Clive wrote:That is definitely worth exploring. Do we have a real cause of Mary and the birth stories? Mary is the mother of God to many!
Mary becomes Mother of God: The year 431 A.D. was a momentous one in the history of the Queen of Heaven. That’s the year the church fathers, meeting in Ephesus in modern day Turkey, officially declared that Mary is Theotokos, literally, in Greek, the one who gave birth to God. More commonly her title is paraphrased as Mother of God. This was an important political step, as it clarified for the theologians that Jesus was both God and man. Perhaps just as importantly, however, it pacified the people, who were demanding that Mary be acknowledged as a divinity.
Technically, the church denied Mary as divine, as a Goddess, but in practical terms, it conveyed a sense of holiness which made her a viable rival to that other popular Roman/Greek/Egyptian hybrid Goddess of the time, represented variously as Diana, Cybele, and Isis.
The political thinking of society evolves as new generations arrive and then depart . The eternal and unchanging divine systems also participate in the same process: Mariology in the making
Saint Athanasius,
As a further corollary of the Incarnation we may notice his frequent use (Orat. iii. 14, 29, 33, iv. 32, c. Apoll. i. 4, 12, 21) of the word θεοτόκος as an epithet or as a name for the Virgin Mary.
The translation ‘Mother of God’ is of course erroneous. ‘God-bearer’ (Gottes-bärerin), the literal equivalent, is scarcely idiomatic English. The perpetual virginity of Mary is maintained incidentally (c. Apoll. i. 4), but there is an entire absence in his writings not only of worship of the Virgin, but of ‘Mariology,’ i.e., of the tendency to assign to her a personal agency, or any peculiar place, in the work of Redemption (Gen. iii. 15, Vulg.).
Further, the argument of Orat. i. 51 fin., that the sending of Christ in the flesh for the first time (λοιπόν) liberated human nature from sin, and enabled the requirement of God’s law to be fulfilled in man (an argument strictly within the lines of Rom. viii. 3), would be absolutely wrecked by the doctrine of the freedom of Mary from original sin (‘immaculate conception’). If that doctrine be held, sin was ‘condemned in the flesh’ (i.e., first deposed from its place in human nature, see Gifford or Meyer-Weiss in loc.), not by the sending of Christ, but by the congenital sinlessness of Mary.
If the Arians had only known of the latter doctrine, they would have had an easy reply to that powerful passage..
If you want to continue your discussion of Mary the mother of Jesus from the synoptic gospels, or later "Mariology", perhaps you could take it to new thread.
This thread has virtually nothing to do with that mother. The mother in this topic was mentioned in the OP in the context of a pagan goddess that likely found a favored position in the pantheon of the polytheistic, pagan, Galatian Celts.
Last edited by robert j on Mon Dec 14, 2015 2:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
robert j wrote:When Paul came along, he offered them a son, the son of the God of the Jews. A son that promised eternal life. A son that made their family of gods complete. A mother, a father and a son --- a tidy little trinity that was surely adequate to satisfy, for each of them, the needs of their own personal spirits.
robert j wrote:But what a nice little divine, nuclear family the Galatian congregation may have assembled ...
It seems a pretty safe bet that the Galatian Celts, after they migrated into Asia Minor, incorporated into their pantheon the great Anatolian mother goddess of the indigenous Phyrigians. At the time of Paul, the great earth mother was most likely in the form of the goddess Cybele. The mother goddess likely enjoyed a favored position.
Paul's Galatians were enamored of the Jewish religion and of the greatest God of all --- that much is obvious from Paul's letter...
When Paul came along, he offered them a son, the son of the God of the Jews. A son that promised eternal life. A son that made their family of gods complete. A mother, a father and a son --- a tidy little trinity that was surely adequate to satisfy, for each of them, the needs of their own personal spirits.
Of course Paul didn’t see it that way.
robert j.
And from my follow-up post ---
robert j wrote:I wrote the short essay in the OP with tongue just slightly in-cheek. After reading this short yet very informative article with the link below, I believe I can remove the tongue from my cheek entirely. Here’s an excerpt from near the end of the article providing significant support for my musings ---
Last edited by robert j on Mon Dec 14, 2015 2:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
robert j wrote:But what a nice little divine, nuclear family the Galatian congregation may have assembled ...
It seems a pretty safe bet that the Galatian Celts, after they migrated into Asia Minor, incorporated into their pantheon the great Anatolian mother goddess of the indigenous Phyrigians. At the time of Paul, the great earth mother was most likely in the form of the goddess Cybele. The mother goddess likely enjoyed a favored position.
Paul's Galatians were enamored of the Jewish religion and of the greatest God of all --- that much is obvious from Paul's letter...
When Paul came along, he offered them a son, the son of the God of the Jews. A son that promised eternal life. A son that made their family of gods complete. A mother, a father and a son --- a tidy little trinity that was surely adequate to satisfy, for each of them, the needs of their own personal spirits.
Of course Paul didn’t see it that way.
robert j.
Paul offered them a mother . A mother, a father and a son --- a tidy little trinity
iskander wrote:I was talking to Clive , when you rudely interrupted.
What happened to common courtesy? I simply requested that you take your discussion to a new thread, since the discussion was veering well away the topic of this thread --- Paul's Galatians.
The main topic of your " essay" is what the Celtic people ... etc
Perhaps attempting to read the letter through the eyes of the congregation may help clarify the situation --- through the eyes of a Celtic people awash in the influences of the still recently opened, wider-world allowed by the Pax Romana