B. U. G. S.

I hope that Peter understands that I agree with every word he says.

But I made the mistake of stating my doubts on the Traditional Christianity thread, and I got blasted for it with no answers.

Here are a couple of Peter’s comments, followed by my reply:

“Peter, when I say that, I am accused of both heresy and blasphemy.”

I don’t have any position to lose.

But actually your formula is wrong that God the Father = Jehovah.

The Septuagint (LXX) does not use the word Jehovah. LXX is the version of the Old Testament that is quoted in the New Testament. The manuscripts currently used in the West are about 1000 years newer (they’re Medieval). So any equation of God the Father is tentative and a modern innovation — at best .

All Christians do make a difference between Old Testament religion and the Christianity. Read Leviticus and find all the laws and commandments that Christians do not follow!

Groups that try to revive Old Testament religion and combine it with Christianity are rightly called “cults,” and they are typically controlling and psychologically harmful. Think about the Jehovah’s Witnesses. (You won’t find any of them in a pro-White site either, so don’t worry about offending them.)

Think about St. Paul’s virulent attacks against the “Judaizers.”

Even Biblical literalists are not literal with the Old Testament. For example, in the numerous passages stating that the enemies of the Israelites must be killed to a man, they say that the enemy must have committed some grave sin. But that is not what the passage says. That is a rationalization. And this rationalization becomes difficult when the Israelites are ordered to slay even the women and children, and sometimes the animals.

The same standard of literalism that can be applied to the New Testament is not applied to the Old. (Besides, even the Old Testament itself says that the Old Testament was lost or destroyed four times, which is why Ezra had to revive it — so, no one has the original Old Testament Urtext anywhere.)

The upshot is that the nature of deity in the Old Testament is not the same as the loving God in the New.

No one denies this.

Further, strictly speaking, God the Father in the New Testament is equivalent to El. El is cognate to Arabic ‘allah, meaning “god.”

Jesus equated God the Father with El on the Cross: Elohe, Elohe, lama sabachthani. Indeed this means “My God, my God…” In Christian theology, Jesus was speaking to God the Father.

Why did he not say “Jehovah” instead of El?

The answer is this. In the mythology of the Levant, Jehovah was a lesser being than the father god El and is an adopted son. Moreover, in the Old Testament, in the oldest Greek and Qumran Hebrew texts of a passage in Deuteronomy, Jehovah is again of lower status than El. This conclusion has become the consensus among Biblical scholars. There are many articles online on this.

By the way, this does not suggest any Christian polytheism (although it does suggest an ancient polytheism in the OT where there are still more names of other gods). To Christians, Christ was begotten of the Father before all worlds and is himself God.

The most that I have ever heard said is that “Jehovah” is an old Hebrew name for God. But there is more scholarship conflicting with that than what I refer to here.

To assume that all Christians equate God the Father, the first person of the Holy and undivided Trinity, to Jehovah is not right.

Comment by Peter

By the way, it may be time to reconsider the details of why Marcion was a heretic and blasphemer.

Marcion said a whole lot more than just that Jehovah was evil. Among this lot, he gutted the New Testament to just the Gospel of Luke, which he justified as being the one author that had never converted to Judaism before converting to Christianity. He also said that Jehovah was a Demiurge that created the world, in other words the world is inherently evil, not corrupted as in Christianity, and that God the Father is not the Creator.

Writers such as Elaine Pagels also note that early Christians likewise condemned Jehovah.

Roman Catholic heresiology is normally very reliable. But the acceptance of “Jehovah” as an old Hebrew name for God for Christian use came about only after Jerome replaced the ancient Septuagint Old Testament with the Medieval Masoretic texts that use the name prolifically. The eastern Church retained the Septuagint.

“Jehovah” does not appear in the texts that Jesus and the Apostles used. Origen included alternative Jewish texts that used “Jehovah” in his Hexapla in order to convert Jews by proving them wrong. Those texts using the word were examples of what Christians were not to hold as true.

Comment by Peter

MY REPLY:

Peter, I cannot imagine that you believe that Jehovah = The Father is MY position.

I have bored readers half to death here insisting that that is NOT my position.

Your description of Marcion is accurate. In fact, he even declared some of hte text of LUKE to be invalid, too.

It is correct that Marcion took the position that all life was evil. He wanted people not to reproduce at all.

But it never occurs to anybody to ask WHERE that concept came from. Like St. Paul Marcion could not have gotten that idea from the Old Testament or from Luke.

But nobody ever wants to discuss WHERE he and St. Paul got that “this world is entirely evil” Manicaean concept.

That concept was all around the Roman world when Paula nd Macion were alive. It was the position of degenerate Zoroastrianism.

How many professional theologians know ANYTHING about Zoroastrianism?

How can you be a professional theologian and NOT know about it?

I am stunned when people tell me this is somehow off our subject. The Christian-Zoroastrian hatred for life itself is exactly the problem we face today. It is basic to two thousand years of Western history.

And this leads us directly into the same problem we face today: How can a race that has evolved to the point that it questions the value of life itself survive when Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrian all devolved into methods of ending life itself?

The suicide complex we face today can be viewed as something new and alien. That approach negates the lessons of thousands of years of lessons from history.

Learn from history or repeat it.