2023-12-15 16:59:00
Mircea Eliade He was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century and his contributions to history of religion They have had universal significance. The Dictionary of Religions has just been published in Spanish, which was originally published after the death of the author in 1991, with the contributions of John P. Couliano. This dictionary includes articles dedicated to the different religions of the world, with updated information on founders, prophets, sacred books and the various spiritual currents that have left their mark on the spiritual history of humanity.
From this edition we publish a fragment of the 10th chapter, dedicated to Christianity, where the origins and lack of historical confirmation of the facts are told.
(…) “Jesus Christ, a Jewish prophet from Nazareth, in Galilee, born at the beginning of the Christian era and crucified, according to tradition in the spring of the year 33, occupies the center of the Christian religion. His life and brief career of the messiah are described in the Gospels. The historical sources of that time contain almost no information about Jesus, to the point that a radical mythological current has seriously questioned his historical existence. Although commonly accepted today, the existence of Jesus continues to raise numerous historical problems.
Why should the Christmas tree be put up on December 8?
“”The Jesus of the Gospels is the son of Mary, wife of the carpenter Joseph. After being baptized by John the Baptist, a prophet later executed by the puppet king Herod, Jesus set out to preach and perform miracles. Today it is impossible for us to reconstruct his original message. Although Christianity is considered a religion of peace, it is likely that Jesus had suspicious relations with the Zealots, fundamentalist Jewish fighters who had set out to end the Roman occupation of Palestine. SGF Brandon even believes that these relationships would have been very close. In any case, Jesus’ attitude was not the most appropriate to attract the sympathies of the Jewish religious authorities, who ordered his arrest and handed him over to Roman justice. The accusation is not entirely clear: it seems, however, that some accused him of blasphemy and others of sedition. After a summary trial in which Pilate (or perhaps the prudent authors of the Gospels, who did not want to bother the Roman authorities) decides to entrust the sentence to the Jewish people, Jesus is crucified by Roman soldiers under the probable accusation of being a false messiah He died and was buried the same day.
“One of the thorniest problems that modern criticism has been forced to confront (although without success) has been that of establishing with some precision the idea that Jesus had of himself. Did he consider himself the Son of God? Did he believe he was the messiah (and what kind of messiah? Did he consider himself a prophet? Be that as it may, the Jesus of the Gospels acts as if he held an authority greater than that of the Torah itself, with the ultimate goal of bringing back the sinners to God and to announce the arrival of the kingdom of God. It seems indisputable that Jesus addressed God with the familiar term abba (“daddy”, “dear father”), although it is doubtful whether his filial feelings were the same as attributed to him by later generations, under the influence of a Platonism that did not dislike the idea that the world of archetypes had been incarnated in a human being. The synoptic Gospels relatively frequently give Jesus the title of Son of Man (used by the prophet Daniel), of which unfortunately we are not in a position to specify the contextual meaning (in the Aramaic language it simply means “man”). His disciples called him mašiaj, messiah (“anointed”), that is, “consecrated, in Greek khristos. If he was crucified under the inscription “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”, it is likely that the idea of belonging to the royal lineage of David was attributed to him. However, it does not appear that Jesus ever openly proclaimed his messiah identity. An enigmatic character, he dies, and his disciples affirm that he was resurrected after three days and that he remained with them for forty more days (Acts 1:3; the apocryphal traditions of the Gnostics offer a much higher number of days ). But, at a time when Christianity was nothing more than a Jewish sect, sects such as the Ebionites considered Jesus a simple prophet and did not believe in his resurrection. It was Paul who put the resurrection at the center of the Christian message.
“Paul of Tarsus, the brilliant ideologist of Christianity, was a complex personality. His real name was Saul (o) and he came from a diaspora Jewish family, wealthy enough to allow him to receive a classical education, along with a solid instruction in the Torah. He was a Roman citizen and Pharisee. He began persecuting Christians, but converted to the new faith following a vision of the resurrected Christ on the road to Damascus. His missionary activity began shortly after and ensured continuity of Christianity outside of Judaism, among the Gentiles. Around the year 48, Paul and his companions, after having spent two years in Asia Minor, embarked for Europe, where they founded the Churches of Philippi, Thessalonica and Corinth. While the Judaizing party of Jerusalem continued to conceive of Christianity as a branch of Judaism and demanded circumcision and observance of the normative prescriptions of the Torah, Paul boldly chose to emancipate Christianity from Judaism, contrasting the regime of the Law with the freedom enjoyed by the Christian under the fortunate regime of Faith. That moment of crisis and tension between Paul and the mother Church of Jerusalem, led by James, brother of Jesus, and Peter, constitutes the theme of Paul’s letter to the Galatians of Asia Minor around the year 53). Paul’s activity in Ephesus comes to an end due to the mutiny of the city’s silversmiths. Later we find him again in Corinth, where he is preparing his mission trip to Rome and Spain. Around the year 57 he visited Jerusalem and planned a trip to Rome. He stopped at Caesarea, where he remained imprisoned for two years, until, on the basis of his status as a Roman citizen, he appealed to the judgment of the emperor himself. In this way, around the year 60, he will arrive in Rome, where two years later he will be executed with Nero as emperor.”
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