It sure has been a while.
Last time, we left off with the Septuagint and the limits of Marcion’s arguments against Yahweh. As promised, today we are going to go beyond Marcion’s original historical arguments and to take a look at alternative non-Septuagint translations of the Hebrew Bible to see what they reveal.
The essay series is titled “Beyond Marcion” for a reason because, actually, we pretty much covered his main argument last time and are ready to move past it and build on it going forward. Marcion’s whole thing can basically be summed up as him reading Septuagint and looking up from time to time to pull this reaction face:
Are you guys reading the same shit I am?
Keep this key point in mind: Marcion essentially simply makes a value judgement on the Septuagint narrative that some people find convincing, but that others reject. I immediately resonated with his argument and felt relief that I wasn’t the only one to have noticed it. Usually though, rejection occurs on account of indoctrination into one sect of Abrahamism or another and the adoption of right/wrong values that come with it. Or, because Yahwehists are defective personalities with warped values who therefore naturally relate to the deity depicted in the Septuagint. Usually, criminals doing hard time find themselves resonating with the message of the Old Testament, in particular.
However, the greater spirit of the Marcionite critique of the Old Testament can be extended beyond the Septuagint. I contend that had he been able to access the Masoretic text, Marcion might have been able to expand his argument against what ended up being Nicene Christianity. This is because the Masoretic Yahweh is even less transcendent and God-like than the Septuagint version.
In a separate series, I argued that the Septuagint was at least partially a Platonic synthetic construct glued on to a pre-existing polytheistic and then monolatrist semitic religion as part of a social engineering experiment. My argument was that the first books are clearly copies of Platonic ideas and Greek myths. This similarity has never been denied, only explained away by claiming that the Greeks had access to the Torah and stole its ideas. The founders of Christianity like Philo and the other Alexandrian Judeo-Hellenists or Josephus, made this claim and once their co-ethnics came to power in Rome and butchered the Old Guard, this became accepted theological history.
Political power defines our accepted reality.
All I did was present new evidence for the order being flipped and Plato and the Greeks coming first. Once again though, in the end, it is up to you to decide for yourself: who do you believe?
God’s Most Favored Nation of Bankers or the Ancient Greeks/Egyptians?
But we should ask ourselves if the nature of the deception goes deeper than just the obscene inversion of ethics and metaphysics outlined in the Septuagint. That is, what if the translation deliberately obscures the correct, original meaning of the holy text?
Take a moment to catch up with the discussion if you haven’t done so yet. Here:
Good?
Hellenism and the Septuagint
Again, we can just go down the list of all the Greek myths that were copied and bastardized by the synthesizers of the Septuagint to prove our point. The Book of Judges, in particular, is a blatant plagiarization of Greek or other peoples’ heroic myths. There are plenty of comparative lists pointing out the similarities out there on the internet now.
Ignorance is no excuse anymore:
But these Greek-primacy theories are not that new.
Originally, the Christian claim was that the dastardly Greek pagans had stolen these stories and ideas from God’s Wisest and Oldest. But, Greek-primacy theories began to emerge in 19th century Germany. Tragically, they were discarded through guilt-by-association suppression campaigns following the two military defeats of Germany.
x2 Political power dictates our shared reality.
At the time, Germany was the leading intellectual powerhouse of Europe, vastly outperforming the British and French and all other traditions in pretty much all fields following unification. This is concurrent to and related no doubt to the flowering of political and cultural Nationalism in the country. Jealous of German scientific and academic superiority, many German “schools” of scholarship and study were shut down or just fell out of fashion. That these ideas are being translated to English and being popularized on the internet now is a new development, but the ideas themselves are already, at their core, more than a century old.
Point being: after around a century of darkness and ignorance in the classical and religious studies departments of the West, these ideas are making a comeback thanks to internet samizdat and we are at the very controversial cutting edge of comparative religious studies right now.
OK, so, you probably believe me when I tell you that we have a lot of ground to cover today, clearly. Without further ado and whenever you are ready, let’s dive in.