My question: it is my impression that the NT supersedes to OT. As Paul worte, Jesus is the fulfillment of the law, and Christians are no longer bound by the Mosaic law. So, given the break with Judaism, is the OT really relevant to Christains? WE don’t observe the Sabbath on Saturday, we eat pork, etc., So, why bother with the harshness and cruelties of the OT?
The issue of the Law being superseded is generally meant only in the context that the Covenant between God and Humanity is no longer based on a faithful following of the 613 mitzvot, but on the actions of Jesus. From this perspective, those aspects of the Law that are tied directly to ritual, diet, and similar cultural phenomena are no longer considered binding, but the laws dealing with human actions remain in effect. (The boundary between cultural phenomena and universal laws has shifted as the cultures have changed over time.)
Since the Old Testament continues to provide the history of the interaction between God and humanity (several New Testament writers invoked the Old Testament to support their beliefs), it cannot be considered irrelevant.
One of the key events in the creation of the Christian New Testament was the attempt by Marcion to abandon and suppress all references to the Old Testament. Those who eventually collected the New Testament rejected that suppression and abandonment.
To confirm what tomndebb said, the Old Testament is necessary to put the New Testament in context. Its like studying U.S. history, without any knowledge of the British and Christian roots of the founders. Further, much of what Jesus did is significant more because it is his fulfillment of the prophecies set forth in the Old Testament.
Though this is really a separate debate, so I’m only mentioning it for information purposes. There are many sects of Christianity that continue to observe the Friday/Saturday Sabbath, OT dietary laws, etc. That part more or less depends upon interpretation.
The rejection of the Old Testament is a common theme amongst early ‘heresies’ such as Marcionism and Manichaenism, which are called ‘dualist’. These heresies deny the identification of God from the OT with the God and Jesus in the NT, and posit that the OT God was the creator of the world and himself evil. This obviously poses problems for orthodox Christianity’s reliance on a specific interpretation of prophecies in the Old Testament to have been ‘fulfilled’ in Jesus.
Orthodox early Christians were indeed challenged by these beliefs, writing many tracts against them, but ultimately ‘Catholicism’ won out.
Can you clarify this statement? It seems to me that ritual, diet and similar cultural phenomena are human actions.
Yeah, that was not very clear.
Ritual and dietary laws were part of the Covenant while laws regarding morality were established for all time. For the most part, Christian law closely parallels the seven Noachide Laws (although I am not aware of any early Christian writers who would have expressed it that way).
Depends on the Christian you are talking to. The OT describes a just God. One who entered into a contract with a particular progeny of Abraham prescribing laws that can be interpreted both for their own survival on the one hand and for His take on universal justice for mankind on the other. It goes on as a historical narrative and also includes the writings of prophets that have been reinterpreted to include the coming of Christ and in other cases the end times.
A lot of Christians see the Hebrews as selected to write and preserve God’s word and provide the Messiah for all mankind. Once the Messiah arrived, its a whole new ballgame.
For many Christians, that means reading the old testament can only provide direction and enlightenment as a historical literary resource. Where it conflicts with the writings of the new testament and Jesus’s simple law, or appears ridiculous in modern eyes as in many of the laws of Moses outside the 10 commandments, it can be ignored.
The new and old testaments are the story of people coming to know God. In some organized religions, the books themselves are far more important than that. In some cases these books are foundations for a hierarchy of authority here on the earth. It is very hard to gain influence, and power if you attribute all judgments to Christ, and accept that His judgment is one of Love, and Mercy. That doesn’t leave a lot of room to require the lay members to support the priest class. So, you establish historical support for your own copy of the bible, and declare it to be the one and only true word of God. Since you are the authority of which version is authoritative, that gives you lots of ways to influence the worldly aspects of the One and Only True Church of God Himself.
God’s authority is not given unto priests. If you want the Word, you should seek the Lord Jesus in your own heart. He is the Word, not the bible. Guard yourself against vanity, and greed, and lust for things of this world, they are not for you. Humility and service to God’s children are for you. Bliss and joy in the spirit are for you. These the Lord will give to you in abundance and you have only to ask Him to be given them. Immortality is just gravy.
Tris
Christianity has moved beyond a lot of the stuff in the Hebrew Bible, but then, so has Judaism. There isn’t much call for burnt offerings in Judaism nowadays, after all.
Christianity still refers to the OT, and much of the NT’s legitimacy derives from the writings in the OT (although, as others have noted, it might have gone the other way).
In the wacky world of the fundies, absolute consistency within the Bible, and absolute consistency between the Bible and reality is a big deal, even though neither really exists. So Adam and Eve, the flood, and some other stuff are hammered on endlessly.
Jewish fundies have the same sorts of things going on, although the areas of emphasis are different. I don’t know of any Jews who are hung up on the flood, but Amalek always gets their juices flowing.
If by ‘writing many tracts against them’ you meant ‘launching a murderous crusade and then, not so unexpectedly, unleashing the Inquisition’, and if if by ‘won’ you mean ‘killed and burned the corpses of gnostics until the Cathars were reduced to a little known historical footnote’ then yes.
Prince of Peace 1 Gnostics 0.
My own interpretation is that the Gospels must be seen as a kind of “new deal” between God and humanity, sealed with His own blood and being made with all of humanity instead of with a single ethnic group (and each person needs to sign this deal in their turn). The Old Testament contains so much stuff that is completely against the message of love and a caring personal relationship to the Diety carried by Jesus that it just doesn’t make sense to try to put the two together like some kind of strange chimera.
I tend to not take the sings said by Paul too seriously either, since he was by most accounts a human missionary rather than a god, never met the Son of God, and was not above error in his judgements.
The Gospels are the Gospel. Real Christianity starts with Jesus, rather than Moses, and ends there. The message of love and hope is there, and what else we need to read, about the creation, our past and the future and our true nature, is there laid out in the wonderful book called the Universe which God in his glory has made decipherable by the tiny human mind using the disciplines of science. Though we are never permitted to see his face, we may look on his shadow every day, and we need no longer be afraid.
tagos, if you want to respond to a poster, you might actually respond to their post. DaphneBlack explicitly noted the early church and the Marcinion and Manichaean heresies. As horrible as the Albigensian Crusade was, it hardly qualifies as an event of the early church and had no effect on the events that occurred a thousand years previously.
She noted nothing whatsoever about what the Church did to them and explicitly stated the stuff about writing tracts as if sweet reason rather than brute force was the defining factor in the debate.
She also assumes they not the literalists were the heretics. And since when have threads every kept to the narrow definition set by a poster? They are more often than not wide-ranging free-for-alls.
You can no more confine any discussion that involves gnostic christianity and the eventual triumph of the Catholic Church to a self-defined time slot than you can confine a discussion of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany to their pre-purge, pre-gas chamber history. Hitler wrote tracts about the evil Jews but that is hardly the most pertinent point of discussion.
I’m just correcting a rather disengenuous impression left, no doubt inadvertently, by one poster. As was the assumption that dualism was just an ‘early’ phenomena. It ran through European and the near east up to the medieval times (Bogomils etc) and continued after the Cathars, at least as an intellectual undercurrent in alchemy.
But by all means - I concede it took Christianity scoring the Roman Empire Religion of Choice slot before it really got into its genocidal stride.
The Cathars, as inheritors of a manichean gnostic thread that ran counter to literalist interpretations since the first century AD, encompassed the early church period. That the Church didn’t get round to finally winning the argument by massacring those who believed the OT god is the god of evil (a pretty plausible position given the OT god’s actions) and that Christ was not a physical person but a spiritual emanation from the true god in the spiritual realm, does not mean we can impose artificial time constraints on the scope of a thread.
If we’re talking about dualism we’re talking about the Cathars, the artificial distinction of the development of christianity into ‘early’ period or whatever notwithstanding. Same for the self-serving ideological term ‘heresy’.
That may be how Catholicism want’s to frame its history but it by no means the only way of looking at it. I prefer to look at the history of christianity in terms of its relationship with and access to political power. And what it did with such power.
She explicitly said “early” and named two explicit groups who rose in the early days of church history. Had you simply posted that the church later went on to be much more violent in its opposition to similar groups, then I would not have blinked an eye. I have no problem with you raising the Albigensian Crusade as an example of the Church, wielding too much power, going nuts.
However, you posted as if you were were correcting her statement, when you were actually raising a rather separate issue. There is no connection between the Cathars and the Marcionites, at all, and the connections between the Manichaeans and the Cathars is more of a matter of a few strands of thought reappearing after hundreds of years than a strong tradition being carried on.
Yes, the Cathars were dualists who rejected the Old Testament, (although their association with Gnostcism is more of a twentieth Century categorization than an actual tradition of the Cathars), but when DaphneBlack refers to the struggles of the early church to come to grips with whether to embrace or reject the Jewish Scriptures, citing the Cathars is not a “correction” to her post, it is simply a remark that later peoples also rejected the Old Testament, not that the church struggled to find its way.
I don’t think it at all unlikely that the Cathars were the inheritors of a dualist Manichean thread running counter the Christianity transmitted like any other tradition.
From what I’ve read there was a constant undercurrent that was transmitted through the Byzantine empire and the balkans, reappearing in a variety of forms. I find the idea of transmission much more likely than the cathars inventing their views out of whole cloth. As does this article.
The concept of cultural diffusion is hardly a new, or even controversial one in general and that is how I, and apparently a lot of much better informed thinkers, regard the origins of Cathar dualism. Terms like ‘strong traditions’ as you use them simply cast the debate in the wrong light. Dualistic beliefs were culturally transmitted through chains of associations, changing, taking on new social forms but traceable back to foundations contemperanous with the accepted Gospels and back further in time to dualistic faiths in the middle east that pre-date Christianity.
And in that sense the Church was clearly fighting manifestations of the same ‘enemy’. Mani, bogomils and Cathars were all manifestations of the gnostic counter stream to the Church version of christianity. The link between Cathars and bogamilism is not controversial.
I see where you are coming from but it all reeks too much of framing the debate in the terms of the ‘winners’ version of history to me (particularly as the Church has gone to extreme lengths to obliterate all the evidence of a counter tradition and prefers to see it all in terms of ‘outbreaks’ of ‘heresy’ and I simply do not accept those terms of debate). And to me it does not make any sense to limit the terms of debate to ‘strong tradition’ instead of threads of cultural transmission (that must have involved many small but organised cults even if we exclude paulicianism) of dualist beliefs and so I was not raising a seperate issue.
I stand by my taking a wider view and can see no basis for your dogmatic assertions of lack of links between cathars and marcionites. Bogamilism can certainly be shown to have strong links to Mani with zoarastrianism in 4th century in armenia and then the mass expulsion of armenian dualists to the balkans by the Byzantine Empire in the 6th century.
And in that case the post was very much open to correction - it being a clear statement of the winners view of history.
In short - Marcionism was just one instance of dualism, which was a belief that the Church stamped on whenever it raised its head. To focus on just this one manifestation and limit the Church response to writing texts is just misleading in the wider context. The establishment of the accepted Bible as a response to Marcion is just one skirmish is a much wider and much bloodier war. And the history of the Church after 325 pretty much shows the only reason fire and sword was not the church response to his ideas and organisation was that the Church did not have its hands on the levers of roman state power at his time.
I don’t know if this is intentional but I’m picking up strong ‘moderator hat on’ vibes in your tone here, without that being stated. Without your mod hat on I really don’t think you can comment whether or not I am right to ‘correct’ another post rather than just taking part in a debate where you accept not all posters will accept your Catholic based definition of terms or history as the framework for debate.
I’ve got no problem with linking a manichaean tradition to the Cathars. (I think the Marcionite connection is much more tenuous.) However, the period to which DaphneBlack alluded was the period in which the overall directions of the general church were decided. Those issues were decided in argument and paper wars. Note that the issue of Manichaean heresy was decided without any referral to a General or Ecumenical Council of the Church. That I recall, only the local council at Saragossa in the late fourth century even touched on it.
So the general direection of the church on that topic was decided pretty much only through the tracts and sermons of the second through fifth centuries. That the ideas continued to resurface is true, but they only showed up in disparate locations as minor annoyances to local bishops, and even then they rarely included rejections of the Old Testament… To me that is a pretty good indication that the anti-dualists/supporters of two testaments “won out” (in the sense of setting the direction of the overall church) long before the Cathars reformulated the ideas and rose up to challenge church hegemony.
(If I am not posting the little “Moderator” or “Moderating” tags, I am posting as one of hoi polloi.)
Thanks, tomndebb, for taking up the slack whilst I was not following the thread and explaining why I phrased my post in the way I did. I would be the last person to defend the action of the church against the Cathars, but they were a much later development, and I would say a further one than the doctrinal difficulties which I was referring to, and which, as tom said, were a serious challenge to the doctrine of ‘orthodox’ Christianity (which the Cathars were not, existing to their misfortune in an entirely ‘orthodox’ world in the early middle ages).
Tagos, I referred to Marcionism and Manichaenism as ‘heresies’ (i.e., with the scare quotes) because they were defined as such with the establishment of ‘orthdox’ Catholicism as the mainstream church. I was not myself passing judgement on the ‘rightness or wrongness’ of their doctrine or anything else.
Given the ‘history written by the victors’ approach and the tendency of Catholic sources to talk in euphemisms concerning the widespread suppression of heretics in the late roman empire I’m finding it hard to find concrete cites other than Gibbon. But from what I have read in dead tree format, in places like Alexandria Arian heresies were tamped out with more than paper. Pagans and heretics were massacred and by people like ‘Saint’ Cyril if Damascius can be used as a source.
I’m afraid I do not make the convenient distinction between the acts of Christian Emperors or the church, so beloved of the Catholic Encyclopedia’s view of history, and the Church. I don’t think anyone can argue that from 325 onwards christian rome and Constantinople did not physically persecute all non-christians. Temples were burnt, religious beliefs outlawed. No one can seriously argue that this was not accompanied by massacres.
I can offer these two quotes:
Look - I’m sure by limiting the terms of debate and limiting the definitions used you can make a case that the ‘Church’ in some strictly defined sense was as pure as the driven snow. This is, after all, the basis of JP II’s various apologies (it wasn’t us Guv, it was over zealous followers and if we hadn’t been rubbing lard on the cat’s boils we’d have stopped it) for Christian misdeeds.
But the bottom line is that Christianity triumphed over pagans and arianism by force, including the force of the state and so it is disengenuous to talk as if literalist christianity won out through reason. Given the Church’s actions against the Cathars and given the crusades and centuries of witch-burning I believe my view is more ‘common sense’.
No one is going to convince anyone to change their mind but I’ll finish with this stunning piece of mendacious, self justifying shit from the Catholic Encyclopedia
“Just because OUR torturers extracted confessions and when we turned OUR prisoners over to Kings who owed their loyalty and position to OUR church and OUR God, somehow people act as if we the Church were somehow involved. Go figure! Besides they bought it upon themselves and Jesus is down with it…” /homer simpson voice.
Forgive me if I carry on “reproaching” and consider the Catholic Church a blight on civilisation, regardless of whatever role it played in later preserving books it didn’t get round to burning all the copies of previously.
Which should read.
Preview would be my friend if only I let it. :smack: