Why had YHWH be adored in a new form?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Giuseppe
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Why had YHWH be adored in a new form?

Post by Giuseppe »


We saw how in Isaiah the figure of the Saviour constantly blends with that of Jahveh. As is known, the aim of the preaching of Isaiah is to confirm the people in monotheistic ideas, in belief in the one God, who says: “I am Jahveh and no other, and there is no god beside me. I am the first and the last.” These words are put in the mouth of the “son of man” in Revelation. In Isaiah xlv, 15, Jahveh is called a “hidden God,” a “Saviour,” just as the servant of God and Saviour was supposed to grow up in obscurity, and the just to expiate sins by his death without attracting much attention or the real significance of his death being recognised. What if, after the manner of Isaiah, the belief in Jahveh were to coalesce with the belief in Jesus in the mind of the sect, and Jesus become the form in which Jahveh was worshipped as healer, expiator, and redeemer in the mystic and esoteric cults? For the religion of Jesus was merely a religion of Jahveh of deeper mysticism, a new and special form of Jewish monotheism; and the orthodox Jews, for whom monotheism was the sum of their faith, had on that account no occasion to put difficulties in the way of the original Christians, the Jessaeans or Nazoraeans, the “saints,” as they were called in Isaiah.[54]

(Arthur Drews, The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus, original emphasis, my underline)

This is very much in evidence, since in a lot of occurrences (no need of list them, the reader knows already), in Mark, Jesus plays the same identical role of YHWH:
Jesus become the form in which Jahveh was worshipped as healer, expiator, and redeemer in the mystic and esoteric cults

Why had YHWH be adored in a new form?

The error was to believe that this utilization of YHWH in the new form of Jesus (''YHWH-saves'') was meant as a protest against polytheism, a “crusade in favour of monotheism” (Smith, Ecce Deus).

My view is that YHWH had to be adored in a new form against the Gnostic/demiurgical dualism. This explains why in the writings there is no reference to Pagan gods, no accusation of idolatry, but a lot of Gnostic allusions (''Carpenter'', ''son of Mary', ''ektroma'', 'gnosis', 'perfects', 'eyes', 'bread and wine', 'water', etc).

So, Christianity was judaization in action from the time 0.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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