Giuseppe wrote: ↑Sat Dec 04, 2021 8:26 am
'Mandeans', 'king of the world'.
It appears that the
King/Prince of the/this World figure was the earliest conception of Christ's total antagonist, with the identification ranging from Satan, Yahweh, the Demiurge, or any combination of those. It looks like it was, at its earliest stage, an otherworldly figure (insofar as the devil or demiurge would be), but perhaps it was first historicized into the
Emperor of the World, i.e. the Roman Emperor? Basically, I wonder if there was a stage between the otherworldly
King of the World and Pilate where the perpetrator was, vaguely the Roman Emperor.
It also fits with my general theory that the older version of the gospel narrative featured its hero darting around the sea, with
THE sea of the era being the Mediterranean. Probably at the same time that Pilate was specified as the perpetrator, the great sea was recast as Lake Tiberias (which we only seem to call a "sea" because the gospels do)