If you are curious about the origins of biblical stories, this is the page for you.
13/08/2024
My praatjie by Renaissance verlede Sondag.
Vrouwees in historiese perspektief: leer uit die verlede vir vandag.
Vrouwees in historiese perspektief; leer uit die verlede vir vandag • Ronelle van Zyl
05/10/2023
28/05/2023
Jokes. 😁
31/05/2022
Could not have said it better. Thank you Mr Borg.
Yesterday someone asked me about homos*xuality. According to them it was wrong as "the Bible says so".
A few thoughts to consider:
1. The authors of the biblical books had no concept of homos*xuality as a loving, caring relationship between two partners of the same biological s*x. (Something could also be said here about the scientific advances in epigenetics and its link to homos*xuality, but lets keep the focus of this post on biblical ideas).
2. The worldview of biblical antiquity was one of honor versus shame. Boys were raised to actively practice the discourse of dominance and achieve social status. They received tutorship in the "correct" way to talk and carry themselves.
3. Dominance was a sign of honor and any sign of weakness a sign of shame. Women were automatically born into shame and expected to submit to their men (first their father and then their husband).
4. Dominance was practiced in the act of s*x and closely associated with pe*******on. It was an act of dominance to "give" s*x (to pe*****te), but an act of submission to "receive" s*x (be pe*****ted). Women were therefore always pe*****ted, while men did the act of pe*******on.
5. The issue with same-s*x s*xual relationship was therefore not the act of penetrating another man, this was perfectly acceptable. The problem was being pe*****ted by another. As a man, this act lowered your status on the social ladder and showed your submission to another. An unthinkable social move in antiquity.
We should be careful not to take concepts out of biblical literature without understanding the socio-historical context it was written in.
To understand the origin(s) of Christianity, we need to realize that Christian history writing is a literary phenomenon and cannot be understood as purely factual. As with all history writings, Christian literature is less about recording an accurate remembering of history than it is about an ideological, cultural, and social reflection of a historical event. This reflection might include actual fabrication of “facts” to put across a certain point, placing Christian history writing as mythmaking (mythography) within the theoretical framework of historiography.
Due to the magnitude of my Honor's Research Project, I am taking a break from creating videos for our Journey through the New Testament.
To keep this page going, and as I assume that most people find the origins of Christianity and the process of its identity formation as fascinating as what I do (jokes), I will share highlights of my project on this page for the remainder of the year. Next year I will hopefully be able to continue with the actual videos.
For those who are interested, the title of my research project is:
Evolving Christian Identities: From following a Holy Man to a Cult Centered on a Divinized Christ.
In essence, my research project is about how Jesus evolved from a man perceived as a holy man / healer / magician / preacher, to the "Son of God". The focus of my project is on the theory of historiography - the study of the writing of history - and how the image(s) of Jesus were constructed through early Christian literature. In other words, the Christian literature produced by the many different Christian communities do not convey actual history, but they created their own "histories" through their literary works.
More on this in the next post.....
We are going to start our journey through the New Testament by investigating the different images of Jesus found in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. It will become clear that each of these sets of authors saw and understood Jesus differently.