Emotions
and universal language.
1 – Evolution of language according to myth :
Ziggurat :
Akkadian term for a stepped religious edifice in Mesopotamia.
Nebuchadnezzar II : (604-561 av. J.-C.)
King of Babylon, his name means : « Ô Nabû, protect my eldest son ! », Nabû being the Babylonian deity of wisdom and son of the god Marduk.
He reigned over a vast empire after the demise of the Assyrian Empire.
When he became king, Nebuchadnezzar II lacked neither experience nor ambition.
When he returned to the Levant to receive tribute from the region's rulers, the ruler of Judah, Joakim, refused to pay. His capital, Jerusalem, was besieged and taken in 597. Joakim lost his life, and his son Joachin and the other notables and scholars of the kingdom were deported to Babylon.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabuchodonosor_II
Marduk :
Originally an agrarian god of secondary importance, Marduk eventually supplanted Enlil as supreme god of the Babylonian pantheon. He came into his own during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I, ruler of Babylon from around 1125 to 1104 B.C. He is associated with the dragon, the planet Jupiter and the number 50.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marduk
Etemenanki : Sumerian name for a tower built in Babylon in honor of the god Marduk, believed to have inspired the myth of the Tower of Babel.
Curse : Etemenanki is not a symbol of human pride, but of allegiance to the patron god Marduk.
The myth of Babel, on the other hand, marks the appearance of the new god of the Hebrews, a powerful god who punishes those who disrespect him.
Coulomb's law : In electrostatics, Coulomb's law expresses the force of electrical interaction between two electrically charged particles.
In other words, it's the way in which two particles “communicate” and interact with each other. [The universe reaches us through various waves which, translated into mathematical language, “inform” us of its state].
Feelings in sea bream :
Do insects suffer ?
It's hard to answer this question, when we know that an injured insect can carry on with its normal activities. For example, a cricket that has been eaten by a praying mantis continues to eat.
Science & Vie Questions-Réponses n°29
Today, after centuries of denial, animal sentience has become a very active field of research. Until now, its existence had only been proven in certain mammals (including dogs) and primates...
Now, however, researchers at the University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal, have extended the ability to feel to fish, and more specifically to sea breams.
To do this, they drew on a set of biological signals known from previous studies to reflect an emotional state.
They then verified that the brain and physiological mechanism of these fish closely resembled that of species with “proven feelings”.
This result, if confirmed, would indicate that this faculty appeared very early in evolution in ancestors common to fish and mammals, some 375 million years ago...
Science & Vie Questions-Réponses n°36
Campbell's Mone :
Cercopithecine monkeys, Campbell's mones, combine different calls to communicate with their fellows. Although embryonic, this astonishing syntax is the most complex ever discovered in animals.
Within these groups, the most talkative is the male pack leader, who possesses a repertoire of calls that differs from those of the females. These males use six alarm calls, Boom, Krak, Hok, Hok-oo, Krak-oo and Wak-oo,
The basic “words” of Campbell's mone are :
Boom: “there's no predator”;
Hok: “beware, eagle”;
Krak: “beware, leopard”.
If they add a -oo suffix, their meaning changes:
Hok-oo: “there's something up in the neighborhood”;
Krak-oo: “beware of danger”;
Wak-oo: “there's something up there but not nearby”.
Then, if they combine these cries into syntactic units, themselves combined into sentences, or propositions, they can then mean: Krak Hok-oo, or “watch out, there's a leopard up in the neighborhood”. Once the danger has passed, they will conclude with a Krak Boom-Boom: “the leopard is moving away”.
https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/articles/culture-et-communication-chez-les-singes
Human migration :
The oldest modern man known to date was exhumed in 2017 at Djebel Irhoub, Morocco. His age is estimated at 300,000 years.
All non-Africans today are descended from a few thousand individuals who left Africa probably 60,000 years ago. They were closely related to groups living today in East Africa, including the Hadza of Tanzania.
Somewhere along the way, perhaps in the Middle East, these traveling Homo sapiens had sexual relations with another species, the Neanderthals. Then, further east, they mingled with Denisovans, another extinct species of the Homo genus.
As they moved, modern humans formed new groups, isolated from the others. Over time, each group acquired its own set of genetic mutations.
Thus, populations living on the high plateaus of Ethiopia, Tibet and the Andean Altiplano benefited from a mutation enabling them to withstand the lack of oxygen at high altitude.Other mutations helped the Inuit adapt to a new marine diet rich in fatty acids.
The mutation concerning skin color, on the other hand, spread to Europe rather late, around 8,000 years ago, via populations from the Middle East.
https://www.nationalgeographic.fr/sciences/la-grande-migration-de-lhomo-sapiens
Building materials : Clay, reeds and tar were mainly used to build ziggurats. Clay was molded into bricks and tar was used as mortar. These towers were solid, i.e. with no interior voids.
The choice of clay bricks was based on practical and economic considerations: the marshy area of Babylon offered a very large quantity of clay, which was easy to work. However, unbaked clay is crumbly and not very resistant. The Mesopotamians would have solved this problem by opting for a stepped pyramid, taller but less massive.
To combat erosion, the ziggurat was faced with more resistant clay bricks. Glazed bricks completed the top of the building, playing the dual role of protection and decoration.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etemenanki
Bricks : Initially shaped, bricks appeared between the eighth and seventh millennia BC, in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The first brick houses were discovered in Mesopotamia.
Raw brick is simply molded, then sun-dried to make it more resistant. It was used to build houses and monuments such as the pyramid of Amenemhat III, but remained fragile and weather-resistant.
Its use became widespread in the fourth millennium, with the invention and use of brick moulds with standardized dimensions, giving rise to the first urban cities.
Brick firing was first experimented with in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley in 2500 BC. Firing enabled the construction of more imposing buildings. Clay bricks were the first artificial stone, long before cement concrete.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brique_(mat%C3%A9riau)
City-state : The term city-state is applied to the micro-states that shared Lower Mesopotamia during the Archaic dynasty period (2900-2340 BC), perhaps already in place during the preceding period, the Uruk period (4100-2900 BC). They were ruled by a king, bounded by ramparts and each had its own political and religious institutions.
The main city-states were Ur on the Euphrates, Uruk, Lagash, Kish and Umma. They were integrated by Sargon, king of Sumer and Akkad, into the first historical empire, around 2340 BC.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cit%C3%A9-%C3%89tat
Genesis 1 : God names his material creations. Genesis 1 english standard version.
Genesis 2 : Man names living creatures - Genesis 1 english standard version.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201&version=ESV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+2&version=ESV
Origin of the name Adam : The first attempt to explain the creation of man is found in a Mesopotamian work, the Poem of Atrahasis (c. 1700 BC): man is made by Ea (Enki), from clay and the blood of a sacrificed minor god.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, we find the expression “to become clay again”, meaning to die.
In Egyptian mythology, it is the potter-god Khnum who shapes men from clay on his wheel.
This origin of man from clay is to be found in all subsequent texts.
The generic noun adam (“humanity”) is found in several Semitic languages. For example, tablets from Ugarit reveal that in Ugaritic, humanity is called “adm”, which in Hebrew means “Adam”, the first man..
The Genesis account relates it to the word adamah, “earth”.
https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/adam/
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam
Projection : CNTRL (National Textual and Lexical Resources Center): In psychology, a personal way of seeing the outside world through one's habits of life, thought and interests (d'apr. Méd. Psychanal. 1971).
Universal communication : CNTRL : Extending to the entire universe, embracing the totality of beings and things.
The adulteress :
The Koran and the child :
These new rules instituted by Muhammad were therefore an exceptional step forward. However, it seems that the political powers that be then froze the evolution to such an extent that, 2,500 years later, while the boy continued to enjoy the privileges of the adult man, the girl child who became a woman most often remained a slave to male authority..
The message of the prophets :
High-altitude adaptation in humans is an adaptation of human populations, especially Tibetans, some inhabitants of the Andes and the Ethiopian highlands, who have acquired a unique ability to survive at very high altitudes.
Compared with populations living at lower altitudes, those living in the high mountains have undergone significant physiological and genetic changes, particularly in their systems for regulating respiration and blood circulation.
Remarkably, Tibetans, who have lived at high altitude for only 3,000 years, do not have high hemoglobin concentrations to cope with lower oxygen availability as observed in other populations temporarily or recently settled at high altitudes. Instead, they inhale more air with each breath and breathe faster than lowland or Andean populations. Tibetans have better oxygenation from birth, and greater total lung capacity throughout their lives.
In 2010, for the first time, the genes responsible for these adaptive traits were identified by sequencing the genomes of 50 Tibetans and 40 Han Chinese from Beijing.
Like the Tibetans, the Andeans, who have lived at high altitude for over 11,000 years, do not have remarkable hemoglobin levels. However, they have increased the level of oxygen in their hemoglobin, meaning that their blood carries more oxygen per unit volume without requiring them to accelerate their respiratory rate.
Among the Quechuas of the altiplano, there is a significant mutation in NOS3, the gene encoding endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), which is associated with higher levels of nitric oxide at high altitude.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_humaine_%C3%A0_la_haute_altitude#
2 – The return of sensitive communication :
Intuition : (CNTRL) The action of guessing, sensing, feeling, understanding, knowing someone or something at once, without going through the stages of analysis, reasoning or reflection; the result of this action; the aptitude of the person capable of this action.
Exegete : (from Greek eksêgêtês, interpreter) 1. In ancient Greece, one who interpreted rites, oracles, prodigies and dreams. (Larousse)
Exegete, masc. One who exegetes a text, who interprets the thought of an author.
One who devotes himself to the interpretative analysis of sacred texts. (CNTRL)
Apostle :
Larousse : from Greek apostolos, sent by God.
1-Name used to designate, in the early days of the Church, either the 12 disciples chosen by Jesus or the first messengers of the Gospel called by particular vocation.
2-Name of those who were the first to bring the Gospel to a town or country.
Apocalypse : Etymologically, the word ‘apocalypse’ is the transcription of the Greek term ἀποκάλυψις / apokálupsis meaning ‘unveiling’ or, in religious vocabulary, ‘revelation’.
The term, over the centuries has moved away from its original meaning to often evoke a catastrophe that suggests the end of the world.
If we wish to retain these two meanings, it would evoke the end of a catastrophic way of functioning in the world, leading to the discovery of a new way of behaving.
If we take a closer look at the latest ‘catastrophic’ events that are shaking our planet, they open our eyes to these two meanings:
- the extinction of all life,
- or the revelation of the behaviour we need to adopt to move towards a better world.
Stoning :The Torah and the Talmud prescribe stoning as a punishment for a number of offences. Over the centuries, rabbinic Judaism has introduced a number of procedural constraints (requirements, obligations) that have made these laws virtually inapplicable.
Although stoning is not mentioned in the Koran, classical Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) has imposed stoning as a hadd (punishment prescribed by the sharia) for certain forms of zina (illicit sexual intercourse) on the basis of certain hadîths (sayings and actions attributed to the Muslim prophet Muhammad, but never written down by himself).
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapidation
Jésus biblical meaning :
The name Jesus is simply a Greek form of Joshua, a common name among the Jews. The same verse also alludes to the meaning of the name: the Lord was to be called Jesus because ‘he will save his people from their sins’. The name Jesus means ‘The Lord saves’ or ‘The Lord is salvation’.
https://surjesus.com/jesus-signification-biblique/
Jesus comes from the ancient Greek Ἰησοῦς, Iēsoûs, itself derived from the ancient Hebrew first name ישוע, Iéshua (and has the same root as Joshua). This word means ‘God saves’ or ‘God delivers’.
https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/J%C3%A9sus-Christ
Messie : masculine noun (Low Latin ecclesiastical Messias, from Aramaic meshihlowdotā, from Hebrew mashiahlowdot, ‘anointed one’)
1. A providential figure who will put an end to the present imperfect or evil order and establish an order of justice and happiness.
2. In the Old Testament, the liberator of Israel and usher in the reign of the Lord.
3. In the New Testament and Christian tradition, Jesus Christ, Son of God, Redeemer of fallen humanity (In the last two senses, capitalized).
https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/messie/50779
To anoint :RELIG. To apply the holy oils to a person in order to consecrate them or administer a sacrament.
https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/oint
OINT masculine noun
Etymology: 17th century. Substantive past participle of anoint.
In Sacred Scripture. The Lord's anointed, the one who, by anointing, has received sacred authority from God. Kings and bishops are the Lord's anointed. With a capital letter, refers more specifically to Christ. Jesus Christ is called, par excellence, the Lord's anointed.
https://www.dictionnaire-academie.fr/article/A9O0306
Date of the writings of Matthew and Luke :
The Gospel according to Matthew is the first of the four canonical Gospels in the New Testament.
It is also the very first book of the New Testament, although modern historiography defines it as later than the Epistles of Paul (written between 50 and 65) and the Gospel according to Mark.
For many centuries, this book was attributed to the apostle Matthew, the tax collector who became a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth. This attribution is being called into question by current research, which believes that the text was composed from two main sources: the Gospel according to Mark (written around 65-75) and a collection of sayings by Jesus known to scholars as the Q source.
Long considered to be the oldest of the Gospels, from which Mark drew inspiration by ‘summarising’ it, the Gospel according to Matthew is now presented as the second Gospel according to the two-source theory. According to this theory and its derivatives, Mark's Gospel predates it by several years and was one of its sources, in addition to what scholars call the Q source, which ‘dates from the 1950s’.
The Q source is defined as the 325 verses that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke have in common, apart from Mark.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89vangile_selon_Matthieu
Source Q :
Source Q (initial of the German Quelle meaning ‘source’) is a supposedly lost source that is said to be the origin of elements common to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, absent from Mark. It is a collection of the sayings of Jesus of Nazareth, dating from around 50 AD. The Source Q hypothesis is a direct consequence of the two-source theory.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Q
Monocratie : A form of government in which effective power resides in the will of the head of state.
Herod I the Great : (73-4 BC) was one of the most important figures in the history of the Second Temple period in Jerusalem. Placed on the throne of Jerusalem by the Romans, he withdrew political power from the priests who had ruled Judea since the beginning of the Second Temple period.
His reputation for cruelty is due above all to a passage in the Gospel according to Matthew (2, 16-18) known as the Massacre of the Innocents (an episode that has left no trace in history).
Bethléhem : The name ‘Bethlehem’ derives from the Hebrew bayit ‘house’, denoting a cult site, and from the names of the Mesopotamian agricultural deities Lahmu and Lahamu, who appear in the Enuma Elish.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethl%C3%A9em
Keeper : Being the guardian here means acting as a protector, while allowing those under his charge to freely choose their way of life.
Gold : Gold is the chemical element with atomic number 79 and symbol Au. This symbol, chosen by Berzelius, is formed from the first two letters of the Latin word aurum (with the same meaning).
The simple body gold is a noble metal, a precious metal coloured precisely in golden yellow, a dense, very ductile and soft pure material, easy to work with, sometimes simply by hand and with a stick, known since ancient times, appreciated for its strong ‘little sun’ brilliance, particularly in the form of various ornaments since the end of the Neolithic (beginning of the Chalcolithic) or coins since Antiquity, and much sought-after, along with silver, since historic times for its decisive monetary functiona. The art of working gold is goldsmithing.
Gold has industrial applications in dentistry and electronics, due to its excellent resistance to corrosion and its excellent electrical conductivity, but its main use remains as a hoarding material.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Or
Incense : A type of aromatic resin often used in religious ceremonies.
In religion, the smoke of incense symbolises prayer to God.
Myrrh : Myrrh is used in Ayurvedic medicine to treat obesity, rheumatoid arthritis and diseases linked to the accumulation of toxins17. In Africa, traditional medicine used it to treat parasites. It is present in several cosmetic preparations (to reduce wrinkles and stretch marks) and dermatological preparations (for its antifungal properties [ref. needed]), as well as in the treatment of the ENT sphere [ref. to be confirmed].
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrrhe
Jérémie :(Yirməyāhū, meaning ‘Let Yahweh arise’) is a character in the Bible who appears mainly in the Book of Jeremiah.
Jeremiah proved to the Israelites the truth of his dreams after an altercation with another prophet named Hananiah (28:1), in the sixth century BC. Jeremiah announces Hananiah's death for the coming year because his prophecies are not divine and he has incurred God's wrath. Indeed, Hananiah died in the seventh month of that year.
Jeremiah announced the arrival of the Chaldeans and predicted the destruction of Jerusalem, as well as the exile of the Judeans to Babylon because of their lack of faith. He encouraged Josiah's reform and tried to halt the spread of idolatry, before being stoned to death by his fellow exiles (according to Baruch 9:31, a pseudepigraph from the early 2nd century AD).
Jeremiah prophesied the destruction of many foreign peoples, kingdoms and cities, including ‘Dedan, Tema, Buz, all the men with shaven temples’ (25:23).
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A9r%C3%A9mie
[Author's note] Historians have never been able to find an episode involving the massacre of children. It would therefore be a mistake to attempt to translate this text as we might for a real event.
Also, let's not forget that we're doing it as if it were a tale describing human behaviour, with its strengths, but also its weaknesses.
Israël appears for the first time in the Hebrew Bible to designate the new name of Jacob, son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, at the moment when he crosses the ford of Yabboq (Genesis 32, 22-29) and fights there with an angel of God who says to him: ‘Henceforth Jacob shall not be your name, but Israel; for you have jousted ( כִּי-שָׂרִית ) against heavenly and human powers and remained strong. ’ Jacob (Israel) had 12 sons who were the origin of the twelve tribes of Israel and one daughter (Dinah).
This word was then used to designate the Children of Israel (Jacob's children), forming the people of Israel, considered in the Bible as the chosen people to carry and bring to life the word of God.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isra%C3%ABl_(Bible)#cite_ref-3
29 He said, ‘Jacob will no longer be your name, but Israel; for you have played against heavenly and human powers and have remained strong.’
https://sefarim.fr/Pentateuque_Gen%25E8se_32_29.asp
He has fought against two forces, and he has acquired the strength of both. He can no longer allow himself to be dominated by a responsibility other than his own.
Jacob wrestles with God.
Genèse 32, 25-29
That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids and his eleven children and went over the ford of the river Yabbok. He led them over the stream and also led over what belonged to him.
In a world where women are the companions and servants of men, essential for ensuring descendants, Jacob left accompanied by his wives. Was it this act that determined the outcome of his struggle ?
Jacob remained alone. But someone fought with him until dawn.
He then wrestled with an unknown man.
The man, seeing that he could do nothing against him, struck him in the hollow of the hip, and Jacob's hip was dislocated during the fight.
The attacker, unable to overcome his will, managed to injure him physically.
The man said, ‘Let me go, for the dawn has broken.’ Jacob replied: ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me.
Jacob did not let go of anything unless the man granted him a favour.
The man asked, ‘What is your name ? He replied, ‘Jacob’.
He continued: ‘Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel (meaning: God fights), because you fought with God and with men, and you won.
This gift is to give him a name linked to his strength and courage: he submitted neither to God nor to men.
With this new name, which determined his accession to adulthood, Jacob became a free man.
The name Israel was given to Jacob after he wrestled with an angel of God during the night. When the angel wanted to leave, Jacob asked the angel to bless him and the angel gave him the name Israel, which means ‘God prevails’ or ‘a fighter with God’.
https://hozana.org/bible/ancien-testament/jacob
Herod Archelaus :After the death of his father in Jericho in 4 BC, he went to Rome to be recognised as King of Judea by the Emperor Augustus, but the latter preferred to appoint him ethnarch (Herod Archelaus).
After ten years of rule in Judea, the situation had deteriorated to such an extent by AD 6 that a delegation of Jewish opponents reached Rome to inform the emperor. Archelaus is described as a cruel and brutal tyrant, disrespectful and incapable of maintaining order and peace, having, according to Flavius Josephus, ‘combined in himself the most unbearable vices of all tyrants’.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9rode_Arch%C3%A9laos
Nazareth : which is written Natzareth in Hebrew - could derive from the root nāșar, which in Hebrew means ‘he who observes’, ‘he who guards’, a hypothetical testimony to the location of the village established at an altitude of 400 m, overlooking the plain of Esdraelon and the trade routes crossing it; an Aramaic origin deriving from the word naserat which designates a ‘watchtower’ could go in the same direction.
Another approach proposes the root netzer, the ‘branch’ or ‘shoot’, in the sense of ‘the Branch [that will bear fruit]’ or the ‘shoot’ (of Israel), in reference to a prophecy of Isaiah (11:1) affirming ‘that a shoot will come forth from the stock of Jesse, a shoot will grow from his roots’.
A third hypothesis links Nazareth to the Aramaic root nzr, meaning ‘vow’, which could then refer to the vows characterising the practices of a community of Nazirs - ascetics ‘who devote themselves [to God]’ - who founded the town.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazareth
3 – L'évolution de la communication humaine : (in french)
Decalogue : The Decalogue (Ten Words in Judaism, translated as the Ten Commandments in Christianity) is a written set of moral and religious instructions received, according to biblical tradition, from God by Moses on Mount Sinai.
In the Torah, it is written that the transmission of these moral instructions in the form of engraved tablets came « from the finger of God ».
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9calogue
God [Author's note] : In the chapter on the Tower of Babel, we compared God's capacity for creation and transformation with that of evolution.
In this chapter, we'll see the similarity between the secular powers of a king administering his people and those of God. For this reason, we'll refer to him with a lower-case “d”.
It goes without saying that this god will be the representative of a powerful, just and wise authority.
Exodus : The Exodus of Israel out of Egypt is the biblical story of how the Hebrews, enslaved by Egypt, emancipate themselves and return, under the leadership of Moses and Aaron, to the land of Canaan, to take possession of it by virtue of the divine promise made to their ancestors. The exit from Egypt and the long desert journey that followed are recounted in the Books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
Its historicity has never been proven, and is the subject of intense and critical debate in the academic world, where research is divided between scholars who deny any possibility of historicity and others who maintain the idea of a historical core, the importance of which varies from one scholar to another.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exode_hors_d%27%C3%89gypte
The Lord [Author's note] : Let's not forget that we've equated this all-powerful god, creator of the entire Universe, with Evolution. It's the same vision that will enable us to understand this text.
Jealous CNRTL (National Textual and Lexical Resources Center):
1 - Who suffers from jealousy; who is a victim of the painful and irritating feeling caused by the fear or certainty of the attachment of a loved one to another person.
Jealous God. God who wants to be loved and served without sharing.
Who desires (someone's) happiness or success for his or her own sake.
2 - Who, in a lively and restless way, is very attached to... (...preserving the future of his people, in this case).
Iniquity : Behavior contrary to equity, justice; acts contrary to religion, morality.
Author's note : Faced with the multiplicity of interpretations of a text taken from its origins, it was necessary to choose one and stick with it. As the original texts have been lost, those we have today often suffer from an interpretation best suited to the translator's faith.
Thus, interpretations can vary
- for religious communities....
Text in Hebrew :
ו לֹא תִשָּׂא אֶת-שֵׁם-יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, לַשָּׁוְא: כִּי לֹא
יְנַקֶּה יְהוָה, אֵת אֲשֶׁר-יִשָּׂא אֶת-שְׁמוֹ לַשָּׁוְא. {פ}
Literal translation :
And you shall not take the name of Jehovah your God in vain,
for Yahweh will not purify him who bears his name. {F}
Traduction du rabbinat :
You shall not call upon the name of the Lord your God to support a lie;
for the Lord will not leave unpunished anyone who calls on his name to support a lie. (The bilingual Hebrew-French Bible).
Louis Segond :
You shall not take the name of Yahweh your God in vain,
for Yahweh will not leave him unpunished who takes his name in vain.
TOB :
You shall not use my name improperly,
for I, the Lord your God, will hold him guilty who does so.
- or when political necessity dictates.
Thus, in the Koran, while the term jihad means effort, a distinction is made between ‘minor jihad’, which targets the enemies of Islam, and ‘major jihad’, which is the fight we wage against ourselves, the fight of the heart according to Imam Al-Bayhaqî (994-1066). Depending on the goal being pursued, certain suras of the Koran will be favoured and others discarded.
Sabbath : The Sabbath or Shabbat is the weekly day of rest in religions that recognise the Old Testament (or Torah). Running from Friday evening to Saturday evening, it is dedicated to God, in memory of Creation.
Christianity, divided into three main denominations (Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Protestantism), has shifted this day of rest, often called the ‘Lord's Day’, to Sunday, the Sunday of rest.
However, various Orthodox Christian religious movements (Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Coptic Orthodox Church) and Sabbatarians (Adventism, Church of God, Seventh Day Baptists, Messianism) continue to keep Saturday instead of Sunday as a ‘day apart’.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbat_(religion)
Holy :To make someone holy, to put them in a state of grace.
Literary. To attribute to something a sacred, noble, exceptional character, to place it above all else.
Rest : This is how we know today that fatigue establishes restorative rest, whether it's sleep that organises memory, or illness that imposes the cessation of activities and allows the weakened body to defend itself.
4 – Advances and regressions :
Aaron : his name means ‘highly placed’ or ‘enlightened’, and in the Bible he is a character in the books of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers. He is the brother (3 years older) of Moses and comes from the tribe of Levi.
He took part in everything Moses did to deliver the Hebrews from the yoke of the Pharaohs.
When Moses climbed Mount Sinai, the Hebrews, unsure of Moses' return, urged Aaron to build them an idol to guide them. After melting down their jewellery, Aaron made them a golden calf, a reproduction of the Apis bull worshipped in Egypt since prehistoric times.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_(Bible)
Apis is the Greek name of a sacred bull from Egyptian mythology that has been worshipped since prehistoric times. The first traces of his cult are depicted on rock engravings, and he is later mentioned in the texts of the pyramids of the Old Kingdom, and his cult continued until Roman times. Apis is a symbol of fertility, sexual power and physical strength.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apis
Moloch ou Molech : is a divinity whose cult was practised in the region of Canaan according to biblical tradition. He appears in a context linked to child sacrifices by fire.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch
Joshua : first called Hoshea, son of Nun. Moses renames him Joshua in the Book of Numbers 13:16 Joshua is written in Hebrew Yehoshua (Deuteronomy 3:21), which means ‘God saves’. He was born in Egypt at the time of the Hebrews' slavery.
He witnessed the Israelites leave Egypt under the leadership of Moses, and became Moses' successor in leading the Hebrew people to the Promised Land. He led the conquest of the land of Canaan and settled the tribes of Israel there.
In his summary of the story, Near Eastern archaeologist and anthropologist William G. Dever writes : "The story celebrates the military exploits of a daring, but ruthlessly cruel, warlord. Joshua's campaign of systematic massacres of the civilian populations of Canaan deserves to be described as genocide; witness Jericho, whose entire population was put to the sword, except for Rahab, the prostitute who enabled the city to be taken".
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josu%C3%A9
5 - The miracle of empathic communication :
Author's note : This study focuses on the text alone, without giving it an origin other than human.
In this way, these texts take on a new meaning: that of human behaviour, whether it be the psychological behaviour of the individual, or the collective behaviour induced by cultures and traditions..
La Pentecôte was originally a Jewish festival, the anniversary of the covenant made some fifty days after the people came out of Egypt. Among Christians, it became a festival celebrating the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on a group of disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, including the Twelve Apostles. This episode is recounted in the Acts of the Apostles.
(Effusion: action of pouring out).
Pentecost is celebrated on the seventh Sunday after Easter Sunday, on a moveable date calculated by the Computation. It always falls on a Sunday between 10 May and 13 June. In some countries, it is followed the next day by a public holiday or non-working Monday, known as ‘Whit Monday’.
(Comput: calendar based on astronomical data, in the Christian tradition)
What do we know about Jesus ? The historical writings on his existence that have come down to us are few and extremely brief.
The first description of Jesus comes to us in a letter, the ‘Letter of Publius Lentulus’, which is said to have been addressed to the Emperor Octavian Augustus by a governor of Judea, Pilate's predecessor.
« In our time, a man of great virtue has appeared and remains, named Jesus Christ, who is called a prophet of truth by the people, but whom his disciples call the Son of God. He raises the dead and heals all kinds of diseases. He is of rather tall and remarkable stature, with a venerable face, which those who see him can [at once] love and fear. His hair is the colour of fresh almonds and is smooth almost down to his ears; but from the ears downwards it is a little curly, a little darker and shinier, waving over his shoulders and parted at the top of his skull, in the manner of the Nazarenes. He looks very calm and serene. His face is without the slightest wrinkle or blemish; a moderate complexion embellishes it. His nose and mouth are impeccable. His beard is full and of the same colour as his hair, not very long and bifid; he is simple and mature in appearance; his eyes, blue-grey, are clear and quick. He is stern when he disapproves, calm and courteous when he advises.
His cheerfulness is tempered by his seriousness; no one has ever seen him laugh, but many have seen him cry; he is well proportioned and upright, his arms and hands very pleasing to the eye. In conversation, he is moderate, modest and wise. His beauty surpasses that of the sons of men ».
This letter, which describes Jesus in a benevolent light, was found in the archives of the Roman Senate by a certain Eutorpe. The text is now attributed to a 13th-century author.
Christusblider. Untersuchungen zur christlichen Legende.
Original translation, Leipzig, 1899.
Latin text by E.von Dobschütz
Le Point HS1
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Apart from this laudatory text, what else can we learn from the historians and other figures of antiquity ?
Flavius Josephus :
Joseph son of Matthatias the Priest, better known by his Latin name Flavius Josephus, born in Jerusalem in 37/38 and died in Rome around 100, was a Roman historiographer of Judean origin in the first century.
Written in Greek, his work is one of the main sources on the history of the Judeans in the first century.
Born after the crucifixion, his life and his many about-turns are not conducive to a rigorous vision of history.
First of all, as military commander of Galilee, he was involved in the war between the Jewish and Roman rebels from 67 to 73, which led to the destruction of Jerusalem.
Defeated in 67 by Vespasian, he was imprisoned before joining the Romans during the siege of Jerusalem led by Titus, who destroyed the temple in 70.
After becoming a Roman citizen, he took the first name of Titus and the name Flavius in honour of his patrons.
His writings reveal his changes of opinion: for example, his book ‘The War of the Jews’ is an apology for Roman intervention against Jewish rebels, before he became an advocate of Jewish religious nationalism in his book ‘Against Apion’ around 95.
The lack of rigour in his works led the scholar Shayes D. Cohen to claim in 1979 that he was ‘compulsively negligent’.
(Shaye J. D. Cohen (born 21 October 1948) is a modern scholar of the Hebrew Bible. He is currently the Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University).
In addition, these texts have been distorted over the centuries by Christian copyists.
As a result, there are now 2 versions of the ‘Jewish War’: the traditional version contains no reference to Jesus.
On the other hand, a copy in Old Russian (known as the Slavonic version) contains a great deal of information about the Nazarene that is so corroborative of the ‘New Testament’ as to be suspect.
The allusions to Jesus in the ‘Jewish antiquities’ seem more credible.
The first shows Jesus as the brother of James.
‘The high priest Annas (...) called together a Sanhedrin and brought before it James, the brother of Jesus called the Christ, and certain others (...) and had them stoned to death’.
The second allusion to Jesus is richer, but more controversial. It is the Testimonium Flavianum (testimony of Flavius):
‘At about the same time Jesus came, a wise man, ‘if he can be called a man’. This last passage, which seems to be an addition, suggests that its author did not believe that Jesus was only a man.
Another passage is also suspect:
‘For he appeared to them 3 days after he had risen, when the divine prophets had foretold this and 1,000 other wonders about him.’
Flavius Joseph speaks of the resurrection as an established fact, which proves that the author is a believer.
Similarly, he links the person of Jesus to the messianic announcements of the Old Testament, something that only a Christian could have written, and Josephus was not a Christian.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavius_Jos%C3%A8phe
https://www.persee.fr/doc/rjuiv_0484-8616_1897_num_35_69_4204
Pliny the Younger : (61-113)
In a letter to Trajan in 111 or 112, Pliny the Younger asked the emperor what to do with the early Christians of Bithynia. It states that “they assemble on a set day, before sunrise; they take turns singing hymns in praise of Christ, as if in honor of a god; they pledge themselves by oath, not to any crime, but not to commit theft, brigandage, adultery, not to break their promise, not to deny a deposit; after this, they used to separate, and gather again to eat common and innocent food.”
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sources_sur_la_vie_de_J%C3%A9sus_de_Nazareth
Tacitus : (58-120)
In the Annals of the Roman historian Tacitus, written around 116, a passage recounts the blaming of Christians during the burning of Rome in 64.
“But no human means, imperial largesse or expiatory ceremonies could silence the public outcry accusing Nero of having ordered the fire. To appease these rumors, he offered other culprits, and made a class of men hated for their abominations, and called Christians, suffer the most refined tortures. This name comes from Christ, who, under Tiberius, was delivered to the torture by the procurator Pontius Pilate.... ”
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacite
Suetone :
In his ‘Lives of the Twelve Caesars’, around 120, Suetonius wrote: ‘[Claudius] drove out of the city the Jews who were constantly rising up at the instigation of a certain Chrestus’.
In fact, none of these three authors (Pliny, Tacitus and Suetonius) testifies to the existence of Jesus, but they do attest that individuals claimed to be his followers, and this in Rome as early as the 40s.
https://www.lhistoire.fr/j%C3%A9sus-t-il-exist%C3%A9
Mara bar Serapion :
A letter from a Stoic named Mara bar Serapion, addressed in Syriac to his son, speaks of a ‘wise king’ executed by his own people - the Jews - following the example of Socrates and Pythagoras, in what is accepted as an allusion to Jesus of Nazareth.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_bar_S%C3%A9rapion
Celsus :
Celsus, a pagan and anti-Christian philosopher of the 2nd century, author of the True Discourse, reports the words of a learned Jew according to whom Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier, Pantera: ‘The mother of Jesus was driven away by the carpenter who had asked her to marry him, because she had been convicted of adultery and had become pregnant by the works of a Roman soldier named Panthera. Separated from her husband, she gave birth to Jesus, a bastard son.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celse_(philosophe)
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The year 1778 marked the beginning of a new era of understanding of the story of Jesus, independent of faith.
That year saw the publication in Germany of Hermann Samuel Reimarus's posthumous ‘Drawing of Jesus and His Disciples’. A rationalist who did not believe in miracles, he came to the following conclusion: Jesus was a Jew who thought in the categories of his time and never wanted to found a new religion. It was his disciples who established Christianity as a religion independent of Judaism. He himself fulfilled nothing other than purely ethical obligations: true love of God and neighbour.
Later, in 1835, a young theologian aged 27, David Friedrich Strauss, published a thesis entitled ‘Life of Jesus, examined by critics’. His aim was not so much to find the real Jesus as to show the ‘eternal truths’ he expressed. For him, Jesus was not a god, but a man in whom a universal figure of thought was embodied.
For the Frenchman Ernest Renan, his ‘Life of Jesus’, written in 1863, presents Jesus as the greatest idealist of all time, capable of rising up against a narrow interpretation of the laws.
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From the point of view of modern historians, and in the absence of reliable historical evidence, the Gospels are approached in an entirely different way.
In fact, no less than 40 years elapsed between the death of this man in the early 1930s and the earliest of the 4 Gospels [the main sources available for historical knowledge of Jesus], and this period is the least known of the beginnings of Christianity.
Luke, to whom the 3rd Gospel is attributed, acknowledges in a letter to Theophilus that he was not the first to write on the subject, and those who preceded him were not themselves eyewitnesses. He himself writes to strengthen the faith of his reader. [Lk 1:1-4, Louis Segond translation (1910)]
The Gospels are therefore not historical works in the modern sense of the term.
However, by understanding how the texts were transmitted, it is possible to determine the conditions of their appearance.
In the 1930s, the German school of ‘literary form criticism’ proposed 4 principles for understanding the formation of the Gospels.
1 - Stereotyped literary forms (sayings of Jesus, parables, accounts of miracles, significant events, etc.) existed at the outset.
2 - these forms circulated freely, first orally, then gradually in written form.
They are found in the various Gospels (the 4 Gospels)
3 - These traditions are passed on within communities for worship and controversy.
4 - they become testimonies of faith and thus lose their character of historical reportage.
Today, the explanatory model on which there is the greatest consensus is the ‘2-source theory’, which explains the relationship between the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, known as the synoptics.
Placed in parallel columns, these texts can easily be compared.
According to this model, Matthew and Luke are each inspired by Mark's Gospel.
But they also use the so-called ‘Q source’ (from the German ‘quelle’ meaning ‘source’), which consists of everything they have in common, but which is absent from Mark's text.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Q
It is also called the source of the ‘logia’ (‘words’ in Greek), because it consists essentially of the words of Jesus.
This model has recently been qualified by the recognition that both Matthew and Luke have specific versions of the ‘Q’ source, and that Mark also has an older version.
Author's note : If we go back to the proposition mentioned earlier [cf: The door to evolution], equating the term ‘God’ with that of Evolution, we can then understand why Jesus could have been called ‘son of God’.
This is because children, before they are conditioned by the community, have an innate moral sense that derives from the evolution of the species.
By expressing themselves with this moral sense, all human beings rediscover innate capacities that they had lost when they became the children of their cultural community. By rediscovering this ‘gift’ granted by life, they once again become ‘children of evolution’...
...the son of ‘God’.
Le miracle de la communication empathique :
Ziggurat :
Akkadian term for a stepped religious edifice in Mesopotamia.
Nebuchadnezzar II : (604-561 av. J.-C.)
King of Babylon, his name means : « Ô Nabû, protect my eldest son ! », Nabû being the Babylonian deity of wisdom and son of the god Marduk.
He reigned over a vast empire after the demise of the Assyrian Empire.
When he became king, Nebuchadnezzar II lacked neither experience nor ambition.
When he returned to the Levant to receive tribute from the region's rulers, the ruler of Judah, Joakim, refused to pay. His capital, Jerusalem, was besieged and taken in 597. Joakim lost his life, and his son Joachin and the other notables and scholars of the kingdom were deported to Babylon.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabuchodonosor_II
Marduk :
Originally an agrarian god of secondary importance, Marduk eventually supplanted Enlil as supreme god of the Babylonian pantheon. He came into his own during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I, ruler of Babylon from around 1125 to 1104 B.C. He is associated with the dragon, the planet Jupiter and the number 50.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marduk
Etemenanki : Sumerian name for a tower built in Babylon in honor of the god Marduk, believed to have inspired the myth of the Tower of Babel.
Curse : Etemenanki is not a symbol of human pride, but of allegiance to the patron god Marduk.
The myth of Babel, on the other hand, marks the appearance of the new god of the Hebrews, a powerful god who punishes those who disrespect him.
Coulomb's law : In electrostatics, Coulomb's law expresses the force of electrical interaction between two electrically charged particles.
In other words, it's the way in which two particles “communicate” and interact with each other. [The universe reaches us through various waves which, translated into mathematical language, “inform” us of its state].
Feelings in sea bream :
Do insects suffer ?
It's hard to answer this question, when we know that an injured insect can carry on with its normal activities. For example, a cricket that has been eaten by a praying mantis continues to eat.
Science & Vie Questions-Réponses n°29
Today, after centuries of denial, animal sentience has become a very active field of research. Until now, its existence had only been proven in certain mammals (including dogs) and primates...
Now, however, researchers at the University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal, have extended the ability to feel to fish, and more specifically to sea breams.
To do this, they drew on a set of biological signals known from previous studies to reflect an emotional state.
They then verified that the brain and physiological mechanism of these fish closely resembled that of species with “proven feelings”.
This result, if confirmed, would indicate that this faculty appeared very early in evolution in ancestors common to fish and mammals, some 375 million years ago...
Science & Vie Questions-Réponses n°36
Campbell's Mone :
Cercopithecine monkeys, Campbell's mones, combine different calls to communicate with their fellows. Although embryonic, this astonishing syntax is the most complex ever discovered in animals.
Within these groups, the most talkative is the male pack leader, who possesses a repertoire of calls that differs from those of the females. These males use six alarm calls, Boom, Krak, Hok, Hok-oo, Krak-oo and Wak-oo,
The basic “words” of Campbell's mone are :
Boom: “there's no predator”;
Hok: “beware, eagle”;
Krak: “beware, leopard”.
If they add a -oo suffix, their meaning changes:
Hok-oo: “there's something up in the neighborhood”;
Krak-oo: “beware of danger”;
Wak-oo: “there's something up there but not nearby”.
Then, if they combine these cries into syntactic units, themselves combined into sentences, or propositions, they can then mean: Krak Hok-oo, or “watch out, there's a leopard up in the neighborhood”. Once the danger has passed, they will conclude with a Krak Boom-Boom: “the leopard is moving away”.
https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/articles/culture-et-communication-chez-les-singes
Human migration :
The oldest modern man known to date was exhumed in 2017 at Djebel Irhoub, Morocco. His age is estimated at 300,000 years.
All non-Africans today are descended from a few thousand individuals who left Africa probably 60,000 years ago. They were closely related to groups living today in East Africa, including the Hadza of Tanzania.
Somewhere along the way, perhaps in the Middle East, these traveling Homo sapiens had sexual relations with another species, the Neanderthals. Then, further east, they mingled with Denisovans, another extinct species of the Homo genus.
As they moved, modern humans formed new groups, isolated from the others. Over time, each group acquired its own set of genetic mutations.
Thus, populations living on the high plateaus of Ethiopia, Tibet and the Andean Altiplano benefited from a mutation enabling them to withstand the lack of oxygen at high altitude.Other mutations helped the Inuit adapt to a new marine diet rich in fatty acids.
The mutation concerning skin color, on the other hand, spread to Europe rather late, around 8,000 years ago, via populations from the Middle East.
https://www.nationalgeographic.fr/sciences/la-grande-migration-de-lhomo-sapiens
Building materials : Clay, reeds and tar were mainly used to build ziggurats. Clay was molded into bricks and tar was used as mortar. These towers were solid, i.e. with no interior voids.
The choice of clay bricks was based on practical and economic considerations: the marshy area of Babylon offered a very large quantity of clay, which was easy to work. However, unbaked clay is crumbly and not very resistant. The Mesopotamians would have solved this problem by opting for a stepped pyramid, taller but less massive.
To combat erosion, the ziggurat was faced with more resistant clay bricks. Glazed bricks completed the top of the building, playing the dual role of protection and decoration.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etemenanki
Bricks : Initially shaped, bricks appeared between the eighth and seventh millennia BC, in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The first brick houses were discovered in Mesopotamia.
Raw brick is simply molded, then sun-dried to make it more resistant. It was used to build houses and monuments such as the pyramid of Amenemhat III, but remained fragile and weather-resistant.
Its use became widespread in the fourth millennium, with the invention and use of brick moulds with standardized dimensions, giving rise to the first urban cities.
Brick firing was first experimented with in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley in 2500 BC. Firing enabled the construction of more imposing buildings. Clay bricks were the first artificial stone, long before cement concrete.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brique_(mat%C3%A9riau)
City-state : The term city-state is applied to the micro-states that shared Lower Mesopotamia during the Archaic dynasty period (2900-2340 BC), perhaps already in place during the preceding period, the Uruk period (4100-2900 BC). They were ruled by a king, bounded by ramparts and each had its own political and religious institutions.
The main city-states were Ur on the Euphrates, Uruk, Lagash, Kish and Umma. They were integrated by Sargon, king of Sumer and Akkad, into the first historical empire, around 2340 BC.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cit%C3%A9-%C3%89tat
Genesis 1 : God names his material creations. Genesis 1 english standard version.
In this text, God creates and names, but he is alone and does not communicate.1 - In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
2 - The earth was without form and void : there was darkness on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved over the waters.
3 - God said, “Let there be light! And there was light.
4 - God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.
5 - God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. So there was evening and there was morning: that was the first day.
6 And God said, Let there be an expanse between the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.
7 And God made the expanse, and separated the waters below the expanse from the waters above the expanse. And so it was.
8 God called the expanse heaven. So there was evening and there was morning: this was the second day.
9 God said, “Let the waters under heaven be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear”. And so it was.
10 God called the dry land earth, and the waters seas. And God saw that it was good.
Genesis 2 : Man names living creatures - Genesis 1 english standard version.
By naming animals, man develops the language that will enable him to communicate with his fellow creatures.19 - Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
20 - The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam[g] there was not found a helper fit for him.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201&version=ESV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+2&version=ESV
Origin of the name Adam : The first attempt to explain the creation of man is found in a Mesopotamian work, the Poem of Atrahasis (c. 1700 BC): man is made by Ea (Enki), from clay and the blood of a sacrificed minor god.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, we find the expression “to become clay again”, meaning to die.
In Egyptian mythology, it is the potter-god Khnum who shapes men from clay on his wheel.
This origin of man from clay is to be found in all subsequent texts.
The generic noun adam (“humanity”) is found in several Semitic languages. For example, tablets from Ugarit reveal that in Ugaritic, humanity is called “adm”, which in Hebrew means “Adam”, the first man..
The Genesis account relates it to the word adamah, “earth”.
https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/adam/
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam
Projection : CNTRL (National Textual and Lexical Resources Center): In psychology, a personal way of seeing the outside world through one's habits of life, thought and interests (d'apr. Méd. Psychanal. 1971).
Universal communication : CNTRL : Extending to the entire universe, embracing the totality of beings and things.
The adulteress :
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%208:1-11&version=NLT1 - Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives,
2 - but early the next morning he was back again at the Temple. A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them.
3 - As he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd.
4 - “Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of adultery.
5 - The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?”
6 - They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him,
but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger.
7 - They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!”
8 - Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust.
9 - When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman.
10 - Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you ?”
11 - “No, Lord,” she said.
And Jesus said, “Neither do I. Go and sin no more.”
The Koran and the child :
Numerous suras are devoted to the inheritance, education and protection granted to the child. Even if these texts seem unjust, particularly for the girl, we mustn't forget that they were written at a time when children and women had no rights whatsoever.Do not touch the orphan's property, unless it is in a praiseworthy way to increase it, until he reaches the fixed age. Fulfill your commitments, for commitments will be called to account.
[ Sura 17 - Verse 34 ]
These new rules instituted by Muhammad were therefore an exceptional step forward. However, it seems that the political powers that be then froze the evolution to such an extent that, 2,500 years later, while the boy continued to enjoy the privileges of the adult man, the girl child who became a woman most often remained a slave to male authority..
The message of the prophets :
Adaptation to altitude :Gospels John 15:12: “This is my commandment : Love one another, as I have loved you.”
Koran (Sura 48-verse 5): “If God had so willed, He would have made you a single community. But He wished to test you by the gift He has given you. Seek to surpass one another in good deeds. You will all return to God, and He will enlighten you about your differences”.
High-altitude adaptation in humans is an adaptation of human populations, especially Tibetans, some inhabitants of the Andes and the Ethiopian highlands, who have acquired a unique ability to survive at very high altitudes.
Compared with populations living at lower altitudes, those living in the high mountains have undergone significant physiological and genetic changes, particularly in their systems for regulating respiration and blood circulation.
Remarkably, Tibetans, who have lived at high altitude for only 3,000 years, do not have high hemoglobin concentrations to cope with lower oxygen availability as observed in other populations temporarily or recently settled at high altitudes. Instead, they inhale more air with each breath and breathe faster than lowland or Andean populations. Tibetans have better oxygenation from birth, and greater total lung capacity throughout their lives.
In 2010, for the first time, the genes responsible for these adaptive traits were identified by sequencing the genomes of 50 Tibetans and 40 Han Chinese from Beijing.
Like the Tibetans, the Andeans, who have lived at high altitude for over 11,000 years, do not have remarkable hemoglobin levels. However, they have increased the level of oxygen in their hemoglobin, meaning that their blood carries more oxygen per unit volume without requiring them to accelerate their respiratory rate.
Among the Quechuas of the altiplano, there is a significant mutation in NOS3, the gene encoding endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), which is associated with higher levels of nitric oxide at high altitude.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_humaine_%C3%A0_la_haute_altitude#
2 – The return of sensitive communication :
Intuition : (CNTRL) The action of guessing, sensing, feeling, understanding, knowing someone or something at once, without going through the stages of analysis, reasoning or reflection; the result of this action; the aptitude of the person capable of this action.
Exegete : (from Greek eksêgêtês, interpreter) 1. In ancient Greece, one who interpreted rites, oracles, prodigies and dreams. (Larousse)
Exegete, masc. One who exegetes a text, who interprets the thought of an author.
One who devotes himself to the interpretative analysis of sacred texts. (CNTRL)
Apostle :
Larousse : from Greek apostolos, sent by God.
1-Name used to designate, in the early days of the Church, either the 12 disciples chosen by Jesus or the first messengers of the Gospel called by particular vocation.
2-Name of those who were the first to bring the Gospel to a town or country.
Apocalypse : Etymologically, the word ‘apocalypse’ is the transcription of the Greek term ἀποκάλυψις / apokálupsis meaning ‘unveiling’ or, in religious vocabulary, ‘revelation’.
The term, over the centuries has moved away from its original meaning to often evoke a catastrophe that suggests the end of the world.
If we wish to retain these two meanings, it would evoke the end of a catastrophic way of functioning in the world, leading to the discovery of a new way of behaving.
If we take a closer look at the latest ‘catastrophic’ events that are shaking our planet, they open our eyes to these two meanings:
- the extinction of all life,
- or the revelation of the behaviour we need to adopt to move towards a better world.
Stoning :The Torah and the Talmud prescribe stoning as a punishment for a number of offences. Over the centuries, rabbinic Judaism has introduced a number of procedural constraints (requirements, obligations) that have made these laws virtually inapplicable.
Although stoning is not mentioned in the Koran, classical Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) has imposed stoning as a hadd (punishment prescribed by the sharia) for certain forms of zina (illicit sexual intercourse) on the basis of certain hadîths (sayings and actions attributed to the Muslim prophet Muhammad, but never written down by himself).
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapidation
Jésus biblical meaning :
The name Jesus is simply a Greek form of Joshua, a common name among the Jews. The same verse also alludes to the meaning of the name: the Lord was to be called Jesus because ‘he will save his people from their sins’. The name Jesus means ‘The Lord saves’ or ‘The Lord is salvation’.
https://surjesus.com/jesus-signification-biblique/
Jesus comes from the ancient Greek Ἰησοῦς, Iēsoûs, itself derived from the ancient Hebrew first name ישוע, Iéshua (and has the same root as Joshua). This word means ‘God saves’ or ‘God delivers’.
https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/J%C3%A9sus-Christ
Messie : masculine noun (Low Latin ecclesiastical Messias, from Aramaic meshihlowdotā, from Hebrew mashiahlowdot, ‘anointed one’)
1. A providential figure who will put an end to the present imperfect or evil order and establish an order of justice and happiness.
2. In the Old Testament, the liberator of Israel and usher in the reign of the Lord.
3. In the New Testament and Christian tradition, Jesus Christ, Son of God, Redeemer of fallen humanity (In the last two senses, capitalized).
https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/messie/50779
To anoint :RELIG. To apply the holy oils to a person in order to consecrate them or administer a sacrament.
https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/oint
OINT masculine noun
Etymology: 17th century. Substantive past participle of anoint.
In Sacred Scripture. The Lord's anointed, the one who, by anointing, has received sacred authority from God. Kings and bishops are the Lord's anointed. With a capital letter, refers more specifically to Christ. Jesus Christ is called, par excellence, the Lord's anointed.
https://www.dictionnaire-academie.fr/article/A9O0306
Date of the writings of Matthew and Luke :
The Gospel according to Matthew is the first of the four canonical Gospels in the New Testament.
It is also the very first book of the New Testament, although modern historiography defines it as later than the Epistles of Paul (written between 50 and 65) and the Gospel according to Mark.
For many centuries, this book was attributed to the apostle Matthew, the tax collector who became a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth. This attribution is being called into question by current research, which believes that the text was composed from two main sources: the Gospel according to Mark (written around 65-75) and a collection of sayings by Jesus known to scholars as the Q source.
Long considered to be the oldest of the Gospels, from which Mark drew inspiration by ‘summarising’ it, the Gospel according to Matthew is now presented as the second Gospel according to the two-source theory. According to this theory and its derivatives, Mark's Gospel predates it by several years and was one of its sources, in addition to what scholars call the Q source, which ‘dates from the 1950s’.
The Q source is defined as the 325 verses that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke have in common, apart from Mark.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89vangile_selon_Matthieu
Source Q :
Source Q (initial of the German Quelle meaning ‘source’) is a supposedly lost source that is said to be the origin of elements common to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, absent from Mark. It is a collection of the sayings of Jesus of Nazareth, dating from around 50 AD. The Source Q hypothesis is a direct consequence of the two-source theory.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Q
Monocratie : A form of government in which effective power resides in the will of the head of state.
Herod I the Great : (73-4 BC) was one of the most important figures in the history of the Second Temple period in Jerusalem. Placed on the throne of Jerusalem by the Romans, he withdrew political power from the priests who had ruled Judea since the beginning of the Second Temple period.
His reputation for cruelty is due above all to a passage in the Gospel according to Matthew (2, 16-18) known as the Massacre of the Innocents (an episode that has left no trace in history).
Bethléhem : The name ‘Bethlehem’ derives from the Hebrew bayit ‘house’, denoting a cult site, and from the names of the Mesopotamian agricultural deities Lahmu and Lahamu, who appear in the Enuma Elish.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethl%C3%A9em
Keeper : Being the guardian here means acting as a protector, while allowing those under his charge to freely choose their way of life.
Gold : Gold is the chemical element with atomic number 79 and symbol Au. This symbol, chosen by Berzelius, is formed from the first two letters of the Latin word aurum (with the same meaning).
The simple body gold is a noble metal, a precious metal coloured precisely in golden yellow, a dense, very ductile and soft pure material, easy to work with, sometimes simply by hand and with a stick, known since ancient times, appreciated for its strong ‘little sun’ brilliance, particularly in the form of various ornaments since the end of the Neolithic (beginning of the Chalcolithic) or coins since Antiquity, and much sought-after, along with silver, since historic times for its decisive monetary functiona. The art of working gold is goldsmithing.
Gold has industrial applications in dentistry and electronics, due to its excellent resistance to corrosion and its excellent electrical conductivity, but its main use remains as a hoarding material.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Or
Incense : A type of aromatic resin often used in religious ceremonies.
In religion, the smoke of incense symbolises prayer to God.
Myrrh : Myrrh is used in Ayurvedic medicine to treat obesity, rheumatoid arthritis and diseases linked to the accumulation of toxins17. In Africa, traditional medicine used it to treat parasites. It is present in several cosmetic preparations (to reduce wrinkles and stretch marks) and dermatological preparations (for its antifungal properties [ref. needed]), as well as in the treatment of the ENT sphere [ref. to be confirmed].
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrrhe
Jérémie :(Yirməyāhū, meaning ‘Let Yahweh arise’) is a character in the Bible who appears mainly in the Book of Jeremiah.
Jeremiah proved to the Israelites the truth of his dreams after an altercation with another prophet named Hananiah (28:1), in the sixth century BC. Jeremiah announces Hananiah's death for the coming year because his prophecies are not divine and he has incurred God's wrath. Indeed, Hananiah died in the seventh month of that year.
Jeremiah announced the arrival of the Chaldeans and predicted the destruction of Jerusalem, as well as the exile of the Judeans to Babylon because of their lack of faith. He encouraged Josiah's reform and tried to halt the spread of idolatry, before being stoned to death by his fellow exiles (according to Baruch 9:31, a pseudepigraph from the early 2nd century AD).
Jeremiah prophesied the destruction of many foreign peoples, kingdoms and cities, including ‘Dedan, Tema, Buz, all the men with shaven temples’ (25:23).
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A9r%C3%A9mie
[Author's note] Historians have never been able to find an episode involving the massacre of children. It would therefore be a mistake to attempt to translate this text as we might for a real event.
Also, let's not forget that we're doing it as if it were a tale describing human behaviour, with its strengths, but also its weaknesses.
Israël appears for the first time in the Hebrew Bible to designate the new name of Jacob, son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, at the moment when he crosses the ford of Yabboq (Genesis 32, 22-29) and fights there with an angel of God who says to him: ‘Henceforth Jacob shall not be your name, but Israel; for you have jousted ( כִּי-שָׂרִית ) against heavenly and human powers and remained strong. ’ Jacob (Israel) had 12 sons who were the origin of the twelve tribes of Israel and one daughter (Dinah).
This word was then used to designate the Children of Israel (Jacob's children), forming the people of Israel, considered in the Bible as the chosen people to carry and bring to life the word of God.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isra%C3%ABl_(Bible)#cite_ref-3
29 He said, ‘Jacob will no longer be your name, but Israel; for you have played against heavenly and human powers and have remained strong.’
https://sefarim.fr/Pentateuque_Gen%25E8se_32_29.asp
He has fought against two forces, and he has acquired the strength of both. He can no longer allow himself to be dominated by a responsibility other than his own.
Jacob wrestles with God.
Genèse 32, 25-29
That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids and his eleven children and went over the ford of the river Yabbok. He led them over the stream and also led over what belonged to him.
In a world where women are the companions and servants of men, essential for ensuring descendants, Jacob left accompanied by his wives. Was it this act that determined the outcome of his struggle ?
Jacob remained alone. But someone fought with him until dawn.
He then wrestled with an unknown man.
The man, seeing that he could do nothing against him, struck him in the hollow of the hip, and Jacob's hip was dislocated during the fight.
The attacker, unable to overcome his will, managed to injure him physically.
The man said, ‘Let me go, for the dawn has broken.’ Jacob replied: ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me.
Jacob did not let go of anything unless the man granted him a favour.
The man asked, ‘What is your name ? He replied, ‘Jacob’.
He continued: ‘Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel (meaning: God fights), because you fought with God and with men, and you won.
This gift is to give him a name linked to his strength and courage: he submitted neither to God nor to men.
With this new name, which determined his accession to adulthood, Jacob became a free man.
The name Israel was given to Jacob after he wrestled with an angel of God during the night. When the angel wanted to leave, Jacob asked the angel to bless him and the angel gave him the name Israel, which means ‘God prevails’ or ‘a fighter with God’.
https://hozana.org/bible/ancien-testament/jacob
Herod Archelaus :After the death of his father in Jericho in 4 BC, he went to Rome to be recognised as King of Judea by the Emperor Augustus, but the latter preferred to appoint him ethnarch (Herod Archelaus).
After ten years of rule in Judea, the situation had deteriorated to such an extent by AD 6 that a delegation of Jewish opponents reached Rome to inform the emperor. Archelaus is described as a cruel and brutal tyrant, disrespectful and incapable of maintaining order and peace, having, according to Flavius Josephus, ‘combined in himself the most unbearable vices of all tyrants’.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9rode_Arch%C3%A9laos
Nazareth : which is written Natzareth in Hebrew - could derive from the root nāșar, which in Hebrew means ‘he who observes’, ‘he who guards’, a hypothetical testimony to the location of the village established at an altitude of 400 m, overlooking the plain of Esdraelon and the trade routes crossing it; an Aramaic origin deriving from the word naserat which designates a ‘watchtower’ could go in the same direction.
Another approach proposes the root netzer, the ‘branch’ or ‘shoot’, in the sense of ‘the Branch [that will bear fruit]’ or the ‘shoot’ (of Israel), in reference to a prophecy of Isaiah (11:1) affirming ‘that a shoot will come forth from the stock of Jesse, a shoot will grow from his roots’.
A third hypothesis links Nazareth to the Aramaic root nzr, meaning ‘vow’, which could then refer to the vows characterising the practices of a community of Nazirs - ascetics ‘who devote themselves [to God]’ - who founded the town.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazareth
3 – L'évolution de la communication humaine : (in french)
Decalogue : The Decalogue (Ten Words in Judaism, translated as the Ten Commandments in Christianity) is a written set of moral and religious instructions received, according to biblical tradition, from God by Moses on Mount Sinai.
In the Torah, it is written that the transmission of these moral instructions in the form of engraved tablets came « from the finger of God ».
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9calogue
God [Author's note] : In the chapter on the Tower of Babel, we compared God's capacity for creation and transformation with that of evolution.
In this chapter, we'll see the similarity between the secular powers of a king administering his people and those of God. For this reason, we'll refer to him with a lower-case “d”.
It goes without saying that this god will be the representative of a powerful, just and wise authority.
Exodus : The Exodus of Israel out of Egypt is the biblical story of how the Hebrews, enslaved by Egypt, emancipate themselves and return, under the leadership of Moses and Aaron, to the land of Canaan, to take possession of it by virtue of the divine promise made to their ancestors. The exit from Egypt and the long desert journey that followed are recounted in the Books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
Its historicity has never been proven, and is the subject of intense and critical debate in the academic world, where research is divided between scholars who deny any possibility of historicity and others who maintain the idea of a historical core, the importance of which varies from one scholar to another.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exode_hors_d%27%C3%89gypte
The Lord [Author's note] : Let's not forget that we've equated this all-powerful god, creator of the entire Universe, with Evolution. It's the same vision that will enable us to understand this text.
Jealous CNRTL (National Textual and Lexical Resources Center):
1 - Who suffers from jealousy; who is a victim of the painful and irritating feeling caused by the fear or certainty of the attachment of a loved one to another person.
Jealous God. God who wants to be loved and served without sharing.
Who desires (someone's) happiness or success for his or her own sake.
2 - Who, in a lively and restless way, is very attached to... (...preserving the future of his people, in this case).
Iniquity : Behavior contrary to equity, justice; acts contrary to religion, morality.
Author's note : Faced with the multiplicity of interpretations of a text taken from its origins, it was necessary to choose one and stick with it. As the original texts have been lost, those we have today often suffer from an interpretation best suited to the translator's faith.
Thus, interpretations can vary
- for religious communities....
Text in Hebrew :
ו לֹא תִשָּׂא אֶת-שֵׁם-יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, לַשָּׁוְא: כִּי לֹא
יְנַקֶּה יְהוָה, אֵת אֲשֶׁר-יִשָּׂא אֶת-שְׁמוֹ לַשָּׁוְא. {פ}
Literal translation :
And you shall not take the name of Jehovah your God in vain,
for Yahweh will not purify him who bears his name. {F}
Traduction du rabbinat :
You shall not call upon the name of the Lord your God to support a lie;
for the Lord will not leave unpunished anyone who calls on his name to support a lie. (The bilingual Hebrew-French Bible).
Louis Segond :
You shall not take the name of Yahweh your God in vain,
for Yahweh will not leave him unpunished who takes his name in vain.
TOB :
You shall not use my name improperly,
for I, the Lord your God, will hold him guilty who does so.
- or when political necessity dictates.
Thus, in the Koran, while the term jihad means effort, a distinction is made between ‘minor jihad’, which targets the enemies of Islam, and ‘major jihad’, which is the fight we wage against ourselves, the fight of the heart according to Imam Al-Bayhaqî (994-1066). Depending on the goal being pursued, certain suras of the Koran will be favoured and others discarded.
Sabbath : The Sabbath or Shabbat is the weekly day of rest in religions that recognise the Old Testament (or Torah). Running from Friday evening to Saturday evening, it is dedicated to God, in memory of Creation.
Christianity, divided into three main denominations (Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Protestantism), has shifted this day of rest, often called the ‘Lord's Day’, to Sunday, the Sunday of rest.
However, various Orthodox Christian religious movements (Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Coptic Orthodox Church) and Sabbatarians (Adventism, Church of God, Seventh Day Baptists, Messianism) continue to keep Saturday instead of Sunday as a ‘day apart’.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbat_(religion)
Holy :To make someone holy, to put them in a state of grace.
Literary. To attribute to something a sacred, noble, exceptional character, to place it above all else.
Rest : This is how we know today that fatigue establishes restorative rest, whether it's sleep that organises memory, or illness that imposes the cessation of activities and allows the weakened body to defend itself.
4 – Advances and regressions :
Aaron : his name means ‘highly placed’ or ‘enlightened’, and in the Bible he is a character in the books of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers. He is the brother (3 years older) of Moses and comes from the tribe of Levi.
He took part in everything Moses did to deliver the Hebrews from the yoke of the Pharaohs.
When Moses climbed Mount Sinai, the Hebrews, unsure of Moses' return, urged Aaron to build them an idol to guide them. After melting down their jewellery, Aaron made them a golden calf, a reproduction of the Apis bull worshipped in Egypt since prehistoric times.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_(Bible)
Apis is the Greek name of a sacred bull from Egyptian mythology that has been worshipped since prehistoric times. The first traces of his cult are depicted on rock engravings, and he is later mentioned in the texts of the pyramids of the Old Kingdom, and his cult continued until Roman times. Apis is a symbol of fertility, sexual power and physical strength.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apis
Moloch ou Molech : is a divinity whose cult was practised in the region of Canaan according to biblical tradition. He appears in a context linked to child sacrifices by fire.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch
Joshua : first called Hoshea, son of Nun. Moses renames him Joshua in the Book of Numbers 13:16 Joshua is written in Hebrew Yehoshua (Deuteronomy 3:21), which means ‘God saves’. He was born in Egypt at the time of the Hebrews' slavery.
He witnessed the Israelites leave Egypt under the leadership of Moses, and became Moses' successor in leading the Hebrew people to the Promised Land. He led the conquest of the land of Canaan and settled the tribes of Israel there.
In his summary of the story, Near Eastern archaeologist and anthropologist William G. Dever writes : "The story celebrates the military exploits of a daring, but ruthlessly cruel, warlord. Joshua's campaign of systematic massacres of the civilian populations of Canaan deserves to be described as genocide; witness Jericho, whose entire population was put to the sword, except for Rahab, the prostitute who enabled the city to be taken".
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josu%C3%A9
5 - The miracle of empathic communication :
Author's note : This study focuses on the text alone, without giving it an origin other than human.
In this way, these texts take on a new meaning: that of human behaviour, whether it be the psychological behaviour of the individual, or the collective behaviour induced by cultures and traditions..
La Pentecôte was originally a Jewish festival, the anniversary of the covenant made some fifty days after the people came out of Egypt. Among Christians, it became a festival celebrating the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on a group of disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, including the Twelve Apostles. This episode is recounted in the Acts of the Apostles.
(Effusion: action of pouring out).
Pentecost is celebrated on the seventh Sunday after Easter Sunday, on a moveable date calculated by the Computation. It always falls on a Sunday between 10 May and 13 June. In some countries, it is followed the next day by a public holiday or non-working Monday, known as ‘Whit Monday’.
(Comput: calendar based on astronomical data, in the Christian tradition)
What do we know about Jesus ? The historical writings on his existence that have come down to us are few and extremely brief.
The first description of Jesus comes to us in a letter, the ‘Letter of Publius Lentulus’, which is said to have been addressed to the Emperor Octavian Augustus by a governor of Judea, Pilate's predecessor.
« In our time, a man of great virtue has appeared and remains, named Jesus Christ, who is called a prophet of truth by the people, but whom his disciples call the Son of God. He raises the dead and heals all kinds of diseases. He is of rather tall and remarkable stature, with a venerable face, which those who see him can [at once] love and fear. His hair is the colour of fresh almonds and is smooth almost down to his ears; but from the ears downwards it is a little curly, a little darker and shinier, waving over his shoulders and parted at the top of his skull, in the manner of the Nazarenes. He looks very calm and serene. His face is without the slightest wrinkle or blemish; a moderate complexion embellishes it. His nose and mouth are impeccable. His beard is full and of the same colour as his hair, not very long and bifid; he is simple and mature in appearance; his eyes, blue-grey, are clear and quick. He is stern when he disapproves, calm and courteous when he advises.
His cheerfulness is tempered by his seriousness; no one has ever seen him laugh, but many have seen him cry; he is well proportioned and upright, his arms and hands very pleasing to the eye. In conversation, he is moderate, modest and wise. His beauty surpasses that of the sons of men ».
This letter, which describes Jesus in a benevolent light, was found in the archives of the Roman Senate by a certain Eutorpe. The text is now attributed to a 13th-century author.
Christusblider. Untersuchungen zur christlichen Legende.
Original translation, Leipzig, 1899.
Latin text by E.von Dobschütz
Le Point HS1
---------------------------
Apart from this laudatory text, what else can we learn from the historians and other figures of antiquity ?
Flavius Josephus :
Joseph son of Matthatias the Priest, better known by his Latin name Flavius Josephus, born in Jerusalem in 37/38 and died in Rome around 100, was a Roman historiographer of Judean origin in the first century.
Written in Greek, his work is one of the main sources on the history of the Judeans in the first century.
Born after the crucifixion, his life and his many about-turns are not conducive to a rigorous vision of history.
First of all, as military commander of Galilee, he was involved in the war between the Jewish and Roman rebels from 67 to 73, which led to the destruction of Jerusalem.
Defeated in 67 by Vespasian, he was imprisoned before joining the Romans during the siege of Jerusalem led by Titus, who destroyed the temple in 70.
After becoming a Roman citizen, he took the first name of Titus and the name Flavius in honour of his patrons.
His writings reveal his changes of opinion: for example, his book ‘The War of the Jews’ is an apology for Roman intervention against Jewish rebels, before he became an advocate of Jewish religious nationalism in his book ‘Against Apion’ around 95.
The lack of rigour in his works led the scholar Shayes D. Cohen to claim in 1979 that he was ‘compulsively negligent’.
(Shaye J. D. Cohen (born 21 October 1948) is a modern scholar of the Hebrew Bible. He is currently the Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University).
In addition, these texts have been distorted over the centuries by Christian copyists.
As a result, there are now 2 versions of the ‘Jewish War’: the traditional version contains no reference to Jesus.
On the other hand, a copy in Old Russian (known as the Slavonic version) contains a great deal of information about the Nazarene that is so corroborative of the ‘New Testament’ as to be suspect.
The allusions to Jesus in the ‘Jewish antiquities’ seem more credible.
The first shows Jesus as the brother of James.
‘The high priest Annas (...) called together a Sanhedrin and brought before it James, the brother of Jesus called the Christ, and certain others (...) and had them stoned to death’.
The second allusion to Jesus is richer, but more controversial. It is the Testimonium Flavianum (testimony of Flavius):
‘At about the same time Jesus came, a wise man, ‘if he can be called a man’. This last passage, which seems to be an addition, suggests that its author did not believe that Jesus was only a man.
Another passage is also suspect:
‘For he appeared to them 3 days after he had risen, when the divine prophets had foretold this and 1,000 other wonders about him.’
Flavius Joseph speaks of the resurrection as an established fact, which proves that the author is a believer.
Similarly, he links the person of Jesus to the messianic announcements of the Old Testament, something that only a Christian could have written, and Josephus was not a Christian.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavius_Jos%C3%A8phe
https://www.persee.fr/doc/rjuiv_0484-8616_1897_num_35_69_4204
Pliny the Younger : (61-113)
In a letter to Trajan in 111 or 112, Pliny the Younger asked the emperor what to do with the early Christians of Bithynia. It states that “they assemble on a set day, before sunrise; they take turns singing hymns in praise of Christ, as if in honor of a god; they pledge themselves by oath, not to any crime, but not to commit theft, brigandage, adultery, not to break their promise, not to deny a deposit; after this, they used to separate, and gather again to eat common and innocent food.”
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sources_sur_la_vie_de_J%C3%A9sus_de_Nazareth
Tacitus : (58-120)
In the Annals of the Roman historian Tacitus, written around 116, a passage recounts the blaming of Christians during the burning of Rome in 64.
“But no human means, imperial largesse or expiatory ceremonies could silence the public outcry accusing Nero of having ordered the fire. To appease these rumors, he offered other culprits, and made a class of men hated for their abominations, and called Christians, suffer the most refined tortures. This name comes from Christ, who, under Tiberius, was delivered to the torture by the procurator Pontius Pilate.... ”
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacite
Suetone :
In his ‘Lives of the Twelve Caesars’, around 120, Suetonius wrote: ‘[Claudius] drove out of the city the Jews who were constantly rising up at the instigation of a certain Chrestus’.
In fact, none of these three authors (Pliny, Tacitus and Suetonius) testifies to the existence of Jesus, but they do attest that individuals claimed to be his followers, and this in Rome as early as the 40s.
https://www.lhistoire.fr/j%C3%A9sus-t-il-exist%C3%A9
Mara bar Serapion :
A letter from a Stoic named Mara bar Serapion, addressed in Syriac to his son, speaks of a ‘wise king’ executed by his own people - the Jews - following the example of Socrates and Pythagoras, in what is accepted as an allusion to Jesus of Nazareth.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_bar_S%C3%A9rapion
Celsus :
Celsus, a pagan and anti-Christian philosopher of the 2nd century, author of the True Discourse, reports the words of a learned Jew according to whom Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier, Pantera: ‘The mother of Jesus was driven away by the carpenter who had asked her to marry him, because she had been convicted of adultery and had become pregnant by the works of a Roman soldier named Panthera. Separated from her husband, she gave birth to Jesus, a bastard son.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celse_(philosophe)
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The year 1778 marked the beginning of a new era of understanding of the story of Jesus, independent of faith.
That year saw the publication in Germany of Hermann Samuel Reimarus's posthumous ‘Drawing of Jesus and His Disciples’. A rationalist who did not believe in miracles, he came to the following conclusion: Jesus was a Jew who thought in the categories of his time and never wanted to found a new religion. It was his disciples who established Christianity as a religion independent of Judaism. He himself fulfilled nothing other than purely ethical obligations: true love of God and neighbour.
Later, in 1835, a young theologian aged 27, David Friedrich Strauss, published a thesis entitled ‘Life of Jesus, examined by critics’. His aim was not so much to find the real Jesus as to show the ‘eternal truths’ he expressed. For him, Jesus was not a god, but a man in whom a universal figure of thought was embodied.
For the Frenchman Ernest Renan, his ‘Life of Jesus’, written in 1863, presents Jesus as the greatest idealist of all time, capable of rising up against a narrow interpretation of the laws.
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From the point of view of modern historians, and in the absence of reliable historical evidence, the Gospels are approached in an entirely different way.
In fact, no less than 40 years elapsed between the death of this man in the early 1930s and the earliest of the 4 Gospels [the main sources available for historical knowledge of Jesus], and this period is the least known of the beginnings of Christianity.
Luke, to whom the 3rd Gospel is attributed, acknowledges in a letter to Theophilus that he was not the first to write on the subject, and those who preceded him were not themselves eyewitnesses. He himself writes to strengthen the faith of his reader. [Lk 1:1-4, Louis Segond translation (1910)]
The Gospels are therefore not historical works in the modern sense of the term.
However, by understanding how the texts were transmitted, it is possible to determine the conditions of their appearance.
In the 1930s, the German school of ‘literary form criticism’ proposed 4 principles for understanding the formation of the Gospels.
1 - Stereotyped literary forms (sayings of Jesus, parables, accounts of miracles, significant events, etc.) existed at the outset.
2 - these forms circulated freely, first orally, then gradually in written form.
They are found in the various Gospels (the 4 Gospels)
3 - These traditions are passed on within communities for worship and controversy.
4 - they become testimonies of faith and thus lose their character of historical reportage.
Today, the explanatory model on which there is the greatest consensus is the ‘2-source theory’, which explains the relationship between the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, known as the synoptics.
Placed in parallel columns, these texts can easily be compared.
According to this model, Matthew and Luke are each inspired by Mark's Gospel.
But they also use the so-called ‘Q source’ (from the German ‘quelle’ meaning ‘source’), which consists of everything they have in common, but which is absent from Mark's text.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Q
It is also called the source of the ‘logia’ (‘words’ in Greek), because it consists essentially of the words of Jesus.
This model has recently been qualified by the recognition that both Matthew and Luke have specific versions of the ‘Q’ source, and that Mark also has an older version.
Author's note : If we go back to the proposition mentioned earlier [cf: The door to evolution], equating the term ‘God’ with that of Evolution, we can then understand why Jesus could have been called ‘son of God’.
This is because children, before they are conditioned by the community, have an innate moral sense that derives from the evolution of the species.
By expressing themselves with this moral sense, all human beings rediscover innate capacities that they had lost when they became the children of their cultural community. By rediscovering this ‘gift’ granted by life, they once again become ‘children of evolution’...
...the son of ‘God’.
Le miracle de la communication empathique :