Great Apostasy revisited

[The Nehor]

6 hours ago, ZealouslyStriving said:

Because scientists in general have immense scholarly pride and are very slow to adopt new ideas. 🤷🏻‍♂️

They demand evidence for new ideas. That can take time to put together and developbut suggesting they don’t like exciting new ideas in the field they almost all nerd out over? Yeah, no.

Religious people love to argue that academics are slow to change and are trapped in old ideas because it is convenient as it implies if they were more open they would obviously agree with me. That, or the religious people are just projecting their own inflexibility onto others.

[Eschaton]

19 hours ago, ZealouslyStriving said:

Because scientists in general have immense scholarly pride and are very slow to adopt new ideas. 🤷🏻‍♂️

It's not because her arguments and evidence are poor? Everyone else is hopelessly biased except the one fringy Biblical scholar who just happens to confirm some of your own theological biases? 

This doesn't seem a little too convenient by half to you as you type it out? 

Edited July 9 by Eschaton

[Eschaton]

16 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

You're leaning on the Hellenization model, and the evolutionary model of religion, that attributes every concept of an eternal soul to Greece, but modern comparative religion shows that's an oversimplification. It is heavily discarded and widely recognized as obsolete, it was pioneered in the 19th-century. Over the last few decades, mainstream New Testament scholars like E.P. Sanders, Geza Vermes, N.T. Wright, and John Dominic Crossan, have completely re-evaluated the world of Jesus, Paul and John, leaning heavily on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, not Plato. The disciples weren't educated Middle Platonists. They were everyday, working-class Galileans.

 

Yeah, none of this is really accurate. I think you're kind of making this up as you go along, especially since you're mentioning NT Wright and JD Crossan in the same breath. The New Testament was not written by working class Galileans by the way - but by highly educated Greek speaking converts. John 1 copies wholesale the ideas of the Platonist Philo. Origen, the primary Christian father who advocated for the pre-existence of the soul, was a Neoplatonist. 

 

16 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

Margaret Barker is a polarizing figure on some of her more radical theories. Though she was awarded a Lambeth Doctor of Divinity by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2008. She's spoken well of by many mainstream historical-critical scholars view her work as brilliant but over-speculative. She's been warmly received by Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican and LDS theologians, because the claims that vestments, rites and liturgies are very ancient are very appealing.

She's not totally wrong on everything, she's a creative researcher. Her work does get used - just not the kooky stuff that gets picked up by LDS apologists. 

 

16 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

Terryl Givens' Oxford University Press study When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought shows that the "Greek-only" narrative is an oversimplification. Givens traces how this doctrine continuously resurfaced across three millennia, despite being repeatedly and aggressively suppressed by mainstream religious orthodoxy. Givens argues that philosophers and theologians did not arbitrarily invent pre-existence, they kept turning to it because it solves many intellectual dilemmas that standard Christian theology struggles to answer. Suffering, genuine free will, deja vu and soulmates and kindred spirits. Givens maps the journey of the pre-mortal soul across history. Originating in ancient Mesopotamian myths where humans are imbued with a spark of divine blood, an idea formalized by Pythagoras and Plato, establishing the soul's native home in the stars.

 

Terryl Givens isn't a qualified or published critical Biblical scholar. 

 

16 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

Mesopotamian and early Semitic frameworks featured the concept of a heavenly assembly where the destinies and "essences" of individuals were determined and formed before their earthly births. 700–300 BC, the Upanishads in ancient India established a highly sophisticated doctrine of the eternal soul (Atman) that pre-existed its current physical birth, independent of any Mediterranean contact.

Anti-Mormon critics in the 19th centuries often accused Joseph Smith of "stealing" the doctrine of pre-mortal existence from Plato. But Joseph Smith didn't need to copy Plato, there was already a vibrant, brilliant underground stream of Western thought that mainstream scholastic theology had spent 1,500 years trying to suffocate. You don't need Margaret Barker to see the timeline flaws.

 

No one accused Smith of copying Plato - it's just that the Jewish and Christian factions that did hold to the pre-existence of souls got the idea from Plato, or others in their faction who got it from Plato. And it's a long line of telephone from Plato to certain Jewish and Christian writers, and on down to Joseph Smith. 

Edited July 9 by Eschaton

[The Nehor]

21 minutes ago, Eschaton said:

It's not because her arguments and evidence are poor? Everyone else is hopelessly biased except the one fringy Biblical scholar who just happens to confirm some of your own theological biases? 

This doesn't seem a little too convenient by half to you as you type it out? 

When something confirms or threatens a belief that is tied to someone’s identity they tend to get really stupid about what they can accept or reject. It is very hard (though possible) to overcome this knee-jerk reaction but few bother to even try.

You can have a great discussion with someone and think they are really bright but then if something touches on their religion or politics or cultural beliefs (assuming those are tied up in their identity) and they suddenly become credulous or denialists. It is a well-known and often studied bug in human rationality.

[Navidad]

I see a bit of intermingling of the terms soul and spirit in this thread.  How would you all define and/or differentiate each term? Or are they synonymous terms referring to the same aspect of humanity/living beings?

[Calm]

1 hour ago, Navidad said:

I see a bit of intermingling of the terms soul and spirit in this thread.  How would you all define and/or differentiate each term? Or are they synonymous terms referring to the same aspect of humanity/living beings?

Personally I use which ever sounds better when reading out loud when writing just for myself.

But LDS language tends to differentiate between the two.  

Spirit is that part of us that existed before we were born (possibly formed around the eternal matter intelligence, possibly formed by intelligence, possibly identical to intelligence…quite a few different interpretations of scripture over the years).

Soul is another word for the individual, it is usually the combination of physical form and spiritual form.

So if a Saint uses “soul” there is a good chance they are talking about the person, not just the person’s spirit.   But most of us know others who use “soul” as synonymous with “spirit” and if engaged with nonLDS, may use that definition.  Best to ask for clarification if it matters.

There is also recognition that scripture uses “soul” in multiple ways.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/gs/soul?lang=eng

“The scriptures speak of souls in three ways: (1) spirit beings, both premortal and postmortal (Alma 40:11–14; Abr. 3:23); (2) a spirit and a body united in mortality (D&C 88:15; Abr. 5:7); and (3) an immortal, resurrected person whose spirit and body have become inseparably connected (2 Ne. 9:13; D&C 88:15–16).”

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/soul?lang=eng

Edited July 10 by Calm

[Zosimus]

On 7/9/2026 at 7:51 AM, Pyreaux said:

Terryl Givens' Oxford University Press study When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought shows that the "Greek-only" narrative is an oversimplification.

This feels like an oversimplification of what Givens is saying, and I think Givens is also, by his own admission, oversimplifying the earliest instances we have of the idea in writing. In his first two chapters, he covers a handful of early Mesopotamian and "Semitic' accounts of gods discussing and planning within a pre-mortal state. But these examples are hardly anything like what we find in his later chapters, ending with Smith. And there's nothing in the Mesopotamian and Semitic accounts that don't also appear in Indian (you yourself bring up atman in the Upanishads) or Persian or Chinese or Norse or anywhere in human history we find myths. The Atrahasis or the Laws of Hammurabi or the Bible or the Upanishads might hint at pre-mortality, but Givens is clear: 

“Positing as it does claims about God, the creation, and human origin, [the Timaeus] is a text that will present special appeal as well as special challenges to early Christian philosophers. Whereas the account in Genesis leaves ambiguous the question of whether God organized or introduced into existence physical matter, Timaeus makes matter clearly preexistent. Over the next centuries, the dialogue will be invoked time and again to fill in the voids left in the Judeo-Christian creation narrative, offering an account, no less plausible than Noah’s flood and Babel’s tower, of divine motives, human origins, and life’s purpose.”

He also says:

"All we know for sure is that, when we encounter Semitic treatments of human preexistence in the early Christian era, they are within a Jewish culture that has been affected by a host of influences, including Babylonian myth, Ugaritic traditions, and most important, the philosophy of the classical world."

Many traditions have pre-mortal gods, but it wasn't until Plato that the idea became a challenge those traditions had to respond to. The early Christians were some of the first to accept the challenge, and Mormonism would not look like it does today without Plato. For example, Givens:

“Implicit in several of Plato’s dialogues, including Timaeus, the ideal is most explicitly stated in Theaetetus, where Socrates tells Theodorus, “a man should make all haste to escape from earth to heaven, and escape means becoming as like God as possible.” Not only is this idea central to Platonic philosophy, it is inextricably connected in his thought with pre-mortal origins. Preexistence and theosis will increasingly be linked, to the eventual detriment of both, in the subsequent thought of Origen, the Neo-Platonists, and a host of others."

That sounds way more like Mormonism than what we find in Akkadian poems or even the Bible.

I think Hansen has got things backwards, the apostasy really kicked off when Christian philosophers rejected the "pagan" ideas of premortality and eternal matter and divine potential 

[Pyreaux]

19 hours ago, Eschaton said:

Yeah, none of this is really accurate. I think you're kind of making this up as you go along, especially since you're mentioning NT Wright and JD Crossan in the same breath. The New Testament was not written by working class Galileans by the way - but by highly educated Greek speaking converts. John 1 copies wholesale the ideas of the Platonist Philo. Origen, the primary Christian father who advocated for the pre-existence of the soul, was a Neoplatonist. 

Terryl Givens isn't a qualified or published critical Biblical scholar. 

No one accused Smith of copying Plato - it's just that the Jewish and Christian factions that did hold to the pre-existence of souls got the idea from Plato, or others in their faction who got it from Plato. And it's a long line of telephone from Plato to certain Jewish and Christian writers, and on down to Joseph Smith. 

Pick up any standard university textbook on the history of biblical scholarship, such as Bart Ehrman, and they will categorize Wright and Crossan, despite many disagreements on other things, as key leaders of a specific academic movement called Third Quest for the Historical Jesus. In fact, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Wright and Crossan traveled the world together doing public debates, co-authoring books like The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N.T. Wright in Dialogue, precisely because they were the two most famous faces of the Third Quest. 

And Third Quest refutes the Hellenistic model using new archaeological data, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. I didn't claim Galilean fishermen penned the Greek texts, rather they are the dialogue of characters, it's all everyday vernacular of Jews, including asking if a man sinned before he was born in John, and they were non-Platonic, fiercely anti-Hellenistic Palestinian Jews in Judea. The Qumran community records starting around 250 BC, they literally fled into the desert to escape Greek cultural contamination. They despised everything Hellenistic. Yet, their writings are packed with highly complex worldviews regarding eternal spirits. They didn't need to get that from reading Plato, they had their own traditions of the First Temple and Enoch.

The Anchor Bible Commentary on John, Raymond Brown systematically evaluates four potential backgrounds for the Logos. Greek philosophy (Stoicism/Platonism), Philo of Alexandria, Gnosticism, and Old Testament/Rabbinic Judaism. His conclusion is definitive. The primary, foundational background for the Johannine Logos is the Old Testament concept of the "Word" of God (Davar), combined with the personification of Wisdom (Hokmah) found in Israel's Wisdom literature like Proverbs 8, Sirach 24, and Wisdom of Solomon 9.

In Stoicism, the Logos was an impersonal, material cosmic force. John’s Logos is a deeply personal, divine being. Brown argues the two concepts are completely different. Philo was a Hellenistic Jew trying to bridge Moses and Plato. For Philo, the Logos was still an abstract metaphysical concept or a buffer zone between God and matter. John’s "And the Word became flesh" would have been utterly abhorrent to Platonists and Philo, who believed the divine could never mix with corrupt physical matter. The Logos in John 1 isn't a Greek philosophical import at all. John took a Greek word and completely bent it to fit a Semitic, biblical worldview.

Poisoning the well claiming Givens isn't qualified, Oxford University Press does not publish kooky apologist material. Every single book they release must pass a brutal, anonymous peer-review process conducted by independent, non-LDS, mainstream secular historians.

Edited July 10 by Pyreaux

[Zosimus]

20 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

The Qumran community records starting around 250 BC, they literally fled into the desert to escape Greek cultural contamination. They despised everything Hellenistic. 

Do you have a reference supporting this? Greek manuscripts were found in Qumran. At least 27 manuscripts were Greek including Greek biblical fragments. (source) There's even some fragments of Enoch that might be Greek.

If they were fleeing Greek influence and escape everything Hellenistic, I don't imagine they'd be reading Greek bibles translated in Alexandria. 

20 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

Yet, their writings are packed with highly complex worldviews regarding eternal spirits. They didn't need to get that from reading Plato, they had their own traditions of the First Temple and Enoch.

afaik the Enoch texts found in Qumran don't have much about premortal human spirits and Qumran doesn't have much to show for such a worldview. The only thing I can find is that Josephus said much later that the Essenes taught that souls composed of the finest ether were imprisoned in bodies. But it seems Josephus was riffing in an attempt to Hellenize the Essenes or as he says it, they were followers of "the Pythagorean way of life" and their belief in eternal souls imprisoned in bodies agrees with "the sons of Greece."

[Pyreaux]

14 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Do you have a reference supporting this? Greek manuscripts were found in Qumran. At least 27 manuscripts were Greek including Greek biblical fragments. (source) There's even some fragments of Enoch that might be Greek.

If they were fleeing Greek influence and escape everything Hellenistic, I don't imagine they'd be reading Greek bibles translated in Alexandria. 

afaik the Enoch texts found in Qumran don't have much about premortal human spirits and Qumran doesn't have much to show for such a worldview. The only thing I can find is that Josephus said much later that the Essenes taught that souls composed of the finest ether were imprisoned in bodies. But it seems Josephus was riffing in an attempt to Hellenize the Essenes or as he says it, they were followers of "the Pythagorean way of life" and their belief in eternal souls imprisoned in bodies agrees with "the sons of Greece."

They weren't offended by the Greek language. Philosophy was incompatible the Raz Nihyeh, secrets of the way things are, as revealed to their leader. Truth was static, divine, and unlocked only through inspired interpretation of Hebrew scripture, the "pesher". Debate, logic, and speculative metaphysics of schools like Stoicism or Platonism were viewed as part of the "dominion of Belial" because it was seeking wisdom outside of God.

The Community Rule lays out that they were leaving society and going to the wilderness to escape the corrupt of mainstream Israel, "They shall separate themselves from the session of the men of deceit in order to depart into the wilderness to prepare there the Way of the Lord; as it is written: 'In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make level in the desert a highway for our God.'" (1QS 8:12–15) The "men of deceit" were the religious rulers in Jerusalem who had done such things as adapt the Torah to find comfortable common ground with Hellenistic laws.

The War Scroll's entire text is about an apocalyptic global war "against the Kittim of Asshur [the Seleucid Greeks]." (1QM). Kittim to refer to the invading Greek Seleucids and Ptolemies, and later the Romans. It and Pesher to Habakkuk (1QpHab) condemn the Greeks for idolatry. But the scrolls biggest ax is for the Hellenized Jews, those were the high priests and elites in Jerusalem who adopted Greek philosophy, Greek sports, and Greek religious syncretism.

The Pesher on Nahum (4Q169), the community explicitly rails against the ruling class in Jerusalem for introducing Greek customs and cooperating with Greek kings, like Antiochus Epiphanes.

Halakhic Letter, Miqsat Ma'aseh ha-Torah (4QMMT) outlining, "We have separated ourselves from the multitude of the people and from all their impurity, and from intermingling in these matters, and from participating with them in these things... because we have seen that they have no understanding of the Law." (4QMMT C:7–8). The "intermingling" refers to the sweeping changes made to Temple sacrifices, marriage laws, and festival schedules under Hellenistic influence.

The Habakkuk Commentary (1QpHab) the community is talking about the high-priestly aristocracy for looting funds, taxing the population, and adopting Greco-Roman economic and political patterns to solidify their own power.

"The explanation of this concerns the Wicked Priest, who was called by the name of truth at the beginning of his course... but when he ruled in Israel his heart became proud, and he abandoned God and betrayed the precepts for the sake of riches. And he robbed and hoarded the wealth of the men of violence who had rebelled against God, and he took the wealth of the peoples to add to himself a load of guilt." (1QpHab 8:8–12).

The Damascus Document (CD) details the "three nets of Belial (Satan)" that have trapped the mainstream Jewish leadership in Jerusalem. One of those nets was the total desecration of the sanctuary through pagan-influenced laxity, "They defile the Sanctuary, for they do not separate according to the Law, but lie with a woman who sees the blood of her discharge... and each man marries the daughter of his brother, whereas Moses said... 'You shall not approach your mother's sister.'" (CD 5:6–11)

Concern for moral, marital, and ritual standards that looked dangerously similar to the practices of the surrounding Hellenistic world, where close marriages was common practice to keep wealth and power concentrated. 

Even Jews who deeply resented the Greek political rule or religion spoke, wrote, and read Greek as a matter of daily survival and commerce. Some scrolls were brought by converts joining the community from Greek-speaking areas, while others may have been brought later from the Jerusalem libraries for safekeeping when the Roman army marched on Judea. They were heavily exposed to the Greek language, yet they fiercely resisted Greek theology, despite centuries of exposure to the Greek language, their theological core remained un-Platonic.

Spirits as the heavenly blueprints before made on earth

Their sectarian scrolls contain a highly developed concept of human spirits existing before mortality, but it is framed through a belief around divine pre-planning of Creation, but not Platonic philosophy. The most famous text on this is the Treatise on the Two Spirits, found within the Community Rule (1QS 3:15)

"From the God of Knowledge comes all that is and shall be. Before they existed, He established all their design; and when they come into being... they fulfill their work according to His glorious design."

Before the world was made, God created the Spirit of Light and the Spirit of Darkness. Every human soul is assigned to one of these two spirits before they are ever born. "Sons of Light" and the "Sons of Darkness". Your spirit exists pre-mortally as either a divine blueprint or an engineered spirit within God's design. God sits down at a metaphorical drafting table before the creation of matter. He designs individual human "spirits" and assigns them a definitive set of tasks, moral capabilities, and historical roles.

The Thanksgiving Hymns (Hodayot / 1QH)

"You have formed every spirit and established its work before creation... You determined the destiny of every human being according to the spirit given to him." (1QH 17:11–12)

The Barkhi Nafshi (Bless, O My Soul / 4Q434–438)

The text explicitly praises God for knowing a person "before they were ever formed in the womb," echoing Jeremiah but expanding it to general human populations.

Spirits in storehouses of the winds

1 Enoch references heavenly storehouses. Enoch sees the "storehouses of all the winds" and these winds are alive. Often treated as identical to being the storehouses of human spirits in the Guf, where pre-existent or post-mortem spirits are kept under lock and key until their appointed time.

References to these storehouses are seen in 4 Ezra (4 Esdras), 2 Baruch 30:2, Psalm 135:7, Jeremiah 10:13, Job 38:22, Ecclesiastes 12:7.

Spirits in the Assembly / Council

Enoch is granted a vision that purposefully blurs the line between the souls of the righteous and the angels:

"And I saw another vision... the dwelling-places of the holy and the resting-places of the righteous. Here my eyes saw their dwellings with His holy angels, and their resting-places with the holy ones." (1 Enoch 39:4-5)

There is the Zedekim, the "Assembly of the Righteous," is framed as part of the exact same celestial architecture as the "Assembly of the Holy Ones." The Zedekim, the righteous ones, in the heavenly court and divine council, are lead by a heavenly Melchizedek.

Later there are clearer references to a pre-mortal council where Adam, Noah, Abraham, Enoch, and Moses sit with God before the physical world is constructed, a classic midrashic concept that was compiled and popularized by Eliyahu Kitov in Sefer HaParshiyot (The Book of Torah Portions) from texts like Bereshit Rabbah 8:7 and the Talmud.

Edited Saturday at 11:28 PM by Pyreaux

[The Nehor]

They were an apocalypse cult. The War Scroll that contained their battle plan wasn’t a good plan. Most likely the community died out during one of the revolts.

As one Jewish scholar I follow a lot says: “If your military plan is for God to save you, stay home.”

[Zosimus]

5 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

But the scrolls biggest ax is for the Hellenized Jews, those were the high priests and elites in Jerusalem who adopted Greek philosophy, Greek sports, and Greek religious syncretism.

Isn't this the 'Hellenization model' you described as an oversimplification?

[Pyreaux]

2 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Isn't this the 'Hellenization model' you described as an oversimplification?

I still think the oversimplification is to paint Second Temple Jerusalem as place where the High Priests were sitting around reading Plato or trying to be philosophers. That strips them of their organic, native development.

The high priests were politicians dealing with Greek overlords, living in Jerusalem, Tiberias and Sepphoris. Jesus’s disciples were from the rural fishing villages and agricultural pockets of Galilee, places like Capernaum, Bethsaida, and Nazareth. Jesus never sets foot inside Sepphoris or Tiberias, and they were only a few miles away. Like the other working class, he actively avoided these urban hubs of foreign compromise.

But even "Hellenized elites", who may have liked Greek styles and luxury still were not sophisticated intellectuals. The disciples were entirely insulated from Greek education, philosophy, and rhetoric, their worldview was shaped exclusively by the text of the Hebrew Scriptures and the oral traditions of their local communities. Jesus preached entirely around local themes of seeds, soil, nets, fish, and vineyards. His hated Jewish corruptions to the Law, the injustice for the poor and the hypocrisy of the ruling class.

Christianity wasn't a brand-new invention, nor was it a product of Greek thought. Jesus the Christ, John the Baptist, James the Righteous, and Jude seem to have more than a little Qumran in them. The movement was populist and from grassroots. But Qumran itself saw every single compromise made by the Jerusalem establishment, whether it was a political treaty with a Greek king, or how the upper-class dressed, was through a magnifying glass of religious panic.

Edited Sunday at 06:31 AM by Pyreaux

[Calm]

2 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

Jesus never sets foot inside Sepphoris or Tiberias

Are you certain of that given how little we have of his life?

[The Nehor]

7 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

I still think the oversimplification is to paint Second Temple Jerusalem as place where the High Priests were sitting around reading Plato or trying to be philosophers. That strips them of their organic, native development.

The high priests were politicians dealing with Greek overlords, living in Jerusalem, Tiberias and Sepphoris. Jesus’s disciples were from the rural fishing villages and agricultural pockets of Galilee, places like Capernaum, Bethsaida, and Nazareth. Jesus never sets foot inside Sepphoris or Tiberias, and they were only a few miles away. Like the other working class, he actively avoided these urban hubs of foreign compromise.

Uh, the working class keeps cities like those running. It is quite possible Jesus and/or his father and/or other family got work building there.

7 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

But even "Hellenized elites", who may have liked Greek styles and luxury still were not sophisticated intellectuals. The disciples were entirely insulated from Greek education, philosophy, and rhetoric, their worldview was shaped exclusively by the text of the Hebrew Scriptures and the oral traditions of their local communities. Jesus preached entirely around local themes of seeds, soil, nets, fish, and vineyards. His hated Jewish corruptions to the Law, the injustice for the poor and the hypocrisy of the ruling class.

Entirely insulated? That is not how culture works.

7 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

Christianity wasn't a brand-new invention, nor was it a product of Greek thought. Jesus the Christ, John the Baptist, James the Righteous, and Jude seem to have more than a little Qumran in them. The movement was populist and from grassroots. But Qumran itself saw every single compromise made by the Jerusalem establishment, whether it was a political treaty with a Greek king, or how the upper-class dressed, was through a magnifying glass of religious panic.

Also no. The general consensus was that Qumran was started by renegade/exiled priests. The Dead Sea Scrolls bear this out. The Halakhic letter shows some of their disputes with the temple priests. It wasn’t grass roots. There is no indication they were proselyting…..especially that they were proselyting the uneducated. Populist movements champion the “common people”. That is not what Qumran was doing based on the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was a religious dispute.

[Pyreaux]

10 hours ago, The Nehor said:

The general consensus was that Qumran was started by renegade/exiled priests. The Dead Sea Scrolls bear this out. The Halakhic letter shows some of their disputes with the temple priests. It wasn’t grass roots. There is no indication they were proselyting…..especially that they were proselyting the uneducated. Populist movements champion the “common people”. That is not what Qumran was doing based on the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was a religious dispute.

Um, no, I was saying the Christians were the populist, grassroots movement of the common people. Qumran were indeed educated, isolated, closed-circled group of Zadokite priests. Both groups intensely disliked the corruption of the Jerusalem/Temple establishment, they had the same anti-establishment, apocalyptic ideas. John the Baptist seems very associated with Qumran but clearly didn't stay in the monastery, baptizing mass crowds of common people. 

Edited Sunday at 11:44 PM by Pyreaux

[The Nehor]

45 minutes ago, Pyreaux said:

Um, no, I saying the Christians were the populist, grassroots movement of the common people. Qumran were indeed educated, isolated, closed-circled group of Zadokite priests. Both groups intensely disliked the corruption of the Jerusalem/Temple establishment, they had the same anti-establishment, apocalyptic ideas. John the Baptist seems very associated with Qumran but clearly didn't stay in the monastery, baptizing mass crowds of common people. 

Oops, I blame lack of sleep for my error.

[Calm]

1 hour ago, The Nehor said:

Oops, I blame lack of sleep for my error.

Don’t we all…  

[InCognitus]

On 7/6/2026 at 11:17 AM, Nofear said:

Jacob Hansen presents an alternative or modified narrative of the Great Apostasy. Loss of priesthood authority, sure. But he points to something deeper: the Hellenization of Christianity.

I thought Jacob Hansen did a good job of presenting his case clearly on this one.

[InCognitus]

On 7/7/2026 at 10:23 AM, telnetd said:

Worshipping an exalted man is a Great Apostasy.

Do you worship Jesus?

[Eschaton]

On 7/10/2026 at 7:06 AM, Pyreaux said:

Pick up any standard university textbook on the history of biblical scholarship, such as Bart Ehrman, and they will categorize Wright and Crossan, despite many disagreements on other things, as key leaders of a specific academic movement called Third Quest for the Historical Jesus. In fact, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Wright and Crossan traveled the world together doing public debates, co-authoring books like The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N.T. Wright in Dialogue, precisely because they were the two most famous faces of the Third Quest. 

 

That's true of Crossan, but Wright is more of an all-purpose conservative Christian scholar who kind of lets his theological bias lead him by the nose. 

 

On 7/10/2026 at 7:06 AM, Pyreaux said:

And Third Quest refutes the Hellenistic model using new archaeological data, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. I didn't claim Galilean fishermen penned the Greek texts, rather they are the dialogue of characters, it's all everyday vernacular of Jews, including asking if a man sinned before he was born in John, and they were non-Platonic, fiercely anti-Hellenistic Palestinian Jews in Judea. The Qumran community records starting around 250 BC, they literally fled into the desert to escape Greek cultural contamination. They despised everything Hellenistic. Yet, their writings are packed with highly complex worldviews regarding eternal spirits. They didn't need to get that from reading Plato, they had their own traditions of the First Temple and Enoch.

 

I'm not sure who told you all that, but its simply not true. Despite their rejection of the idolatry of the Greeks, they certainly picked up Greek theological ideas ran with them.  They might not even have been aware of it was Greek. The same thing happened with the Babylonians, by the way.  Every time a new nation invaded Israel, they influenced the Israelite literature of the time. 

 

On 7/10/2026 at 7:06 AM, Pyreaux said:

The Anchor Bible Commentary on John, Raymond Brown systematically evaluates four potential backgrounds for the Logos. Greek philosophy (Stoicism/Platonism), Philo of Alexandria, Gnosticism, and Old Testament/Rabbinic Judaism. His conclusion is definitive. The primary, foundational background for the Johannine Logos is the Old Testament concept of the "Word" of God (Davar), combined with the personification of Wisdom (Hokmah) found in Israel's Wisdom literature like Proverbs 8, Sirach 24, and Wisdom of Solomon 9.

In Stoicism, the Logos was an impersonal, material cosmic force. John’s Logos is a deeply personal, divine being. Brown argues the two concepts are completely different. Philo was a Hellenistic Jew trying to bridge Moses and Plato. For Philo, the Logos was still an abstract metaphysical concept or a buffer zone between God and matter. John’s "And the Word became flesh" would have been utterly abhorrent to Platonists and Philo, who believed the divine could never mix with corrupt physical matter. The Logos in John 1 isn't a Greek philosophical import at all. John took a Greek word and completely bent it to fit a Semitic, biblical worldview.

See: Runia, D. T. (1993). Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ISBN 9789023227137.

 

On 7/10/2026 at 7:06 AM, Pyreaux said:

Poisoning the well claiming Givens isn't qualified, Oxford University Press does not publish kooky apologist material. Every single book they release must pass a brutal, anonymous peer-review process conducted by independent, non-LDS, mainstream secular historians.

It's simply not his area of expertise. That's a fact. Why rely on unqualified scholars when there are so many who specialize in this area? 

[Eschaton]

On 7/12/2026 at 12:53 AM, Pyreaux said:

I still think the oversimplification is to paint Second Temple Jerusalem as place where the High Priests were sitting around reading Plato or trying to be philosophers. That strips them of their organic, native development.

 

 

No one ever claimed they did this - this is a strawman you've invented in your mind, and then turned to AI to try to refute. 

However unlike others who have responded to you I will agree that Jesus seems to have avoided gentile centers. However that wouldn't have insulated him from Greek ideas. But we know very little about what Jesus actually taught - the gospels are full of ideas that later Christian communities came up with. There are only a handful of teachings that we can even say probably went back to Jesus himself. 

Edited Monday at 02:53 PM by Eschaton

[telnetd]

15 hours ago, InCognitus said:

Do you worship Jesus?

Yes. The God/man, not a being who became God.

[InCognitus]

10 hours ago, telnetd said:

Yes. The God/man, not a being who became God.

Jesus was God before he was a man, and God the Father was God while he was a man, or else he would not have had the power to lay down his life and take it up again (as Joseph Smith said he did), and Jesus did what his Father did.

The early Christians taught that Jesus is "the first-born of all creation, who is the first to be with God, and to attract to Himself divinity, is a being of more exalted rank than the other gods beside Him...  It was by the offices of the first-born that they became gods, for He drew from God in generous measure that they should be made gods" (Origen, Commentary on John 1:1, Book II, chapter 2).  And, that "the nature of the Son, which is nearest to Him who is alone the Almighty One, is the most perfect, and most holy, and most potent, and most princely, and most kingly, and most beneficent... To Him is placed in subjection all the host of angels and gods " (Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, Book VII, Chapter2).  These things are not apostasy, they were the original teachings.

[Zosimus]

2 hours ago, InCognitus said:

(Origen, Commentary on John 1:1, Book II, chapter 2)

(Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, Book VII, Chapter2).  

These things are not apostasy, they were the original teachings.

This is the tension in this discussion innit. Many of the things Mormons see as early Christianity is Platonism. Both Origen and Clement of Alexandria was heavily influenced by Plato. Origen, who you quote, was a student of the platonist Ammonius Saccas who also taught Plotinus, the founder of neoplatonism.

This goes back to the earlier questions in this thread, if we remove the Hellenist influence from Judaism and Christianity, we'd not have all these works that allow us to recognize all these 'original teachings' that Joseph Smith restored.

This is why it feels to me that Hansen has things backwards. The early Christians that had training in Plato somehow were the ones that managed to inject many of the 'original teachings' that were later rejected as heresies by the orthodox Church. Smith restored many of them