To be fair, the heaven of the Bible is neither stateless nor classless. “The nations” are still present in Revelation 21 and 22, and inequality in heaven is a common theme in Jesus’s parables.
“The nations” is just fancy for “non Jews”. Remember that the bible predates modern nation states by more than a millennium.
inequality in heaven is a common theme in Jesus’s parables.
Is that so? I can think of the story with the lamps where it’s about getting into the kingdom of god or the treasure in the field where it’s about finding the kingdom of god. Or that the poor will inherit the kingdom of god while rich people cannot get into it. Nothing about inequality inside the kingdom of god.
You have to keep in mind that the kingdom of god isn’t really heaven as we think of it even tho Matthew uses the wording kingdom of heaven (to avoid the word god as a good jew). We think of heaven as life after death but the kingdom of god is on earth when Jesus returns and the dead arise and he builds his kingdom here.
“Least”/“Greatest” in “the kingdom of heaven” is a construction that appears at least once off the top of my head, Matthew 5:19. I’m sure there are more. But also, Jesus is depicted as a literal monarch and heaven a kingdom like you said, so there’s at least one extra class right there.
I had it drilled into my head as a kid. When I left home I forgot most of it. Then as an adult I brushed up on it to argue with the kind of people who drilled it into my head as a kid.
Saying “The only one I call king is the one who died at the cross” subverts the very concept of a king. Not only is this guy no longer here to directly command anyone but his death was the most humiliating to him and his followers possible. In this way, it’s anti-authoritarian. Similar with the greatest in the kingdom of god. It’s the last you would think of: the poor, the children, … . Sure, this leaves place for interpretation. You can say it’s just a new hierarchy. Or it’s so radically putting everything into question that it’s in effect a call against all hierarchies. Or that it’s so radical, it can’t be taken serious at all so barely means anything anymore.
Christianity as a whole shows all of this. The first communes shared everything in common, there was “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. (Gal 3, 28). Later a new hierarchy establish which, once established, wasn’t new or subversive anymore but just a top down hierarchy. Once in a while someone came with a more subversive reading, more often than not founding a new organization that ended up with a strict hierarchy.
I think the biggest flaw is that there is no sustainable alternative given. You can criticize capitalism all day long and reinforce it as a system without an alternative if you don’t give one. Some Christians found alternatives and supported them with the scripture, others supported very different things with scripture. That’s the thing with all world religions: They start in opposition to society but fail to think outside the box and so they end up reinforcing it while keeping the seldom fulfilled potential for a better society (“world region” in the sense Graeber uses the term in Debt and Graham discusses in this podcast episode I guess but I’m not sure).
All that said, since the first Christians certainly had a very egalitarian, anti-authoritative reading, this is the most authoritative reading (pun intended).
This is good stuff; your argument is well reasoned. Brings me back to my Bible study days.
I still think “all hierarchies” might be overbroad. The Bible itself prescribes elders/bishops and deacons to administer the church, for instance, and it’s radical enough regarding obedience to authority that, in my experience, modern day theologically conservative churches trend toward authoritarianism and mostly unchecked abuse of power more often than not. This would have been contemporaneous with the communes.
As for the more heavenly hierarchies, I looked back at some of the points of evidence that I was going to bring up here that I thought supported my case, but the “outer darkness” in Matthew 22 I once thought might not necessarily be hell sure seems like hell upon rereading, and as for the parable of the unforgiving servant who was sent to the “torturers” despite his debts being forgiven, it looks like that word “torturers” is connected to jailers, i.e. debtors’ prison, so I can’t argue confidently that the servant was “saved” from anything and given a different punishment instead. There are still a few passages I can’t totally square though:
The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32): He gets welcomed back into the family, and he sure seems saved in the sense that I think most Christians would read into it, but his inheritance is spent; he doesn’t get more. All the father has belongs to the other son.
The purifying fire of 1 Corinthians 3:9-15: Both groups of people are explicitly “saved”. One is rewarded, the other suffers loss.
The parable of the talents/minas: In the Matthew 25 version of the parable, the first two servants get the same reward (authority over “many things”). No issue there. But in the Luke 19 version, the rewards are proportional. And the one with 10 minas gets a bonus at the end.
That’s as far as I got before my eyes glazed over.
I never had much use for non-religious secondary sources back when I was a believer, so I can’t recommend any, but the New Testament isn’t actually that long; you could probably finish it in a week if you read 20-30 chapters a day, and the chapters are short. The first three books, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and to a lesser extent the fourth, John, are all the same; you can probably just pick one (John is probably the most interesting) and read the rest of the NT as is. Whether or not it’s worth your time is entirely up to you. I certainly have no intention of reading it again any time soon.
I think nothing outside of the gospels is of any merit. It is probably worth your time to read the red words in the bible. Jesus was on some real shit, minus all the son of god stuff
Before people get huffy yes I have read the entire bible; it is not “the most beautiful book ever written” nor anything close to that, but Jesus was an interesting dude
You also can not read the bible as if it’s modern English and interpret it as such. Always consider 1. who was talking then, 2. who they were talking to, and 3. the context in which they were speaking at the time.
Like, you can do some really interesting conversations about Neo Platonism and philo-semitism around the time some of the New Testament was being written - Gnosticism undoubtedly comes from Greek philosophy - but many portions of the Hebrew Bible predate Hesiod entirely.
Can you provide any form of argument, or is this some shit you picked up from like Zeitgeist or something.
Didn’t Alan Watts usually talk about (his extremely westernized interpretation of) Zen Buddhism? When has Alan Watts made the strange argument that ancient Israelites were somehow aware of Greek mythology and a specific text that wasn’t even written until at least many of the minor prophets books were written?
When has Alan Watts ever really been focused on the development of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament and it’s relationship to Greek mythology? Do you have a link to his argument?
Edit: Checked out and skimmed Myth & Ritual in Christianity online to see if what you are saying is in there. I strongly suspect that you are seriously misinterpreting ideas related to Jung and the collective unconscious (as does Zeitgeist), but feel free to clarify.
He’s got like hundreds of hours of lectures spanning a 50 year career.
Greece, Ahura Mazda, bhudda, Jesus, mythology, jungian shadow work he touches on just about all of it eventually.
It’s in this body of work I came across things he’d translated from Jesus in the original Greek. As the Old Testament was like 2 thousand years before the new.
We talk about Jesus the way he talked about Moses etc.
To be fair, the heaven of the Bible is neither stateless nor classless. “The nations” are still present in Revelation 21 and 22, and inequality in heaven is a common theme in Jesus’s parables.
“The nations” is just fancy for “non Jews”. Remember that the bible predates modern nation states by more than a millennium.
Is that so? I can think of the story with the lamps where it’s about getting into the kingdom of god or the treasure in the field where it’s about finding the kingdom of god. Or that the poor will inherit the kingdom of god while rich people cannot get into it. Nothing about inequality inside the kingdom of god.
You have to keep in mind that the kingdom of god isn’t really heaven as we think of it even tho Matthew uses the wording kingdom of heaven (to avoid the word god as a good jew). We think of heaven as life after death but the kingdom of god is on earth when Jesus returns and the dead arise and he builds his kingdom here.
“Least”/“Greatest” in “the kingdom of heaven” is a construction that appears at least once off the top of my head, Matthew 5:19. I’m sure there are more. But also, Jesus is depicted as a literal monarch and heaven a kingdom like you said, so there’s at least one extra class right there.
There’s also 11 classes of angels in a ladder system under Jesus. My boys Metatron and Enoch up top if I’m not mistaken.
Is that a Catholic thing?
It’s a Dead Sea scrolls thing
Why are you guys all able to recall random bits of the bible. What normal people are even reading this stuff in the last 40 years?
I had it drilled into my head as a kid. When I left home I forgot most of it. Then as an adult I brushed up on it to argue with the kind of people who drilled it into my head as a kid.
lol.
I see your point but hear me out:
Saying “The only one I call king is the one who died at the cross” subverts the very concept of a king. Not only is this guy no longer here to directly command anyone but his death was the most humiliating to him and his followers possible. In this way, it’s anti-authoritarian. Similar with the greatest in the kingdom of god. It’s the last you would think of: the poor, the children, … . Sure, this leaves place for interpretation. You can say it’s just a new hierarchy. Or it’s so radically putting everything into question that it’s in effect a call against all hierarchies. Or that it’s so radical, it can’t be taken serious at all so barely means anything anymore.
Christianity as a whole shows all of this. The first communes shared everything in common, there was “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. (Gal 3, 28). Later a new hierarchy establish which, once established, wasn’t new or subversive anymore but just a top down hierarchy. Once in a while someone came with a more subversive reading, more often than not founding a new organization that ended up with a strict hierarchy.
I think the biggest flaw is that there is no sustainable alternative given. You can criticize capitalism all day long and reinforce it as a system without an alternative if you don’t give one. Some Christians found alternatives and supported them with the scripture, others supported very different things with scripture. That’s the thing with all world religions: They start in opposition to society but fail to think outside the box and so they end up reinforcing it while keeping the seldom fulfilled potential for a better society (“world region” in the sense Graeber uses the term in Debt and Graham discusses in this podcast episode I guess but I’m not sure).
All that said, since the first Christians certainly had a very egalitarian, anti-authoritative reading, this is the most authoritative reading (pun intended).
This is good stuff; your argument is well reasoned. Brings me back to my Bible study days.
I still think “all hierarchies” might be overbroad. The Bible itself prescribes elders/bishops and deacons to administer the church, for instance, and it’s radical enough regarding obedience to authority that, in my experience, modern day theologically conservative churches trend toward authoritarianism and mostly unchecked abuse of power more often than not. This would have been contemporaneous with the communes.
As for the more heavenly hierarchies, I looked back at some of the points of evidence that I was going to bring up here that I thought supported my case, but the “outer darkness” in Matthew 22 I once thought might not necessarily be hell sure seems like hell upon rereading, and as for the parable of the unforgiving servant who was sent to the “torturers” despite his debts being forgiven, it looks like that word “torturers” is connected to jailers, i.e. debtors’ prison, so I can’t argue confidently that the servant was “saved” from anything and given a different punishment instead. There are still a few passages I can’t totally square though:
The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32): He gets welcomed back into the family, and he sure seems saved in the sense that I think most Christians would read into it, but his inheritance is spent; he doesn’t get more. All the father has belongs to the other son.
The purifying fire of 1 Corinthians 3:9-15: Both groups of people are explicitly “saved”. One is rewarded, the other suffers loss.
The parable of the talents/minas: In the Matthew 25 version of the parable, the first two servants get the same reward (authority over “many things”). No issue there. But in the Luke 19 version, the rewards are proportional. And the one with 10 minas gets a bonus at the end.
That’s as far as I got before my eyes glazed over.
This is really fascinating. I never heard of this.
Is there a non-religious, ELI5 resource I can read more about this?
I never had much use for non-religious secondary sources back when I was a believer, so I can’t recommend any, but the New Testament isn’t actually that long; you could probably finish it in a week if you read 20-30 chapters a day, and the chapters are short. The first three books, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and to a lesser extent the fourth, John, are all the same; you can probably just pick one (John is probably the most interesting) and read the rest of the NT as is. Whether or not it’s worth your time is entirely up to you. I certainly have no intention of reading it again any time soon.
I think nothing outside of the gospels is of any merit. It is probably worth your time to read the red words in the bible. Jesus was on some real shit, minus all the son of god stuff
Before people get huffy yes I have read the entire bible; it is not “the most beautiful book ever written” nor anything close to that, but Jesus was an interesting dude
You also can not read the bible as if it’s modern English and interpret it as such. Always consider 1. who was talking then, 2. who they were talking to, and 3. the context in which they were speaking at the time.
Dan McClellan videos on YouTube and TikTok are great and accessible discussions of a lot of academic Bible research.
Yeah it’s called Theogany by Hesiod
How is Ancient Greek poetry about the origin of the Greek gods relevant here?
Peep this.
It’s the inspiration for the Bible.
How???
Like, you can do some really interesting conversations about Neo Platonism and philo-semitism around the time some of the New Testament was being written - Gnosticism undoubtedly comes from Greek philosophy - but many portions of the Hebrew Bible predate Hesiod entirely.
Can you provide any form of argument, or is this some shit you picked up from like Zeitgeist or something.
Alan watts
Didn’t Alan Watts usually talk about (his extremely westernized interpretation of) Zen Buddhism? When has Alan Watts made the strange argument that ancient Israelites were somehow aware of Greek mythology and a specific text that wasn’t even written until at least many of the minor prophets books were written?
When has Alan Watts ever really been focused on the development of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament and it’s relationship to Greek mythology? Do you have a link to his argument?
Edit: Checked out and skimmed Myth & Ritual in Christianity online to see if what you are saying is in there. I strongly suspect that you are seriously misinterpreting ideas related to Jung and the collective unconscious (as does Zeitgeist), but feel free to clarify.
He’s got like hundreds of hours of lectures spanning a 50 year career.
Greece, Ahura Mazda, bhudda, Jesus, mythology, jungian shadow work he touches on just about all of it eventually.
It’s in this body of work I came across things he’d translated from Jesus in the original Greek. As the Old Testament was like 2 thousand years before the new. We talk about Jesus the way he talked about Moses etc.
Revelation 21 and 22 describe changes in the city of Jerusalem and basically nothing else. 🤦♂️