Olivier5

God, maybe, or your vision of Him. Parents, often. Your self-esteem too, perhaps. There are worse saints than Francis, if you ask me. He is interestin...

Not many folks would understand Renaud's verses here. It's not even standard French... This may be a bit easier to follow. Must be the only pop song m...

So it's important in terms of the history of furniture?

In effect, Renard is Renaud's demon. The French text is much better than my translation, BTW. He writes in thick Parisian slang, and I learnt English ...

I was somewhat less interested in ecclesiastic history when I visited Assisi than I am now. I remember the basilica was beautiful. A missed opportunit...

This assumes quite a lot, for instance that Greeks were likely to patronize Jewish carpenters at the time, in spite of all the hatred and prejudice on...

You know me well... I visited Assisi once but I know very little about St Francis, still.

No, I did not say any such thing. But I suppose those Palestinian Jews who needed to learn Greek for their dealing with the Greeks might gave gone thr...

Not if he had no business with the Kittim. You learn a language for a reason. Jews in the diaspora had very good reasons to learn Greek, but not those...

I don't know why people keep on looking for Greek influences on Jesus. A more useful line of analysis takes a longer historical view, and look at the ...

Of course there were. But it does not follow that Jesus was one of them.

I am all for the law and its application. Attempts at self-righteous lynching is what I object to.

They wouldn't, not in 1st century Palestine, but a century later, when Greek speakers wrote the story, they used the LXX to check that they had the qu...

That is simply not true. Targumin existed for a reason, and they were not sacrilegious. Or not too much, not anymore than the Septuagint... Jesus read...

It's great to have if you want to be able to move on, and not let your life get dragged by endless grudges. And once punished, large damages too are f...

Right. But that could be simply because the writers checked on the source they had access to while writing the gospels. He spoke Aramaic.

It is perfectly fine to discard views you don't like, as long as you know why you don't like them. We all do that. You can't force me to listen to Tru...

Because nobody's perfect. Errare humanum est. When YOU make a mistake, do you prefer it not when people show a little charity? Or do you prefer to be ...

Where?

Yes, it makes lynching quite tempting, even righteous.

I don't know. What I see is a lot of folks getting a kick out of behaving all judgmental on others, and doing so in a mindless mob-like manner. What I...

I suppose the problem with throngs of folks angrily pursuing social justice over the interwebs is that things are often more complicated than most peo...

By and large, so-called cancel culture only concerns people with a significant social media exposure, who tend to care for their online or public prof...

Welcome back, man. I liked that!

Blick Bassy - Mpodol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZaDnzVz3PM Heard this song and found it real nice. Though I don't have the lyrics, it seems pret...

He is considered one of the best specialists of that period in the English-speaking world.

Yes, the canon was set in Jamnia, which is widely seen as the birth date of modern rabbinical judaism. But the text itself in a fully vocalized and pu...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNe-oa8GeCU My naked body on the floor I’ve hurt myself for years My hand on my eyes Don't want to remove it Yet there...

The Jewish canon wasn't fixed until later, but the Septuagint gives you a good idea of the books considered normative, and worthy of being translated ...

As you must be aware of already, people read whatever they want in scripture. They invest into it. Readers, midrashers, commentators, translators have...

At least they had this reputation among among Jerusalemites, but I suppose you are right, that having to live with other nations and religions, you mi...

It is true that Galilee at the time was hosting a variety of folks and tribes. It's already called 'Galilee of the nations' in Isaiah, written well be...

In a way, the same thing applies to Jesus: the messianic and son-of-god 'mythology' has come at the expense of the message. What the man had said beca...

Importantly, the Roman supression of the Bar Kochba revolt killed millions of Jews and left Palestine unrecognisable, "ethnically cleansed". So what m...

Hadrian did that. I mean, the region was devastated by Hadrian's legions circa 130 AD, with millions of deaths. Jewish presence was purposefully erase...

Thanks for the kind words. ------- Just to be clear, my point was NOT to try and mock Jesus or anybody else, or to say that he was 'just another rabbi...

I don't think so. There's a taboo on heathen books at the times, they were not considered worthy of study by a lawful Jew. "Cursed is the person who r...

Clearly, but I don't think Jesus intended to die on that cross either... My guess is he was expecting a miracle or divine intervention, hence the "Eli...

Gandhi spent a lot of time in jail, together with many other Congress leaders. The Brits were not Pontius Pilates, but the struggle for independence i...

Or that he helped theorize, if you consider the non-violent 'show the other cheeck'. Coming back to the premises of 'separation of church and state' d...

He died miserably, thinking he had failed. But then, as he had himself theorized, a bizarre thing happened: his weakness became his strength. From his...

I only read the Go Master. I found it rather mystic, or zen. Though of course I know nothing about zen.

Ok, I was lying. Through the lenses of my very basic telescope, the Orion Nebula looks like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/...

This is precisely the problem I see with the mythicists: they want us to believe that the authors of the Gospels were liars, insincere, manipulative. ...

Many such sources exist, the connection between Hillel and Jesus was first noted in the academic literature at the end of the 19th century and it's no...

I agree. There's a rather thick book I once read about the way the messiah concept evolved and diversified prior and after Jesus: The Scepter and the ...

Yes. The distinction made between the things (or share) to be paid to Caesar and the things (or share) to be paid to God, stems from a cosmology where...

Ok, you asked... An interesting question that crops up when you consider Jesus as a historical man rather than as the son of God, is the question of h...

And in many other names. A list from Wikipedia with their meanings in Hebrew: Abdiel – Servant of God Abiel – God my Father Abimael – A Father sent fr...

"El" is also cognate to "Allah" (= "the El"), BTW. "Elohim" is the plural. It means "gods" but is generally translated as "God" or "God and angels" to...