The pathetic effort to make Pilate the archon of THIS aeon

[Giuseppe]

Markus Vinzent gives another suggestive translation of an episode of Mcn here.

Assuming the translation is correct (and probably it is, because Tertullian gives an information key about the text of Mcn), I see a suggestive clue:

Mcn 20:34-39 Translation (derived from Luke 20:34-40 Translation)

20:34 So Jesus said to
them, “The people of
this age being born
and giving birth,

20:35 But those who
the God of that age [ὁ θεὸς τοῦ αἰῶνος ἐκείνου] regards
worthy of being heirs
and of the resurrection
from among the dead
neither marry nor
are married,

20:36 because neither do
they die anymore
for they will be like angels
of this God and made sons
of the resurrection.”


20:39 In response some of the scribes
said, “Teacher,
you spoke well.”

The good God of Marcion is called ''the God of that Aeon'', where 'that' means 'future' in context. Then that God is defined as true God only by direct contrast against the God of this Aeon.

It cannot be a coincidence, the opposition between ''that Aeon''/''this Aeon'', adding therefore further evidence that the 'archons of this Aeon' of 1 Cor 2:6-8 are really spiritual forces and not mere human leaders.

Reading 'archons of this age' as allusion to Pilate raises the problem: if Pilate is archon of THIS age, then who will be the human archon of the future age ?

I think that the proto-catholics had to make the figure of Pilate a so important figure (against the fact that he was not so important) to pose him as THE archon of this age. Therefore we see again and again ''he died under Pontius Pilate''.

The proto-Catholics replaced the original opposition :

The archons of this Aeon versus the God of the Jews

with the opposition:

Pilate versus Jesus.

While the marcionites replaced that same opposition with:

The God of the Jews versus the God of that Aeon.

[Secret Alias]

As I have noted many times the idea of a division between the god of one age and another is nothing more than the reinterpretation of the situation on Sinai where one god appeared and was seen with the eyes 'out there' in physical reality by the Israelites and another god was heard (invisible) speaking from the heavens. The orthodox (R. Akiba) are credited with 'solving' this challenge to monotheism by saying that time and space effectively 'bent' and the heaven out of which the voice was heard was one and the same with the physical space occupied by the god on the mountain. But this is obviously an unsatisfactory, desperate interpretation.

Whenever people like yourself who want to demonize 'tradition' attempt to heighten the tension between these two gods you do so owing to some pathological hatred of religion or authority. The reality is that the being whom the Israelites saw (and whom their descendants venerated at their altar) was a subordinate being to the power heard in heaven. The question which emerges then is how to interpret Christianity's narrative that the same being seen on Sinai 'reappearing' before the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. It would seem you are not a fair arbiter in determining what the likely meaning here given your predisposition to heightening tensions between the powers and against any sort of religious authority.

So what do we know? The god of this world (= Jesus) ends up appearing crucified under Pilate. How do we know this? The heretics were heavily influenced by Platonism and notions of 'the highest god' being incompatible with matter (and emotions and all else that was believed to be resultant or associated with matter). To this end, given that the Israelites believed that (a) the power of this world had already appeared at Sinai, and (b) Jesus was that power it stands to reason that the crucifixion of the power of this world (implied also in various statements of Paul) leads to a new age where the other god who was heard at Sinai speaking from heaven is now venerated by the community of Israel.

This I believe is a much more reasonable assessment of what is likely the seminal idea behind Christianity than any radical hypothesis you could come up with.

[Giuseppe]

I think that against your speculative hypothesis about your presumed tradition of Two Powers in Heaven I have a better solution to explain the presence of real mysticism behind someone claiming to hate the God of the Jews (and not the Jews themselves, obviously, as you would accuse wrongly):

So in my view Robert Price seems to write the following words (especially the words by me put in bold) against you in mind:

Ioan P. Couliano, in his book The Tree of Gnosis, argued how it is much less problematical to suggest that, since the human brain is much the same from generation to generation, from century to century, whenever it is faced with similar challenges and similar data, the brain of whatever century will produce the same range of solutions. Thus Gnosticism as a 'theodicy‘ — finding a way to exculpate the deity for the existence of evil — can be expected to resurface, independently, again and again through the ages.
We don‘t need to picture some cleric discovering some dusty old parchments and reading some blasphemous gospel, which then acts as a match to spark a rediscovery of Gnosticism. No, we can just count on the inventive mind to put the pieces together again and again. If the world is infested with evil, and if God is good, how can he have created this world? Faced with this difficulty, some minds will always come to posit: ―Perhaps it wasn‘t God who made the world! Maybe some disobedient subordinates did it! Voilà — a Gnostic theodicy is reborn.

(Jesus is Dead, p. 100)

Why do you have need of having a conspirationist view about the Old Testament (disturbing Moses and Sanai, etc) when you have before you a more plausible reason behind the resurfacing of Gnosticism as 'theodicy' again and again?

And why some Gnostic Christian called the God of the Jews as the ''God of WAR'', when the Jesus of the Gospel is so pacificist in nature? And you are the same guy that says that the ancient Gnostic heretics were more Jews than proto-Catholics...

[Secret Alias]

It is hardly a speculative assumption on my part. It is the plain meaning of the original text of Exodus and what is now (because of changes made to the Jewish text of Exodus) the combined reading of Exodus and Deuteronomy. The fact that you are an ignoramus and have pathological motives for tearing down tradition in the hopes of setting up your own misunderstandings as a new rule is hardly worth considering as an alternative. The facts are:

1. the surviving Samaritan text of Exodus, the Jewish text of Exodus at Qumran (so earlier than the MT) and the text of Exodus from the circle of R Ishmael as represented in the mekhilta all make EXPLICIT this assumption viz. a god ishu (his i.e. God's fire/his Man) on Sinai and on the other hand a divine voice from heaven. Note that the MT (unlike the mekhilta and the SP) change the wording for how the Israelites apprehended the information of the god of heaven viz. 'seeing' rather than 'hearing' the thunder. Hardly an accident.
2. the resulting controversy from the so-called 'two powers tradition' which emerges principally in the mekhilata (not surprising because these are the earliest exegesis of Exodus in Judaism dating to the late first and early second century) reinforces that a controversy existed over the proper interpretation of Exodus in light of the EXPLICIT understanding of one god seen on Sinai and another heard from heaven.
3. the fact that a number of prominent authorities (Ishmael, Akiba) are referenced as 'dealing' with this overt challenge to monotheism in a text which repeatedly cites from these same sources makes it highly unlikely that the information being presented is somehow 'unreliable.' The mekhilta is one of our oldest and most reliable sources of information about Judaism and its beliefs, controversies specifically related to the Book of Exodus.

There is no debate here once people know the facts. No let me correct that. There is no debate here once people know the facts are not guided by pathological obsessions like you, Giuseppe. There were two powers in Judaism (Philo is another source) and the early heretical understanding of Jesus and his Father as two powers is an outgrowth of this normative Israelite (i.e. Judaism and Samaritanism) tradition.

[Giuseppe]

Prove me that you have the necessary ''missing ring'' of the your theory:

not the fact that exists the Two Powers tradition etc...

...but real, concrete, earliest evidence (in Paul or in the Gospels) that

a god ishu on Sinai

became what we know as Jesus/Joshua.

Until that day, my answer will be the same answer given to the proto-catholic Paul by Athenians:

''We will listen you another time.''

[Bernard Muller]

to Giuseppe,

The good God of Marcion is called ''the God of that Aeon'', where 'that' means 'future' in context. Then that God is defined as true God only by direct contrast against the God of this Aeon.
It cannot be a coincidence, the opposition between ''that Aeon''/''this Aeon'', adding therefore further evidence that the 'archons of this Aeon' of 1 Cor 2:6-8 are really spiritual forces and not mere human leaders.

"that" and "this" are translations of the same Greek word 'τούτου', as also in 2 Corinthians 4:4 "god of this Aeon". So "that" and "this" are interchangeable and mean exactly the same thing, because they are the translation of the same Greek word.

And how do you know "'archons of this Aeon' of 1 Cor 2:6-8 are really spiritual forces and not mere human leaders"?
http://historical-jesus.info/68.html

Cordially, Bernard

[Giuseppe]

Bernard, specifically you write:

But it is possible Paul would have thought of Satan as one of the rulers, one who could use humans from afar to kill people as in the book of Job and Paul in 1 Corinthians 5:5 "to deliver such a one [a bad Christian] to Satan for the destruction of the flesh...".

This is denied by Dale Allison when he says:

Because it is hard to fathom evil spirits, on their own, crucifying Jesus, some have identified “the rulers of this age” with both the governing authorities and the invisible demonic powers that stand behind them and carry out their will through them. Against this, “the angels, when they are concerned with the world of men, may relate to the fate of nations as a whole, but never to the individual king, ruler or government.”

http://vridar.org/2011/10/05/rulers-of- ... an-rulers/

Pilate is not a nation. Pilate is not the Roman Empire. Therefore the less probable interpretation of 1 Cor 2:6-8 is to assume Satan (the Archons) manipulating the human Pilate.

[Secret Alias]

a god ishu on Sinai


became what we know as Jesus/Joshua.

Whether or not ur-Exodus's/Deuteronomy 4:36's ishu is the source of Christianity's Jesus is immaterial to the question referenced in my post = whether the ur-text of Exodus found among Samaritans and Jews before the MT (and henceforth a combined reading of MT Exodus and MT Deuteronomy) makes explicit the reported tradition of the 'two powers' tradition in the mekhilta.

Exodus original made explicit that Jews knew of two powers. It would seem that early Christianity made the case that they venerated only one of those powers in their daily services (from what time this veneration of 'the god' or 'power' of the world who was inferior to the true god emerged is of course debatable. But that this is the most likely source of early Christianity's two powers (including the god of this/that age statement) is without question IMHO. It also makes all this nonsensical talk about Christianity being found in the second century highly unlikely.

[Giuseppe]

How to justify the Romans as not wanting to crucify Jesus if they "knew"?
- Because the leaders among Romans would not take the risk to kill a favorite of a god ("the Lord of glory") fearing that god could exercise terrible revenge on them.

But then Paul would say that these ''Roman'' archons are held deliberately by God in an obscure state of not-knowledge, so that they can kill Jesus without knowing his identity.

This is like to say that if a Judas didn't exist, he had to be invented, because otherwise Jesus couldn't be killed.

Your hypothesis seems to assume that these ''Roman'' archons are basically innocent in killing Jesus. The idea of their presumed innocence is not Pauline, ma comes from Gospel (Pilate is a good guy, there).

[Bernard Muller]

to Giuseppe,

Against this, “the angels, when they are concerned with the world of men, may relate to the fate of nations as a whole, but never to the individual king, ruler or government.”

I mentioned Satan only, not demons. Furthermore the alleged participation of Satan in the arrest of Jesus leading to his crucifixion is mentioned in Lk 22:3 & Jn 13:27.

Pilate is not a nation. Pilate is not the Roman Empire. Therefore the less probable interpretation of 1 Cor 2:6-8 is to assume Satan (the Archons) manipulating the human Pilate.

Where did I say Pilate is a nation and the Roman Empire?
Where did I say Satan is the archons (plural)?
Where did I say Satan manipulated the human Pilate?

Cordially, Bernard