On the Death of God: A Post-mortem Reflection on a "Life"
The intent of this paper is to tease out some of the more signifijicant philosophical and methodological ramifijications of the research presented in a recently published study, entitled “Philosophy, Archaeology and the Bible. Is Emperor Julian’s Contra Galilaeos a Plausible Critique of Christianity?”...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Brill
[2019]
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| In: |
Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte
Year: 2019, Volume: 71, Issue: 3, Pages: 285-311 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Old Testament
/ God
/ Platonism
/ New Testament
/ Neoplatonism
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| IxTheo Classification: | AB Philosophy of religion; criticism of religion; atheism HA Bible NBC Doctrine of God |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | The intent of this paper is to tease out some of the more signifijicant philosophical and methodological ramifijications of the research presented in a recently published study, entitled “Philosophy, Archaeology and the Bible. Is Emperor Julian’s Contra Galilaeos a Plausible Critique of Christianity?”Journal of Late Antique Religion and Culture 11 (2017), S. 1-37; E-ISSN: 1754-517X). In clear, the premise of this paper admits as plausible the argument advanced by Emperor Julian in his treatise Contra Galilaeos, i.e., that the triune Supreme Being articulated and adopted by the Christian theologians is not the God of the Bible, but rather a transformation and adaptation of the God of the Greek philosophers, which was fijirst articulated by the pre-Socratic Xenophanes (c. 570 - c. 475 BC). There is also good reason to think that, as articulated by the Christian thinkers and as an “Entity” supposedly grounded in the biblical texts, the Christian God is simply a flawed philosophical “Idea”. Because the “profijile” of the God of the Christians is in such evident conflict with the “profijile” of the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible, one must necessarily conclude that there is not One God of the entire Bible. Indeed, this deduction is not new on this telling, but was already a signifijicant element in some variations of early Christian Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, and Manichaeism. The preponderance of evidence, archeological, textual, and contextual, strongly supports the claim that the God of the Christians is anhistorical – a Deity of Logic born out of the speculations of the earliest Hellenized Christian philosophers. The God of the Christian theologians corresponds to the highest ideals of western Neo-Platonic thought, and bears no comparison, either in actions or character, to the historico-geographical deities present in the Hebrew Bible. At this point, then, it is necessary to begin reconstructing “the rest of the story” for Christianity and the West. |
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| ISSN: | 1570-0739 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1163/15700739-07103005 |