viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3120According to pre-christian sects, this celestial Christ ''had manifested himself only in the persons of certain mythical or semi-mythical characters'' such as Adam, Cain, Abraham, Enoch, Noah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph,and Moses.
If the Odes are ''of Solomon'', then it means that Solomon was believed (by the real author of the Odes) as the temporary recipient possessed by the Christ. Christ ''dies'' in the man Solomon and rises as pure spirit. Extend this on all the previous biblical persons - Adam, Cain, Abraham, Enoch, Noah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, etc... - and you have that the spiritual Christ is dead not one, but thousands of times for all the human history.
Hermann Detering explains the absence of the name ''Jesus'' in the Odes as work of deliberate fraud by his author:
https://www.academia.edu/33027059/_Amat ... o=download„The fiction is not without importance … Solomon could speak of Christ because it is an Old Testament term that has a meaning within Judaism; but even as a prophet, he could hardly know the name Jesus as the name of the Messiah“ - Pétrement, A Separate God, (s. Anm. 10), 374.
102 Schenke,
I disagree with Detering's view insofar I suspect that the his theological agenda seems to be to push all the
Christian books in the II CE so that the real Origins became ''metaphysically mysterious'' and the faith of the any Christian (like Detering himself) is ''pure'' insofar it is founded not on evidence.
But I see that at least a II CE Christian sect had a view very similar to that one I am proposing here:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library ... tury#toc35Finally, the Elchasaites, having entered into the general quarrel about the “true messiah,” were perhaps the first to produce — with Saul/Paul and Satornil — the ecumenical name Joshua/Jesus.
In the manner of the various Christianities of the first two centuries, the Elchasaites’ conception of the Messiah was that of the angelos-christos. He had been created like one of the archangels — in the same way that Michael is also Melchitsedeq. “To all beings, God gave a prototype: to angels an angel, to the spirits a spirit, to men a man who was Adam-Jesus. Adam was without sin, despite certain mendacious passages in the Scriptures.”[182]
Elchasaite Christianity believed in the successive reincarnations of the Messiah, who had “since the origin of the world changed his form and name, and thus reappears ceaselessly and ceaselessly in the world” (Homelies, III, 10).
Stantibus sic rebus, I wonder:
who were really the ''archons of this eon'' ?
1) If for ''rulers of this age'' we mean the set of ALL the kings of the earth in all the chronological interval of time called ''AEON'',
2) and if the successive reincarnations of the Messiah in the History served to make the Christ apparently killed by any single earthly ''ruler'' during all the ''AEON'' - the unique AEON that goes from the creation to today -,
...then Paul could say that all ''the rulers of this age'' crucified Jesus without knowing him.
That was the shortest way to mean that Paul would have believed in successive reincarnations and CRUCIFIXIONS of the Christ.
The insistence on a crucifixion BY PILATE and only by Pilate was the mere effect of the reductio ad unum triggered by the first Gospel: one incarnation, one crucifixion, one Jesus Christ.