rejecting its theology. The sad thing is that it is the other way round. The "imperialists" have the better theology. Those with the more hazardous theology (Orthodox, Islam) are however a lot more sympathique.


Well, you're allowed to do that. Such an "upgrade" takes place some nine or ten centuries distant from any lessons by Jesus, so, in terms of authenticity, this has the weakest leg to stand on.

There was plenty of time to discuss the Spirit, and that kind of confusion is what we get.

I found something far more difficult that addresses this. I will have to post it later. It may revoke some primacy. Take the toys out of their hands. With reference to the above, Den Yasht (16) is the hymn of goddess Chista (Wisdom), which is older. The cover-up may be applicable here.

[Michel Leclerc]

Anteriority has no role to play in spiritual matters, Shaberon. But people who claim that A came before B and therefore should have more worth should be reminded of that, occasionally.

If we forget the spiritual plane (but why would we, really?), then the argument stands firm that we do not know what was lost.

And finally, the argument has been made that the anteriority claim of the Greek versions is just wrong. Maybe you could try and widen your array of sources.

[Michel Leclerc]

Dinanukht. Indeed, the end of the name (ukht) must be the Indo-European wek-, ‘to speak‘, which one finds also in the Indian cognate vac- with the same meaning, the Greek cognate wep- which shed the w- to become the ep- of epos and epic, and in Germanic, up to the modern Dutch verb gewagen (prefix ge-) meaning ‘to refer to’, ‘to evoke’ etc. The possibility that -ukht might be wek- struck me when reading the translation you offered but the second n (dinanukht) made me seriously question that.

The solution lies in the fact that this -n- is the trace of a prefix. However that could be anu- or ni-, both coinciding in a final nawākht with quite different meanings: ‘(he/she cursed’ or the past participle ‘cursed', or 'he/she spoke friendly, kindly, played (an instrument)' or 'spoken kindly of, played (said of the instrument)'. Let us discount the 'cursed' possibility, then we will get 'spoken kindly of by Religion’, 'caressed by Religion’.

The entire name is Iranian, which is also simplest and most probable. No need for a Semitic Enokh or Enosh!

[shaberon]

Anteriority has no role to play in spiritual matters, Shaberon. But people who claim that A came before B and therefore should have more worth should be reminded of that, occasionally.


No, it doesn't.

It does, in intellectual history, in the development of ideas and language.

All I am trying to do is stack them in order. Such as, ca. 300 B. C. E., Jewish sources reduce a sensible Greek "kakodaimon" to the inappropriate "daimon", and basically decapitate the language and change everything forever, providing us the meaningless word, "demon". In this sense, the older "Agathodaimon and kakodaimon" is more valuable. Especially because any mechanism or rationale for changing it is missing.


Compared to the oldest doctrines as written in Old Kingdom Egypt and Mesopotamia, I would say, at most, those are kind of crude. The point would be in taking these archaic notions and refining or developing them into a superior format. The later Veda and Avesta are huge strides in this. I'm not sure other things are. The Vedic view simply disposes of anything previous, eradicates man's previous notions; and Zarathustra apparently met tremendous resistance by those attached to their previous practices. These "As" have more value than their "Bs", not because of age, but because the later literature is less useful (with certain exceptions).







If we forget the spiritual plane (but why would we, really?), then the argument stands firm that we do not know what was lost.

And finally, the argument has been made that the anteriority claim of the Greek versions is just wrong. Maybe you could try and widen your array of sources.


I asked.

Make one point that assists "the Aramaic New Testament is older". I haven't found one, yet. On the other hand, I'm not saying it was entirely composed in Egypt and simply given to people on the other coast. The logic is in the real activity of the Apostles, leading to a difficult paradox about John.

I'm not sure why we would fish for a missing Aramaic NT, in the same step as denying the Mandeans have a West Aramean origin. Both simply lack period-appropriate written evidence.

In cases of other things, we often find stray quotes or references to such "missing works", which is a better lead. This is the case in Buddhism and Zoroastrianism (twenty Nasks for example). There are a lot of specific references to missing entities, whereas, comparatively, most of the Biblical lore seems to concern alternate manuscripts of the *same* entities.

From other postings, Aramaic primacy (https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/gxzlpe/why_is_the_pe****ta_primacy_aramaic_original_new/) doesn't gain any traction. Little supports it, and too many issues give it a Greek likelihood. That's not to ultimately say no "parts" of it may have come from Aramaic. Just that I, at least, can conceive of Aramaic having primacy over Semitic languages, more easily than its application in this particular setting, where anything "fit to publish" was Greek.


I accidentally struck upon a backstory for language that is recycled there.


Here is something that was lost from spiritual affairs.


We received a vocabulary lesson that is Rehsok, that is, it has never been touched by a rabbi.

I'm going to attempt a pro-Semitic move by washing a language family.

Now, if it sounds strange to us that a group of Semites would come out of Egypt, spend forty days crossing the narrow Sinai while collecting a pet rock, there is something very normal about Semites and Egypt. That is, by 3,000 B. C. E., Byblos was the source of all the coniferous wood used in Egyptian construction. In Lebanon, you find the copper axes engraved with hieroglyphs, and, offerings from these Egyptians to Our Lady of Byblos.

And now for some reciprocity.

In the older Ugaritic texts from ca. 1,500 B. C. E., "Dagon", or, the character


"fisherman of Athirat" (dgy aṯrt)

is personally named

qdš w amrr

Qudshu-wa-Amruru


and he is sent on a mission to Egypt, to ask the Ugaritic deity Kothar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kothar-wa-Khasis) to make a present. Around Memphis, there are a few minor attestations of such a Kothar. This is almost literally meaningful.


There is something bigger.

So we are having some obscura on the Holy (qds) Spirit. And the same Semitic term is the name of this male deity, or, it is also an epithet of El.

Something new changes that, and we are going to learn how to read.



Stele of Qetesh / Kadesh, Dynasty XIX (1292–1186 BC)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/da/Stele_of_the_Syrian_goddess_Kadesh.JPG/575px-Stele_of_the_Syrian_goddess_Kadesh.JPG




Now, if it was just me, I would say that shortly before the time of King Solomon, Semites have ported "Qds" into Egypt in a way that is much more strongly commemorated than the first instance, be satisfied with that, and probably not care.

This is a standard image distributed in various copies.

They have focused Holy Goddess and stamped her with Hathor, in terms of the horns, and also the curved hair style, resembling an inverted omega. Her standing on a lion is visibly equivalent to Syrian Goddess on seals from centuries earlier. So by plain appearance she is a merger of Syria and Egypt. This is elaborated by the male on the left, Min, who is pre-dynastic Egyptian and iterates with the Apis Bull and the "mobile" sun god, over a time period I might say they are "working on" spiritual ideas that *might* be present here. The male on the right is Semitic Resheph, who is described in the earliest Ebla tablets as the spouse of Adamma -- who, interestingly, is probably the first precise use of the stem *-adm to have the meaning of "life", which is unclear in Akkadian. Moreover, Eblaites syncretized Resheph to Nergal -- making him the syncretic deity through the Parthian Empire.


He's not static, he goes to Egypt with Qedesh who becomes Hathor.

Hathor comes out of Egypt and becomes Our Lady of Byblos, Baalat Gubal (https://www.jstor.org/stable/23608857), until as recently as the fifth century B. C. E. (if not later). And she is the syncretic deity, which scholars have tried to pick which "one" of them she is, the correct answer seems to be "any and all". This would include Qds as found in Ugaritic middle texts:



In Ugarit she is called Athirat,
but is also known to us as Asherah, Elath, and Qudshu

The Kirta epic is a myth that is about a man, Kirta, who is
desperate to be married and have sons so that he can secure his
posterity. At first he approaches El who promises him that he will be
successful in his quest to obtain Hurriya as a wife and that she will bear
him children. Not satisfied, on the way to take Hurriya he comes to
Athirat and seeks her blessing also, identifying her as Qudshu, Athirat
of Tyre, and Elath of Sidon.


This is a nascent iconography; see for example Anat and Qudshu as Mistress of Animals (http://www.sel.cchs.csic.es/sites/default/files/03cornelius_01d8b7a2.pdf).

So you have the precursor term for the Holy Spirit, as knowable in the town that is the precursor for "Bible". And as they co-develop, we will find *-qds in the Old Testament at least 890 times in a way that has nothing to do with the above.

It remains in current expressions for Spirit.

Arabic:


Rúḥu 'l-Quds (or Rūḥu 'l'Qudus)


Mandaic:

Ewath, (ruha d qudsa)


which in this case is female, like Semitic Qudush.


Those deities very clearly show acceptance and everyone working together, which is the antithesis of the authors of the OT.


The counter-argument is that Asherah and Qds were Vanquished (https://medusacoils.blogspot.com/2014/04/review-book-on-asherah-by-darlene-kosnik.html) by the way the terms were rendered stale and impotent.


So, we are able to find -- by inscriptions and texts, rather than guesswork -- that certain deities are understood as "regional variations" of each other, and identified as equivalents. I had no clue that Egypt had anything to do with it until a few days ago. Now we have to say that by or before 1,200 B. C. E., it had joined a Semitic conversation on the level of ideas. Same amalgamation that happens everywhere, except nothing Jewish or Hebrew is ever attached to it. In order to do that, we are relegated to Enoch.

I'm willing to accept -- or even *promote* -- that it contains two items of value. Of course, these resemble the facets of "syncretic deity", and for fairness and accuracy, we should enquire of these in any culture. Similarly, in this case, so far the proof is in the Aramaic Enoch Fragments (https://ia601408.us.archive.org/9/items/MILIKEnochInAramaicQumranCave4/MILIK_Enoch-in-Aramaic-Qumran-Cave-4.pdf) which runs over four hundred pages. The result is that original Enoch was based upon the common, civil, universal, catholic, or orthodox concern:

Astrology (The Year)

and the Enoch compilation contains another important main subject:


Journey in Other Realms


The point of such a Journey is to experience something of the Afterlife in this life, an aspect of gnosis. The trouble with scriptures is they practically ignore this. The ability of a Spirit of Wisdom would seem to be to assist you.


The remaining curiosity from Ugarit is a theological increase.

It is something I can get from the Vedas, and I am not sure in the Avesta. It seems to be in medieval Rosicrucianism and Alchemy. Otherwise rather elusive. Careful hunting through the library reveals the subject of:


Divine Marriage (https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/5bbe322f-4104-4b06-b427-3529af83c280/content)



Just to tie this back in, it can also be found in what I would say is the intent of Sukla Yajur Veda, Household Religion (http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/25268/1/1.pdf.pdf):


Rashpu is named in the deity lists (in various manifestations and even in the plural
rPpm) and is a regular recipient of offerings (e.g., ewes, rams, cows) in the ritual
texts. He is usually thought to be a god of pestilence and a lord of the underworld
due to his equation with Nergal in the deity lists and his mention as Shapshu’s
“gatekeeper,”



Ugarit has no material that deals with Seven Planets.

This is considered the only "potential" one, i. e. Resheph "might" be Mars due to positioning.

Going back to the marriage, it is unusual because it describes the border to the underworld or land of the dead in a strange way:


Scholars are uncertain about the meaning mdbr qds



The border is expressed again by the refrain:


28 The field is {the field} of El,
Field of Athirat waRahmay

raḥmu, "womb."


That's at a pretty deep level of metaphorical meaning, why marriage or even pregnancy are linked up with death. Moreover, the text introduces one of the most important Ugaritic deities, Sun Goddess Shapshu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapshu), of obscure or uncertain origin. She is in the Amarna letters. But she lacks pointers or equivalencies.

That's noticeable, right? Assur, Shamash, Ra, Apollo, are not in short supply. There are not many places where a Young Sun Goddess enters the picture to interface with Divine Marriage. The Rg Veda is one of these. In particular, it appears to elaborate the idea within itself, to create it.

It seems to me that both Naram-Sin and Old Kingdom Pharaohs had a "consecratory" form of spiritual practice, that is, they associated Heaven with values such as morality and justice. I'm not solid enough on the Sumerian and Egyptian cycles to recognize a parallel to what was just made. I can see that the Akkadian root *-qds has the meaning of "purify", and, over the course of a thousand years or so, passes through a syncretized Ugaritic pantheon in a way that manifests what I would call those "basic doctrines". Certainly not every tale of "marriage" has enough subjective material to qualify as the meaning sought. At the more basic level, we might say Underworld Hero is readily valid anywhere in Greece as Herakles, that there is an unmistakable public standard. Beyond that, I am not sure what else may be directly comparable to the Ugaritic archive.


Just like with Hathor, it has a section on Semitic deities merging with Hittite ones, and the new hybrids coming to Ugarit. In this context, the suggested inspiration is a Hittite continuity of Hattian sun goddess Estan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_goddess_of_Arinna), later equated to Hurrian Hepat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%B8%AAepat) of Aleppo.

In particular, she has a daughter or an additional aspect as Taknas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_goddess_of_the_Earth):



The Sun goddess of the Earth, as a personification of the chthonic aspects of the Sun, had the task of opening the doors to the Underworld. She was said to cleanse all evil, impurity, and sickness on Earth.

In the Hurrian-Hittite "Song of the Ransom," the Sun goddess of the Earth / Allani invites the king of the gods, Tarḫunna/Teššub and his brother Šuwaliyat/Tašmišu to a feast in the Underworld and dances before them.


The older Semitic sources, on the other hand, merely succinctly state the existence of a female solar deity, perhaps implicitly the sun's wife, by feminizing Sumerioan "Utu". Here, though far more extravagant, the Hittites are still speaking in agricultural or astrological terms, i. e., it is a deity who descends to the underworld, not "you".

If one is able to see a refinement of Anatolian Sun Goddess into Ugaritic Divine Marriage, I would say this is mirrored by the early part of the Rg Veda. And, I think it is providing something about Spirit which is not available in the OT. It also provides the deity, El, which Jesus spoke of.


We see that a simple image like the one posted may speak volumes.

It, of course, is like a "key" to the heraldic language displayed on thousands of Syrian seals older than Ugarit. They are very technical. They make the IVC artists look like amateurs, or even asleep. They may have been IVC artists who got a new gig. One might surmise that the Horse on the seals means India. I don't know. We do know in modern (https://www.smp.org/dynamicmedia/files/9513be125e814ce049a4206a7f858569/TX001341_1-Background-Called_to_Holiness_Holiness_in_Modern_Church_Teaching.pdf?srsltid=AfmBOoozw4ByE1dXhChmqL33ovbWdtLKgk bVCUageL73qyZ1jl0NR7f3) terms:



...the English word holy is an English equivalent for the Hebrew word qds and the
Greek word hagios...


Exactly what are the Lebanese doing with this "Hebrew word" in Egypt at the time of Moses allegedly?

It may not have utmost detail, but it has one thing, external corroborating evidence.

[shaberon]

Let us discount the 'cursed' possibility, then we will get 'spoken kindly of by Religion’, 'caressed by Religion’.

The entire name is Iranian, which is also simplest and most probable. No need for a Semitic Enokh or Enosh!


I don't think it was meant as an etymology, but an equivalent character.

I was unaware of it as a separate legend; this is how it appears in the Mandaic appropriation of 130 Middle Persian terms (https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/mandaeans-iii):



Proper names of celestial beings (see below) Abāthur, Bihrām, Rām, Yāwar, or of the legendary figure Dīnānūkht (Av. daēna naoxda, MPers. dēnānūxt “talking in according with religion”).


In terms of importance, the article correctly states the *most* important one is Bihram -- Verethragna, *and* it fails to connect this with the distinctly non-Iranian practice, weekly baptism. But, some of the Mandeans think Bihram is Abraham. And we are still not told where this "figure" came from, how could it possibly have an Avestan name.

Although not their own name for themselves:



The cult hut (temple): mandi (MPers. māndan, “to remain,” mān “house, temple”; the older, classical term is maškna, Hebr.“place of worship”).



As far as I can tell, Dinanukht (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinanukht) comes from Mandean scripture, only, where he interacts with Ruha d Qudsha and travels through heavenly realms. He happens to have the form of Avestan Sraosa (half book), and evidently has one instance, in Book 6 of the Right Ginza. This tale obviously mashes together multiple Iranic and Semitic characters.


Anush Uthra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anush_(Mandaeism)) is directly absorbed from Semitic lore and simply "enhanced".


Skimming the contents of Right Ginza (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_Ginza), Anush is in multiple places. It heavily relies on its non-Jewish "Aramaic Old Testament", even though it is begun by Iranian Mana. The Dinanukht chapter is just sort of slipped in there, doesn't really fit the flow very well. Because this is a late text (700s) and this character -- unlike most others -- has no background, and, the half-book Sraosa image traces to the 400s, that is why one might guess that Sraosa is being sublimated. It's a unique form; anyone would see through it. There, of course, where Ruha d Qudsha assimilates to "everything", such as Kusta, she is much more Holy Spirit than All Evil.

He sits by the waters between the worlds, reading himself:

https://tarnmoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/picdinanukht.jpg

[Michel Leclerc]

First the language … that is my position and principle, Shaberon.

In Ugarit she is called Athirat, but is also known to us as Asherah, Elath, and Qudshu.

Those are not given names. They are plain adjectives, with quite unambiguous feminine suffixes in -at(h), or -a. Athir means “leaving traces”; “effective” we would say, in management jargon; and then, because leaders effect things: “noble”;
“ashir” means "lively”, "dynamic” in management parlance;
“el” means "high" (Allah; Lât in the Qur'an also means the (female) High One);
qudshu has the masculine ending -u, “qudsh” means “holy”.

Any deity is noble, effective, dynamic and holy.

I can be terribly wrong. On Dinanukt I was. However, my present suggestions for its Iranian meaning are better than the boring "in accordance with" your source says. In this case, a descriptive adjective has become a given name. Its construction is typically Indo-European, as Persian is. Hundreds of given names in our cultures are built like that.

***

addendum:

Re-reading your post. What is the link between Lebanon and Hebrew?

You cannot be serious.

They spoke the same language Shaberon. “Canaanite", or "Canaanite-derived” languages.

[shaberon]

In Ugarit she is called Athirat, but is also known to us as Asherah, Elath, and Qudshu.

Those are not given names. They are plain adjectives

Any deity is noble, effective, dynamic and holy.

...my present suggestions for its Iranian meaning are better than the boring "in accordance with" your source says. In this case, a descriptive adjective has become a given name. Its construction is typically Indo-European, as Persian is. Hundreds of given names in our cultures are built like that.


Good, yes, this is an issue in intellectual history that you might become helpful with.

I got this out of responding to nineteenth-century academia. It is the tendency to "re-ify", in the sense that an "object" turns into a "kingdom" or something like that. It seems to have been assumed that everything was about proper names, which leads to inventions, such as "Aryan Invasion" theory. Or for example, similar to Zoroaster's adversary "Druj", in the Vedas a group of "Druhyus" is fought on more than one occasion. Then we go off looking for this kingdom, and it is never found, because it is an adjective.

"In Ugarit, she is called Effective" would not lead us to search for a lost kingdom.

We would just need to distinguish when the generic adjective, "effective", is being used in a mundane sense. And in the nineteenth century, they probably made a lot of generic words into personal names, or countries, and started trying to force-fit things that were never there.







What is the link between Lebanon and Hebrew?

You cannot be serious.

They spoke the same language...


I speak the same English words as everyone in my surroundings, but we are barely speaking the same language. Seems to be a matter of degree. At times, opposite.

The Hebrew version of the same "qds" appears to have a different intent that is incompatible with its surroundings.

Most of the surroundings appear to be fine with any titles, languages, or names for "Lady of Heaven", and then there is this change.

The Old Testament appears to be altering the meaning of words spontaneously and arbitrarily. Concerning afterlife, it is, at best, recalcitrant.


Things I post in many cases would not be surprises to anyone who is an expert in their field, but, to me, it is all mostly "new" because of discoveries that have been made in my lifetime, and the number of projects and explorations and whatnot is really a lot. And so I am trying to parse it out by epochal events such as to when an idea is attested, or a word changes. It seems when I find a subject, it has a tendency to answer the question itself without me necessarily looking for anything. Here it goes.

These are the new "poster children" of the Lebanese Tourism Industry:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/45/Phoenician_statuettes.jpg/365px-Phoenician_statuettes.jpg


1,500+ of them collected.

Suggestive of Rephesh. There are barely a few corresponding females, and, a few other kinds. They come from the Temple of Our Lady.



What we call "Byblos" was the main export center for Egyptian papyrus, a reed product, and primarily for writing, at which they appear to have invented the Alphabet. But Byblos is like a coastal "Aleppo", it witnessed everything before that.

"Our Lady" is thought to translate as "a well", GBL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baalat_Gebal), as also seen in Akkadian:


dNIN ša uruGub-la, read as Bēltu ša Gubla, occurs in the Amarna letters



She will answer the question I asked in a previous post:



Due to contacts between Byblos and Egypt, Baalat Gebal came to be identified with Hathor. Egyptians referred to the latter goddess as the “Lady of Byblos” (nbt kpn), a reflection of Baalat Gebal’s name. She could also be referred to as “Lady of Dendera who dwells in Byblos”. The oldest attestation of the connection between the two goddesses occurs in the Coffin Texts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_Texts) appearing around 2,100 B. C. E.:



An Osirian afterlife is offered to everyone, and the deceased is even referred to as "the Osiris-[name]."



In the relevant passage, Hathor is addressed as the “Lady of Byblos” while she is invoked as a protector of the passengers of the solar barque.


It is possible that this phenomenon had an ideological dimension, as interpreting foreign goddess as Hathor made it possible to present payments made to local temples in areas such as Byblos and Punt, possibly made to acquire local goods, as a display of piety towards an Egyptian deity. In a text from the reign of Thutmose III, the official Minmose lists the temple of “Hathor, Lady of Byblos” among these belonging to Egyptian deities, and it is possible that the connection was reinforced by Egyptian involvement in local construction projects. No references to the connection between Baalat Gebal and Hathor postdate the New Kingdom, both due to less frequent contact with Byblos and due to the latter being partially replaced by Isis in Egyptian religion.


It's a genre of literature. By this description, Old Kingdom beliefs are summarized as "Pyramid Texts", and here we go. In terms of intellectual history, Egypt "baptizes", so to speak, Lebanon, or draws it into this realm of "afterlife for everyone", evidently in one and the same motion of first recording it. Hathor has five other syncretic sites -- all in Egypt.

Would the corresponding Vedic belief be as old as "this kind" of Osiris, yes, I think it could be, and in terms of would it be "anterior", most likely not.

What is clear in India is that this is a learned or discovered reality. As soon as the Coffin Texts say "Osiris means that we can do this", they are the same. I take it as important, profound. When we get to the OT, this element is reduced back again.

Baalat persisted until "the Roman period", or, that is, finalization of the New Testament.

My suggestion is the "Book of the Dead", slightly later than the Coffin Texts, is a form of meditation.

I think it is attempting exercises based on increasing personal perception of "the Afterlife".

From that, I, at least, get a sense of Spirit or spirituality, which makes me curious how it could be improved on or disfigured.


Hathor of Byblos protects those on the "solar barque", which, iconographically, manifests before "solar chariot". The pictographic symbol may also work in the Old Kingdom and similar mythologies, and so here, the meaning has importantly been changed to "you" are on it.


Heracles on the sea in the golden bowl of Helios, c. 480 B. C. E.:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Heracles_on_the_sea_in_the_bowl_of_Helios.jpg/496px-Heracles_on_the_sea_in_the_bowl_of_Helios.jpg




This is doubly satisfying, because, my criticism of Egypt would be, there is no continuity. It influenced nothing. Whatever interesting spiritual practices may have developed under the core Osirian belief, are extinguished. This must be partially incorrect because Byblos was quite heavily Egyptianized all through it.

Because they were interested in the corresponding land corridor, it is not surprising they got aggressive towards the Assyrian Empire. In what is one of the most bizarre military decision known to man, King Josiah attacked the Egyptian force. It wasn't successful; Pharaoh was bewildered as to why or what the king was thinking. It's inexplicable.



In virtually the same environment as Hathor of Byblos, Old Syrian Seals are a "genre" considered as being issued ca. 1,850 - 1,600 B. C. E.. And if we took this in the most default assignment, it would say Iran Syria Egypt:


This seal shows a smiting weather god wielding a mace and a sickle sword, approached by a goddess wearing a square, horned miter and a long garment. Behind her stands a nude goddess wearing a brimmed cap, and a galloping ibex above a seated lion. A number of objects are arranged in the empty spaces of the pictorial field including a crescent, a sun disk, and ankh symbols.

https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/327382/2274070/main-image




Concerning the letter gamma, gimmel, camel, or C to be of any antiquity, the beast is not found as an Arabian Dromedary until after 1,000 B. C. E., but from the land of Zoroaster or Zarat Ustra:


This seal shows a divine couple sitting on the two humps of a Bactrian camel, one of the earliest images of this animal. Above them hovers a winged rosette, which is a protective emblem. A smaller figure holding a bow stands on the head and neck of the camel. A winged female deity, stands off to the side, facing a contest between a man and a beast. The surrounding space is filled with a variety of animals, including a lion, scorpion, bull, and gazelle.

https://art.thewalters.org/images/art/PL9_42.804_Fnt_BW_H70.jpg







We have reason to think these may not just be stylistic copies of something the artist had never seen. Those could be entire stories, like taking pictures of a play done by actors. It appears the mind was ready to engage the meaning of an Ankh at a level that looks like it would be more complex and sincere.


In this same Old Syrian layer are found the oldest remains of Indian animals (e. g., elephants). Something extraordinarily fusionistic started going on, here, consisting of Immortality, multiple suns, the Bull as a shared or universal icon, and the ability to articulate increasingly vivid ideas.

Such an ideal situation must not have remained intact, very long, for we are then told everyone went off and made his own Vedas, Gathas, Hermetic or Orphic Hymns, and it seems very divergent.

And yet the outcome of "syncretic deity" (such as, most likely, the metal figures above), is the "Bahram" from Mandean baptism. It's not the original Avestan one from East Iran, or Bactria, etc., it's the Verethragna Herakles off the statue.


I find it impressive, against the hard forces of nature with somewhat low technology, that human beings could have assembled that kind of a "crossroads", even only if temporarily.

The Coffin Texts appear to cover an arc from personal afterlife up to the famous symbol of the Scales. I'm not familiar enough with it to say anything about the textual evolution of entities or subjects, but I would be willing to guess there are studies on this.

I am interested in how the positive aspects of that evolve, and, for what I am doing to work, I require the New Testament. That is for Melchizedek. The simple reason is because Jerusalem is not a place of peace and righteousness. The more adequate text in this class is Apocryphal Enoch. In a slightly different vein, I could probably accept that Jesus "should" have had a political career. I would "vote" for him. I can see why that probably would have been a good idea to many Greeks and Jews of the time. It didn't work, and the idea appears to have been changed to Eschatology. My questioning here lies along the lines of, what is said or expressed here in philosophy or spirituality that would not have come along since the Osirian expression?

[Ravenlocke]

https://x.com/BereketWL/status/1876915324827627763

1876915324827627763

[Ravenlocke]

https://x.com/BereketWL/status/1875702836648083572

1875702836648083572

[Ravenlocke]

https://x.com/BereketWL/status/1876180471266373934

1876180471266373934


https://x.com/BereketWL/status/1876585207240728751

1876585207240728751

[Ravenlocke]

https://x.com/BereketWL/status/1876623477152825829

1876623477152825829

[Ravenlocke]

https://x.com/BereketWL/status/1883558010473402643

1883558010473402643

https://x.com/BereketWL/status/1883556361843417283

1883556361843417283

[Ravenlocke]

https://x.com/BereketWL/status/1878756120803803519

1878756120803803519

[Ravenlocke]

Sputnik Africa,

🇪🇹✨ Faith alight: Ethiopian Orthodox Christians mark Meskel — Festival of the Cross — in Addis Ababa

The UNESCO-recognized celebration brought together church leaders, government officials, diplomats, and thousands of faithful.

☦️ This annual Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church festival honors the discovery of the True Cross by Empress Helena. The celebrations include prayers, bonfires, music, and community activities.

https://x.com/sputnik_africa/status/1971592365589635568

1971592365589635568

[Ravenlocke]

From EBC WORLD

Ethiopia is celebrating the Meskel Festival, which begins with the lighting of the iconic Demera (bonfire) ceremony, the eve of the main religious holiday.

Meskel is a major religious festival commemorating the traditional finding of the True Cross—the cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified. The celebration honors the finding of the Cross by Empress Helena after it was unearthed from where it had been buried.

#Ethiopia #Meskel #findingofthetruecross #EBC

https://x.com/ebczena/status/1971599587812028464

1971599587812028464