Comparing Epictetus with Paul

 "Are you in fact wanting what's possible and in particular what's possible for you? If so, why are you obstructed? Why are you discontented? Are you in fact avoiding what's unavoidable? If so, why do you encounter difficulties of any kind? Why do you meet with misfortune? Why do things that you want to happen not happen, while things you don't want to happen do happen? That's unmistakable evidence of a discontented and unhappy existence. 'I want something and it doesn't happen; am I not the most wretched creature in the world? I don't want something and it does happen: am I not the most wretched creature in the world?' ... 'in short, align what you want with what God wants. Who will impede you then? Who will constrain you? No one, any more than they could impede or constrain Zeus. When you have Zeus as your commander and align your wishes and desires with his, can you still be afraid of failing to get what you want? Give your desire and aversion over to poverty and wealth, and you'll fail to get what you desire and meet with what you want to avoid. Give them over to health, and you'll be miserable. Give them over to political power, honors, country, friends, children--in short, to anything that isn't subject to will--and the same goes. But give them over to Zeus and the gods--hand them over to them, put them in their charge, enroll them in their command--and how could you still be discontented?"
Epictetus, Discourses, Book 2, 17:17-18, 22c-25; Robin Waterfield, trans.

"Because I don't know what I'm achieving; because I'm not practicing what I want, but I'm doing this thing I hate. And if I don't want this thing I'm doing, I'm in agreement with the rule that it's good. But now I am no longer achieving it but the error residing within me. Because I know that within me doesn't reside, that is, within my flesh, good; because the willing is there in me, but the achieving the good is not; because I'm not doing the good I want, but I'm practicing this bad thing I don't want. And if I'm doing this thing I don't want, I'm no longer achieving it but the malfunction residing within me. I'm then finding the rule, for me who is willing to do the good, that the bad is there in me; because I am rejoicing together with the rule of the God in line with the internal person, yet I'm looking at a different rule among my body parts soldiering against the rule of my intellect and capturing me with the rule of the malfunction which exists within my body parts. I am a miserable human being; who will rescue me from this body of death? But charity to the God through Yeshua the Anointed our Lord. Therefore then I myself am in fact enslaved by the intellect to the divine rule, yet by the flesh to the rule of the malfunction. Nothing therefore is now a condemnation against those within the Anointed Yeshua not walking in line with the flesh, but in line with the Pneuma."
Romans 7:15-8:1

I Am Not My Disability or Difference

 A little while ago, I unintentionally got into a discussion on Facebook which went downhill almost immediately and in a way I hadn't expected.  I'm no stranger to arguments or difficult conversations, but this one really took me by surprise. It was my first introduction to what appears to be a subculture of neurodivergent folks, such as myself, who so identify with their neurodivergence that to suggest any kind of a treatment which might assist in normalizing the brain is considered horrendous and akin to being a Nazi (I myself was accused of advocating for the extermination of autistic people, something which anyone who knows me and my history knows is absurd).

     This came up in a conversation I was having with Phoenix earlier tonight, and what stuck in my mind is how one's difference or disability becomes such a part of their self-identity that they can't even consider parting with it. And this becomes true regardless of what thing you are self-identifying with.

     Here's the thing though, you are not your disability. You are not your thoughts. You are not your trauma. I tend to self-identify with being pretty proficient with Koine Greek, but I am not my proficiency with Greek. I tend to self-identify with being part native American as well as being thirteenth generation American, but I am not my ancestry. I am not even my own personal history or experiences. As much as I love and appreciate my relationships with the people around me, I am not those relationships. I am not my possessions either. I am not my personal likes or dislikes. I am not what I know or don't know. All of these things are acquired during this life in some way and at some time, but they will all leave once this life ends and all that will remain is this consciousness. The memories of each thing might continue, baked into the experiences of that consciousness, but they are not that consciousness.

     So what am I if I am none of these things? What are you if you are none of the things you self-identify with? At the very foundation, you are logos and a part of the Logos. You are being, and share in the existence of the Being. You are a member, a body part, of the Logos with Him as the head to which you are connected as a single body. Everything else you cling to, everything else I cling to as my self-identity will drop away once this brain stops functioning because, when all is said and done, I am none of those things.

     And to this I would add as well that you are not your error. You are not your malfunction. You are not your hamartia because you are not your body. You are not your brain. You inhabit a body. You have a hamartia disorder in this life because you inhabit a human body and possess a human brain. But you yourself are not inherently erroneous. You yourself are logos and part of the Logos. You yourself are the image of God.

      The conditions of discipleship which Jesus laid down were to let go of any relationships, any possessions, any self-identity to which you are clinging so that you could focus on remaining aware of and attached to the Head, which of course was Him as the Logos and the source of who you really are, that is, the image of God. As Jesus Himself said, speaking as the Logos, "Remain in Me and I in you ... without Me you can't do anything at all."

The Authenticity of Paul

 Recently, I've seen several folks online arguing that Paul didn't even exist and that his letters were a fourth century fraud. For some reason, this absurdity keeps making the rounds and there are far too many people who buy into it. The latest person I encountered suggested that they could have been written as late as the seventh century because Koine Greek extended between the second century BCE to the seventh century BCE. The constant error behind this is that those who make this claim don't understand the language in which they were written, or how language changes over time. Five hundred years give or take is generally when two stages of a language become mutually unintelligible, though it becomes a lot tougher around four hundred. I thought I'd post my response to this here:
     "Seventh century CE is pushing it. A lot. Seventh century Greek would be unintelligible to a first century speaker and would at the least be very, very different. The Greek of the New Testament is definitely what was spoken between the first and second centuries. You can tell this by comparing it with other first century and early second century writings in the Koine such as Epictetus and the Early Church Patristics like the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, and others. You have to take language change into account, even within the same language. To say that the New Testament could have been written in the fourth century, much less the seventh, doesn't take into account the change in the language over time, as well as regional accents and dialects. It's like saying Chaucer could have been written in the 1900s because English has technically been spoken since the 900s or even earlier. I would draw your attention to the Book of Mormon as an illustration of an obvious linguistic forgery. It attempts greatly to mimic the language of the King James Version, but any honest comparison of the two would conclude that the author of the former doesn't actually know how to wield the Elizabethan form of the language and it comes off as completely erroneous. The only way anyone can conclude that the New Testament was not written in the first century is if they had never actually read it in the original Greek and had never compared any other Greek texts from various periods and regions either. I have. I assure you, they are very different. I've been doing it for thirty years. The writings of Paul are first century and all written or dictated by the same person."
     To add to this, I would put forth as an example the original Greek form of the Philokalia. This is the second most important book of the Eastern Orthodox Church and is a series of mystical and theological essays and spiritual reflections written in Greek over a period between the fifth century CE and the fifteenth century CE by multiple religious and monastics across the Orthodox spectrum. The Greek in which it was written is diverse from beginning to end as it moves from late Koine into Byzantine and the proto form of what is now Modern Greek.
     My point to all of this is that you can tell what period a text was written in simply by comparing the form of the language to other texts in the same way they you can tell what period an English text was written in whether it was Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Elizabethan, eighteenth century, or present day twenty-first century English. You can also tell from what region the speaker or writer came from by the idioms, spellings, and choices of vocabulary. It's not hard to distinguish J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. It's also not hard to distinguish Jane Eyre from the original text of Beowulf. Even C.S. Lewis's writing style can be distinguished from J.R.R. Tolkien's, and they were contemporaries, friends, and colleagues in roughly the same socio-linguistic landscape!
     Paul's writing is distinct from all the other New Testament authors, but it is clearly written by a single author who lived in the first century, was clearly educated in the Greek classics and Roman Stoic worldview as well as of a distinctly first century Jewish education and identity. Everything from the internal evidence of his letters pinpoints the mid-first century and largely the eastern Mediterranean. Could they have been faked at a much later date? Honestly, I can't see how. These letters were known by the Patristic Fathers and mentioned by them as far back as the late first century, as was Paul. No one in the first three centuries of Christianity ever actually questioned their authenticity. There were a number of writings which were questioned, even within the canon N.T., but Paul's never actually were, and they were among the earliest to be translated to Aramaic in the second century if memory serves at all.
     Finally, Paul's letters are personal from beginning to end, and they're personal in a way that strikes of authenticity. One would have to be a very talented novelist to be able to express this much authentic emotion through the words of the original first century Greek. They would have had to not only fake Paul's letters, but most of the book of Acts in which Paul's story was told, and as such, the Gospel of Luke as well which is written in the exact same style, dialect, and accent as Acts. They would also have had to really had down Paul's movements and the first century historical figures mentioned in them to such an extent as to be able to authentically write and keep track of where he was writing from and the events surrounding the period in which he was writing. This would have been a massive scholarly undertaking considering it would have had to be written in at least two different styles and dialects of the language which no longer existed by the fourth century, much less the fifth. Honestly, it takes less faith to believe these writings are exactly what they purport to be as the preponderance of internal evidence is just rabidly against their being a fraud.
     Whether one agrees with St. Paul or not, whether they understand what he was really writing and saying, there is really just no other conclusion that can be drawn except they they were written when they say they were, by whom they say they were, and to whom they say they were. Any suggestion otherwise just betrays an utter ignorance of the language, the time period, and every other factor involved all for the sake of ignoring what the reader perceives to be what Paul meant.

Because It's Israel

 It has now been reported that Netanyahu's government has approved a plan to not only permanently occupy Gaza, but forcibly relocate its residents south. Over 50,000 Palestinians, men, women, and children have been killed since the October 7th massacre, and 118,000 have been injured. Hospitals have been raided and bombed. Schools have been destroyed. All aid supplies into Gaza have been cut off by the Israeli defense force. People are literally starving to death, and Gaza now resembles a landscape worse than something out of the Fallout games.
     The most chilling fact? Far too many professing "Christians" are cheering it on. Why? Because the government of Israel is the perpetrator. What are considered multiple atrocities if committed by any other nation are seen as Biblically mandated by these people because it is Israel and it is the Palestinians. It is because of things that occurred 3500 years ago with a very different nation of Israel and a very different, pagan, child-sacrificing Canaanite population. It has nothing to do with the virtues or lack thereof of the Palestinian people. Yes, Hamas committed atrocities, and is a terrorist group, but not every Palestinian in Gaza was Hamas. Most weren't. Most were just people trying to live their lives, work, go to school, raise their families, even try to make the world better in their own way.
     When is it considered an atrocity? When is it considered wrong? Regardless of Israel's ancestral claims on this strip of land along the Mediterranean coastline, regardless of what happened on October 7th, when does the intentional slaughter and forced relocation of civilians, a great many of whom are children, become an atrocity even if Israel is the nation doing it? How high do the numbers have to go? Or do they get a carte blanche no matter what they do to them because they're Israel?
     The Palestinians are not the Canaanites. The Canaanites were all gone by the time Judah went into captivity. They didn't exist by the first century. The Palestinians are descendants of various groups that have lived in and around the Levant for thousands of years. They represent not only Muslims, but also a good many Christians from some of the oldest Churches in the world. There was no command in the Torah to wipe out the Palestinians, the majority of whom are also descendants of Abraham, one way or the other. God commanded Israel to spare his brother Esau's nation, Edom, and the descendants of Ishmael were always considered distant family to them as well. By committing these atrocities against the Palestinians, Israel is committing these atrocities against their own relations in the family of Abraham, and disobeying the Torah of God egregiously.
     Does anyone seriously think God will be pleased with them over this?

A Ramble About Death and Passing On

 A brother I knew from Cursillo just passed away today. He was an older man, a Vietnam veteran, but still, it was sudden and unexpected. Looking back, I feel like I've seen almost too many people I've known pass away. Death really hasn't been a stranger. One day they're there and talking to you, and the next they're not, and it makes me remember how short this life can be every time. All of my grandparents, my dad, my nephew, my sister, classmates from college, a professor who died while I was in attendance, people I served as a minister, people who had become close. I feel like I've seen far too many open caskets, and heard about far too many more.
     I've made no secret about my found belief in the passing of one's consciousness from one's life to the next, or my belief in a final resurrection. I see no contradiction between the two. There are parts in the Gospels where Jesus and His disciples assume this possibility, and the idea of a kind of reincarnation in the western world dates back to Pythagoras, though is really expounded on by Plato. The possibility was just as much a part of the Hellenistic understanding of death as was Hades, Elysium, and Tartarus. From the studies done of kids who remember their past lives up to about five or six years old, to the many, many testimonies of NDEers, and of course the testimony of the Holy Scriptures, it's clear to me that one's soul, or consciousness, is not tied to the body and does not cease to exist when the body shuts down and dies. This is what the evidence which I've studied and read has led me to.
     What is often quoted here in rebuttal to the view I've come to hold is the verse in Hebrews which says, "For it is appointed for a human being to die once, and after this the judgment." After all of my study and ruminations on the subject, I've come to understand that there is more than one way to understand this verse. The question which must be asked is, "What comprises a human being, or 'anthropos' in the original Greek?" Is it the consciousness of the person alone? Or is it the consciousness and the body?" Is each separate human life which the consciousness inhabits an individual human being with their own experiences, thoughts, memories, and so on? If so, than this concept that an individual human being can only die once can and does coexist with the consciousness living multiple lifetimes inhabiting different bodies and assuming different personas.
     I've described it before as a person creating an avatar in a massively multiplayer online role playing game. They play that character up until the character dies, and then a new one is created. Each time, there's an amnesia which takes place so that the new person is unaware and unconscious (most of the time; with the exception of those aforementioned kids) of any of the previous "player characters" before them. One character might be a rogue and a scoundrel, another might be a saint or a paladin. One might be a man, another might be a woman as the consciousness, the "player" itself, knows no physical gender. There will always be some hints, some unconscious tells, some choices which the player simply will or will not make regardless of which character they're playing, but otherwise, each character is a separate individual.
     This understanding brings both comfort and a sense of tragedy to me. On the one hand, no one is ever truly lost, as the consciousness itself is immortal and eternal in nature. On the other, each combination of consciousness and body into a unique human being is in itself special and worth knowing with their own stories, their own memories, and their own triumphs and tragedies. These individual characters live on only in our memories while the consciousness behind them moves on to a new avatar and a new experience.
     All those people, all those characters whom I have known for whom the game has ended, were worth knowing. Their stories meant something, and each one was intriguing. Some were tragic, others were triumphant, and still more were both. Even as the consciousness of my friend from Cursillo has moved on from the character it was playing, I wish I had known more of the story of that character and the life he led.
     At some point, I will move on as well from this body and this character's story, and that's okay. When that happens, I hope my story inspired and entertained and gave people pause to think and reflect. That is, as I understand it, the point.