Pneuma and Daimonion

Fascinating (although very technical) article by Michael R. Jost, comparing the Spirit (πνεῦμα) as Paraclete in the Gospel of John to Socrates’ idea of the daimonion (δαιμόνιον). The daimonion is a divine voice within us but also transcending us, as a personal spirit that accompanies humans. These issues relate to the issue of synthesis between biblical and Greek texts. To some extent, the synthesis is already in the New Testament.

Jost says, “The notion of personal spirits was not only widespread in the context of ancient Judaism but also among the Hellenists. The difference between the Daimonion of Socrates and the Pneuma-Paraclete of Jesus is not so much based on the function of the spirit. Nor is the difference based on the spirit’s intermediate position and mediation between heaven and earth. Nor is the difference based on a personal identity of the spirit, as it was often assumed in the history of research. On the contrary, these parallels make the notion of a spirit understood as a personal agent all the more plausible, above all because the Synoptic Gospels combine the terms πνεῦμα and δαιμόνιον.”

But there is also a difference. Jost says that in John, Jesus is not just a divinely inspired teacher, but God himself.

Jost says, 

“The goal of the Gospel of John is not spiritualization, that is, becoming a δαίμων by detaching oneself from the incarnation, as is the case in Platonism. Rather, the goal is the presence of God in the world, the dwelling of the incarnate Logos on earth. That is why the Spirit-Paraclete in John reminds the readers of Jesus of Nazareth, who lived and taught in space and time.”

https://www.zora.uzh.ch/server/api/core/bitstreams/2e5782b2-c7cc-440e-905a-f3acc660803e/content?trackerId=ee1b72b47a6c077c

My Audiobooks

Well, I have converted two of my books to audiobooks. Not an automatic process, unless you want a lot of mistakes. But I am impressed with the end result. You can listen to a sample here. The hardest part was choosing which of 55 voices to use. And here I found all kinds of stereotypical assumptions. Is a male voice more authoritative? Is a female voice more sympathetic? Is an American voice too casual? Should I use a female voice if I am a male author? The men’s voices were more appropriate for a southern Gothic thriller or a documentary about badgers. In the end, I chose a mid 30’s female British voice, who had the most modulation in tone, and the clearest enunciation, serious without sounding too posh. Easy to listen to. For my book on Ramana, I had to teach her Sanskrit. This is not easy. Amazon does not use the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) so I had to invent ways of approximating the sound. I couldn’t even put in a schwa (upside down e, for unstressed syllable). For “advaita” I had to say “ad-vight-ta.” Close enough. And no way to emphasize particular words unless I put in a pause or slowed down the word. Not the same.

This was a very interesting process, since it meant choosing an online alter ego. What do I call her? I think of her as “Johanna Glenna Windsor” (my third, unused name). And that reminds me of Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna,” but that’s another story.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FFY123TC/ref=sr_1_2…

What the Nicene Creed left out

What the Nicene Creed omitted —Jesus’s call for justice. It didn’t fit with the political power structures at that time. How would you re-write the Creed to more accurately summarize Jesus’s teachings and life?

Building towards the Creed (6): what Nicaea left out

Low German as Mother Tongue

Following up on my previous post “People who speak a language they learned after early childhood live in chronic abstraction.” I grew up speaking Low German (Plautdietsch). I have since assimilated to English, and have learned several other languages. Does this mean I have lived in “chronic abstraction?” Probably. One’s mother tongue is certainly grounding in reality. But Low German was (until very recently) a non-written language. In church, and for reading the Bible we used High German. Low German, being non-written, is also non-literary; it is an agricultural language, not really suited to academic discussions (although there have been some writers who have tried). But here are some interesting facts:

1. Low German is still spoken by several million people, in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Canada, and by the Mennonite diaspora in South America. But dialects differ. Wikipedia has some very interestingt audio clips giving examples of different dialects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German

2. I have some novels written in low German (e.g. by Arnold Dyck), and some Low-German to English dictionaries. I also have a translation of the New Testament: Daut Niehe Tastament.But the attempt to write in low German is relatively recent (last hundred years).

3. Here is a link to the Bible being read in low German. It sounds funny to me, as though the Bible is being mocked (for me, spirituality is linked with the Luther translation into High German). But I understand that for the Mennonite diaspora in South America, this is a very important tool. Listen to Genesis 1 (Mose 1). “Without form and void” is translated “stock-diestra” [completely dark]

https://www.bible.com/en-GB/audio-bible/563/GEN.1.PB

Living in Abstraction

alfabet/Alphabet by Sadiqa de Meier. This is a wonderful quirky little book about the author who “was born in Amsterdam to a Dutch-Kenyan-Pakistani-Afghani family and moved to Canada” and who learns English. She speaks of how emotiona are linked to one’s mother tongue, and the difficulties of translation of poetry into another language. As a child, she calmly told a Canadianj friend that her grandma had died. But when she told another friend “Mijn oma is verleden” she burst into unstoppable tears. She never had a grandma. She had an oma. She says,”People who speak a language they learned after early childhood live in chronic abstraction.”

There is a good review of the book here.

Avoiding Procreation for the Apocalypse

Because Jesus and the early church believed in an imminent apocalypse, they were opposed to having sex and producing children. I have written about this elsewhere; I recently discovered similar views by Amy-Jill Levine, Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, Vanderbilt. See “The Earth Moved: Jesus, Sex and Eschatology.” The early church did not believe that there would be a next generation. (Some young people today hold similar views for fear of a different kind of apocalypse). Jesus thought he was inaugurating a new age, when people would be like angels, when marriage and childbirth would no longer be needed. Angels neither married nor were given in marriage (Mt. 22:30; Lk 20:35). Jesus encouraged his followers to become like eunuchs (who cannot produce children) (Mt. 19:12). Jesus insisted on no divorce, since there was no reason for divorce. It appears that some separations of husbands and wives occurred in the early church, although Paul encourages them to stay together [in a loveless marriage?] (1 Cor. 7:10-12). Matt. 5:27-28 forbids not only adultery but lust. Mark 9 says it is better to cut off a “hand” that causes you to stumble (“hand” being a euphemism). Jesus created a new family, a “fictive kinship group,” where relationship is not by biology but one of mutual support.

We are to be like children (who do not procreate), but we are not to conceive children. As Crossan says, “A kingdom of children is a kingdom of the celibate.” Nowhere in the New Testament is there anything about the joy and blessing of having children. Celibacy and lack of children was a marker of group identity. Contrast this with Judaism (which Christians called “carnal Israel.” It encouraged its people, including the rabbis, to enjoy the blessings of children and family.

Jesus’s views are consistent with John the Baptist, the Essenes, and with Paul. Paul encouraged Christians not to marry, although he said it is better to marry than to burn with passion (2 Cor. 7). Some early disciples had “sister-wives,” who were more like sisters than wives (1 Cor. 9). In Revelation, the number saved would be 144,000 male virgins “who had not defiled themselves with women” (Rev. 14:4). The asceticism and celibacy issues in the Catholic church have a long history!

All of this shows that Dan Brown’s fantasy of Jesus having a romantic relationship with Mary Magdalene cannot be right. Jesus did not believe he had time! Furthermore, I believe that Mary Magdalene was the adopted mother of Jesus, pursuant to a Jewish tradition of ritual adoption for those who were being consecrated as Jewish Kings (See Robert Graves: The Nazarene Gospel Restored). Jesus was crucified for claiming to be King of the Jews. There are early sources depicting Mary Magdalene as the mother of Jesus. Her name comes from “the Braider,” [Miriam M’gadd’la], from her work as one of the virgin weavers of the temple veil. Medieval paintings show the mother of Jesus as a weaver. This adopted relationship also explains the virgin birth as being born again, and it explains how James, who was educated, and who performed priestly work, is related to Jesus, who was not of priestly lineage. And it explains why Jesus had problems with his birth family, who thought that he was crazy (Mk 3:21). He is not very respectful to his own birth mother or family but speaks of his true brother and sister and mother (Mt. 12:48-50).

Amy-Jill Levine: “The Earth Moved: Jesus, Sex and Eschatology,” in Apocalypticism, Anti-Semitism and the Historical Jesus

Daniel Boyarin: Carnal Israel

My own article on the Mennonite theologian, “John Howard Yoder: Seeking a Christian Tantra.”

How not to use Reformational Philosophy

“Long Films About Love: Kuyper and Kieslowski’s Three Colours Trilogy” by the film critic Alissa M. Wilkinson (pages 99-114 in the book “Neo-Calvinism and the French Revolution.” Kieslowski is one of my favourite directors. Wilkinson has some very good insights into these three films, of how Kieslowski is showing competing views of the ideals of the French Revolution, “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” Liberty is not autonomous freedom from responsibility; equality is not about who has power; fraternity is not to be seen in terms of exclusion of people by the law. These are all insufficient apart from some overriding self-sacrificing love and charity.

But I find her comparisons to Abraham Kuyper’s theology very forced and unhelpful. Kuyper and neo-Calvinism of course opposed the French Revolution, but they did so from a dogmatic theological perspective that opposed modernism. In contrast, Kieslowski raises more questions than answers in his movies—everything in his movies is geared towards mystery (p. 100, quoting the critic Haltoff). Wilkinson puts forward Kuyper’s idea of “liberty of conscience;” she refers to Kuyper’s opposition to “state-mandated equality” that fails to honour humanity as created in the image of God, and to Kuyper’s idea of fraternity as an “equality of brotherhood” –an equality not of rich and poor, but equality in joining together at the Lord’s Supper regardless of social standing. She says that this ”does not mean those men cease to be rich or poor” ands quotes Kuyper, “Just as rich and poor sit down with each other at the communion table, so also you feel for the poor man as for a member of the body…” She quotes Kuyper as saying that justice is inadequate, and that the French Revolution “stripped away the ‘natural order’ of things.

I do not find these ideas in Kieslowski! I am especially disturbed by Wilkinson’s quotation from Kuyper’s “Problem of Poverty,” where he advocates a minimalist view of the state. He says, “Never forget that all state relief for the poor is a blight on the honor of your Savior.” This is a reactionary right-wing politics that denies justice, equality and fraternity. Kuyper’s view is contrary to Jesus’s idea of the Kingdom of God–it is a political, and not merely a spiritual kingdom. And Mary’s Magnificat shows that justice means putting down the mighty, filling the hungry with good things and “the rich he hath sent empty away.”