Eso viene de viejo. Aún antes de la traducción al griego, la biblia fue escrita en arameo, la traducciones que hicieron al griego es la septianaquiensabe, en Egipto, la cual era de 70 tractores que ¡Milagro! Todos hicieron la misma traducción. Hasta las comas. Y se perdió el signicado del nuevo testamento. Por ejemplo la frase repetida " por 40 días y noches" quería decir se fue mucho tiempo, más de un mes(lunar) pero nadie sabe cuánto. Y por ahí te vas, el NT no fue echo, no para ricos oletrado, eran gente del pueblo hablando a gente común. Y ese espíritu se perdió, por excesiva intelectuacion. Las apostacia agotaron las opciones está una del siglo 3 que decía q quien murió en la cruz no era Jesús, las gnósticas q se parecen mucho a los Cataros, q los extinguieron. Sobre la religión de la religión católica se ha escrito mucho. Lamentablemente no es original nada de eso. Búscate las apostacias ( esa no es la palabra exacta, no la recuerdo) del siglo IV y V y la vas a conseguir, recuerdo haber leído algo similar. Suerte para la próxima 😎😎
Vicente, you wouldn’t tolerate some aspects of your analysis applied to other body of text and their interpreters. Has classical philosophical been manipulated in their translations? Of course they have. Shared interpretation is nasty business.
I understand your sympathy with the gnostics. There is something there that more organized Christians like me sometimes disregard too quickly. At the same time, I think you are simplifying the internal struggles inside the churches.
For instance, both Ignatius, founder of the Jesuits, and Teresa de Jesus, likely the most influential mystic of the Catholic Church, were accused in their time of giving too much importance to their internal experiences. Nowadays, it’s hard to be more validated. However, they both found something in staying within the church. Luther, somehow contemporary to them, choose a different path.
The path of the Catholic and orthodox churches is that the gospel is clear when we stay together. Sometimes that feels like is just one big unmovable clusterfuck, but history proves otherwise. I have no reason to believe that such struggles have stopped.
Going back to your argument, the Greek of the New Testament is a subject of study in and out of the churches. Biblists are … weird people. Many of them are not really concerned about current interpretation, and keep coming back to it and other sources.
I meet a guy who did his PhD thesis on one word used in the gospel. (It’s the interjection in the version of the beatitudes used for being sorry about the rich because they are satisfied.)
So, I understand. In my opinion, you could make your argument without such a rampant generalization as if a generation of people have been lobotimized, and only a few realize the truth.
Or perhaps I’m complaining using the arguments that the fathers of the church used against the gnostics: you guys think you are so special and end up forgetting mercy (the widow and the orfan, one of them said). Perhaps my comment is just a repetition of an old struggle.
At least, I’m trying to acknowledge your point of view. Part of the treasures of being Catholic, paraphrasing Chesterton, is to be old as keeping close to my heart what people in other centuries and places have thought. Not because they are dead, it means their opinion should not be heard, paraphrasing again.
Good to have you here, I was going to send you the text if you didn't show up, since you're one of the guys I know who's really schooled in biblical subjects.
I'm not sure you could get away with bad translations in Philosophy, especially if your translation points diametrically in the other sense. For example, Derrida made a whole career (and quite a mess) by concentrating on the translation of Plato's "Pharmakon" in Dissemination. His whole "Phalogocentric" theory stems from the translation of "Pharmakon" as remedy, not poison. So I'm not really sure what you're refering too; of course we have hermeneutics and the school of interpretation put forward by Hans-George Gadamer, but the point of hermeneutics isn't sloppy translations done with a high degree of liberty, it's the constitution of the interpretative field and how or why we read texts as A and not B.
To answer you comment, though, I make a severe and tranchant distinction between the sacred text and the Church. I don't think people have been lobotomized, they can fairly easily read the Bible and figure it out by themselves, but the Church's raison d'être was, at a certain point (and I'm sure you'll concede this), to explain and interpret the Bible for you, as if you were too dumb to get the parable of the prodigal son or what have you. Therefore, when the Church was historically linked to centralized power structures (like the King) or was the power structure itself, it stands to reason the interpretation they'd give would be stacked in the Church's favor. Making a Church that goes around speaking about how useless churches are, wouldn't make sense.
I personally have the utmost respect for codes of ethics that have lasted thousands of years. If people keep finding meaning in them, there has to be some embedded, transcendental meaning. So I can understand people being catholic or finding meaning in a catholic life. You can even choose to subjugate yourself to the church. Does it make your life better? Great! Go for it.
However, reading sacred texts from a gnostic point of view isn't new and shouldn't be controversial, nowadays. Before, people were killed for saying a fraction of what I said in my post; whereas today we can have conversations. Of course none of this liberalism, tolerance and freedom came from the Church: it was snatched away from their hands martyr by martyr and inch by inch. I repeat: the Church as a power structure (not as a spiritual organization) is just as power-hungry and manipulative as any other one. I don't find this controversial. It's humans being humans. So it seems pretty obvious to me that a power structure of this kind would absolutely edit the Bible in a way that helps it ascertain said power, not diminish it.
I'll just end saying I hope I didn't make anybody mad? It wasn't the point.
On the gnostics text, a sign of diversity is biblists new take on the so called apocryphal gospels. They are out of the canon, but biblist don’t care. There is consensus about many of them being very late text. One except is precisely Thomas’ gospel, that is more a list of sayings, close in format to a theoretical text called (Q) that influenced the three Synoptics gospels.
Some biblist even say they should be part of the canon. They are free to do so, especially because biblist move freely among Christian denominations, and some are non believers.
It’s totally ok to discuss Thomas gospel in a seminary. How did that happen?
Any understanding of the churches and the bible should account for these events.
I read the Spanish “las iglesias que los apóstoles dejaron”.
It’s a book for non-scholars on the gospels and what their community could have been, written as a fiction.
Another instance of open discussion is that since I was a child, I have heard how John’s gospel could have gnostics influences. No one blink. These days some people say is actually not gnostic.
In any case, it’s hard to remain close to the gospel. We all want to digest it, simplify it, so it doesn’t bother us.
That might seems to contradict what I said about the gospel living in the people. It’s not contradiction. The written gospels are an stable reminder that serves as source of renovation.
It’s sad we didn’t keep many of the text written by gnostics. We are still learning from them. All so-called heresies have partially a point. We are defined by this narrow shared beliefs and every generation keeps huge buildings on top to them, especially the one in power. The gospel is smaller and had survived those attempts to be explain away.
I believe it will continue to do so.
I’m ok with people not fully understanding the church. There is a part that is not justified, and goes into the actual faith. My believe on Christ being the Son of God, his death and resurrection, is right there in the same creed that says we believe in a church. It doesn’t imply we believe whatever the current pope just said, because the pope is not the church. The ultimate reality of the church for us is not these stupid anecdotes, this drama with so many consequences. That helps to stay and do we what can.
I'm not that impressed with the Gospel surviving attempts to "explain it away", as much as I am of Gnosticism still existing after all the people being tortured and killed by the Church (plus the burning and destruction of texts).
I don't think it's "sad" that we "lost" (ie. the Church burned them) gnostic texts - I think it's an outright and inexcusable tragedy... Yet here we are ;-) so I guess the value of a Gnostic reading of spiritual texts is still very much relevant...
All in all, I think our major point of disagreement is the role given to the Church. Maybe I have the wrong historical references, but to me, it's not this tolerant institution, letting discussions happen in its midst with respect and openness. Absolutely not. To me, The Church with a capital "C" is the institution that offered grilled Giordano Bruno skewers, burned books and tortured Indians, to name a few. If, by some magic act of empathy, we've managed over the centuries to curb the Church thanks to social pressure and its dying influence in sociopolitical activities, better; but this was a dog fight, where we had to subdue the Church by force, and it went down kicking and screaming. It wasn't some sort of "compassion" that led the Church to admit Heliocentric theory: it was loss of power and relevance, together with the advance of rationality.
If we can discuss gnosticism in seminary today, in 2022, it's not because the Church made some great act of tolerance, it's because external pressures forced her to, she didn't have a choice. Of course individual people inside the institution are very different and I'm sure we can find priests in favor of gay marriage or women priests. But they have those views because *the society around them* has influenced them, not because the Church allows people to freely wonder out loud if abortion is ethical. Maybe I'm wrong, but this is a pretty popular way of regarding the Church's history, which I find to be supported by historical facts. I'd love the Church to be open and free, and I applaud any attempt to get there. But we have to be realistic about the institution, where it came from, its power structure and its original goals, which were far from letting people be individually emancipated and find God on their own.
Look, if anything I want to remember and to dig deeper all the horrible things the Catholic institutions did and do today. That’s opposed to the gnostics views and the ones those institutions claim to follow.
Moreover, until very recently most of those institutions would consider the gnostics views as dangerous non-sense.
No institution with power gives it away. The church institutions were forced to do it, of course.
Other questions like how that happened in each case, might be out of scope. It’s probably out of the scope how these views move in people, groups, culture and institutions, and how their dynamic is intertwine. That path would probably collapse the latent notion of a atomic institution with a clear goal. But that’s what not you are talking about.
Perhaps I’m just justifying my point of view by making things more complicated.
Hermeneutics is precisely the point. There are many sloppy translations, but then people go back to the text. As I said, contemporary biblist are very serious. Their work has make it into modern translations. In the last two decades, there has been more work on looking at the sociological aspect, as those text were written by communities for communities.
Second, I think the main issue is that your refer to the Catholic Church as a monolithic institution. It is not. Even in Rome, there are multiple forces at play.
In general, it’s a lax connection of institutions and people’s guts.
That model is necessary for explaining the history of the church. I’ve mentioned multiple times how certain movement and people change its course. Even at its peak, not today, there were always some degree of autonomy on institutions that has significant effects.
Moreover, people go home and do what they want. Faith was transmitted mostly at home or in the town.
That’s visible in many ideas they tried to put in people’a minds and failed, and others that had no recognition but people keep coming back to them.
In that sense the official recognition of the gnostics become less important. It’s the people. Emphasis on angle change over time. The gospel is within you? As I said: Ignatius, Teresa.
It is true we have a few things that keep us together. To be honest the most important is believing that we must remain united, so we should manage to tolerate the crazy assholes over there. Conservatives and progress manage to stay in communion. It’s not trivial. But we love that. We feel back in the last super.
Nowadays, the church is incredibly diverse. I know so many people with so many perspectives, lay people, priests, nuns, scholars. It’s a fucking mess. I love it and I suffer.
The centralized powers at all levels are important, I’m not being dumb. The fuckers covered the sexual abuses. But I know they are dust and will be back to dust. The gospel and the church will survive them. The church will remain the holy prostitute -as a Father of the Church said like 15 centuries ago–. It’s fucked up, but it’s holy because we believe God remains with us. Not to cover or justify our shit, but to become a better version of ourselves.
In summary, I think I emphasize the Gospel as something people can only live together. The words are secondary, it’s the people where the gospel resides. That’s the fire I received, and well, I do what I do. But I’m grateful all the ways to tears
Eso viene de viejo. Aún antes de la traducción al griego, la biblia fue escrita en arameo, la traducciones que hicieron al griego es la septianaquiensabe, en Egipto, la cual era de 70 tractores que ¡Milagro! Todos hicieron la misma traducción. Hasta las comas. Y se perdió el signicado del nuevo testamento. Por ejemplo la frase repetida " por 40 días y noches" quería decir se fue mucho tiempo, más de un mes(lunar) pero nadie sabe cuánto. Y por ahí te vas, el NT no fue echo, no para ricos oletrado, eran gente del pueblo hablando a gente común. Y ese espíritu se perdió, por excesiva intelectuacion. Las apostacia agotaron las opciones está una del siglo 3 que decía q quien murió en la cruz no era Jesús, las gnósticas q se parecen mucho a los Cataros, q los extinguieron. Sobre la religión de la religión católica se ha escrito mucho. Lamentablemente no es original nada de eso. Búscate las apostacias ( esa no es la palabra exacta, no la recuerdo) del siglo IV y V y la vas a conseguir, recuerdo haber leído algo similar. Suerte para la próxima 😎😎
Hola!
Me refería al nuevo testamento, que fue escrito en griego antiguo. La cita de Juan que coloco es la "original".
Gracias por la recomendación, le echaré un ojo ;-)
Vicente, you wouldn’t tolerate some aspects of your analysis applied to other body of text and their interpreters. Has classical philosophical been manipulated in their translations? Of course they have. Shared interpretation is nasty business.
I understand your sympathy with the gnostics. There is something there that more organized Christians like me sometimes disregard too quickly. At the same time, I think you are simplifying the internal struggles inside the churches.
For instance, both Ignatius, founder of the Jesuits, and Teresa de Jesus, likely the most influential mystic of the Catholic Church, were accused in their time of giving too much importance to their internal experiences. Nowadays, it’s hard to be more validated. However, they both found something in staying within the church. Luther, somehow contemporary to them, choose a different path.
The path of the Catholic and orthodox churches is that the gospel is clear when we stay together. Sometimes that feels like is just one big unmovable clusterfuck, but history proves otherwise. I have no reason to believe that such struggles have stopped.
Going back to your argument, the Greek of the New Testament is a subject of study in and out of the churches. Biblists are … weird people. Many of them are not really concerned about current interpretation, and keep coming back to it and other sources.
I meet a guy who did his PhD thesis on one word used in the gospel. (It’s the interjection in the version of the beatitudes used for being sorry about the rich because they are satisfied.)
So, I understand. In my opinion, you could make your argument without such a rampant generalization as if a generation of people have been lobotimized, and only a few realize the truth.
Or perhaps I’m complaining using the arguments that the fathers of the church used against the gnostics: you guys think you are so special and end up forgetting mercy (the widow and the orfan, one of them said). Perhaps my comment is just a repetition of an old struggle.
At least, I’m trying to acknowledge your point of view. Part of the treasures of being Catholic, paraphrasing Chesterton, is to be old as keeping close to my heart what people in other centuries and places have thought. Not because they are dead, it means their opinion should not be heard, paraphrasing again.
Good to have you here, I was going to send you the text if you didn't show up, since you're one of the guys I know who's really schooled in biblical subjects.
I'm not sure you could get away with bad translations in Philosophy, especially if your translation points diametrically in the other sense. For example, Derrida made a whole career (and quite a mess) by concentrating on the translation of Plato's "Pharmakon" in Dissemination. His whole "Phalogocentric" theory stems from the translation of "Pharmakon" as remedy, not poison. So I'm not really sure what you're refering too; of course we have hermeneutics and the school of interpretation put forward by Hans-George Gadamer, but the point of hermeneutics isn't sloppy translations done with a high degree of liberty, it's the constitution of the interpretative field and how or why we read texts as A and not B.
To answer you comment, though, I make a severe and tranchant distinction between the sacred text and the Church. I don't think people have been lobotomized, they can fairly easily read the Bible and figure it out by themselves, but the Church's raison d'être was, at a certain point (and I'm sure you'll concede this), to explain and interpret the Bible for you, as if you were too dumb to get the parable of the prodigal son or what have you. Therefore, when the Church was historically linked to centralized power structures (like the King) or was the power structure itself, it stands to reason the interpretation they'd give would be stacked in the Church's favor. Making a Church that goes around speaking about how useless churches are, wouldn't make sense.
I personally have the utmost respect for codes of ethics that have lasted thousands of years. If people keep finding meaning in them, there has to be some embedded, transcendental meaning. So I can understand people being catholic or finding meaning in a catholic life. You can even choose to subjugate yourself to the church. Does it make your life better? Great! Go for it.
However, reading sacred texts from a gnostic point of view isn't new and shouldn't be controversial, nowadays. Before, people were killed for saying a fraction of what I said in my post; whereas today we can have conversations. Of course none of this liberalism, tolerance and freedom came from the Church: it was snatched away from their hands martyr by martyr and inch by inch. I repeat: the Church as a power structure (not as a spiritual organization) is just as power-hungry and manipulative as any other one. I don't find this controversial. It's humans being humans. So it seems pretty obvious to me that a power structure of this kind would absolutely edit the Bible in a way that helps it ascertain said power, not diminish it.
I'll just end saying I hope I didn't make anybody mad? It wasn't the point.
Cheers
On the gnostics text, a sign of diversity is biblists new take on the so called apocryphal gospels. They are out of the canon, but biblist don’t care. There is consensus about many of them being very late text. One except is precisely Thomas’ gospel, that is more a list of sayings, close in format to a theoretical text called (Q) that influenced the three Synoptics gospels.
Some biblist even say they should be part of the canon. They are free to do so, especially because biblist move freely among Christian denominations, and some are non believers.
It’s totally ok to discuss Thomas gospel in a seminary. How did that happen?
Any understanding of the churches and the bible should account for these events.
For me it was very influential this book:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/739501.The_Churches_the_Apostles_Left_Behind
I read the Spanish “las iglesias que los apóstoles dejaron”.
It’s a book for non-scholars on the gospels and what their community could have been, written as a fiction.
Another instance of open discussion is that since I was a child, I have heard how John’s gospel could have gnostics influences. No one blink. These days some people say is actually not gnostic.
In any case, it’s hard to remain close to the gospel. We all want to digest it, simplify it, so it doesn’t bother us.
That might seems to contradict what I said about the gospel living in the people. It’s not contradiction. The written gospels are an stable reminder that serves as source of renovation.
It’s sad we didn’t keep many of the text written by gnostics. We are still learning from them. All so-called heresies have partially a point. We are defined by this narrow shared beliefs and every generation keeps huge buildings on top to them, especially the one in power. The gospel is smaller and had survived those attempts to be explain away.
I believe it will continue to do so.
I’m ok with people not fully understanding the church. There is a part that is not justified, and goes into the actual faith. My believe on Christ being the Son of God, his death and resurrection, is right there in the same creed that says we believe in a church. It doesn’t imply we believe whatever the current pope just said, because the pope is not the church. The ultimate reality of the church for us is not these stupid anecdotes, this drama with so many consequences. That helps to stay and do we what can.
I'm not that impressed with the Gospel surviving attempts to "explain it away", as much as I am of Gnosticism still existing after all the people being tortured and killed by the Church (plus the burning and destruction of texts).
I don't think it's "sad" that we "lost" (ie. the Church burned them) gnostic texts - I think it's an outright and inexcusable tragedy... Yet here we are ;-) so I guess the value of a Gnostic reading of spiritual texts is still very much relevant...
All in all, I think our major point of disagreement is the role given to the Church. Maybe I have the wrong historical references, but to me, it's not this tolerant institution, letting discussions happen in its midst with respect and openness. Absolutely not. To me, The Church with a capital "C" is the institution that offered grilled Giordano Bruno skewers, burned books and tortured Indians, to name a few. If, by some magic act of empathy, we've managed over the centuries to curb the Church thanks to social pressure and its dying influence in sociopolitical activities, better; but this was a dog fight, where we had to subdue the Church by force, and it went down kicking and screaming. It wasn't some sort of "compassion" that led the Church to admit Heliocentric theory: it was loss of power and relevance, together with the advance of rationality.
If we can discuss gnosticism in seminary today, in 2022, it's not because the Church made some great act of tolerance, it's because external pressures forced her to, she didn't have a choice. Of course individual people inside the institution are very different and I'm sure we can find priests in favor of gay marriage or women priests. But they have those views because *the society around them* has influenced them, not because the Church allows people to freely wonder out loud if abortion is ethical. Maybe I'm wrong, but this is a pretty popular way of regarding the Church's history, which I find to be supported by historical facts. I'd love the Church to be open and free, and I applaud any attempt to get there. But we have to be realistic about the institution, where it came from, its power structure and its original goals, which were far from letting people be individually emancipated and find God on their own.
Cheers!
Look, if anything I want to remember and to dig deeper all the horrible things the Catholic institutions did and do today. That’s opposed to the gnostics views and the ones those institutions claim to follow.
Moreover, until very recently most of those institutions would consider the gnostics views as dangerous non-sense.
No institution with power gives it away. The church institutions were forced to do it, of course.
Other questions like how that happened in each case, might be out of scope. It’s probably out of the scope how these views move in people, groups, culture and institutions, and how their dynamic is intertwine. That path would probably collapse the latent notion of a atomic institution with a clear goal. But that’s what not you are talking about.
Perhaps I’m just justifying my point of view by making things more complicated.
I’m not mad. Please. This is good.
Two things.
Hermeneutics is precisely the point. There are many sloppy translations, but then people go back to the text. As I said, contemporary biblist are very serious. Their work has make it into modern translations. In the last two decades, there has been more work on looking at the sociological aspect, as those text were written by communities for communities.
Second, I think the main issue is that your refer to the Catholic Church as a monolithic institution. It is not. Even in Rome, there are multiple forces at play.
In general, it’s a lax connection of institutions and people’s guts.
That model is necessary for explaining the history of the church. I’ve mentioned multiple times how certain movement and people change its course. Even at its peak, not today, there were always some degree of autonomy on institutions that has significant effects.
Moreover, people go home and do what they want. Faith was transmitted mostly at home or in the town.
That’s visible in many ideas they tried to put in people’a minds and failed, and others that had no recognition but people keep coming back to them.
In that sense the official recognition of the gnostics become less important. It’s the people. Emphasis on angle change over time. The gospel is within you? As I said: Ignatius, Teresa.
It is true we have a few things that keep us together. To be honest the most important is believing that we must remain united, so we should manage to tolerate the crazy assholes over there. Conservatives and progress manage to stay in communion. It’s not trivial. But we love that. We feel back in the last super.
Nowadays, the church is incredibly diverse. I know so many people with so many perspectives, lay people, priests, nuns, scholars. It’s a fucking mess. I love it and I suffer.
The centralized powers at all levels are important, I’m not being dumb. The fuckers covered the sexual abuses. But I know they are dust and will be back to dust. The gospel and the church will survive them. The church will remain the holy prostitute -as a Father of the Church said like 15 centuries ago–. It’s fucked up, but it’s holy because we believe God remains with us. Not to cover or justify our shit, but to become a better version of ourselves.
In summary, I think I emphasize the Gospel as something people can only live together. The words are secondary, it’s the people where the gospel resides. That’s the fire I received, and well, I do what I do. But I’m grateful all the ways to tears