Norman Cohn Gönderileri
Norman Cohn kitaplarını, Norman Cohn sözleri ve alıntılarını, Norman Cohn yazarlarını, Norman Cohn yorumları ve incelemelerini 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.
Of the gospels, Matthew's shows the clearest signs of Zoroastrian influence. Most obvious is the famous passage about the magi: ‘After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judaea … some magi came to Jerusalem from the east. “Where is the infant king of the Jews?” they asked. “We saw his star as it rose." In Greek usage a magus was simply a Zoroastrian priest.
In 614, the Persian army under Chosroes invaded Palestine, his soldiers destroyed the churches of Jerusalem but spared the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem because a mosaic there depicted the magi in Persian dress.
The suffering, humiliation and death of Jesus ceased to present a problem if they could be understood as preconditions for an exaltation far beyond any known to mere mortals: ‘Was the Messiah not bound to suffer thus before entering upon his glory?
His decision to choose twelve disciples seems to have originated in his expectation of ruling over all the twelve tribes. His promise to ‘the twelve’ certainly suggests as much: ‘I vest in you the kingship which my Father vested in me; you shall eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones as judges of the twelve tribes of Israel.‘
Until the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD and the ensuing council at Yavneh there was no Jewish orthodoxy: Judaism embraced a number of groups and sects. Christians constituted one of these, alongside Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, ‘Zealots’ (resistance fighters), and other less well known. Christians, including Gentile converts, regarded themselves as Jews — and until well into the second century other Jews also regarded them as Jews.
Smiling in their agonies and mildly deriding their tormentors, they cheerfully resigned their souls, confident that they would receive them back again.
The demons had a chief, Mastema — and he asked God a favour: that some of the demons should remain on earth, under his command, for the purpose of corrupting human beings and leading them astray. Impressed by Mastema's argument that ‘great is the wickedness of the sons of men’, God agreed to let them be tempted in this way. A tenth of the demons was spared, to be subject to their chief until the day of judgment.
Chapters 6–16, plus 19, tell how, as mankind multiplied, some of the angels were so overcome by the beauty of the daughters of men that they came down to earth, took on human form, and acquired a wife each. By so doing they polluted themselves and forfeited the spiritual quality with which God had endowed them. They also taught human beings much that they ought never to have known: how to make weapons, how to dress seductively, how to practise magic — which in turn involved sacrificing to false gods. Worse: the illicit intercourse between angels and women produced a race of giants — a most destructive breed, who set about devouring everything on earth, including human beings and even one another.
All angels were male, and God had created the two highest ranks of angels already circumcised. Now Jewish males were required to follow that example. A Jewish boy who was not circumcised on the eighth day after birth had transgressed the order that God had established and was fit only to be ‘rooted out of the earth’.
Jews might no longer accept the patron gods of the nations as real gods, but they had replaced them by patron angels — and these angels could take part, alongside human beings, in international conflicts. In Daniel the guardian angel of Israel, Michael, is referred to as ‘the great prince,’ ‘one of the chief princes’; and the fact that Israel has such a powerful protector at the heavenly court means that, however insignificant the Chosen People may appear in purely political terms, it can never be destroyed by any other nation.