Egyptian king/Osiris as logos.

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nightshadetwine
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Egyptian king/Osiris as logos.

Post by nightshadetwine »

The ancient Egyptian king is often described in the same way as the logos is described by Philo and gJohn. Osiris was an Egyptian king and Plutarch describes him as the Logos.

The Logos according to Philo and Gjohn:

Divine Embodiment in Jewish Antiquity: Rediscovering the Jewishness of John’s Incarnate Christ, Deborah Forger
Though sharing the divine identity with God, the logos is subordinate as indicated by being “the eldest of all created things” ((Leg. 3, 61, 173; Migr. 6), “the first-born of God” (Agr. 12, 51),, the “man of God” (Conf. 11, 41; cf. 14, 62; 28, 146), the “image of God” (Conf. 28), the “second God” (QE II, 62, Marcus, LCL)… Jesus as the logos is one with the Father but also subordinate to the Father. The Father “has given all things into his hand”, “has given him authority to judge” yet for all he does he needs the Father’s permission; also as an indicator of Jesus’ subordinate role, he always calls God his Father — even though he and the Father are one from the beginning of time.
Compare that to:

Temples of Ancient Egypt Edited by Byron E Shafer
The royal ka was the immortal creative spirit of divine kingship, a form of the Creator’s collective ka. The ka of a particular king was but a specific instance, or fragment, of the royal ka... Only in retrospect could he be portrayed as predestined by the Creator to rule Egypt as truly perfect from the beginning, as divine seed, son of the Creator, the very flesh of god, one with the Father, god’s incarnation on earth, his sacred image.
Becoming Divine: An Introduction to Deification in Western Culture By M. David Litwa
In an inscription from western Thebes (modern Luxor), the god Amun-Re hails Pharaoh Amenhotep III as “my son of my body, my beloved Nebmaatra, my living image, my body’s creation.”

Philo also says of the Logos:
For that man who is the eldest son, whom the father of all raised up, and elsewhere calls his fistborn
The Egyptian king is also "raised up" by his father. Osiris was a king who was also "raised up".

From the Egyptian text called "King as solar priest":
As his father Osiris raises him up...
The king, identified with the rising sun god, is being "raised" by his father.

Plutarch calls king Osiris the Logos:

The Gospel of Thomas and Plato : A Study of the Impact of Platonism on the Fifth Gospel By Ivan Miroshnikov
The double role of Plutarch's Osiris is determined by his intermediary status: in order to act as an intermediary between the transcendent God and the world, he needs to participate in both transcendence and immanence. The very same double role is ascribed to Logos in Philo: according to Mos. 2.127, the cosmic Logos deals with both "the incorporeal and paradigmatic forms" and the visible objects that imitate these forms. The fact that Philo's Logos and Plutarch's Osiris are functionally identical and that Osiris can also be called Logos demonstrates that Philo's philosophy of Logos was part of a larger Middle Platonist tradition and that this tradition as a whole should be recognized as a possible background for the Johannine Logos.
This Logos concept seems to have originally been associated with the king. The concept is used by the Middle Platonists(Philo, Plutarch) and they most likely influenced GJohn and other parts of the NT. King Jesus is the Logos in GJohn and king Osiris is the Logos in Plutarch's writings.
nightshadetwine
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Re: Egyptian king/Osiris as logos.

Post by nightshadetwine »

The king, the Logos, and the dying and resurrecting savior are all intertwined. This is why Jesus can so easily be seen as the king/messiah, the Logos, and the dying and resurrecting savior. Both Osiris and Dionysus both can be seen as the king, resurrecting savior, and Logos.

The Dionysian Gospel: The Fourth Gospel and Euripides by Dennis R. MacDonald
John sounds themes that would have instantly been recognized as proper to the Greek god Dionysos (the Roman Bacchus), not least as he was depicted in Euripides’s play The Bacchae. A divine figure, the offspring of a divine father and human mother, takes on flesh to live among mortals but is rejected by his own.
Orphic Tradition and the Birth of the Gods By Dwayne A. Meisner
Dionysus…is the soul of the universe, which is divided and yet retains it’s indestructible unity. The Titans represent the evil principle of division which is hostile to the abiding aspiration of the universe toward unity…More precisely, the Titans represent the division that occurs as the forms proceed from soul into matter…Having been dismembered and brought back to life, Dionysus represents the center-point between these two where the processes of preceding and reversion intersect…In this way, Dionysus is the center-point between Zeus and the many…The spiritual interpretation is basically a consequence of the metaphysical interpretation since, as encosmic soul is distributed throughout the universe into physical matter one of the natural results of this “Titanic Division” is the insertion of human souls into bodies.
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DCHindley
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Re: Egyptian king/Osiris as logos.

Post by DCHindley »

nightshadetwine,

Equating Platonic terms with mythological figures from different cultures was something Middle Platonic scholars did. While I have heard that some have implied from this that Plato could have borrowed from the myths of earlier cultures, I also think that Plato's principals and entities/powers were worked out by the process of deduction, not as a means to harmonize ancient Myths.

The term "Logos" was used by many an ancient Philosopher, and frequently described quite different things. Each element of Platonic cosmology were also described using quite different vocabulary. Philo never mentions Isis at all, I don't think. Plutarch, of course, wrote On Isis and Osiris (Sect 372e of Stephanus' edition of the Moralia, for The Loeb edition translation of the Moralia by Frank Cole Babbitt, starting Page 129).
But let us now take up again the proper subject of our discussion. (53.) Isis is, in fact, the female principle of Nature, and is receptive of every form of generation, in accord with which she is called by Plato [Timaeus, 49a & 51a] the gentle nurse and the all-receptive, and by most people has been called by countless names, since, because of the force of Reason, she turns herself to this thing or that and is receptive of all manner of shapes and forms [διὰ τὸ πάσας ὑπὸ τοῦ λόγου τρεπομένη μορφὰς δέχεσθαι καὶ ἰδέας].

Note that Babbitt says "Plutarch's knowledge of Egyptology was not profound." So, Plutarch equates Isis with the female principal of Nature, corresponding to an entity which Plato suggests was awakened/impregnated in some way by the power of divine Reason. How else would the Craftsman have known how to fabricate the world from unformed matter in the Receptacle, but from the Ideal Forms, which reside in the Reason of the One.

But also look at what Plato actually says:
Timaeus 49a We must, however, in beginning our fresh account of the Universe make more distinctions than we did before; for whereas then we distinguished two Forms,87 we must now declare another third kind. For our former
exposition those two were sufficient, one of them being assumed as a Model Form, intelligible and ever uniformly existent, [49a] and the second as the model's Copy, subject to becoming and visible. A third kind we did not
at that time distinguish, considering that those two were sufficient; but now the argument seems to compel us to try to reveal by words a Form that is baffling and obscure. What essential property, then, are we to conceive it to
possess? This in particular,—that it should be the receptacle, and as it were the nurse, of all Becoming.

51a Wherefore, let us not speak of her that is the Mother and Receptacle of this generated world, which is perceptible by sight and all the senses, by the name of earth or air or fire or water, or any aggregates or constituents thereof: rather, if we describe her as a Kind invisible and unshaped, all-receptive, and in some most perplexing and most baffling way partaking of the intelligible

This refers to Plato's "mother and receptacle of all," not Isis.

DCH
nightshadetwine
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Re: Egyptian king/Osiris as logos.

Post by nightshadetwine »

My post is just showing that the Egyptian king was described in the same way as the Logos is described by Middle Platonists and gJohn. So Plutarch describing Osiris as the Logos actually makes a lot of sense because the Egyptian king(Osiris was a king) was described in the same way as the Logos is later described by Middle Platonists and gJohn. The Middle Platonic Logos is like an "emanation" that mediates between the divine/god and the physical realm so it takes part in both. The Egyptian king was seen in a very similar way.

King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature by Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins
Even in the royal inscriptions, the dependence of the king on the higher divine power is clear. So we read in one of the hymns of Akhenaten:
"Thy rays are upon thy beloved son...the child who came forth from thy rays. You assign to him your lifetime and your years...he is thy beloved,
you make him like Aten. When you rise, eternity is given to him; when you set, you give him everlastingness. You beget him in the morning like your own forms; you form him as your emanation, like Aten, ruler of truth, who came forth from eternity, son of Re, wearing his beauty."
So this is why dying and resurrecting saviors like Osiris, Dionysus, and Jesus are often associated with the Logos in writings of the Greco-Roman era. The dying and resurrecting savior/king is a mediator between the divine and the physical realm.

The oldest version of some of the different Logos concepts are actually found in Egyptian religion.

The Oxford Companion to World Mythology By David Leeming
Maat might be seen as a principle analogous to the Logos, divine reason and order. As Christians are told "In the beginning the Word[Logos] already was"(John 1:1), Atum announces that before creation, "when the heavens were asleep, my daughter Maat lived within me and around me."
The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt by Richard H. Wilkinson
The text alludes to the Heliopolitan creation account centered on the god Atum, but goes on to claim that the Memphite god Ptah preceded the sun god and that it was Ptah who created Atum and ultimately the other gods and all else 'through his heart and through his tongue'. The expression alludes to the conscious planning of creation and it's execution through rational thought and speech, and this story of creation ex nihilo as attributed to Ptah by the priests of Memphis is the earliest known example of the so-called 'logos' doctrine in which the world is formed through a god's creative speech...It lies before, and in line with, the philosophical concepts found in the Hebrew Bible where 'God said, let there be light, and there was light'(Genesis 1:3), and the Christian scriptures which state that 'In the beginning was the word[logos]...and the word was God...all things were made by him...'(John 1:1,3).
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MrMacSon
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Re: Egyptian king/Osiris as logos.

Post by MrMacSon »

nightshadetwine wrote: Sun Feb 03, 2019 11:26 am My post is just showing that the Egyptian king was described in the same way as the Logos is described by Middle Platonists and gJohn. So Plutarch describing Osiris as the Logos actually makes a lot of sense because the Egyptian king (Osiris was a king) was described in the same way as the Logos is later described by Middle Platonists and gJohn ...
Does Plutarch actually - literally - describe Osiris as the Logos?

You have posted a passage by Ivan Miroshnikov, from The Gospel of Thomas and Plato : A Study of the Impact of Platonism on the Fifth Gospel, that says

The double role of Plutarch's Osiris is determined by his intermediary status: in order to act as an intermediary between the transcendent God and the world, he needs to participate in both transcendence and immanence ... The fact that Philo's Logos and Plutarch's Osiris are functionally identical and that Osiris can also be called Logos demonstrates that Philo's philosophy of Logos was part of a larger Middle Platonist tradition and that this tradition as a whole should be recognized as a possible background for the Johannine Logos.
Is there a specific passage in the works of Plutarch where he calls Osiris the Logos?

eta: a quick internet search found this -

.
2. Plutarch's Platonism

... Plutarch structures his work into argument (logos) and a narrative (mythos) ...


4. Metaphysics

4.1 First Principles


... for Plutarch Osiris is both the intellect and the logos present in the world soul (De Iside 371A, 376C, De an. procr. 1023C–D) ... Plutarch..claim[s] that God is the totality of Forms (paradeigma; De sera 550D; see Helmig 2005, 20–26). However, it is not clear how for Plutarch the Forms exist in God, since in Plutarch's view God, as Osiris, can be analyzed into three elements, intellect, soul, and body (De Iside 373A) ...


4.2 Fate and what is up to us

... Plutarch appears to maintain that God's power is limited by the necessity (anankê) imposed by matter. Yet, on the other hand, he does distinguish between the rule of nature, or fate, on the one hand, and divine providence on the other, arguing, against the Stoics, that God can dominate nature (De facie 927A-B) and can function providentially for us (De comm. not. 1075E, De Iside 371A, De defect oraculorum 413E –Ammonius speaking). The fact that God, by means of his logos, with which he is often identified (De Iside 373A-B), moulds the principle of disorder, the Indefinite Dyad, suggests to Plutarch the supremacy of God over any other force.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plutarch/

nightshadetwine
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Re: Egyptian king/Osiris as logos.

Post by nightshadetwine »

MrMacSon wrote: Sun Feb 03, 2019 1:26 pm eta: a quick internet search found this -

.
2. Plutarch's Platonism

... Plutarch structures his work into argument (logos) and a narrative (mythos) ...


4. Metaphysics

4.1 First Principles


... for Plutarch Osiris is both the intellect and the logos present in the world soul (De Iside 371A, 376C, De an. procr. 1023C–D) ... Plutarch..claim[s] that God is the totality of Forms (paradeigma; De sera 550D; see Helmig 2005, 20–26). However, it is not clear how for Plutarch the Forms exist in God, since in Plutarch's view God, as Osiris, can be analyzed into three elements, intellect, soul, and body (De Iside 373A) ...


4.2 Fate and what is up to us

... Plutarch appears to maintain that God's power is limited by the necessity (anankê) imposed by matter. Yet, on the other hand, he does distinguish between the rule of nature, or fate, on the one hand, and divine providence on the other, arguing, against the Stoics, that God can dominate nature (De facie 927A-B) and can function providentially for us (De comm. not. 1075E, De Iside 371A, De defect oraculorum 413E –Ammonius speaking). The fact that God, by means of his logos, with which he is often identified (De Iside 373A-B), moulds the principle of disorder, the Indefinite Dyad, suggests to Plutarch the supremacy of God over any other force.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plutarch/

Yeah, Plutarch also says in Isis and Osiris 371a:
So in the soul, Intelligence and Reason, the Ruler and Lord of all that is good, is Osiris, and in earth and wind and water and the heavens and stars that which is ordered, established, and healthy, as evidenced by seasons, temperatures, and cycles of revolution, is the efflux of Osiris and his reflected image.
nightshadetwine
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Re: Egyptian king/Osiris as logos.

Post by nightshadetwine »

Some scholars have also pointed to "Wisdom" in the Hebrew scriptures as being related to the logos. Wisdom in the Hebrew scriptures is described the same way as Maat is in the Egyptian religion.

The Invention of God" by Thomas Romer
Another way of compensating for the disappearance of the goddess is the personification of wisdom... In Proverbs 8, Wisdom herself speaks, presenting herself as a goddess who was at the side of Yhwh even before the creation of the world... Wisdom appears here as a daughter of Yhwh, begotten by him during the creation of the universe; to some extant she is a mediatrix between Yhwh and men
Compare that to:

The Oxford Companion to World Mythology By David Leeming
Maat might be seen as a principle analogous to the Logos, divine reason and order. As Christians are told "In the beginning the Word[Logos] already was"(John 1:1), Atum announces that before creation, "when the heavens were asleep, my daughter Maat lived within me and around me."
The Logos is associated with mediators between the divine and humanity.
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GakuseiDon
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Re: Egyptian king/Osiris as logos.

Post by GakuseiDon »

The Hebrew word is 'Memra': "MEMRA (= "Ma'amar" or "Dibbur," "Logos")"
http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10618-memra

"The Word," in the sense of the creative or directive word or speech of God manifesting His power in the world of matter or mind; a term used especially in the Targum as a substitute for "the Lord" when an anthropomorphic expression is to be avoided...

Mediatorship.

Like the Shekinah (comp. Targ. Num. xxiii. 21), the Memra is accordingly the manifestation of God. "The Memra brings Israel nigh unto God and sits on His throne receiving the prayers of Israel" (Targ. Yer. to Deut. iv. 7). It shielded Noah from the flood (Targ. Yer. to Gen. vii. 16) and brought about the dispersion of the seventy nations (l.c. xi. 8); it is the guardian of Jacob (Gen. xxviii. 20-21, xxxv. 3) and of Israel (Targ. Yer. to Ex. xii. 23, 29); it works all the wonders in Egypt (l.c. xiii. 8, xiv. 25); hardens the heart of Pharaoh (l.c. xiii. 15); goes before Israel in the wilderness (Targ. Yer. to Ex. xx. 1); blesses Israel (Targ. Yer. to Num. xxiii. 8); battles for the people (Targ. Josh. iii. 7, x. 14, xxiii. 3)...

The Logos

It is difficult to say how far the rabbinical concept of the Memra, which is used now as a parallel to the divine Wisdom and again as a parallel to the Shekinah, had come under the influence of the Greek term "Logos," which denotes both word and reason, and, perhaps owing to Egyptian mythological notions, assumed in the philosophical system of Heraclitos, of Plato, and of the Stoa the metaphysical meaning of world-constructive and world-permeating intelligence...

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billd89
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Re: Osiris as Logos.

Post by billd89 »

nightshadetwine wrote: Sun Feb 03, 2019 3:08 pmPlutarch also says in Isis and Osiris 371a:
So in the soul, Intelligence and Reason, the Ruler and Lord of all that is good, is Osiris, and in earth and wind and water and the heavens and stars that which is ordered, established, and healthy, as evidenced by seasons, temperatures, and cycles of revolution, is the efflux of Osiris and his reflected image.
If Plutarch's knowledge (c.100 AD) of Egyptian religion was scant, and Osiris is/was known as Logos in his writings, it follows that an Alexandrian intellectual - living so close to Egyptian culture - must have known this tradition.

I'm curious what research on Philo (or Egypto-Hellenistic Jewish culture of the 1st C AD) ties in or connects such explicit Egyptian themes. Any recommendations?

Suggestive or bunkum?
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