Have I been here before?
No, not metempsychosis aka reincarnation, but as here?
Is this the instance of the fingerpost hiding in plain sight?
Jesus is dead in 31. Paul is struck down by Him (or guilt) in 37. In 6 years the Church was a thriving, widespread, international, underground network. Driven underground after significant, dangerous, social justice was rapidly achieved 31-34 led by Stephen, a Hellenized Jew, amongst others.
At the very least it speaks to Jesus the martyred peaceful subversive social revolutionary as the proximal source.
I've had the pieces before, but they've only just come together in this Heraclitus loop.
Could Jesus and His followers, including Paul, have achieved this naturally? In less than a decade from the start of His ministry? Is Incarnation required?
This makes the novel harder work!
Is this the instance of the fingerpost hiding in plain sight?
Jesus is dead in 31. Paul is struck down by Him (or guilt) in 37. In 6 years the Church was a thriving, widespread, international, underground network. Driven underground after significant, dangerous, social justice was rapidly achieved 31-34 led by Stephen, a Hellenized Jew, amongst others.
At the very least it speaks to Jesus the martyred peaceful subversive social revolutionary as the proximal source.
I've had the pieces before, but they've only just come together in this Heraclitus loop.
Could Jesus and His followers, including Paul, have achieved this naturally? In less than a decade from the start of His ministry? Is Incarnation required?
This makes the novel harder work!
Comments
What seems different about this current dive?
I expect you will answer your questions naturalistically. Don't you?
What IS the timeline on getting this novel published, by the way?
A robed, provincial, ME, Jewish carpenter set an underground fire burning that consumed the greatest empire the world had seen within 300 years. It's still burning. It was well alight in 3 years on the surface.
It's that initial historical ignition that is fascinating.
I can't even get my expenses 'published' at the moment. I've had 4 bookings at the hall in the last two days, those are the ones that won out. I ran out of chairs twice and had to drag posh ones up from the church. One drag (well three actually) on another.
The same star that gave us life, shares your life. A bonny, bouncing baby, born in a nursery without walls. And then, ignition!
Sun, wind, rain and sun again. The season cycle doesn't trap you, it sustains you. Light gazes down upon you.
And hopes, if the stellar tales are true, to share our cycle of life. A second ignition!
From stardust we were born, to stardust we return.
Sorry.* I keep pushing around the pieces you laid out the table. I picked them up to inspect the backs. I don't understand what about them looks different to you this time.
This reminds me of Stephen Wright's story about thieves coming in, stealing all his furniture and replacing it with exact replicas.
I"m missing the subtle difference you're trying to point out. I'm sorry.
Is this a loop, because it's all the same evidence coming back around again, but appearing different somehow?
Anyway, Happy New Year!
*(Midwest U.S. & Canada usage)
So, I've mithered on about the Church exploding from nothing before? It's me age. And it was two runnings out and two sets of three drags. Up. And back.
Is the Church unnatural? Does it require Incarnation? Nothing else comes close now. Paul collided with the Church. The Church won.
Na. No Mitherin'.
It's not you. Or your age.
Can you help with the running and dragging? Please?
Iffin' it did?
Until I understood you had t' 'and trolley, I was speccing one out for you in my 'ead.
Paul fought the church, and the church won
Paul fought the church, and the church won
I've never considered the church to be very mysterious or a mystery - the church that we can see, hear, smell, touch, taste is an entirely natural phenomenon. An institution. Its growth trajectory isn't dissimilar to social media, taking into account means and speed of communication.
It's a rather less convincing fingerpost than some of the others you've pursued. The only meaningful fingerposts you'll find here are the ones we all make when we tap the digits on the ends of our arms on the buttons on our keyboards and screens.
The Church now and for most of the past 1700 years isn't mysterious, no. But for the first 6 is. Exponentially so back to June 31 AD.
That 'u'd be th' 'and trolley wi'out wi'.
The image of the first six years that you are looking at is heavily influenced by 2000 years' interpolation and restoration by the church's own scribes, scholars and historians.
Why prefer that to the vision of 100,000 souls in one year of the 1904-1905 Welsh Revival of just over 100 years ago? Is it all down to the share you bring to the party?
Revivals are two a penny,
etc, etc, etc
What makes the Welsh an instance of the fingerpost?
Is it just me? Or is that the point? It's just going round in a perpetual circle that never gets anywhere, like a toy train in a shop window.
The short, initial, unnatural phase was succeeded by a rather longer natural, (institutional), phase. Many of the elements of the unnatural phase have subsequently been replayed, at various times and places, over the subsequent 2000 years. To denote all of them as being natural, but the initial concurrence as being unnatural looks little different to ascribing omnipotent creativity to the big bang and everything thereafter as natural philosophy.
The 1700 hundred years of establishment Christianity with all its fissiparity and dependent interaction with social development certainly doesn't inspire. It's never delivered the promise of that first handful of years.
It's obvious sociologically where the Welsh revival comes from. Is the birth and human scale infancy and lifespan of the C1st Church sociologically impossible?
Or just the second half of the novel?
There's a kind of ultra-purist 'restorationist' Protestantism that seems to hold that everything was hunky-dory for about two hours on a Thursday afternoon somewhere around 6 AD only for it all to go down hill after that.
Whether that development leads to something 'unrecognisable' over time is a moot point, of course.
Sure, I don't imagine first century Christians would have foreseen St Peter's in Rome or Soul Survivor or TV evangelists or ...
What continues to strike me about this post is your use of *we*.
And whatever else the very early church is, it's community. You're talking about the unnatural creation of a natural(?) community - and your desire to see it as a fingerpost. In this context, you seem to be appealing to this particular natural community (ie these forums) for something - although what that something is, is unclear - "confirmation" seems inapt; maybe it's "vigorous contemplation" (but there are other possibilities).
Whatever it is, it illustrates the complex relationship between that which sustains individuals and that which sustains communities.
I guess I'll have to raise the question elsewhere.
I feel like I have little to contribute except encouragement to keep searching. I don't know much at all about the infant church and can really only give you a good, old parochial, "Well, sure it was supernatural and required Incarnation!" But I don't think that is at all what you are looking for.
Perhaps I can contribute something I do professionally: a reference interview.
Your turn:
Name removed
North East Quine, Purgatory host
This . is . brilliant.
.
But Dang! That got me thinking about your question. Assuming .... you know, you find what you're yearning for about the early church and incarnation, where does Infinity fit?