Tag Archives: Bible

Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Hell

30 January 2026 By in Philosophy, Religion Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“What I am going to say is not a dogma of faith but my own personal view: I like to think of hell as empty; I hope it is.”  Pope Francis, 14 January 2024.

Few utterances from the papal class have landed with more confusion than Pope Francis’s remark. It is muddled, misleading, and ultimately misconstrued, though with two thousand years of ecclesiastical history, one might find other contenders. To be fair, only two papal statements have ever been deemed infallible: Pius IX’s definition of the Immaculate Conception and Pius XII’s proclamation of the Assumption of Mary. Nearly everything else falls under the category of secular opinion. So secular opinion will have to stand along with my slightly pedantic philosophical flourish on the topic.

The trouble with Francis’s remark is not that it expresses hope in an infinitely merciful God. It does, and God is. Humans are extravagantly hopeful when it comes to their own stake in the hereafter. But the Pope’s phrasing seems to remove the ultimate incentive to live a moral life. If there is no hell, then there are no boundaries to one’s actions. On its surface, the statement reduces moral teaching and punishment for sin to negligible outcomes. Two millennia of urging humans to keep their souls pure dissipate in an instant. It treats hell as if it were a place one might stroll into and find as empty as a modern mall, then decide to shop elsewhere; Amazon, perhaps. It blurs the line between our desire to avoid suffering and the eschatological reality in which immorality and punishment are tied to free will. Judgment remains inevitable, for better or worse, and forever. The qualifier “I hope it is” reduces judgment to a wish for mercy rather than a real consequence of one’s actions. It also suggests that the Pope is worried not only about your soul but his own. A merciful God will save a repentant sinner, but hoping is an insecure measure of remorse.

In short, Francis managed an exceptionally muddled rendering of the Augustinian and Thomistic view that hell is the final state of a person who refuses the good and closes themselves off to God’s love. To be fair, clarity is difficult when the very word “hell” carries millennia of conflicting meanings, teachings, and eschatological traditions.

This confusion is inevitable because the Christian vocabulary of the afterlife is a translucent overlay of older worlds, cultures, and languages. The Hebrew Scriptures speak of Sheol, a shadowy realm of the dead with no inherent moral judgment, not a prison for the wicked, but simply the condition of being dead. In Christian theology, “[Jesus] was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell.” The “hell” in this line refers to Sheol (often rendered as Hades), the realm of the dead into which Christ entered. His descent breaks open the barrier between death and divine life. In Sheol, He liberates the righteous dead and inaugurates the post‑biblical landscape of heaven, purgatory, and the final hell of separation from God’s love. After this event, Sheol becomes vestigial in Christian thought, a name without a continuing function. Christianity judges the soul immediately and resurrects the body later, whereas Judaism gives the soul varied post‑death experiences but reserves final judgment for bodily resurrection.

In the ancient Greek world, Hades begins much like Sheol: a neutral underworld where all the dead reside. Only the exceptional are diverted: heroes to the Elysian Fields, mythic offenders to Tartarus. Plato’s Myth of Er overlays this older realm with Socratic soulfully infused moral vision: judgment, reward, punishment, and reincarnation. Over time, mythic Hades and Platonic moral Hades blend into a single, more complex vision. Early Judaism and early Greek religion both had neutral underworlds, but the Greeks moralized theirs first. Socrates’ preoccupation with the soul made him less a secular philosopher than a theological pioneer or prophet if you will.

Hell does not take on its later punitive shape until the New Testament’s use of Gehenna, a metaphor drawn from a real valley outside Jerusalem associated with corruption and divine judgment. In the Gospels, Gehenna is a warning, not a mapped realm. Jesus uses it as prophetic shorthand for the consequence of a life turned away from the good. A moral and relational judgment rather than the later imagery of fire, demons, or descending circles. Gehenna is not the fully developed hell of medieval imagination but a symbol of what becomes of a life that refuses the shape of love.

Augustine, in the 4th century, further develops hell as a condition rather than a location. Hell is self‑exclusion: the soul turns away from God and locks itself into disordered love. Suffering arises from the consequences of one’s own choice; separation from the source of all goodness. This state is eternal not because God withholds mercy but because the will can become fixed in refusal. Fire is both real and symbolic: suffering is real, though its mode lies beyond language and expression.

Aquinas in the 13th century builds on Augustine by grounding hell in Aristotelian metaphysics. Hell is the definitive state of a rational soul that dies in mortal sin. The soul’s refusal of God is not only moral failure but a failure of rational nature. Aquinas distinguishes poena damni (the pain of loss) and poena sensus (the pain of sense). At death, the soul’s direction becomes fixed; eternal destiny is determined not by divine wrath but by the soul’s own settled choice. At the resurrection, the body joins the soul in its suffering. William Blake captures this Thomistic vision in his illustration of Dante conversing with the heretic Farinata degli Uberti in the fiery tombs of the sixth circle.

Aquinas provided his near‑contemporary Dante with the moral architecture that allowed hell to shift from concept to vividly imagined landscape. In the Inferno, Dante transforms that architecture into a descending spiral of circles, each calibrated to a deeper distortion of the good and a harsher form of alienation. At the frozen center lies the absolute loss of God’s presence and love. Dante’s genius is giving spatial form to moral trajectory. Sin becomes architecture.

Modern Christians often imagine hell through Dante’s nine circles without realizing it. Levels, tailored punishments, structured descent, these are Dante’s inventions, not biblical categories. Yet his poetic vision has become the default mental picture of what it means to lose God’s love. His circles are not doctrine, but they express a truth the tradition affirms: the more a soul rejects the good, the more it collapses inward, freezing into itself; a thermodynamic loss not of heat but of God’s presence. Dante’s afterlife remains a symbolic map of the soul’s self‑chosen distance from God, shaping imagination long after its theology has been forgotten or more likely, ignored.

By the modern era, hell has traveled a long road: from Sheol and Hades, through Gehenna, into Augustine’s self‑chosen alienation, Aquinas’s metaphysical finality, and Dante’s architectural imagination. Each stage sharpens the moral stakes, but none claims to know the final census of the saved and the lost.

It is here that Hans Urs von Balthasar, the 20th‑century Swiss theologian, offers a different starting point: beauty as the mode of God’s self‑revelation. God becomes visible through form, radiance, and splendor; beauty is the shape of truth and goodness. For Balthasar, salvation is participation in God’s dramatic love: the drama in which God and humanity meet in freedom. Christ is the central actor whose obedience, self‑gift, and descent into the depths of human abandonment open the way for every person to enter divine life. Salvation is aesthetic: God is Beauty, Christ is Beauty made visible, and salvation is the soul learning again to see the Beauty that is God.

Balthasar insists that Christ’s descent into Sheol means no place remains where God is not. Hell remains a real possibility, but God’s love hopes for every person, even as human freedom is never overridden. Salvation is the soul being drawn freely, dramatically, and beautifully into the radiant self‑giving love of the Triune God.

Balthasar offers a final, chastened note: Christians may hope that all will be saved, but they may never presume it. Hope is a virtue; presumption a trespass. Hell remains real, possible, and bound to freedom, yet the Christian stance toward final judgment is not certainty but reverent uncertainty. We may hope that no soul ultimately refuses the good, but we may not claim to know the mind of God. This hope is not optimism; it is the trembling aspiration of the penitent, something beyond the insecure measure of remorse that opened this essay.

In the end, tradition leaves us with a paradox: hell is the consequence of free-will, yet hope is the proper response to divine mercy. Between those two poles, freedom and mercy, the human soul stands. And perhaps that is the only place it can stand: not in presumption, not in despair, but in the narrow space where hope remains possible without ever becoming a certainty. Perhaps this is what Pope Francis, in his inelegant phrasing, was reaching for.

By the time afterlife dogma and secular imagination knock on our modern door, “hell” is less a settled place or concept than a linguistic suitcase and atlas stuffed with conflicting contents and branching paths toward judgment. Hope without presumption is allowed; hiding never is.

Graphic: Chart of Hell by Sandro Botticelli, c1480. Vatican City. Public Domain.

End Times

7 January 2026 By in Biography, History, Philosophy, Religion Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Isaac Newton (1642–1727), remembered as one of the greatest mathematicians and architect of modern physics, devoted more time to theology and biblical study than to science. Among his vast unpublished papers lies a remarkable calculation: Newton believed that the End of Times would not occur before the year 2060. His thesis was not a prediction of hell on Earth, but rather a forecast of the corrupt secular and spiritual powers giving way to the establishment of Christ’s kingdom on earth.

Newton’s notes on prophecy and chronology survive in the Yahuda manuscripts, now housed at the National Library of Israel. For more than a century, these papers were considered “unfit to print” and remained hidden in the English Earl of Portsmouth’s family archives. In 1936, Sotheby’s auctioned off Newton’s theological and alchemical writings for just over 9,000 British pounds or about $1 million in today’s dollars. Abraham Shalom Yahuda, a Jewish polymath and collector, recognized their importance and purchased a large portion, including Newton’s calculations on the End of Times.

Newton was deeply engaged with biblical prophecy, especially the Books of Daniel and Revelation. He believed these texts contained coded timelines of history on into the future. In Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel (published posthumously in 1733), he wrote: “The prophecies of Daniel are all of them related to one another, as if they were but several parts of one general prophecy… The Apocalypse of John is written in the same style and language with Daniel, and hath many of the same figures.”

In Daniel 7:25 and 12:7, and again in Revelation 12:14, “a time” is taken as one year, “times” as two years, and “half a time” as half a year—an interpretation rooted in the Aramaic/Hebrew idiom in which “time” means “year.” Revelation 11:2 and 13:5 describe the same period as 42 months, which equals 3½ years (42 ÷ 12). Revelation 11:3 and 12:6 express it again as 1,260 days, using the Jewish symbolic 360‑day prophetic year (360 × 3.5 = 1,260). Across Revelation 11–13, these expressions appear interchangeably, reinforcing the equivalence.

The 3½‑year duration itself is symbolic: it is half of seven, the biblical number of completeness, and thus represents a period of incompleteness or tribulation deliberately cut short. Cut short because in Matthew 24:22 Jesus states, “Unless those days had been cut short, no flesh would be saved; but for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short.” A full seven would symbolize evil completing its course, but Scripture portrays God as limiting evil’s duration, preserving a some but not all, and interrupting the “full seven” before it reaches completion.

Later interpreters extended this further. Drawing on Numbers 14:34: “a day for a year”; and Ezekiel 4:6, where God again assigns “a day for a year,” they applied the day‑year principle to the 1,260 days, transforming them into 1,260 years.

Newton then sought a historical anchor, a year to start the clock to End Times. He identified 800 AD, when Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III, as the beginning of ecclesiastical corruption. For Newton, this coronation marked the fusion of secular and papal power: the fulfillment of Daniel’s prophecy of a blasphemous authority ruling over the saints. Adding 1,260 years to 800 AD produced the year 2060. In his notes, Newton wrote: “The period of 1260 days, if dated from the complete conquest of the three kings A.C. 800, will end A.C. 2060.” (Newton preferred A.C., Anno Christi, in the year of Christ over A.D., Anno Domini, in the year of the Lord.)

Newton also considered 2034 as an alternative. Anchoring the calculation in 774 AD; the year of Charlemagne’s conquest of the Lombards and alliance with Pope Adrian I: 774 plus 1260 equals 2034. The year 774 also coincided with a massive solar storm, sometimes referred to as the Charlemagne Event (stronger than the Carrington Event of 1859), with auroras reaching deep into southern latitudes and temperatures dropping a few degrees. Yet 2060 remained the most consistent date in his manuscripts.

Newton believed that the corrupt powers that would bring about the End of Times was both the papacy and the secular rulers who supported the church. In his manuscripts he clearly identified the papacy as the “little horn” and the “man of sin,” a corrupt ecclesiastical power that had usurped apostolic Christianity. At the same time he perceived that secular rulers were equally part of the apostate system destined to collapse. The ten horns of the Beast were the European kingdoms. Their political power upheld the papal system and thus shared in its guilt and its eschatological fate.

Importantly, Newton did not envision annihilation at the End of Times. He saw 2060 as the end of corruption and the dawn of a new divine order. He cautioned it may end later, but said “I see no reason for its ending sooner. This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men…”

Newton feared that false predictions would undermine faith. His calculation was meant as sober interpretation, not sensational prophecy. He emphasized that only God knows the appointed time: “It is not for us to know the times and seasons which God hath put into his own breast.”

Newton’s calculation of the End of Times flows logically from the biblical text, and he treats the prophetic numbers with strict literalism. Yet he interprets the tribulation not as a final, catastrophic episode at the end of history, but as a long historical decline. Slow corruption within secular and ecclesiastical institutions. All culminating in the restoration of true Christianity.

Although Newton’s prophetic writings remained unpublished during his lifetime, the rediscovery of the Yahuda manuscripts in the 1930s revealed the full scope of his vision. He saw the End Times not as annihilation but as transformation: the fall of apostate Christianity, the renewal of true religion, and the establishment of Christ’s kingdom of peace.

Newton’s restrained timing aligns with Christ’s teaching in Matthew 24:36: “But of that day and hour no one knoweth, not the angels of heaven, but the Father alone.” In Christian eschatology, the Second Coming is likened to a Canaanite or Jewish wedding: the Father alone knows the day, the Son prepares a place, and the bride: the Church, must remain watchful. Newton’s calculations were an attempt to glimpse the architecture of prophecy, yet he humbly accepted the unknowable will of God.

Graphic: Isaac Newton by Godrey Kneller, 1689. Issac Newton Institute. Public Domain.

Solution in Search of a Problem

26 December 2025 By in Philosophy, Religion Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

…[God] commanded him, saying: Of every tree of paradise thou shalt eat:  But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat. For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death. Genesis 2: 16-17.  …And the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and fair to the eyes, and delightful to behold: and she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave to her husband who did eat. Genesis 3: 6.  …And to Adam he said: Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat, cursed is the earth in thy work; with labor and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life. Genesis 3: 17.

The command. The Original Sin. The yoke of punishment.

Within the Christian narrative, the Garden of Eden; whether read as fact or parable, is not a catastrophe that condemns humanity but a pedagogical interval in which freedom, purpose, and morality first become visible. Eden is the place where God teaches that a being with a soul cannot thrive in effortless abundance; that freedom requires choice; that purpose emerges only through effort–trial and error, consequence, responsibility, and growth. Original Sin is not an accident but the awakening of the human soul, the moment the lesson begins.

Against this backdrop, William Dembski’s (1960-present) The End of Christianity advances a far more far‑reaching claim: that God imposed suffering and death across the entire 4.5‑billion‑year history of Earth in response to Adam’s sin; an event that, even on the most generous timelines, occurred only a few tens of thousands of years ago. The difficulty with this theory is not merely its scale but its direction. Within the Christian understanding of God’s eternal now, Eden is not an isolated moment but a teaching environment whose possibilities: temptation, failure, growth, are already present to the divine mind. Dembski’s proposal, however, requires suffering to be imposed on the epochs that precede the sin itself. Adam has no predecessors whose guilt could be inherited, and the only antecedent in the narrative is God Himself. This reversal of moral sequence renders the thesis difficult to sustain.

His theodicy survives only at the level of abstraction; once the brush narrows to a single creature or a single moment, the logic collapses. A brontosaurus sinking into Jurassic mud is not a moral agent, nor is a trilobite crushed in a Cambrian landslide. To treat their deaths as the retroactive consequence of a human sin that has not yet occurred is to impose moral causality where no moral subject exists. The moment the argument touches the concrete world: an ecosystem, a predator’s hunger, a tectonic shift, it demands that nature behave like a courtroom, assigning guilt and punishment across epochs that cannot bear such categories.

Nor does the appeal to the serpent resolve the difficulty. To identify the serpent as the origin of evil is to mistake a narrative instrument for a metaphysical explanation. The question is not who tempted Adam, but how the possibility of temptation exists at all within a creation held in the eternal knowledge of God. If evil can arise only through the serpent’s intrusion or Adam’s misstep, then the divine eternity becomes strangely porous, as though God were surprised by a contingency He did not foresee. A coherent theodicy must account for the possibility of evil within the very structure of creation; reducing it to a reptile or a human choice leaves the deeper metaphysical question untouched.

Additionally, he treats death itself as a sin and the result of sin, redefining a creaturely condition as a moral indictment and thereby forcing all pre‑human death into the ledger of Adam’s guilt. Once these premises are set, the argument can proceed only by inverting causality, collapsing divine eternity into creaturely time, and assigning retroactive guilt to a world that existed long before humanity appeared.

A further difficulty remains unaddressed. If God is placed within a temporal sequence, as Dembski’s model requires, then any retroactive application of punishment collapses into divine causation. A temporal God cannot reach backward in time without becoming the direct agent of the suffering He imposes. If Adam’s sin occurs after millions of years of natural history, then all pre‑human suffering occurs before the sin; and if that suffering is nevertheless treated as punishment for Adam, the only possible source of it is God Himself. The attempt to preserve a literal reading of Genesis thus forces the blame for natural evil onto the Creator, a conclusion Dembski never acknowledges and cannot escape.

As the argument unfolds, the incoherence deepens. Dembski appeals to Rabbi Harold Kushner, who resolves the problem of suffering by limiting God’s power, and to Tony Campolo, who suggests that God voluntarily cedes power to human freedom; positions incompatible with a thesis that requires God to exercise maximal power across billions of years to impose retroactive suffering on creation. He suggests that God created a perfect world, that the Son of God somehow disrupted that perfection, and that God was then forced to rewrite the story while it was being undone. Such a view divides the Trinity into competing agents and reduces God’s eternal now to a sequence of creaturely reactions. In attempting to preserve a literal reading of Genesis, Dembski abandons the very doctrines of divine eternity, unity, and immutability that Christianity has always affirmed.

His treatment of Chronos and Kairos only compounds the confusion. He proposes that God creates in Kairos and implements in Chronos, as though the eternal act of God could be divided into a timeless planning phase and a temporal execution phase. But Kairos and Chronos are categories of human experience, not metaphysical compartments within the divine life. By splitting God’s creative act into stages, Dembski collapses divine eternity into creaturely sequence, producing a picture of God who drafts outside of time and then steps into time to carry out the plan. It is a scheme that contradicts both classical doctrine and the logic of his own argument.

The result is a proposal that feels less like a coherent theological model and more like a solution in search of a problem; an attempt to preserve a preferred interpretation rather than a conclusion arising naturally from the metaphysics he invokes. His argument depends on a literal, historical Adam whose single act introduces moral disorder into the entire cosmos, yet he never defends this premise or engages the long tradition that treats Adam as archetype rather than biological progenitor. Nor does he address the scientific evidence that humanity emerged from a population rather than a solitary pair. The entire structure stands on an unexamined foundation.

By contrast, a more coherent theological reading sees Eden as a deliberate environment constructed to teach humanity its telos. God did not create paradise for idle comfort but to reveal that abundance without purpose is not paradise; that safety without responsibility is not fulfillment; that comfort without growth is tedium. The expulsion from Eden is not divine vindictiveness but the extension of the curriculum: a life in which effort–trial and error, consequence, and responsibility become the conditions for virtue. Original Sin is not a permanent stain but the beginning of moral adulthood, an inherited condition whose guilt is washed away in baptism. God does not abandon humanity after the Fall; He immediately promises redemption and sets further boundaries to guide the soul toward righteousness.

In this light, Eden is not the site of global catastrophe but the first classroom of the human spirit. Eden and Adam are not the problem but the beginning of the solution. It is the place where freedom is defined, purpose is revealed, and the long winding road of redemption begins.

Graphic: The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise by Benjamin West, 1791. Public Domain

Curse of the Estranged

4 December 2025 By in Books Fiction, Novel Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Gabriel García Márquez’s (1927–2014) One Hundred Years of Solitude is a masterpiece of magical realism; at once stoic, uplifting, comically despondent, and burdened by the fatigue of generational inheritance. Yet the novel is less an invention of imagination than a genealogical metaphor of memory, familial hope, and civilizational rise and fall. It rises like a sanctuary built from familiar tablets: the Bible, Cervantes, Voltaire, Tolstoy, Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, Steinbeck, and Borges. Each echo resounds through the Colombian fictional town of Macondo, transforming it into a mythic stage where memory, estrangement, and loneliness endlessly repeat.

From the very first pages, Márquez threads this cycle with solitude: literally. Including the title, the word appears fifty‑two times in the century‑long history of Macondo and the Buendías. This repetition carries a biblical resonance, binding the family of protagonists and antagonists alike to a penitential tether, chained to their founding dynasty.

In Spanish, soledad is semantically broader than its English counterpart. It signifies estrangement and alienation, being cut off from community, intimacy, or history, even exiled. Yet it also carries the weight of aloneness and solitude: quiet, contemplative, existential. Both registers coexist, and the Spanish reader does not have to choose.

For the English reader, however, the word disconnects, pulling them towards a definition that resists the narrative. The translator, and likely Márquez himself, kept this tension to force meditation not only on the word but on the characters’ purgatory. The Buendías are lost in their obsessions, unable to connect to those around them. In the first half of the book, solitude leans toward estrangement and alienation; by the latter half, it transforms into aloneness, as the Buendías begin to accept their fate. The family lives together in their sanctuary but they live their lives separate and alone. In its final use, the meaning retreats back to estrangement and collective dissolution, a history erased, trapped in a myth of their own making: “because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

Márquez saturates the Buendía saga with biblical archetypes, weaving Genesis, Exodus, Revelation, and Marian purity into the fabric of Macondo: an Eden where death was alien, maturing into purgatory, then the Flood, and finally apocalypse. José Arcadio Buendía, the founder, is Adam and Noah at once, naming the world yet cursed by forbidden knowledge. “The earth is round, like an orange,” he declares, signaling a lifelong obsession with the metaphysical and the scientific. His wife, Úrsula Iguarán, is Eve and Sarah, burdened by genealogy and the fear of incest as original sin, a fear that culminates in the pig’s tail. Melquíades, the gypsy prophet, is Elijah and Daniel, his parchments the scripture of Macondo. The saga culminates in apocalyptic imagery: four years of rain, a final wind of destruction, Revelation retold as estrangement and erasure: endless solitude.

But Márquez’s tablets of echoes reach further, extending beyond scripture into the canon of world literature. The novel from the first pages breeds familiarity with the reader. One Hundred Years of Solitude is less a solitary invention than a refracting of the great books through Macondo’s myth. Its pages carry the shadows of Ovid’s transformations, Homer’s wanderings, Cervantes’ absurd quests, Kafka’s fate, Borges’ magic, and Proust’s memory; a literary inheritance reborn in Macondo’s myth.

These echoes form the very foundations of the narrative, opening into critiques of power, class, and the absurdity of the human condition. They expose an overreliance on human appetites; sexuality, incest, adultery, compulsion; that drive the fate of the family. The Buendías cannot conquer their world or their desires. Noble beginnings collapse into a fated Sartrian No Exit. And in the end, the Buendías’ saga dissolves into futility, their century of solitude reduced to the bitter irony that “wisdom was worth nothing if it could not be used to invent a new way of preparing chickpeas.”

Graphic: Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Jose Lara, 2002. Flickr

My Name is Legion

9 June 2025 By in History, Religion Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Beelzebub has been wandering through western civilization since the Philistines appeared on the scene in the 12th century BC. The polytheistic Philistines of Ekron, one of their five cities within Canaan, worshiped Beelzebub, Baal-Zebub in the Philistine language, as a minor god of healing and protection from diseases, mainly from flies. In the semitic languages Beelzebub was literally known as the “Lord of the Flies”. (In Indo-European languages some interpretations suggest that Beelzebub is translated into a more friendly Lord of the Jungle.)

As monotheistic traditions took root in Canaan, Beelzebub shifted from a protective deity to a purveyor of evil, demonized within emerging Jewish thought. By the 9th century BC, the prophet Elijah condemned the Israel King Ahab and the prophets of Baal for worshiping this god rather than the true God of the Jews. By the time of the New Testament, which mentioned him 7 times in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he was associated with Satan, who represented the emperor of Hell.

In Matthew and Mark, the Pharisees accused Jesus of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebub or the “Prince of the Demons”. Jesus counters by exclaiming that “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.” Jesus’ response backed the Pharisees into a corner, if they admitted that Jesus was casting out demons by God’s power, then they would have to acknowledge his divine authority. But if they insisted, he was working with Satan, they would have to explain why Satan would undermine his own influence: a house divided will not stand. (Lincoln in an 1858 speech used the same words with a moral rather than religious meaning, granted that is a very fine line, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” suggesting that the evils of slavery would lead to collapse of the country.)

Between the 15th and 17th centuries Beelzebub was transformed into one of the seven princes of Hell: Lucifer the Emperor, Satan, Leviathan, Belphegor, Mammon, Asmodeus, and Beelzebub. Beelzebub represented the deadly sins of gluttony and envy.

In modern times Beelzebub remains a symbol of evil in literature and culture. John Milton’s Paradise Lost cast him as a chief demon and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies takes a more ancient meaning associated with corruption and destruction.

From an ancient minor Philistine god to Satan during the times of Jesus, to a major Christian demon in medieval times, back to Satan himself in modern times; Beelzebub’s transformation reflects the shifting religious and cultural landscapes over millennia, but demons will always have a name. In Mark 5:9, Jesus asks a possessed man, “What is your name?” The demon responds, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”

Graphic: Satan and Beelzebub by William Hayley, Jean Pierre Simon, Richard Westall: Paradise Lost. Public Domain.

Rainbows

18 October 2024 By in Religion Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

God’s Edenic Covenant with Adam and Eve in which they were promised eternal life and given dominion over the animals stipulated that they were to obey one command: not to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge (of good and evil).

That didn’t work out well for Adam and Eve, so he made a covenant with Noah after the flood that included seven laws for man to live a just and moral life. With man’s observance, God promised to never destroy the world by flood again.  God sealed the covenant by creating a rainbow.

The seven laws of Noah:

1 – Do not worship false gods

2 – Do not curse God.

3 – Do not murder.

4 – Do not commit adultery or sexually immorality.

5 – Do not steal.

6 – Do not eat flesh from a living animal.

7 – Establish courts of justice.

Source: Seven Laws of Noah by Slon Anava, 2014, Azmut. Graphic: Noahs Dankgebet by Domenico Morelli 1901, Public Domain.

The Ark of the Covenant

7 June 2024 By in History, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Shortly after the Israelites exodus from Egypt around 1500 BC Moses received the Ten Commandments from God who further instructed Moses to have Bezalel build an Ark to house the commandments and He gives specific instructions on how the Ark should be built. Since no pictures are known to exist for the actual Ark, Spielberg’s rendition, built for “Raiders of the Lost Ark” movie, is as good as anything that currently depicts it.

The Ark was initially kept in the ancient Samarian sanctuary city of Shiloh in a tabernacle built under Moses direction and remained there for 369 years.

During the battle of Eben-ezer in 1180 BC the Israelites were defeated by the Philistines, bringing the Ark back to the Philistine pentapolis city of Ashdod, just south of the present-day Tel Aviv, as part of their plunder of Shiloh. Upon capturing the Ark, the Philistines were beset by plagues and misfortune and decided that it would be best to return it to the Israelites.

After its return it eventually settled in Kiriath-Jearim where it remained for about 20 years.  King David eventually brought the Ark to Zion or the City of David. When Solomon succeeded David, he had the Ark brought to his temple in Jerusalem sometime in the 10th century BC, no earlier than 957 BC.

Around 586 BC the Neo-Babylonian Empire destroyed Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple. After this destruction the Ark disappeared, and its location has been a mystery ever since.

Legends and myths say the Ark was destroyed, or it is currently in Ethiopia, or in the Philistine city of Ekron, or beneath Jerusalem, or on Mount Nebo, or in a cave near the Dead Sea, or the Romans captured it during the Jewish revolts in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, or aliens took it.

Source: Bible. BibleArchaeology.org. Wikipedia. Graphic: Ark from “The Raiders of the Lost Ark”

The Antiquities of the Jews

19 May 2024 By in Biography, History, Religion Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Josephus’s 20 volume history of the Jews titled: The Antiquities of the Jews was written to provide an account of the Jewish people for his Roman patrons and protectors.

Below is a synopsis of the 20 volumes:

  • Biblical creation to the death of Abraham’s son Isaac
  • History of Isaac’s sons to the Exodus of Jews from Biblical Egypt
  • Exodus from Egypt to the first 2 years of the 40 years in the wilderness
  • The remaining 38 years in the wilderness to the death of Moses upon reaching Canaan
  • Joshua’s replacement of Moses as leader to the death of the priest Eli
  • The capture of the Ark by the Philistines to the death of King Saul
  • David’s ascension to the throne of the Kingdom of Israel to the death of King David
  • Solomon’s ascension as King of Israel to the death of King Ahab
  • Reign of King Jehoshaphat to the fall of Samaria
  • Babylonian captivity of the Jews and the destruction of the Neo-Assyrian Empire
  • Start of the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great to the death of Alexander the Great
  • Death of Alexander the Great to the Maccabean Revolt
  • Origins of the Hasmonean dynasty to the death of Queen Alexandra
  • The death of Queen Alexandra to the death of Antigonus II Mattathias
  • Herod the Great’s taking of Jerusalem to the completion of King Herod’s temple
  • Completion of King Herod’s temple to the death of Herod’s sons
  • Death of Herod’s sons to the banishment of King Archelaus

Josephus history covers major portions of the Old Testament including Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel 1&2, 1&2 Kings, 1&2 Chronicles, and Prophets. Josephus’s accounts provide for additional material and commentary not found in other texts including the bible.

Source: Josephus: The Complete Works, 2003. Jewish Virtual Library. World History Encyclopedia. Graphic Joseph, Son of Gorian, by Thomas Emmet, 1880, public domain.

Apologetics

17 January 2024 By in Books Nonfiction, History Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Eusebius: The Church History

By Eusebius (of Caesarea)

Translated by Paul L. Maier

Kregel Academic

Copyright: © 2007

Original Publication Dates: 313-326 AD

Original Title: Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History

AmazonPicture

Maier Biography:

Paul L. Maier, born 1930 in St. Louis, author, public speaker, and historian has written twenty-three adult and children, fiction and non-fiction, books about Christianity. He is the son of Walter A. Maier, founder, and speaker of The Lutheran Hour.

He graduated from Harvard and Concordia Seminary in St. Louis with additional studies in Heidelberg, Germany and Basel, Switzerland. He was the Seibert Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University until he retired in 2011.

In addition to his definitive translation of “Eusebius: The Church History“, his 1993 “Skeleton in God’s Closet” was a number one best seller in religious fiction, a thriller concerning the Resurrection of Jesus. He also co-wrote with Hank Hanegraaff in 2006 a rebuttal to Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code“: “The Da Vinci Code: Fact or Fiction?“

In addition to writing books Maier has produced six religious documentaries including the 2014 “The Week That Changed the World“, detailing the Holy Week before Jesus’s resurrection, discussing the key personalities, the politics, and the treachery that sealed Christ’s fate.

Maier Bibliography-Books and Documentaries:

  • A Man Spoke, A World Listened: The Story of Walter A. Maier 1963
  • Pontius Pilate 1968
  • First Christmas: The True and Unfamiliar Story in Words and Pictures 1971
  • First Easter: The True and Unfamiliar Story in Words and Pictures 1973
  • First Christians: Pentecost and the Spread of Christianity 1976
  • Flames of Rome 1981
  • The Best of Walter A. Maier 1981 (paperback)
  • Josephus, The Essential Writings 1988
  • In Fullness of Time 1991
  • A Skeleton in God’s Closet 1994
  • The Very First Christmas 1998
  • The New Complete Works of Josephus with William Whiston 1999
  • Eusebius: The Church History 1999
  • The Very First Easter 2000
  • More Than a Skeleton 2003
  • Caspar Schwenckfeld on the Person and Work of Christ: A Study of Schwenckfeldian Theology at Its Core 2004 (paperback)
  • Martin Luther a Man Who Changed the World 2004
  • The Da Vinci Code: Fact or Fiction? with Hank Hanegraaf 2006
  • The Real Story of Creation 2007
  • The Real Story of the Flood 2008
  • A Skeleton in Rome 2011
  • The Constantine Codex 2011
  • The Genuine Jesus 2021
  • Christianity: The First Three Centuries (Documentary) 2003
  • The Odyssey of St. Paul (Documentary) 2003
  • Jesus: Legend or Lord? (Documentary) 2003
  • How We Got the Bible (Documentary) 2009
  • Christianity and the Competition (Documentary) 2010
  • The Week that Changed the World (Documentary) 2011

Eusebius Biography:

FootnoteA

“May I be an enemy to no one and the friend of what abides eternally. May I never quarrel with those nearest me and be reconciled quickly if I should. May I never plot evil against others, and if anyone plots evil against me, may I escape unharmed and without the need to hurt anyone else.” — Eusebius

Eusebius of Caesarea, also known as Eusebius Pamphili, was a historian, interpreter of scripture, and Christian apologist, born around 260-265 AD in Caesarea, where he gained prominence in the fourth century, before passing away around 339 AD. His early education was by the learned presbyter, and eventual saint, Pamphilus, the principle religious scholar of his generation.  Eusebius became bishop of Caesarea around 314 AD, shortly after Constantine became Roman Emperor, and remained in that position until his death in 339 AD. Eusebius became a significant figure in the theological controversies and politics of his day, becoming a, if not the leading spiritual advisor and confidant to Constantine.

Christians since the time of Christ were persecuted for their faith which came to a ghoulish crescendo under the Diocletian Edicts, also known as “The Edicts Against the Christians” of 303 AD. The edicts dissolved the Christians’ legal rights, compelled them to reject Jesus and to adhere to the local religious customs of paganism and polytheism. The edict saw the destruction of Christian scripture and churches along with the torture and execution of approximately 3500 church leaders and lay people including Eusebius’ teacher Pamphilus. The persecution ended with the Edict of Milian in 313 AD, decreed and signed by Constantine and Licinius proclaiming religious toleration within the empire.

FootnoteB

The edict gained the life-long gratitude of Eusebius culminating in the Christian bishop’s panegyric, “Life of Constantine“, in which the author details the emperor’s religious policies as well as a hagiographic account of Constantine’s life. Historians have described their relationship as complex, evolving over time. They have also stated that Eusebius may have been the power behind the throne or, as others have surmised, just an obsequious toady seeking protection from his church enemies. Regardless of the actual relationship it is agreed that Eusebius was Constantine’s spiritual and political advisor.

FootnoteC

Eusebius, through his bond with the emperor, helped structure the relationship between church and state, assisting in the creation of the Constantinian concept of a Christian empire, which had a considerable influence on the development of the early Christian Church and the Roman Empire, along with empires to come.

Constantine, to put down an early rebellion of church leaders, ordered three hundred bishops throughout the empire to meet at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD to resolve the controversy of Arianism, a concept that Christ was not divine but was created by God. Much of the Church believed that Christ was of the same substance, “consubstantiality“, as the Father and as such: divine. Eusebius, enjoying the emperor’s favor, sat next to him at the council and offered his own creed stating that Christ was begotten, not made, from the Father. The council, in the end, rejected Arianism and formulated the creed that is recited at every High Catholic Mass to this day. The council also set the time for Easter as the Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring equinox rather than occurring on the Sunday closest to Jewish Passover or on the Jewish Passover even it was not on a Sunday. Which explains why no one knowns when Easter occurs. Constantine was adamant about foregoing any Jewish practices in the honor of Jesus.

Eusebius is referred to as the “Father of Church History” due to his voluminous writings in the field including, as discussed below, his account of the first centuries of Christianity in his “Ecclesiastical History” or “Church History“. 

Church History (Ecclesiastical History):

FootnoteD

“Church History ” or “Ecclesiastical History” is the only exigent work that chronicles the development of early Christianity and its Church from the birth of Christ on into the fourth century. Eusebius’s account, written in Koiné Greek, lingua franca for the Mediterranean area from fourth century BC to fourth century AD, provides a chronological narrative, using the succession of Roman Emperors as a linear timeline, of the early Christian Church. Eusebius, with his access to the Theological Library of Caesarea, incorporated many church documents, acts of the martyrs, letters, and extracts from earlier Christian writings into his work, many which no longer exists. The “Church History” covers the succession of Church bishops, the history of Christian teachers especially Origen, the history of the many church heresies and conflicts, and Christianity’s relationships with Romans, pagans, and Jews. Despite accusations that “Church History” is more a defense of Christianity, an apologetic and hagiography, than a history, Eusebius’s work remains a valuable source for understanding early Christian history.

Below are the Maier’s chapter listings, brief descriptions, and Roman Emperors during the historical period covered.

  • Book I: The Person and Work of Christ: Eusebius on Christ. Augustus to Tiberius.
  • Book II: The Apostles: Eusebius on the Apostles. Tiberius to Nero.
  • Book III: Missions and Persecutions: Formation of the New Testament. Galba to Trajan.
  • Book IV: Bishops, Writings, and Martyrdoms: Defenders and Defamers of the Faith. Trajan to Marcus Aurelius.
  • Book V: Western Heros, Eastern Heretics: Death at Lyons, Rome, and Alexandria. Marcus Aurelius to Septimius Severus.
  • Book VI: Origen and Atrocities at Alexandria: Life of Origen. Septimius Severus to Decius.
  • Book VII: Dionysius and Dissent: Church Life According to Dionysius. Gallus to Diocletian.
  • Book VIII: The Great Persecution: Edicts Against Christians. Diocletian to Galerius.
  • Book IX: The Great Deliverance: The End of Persecution? Maximin, Maxentius, and Constantine.
  • Book X: Constantine and Peace: Eusebius and Constantine. Constantine.

Literary Criticism:

In C.F. Cruse’s 1850 translation of “Ecclesiastical History” he states that, “…Eusebius was not without his beauties, but they were rarely scattered, that we can hardly allow him an eminent rank as a writer.” This is an understatement of the 19th century although it is a polite way to admit Eusebius was incapable of engaging his readers in any form other than pedantic verbosity. This is also an example that Cruse was not immune from obfuscating meaning in his written translations and commentary. His comment above simply stated that Eusebius rarely wrote with elegance and concision. Eusebius’ writing was dense, confusing, dogmatic, and sometimes incomprehensible. Eusebius’ writing compares favorably, snark intended, with Edward Gibbons’ “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” whose erudite, verbose, and opaque style has managed to confuse his readers for two plus centuries now, but for some reason no one seems to mind, except me. Gibbons disliked, immensely, Eusebius’ “Ecclesiastical History” stating that it was full of lies and falsehoods which is an exceedingly difficult position to support due to Eusebius’ excessive use, usually in quotes, of original source material. Gibbons blamed the fall of the Roman Empire on the rise of Christianity, a problematic thesis considering Christianity was the least of the Empires worries. Unchecked immigration and a corrupt governing class were much bigger problems than a few Christians asking to be left alone to worship their God in peace.

Paul L. Maier’s translation of “Church History” is a masterful improvement over C.F. Cruse’s 1850 attempt to make Eusebius readable. Cruse strove to accurately translate Eusebius with the result of burdening his readers with difficult and cluttered phrasing. Maier saves his readers by reducing Eusebius’s lengthy sentences, dense language, and abrupt subject changes to intelligible bites of prose that are readable, understandable, and usable. An example of Maier taking difficult sentences and distilling them into something cogent can be seen in the two example sentences below. The first sentence comes from Loeb’s edition of “Ecclesiastical History“, which is a very faithful rendition of Eusebius’ writing, followed by Maier’s translated version. Loeb: “I have already summarized the material in the chronological tables which I have drawn up, but nevertheless in the present work I have undertaken to give the narrative in full detail.” Maier: “Previously I summarized this material in my Chronicle but in the present work I deal with it in the fullest detail.” The first sentence takes a few readings to comprehend the meaning. Maier allows for instant comprehension.

“Ecclesiastical History” or “Church History” is an important work in understanding the beginnings of Christianity and the governing hierarchy that was built up over the centuries. This is not a long book, less than four hundred pages, but it does take dedication to the task of reading and understanding it. In the end it is worth the effort as a little history is always useful if not enlightening.

References and Readings:

FootnoteA: Eusebius preceding his Eusebian Canons in the Garima Gospels. Michael Gervers. 2004. Public Domain

FootnoteB: The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer. Jean-Leon Gerome. Walters Art Museum. 1863-1883. Public Domain

FootnoteC: Eusebius of Caesarea. Unknown Source and Date. Public Domain

FootnoteD: Constantine the Great. Unknown Source and Date. Public Domain

Giant Before Us

18 December 2022 By in Biography, Books Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Isaac Newton

By James Gleick

Published by Pantheon

Copyright: © 2003

Isaac Newton at 46

James Gleick left Harvard in 1976 with a degree in English and a disposition towards independence from the 9 to 5. His initial attempt at independence after college was launching a weekly newspaper in the midwest city of Minneapolis, Minnesota. This endeavor ended in failure within a year, and it would take another 10 years before he could leave his day job, succeeding as an author of history of science and a provider of internet service in New York City.

His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, was critically acclaimed and a million copy best seller establishing Gleick as a first-rate storyteller of difficult subjects to the lay public. He wrote two other bestsellers, both biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman in 1992 and Isaac Newton nine years later.

Gleick presents Newton’s life in chronological order, painting a beautiful portrait of his acheivements but also imparting a sense of his being as a human. His accomplishments were beyond exceptional, but his temperament was that of a reluctant member of society at large, not easily befriended, easy to offend, and not quick to forgive. Current hypotheses suggest that Newton may have suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome, one of the milder forms of autism. As a social being he appears a lot like Beethoven, also a genius but also without grace or courtesy.

Issac Newton was born fatherless, on Christmas Day in 1642 according to the Julian calendar, still in use in England at the time, or the less interesting 4 January 1643 by the today’s Gregorian calendar, on a sheep farmstead far north of London in Lincolnshire County. His father died about three months before his birth and in three years he was shuffled off to a grandmother’s care for the next 9 years to keep him away and out of site from his mother’s new husband, Reverend Barnabas Smith. His early education was at the ancient King’s School, already more than two hundred years old when he entered in 1655 and still operates as an all-boys grammer school to this day. Upon finishing at King’s School, he entered Trinity College at Cambridge in 1661 and, except for a year away in 1665, he stayed as a student and professor until 1696. Immediately following Cambridge, he became Warden of the King’s Mint and in 1703 became president of the Royal Society and stayed in that position until he died in 1727.

Newton’s contributions to the world were many and varied. His Three Laws of Motion were revolutionary in the 18th century, and as a testament to their lasting correctness are still taught to every school kid early in their education. The Law of Gravitation explained the orbit of the heavenly bodies and why apples fall and not rise, float, or go sideways. It has since been replaced by Einstein’s General Relativity but is still a particularly good approximation for us lessor mortals. Calculus. Enough said.

Newton also intensely studied the bible, believing that the universe could only exist through the existence of God. He rejected the Trinity believing there is one God, God the Father with Jesus and the Holy Spirit subservient to God. Newton also predicted that the end of times would not come before 2060, 38 short years from now. Still a little early to be maxing out your credit cards.

Newton researched and experimented with alchemy, including looking for the Philosophers Stone and the force that keeps the planets in their orbits. Seeking the Philosophers Stone may have been worthy of Harry Potter but I’m not sure about Newton. Newton never published anything on his alchemy studies, likely because it didn’t make any sense. Now looking for the force that kept planets from falling your head during a walk-in park was worthy of Newton and the rest of the world, especially Einstein. Newton found it and it was called gravity.

My one complaint with Gleick’s book is his derisive commenting on Newton’s fascination with alchemy through today’s lens of knowledge rather than accepting that understanding and meaning in this world changes, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. People respond to the time they live in not to the unknowns of the future. Newton put it this way, “What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.” and one can only study the drop that he has.

One of my favorite quotes of Newton or anyone for that matter was, “A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true.” I liked this quote when I first saw it, not because it was profound, it was, but because it was an idea I had promulgated early on in my education, if it didn’t make logical sense, it probably was wrong.