Calling Zionism Colonialism is completely Backwards.

Zionism means the belief that the Jews have the right to self determination and sovereignty over their ancient homeland.  If you replace “Jews” with any other group of people traditionally marginalized in the Western world, the Left is inclined to agree with that statement.  Treating Zionism differently is pure Antisemitism, I don’t care what your excuse is.

I am a Labour Zionist and Libertarian-Socialist, that means I wish Israel (like every other nation) was a Proletarian Direct Democracy.  I absolutely consider the Israeli State’s handling of the Palestinian situation in both Gaza and the West Bank to be horrendous. 

But I do not support a Two State Solution because that would be the Sudetenland all over again.  Until we have a Global Communist Utopia the Jews need a state that is their own, and I feel the same about other Marginalized groups like the Kurds and the Druze who I feel Israel should give the Golan Heights to.  The Palestinians already have a State, it’s Jordan, they are over 80% of the population of Jordan, the British Mandate originally covered both Israel and Jordan, Jordan was pealed off to be the Muslim State.  And that’s just one of many Arab states, the Arabs are not a people lacking Nations where they are the privileged ethnic group.

Calling Zionism Colonialism is backwards because it’s actually if anything Decolonization, it was the Colonialism of Ancient Empires that removed the Jews from their homeland and placed Geco-Roman Christian and Muslim populations and places of worship there.

There is a common perception out there that it is anachronistic to use the term “Colonialism” to describe the actions of any pre-1492 Empires.  Rome especially tends to be popularly depicted as always simply invading and conquering people with no high minded excuses at all.  This is a very Modernist bias, the notion that it took till the Renaissance for Imperialism to ever start trying to disguise itself as something more benevolent.

What supposedly separates Colonialism from other forms of Imperialism is the claim that it’s simply about founding colonies in new lands but leaving the local populations to govern themselves while we trade and peacefully coexist with them.  But of course that peaceful coexistence always eventually turned out to be a sham.  Well guess what, that is how Rome operated in some parts of their Empire, especially in Judea.

Cities like Caesarea Martiima were the colonies while the Jews had carefully controlled nominal self rule via the Sanhedrin, Priesthood and the Herodian monarchs.  In time even those were taken away over the course of various failed rebellions, and after the Bar Kochba Revolt Hadrian banned them from even setting foot in Jerusalem and rebuilt that city as a Roman colony named after himself.  And the Christian Emperors maintained that policy throughout their rule over Jerusalem.  However the Jews always had some presence within the borders of Modern Israel, especially in the Galilee where Jewish Rebellions against Christian Roman rule in Israel were chiefly based.

The Qurran is actually a Zionist text, Muhammad never intended his Arab State to extend beyond Arabia.  But while Umar and the other early Caliphs after him were violating Muhammad’s intent in their conquests, they still at first by and large let the local populations govern themselves, especially the Jews and Christians in Judea.  It was Umar who in fact allowed the Jews to finally return to Jerusalem after being denied access for five centuries of Roman rule.  The earliest references to Muslim presence on the Temple Mount I believe can be interpreted as Muslims actually allowing the Jews to worship on the former site of The Temple.

It was under Abd Al-Malik this began to change.  He began building the Dome of The Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque while Mecca was under the control of Rebels to be an alternative to Mecca. The modern notion that they are the third and fourth Holiest sites in Islam after Mecca and Medina (too Shiites they’re not even that highly ranked being topped by several sites in Iraq) is later cultural white washing of the actual origins of those structures.  That said I do not believe the actual proper site of Solomon’s Temple is either of those exact locations so a Third Temple could peacefully coexist with them.

Anti-Zionists either Pretend Israel had no Jewish presence between the Bar-Kochba Revolt and the First Aliyah in the early 1880s.  Or as I saw on Tumblr recently will claim that “before the Zionists came Muslims, Jews and Christians all lived peacefully together in Jerusalem”, that is literally a Pre-Lapsarian Utopia fantasy, Leftists should no better then to make such claims, in any other context we’d call it out as being part of a fundamentally reactionary world view.

Karl Marx himself, who wasn’t a Zionist, debunks that fanciful claim in a piece he wrote in relation to the Cimrean War in 1854.

“the sedentary population of Jerusalem numbers about 15,500 souls, of whom 4,000 are Mussulmans and 8,000 Jews. The Mussulmans, forming about a fourth part of the whole, and consisting of Turks, Arabs and Moors, are, of course, the masters in every respect, as they are in no way affected with the weakness of their Government at Constantinople. Nothing equals the misery and the sufferings of the Jews at Jerusalem, inhabiting the most filthy quarter of the town, called hareth-el-yahoud, the quarter of dirt, between the Zion and the Moriah, where their synagogues are situated – the constant objects of Mussulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins, and living only upon the scanty alms transmitted by their European brethren. ”

Mark Twain would later confirm that Jews were over half the Population of Jerusalem already well before the First Aliyah.  And they had presence in more than just Jerusalem but also in Tiberias in the Galilee and down in Hebron.

In the early 1880s it wasn’t just Jews migrating to Israel, increased waves of migration of Muslims to this region from other Ottoman lands also started then, under Imperial encouragement.  So a good deal of the Muslim population of the region can’t even claim to go back to the original Arab Conquests.

The origins of the Zionist movement are very Socialist, with Moses Hess being a pre-Marx Socialist and the author of one of the first modern Zionist texts in 1862.  Later two Labour Zionist parties would be founded during the truly modern Zionist movement, one Marxist the other non-Marxist, they were the most popular parties all through the Cold War.  The earliest Zionist settlements were Communes.  One important Labour Zionist was Albert Einstein.

The association with Britain is the main basis for calling it Colonialism, everything else Britain was doing at this time was Colonialism at its worst after all, and their influence is largely why Israel was founded as a Capitalist state despite the Socialist parties overwhelming popularity.  However the Jews under the British Mandate never truly felt that the British authorities were actually on their side.  Brittan used the mandate as an excuse to continue controlling the region during a period when old fashioned Colonialism was waning in popularity and starting to be phased out.  It took the outcry of Jewish sympathy in the wake of the Holocaust to make them take it seriously, and that's why Holocaust Denial is specifically Anti-Zionist in origin.

Plenty of Arabs and Muslims in the region at the time supported Zionism, like Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali and his son, King Feisal of Hijaz and then of Iraq, as well as As'ad Shukeiri, a Muslim scholar ('alim) of the Acre area, the mayor of Haifa, Hassan Bey Shukri and Sheikh Musa Hadeib. 

But more important than those figures who you could dismiss as privileged collaborators with the British, is the support Zionism had and still has from certain entire Muslim communities in Israel, the kind who would still be just as demographically marginalized under a Palestinian State as they are under a Jewish one.  The Negev Bedouins who are in fact the oldest Arab population west of Jordan, the Druze who are often not counted as Muslims but I consider them essentially an offshoot of the Shia, and the Circasian Muslims who migrated to Israel as refugees in the 1800s to escape the Genocide that was being carried out agaisnt them by Tzarist Russia, so under circumstances similar to the Jews.

That’s the thing, the Arab Nationalists opposing Jewish migration to the region during the 1880s through 1940s are to me just the same as European Nationalists refusing Jewish Refugees at the exact same time.  It’s the same Xenophobia and Antisemitism that was going on in Europe, only here in Islamic dressing rather then Christian.

Now some Right Wing defenders of Zionism on the Internet talk a bit too much about the Arab Nationalists who colluded with the Nazis during WWII, Amin al-Husseini is not solely responsible for giving the Nazis the idea to do the Holocaust, that was Hitler’s stated goal from Mein Kamf and anything that was pragmatically holding him back from it became irrelevant when the War started.  And they will often ignore the Muslims and Arabs who fought on the Allies side of the War, but the important fact here is that the Muslims who sided agaisnt the Nazis were the same ones who already supported Zionism.

Most of the Arab Nationalist leaders who allied with Nazi Germany did so just as begrudgingly as Mussolini, they knew Hitler was just using them and didn’t actually care much about what happens in the Middle East at all.  But not Amin al-Hussein, he was given the Honorary Aryan status and actually helped SS Leader Harun el-Raschid Hintersatz organize Muslim SS units in Bosnia, he was a true Arab Nazi, and the Fatah party which controls the Palestinian Authority reveres him as their spiritual founder to this day.  And during the 50s and 60s he had the backing of Nasser.

Stalin supported Zionism between the end of the War and 1948 then stopped, I feel he simply gave up on Israel having a Communist Revolution too quickly. However the USSR did not truly start backing Arab Nationalists till after Stalin, it began with Khrushchev's alliance with Nasser.  Nasser was a member of the Young Egypt Party also called the Green Shirts who were Egypt’s openly pro-Fascist and pro-Nazi party of the 1930s.  He also employed surviving SS Officers including Johann von Leers, Otto Skorzeny and Leopold Gleim as key advisors.  Leers and Skorzeny were already important even before the Nazi regime fell.  Khrushchev is a figure even many Tankies don’t like, TheFinnishBolshevik has argued he had Stalin murdered.  Nasser had banned Egypt’s Communist Party, Khrushchev asked Nasser to legalize them again but he refused, yet Krushchev kept the alliance anyway.  Nasser used quasi Socialist rhetoric that a lot of modern “Anti-imperialist” MLs like Caleb Maupin fall for, but this was no more legit Socialism than the National Socialist Workers Party.  François Genoud was the Nazi Regime’s Swiss banker who spent his post war life financing both Neonazis and nominally Left Wing Arab Nationalists, openly standing by his support of Hitler till he died in the 1990s.  

It is my thesis that the truest Nazis are those for whom the Anti-Semitism was their main driving motivation, everything else is in service of that.  During the first half of the 20th Century Antisemitism and Anti-Communism frequently went together because as a marginalized group many Jews were inclined towards Communism.  Some people were Anti-Communists because they were Antisemitic, and some were Antisemitic because they were Anti-Communist.  But during the 1950s as it became clear that Israel and the Soviet Union were going to be on opposing sides of the Cold War, this began to shift.  Otto Ernst Remer was a former high ranking Nazi Official who in the 1950s lead a Neonazi Party in West Germany called the Socialist Reich Party that was financed by the USSR.

In the United States there were two men who literally worked for the SD during the War and became Neonazi leaders after the War and developed ties to Remer, Leers, Skorzeny and Amin al-Husseini and began arguing that USSR was not controlled by Jews anymore thanks to Stalin and Khrushchev's purges and that the Far Right and Far Left should work together against their common enemies of Israel and the United States, they considered American Style Capitalist society far worse and more degenerate than the Authoritarianism of Stalinist Russia.  They were H. Keith Thompson and Francis Parker Yockey, there is evidence Yockey possibly traveled to Russia and even spoke with Soviet leaders.  In the US their brand of Nazism didn’t catch on, The American Right is over all more Anti-Communist then Anitsemitic, so George Lincoln Rockwell’s firmly anti-Communist American Nazi Party was more popular, but in Europe Yockey’s approach was very influential including on Alexander Dugin.  Willis Carlo carried on the legacy of Yockey and became a close associate of Lyndon LaRouche.

That is the origin of the NazBol Vortex, but the modern Anarchists, LibComs and Breadtubers who oppose the NazBols still keep falling for the Anti-Zionist propaganda they popularized. 

Nazis of the Rockwell variety were still too Anti-Semitic to support Israel, they generally tried to convince people that Israel was secretly actually with the Soviets.  And yeah Socialist parties were still popular in Israel, but after the developments of the 50s none of them were Bolsheviks.

The current head of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority is Mahmoud Abbas a known Holocaust Denier.  In fact his most recent quotes are the worst kind of Holocaust denial, which is not denying it happened but alleging that the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis to make it happen.  He is the leader of the movement you are claiming solidarity with when you Tweet "Free Palestine".

Judeo-Menshevism

Too many online Leftists today want to minimize the Jewish Contributions to Socialism and Communism for the sake of refuting the Nazi Judeo-Bolshevism Conspiracy theory.  

That's a shame, I feel we should be proud of the influence of Jews and other marginalized peoples.  

And perhaps Jews are overrepresented among the philosophers of The Left because of the overlooked support for Communism in the Hebrew Bible, a book many Conservatives also consider Sacred.

But sadly mainstream Christians have trouble accepting the Communism even in the NT much less the Old because of how they've been influenced by Neo-Platonism and Rome.

The irony of the Judeo-Bolshevism narrative however is that the Bolsheviks were the least Jewish of the many factions of the 1917 Russian Left, in terms of their leadership at least. 

Perhaps the USSR's failures could have been avoided by being more Jewish?

Early Socialists who were Jews or had Jewish Ancestry

Moses Hess

Karl Marx (his family converted to Lutheranism when he was a child)

Ferdinand Lassalle

Paul Lafargue

Paul Singer

Eduard Bernstein

Luise Kautsky

Victor Adler

Laura Marx

Eleanor Marx

Charles Rappoport

Rudolf Hilferding

Daniel De Leon

Victor L. Berger

Morris Hillquit

Meyer London

Aaron Zundelevich

Gesia Gelman

Marie Goldsmith

SRs who were Jews or had Jewish Ancestry

Mikhail Gots

Avram Gots

Grigory Gershuni

Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum aka Volin

Isaac Steinberg

Yakov Blumkin

Mark Natanson

Fanny Kaplan

Jewish Socialist Workers Party

Mensheviks who were Jews or had Jewish Ancestry

Pavel Axelrod

Lev Grigorievich Deutsch aka Leo Deutsch

Julius Martov

Lydia Dan

Fyodor Dan

The General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia

Haim Kantorovitch

Bolsheviks who were Purged by Stalin or Krushchev

Leon Trotsky (Former Menshevik)

Adolph Joffe (Former Menshevik who switched with Trotsky)

Lev Kamenev

Grigory Zinoviev

Karl Radek

Béla Kun

Shmuel Weizmann 

Maria Weizmann

Polina Zhemchuzhina

Michael Metallikov

Bronislava Poskrebysheva

Solomon Mikhoels

Alexei Kapler

Ignace Reiss

Alexander Parvus

Louis Shapiro

Noah London

Walter Krivitsky

Lazar Kaganovich

Gyorgy Lukacs

Spartacus League

Rosa Luxemburg

Leo Jogiches

Paul Levi

Mathilde Jacob

Bavarian Soviet Republic

Kurt Eisner

Ernst Toller

Gustav Landauer

Erich Mühsam

Eugen Leviné

Other German Socialists who had Jewish Heritage

Otto Landsberg (Only Jew among the Bad SPD)

Hugo Haase (SPD)

Alexander Parvus (SPD)

Kurt Rosenfeld (SPD)

Werner Scholem (KPD)

Ernst Heilmann (SPD)

Arkadi Maslow (KPD)

Ruth Fischer (KPO)

Gerhart Eisler (KPD)

The Frankfurt School also had some Jews but I'm not gonna list individuals since I don't like their pessimism.

Some might want to accuse me of simply labeling everyone outside Russia as non Bolshevik, but Rosa Luxemburg criticized Lenin when she died before he did most of what anti Lenninists later condemn him for.  

Ernst Thalmann and Walter Ulbricht were the German stooges of Stalin, they were both Gentiles and the Weimar KPD declined under their leadership.  Ulbricht and Stalin would turn their back on Thalmann during the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact making no attempt to get him released from Prison.

Labor Zionism

Aaron David Gordon

Ber Borochov

Nachman Syrkin

Joseph Trumpeldor

Jean Longuet (Grandson of Karl Marx)

Leon Blum

Albert Einstein

Oskar Cohn

Jacob Lestschinsky

Angelica Balabanoff

Haim Arlosoroff 

Zeev Latsky

Shmuel Niger

Yitzhak Ben-Zvi

Yosef Sprinzak

Ya'akov Zerubavel

Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi

Berl Katznelson

Meir Ya'ari

David Ben Gurion

Moshe Sharett

Zalman Shazar

Levi Eshkol

Golda Meir

Ya'akov Hazan

Moshe Sneh

Meir Talmi

Victor Shem-Tov

Yigal Allon

Yitzhak Rabin

(Camille Huysmans was a Gentile leader of the Second International who also supported Zionism) 

American Anarchists

Emma Goldman

Alexander Berkman

Paul Goodman

Murray Bookchin

Noam Chomsky

David Graeber

Property is actually irrelevant to the Definition of Communism or Socialism.

The definition of Communism is a Moneyless, Classless, Stateless society.  The definition of Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production.  Under those definitions a Communist society will inevitably qualify as Socialist but not every hypothetical Socialist society will qualify as Communist.  But neither definition is directly about "Property" per se.

Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto acknowledged that Property is technically irrelevant to the definition but still argued that in our then current situation (January of 1848) abolishing Capitalism would require abolishing private property.  And maybe that was correct in 1848 but given how much what ownership even means has functionally changed entirely since then, it's an issue that's worth revisiting.

Some Socialist thinkers like to make a distinction between "Private Property" and "Personal Property".  What I'm focusing on in this post is more specific then either of those however, this is specifically about land, is it compatible with Communism or Socialism to allow individuals or families some sense of ownership of the land they live on or house the live in?

Land ownership can be compatible if it's regulated.  If not all land is privately owned but rather preferably most is common land.  If there is a limit to how much one person can own, but also a minimum, every person or family should own their own home, home ownership shouldn't be something you have to "earn".  And any thing produced from that land should still be shared with the community.

People thinking of whether or not there is or isn't private land property as the key cornerstone to defining Communism is why people keep thinking Kalliopolis in Plato's Republic or Thomas Moore's Utopia qualify as Communist societies even though they are absolutely Class based societies.

And it's also why people think it's absurd for me to call modern Dengist China the most Capitalist nation on Earth, "they don't have private property", they have worse Labor laws then even the United States and a Market based economy, I really don't care who owns what, that's pure Capitalism.

But it's also why people think you can't describe the system The Bible depicts The Israelites as living under during the Judges period as a form of Socialism.  These American Conservative Christians make a big deal out of how much The Bible talks about Property, however there were regulations on that property ownership that make it not compatible with the "Property Rights" philosophy held by modern Anarcho-Capitalists, Libertarians, Conservatives and Objectivists.  The Gleaning rights, the Tithes, the Sabbatical year and Jubilee laws, all paint the picture of a society the prioritizes making sure everyone's needs are provided for.

That applies in turn to certain separatist Christian sects, like the Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites who descend from the Anabaptists, that some may allow individual ownership of the house you live in is irrelevant, they are all Anarho-Communist societies.

That leads us to John Locke, John Locke is often thought of as the father of Liberal/Capitalist conceptions of Property, but what he actually said was left unclear in many areas.  James Tully in 1980 argued that Locke's views on Property can be compatible with Socialist values.  Locke stressed the Labor Theory of Value, something which today only Socialists believe in unconditionally.  Locke also clearly said someone's right to claim exclusive ownership of something was only valid if it didn't disadvantage someone else.  I think the Left needs to stop letting Libertarians and Conservatives get away with claiming Locke exclusively for themselves.

Nicola Bonneville and Thomas Paine during the French Revolution proposed forms of Communism that involved regulated land ownership.

Also here's an official statement of the Communist Party USA that was active during the Cold War.

Many myths have been propagated about socialism. Contrary to right-wing claims, socialism would not take away the personal private property of workers, only the private ownership of major industries, financial institutions, and other large corporations, and the excessive luxuries of the super-rich.^[35]

This Party's split from the solder Socialist Party USA was entirely that they were more pro USSR.

Are there valid successful Socialist States?

That question seems be a key dividing issues in the modern American online Left's factional infighting.  And like many such fights few are willing to actually bring any nuance to the conversation.  On the one side are people insisting Socialism has still never been tried (which includes Anarchists who think a benevolent state is not even hypothetically possible).  Then you have your MLs who think criticizing any state or party with a claimed Leninist lineage "serves imperialism".

For States in existence today I consider both Cuba and Vietnam legitimate examples of successful Socialist experiments.  Their societies still aren't perfect, under the model of Socialism they're going for the "higher phase" won't be possible till the entire world is Communist.  But they are still Revolutions that have improved the conditions of their working class and are not guilty of most of the crimes the western media seeks to level against them.  And I'm willing to say the same of Eva Morales in Bolivia.

However Modern China and North Korea are Fascist Ethno-States, Mao may have been legit, but China as it is now is an authoritarian Ethno-State.  The Baath Party and Fatah parties are also Fascist parties.  Caleb Maupin doesn't even limit his apologetics to dictators claiming to Communists, he even defends Nasser, a Green Shirt who hired multiple high ranking SS Officers and banned Egypt's Communist Party, Khrushchev asked him to unban it but he refused.  There is a video on YouTube of a speech where Nasser sounds like he's defending Socialism, but it's the same wishy washy abstract "socialism" you get from Social Democrats calling them Democratic Socialists.

Maupin also spreads this "color revolution" narrative, seeking to discredit Left Wing resistance movements within States he likes by pointing to their CIA backing.  Empires like the US will often back revolutionary movements within enemy nations simply to cause instability, even though the ideologies of those groups are ones they will also be opposing if they take power.  That does not discredit those movements as legitimately Leftist.  Because guess what, you can pull that same card on Lenin himself, Lenin was only able to get back to Russia in 1917 because of the assistance he got from the Kaiser.  The CIA may very well also wind up backing a revolution they shouldn't have.

So that leads me to finally talking about the USSR.  I believe that the Russian Revolution should have went a different route, the Socialist Revolutionary Party I think had the right ideas for Russia given how much Russia was still Feudal and Agrarian unlike the Industrialized states Marx and Engels were mainly thinking of when they wrote their theories.  The Left SRs would have handled the Kulak situation differently.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to demonize Lenin or even Stalin, in fact I disagree with separating them, whatever Stalin did you object to Lenin would have probably done the same.  And if anything Stalin was better since he ended the state persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is actually one of George Orwell's criticisms of Stalin expressed in Animal Farm.  They did make Russia better, much of what's said to vilify them are lies, but they did do things I feel they shouldn't have.

As far as the Holodomor goes, I do believe the Kulak situation should have been handled differently, but calling it a Genocide is absurd.  Under the Tsars Russia had a famine about every decade, Socialists don't claim they can magically make the conditions that cause Famines disappear, none the less after having three Famines in the first 35 years of Bolshevik rule Russia had none between the end of WWII in 1945 and Gorbachev's Neo-Liberal reforms in 1985.  40 years of no Famine is considering Russia's material conditions absolutely impressive.

Spiritual and Heavenly, what do they actually mean?

This post is kind of a follow up to God and The Universe.

The problem with all this talk from Platonized Christians of various forms about how Scripture is supposed to be interpreted "Spiritually" rather then "Carnally" is that the modern English connotations for words like "Spirit" and "Heaven" don't truly fit the original meanings of the Hebrew and Greek words being used in those verses.

The word "Sky" rarely appears in English translations of The Bible, because the primary Hebrew and Greeks words used to refer what we call the Sky are translated "Heaven", also "Celestial" in the KJV is the same Greek word as Heavenly. The Ancient Platonists referred to the World of Forms where their transcendent God lived not as Heaven but as "A Place Beyond Heaven". Some Bible verses even refer to the Dew as being of Heaven in the same way Fruits are of The Earth, as if the Ancient Hebrews were not entirely ignorant of the Scientific fact that what we are looking at when we look at the Heavens is the same air we inhale when we breath.  

Which leads us to how the words translated "Spirit", "Ghost" and in the Hebrew at least "Soul" are also words for "Breath" and "Air", as is the word for "Life" when Leviticus 17 says the Life is in The Blood.  Leviticus is actually quite literally alluding to the scientific fact that our blood caries the oxygen we inhale from our lungs to other parts of our body chiefly the brain, but translations obscure that to modern readers.  Adam became a living Soul when God breathed the breath of life into him.  And that same imagery describes the future Bodily Resurrection in Ezekiel 37.  The phrase translated "give up the Ghost" really just means to stop breathing, The Bible constantly refers to death as being asleep, not separate from the Body which is built on a misuse of one verse in 2nd Corinthians 5.

Even in Gentile Greek thinking the strict Dualism of Pythagoras was still a minority view in Paul's time, and those who were Pythagoreans or Platonists in the 1st Century didn't use the word Pneuma for the intangible realm they believed it.  In Anaximenes Pneuma is synonymous with the element Air which in his theory was the first element from which all the others were formed.  In Greek medical texts this meaning remains but also became associated with being how the different parts of the body communicate with each other.  In Aristotle the "connate pneuma" was the "air" in the sperm that passes on capacity to the offspring, sounding a lot like what would become the the Christian Doctrine of Traducianism.  The Stoics then greatly developed the concept of Pneuma to refer to "unseen" manifestations of the Divine but still very corporeal.

The Greek word translated Soul is Psyche a word we still use in modern English but with a seemingly completely different meaning to how we use Soul.  Most people aware of this assume it's the Psychological meaning that has no relation to Ancient Greek usage, but I feel the truth is closer to being the opposite.  Plenty of early Christians like Justin Martyr argued against the Immortality of the Soul as taught by Plato, Pythagoras and Origen.

So when in some contexts The Bible calls The Kingdom of which Jesus is King a Kingdom of Heaven rather then Earth, or uses Spiritual as a contrast to the Carnal/Physical/Natural, those are symbolic uses of those words that still derive from what they refer to materially.    

Now in 2nd Corinthians 12 Paul refers to a "Third Heaven", the popular view today is that the first two Heavens are the Sky and Outer Space but the Third Heaven is actually Plato's "Place Beyond Heaven".  I however would argue the Third Heaven is still part of the Universe simply not within the 4 Dimensions we can currently mortally perceive.  According to E. W. Bullinger, the Greek says "caught away", not "caught up" possibly reflecting Jewish beliefs that Paradise was somewhere other than the uppermost heaven.(A Critical Lexicon and Concordance to the English and Greek "2, 14, To this "Third heaven" and " Paradise " Paul was caught away, 2 Cor. xii. 2, 4, (not " up," see under " catch,") in "visions and revelations of the Lord," 2 Cor. xii. 1. One catching away – with a double revelation of the New heaven and the ...")

The Dualistic Platonist/Pythagorean senses of these words are maybe in mind in how Paul uses them more then any other NT writers, but Paul while engaging with the Greeks is seeking to deconstruct that dualism.  People take out of context from 1st Corinthians 15 the "flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of Heaven" and the contrasts that are made.  But what they build up to is saying the Bodily will put on the Spiritual, the Mortal will put on the Immortal, the separation between the Material and Divine caused by the Fall is undone in The Resurrection.

So one Full Preterist YT video I watched part of went on about how in John's Gospel the "Jews" kept interpreting what Jesus said "Physically" or "Materially" while the narrative voice informs us Jesus really meant something "Spiritually".  Jesus often used metaphors and symbolism and figures of speech, that doesn't mean those metaphors need to be interpreted in a Spiritual vs Physical paradigm.  

Like when Orgasm is called a "little death", that expression is using one physical event to analogize another physical event. I started writing this thinking it was specifically Male Orgasm called a "Little Death" because visually that analogy instantly makes sense to me while I always thought of Female Orgasm as well the opposite.  Bur upon researching it for this post it seems La petite mort is used pretty gender neutrally.  The expression in it's French origins is mainly supposed to be about the sense of exhaustion, it is after all not uncommon to go to sleep right after.

Likewise when Paul refers to the dead as being asleep, that is one physical state being analogized to another, but the point lies in how the basic difference between death and sleep is that sleep is temporary, Paul is communicating that The Gospel is that Christ has made death temporary.

The quote from John's Gospel about eating His Flesh and drinking His Blood is obviously meant to be understood in terms of The Eucharist, the Last Supper depicted in the Synoptics and referred to by Paul, where His Body and Blood is symbolized by Bread and Wine.  So there are layers of symbolism there, when He was tempted by Satan He speaks of the true Bread of Life being the Word of God, the Scriptures, which is a part of the Material world.

The beginning of this theme is the Born Again teaching from John 3.  I disagree with most casual usage of the Born Again phrasing, but I'm no longer happy with my prior post on the subject, so I may have to redo it. Point here is the Birth imagery is indeed symbolic, it's symbolic of Resurrection.  Our conversion is merely when we're Begotten again.

And that Birth imagery being associated with Resurrection itself points to a physical Resurrection.  It has it's roots in Isaiah 26:19 in many translations saying "the Earth shall give birth to her dead", terminology that refers to Revelation 20 talking about Hades and the Sea giving up the Dead that are in them.  And those translations of Isaiah 26:19 must be the correct ones because all translations are setting up this birth imagery in verses 17 and 18.

There are three different Hebrew words for "dead" as in words you'd use to refer to dead people, all three are in Isaiah 26:19, as if YHWH through Isaiah really wanted us to get that there is no sense of Death not included in this Resurrection.  One of the words is frequently translated very specifically as  words like Corpse, being the word Leviticus uses when talking about being made unclean by touching a Carcass.

In this Birth metaphor the Earth is the mother, our dead corpse is the seed which enters her after our "big death" and our Resurrected perfected form is The Man Child of Revelation 12.  The Mother is also Israel in that Chapter, but Israel is tied to her Land(Ertetz), Hephzibah and Beulah of Isaiah 62.  I've also proven with Revelation that Sheol/Hades is a physical location of bodies and that Grave is an accurate translation.  If the Earth is the Mother and the dead body is the Seed, then Sheol would be the Earth's Womb.

That is also complimented by the sowing imagery Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 15:37, our mortal Body is the Seed that is planted in the Earth and from which our future Resurrection Body will sprout.  So yes our current bodies and future bodies are sometimes referred to as separate bodies, but that's not because they are completely separate things, there is still a continuity, just as in a sense I'm not the same person I was 15 years ago.  1 Corinthians 15:44 is clear that the Natural Body and Spiritual Body are the same matter, simply changed.

2 Corinthians 5 doesn't in any translation say "to be absent from the body is to be present with The Lord".  But either way in the context of what's set up at the start of the Chapter and what Paul had earlier taught to this same community in 1 Corinthians 15, "the Body" being spoken of just means our body in it's current mortal state before we put on immortality.  Nothing Paul says implies we are absent from the body when we Die, instead Paul consistently refers to physical death as being asleep.

The word translated "Naked" in Genesis 2:25 is not the same as the word being translated Naked repeatedly in Genesis 3, they are arguably similar but not the same.  The word used in Genesis 2 is the same as a word translated Cunning, Crafty and Subtle, in Genesis 3:1 that word is used to describe what The Serpent is more of then any other beast of the field. When Jesus says believers should be "wise as serpents" the Greek word for "wise" being used there is an equivalent to this Hebrew word. Likewise the word for "ashamed" in 2:25 is elsewhere translated "confounded".  The irony is the West has spent centuries acting like the sense in which Adam and Eve were "Naked and unashamed" in Genesis 2 symbolizes childish innocence and naivety when the actual etymology of the words used says the opposite.  Later Hebrew Scripture definitely does use this word for "naked" as in not wearing clothing, but never in the Pentateuch, that I believe was a development of the word's usage in later Hebrew.

The word for "naked" used in Genesis 3 is the more proper word for Naked, and based on 2 Corinthians 5's discussion of how we are currently Spiritually Naked until we are clothed in The Resurrection, I believe the reason Adam and Eve didn't "know" they were Naked before was because they weren't really, they might have seemed to be Naked to how we in our current state perceive that concept, but that's because they were clothed in this Immortal Oiketerion.

When we Put On Immortality at The Resurrection, it's not us ceasing to be Material, it's the Material being upgraded, improved, perfected.  Some may find this weird, but I think a good visual analogy would be like a Transformation in a Magical Girl Anime.

The Sects of First Century Judaism

This is what Josephus has to say in Antiquities of the Jews Book 18 Chapter 1.

2. The Jews had, for a great while, had three sects of philosophy peculiar to themselves. The sect of the Essens; and the sect of the Sadducees; and the third sort of opinions was that of those called Pharisees. Of which sects although I have already spoken in the second book of the Jewish war;¹ yet will I a little touch upon them now.

3. Now for the Pharisees, they live meanly, and despise delicacies in diet; and they follow the contract of reason: and what that prescribes to them as good for them they do: and they think they ought earnestly to strive to observe reason’s dictates for practice. They also pay a respect to such as are in years: nor are they so bold as to contradict them in any thing which they have introduced. And when they determine that all things are done by fate,² they do not take away the freedom from men of acting as they think fit: since their notion is, that it hath pleased God to make a temperament; whereby what he wills is done; but so that the will of man can act virtuously or viciously. They also believe that souls have an immortal vigour in them: and that under the earth there will be rewards, or punishments; according as they have lived virtuously or viciously in this life: and the latter are to be detained in an everlasting prison; but that the former shall have power to revive and live again. On account of which doctrines they are able greatly to persuade the body of the people: and whatsoever they do about divine worship, prayers, and sacrifices, they perform them according to their direction. Insomuch, that the cities give great attestations to them, on account of their intire virtuous conduct, both in the actions of their lives, and their discourses also.

4. But the doctrine of the Sadducees is this; that souls die with the bodies. Nor do they regard the observation of any thing besides what the law enjoins them. For they think it an instance of virtue to dispute with those teachers of philosophy whom they frequent. But this doctrine is received but by a few: yet by those still of the greatest dignity. But they are able to do almost nothing of themselves. For when they become magistrates; as they are unwillingly and by force sometimes obliged to be; they addict themselves to the notions of the Pharisees: because the multitude would not otherwise bear them.

5. The doctrine of the Essens is this; that all things are best ascribed to God. They teach the immortality of souls: and esteem that the rewards of righteousness are to be earnestly striven for. And when they send what they have dedicated to God into the temple, they do not offer sacrifices: (3) because they have more pure lustrations of their own. On which account they are excluded from the common court of the temple: but offer their sacrifices themselves. Yet is their course of life better than that of other men; and they intirely addict themselves to husbandry. It also deserves our admiration, how much they exceed all other men that addict themselves to virtue, and this in righteousness: and indeed to such a degree, that as it hath never appeared among any other men, neither Greeks nor Barbarians, no not for a little time: so hath it endured a long while among them. This is demonstrated by that institution of theirs, which will not suffer any thing to hinder them from having all things in common: so that a rich man enjoys no more of his own wealth, than he who hath nothing at all. There are about four thousand men that live in this way: and neither marry wives, nor are desirous to keep servants: as thinking the latter tempts men to be unjust; and the former gives the handle to domestick quarrels. But as they live by themselves, they minister one to another. They also appoint certain stewards to receive the incomes of their revenues, and of the fruits of the ground; such as are good men, and priests: who are to get their corn, and their food ready for them. They none of them differ from others of the Essens in their way of living: but do the most resemble those Dacæ, who are called Polistæ. [Dwellers in cities.] (4)

6. But of the fourth sect of Jewish philosophy, Judas the Galilean was the author. These men agree in all other things with the Pharisaick notions; but they have an inviolable attachment to liberty; and say that God is to be their only ruler and lord. They also do not value dying any kinds of death; nor indeed do they heed the deaths of their relations and friends: nor can any such fear make them call any man lord. And since this immoveable resolution of theirs is well known to a great many, I shall speak no farther about that matter. Nor am I afraid that any thing I have said of them should be disbelieved: but rather fear that what I have said is beneath the resolution they shew when they undergo pain. And it was in Gessius Florus’s time that the nation began to grow mad with this distemper; who was our procurator; and who occasioned the Jews to go wild with it, by the abuse of his authority; and to make them revolt from the Romans. And these are the sects of Jewish philosophy.

Based on the Metaphysics it's clear that the sect of Judaism to which the Early Christians at least nominally belonged was basically the Pharisees.  That can be difficult for a moderner to wrap their head around given how much the word "Pharisee" is colloquially treated as synonymous with being the "Bad Guys" of the Gospels.

Often people who clearly qualify as Christians but exist outside the mainstream will simply refer to what they oppose as "Christianity", I personally try not to do that even though I have greater disagreement with the mainstream Church then some who do, but it is a thing.  

Josephus also tells us here that most of the common people were basically with the Pharisees, so those mass Crowds of people Jesus attracted must have been made up of lots of Pharisees. And then Josephus suggests a lot of people in positions of power were really Sadducees merely pretending to follow the popular religion.

There are hints in The Gospel narrative itself that Jesus' criticisms of the Pharisees are really criticisms from within directed at their leadership.  

In the first three verses of Matthew 23 Jesus tells us two things about the leaders of the Pharisees.  The seat they sit in makes them legitimate heirs of Moses, this to me confirms that the Sanhedrin of the Greco-Roman period as an institution does have unbroken continuity with the Council of Seventy Elders ordained in Numbers 11:16-25.  

The other appears to be that what they preach is correct, they simply don't practice what they preach.  Other things Jesus says about them may seem inconsistent with that, seem absolutely about what they teach.  But I think "from a certain point of view" how you practice what you preach can include how you teach it and interpret it.  The point is Jesus couldn't have said that if He disagreed with the core definition of being a Pharisee.

In Acts 23:6 Paul identifies himself as still a Pharisee on simply the grounds that He believes in The Resurrection of The Dead.  So likewise all of Christianity can claim the same.

According to the timeline that can be inferred from The Talmud, Shammai was head of the Sanhedrin from 20-30 AD.  Some have observed similarities between the teachings of Jesus and Hillel the Elder, the head of the School that Shammai opposed.  This particular internal disagreement within the Pharisees doesn't come up in Josephus, possibly because in his time the Shammai school was already mostly defunct.  But the time period I and many others place the ministry of Jesus is at the height of Shammai's influence, so the Pharisees who are the bad guys of the Gospels could be mainly him and his followers.  I do think certain people online overstate the similarities between Jesus teachings and Hillel's to suit various misguided agendas of their own.  But it's interesting because modern Rabbinic Judaism also descends not only from the Pharisees but specifically Hillel's school.  Perhaps Shammai should have filled the role of the made up Zerah (played by Ian Holm) in the 70s Jesus of Nazareth miniseries.

However even in Josephus's brief description of the Pharisees there is at least one apparent disagreement with The New Testament view of The Resurrection, and that's how it seems ONLY the "Righteous" will be Resurrected.  1 Corinthians 15,  Acts 24:15, Revelation 20 and Jesus in John 5:28-29 are all clear that everyone no exceptions will rise again., and The Hebrew Bible agrees with the NT on this in Daniel 12.  Now as a proponent of Universal Salvation I disagree with most mainstream Christians on exactly what it means that the unjust will face "Judgment" after their Resurrection, but we do all still agree that they will also rise again to a literal bodily Resurrection.

And that last point is key to why I wanted to discus the Doctrine of the Resurrection in the context of 1st Century Judaism.  Some people try really hard to abuse certain details of 1 Corinthians 15 and 2 Corinthians 5 to suggest Paul and other NT writers must mean by "Resurrection" something that is actually functionally the same as what either the Essenes (we live forever as immortal souls without a body) or Sadducees (no real after life at all) believed.  However we see here that people who believed those kinds of things in first century Judaism didn't use the language of Resurrection, so it's silly to think Paul or Peter or Jesus would if that's what they meant.

Another interesting observation I can make from Josephus's description is how there was a familiar debate about Human Free Will vs Divine Sovereignty.  With the Essenes being like Augustine and the Calvinists, while the Sadducees were more like Pelegius or the Arminians.  The Pharisees however have a more nuanced take on that tension that again I feel is closer to what The New Testament is actually saying, but could also be compared to the Stoic position on Free Will vs Fate in Greek Philosophy.  I also feel like the Sadducees are functionally Deists, what we today call Deism began in Greek Philosophy with Aristotle and then the Epicureans.

Many people want to connect the Essenes to the origins of Christianity based on their practicing a voluntary communalism similar to the Early Church in Acts.  But they did it for a different reason, they had inherited a Pythagorean notion of the Immortality of The Soul, and indeed Classical Pagan Pythagoreans also practiced a sort of Voluntary Communalism, but for both it was about viewing the physical world as a Prison they seek liberation from.  Early Christians lived this way to be a light within the world and salt of the earth.  The Early Christians were true Communists, the Pythagoreans were more like Strasserists or NazBols, they were in bed with totalitarian governments in Samos and Crotone, and likewise I had argued that those Josephus called Essenes were those Matthew 22 called Herodians.  Philo's description of the Essenes also repeats that they had the support of many "Great Kings".  I've also talked about the Pythagorean role in the origins of Puritanical Sexual Morality, and the Essenes seem to have been the same way on that too, as well as their Misogyny, I think the Essenes were basically Herod's Proud Boys.  The Zealots were the Revolutionary Anarchists, and they were also originally a sect of the Pharisees.

Update: Of course much Confusion about the Essenes exists because of how they are conflated with the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Many have questioned that connection for reasons that have little to do with why I'm skeptical of it.

I partly reject it, I don't think the Scrolls all have a common origin.  Even if they did all come from that one settlement called Qumran, maybe the assumption everyone living there was all of the same sect is wrong.  Some Scrolls do seem fairly consistent with how Josephus described the Essenes, but other Scrolls mention the Resurrection, and also clearly have an interest in Eschatology and The Messiah.

Roman A. Montero in All Things In Common says the Pythagoreans weren't like the Essenes or Early Christians because they weren't Messianic or Apocalyptic.  But the thing is from what Josephus tells us, Eschatology was inherently the purview of the Pharisees, people with Essene or Sadducee views on the After Life would be just as uninterested in the Future as most Pagan Greeks were.  He also mentions how the Pythagoreans were a purely upper class phenomena, and again based on the Herodian connection I think the real Essenes were too.  It's possible at Qumran the Essenes were the Bourgeoisie who owned the place while the Pharisees were the Proletariat.

Update: "Everlasting Prison".

The "everlasting prison" in the above translation of Josephus's description of the After Life view of the Pharisees might in some other translations read "eternal prison".  In this case Eternal/Everlasting is Aidios which in a real sense does mean that, not Aionios which never actually means that.

Some of my Universal Salvation allies make much out of the Pharisees here using different language then Jesus who used Aionios and not that particular word for "prison" either, saying Jesus would have used the same word if He also meant a punishment with no end.  But I feel we overstate our case on that one a bit.

First of all Jesus was not speaking in Greek, and what ever main doctrinal statements the Pharisees had that Josephus got this from probably weren't in Greek either, they were either Hebrew or Aramaic. I am also with those who believe Matthew's Gospel was originally written in one of those languages not Greek.  The possibility that Josephus and the New Testament are sometimes translating the same Semitic expression into Greek differently can't be ruled out.

However even the Greek words in question can have nuance to how they are used.  Jude used "Aidios chains" to describe an imprisonment that is clearly defined as having an end.  And in my view those Angels are not Supernatural Angels but those who were swallowed up by the earth with Korah and Dathan.  So the Prison in the Pharisees eschatology could be Aidios in the same way Jude's chains are.

Maybe my prior assumption that Josephus or the Pharisees he got that from were absolutely precluding the Unrighteous from future Resurrection was mistaken.  Maybe the contrasting language there is like those Bible Verses that seemingly contrast "Life" and "Judgment" at the Resurrection. The Pharisees Jesus was most often in conflict with certainly seem like the kinds of people who wouldn't like Universal Salvation.  But I doubt the very idea was inherently unheard of in Pharisee circles.

In Josephus's description of the Zealots when he says they refuse to "call any man lord" for God is their only Lord, I do think that is a different Greek translation of the same sentiment Jesus expressed in Matthew 23:8-10, one says "Master" the other says "Lord" but the gist of meaning is the same.  

Usually when someone suggests Jesus and the Early Christians were Zealots it goes hand in hand with saying the Pacifist parts of His teachings were a later Romanized white washing.  However I have come to see the Zealot movement as like the Anabaptists of the 16th Century and Secular Anarchists of modern history (and Petr Chelčický could be considered the Pacifist Taborite), they included Violent Rebels like Thomas Muntzer, absolute Pacifist Separatists like those the Mennonites, Hutterites and Amish descend from, and many gradients in-between.  With the reputation of the violent rebels often used to justify not believing the pacifists when they claim to be non-violent.

Hamartia, what does "Sin" actually mean?

People outside The Faith will often look at passages like Romans 3 saying "All have Sinned" and that we are all Sinners as being a very misanthropic sentiment, and some Christians do also treat it that way including myself in the past when I was a more cynical person then I am now.  However the problem is that the harshness of what "Sin" has come to mean to English speakers is no longer a good translation of the Greek or Hebrew concepts being referenced.

The Greek word that Paul and others are using in The New Testament is Hamartia and other forms of that word.  Hamartia is in origin it seems an Archery term, most literally meaning "to miss the mark".  Saying we are all Sinners is just Paul's way of saying nobody's perfect.  Hence "come short of the glory of God".  Now in just these early chapters of Romans it sounds like the consequences of merely being imperfect are pretty harsh, but this is in the context of him arguing agaisnt people way more judgmental then he is as he ultimately argues God has no intention of casting off even the worst of us.

When you look into literary analysis people talk about the concept of a "tragic flaw" that goes back to Aristotle's writings on the subject.  That two word phrase is a translation of one word Aristotle used, Hamartia, I use Hamartia in this literary sense on another blog in my recent School Days analysis, but I wrote that already planning to write this and will probably go back and add links to this post.  It amuses me how rarely this connection is made.

Red of OverlySarcasticProductions in her video on Tragedies says that a character's "Tragic Flaw" can also be the same as their virtue in a different context.  And indeed I'd argue many of the best Superman stories involve the villain trying make a weakness of the very thing that makes him a Hero, and the same thing sometimes happens in Magical Girl Anime.  Now many Christians may have trouble with the idea of this being applicable to The Bible's use of Hamartia, but remember when Paul called himself the Chief of Sinners in 1 Timothy 1:15?  Well the Sin he means is confirmed by what he said earlier in the chapter to be his former status as a persecutor of the Church, and I would argue the very character traits that made Paul a dangerous enemy of The Gospel are what later made him a powerful advocate for it.

However I also think to a large extent the Jewish writers of The New Testament are using Hamartia to translate the Hebrew Bible's concept of Chet'/Chatta'/Chatta'ah, which is also frequently translated Sin and is the word used to name the Sin Offering of the Levitical Sacrificial system.  When 2 Corinthians 5:21 says Jesus was made Sin for us, it's defining Him as a Sin Offering as the Hebrew of those Torah passages usually don't feature a word for offering as a separate word.

The Sin offering is defined as being offered to atone for violations of the Torah committed in Ignorance, the Trespass offering is for violations that were "high handed" (I've seen that suggested as the best translation), but neither is sufficient for actual capital offenses.

Hebrew Roots people will take 1 John 3:4's statement that "Sin is transgression of the Law" to prove that "yes The Torah does still apply no matter how often Paul appears to say otherwise".  However that ignores how in The Torah not all transgressions of The Law are what the word "Sin" refers to.

On The Cross Jesus said "Father forgive them for they know not what they do", he defined their actions as Sins committed in ignorance even though by any normal standard they clearly aren't.  Matthew 9:10-13 tells us to think of Sin as an illness that needs treatment, not a crime that needs punishment.  Which is why many theologians see that statement from The Cross as ultimately applying to all the wrongdoings of all Mankind.

Related to this is the issue of cleanness and uncleanness in the Torah.  People keep assuming those passages are about some mystical spiritual uncleanness, but they aren't, they are just literal hygiene laws.

Like how some people keep citing the verse saying Women are "unclean" when they menstruate as some proof of The Bible's horrible sexism.  The Torah is imperfect (Hebrew 7) so I'm not going to claim there is nothing patriarchal about it.  But that exact same chapter of Leviticus says the same about Male Ejaculate and the bodily waste everyone produces regardless of gender.  It's just a passage telling us to wash our hands and shower.

"What about the incident where Jesus refused to wash his hands and then clearly moral uncleanness".  The thing about that incident is that I'm wiling to bet Jesus had washed His hands, just not in the specific public ritual customary to that group of Pharisees.  What He said there was in response to that they were thinking of spiritual cleanness because Hellenistic ideas were already infecting 1st Century Judaism.

The Ten Planks of The Communist Manifesto are NOT the definition of Communism.

Taking the 10 Planks out of their context is where the basis of defining Socialism as "when the Government does stuff" comes from.

For a lot of people this small piece of the Manifesto is the only Marxist material they've ever been exposed to.  Which frankly would be like claiming to understand Christianity if your knowledge of The Gospel narrative ended on Good Friday.  I long ago used to think these were the entirety of the Manifesto from how people like Kent Hovind presented it, but the truth is they occur at the end of chapter 2 of a 4 chapter manifesto almost as an after thought.

The Definition of Communism is a Moneyless, Classless, Stateless Society.  The definition of Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production.  Most politically educated people know that the core disagreement between Anarchists and Marxists is on the transitional state.  However Marxism actually has two transitional states, Lower Phase Communism (which Lenin called Socialism) is itself the product of a prior transitional period.  Lenin on the eve of his death still did not believe Russia was Socialist yet but only almsot ready for it, and remember for Lenin Socialism referred specifically to the Lower Phase.  The 10 Planks are still State Capitalism even when genuine Communists are doing them.

The problem with someone like Casual Historian thinking they can critique how "Communist" America is by going down these planks and measuring how much they apply like some sort of Political Compass test is that Marxists do not support these measures inherently for their own sake.  They are the measures Revolutionaries are supposed to take after a Revolution.  A State doing these things is only even mildly Communist if it's a truly Proletarian State, if it's far more actually Democratic then The United States has ever been.  Or at the very least a State controlled by unapologetic Socialists, not merely mildly socially progressive Liberals who the Conservatives will call Socialists no matter what.

I am a Communist who does not in fact fully agree with these planks even in their proper context, but that's besides the point of this post.  Even to the most enthusiastic apologists of these planks, they are not themselves what Communism is.

The thing about the 2nd Plank, the Income Tax plank.  Is that even in a proper revolutionary context it is not compatible with an income tax on hourly wages.  In the context of what Marxist ideology is, it's obvious that Profits or Surplus is the income meant here, however the Manifesto didn't feel the need to explain that since I don't think the idea of taxing hourly wages was even proposed yet back then.  

Unfortunately in the modern U.S. the Taxation discussion has become so poisoned that everyone now thinks calling for any kind of Tax cuts much less abolition is inherently right wing.  But the truth is there is nothing Socialist about taxing wages, Marxist ideology is founded on the belief that wage laborers already aren't getting nearly the compensation they deserve even before they are Taxed. Liberal progressives and even many Social Democrats have convinced themselves that "paying taxes is how I contribute to society", but if it's only Corporate Profits being Taxed those Profits are still generated by the labor of the workers, it's still a contribution you are truly responsible for.  It's not greedy or selfish to want the Government to stop stealing from the already minimal compensation you were forced to accept.

After the Paris Commune Marx and Engels actually said that the 10 planks of the Manifesto should be rewritten to clarify that the Communists can't simply co-opt the existing state institutions, they are fundamentally Capitalist institutions at their core, so the Revolution needs to tare those down and rebuild them from scratch.

That leads me to Plank 5, the Central Bank.  The problem with saying The Federal Reserve can be a fulfilment of this plank is that in addition to all the context I provided above, a truly Socialist Central Bank would be actually Publicly owned not privately owned with alleged Government oversight.  A lot of supporters of our current monetary status quo really want to dismiss the Private nature of the Federal Reserve, saying it's only privately owned in the most technical sense. And yes I know a lot of the Anti-Federal Reserve rhetoric out there comes from a Right Wing conspiracy theorist world view, but that doesn't change that Socialists should also oppose such an institution.  The Fed being run by presidential appointments means nothing when the shareholders of the Fed are the same super rich people financing both major parties.

It's not always just Anti-Communists who misuse the Manifesto in this way.  Plank 8 for example is why there is any leftist opposition to The Basic Income.  And  I've also seen Leftists argue that we should ban Home Schooling by pointing to the 10th Plank.

Now Plank 10 is the one I most disagree with even in it's proper context, I'm agaisnt Public Education as a concept.  But regardless the current Prussian Model Public School system is a fundamentally Capitalist institution who's goal is to indoctrinate not educate, to create passive industrial wage laborers.  It's become long outdated even within the framework of Liberal Capitalism as society is now deindustrializing.  So it's certainly not something The Left should defend just because there is talk of Public Education in an 1848 Manifesto.

In my opinion Communists should themselves be doing Homeschooling and not subjecting our children to this broken and evil system.  If that comes with allowing Conservative Evangelicals to do their Right Wing home schooling then so be it.  Even Conservative Home Schooling is better then the existing School System which doesn't have a single redeeming quality.

The Marxist definition of Utopianism.

One of the things that annoys me about Marxists is how they create definitions of words but then treat those definition as the somehow true definitions.

They are most inclined to acknowledge other definitions exist when referring to the "Anarchist definition of The State" when addressing their disagreements with Anarchists.  Thing is the Anarchist Definition is also the objective definition, even pro-State conservatives and liberals can't really object to it.  It's only Marxists that use a different definition, yet they keep trying to frame the debate as if the Anarchist are the ones who fabricated a biased definition.

However the worst Marxist definition is their definition of Utopianism.  Whenever someone accuses Marx of Utopianism instead of engaging with that actual criticism they go "Ugh Marx invented criticizing Utopian Socialists so you clearly don't understand Marxism".  But the Marxist definition of Utopian is in fact not even close to being a valid definition.  At least with The State their definition is a reasonable alternate explanation for the same phenomena, but what Marxists mean when they say "Utopian Socialists" is not even related to what the root word "Utopia" means.

The reason I can say that so strongly is because I also know exactly what word they should be using instead, Idealist/Idealistic.  What Marxists keep saying is wrong with Utopianism is that it's a belief that a Platonic Ideal of Socialism already exists in the Platonic world of forms, and the way to finally make it work in the material world is to make a less imperfect copy of this predetermined form.  Anyone who actually is thinking that way I would disagree with, as rejecting Plato is one of the overarching storylines of this blog.

But I don't think everyone Marxists call Utopian are truly guilty of that, I have my doubts any really are.  My point is that's what their definition is, and their continually saying "Utopian" when they mean "Idealist" is simply bad use of language, period.

They sometimes call Anarchists "Utopian", but Anarchists in fact do just as much Material Class Analysis as they do, they simply come to different conclusions on issues like Economic Determinism.  But even with the writers most uncontroversial to describe as Utopian Socialists, I feel like maybe their critics are just taking them a little too literally.

If I wrote a work of fiction in which I depicted a Socialist society and included a lot of world building details on how it functions.  I would take it for granted that no one would assume I'm saying real world Socialism needs to match that exactly.  It's just a hypothetical idea I threw out to get people thinking.  Maybe Charles Fourier and Saint-Simon were simply doing the same in a non fiction format?  I don't know since I haven't and don't plan to actually read them.

However it's Moses Hess and Flora Tristan I most object to dismissing the way Marxists like to dismiss everyone before Marx as "Utopian".  Their approaches were just as Materialist as Marx and Bakunin, but Marxists are invested in a belief that no one was doing material Analysis before Marx.  So for the most part their very existence gets ignored.

In ContraPoints recent Video on Envy which I thought was pretty darn great even though I don't agree with everything, she calls Marxism "Utopian" because of it's deterministic belief in the inevitability of the fall of Capitalism to Socialism.  I don't think that's a great use of the word "Utopian" either, but it's still a valid criticism, as the idea is a comparison to the perceived ramifications of Christian belief in an inevitable Second Coming.  Which is a comparison that has been made before, just usually not using that word.

Marxists tend to insist they're more Optimistic then other Leftists precisely because of this belief in it's inevitability.  But no, Optimism is the Belief that you can Win and Pessimism the belief that you can't.  Believing victory is inevitable is a way to be Optimistic, but arguably not the most pragmatic way.  I think it's important to believe we can win, but we won't if we don't actually do anything but vote for Democrats.

Okay so enough with rambling about what Utopian doesn't mean. 

The Definition of Communism, a Moneyless, Classless, Stateless Society, is a Utopia, period.  Secular Leftists not liking the quasi religious connotations the word often has doesn't change that.  The word "Utopia" was being used to describe that idea long before the word "Communism" was, in fact the original hypothetical society the word was coined to describe was a Communist one.

Because the word has become so negatively connotated in the last century, among Leftists it keeps in some way being used a description of how to get there, they make it a Verb instead of a Noun.  I however say we reject the negative connotations and start calling ourselves Utopians as a badge of honor.

God and The Universe

The more I've thought about the issues I first discussed in Semi-Arianism and the Second Ecumenical Council the more I've come to think that the Homoousion controversy became a distraction from the actual point of the Arian Heresy.  But that's not me saying Homoousionism is wrong, per se.

So first we need to ask the question of why even did the full Arians (and even many Semi-Arians) object to the Homoousion formula so strongly?  It was not relevant to Arius's original explanation of his Theology at all.  And Arians did believe Jesus was the Son of God.  Aren't most children made from the Substance of their parents?

It's because of how by this time the Pythagorean and Platonic understanding of The Divine had influenced all schools of thought in the Greco-Roman world.  To them no Created Being could be described as being of the same Substance as the True Original God.  The Demiurge of Timaeus could be considered in some sense Homousian with the matter it was merely rearranging, but even the Demiurge was not Homousian with the True God (at least during this later post Numenius of Apamea period of Platonism and Pythagoreanism).  And the Arians were essentially Platonists who identified The Logos/Jesus with the Demiurge not the ultimate Supreme Being.  However what the Arians and Athanasians and Trinitarians who were iffy on Homoousianism like Eusebius of Caesarea all agreed on was that Creation itself is not Homousian with The Father.

I am making this post to suggest that this assumption everyone at Nicaea agreed on is actually something that The Bible maybe doesn't agree with.

I know that many Christians are used to thinking God must be completely outside The Universe in order to be it's Creator.  But if you know what you're doing, you can construct a circular wall in such a way that you are within it when you are done making it.  And maybe the Substance of God is Infinite enough that He could create the Universe from His own Substance without lessening Himself at all?

When The Bible says that The Heavens are His Throne and The Earth His Footstool, that imagery tells me He's within The Universe not outside of it.  Remember both the Ancient Hebrew and Greek words for "Heaven" at their core just meant The Sky and what we would call Outer Space.  I already made a post arguing that the Light that lightened the Universe before the Sun, Moon and Stars were created was the same Light that Jesus is identified with.  And then there is the fact that Adam became a Living Soul when God Breathed Life into him.  Breath in that verse is also a word for Spirit.  To me that is pretty strong support for at least our Spirits and/or Souls being homousian with The Holy Spirit.

InspiringPhilosophy in his video on Panentheism said there is supposed to be a strong distinction between Creator and Creation, but the only verse he cited was what Paul said in Romans 1.  First of all that verse was only about what we're supposed to Worship and nothing else.  And also Romans 1:18-32 is Paul quoting the beliefs of the Platonic Hellenized Jews of Rome he spent the rest of the Epistle refuting.  In Romans 11 Paul tells us what God is doing in grafting Gentiles into Israel is "Para phusis" thus utterly destroying the world view of Romans 1 where being "Para Phusis" is presented as inherently evil.

Materialism is often assumed to be inherently Atheistic.  However the Theology of the Ancient Stoics was a Materialist Monotheism.  (IP for some reason defined Soticism completely wrong in the Panentheism video), and so was the Theology of Dutch Jewish Philosopher Spinoza.

God being in The Universe doesn't mean He would be in it in a way that our currently limited ablity to perceive it could detect.  We now know there are at least 10 dimensions but we live in or perceive only 4 of them, the 3 spatial dimensions and time.  "Dark matter" is just a term for matter scientists are pretty sure exists but we are not currently capable of detecting with any of our 5 senses, and it's estimated to make up 85% of all matter.  The 6 colors our eyes can see are only a small piece of the Electromagnetic Spectrum, and it's the same with the other senses.

In other words No I'm not arguing that God and His Angels simply live on a Planet orbiting Polaris that we could fly a space ship to.

[Update November: See this post which is kind of a follow up.]

[The below digression into Stoicism I am more iffy on now, I don't want to erase it, it should have maybe always been a separate post.]

Divine Impassability and Divine Immutability

Are two doctrines that I had mistakenly conflated with each other in some of my past posts mentioning Divine Impassability on this blog. But they are related.

Divine Impassibility is the position that God did not suffer when Jesus was on Th Cross, it doesn't deny the Divinity of Christ, but holds that it was only in His Humanity that He Suffered.  Divine Immutability is the position that God doesn't change.  They tend to go together because Suffering is often both the cause and effect of some kind of Change.

The three way dispute between Chalcedonian, Nestorian and Miaphysite Christologies from the 5th and 6th Centuries is arguably pure semantics since all three were/are Nicene Trinitarians who view Christ as both Fully Divine and Fully Human.  The Nestorians held that Christ has two Natures, Divine and Human, that are not in any way mixed.  The Miaphysite position is that Christ has One Nature that is both Divine and Human.  The Chalcedonian position is that Christ had Two Natures, Divine and Human, that are mixed in the Incarnation.  The Bible doesn't directly address any of that, but my understanding of the Biblical Metanarrative leads me to favoring the Chalcedonian position, even if there are some details of the Chalcedonian Confession I don't like.

Thing is what makes these disputes a little less semantical are the other issues tied into them.  My greatest affinity with Nestorianism is that I don't like calling Mary Theotokos.  However since the technical accuracy of the term is not my issue with it, it's really irrelevant to the actual dispute Nestorius, Cyril and others were having 15 centuries ago.

While Divine Impassability is affirmed by theologians in all three camps, it was the Nestorians for whom it was the core of their position, and they alone who accused both other camps of rejecting Divine Impassability whether they would have self identified as doing so or not.  That is why in-spite of my respect for the Ancient Church of the East and how much I prefer the Antiochene School's approach to Scripture over the Alexandrian, I have to reject Nestorian Christology.

Thing is the Nestorians were not wrong to suggest that it's rather illogical to claim Divine Impassability if you believe the Divine and Human Natures were fully United in the Incarnation.  Cyril of Alexandria's attempts to justify himself on this involved a lot of Platonist Philosophical nonsense.  And that is why I unapologetically reject Divine Impassability.

But I still oppose misrepresenting Nestorius or the Ancient Church of The East, they did and still do believe Christ was one Person/Personality.  But the Miaphysites also get misrepresented, they were NOT Monophysites.

The Fifth Ecumenical Council affirmed the Theopaschite formula in it's 10th Canon.  And yet Impassability has still been affirmed by theologians belonging to Churches that nominally uphold that Council, thanks to Augustine's influence in the West and Cyril's in the East, so that canon gets ignored.  When the Fifth Council is brought up today it's only to debate what/who it did or did not condemn, never what it affirmed.  But getting the Theopaschite Formula affirmed was the whole point of the Council at the time, Justinian thought that would be the key to mending the Chalcedonian schism.

The fact that I agree with Justinian on the Theopaschite formula doesn't change that I despise him as a Ruler.  His obsession with trying to force everyone to agree only made them dig their heels in deeper.

Another issue related to the Divine Impassability v Theopaschite debate is Patripassianism, did The Father also suffer?  I would argue He Suffered in the way any Father watching His Son Suffer would Suffer, but that is distinct from feeling the Physical pain.

Augustine of Hippo used to be a Manichean Gnostic, and the whole reason he once held a Gnostic attitude towards the God of the Old Testament was because he was uncomfortable with the idea of God being so Emotional.  It was Ambrose telling he can just allegorize away all of those verses that finally enabled Augustine to abandon Gnosticism and become "Orthodox".  To me it is Augustine being someone who doesn't want an Emotional God that is the source of everything wrong with this Theology.

While strictly speaking the word Impassibility refers to is Suffering, to some this doctrine refers to God not feeling Pleasure as well.  To me this rejecting of God being an Emotional being at all is pure Platonic/Pythagorean heresy and utterly in conflict with The Hebrew Bible and The New Testament which teaches that God Is Love as the experience of Love tends to involve both Pleasure and Pain.

On the subject of Divine Immutability, it depends what you mean by it.  Malachi 3:6 is what most gets abused here as people keep quoting it while ignoring it's context.  That God keeps His Promises doesn't change, that He Is Love won't change, therefore He will NOT allow His People to be Consumed.  That Core aspect of Who God Is does not change.  It's the same with Hebrews 13:8 "Jesus Christ is the same Yesterday, Today and Forever" the context is about Grace and Jesus being a Sacrifice offered for us, it's about His essential character not some absolute declaration that nothing can ever change, as Romans 8:35 and it's context make clear.

But The Bible also refers to God Repenting (See Exodus 32:14 and Numbers 14:12-20; Jonah 3:10; Amos 7:3-9; Jeremiah 26:3), repent means to change one's mind.  And I feel the whole point of the Incarnation is that Humanity and Divinity are both permanently changed by being United in Christ.  The Hyper Immutability that is favored by Nestorius, Cyril and Augustine is again a heresy based on the Greek and Roman Churches' infatuation with Platonic and Pythagorean theology, not Scripture.

Divine Immutability doesn't begin with Plato or Pythagoras however but with Xenophanes.

There is also the matter of one of the most vital passages to defining God in all of scripture.  The famous "I Am that I am" statement, many scholars have argued a more accurate translation would be "I Am who I Am Becoming" or "I Will Be whom I Will Be", meanings that imply change even if in a paradoxical way due to God's knowing the future.  I personally have grown to like "I Am whom I Will Be", "Watashi wa watashi ga dare ni naru ka".

Update September 2022: I bought Robert C. Gregg and Dennis E. Groh's Early Arianism - a view of salvation for the purpose of research on the Arian controversy I'm doing for the sake of a possible future post.  But two things I didn't expect to learn were. 1. Arius had a fixation on Divine Impassability similar to the future Nestorians.  2. The Arians used Divine Immutability against the Nicenes by proving the changeability of The Son.  And this was kind of their greatest strength because Athanasius was unwilling to abandon Divine Immutability.

The Changeability the Arians the argued for The Son was for Improvability, which you may at first think doesn't correlate to the Changeability I am here arguing for The Godhead, but from a certain point of view it is.  God incarnating and becoming fully Human made Him a better God.  Hebrews stresses how Jesus faced all the Temptations normal humans face yet never sinned.  Not sinning is easy when you aren't even tempted, it is facing Temptation and beating it that is a true accomplishment.

The Pagan Greek Origins of Puritan Sexual Morality.

I wrote an Amazon Review for the book Plato or Paul?: The Origins of Western Homophobia by Theodore W. Jennings Jr.  [I recently learned that Jennings had passed away in 2020, may he Rest in Peace.]

I have also more recently obtained The Classical Origins of Modern Homophobia by Robert H. Allen.  I may also write an Amazon Review for it. 

I first learned about the Homophobia of Plato's The Laws however when I discovered this Website.

https://people.well.com/user/aquarius/

In it's article Plato: The Serpent in the Garden of Sexuality.  

My own past blog posts on this issue are a bit outdated now due to their references to things I've since changed my mind on, or at least now have a more informed opinion on.  Like how I had fallen into the trap of mistakenly thinking there was anything Communist or Socialist about either of Plato's proposed political systems.

Each of those three discussions of this issue have areas I disagree with.  None are as "Conservative" as I am about the origins of The Bible.  Only Jennings agrees with me that Paul is on our side, and Allen's agenda is not to exonerate The Bible of Homophobia at all, he alone of them agrees with the Homophobic reading of even the Leviticus verses.  Actually he cites a Saul Olyan that it's specifically referring to Male on Male Anal Penetration, which is close to my old position, but I now believe the "Wife's Bed" and "Abomination to Her" readings are the key to proving this is not a unilateral condemnation of any specific Sex act much less any type of relationship.

I think Jennings's theory on what Arsenokoites refers to (which is that it's essentially Rape) is probably most correct.  But I don't agree with his argument against it being in any way an allusion to the Leviticus verses, I simply think what he correctly argues Arsenkoites refers to, is what some people in Ancient Corinth and Ephesus thought those Leviticus verses were about.  His argument that Paul doesn't generally cite Leviticus to make moral arguments is irrelevant to the Vice Lists, because in those he was just using terms his audience would be familiar with, the vice lists are not themselves arguments against the behaviors listed.

I think Jennings's break down of Romans 1 is useful. but I still mainly side with Colby Martin's take on that in his Unclobber series.  Which is that Romans 1:18-32 is a rhetorical rant, that he's laying out the worldview the Epistle as a whole is written against, paraphrasing passages from Wisdom of Solomon and adding in Philo's usage of the "Para Phusis" concept introduced in The Laws, in order to spend the rest of the Epistle refuting that world view, in Romans 11 what God does is Para Phusis clearly rejecting the idea that being Para Phusis is immoral.

And Allen's cynical readings of The Bible lead to similar issues with extra-Biblical Church writers as well.  Clement of Alexandria was the first Christian to bring this "Para Phusis" Sexual Morality into the Church.  The crime of "corrupting youth" in works like the Didache is not Homosexuality or anything Sexual, just as it wasn't when Athens executed Socrates for that crime.  I likewise feel Allen is being unfair to both Justin Martyr and Tertullian.

The reason why I didn't put Plato in the title of this post is because Allen argues Pythagorean Philosophy and it's Dualism is the ultimate origin of this problem.  He argues Authentic Plato may have been at least partially influenced by Pythagoreanism, but also argues that The Laws as we have it is not an authentic work of Plato but a forgery produced and transmitted primarily by Pythagoreans.  And I think he might be correct on that.  Here is a YouTube video expressing similar ideas about the origins of Laws and how to interpret The Republic.

But still Authentic Plato or not the development of Platonic Schools of Philosophy was influenced by The Laws on these issues and others, which in turn influenced Roman Stoicism, Neopythagoreanism, Hellenistic Judaism, Gnosticism, The Alexandrian School of Christianity, and Neo-Platonism, which also all influenced each other in late Antiquity culminating in John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria and Augustine of Hippo.  Allen also documents how across the board Pagan Roman Society was Homophobic having been influenced by Southern Italian Pythagoreanism long before they even came into contact with the Eastern Mediterranean.

However another theory on the perceived inconsistencies between The Laws and the seemingly more positive Sexual attitudes expressed in works like Symposium is that Plato changed over the course of his life, perhaps partly from Pythagorean influence.  The Laws is considered the very last book he wrote and Symposium one of the earliest.

But going back to more indisputably authentic Plato, the title character of Timaeus (who's still around during Critias) is inferred to be a Pythagorean in the text of that dialogue.  So what Timaeus says can reasonably be presumed to be at least what Plato thought the Pythagoreans believed.  And it's from Timaeus we get what's considered the Platonic Creation Myth including the The Demiurge.  What's up for debate is how much the author wants us to take the title character and his ideas seriously.

The Website I linked to up top also has interesting stuff on the "Born Eunuch" issue and other subjects.  But it's article The Historic Origins of Church Condemnation of Homosexuality I don't recommend.  I have found no other sources claiming Eusebius of Nicomedia was ever referred to as a Eunuch.  meanwhile the pro Nicene Emperor Constans was a known Homosexual, before Theodosius I it was the Arian Emperors who were far more oppressive to those who disagreed with them.  [Update: So the Eunuch he's talking isn't the Bishop of Nicomedia who died in 341 but a different Eusebius mentioned in Athanasius's History of The Arians during the "Papacy" of Liberius.  Still I feel it's wrong to say the Arian controversy is why The Church embraced this Pythagorean sexual morality.  There were clearly Homosexuals and Platonists on both sides, Arian theology wouldn't be possible without the Timaeus based distinction between the Demiurge and the Monad, though making that distinction arguably begins with Numenius of Apamea in the 2nd Century.]

It's not just Homophobia, condemning all Sex Outside Marriage has the same roots in The Laws attributed to Plato.  As well as the idea that Sex is only for Reproduction which 1 Corinthians 7 explicitly contradicts.  What's almost Prophetic about it is how it talks about using Religion to condition society to react to Same Sex love the same way they do Incest.  These people were never fully able to get the Greeks to believe such things about their Native gods, but once many Greeks started worshiping the God of Abraham without a proper understanding of Bronze Age Semitic culture, that was when this long term scheme to lie about God's attitude towards Sex was able to take off.

Here is another Article I found about Pythagorean Sexual Morality.  And here is one on Pythagoras and Celibacy.

And it's not just the Sexual Morality of The Laws either.  Some people accuse Plato of being Proto-Fascist just based on The Republic, but The Laws is even more indistinguishable from the actual definition of Fascism.  Allen argued that the Pythagorean movement was tied to Totalitarianism already even before Plato's time.  Meanwhile the Calvinist view of Election which derives from Augustine's Gnostic Predestinationism lends itself well to the in-group vs out-group mentality.

Connecting this Sexual Morality to Platonism is useful because of how many other Unbiblical Ideas to enter Christianity are also tied to Plato's both direct and indirect influence on Greco-Roman Church Writers, including ideas opposed by many Conservative Evangelicals today.  So maybe a good way to open some minds is to show how these Sexual attitudes are tied to other doctrines they don't like.

Not all Platonic Ideas to enter the Church became part of Mainstream Christian thought.  Gnosticism and Marcionism were condemned as Heretical, as well as the Pre-Existence of Souls doctrine often associated with Origen, and Arianism which was also influenced by the Theology of Timaeus.  Still those ideas are related to things that did become mainstream.  Most casual Christians do have a fairly Platonic Understanding of the Immortality of the Soul simply minus the Reincarnation and Pre-Existence (Pope Benedict XII's Benedictus Deus in 1336 basically canonized the After Life depicted in Gorgias for the Western Church.), which in turn helps lead to Full Preterism and Amillenialism and any other Eschatology that denies a Literal Bodily Resurrection. 

Divine Impassability and Divine Immutability which I plan on making a separate post on are also tied to Platonic understandings of The Divine.  And a section in Gorgias definitely influenced the Traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of Hell and The Lake of Fire.

Evangelicals who don't like how more mainline dominations have been rejecting taking The Old Testament literally should know that not only is that a Platonic influence but the Allegorists are open about that.  In Brad Jersak's seminar on the subject he brags about how the Early Church Fathers decided to take the same approach to the Hebrew Bible that Plato and other Philosophers took to Homer and Hesiod.  He leaves out how the Antiochene School rejected that idea and were hyper-literalists.

Even Plato wasn't wrong on everything, he correctly concluded that the Earth was Round.  And that is why the most openly anti-Plato Christians on YouTube right now are the Flat Earthers.  So someone should explain to them how their Puritan Sexual morality has the same Platonic roots.  Still these Flat Earthers are unwittingly Pythagorean themselves with their Dome Cosmology resulting in a hard separation between the Divine and Earthly realms, and Rob Skiba even entertaining the view that we didn't have physical bodies before The Fall which is outright Gnostic.

One Pythagorean idea that was only ever accepted among some of the Full Blown Gnostics was Reincarnation, that one was especially impossible to make fit into The Bible.  But I do feel those who on Eschatology argue John The Baptist was the return of Elijah promised by Malachi's final verse are trying to plant a seed for it.

Over the course of the 2nd through 6th centuries Greco-Roman Christians increasingly took on Platonic Influences but in different ways.  Some seemed to be taking the Dialogue structure more so then any Metaphysics.  However when I look at Athenagoras of Athens who came a little before even Clement, it seems like the Sexual Morality of Laws was one of the first aspects of Platonism Christians embraced.  Maybe it's because even early on Paul's use of Para Phusis was easy to misunderstand.  Or maybe it's because this Minority religion mistakenly felt they should be rebelling agaisnt the Morals of mainstream Greek Society which it so happened was also what the Pythagoreans were doing.

Some similarities between Neoplatonism and Hellenic Judeo-Christians are the former being influenced by the latter, Numenius of Apamea definitely studied Jewish Platonists like Philo, and Ammonius Saccas was raised a Christian but then left the faith before becoming a teacher of Plotinus.  The puritanical Sexual Morality however definitely began with the Pagans not the Christians as this post has shown.