DECEMBER 7, 2021 AT 7:00 AM BY ROB BREZSNY (newcity.com)

“No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.”

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Aries filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) was experimental and innovative and influential. His imagery was often dreamlike, and his themes were metaphysical. He felt that the most crucial aspect of his creative process was his faith. If he could genuinely believe in the work he was doing, he was sure he’d succeed at even the most improbable projects. But that was a challenge for him. “There is nothing more difficult to achieve than a passionate, sincere, quiet faith,” he said. In accordance with your astrological omens during the next twelve months, Aries, I suggest you draw inspiration from his approach. Cultivating a passionate, sincere, quiet faith will be more attainable than it has ever been.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware,” said philosopher Martin Buber. How true! I would add that the traveler is wise to prepare for the challenges and opportunities of those secret destinations…and be alert for them if they appear…and treat them with welcome and respect, not resistance and avoidance. When travelers follow those protocols, they are far more likely to be delightfully surprised than disappointingly surprised. Everything I just said will apply to you in the coming weeks, Taurus.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Gemini sleight-of-hand artist Apollo Robbins may be the best and most famous pickpocket in the world. Fortunately, he uses his skill for entertainment purposes only. He doesn’t steal strangers’ money and valuables from their pockets and purses and jackets. On one occasion, while in the company of former US President Jimmy Carter, he pilfered multiple items from a secret service agent assigned to protect Carter. He gave the items back, of course. It was an amusing and humbling lesson that inspired many law-enforcement officials to seek him out as a consultant. I suspect that in the coming weeks, you may have comparable abilities to trick, fool, beguile and enchant. I hope you will use your superpowers exclusively to carry out good deeds and attract inviting possibilities.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Many sportswriters regard Michael Jordan as the greatest basketball player ever. He was the Most Valuable Player five times and had a higher scoring average than anyone else who has ever played. And yet he confesses, “I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. And I have failed over and over and over again in my life.” He says the keys to his success are his familiarity with bungles and his determination to keep going despite his bungles. I invite you to meditate on Jordan’s example in the coming days.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In his poem “Song of Poplars,” Leo author Aldous Huxley speaks to a stand of poplar trees. He asks them if they are an “agony of undefined desires.” Now I will pose the same question to you, Leo. Are you an agony of undefined desires? Or are you a treasury of well-defined desires? I hope it’s the latter. But if it’s not, the coming weeks will be an excellent time to fix the problem. Learning to be precise about the nature of your longings is your growing edge, your frontier. Find out more about what you want, please.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Black is your lucky color for the foreseeable future. I invite you to delve further than ever before into its mysteries and meanings and powers. I encourage you to celebrate blackness and honor blackness and nurture blackness in every way you can imagine. For inspiration, meditate on how, in art, black is the presence of all colors. In printing, black is a color needed to produce other colors. In mythology, blackness is the primal source of all life and possibility. In psychology, blackness symbolizes the rich unconscious core from which all vitality emerges.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In the first season of the animated TV series “South Park,” its two creators produced an episode called “Make Love, Not Warcraft.” The story lovingly mocked nerds and the culture of online gaming. Soon after sending his handiwork to executive producers, Libran co-creator Trey Parker decided it was a terrible show that would wreck his career. He begged for it to be withheld from broadcast. But the producers ignored his pleas. That turned out to be a lucky break. The episode ultimately won an Emmy Award and became popular with fans. I foresee the possibility of comparable events in your life, Libra. Don’t be too sure you know which of your efforts will work best.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Nobel Prize-winning Scorpio author André Gide (1869–1951) had an unusual relationship with his wife Madeleine Rondeaux. Although married for forty-three years, they never had sex. As long as she was alive, he never mentioned her in his extensive writings. But after she died, he wrote a book about their complex relationship. Here’s the best thing he ever said about her: “I believe it was through her that I drew the need for truthfulness and sincerity.” I’d love for you to be lit up by an influence like Madeleine Rondeaux, Scorpio. I’d be excited for you to cultivate a bond with a person who will inspire your longing to be disarmingly candid and refreshingly genuine. If there are no such characters in your life, go looking for them. If there are, deepen your connection.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): A fashion company called Tibi sells a silver mini dress that features thousands of sequins. It’s also available in gold. I wonder if the designers were inspired by poet Mark Doty’s line: “No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.” In my astrological estimation, the coming weeks will be a fun time to make this one of your mottoes. You will have a poetic license to be flashy, shiny, bold, swanky, glittery, splashy, sparkling and extravagant. If expressing such themes in the way you dress isn’t appealing, embody more metaphorical versions.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): “I have pasts inside me I did not bury properly,” writes Nigerian poet Ijeoma Umebinyuo. Isn’t that true for each of us? Don’t we all carry around painful memories as if they were still fresh and current? With a little work, we could depotentize at least some of them and consign them to a final resting place where they wouldn’t nag and sting us anymore. The good news, Capricorn, is that the coming weeks will be an excellent time to do just that: bury any pasts that you have not properly buried before now.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In February 1967, the Beatles recorded their album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in London. A man claiming to be Jesus Christ convinced Paul McCartney to let him weasel his way into the studio. McCartney later said that he was pretty sure it wasn’t the real Jesus. But if by some remote chance it was, he said, he didn’t want to make a big mistake. I bring this to your attention, Aquarius, because I suspect that comparable events may be brewing in your vicinity. My advice: Don’t assume you already know who your teachers and helpers are. Here’s the relevant verse from the Bible: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): According to Professor of Classics Anne Carson, ancient Greek author Homer “suggested we stand in time with our backs to the future, face to the past.” And why would we do that? To “search for the meaning of the present—scanning history and myth for a precedent.” I bring this to your attention, Pisces, because I think you should avoid such an approach in the coming months. In my view, the next chapter of your life story will be so new, so unpredicted, that it will have no antecedents, no precursory roots that might illuminate its plot and meaning. Your future is unprecedented.

Homework: Send your predictions for the new year—both for yourself and the world. Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology

CEE Video Channel *****See timestamps below for easy browsing***** This audiobook edition of Nietzsche and the Nazis is read by the author, Dr. Stephen Hicks. To listen to more of the audiobook on YouTube, visit: https://www.youtube.com/user/NNAudiobook To purchase the book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Nietzsche-Nazi… To download MP3s of the audiobook or for more information, visit Dr. Stephen Hicks’s Nietzsche and the Nazis page: http://www.stephenhicks.org/publicati…00:00 Part 1. Introduction: Philosophy and History/1. Fascinated by history 03:36 2. What is philosophy of history? 04:46 Part 2. Explaining Nazism Philosophically/3. How could Nazism happen? 06:17 4. Five weak explanations for National Socialism 14:31 5. Explaining Nazism philosophically 21:40 Part 3. National Socialist Philosophy/6. The Nazi Party Program 22:44 7. Collectivism, not individualism 24:01 8. Economic socialism, not capitalism 27:40 9. Nationalism, not internationalism or cosmopolitanism 32:25 10. Authoritarianism, not liberal democracy 35:21 11. Idealism, not politics as usual 38:42 12. Nazi democratic success 41:05 Part 4. The Nazis in Power/13. Political controls 43:27 14. Education 51:28 15. Censorship 55:32 16. Eugenics 1:05:16 17. Economic controls 1:11:37 18. Militarization 1:15:55 19. The Holocaust 1:20:31 20. The question of Nazism’s philosophical roots 1:24:58 Part 5. Nietzsche’s Life and Influence/21. Who was Friedrich Nietzsche? 1:27:56 22. God is dead 1:30:27 23. Nihilism’s symptoms 1:34:20 24. Masters and slaves 1:46:05 25. The origin of slave morality 2:01:53 26. The Overman 2:10:44 Part 6. Nietzsche against the Nazis/27. Five differences 2:12:08 28. On the “blond beast” and racism 2:15:19 29. On contemporary Germans 2:16:53 30. On anti-Semitism 2:18:36 31. On the Jews 2:21:10 32. On Judaism and Christianity 2:24:27 33. Summary of the five differences 2:26:06 Part 7. Nietzsche as a Proto-Nazi/34. Anti-individualism and collectivism 2:36:38 35. Conflict of groups 2:39:31 36. Instinct, passion, and anti-reason 2:43:42 37. Conquest and war 2:48:36 38. Authoritarianism 2:52:00 39. Summary of the five similarities 2:53:18 Part 8. Conclusion: Nazi and Anti-Nazi Philosophies/40. Hindsight and future resolve 2:57:34 41. Principled anti-Nazism

By Maria Popova (newsletter@brainpickings.org)

“Our emotional life maps our incompleteness,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in her luminous letter of advice to the young. “A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger.” Anger, indeed, is one of the emotions we judge most harshly — in others, as well as in ourselves — and yet understanding anger is central to mapping out the landscape of our interior lives. Aristotle, in planting the civilizational seed for practical wisdom, recognized this when he asked not whether anger is “good” or “bad” but how it shall be used: directed at whom, manifested how, for how long and to what end.

This undervalued soul-mapping quality of anger is what English poet and philosopher David Whyte explores in a section of Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (public library) — the same breathtaking volume “dedicated to words and their beautiful hidden and beckoning uncertainty,” which gave us Whyte on the deeper meanings of friendship, love, and heartbreak.

David Whyte (Nicol Ragland Photography)

Many of Whyte’s meditations invert the common understanding of each word and peel off the superficial to reveal the deeper, often counterintuitive meaning — but nowhere more so than in his essay on anger. Whyte writes:

ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak for a special edition of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Nutcracker

Such a reconsideration renders Whyte not an apologist for anger but a peacemaker in our eternal war with its underlying vulnerability, which is essentially an eternal war with ourselves — for at its source lies our tenderest, timidest humanity. In a sentiment that calls to mind Brené Brown’s masterful and culturally necessary manifesto for vulnerability — “Vulnerability,” she wrote, “is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, accountability, and authenticity.” — Whyte adds:

What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.

Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability… Anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics.

One need only think of Van Gogh — “I am so angry with myself because I cannot do what I should like to do,” he wrote in a letter as he tussled with mental illness — to appreciate Whyte’s expedition beyond anger’s surface tumults and into its innermost core: profound frustration swelling with a sense of personal failure. (Hannah Arendt captured another facet of this in her brilliant essay on how bureaucracy breeds violence — for what is bureaucracy if not the supreme institutionalization of helplessness?)

With remarkable intellectual elegance and a sensitivity to the full dimension of the human spirit, Whyte illuminates the vitalizing underbelly of anger:

Anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence.

Illustration by Marianne Dubuc from The Lion and the Bird

In a related meditation, Whyte considers the nature of forgiveness:

FORGIVENESS is a heartache and difficult to achieve because strangely, it not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source. To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw center, to reimagine our relation to it.

Echoing Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s historic dialogue on forgiveness, Whyte — who has also asserted that “all friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness” — explores the true source of forgiveness:

Strangely, forgiveness never arises from the part of us that was actually wounded. The wounded self may be the part of us incapable of forgetting, and perhaps, not actually meant to forget, as if, like the foundational dynamics of the physiological immune system our psychological defenses must remember and organize against any future attacks — after all, the identity of the one who must forgive is actually founded on the very fact of having been wounded.

Stranger still, it is that wounded, branded, un-forgetting part of us that eventually makes forgiveness an act of compassion rather than one of simple forgetting. To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt, to mature and bring to fruition an identity that can put its arm, not only around the afflicted one within but also around the memories seared within us by the original blow and through a kind of psychological virtuosity, extend our understanding to one who first delivered it. Forgiveness is a skill, a way of preserving clarity, sanity and generosity in an individual life, a beautiful way of shaping the mind to a future we want for ourselves; an admittance that if forgiveness comes through understanding, and if understanding is just a matter of time and application then we might as well begin forgiving right at the beginning of any drama rather than put ourselves through the full cycle of festering, incapacitation, reluctant healing and eventual blessing.

To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity, we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft.

Illustration by Marianne Dubuc from The Lion and the Bird

This question of maturity, so intimately tied to forgiveness, is the subject of another of Whyte’s short essays. Echoing Anaïs Nin’s assertion that maturity is a matter of “unifying” and “integrating,” he writes:

MATURITY is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts; most especially, the ability, despite our grief and losses, to courageously inhabit the past the present and the future all at once. The wisdom that comes from maturity is recognized through a disciplined refusal to choose between or isolate three powerful dynamics that form human identity: what has happened, what is happening now and what is about to occur.

Immaturity is shown by making false choices: living only in the past, or only in the present, or only in the future, or even, living only two out of the three.

Maturity is not a static arrived platform, where life is viewed from a calm, untouched oasis of wisdom, but a living elemental frontier between what has happened, what is happening now and the consequences of that past and present; first imagined and then lived into the waiting future.

Maturity calls us to risk ourselves as much as immaturity, but for a bigger picture, a larger horizon; for a powerfully generous outward incarnation of our inward qualities and not for gains that make us smaller, even in the winning.

Maturity, Whyte seems to suggest, becomes a kind of arrival at a sense of enoughness — a willingness to enact what Kurt Vonnegut considered one of the great human virtues: the ability to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?” Whyte writes:

Maturity beckons also, asking us to be larger, more fluid, more elemental, less cornered, less unilateral, a living conversational intuition between the inherited story, the one we are privileged to inhabit and the one, if we are large enough and broad enough, moveable enough and even, here enough, just, astonishingly, about to occur.

Consolations, it bears repeating, is an absolutely magnificent read — the kind that reorients your world and remains a compass for a lifetime. Complement it with Whyte on ending relationships and breaking the tyranny of work-life balance.

The Hermit

The Hermit (or sometimes Lord of Time) is numbered nine and is usually depicted as an old man, carrying a lamp or staff. He picks his way carefully through the terrain. The Lamp of Knowledge he carries is a magical receptacle for all the knowledge and wisdom he has acquired through many years of study and meditation. The staff represents the weight of his experience, upon which he leans for support.

The Hermit lacks human company, as the teaching/learning process is often one of aloneness and solitude. He is an adept, someone who knows the inner mysteries of life. He has reached the point in his journey where nobody else can help – he must rely on inner resources, previous experiences and sheer faith in the light which leads him.

When we walk the path of the Hermit we travel deep inside our soul. Here we discover the name of the god or goddess residing within us and bring back the keys to self-knowledge and mastery. After this, we live from the centre of our self and become content with our essential aloneness. And perhaps, after this, we will be ready to teach others what we have discovered.

(via angelpaths.com and Alan Blackman)

Who Rules America? Power, Politics and Social Change

by G. William Domhoff 

Domhoff’s text is teaches students about how power operates in U.S. society. It argues that the owners and top-level managers in large income-producing properties are far and away the dominant figures in the U.S.

(Goodreads.com)

God is My Adventure: A Book on Modern Mystics, Masters, and Teachers

by Rom Landau 

Originally published in 1935. GOD IS MY ADVENTURE- a book on modern mystics masters and teachers By ROM LANDAU. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION: There is something sacrilegious in your intention of writing such a book, ‘ said a friend and yet I went on with it. Since I was a boy I have always been attracted by those regions of truth that the official religions and sciences are shy of exploring. The men who claim to have penetrated them have always had for me the same fascination that famous artists, explorers or states men have for others and such men are the subject of this book. Some of them come from the East, some from Europe and America; some give us a glimpse of truth by the mere flicker of an eyelid, while others speak of heaven and hell with the precision of mathe maticians. I have met them all, and some I have watched in their daily lives. For years now I have sought their company, questioned them and watched them closely at work. I have tried to dissociate the per sonality from the teaching and then to reconcile the two. I have included some of those whom now I cannot view without mistrust. Since thousands of other people believe in them, they are at any rate most interesting figures in contemporary spiritual life, however little of ultimate value their teaching may possess. There are people who know the heroes of this book more inti mately than I, but my aim has never been to identify myself with any one teacher. On the contrary, I have always been anxious to discover for myself through what powers they have influenced so many people. This attitude will warn the reader not to expect an impersonal survey of contemporary spiritual doctrines. I have limited myself to writing of those men with whom I have been in personal contact. I approach them not as the scholar but as the ordinary man who tries to find God in daily life. This book is the confession of an adventure and the story of my friendships with those men whom a future generation may possibly call the true prophets of our time. The core of the adventure is a search for God. I leave it to the reader to decide whether such a search can be sacrilegious. R. L. MOCKBRIDGE HOUSE HENFIELD, SUSSEX Summer, 1935. PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION ( Ninth Impression): It is an agreeable duty for an a* uthor to express his pleasure when one of his books has enjoyed public favour sufficiently to call for yet another edition seven years after its first publication. In the present case, to the author’s pleasure must be added his gratitude to his readers. For I have greatly profited from the thousands of letters received from people previously unknown to me, and even more so from the many valuable personal contacts which have often resulted from such correspondence. I should be false to my real feelings if I refrained from giving utterance to my gratitude for the enlightenment which I have thus derived. When the manuscript of God Is My Adventure was first submitted to its original publishers, four of the five readers to whom the book was sent for a professional opinion, turned it down. The fifth pointed out that, whatever merits the book might possibly possess, it hardly justified publication since not more than a handful of people were ever likely to be interested in it. The five readers were unanimous in thinking that for a ‘ philosophical’ book God Is My Adventure was not sufficiently orthodox, and for one purporting to explore the by-ways of modem esotericism, not pronounced enough in its allegiance to any individual one of the teachers and systems which it described.

(Goodreads.com)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Part of a series on
Jewish Christianity
Figures
JesusJohn the BaptistSimon PeterTwelve ApostlesJames, brother of JesusSimeon of JerusalemJudePaul
Ancient groups
EbionitesElcesaitesNazarenes
Pejoratives
JudaizersLegalists
Recent groups
Hebrew Christian movementMessianic JudaismHebrew Roots
Adversity
Split of Christianity and JudaismPaul and JudaismMarcionismChristian anti-semitismConstantine
Writings
Gospel of MatthewEpistle of JamesClementineDidacheBook of ElchasaiJewish–Christian gospelsGospel of the EbionitesGospel of the HebrewsGospel of the Nazarenes
Issues
Aramaic of JesusYeshua (name)Council of JerusalemExpounding of the LawSabbathQuartodecimanismNoahide laws
vte

Ebionites (Greek: Ἐβιωναῖοι, Ebionaioi, derived from Hebrew אביונים‎ ebyonim, ebionim, meaning ‘the poor’ or ‘poor ones’) as a term refers to a Jewish Christian sect who were vegetarians, viewed poverty as holy, believed in ritual ablutions, and rejected animal sacrifices.^[1] They existed during the early centuries of the Common Era.^[2] The Ebionites embraced an adoptionist Christology, thus understanding Jesus of Nazareth as a mere man who, by virtue of his righteousness, was chosen by God to be a true prophet. A majority of the Ebionites rejected as heresies the proto-orthodox Christian beliefs in Jesus’s divinity and virgin birth.^[3] They maintained that Jesus was the natural son of Joseph and Mary who became the Messiah because he obeyed the Jewish law.^[1]

Accordingly, the Ebionites insisted on the necessity of following the Written Law of Moses alone (without the Oral Law); used one, some or all of the Jewish–Christian gospels, such as the Gospel of the Ebionites, as additional scripture to the Hebrew Bible; and revered James the Just as an exemplar of righteousness and the true successor to Jesus (rather than Peter), while rejecting Paul as a false apostle and an apostate from the Law.^[4][5][6]

Since historical records by the Ebionites are scarce, fragmentary and disputed, much of what is known or conjectured about them derives from the Church Fathers who saw all Jewish Christians as Ebionites and confused different groups in their polemics whom they labeled heretical “Judaizers“.^[7][8] Consequently, very little about the Ebionite sect or sects is known with certainty, and most, if not all, statements about them are speculative. The Church Fathers consider the Ebionites identical with other Jewish Christian sects, such as the Nazarenes.^[9][10]

Name

The hellenized Hebrew term Ebionite (Ebionai) was first applied by Irenaeus in the second century without making mention of Nazarenes (c.180 CE).^[11][12] Origen wrote “for Ebion signifies ‘poor’ among the Jews, and those Jews who have received Jesus as Christ are called by the name of Ebionites.”^[13][14] Tertullian was the first to write against a heresiarch called Ebion; scholars believe he derived this name from a literal reading of Ebionaioi as ‘followers of Ebion’, a derivation now considered mistaken for lack of any more substantial references to such a figure.^[15][16] The term the poor (Greek: ptōkhoí) was still used in its original, more general sense.^[15][16] Modern Hebrew still uses the Biblical Hebrew term the needy both in histories of Christianity for “Ebionites” (אביונים‎) and for almsgiving to the needy at Purim.^[17]

History

Map of the Decapolis showing the location of Pella.

Emergence

The earliest reference to a sect that might fit the description of the later Ebionites appears in Justin Martyr‘s Dialogue with Trypho (c. 140).^{[citation needed]} Justin distinguishes between Jewish Christians who observe the Law of Moses but do not require its observance upon others and those who believe the Mosaic Law to be obligatory on all.^[18] Irenaeus (c. 180) was probably the first to use the term Ebionites to name a sect he labeled heretical “Judaizers” for “stubbornly clinging to the Law“.^[19] Origen (c. 212) remarks that the name derives from the Hebrew word evyon, meaning ‘poor’.^[20] Epiphanius of Salamis (c. 310–320 – 403) gives the most complete account in his heresiology called Panarion, denouncing eighty heretical sects, among them the Ebionites.^[21][22] Epiphanius mostly gives general descriptions of their religious beliefs and includes quotations from their gospels, which have not survived. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the Ebionite movement “may have arisen about the time of the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem (70 CE).”^[23] The tentative dating of the origins of this sect depends on Epiphanius writing three centuries later and relying on information for the Ebionites from the Book of Elchasai, which may not have had anything to do with the Ebionites.^[24]

Paul talks of his collection for the “poor among the saints” in the Jerusalem church, but this is generally taken as meaning the poorer members of the church rather than a schismatic sect.^[25]

The actual number of sects described as Ebionites is difficult to ascertain, as the contradictory patristic accounts in their attempt to distinguish various sects sometimes confuse them with each other.^[16] Other sects mentioned are the Carpocratians, the Cerinthians, the Elcesaites, the fourth century Nazarenes and the Sampsaeans, most of whom were Jewish Christian sects who held gnostic or other views rejected by the Ebionites. Epiphanius, however, mentions that a sect of Ebionites came to embrace some of these views despite keeping their name.^[26]

As the Ebionites are first mentioned as such in the second century, their earlier history and any relation to the first Jerusalem church remains obscure and a matter of contention. There is no evidence linking the origin of the later sect of the Ebionites with the First Jewish-Roman War of 66–70 CE or with the Jerusalem church led by James. Eusebius relates a tradition, probably based on Aristo of Pella, that the early Christians left Jerusalem just prior to the war and fled to Pella,^[27] Jordan beyond the Jordan River, but does not connect this with Ebionites.^[15][16] They were led by Simeon of Jerusalem (d. 107) and during the Second Jewish-Roman War of 115–117, they were persecuted by the Jewish followers of Bar Kochba for refusing to recognize his messianic claims.^[26] As late as Epiphanius of Salamis (310–403), members of the Ebionite sect resided in Nabatea, and Paneas, Moabitis, and Kochaba in the region of Bashan, near Adraa.^[28] From these places, they dispersed and went into Asia (Turkey), Rome and Cyprus.^[28]

According to Harnack, the influence of Elchasaites places some Ebionites in the context of the gnostic movements widespread in Syria and the lands to the east.^[16][29]

Disappearance

After the end of the First Jewish–Roman War, the importance of the Jerusalem church began to fade. Jewish Christianity became dispersed throughout the Jewish diaspora in the Levant, where it was slowly eclipsed by Gentile Christianity, which then spread throughout the Roman Empire without competition from Jewish Christian sects.^[30] Once the Jerusalem church was eliminated during the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135, the Ebionites gradually lost influence and followers. Some modern scholars, such as Hyam Maccoby, argue the decline of the Ebionites was due to marginalization and persecution by both Jews and Christians.^[5] Following the defeat of the rebellion and the expulsion of Jews from Judea, Jerusalem became the Gentile city of Aelia Capitolina. Many of the Jewish Christians residing at Pella renounced their Jewish practices at this time and joined to the mainstream Christian church. Those who remained at Pella and continued in obedience to the Law were labeled heretics.^[31] In 375, Epiphanius records the settlement of Ebionites on Cyprus, but by the fifth century, Theodoret of Cyrrhus reported that they were no longer present in the region.^[26]

The Ebionites are still attested, if as marginal communities, down to the 7th century. Some modern scholars argue that the Ebionites survived much longer and identify them with a sect encountered by the historian Abd al-Jabbar ibn Ahmad around the year 1000.^[32] There is another possible reference to Ebionite communities existing around the 11th century in northwestern Arabia in Sefer Ha’masaot, the “Book of the Travels” of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, a rabbi from Spain. These communities were located in two cities, Tayma and “Tilmas”,^[33] possibly Sa`dah in Yemen. The 12th century Muslim historian Muhammad al-Shahrastani mentions Jews living in nearby Medina and Hejaz who accepted Jesus as a prophetic figure and followed traditional Judaism, rejecting mainstream Christian views.^[34] Some scholars argue that they contributed to the development of the Islamic view of Jesus due to exchanges of Ebionite remnants with the first Muslims.^[16][35]

Views and practices

Judaism, Gnosticism and Essenism

Most patristic sources^{[citation needed]} portray the Ebionites as Jews who zealously followed the Written Law alone (without the Oral Law), revered Jerusalem as the holiest city^[19] and restricted table fellowship only to Gentiles who converted to Judaism.^[18]

Some Church Fathers describe some Ebionites as departing from traditional Jewish principles of faith and practice. For example, Methodius of Olympus stated that the Ebionites believed that the prophets spoke only by their own power and not by the power of the Holy Spirit.^[36] Epiphanius of Salamis stated that the Ebionites engaged in excessive ritual bathing,^[37] possessed an angelology which claimed that the Christ is an angel of God who was incarnated in Jesus when he was adopted as the son of God during his baptism,^[38][39] denied parts of the Law deemed obsolete or corrupt,^[40] opposed animal sacrifice,^[39][41] practiced Jewish vegetarianism^[42] and celebrated a commemorative meal annually^[43] on or around Passover with unleavened bread and water only, in contrast to the daily Christian Eucharist.^[21][44][45] The reliability of Epiphanius’ account of the Ebionites is questioned by some scholars.^[8][46] Modern scholar Shlomo Pines, for example, argues that the heterodox views and practices he ascribes to some Ebionites originated in Gnostic Christianity rather than Jewish Christianity and are characteristics of the Elcesaite sect, which Epiphanius mistakenly attributed to the Ebionites.^[47]

While mainstream biblical scholars do suppose some Essene influence on the nascent Jewish Christian church in some organizational, administrative and cultic respects, some scholars go beyond that assumption. Regarding the Ebionites specifically, a number of scholars have different theories on how the Ebionites may have developed from an Essene Jewish messianic sect. Hans-Joachim Schoeps argues that the conversion of some Essenes to Jewish Christianity after the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE may be the source of some Ebionites adopting Essene views and practices,^[35] while some conclude that the Essenes did not become Jewish Christians, but still had an influence on the Ebionites.^[48]

On John the Baptist

In the Gospel of the Ebionites, as quoted by Epiphanius, John the Baptist and Jesus are portrayed as vegetarians.^[49][50][51] Epiphanius states that the Ebionites had amended “locusts” (Greek akris) to “honey cake” (Greek ekris). This emendation is not found in any other New Testament manuscript or translation,^[52][53] though a different vegetarian reading is found in a late Slavonic version of Josephus‘ War of the Jews.^[54] Pines and other modern scholars propose that the Ebionites were projecting their own vegetarianism onto John the Baptist.^[47]

The strict vegetarianism of the Ebionites may have been a reaction to the cessation of animal sacrifices after the destruction of Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE and a safeguard against the consumption of unclean meat in a pagan environment.^[55] James Tabor, however, argues that Ebionite disdain for eating meat and the Temple sacrifice of animals is due to their preference for the ideal pre-Flood diet and what they took to be the original form of worship. In this view, the Ebionites had an interest in reviving the traditions inspired by pre-Sinai revelation, especially the time from Enoch to Noah.^[56]

On Jesus the Nazarene

The Church Fathers agree that some or all of the Ebionites rejected many of the precepts central to proto-orthodox Christianity, such as Jesus’ divinity, pre-existence, virgin birth and substitutionary atonement.^[8] The Ebionites are described as emphasizing the humanity of Jesus as the biological son of Mary and Joseph, who, by virtue of his righteousness in keeping the law perfectly, was adopted as the son of God to fulfill the Jewish scriptures.^{[57][page needed]} According to Bart D. Ehrman the Ebionites viewed Jesus as the perfect sacrifice who went to the cross for the sins of the world and was raised from the dead and exalted to heaven.^[57]

Origen (Contra Celsum 5.61)^[58] and Eusebius (Historia Ecclesiastica 3.27.3) recognize some variation in the Christology of Ebionite sects; for example, that while all Ebionites denied Jesus’ pre-existence, there was a sub-sect which did not deny the virgin birth.^[59] Theodoret, while dependent on earlier writers,^[60] draws the conclusion that the two sub-sects would have used different gospels.^[61] The Ebionites may have used only one, some or all of the Jewish–Christian gospels as additional scripture to the Hebrew Bible. However, Irenaeus reports that they only used a version of the Gospel of Matthew, which omitted the first two chapters (on the nativity of Jesus) and started with the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist.^[19]

The Ebionites appear to have understood Jesus not as the Messiah but as a prophetic precursor who heralds the coming kingdom of God on Earth in which two human Messiahs (a Davidic king and an Aaronite high priest) and/or an angelic Messiah (a cosmic judge of the Earth from heaven known as the “Son of man“) will reign forever.^[56] Consequently, Jesus is believed to have come to fulfill a threefold mission: 1) teach all Israelites to live immediately according to a radical ethic of inward and outward righteousness that will be standard in the Messianic Age; 2) complete the work of Moses by calling for the abolishment of animal sacrifices^[39][41] during a cleansing of the Temple; and 3) die as a moral exemplar (rather than as a substitutionary atonement) to move Israelites to the repentance necessary for personal atonement and national redemption in order to prepare for the world to come.^[62]

Therefore, in order to become righteous, achieve communion with God^[63] and be saved from annihilation, the Ebionites insisted that Jews and Gentiles must observe all the commandments in the Written Law^[18] (except for those concerning animal sacrifice) but they must be interpreted through Jesus’ expounding of the Law (rather than the Oral Law).^[64]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebionites

Lesson 139:  I will accept Atonement for myself.

Here is the end of choice. For here we come to a decision to accept ourselves as God created us. And what is choice except uncertainty of what we are? There is no doubt that is not rooted here. There is no question but reflects this one. There is no conflict that does not entail the single, simple question, “What am I?”

Yet who could ask this question except one who has refused to recognize himself? Only refusal to accept yourself could make the question seem to be sincere. The only thing that can be surely known by any living thing is what it is. From this one point of certainty, it looks on other things as certain as itself.

Uncertainty about what you must be is self-deception on a scale so vast, its magnitude can hardly be conceived. To be alive and not to know yourself is to believe that you are really dead. For what is life except to be yourself, and what but you can be alive instead? Who is the doubter? What is it he doubts? Whom does he question? Who can answer him?

He merely states that he is not himself, and therefore, being something else, becomes a questioner of what that something is. Yet he could never be alive at all unless he knew the answer. If he asks as if he does not know, it merely shows he does not want to be the thing he is. He has accepted it because he lives; has judged against it and denied its worth, and has decided that he does not know the only certainty by which he lives.

Thus he becomes uncertain of his life, for what it is has been denied by him. It is for this denial that you need Atonement. Your denial made no change in what you are. But you have split your mind into what knows and does not know the truth. You are yourself. There is no doubt of this. And yet you doubt it. But you do not ask what part of you can really doubt yourself. It cannot really be a part of you that asks this question. For it asks of one who knows the answer. Were it part of you, then certainty would be impossible.

Atonement remedies the strange idea that it is possible to doubt yourself, and be unsure of what you really are. This is the depth of madness. Yet it is the universal question of the world. What does this mean except the world is mad? Why share its madness in the sad belief that what is universal here is true?

Nothing the world believes is true. It is a place whose purpose is to be a home where those who claim they do not know themselves can come to question what it is they are. And they will come again until the time Atonement is accepted, and they learn it is impossible to doubt yourself, and not to be aware of what you are.

Only acceptance can be asked of you, for what you are is certain. It is set forever in the holy Mind of God, and in your own. It is so far beyond all doubt and question that to ask what it must be is all the proof you need to show that you believe the contradiction that you know not what you cannot fail to know. Is this a question, or a statement which denies itself in statement? Let us not allow our holy minds to occupy themselves with senseless musings such as this.

We have a mission here. We did not come to reinforce the madness that we once believed in. Let us not forget the goal that we accepted. It is more than just our happiness alone we came to gain. What we accept as what we are proclaims what everyone must be, along with us. Fail not your brothers, or you fail yourself. Look lovingly on them, that they may know that they are part of you, and you of them.

This does Atonement teach, and demonstrates the Oneness of God’s Son is unassailed by his belief he knows not what he is. Today accept Atonement, not to change reality, but merely to accept the truth about yourself, and go your way rejoicing in the endless Love of God. It is but this that we are asked to do. It is but this that we will do today.

Five minutes in the morning and at night we will devote to dedicate our minds to our assignment for today. We start with this review of what our mission is:

I will accept Atonement for myself,
For I remain as God created me.

We have not lost the knowledge that God gave to us when He created us like Him. We can remember it for everyone, for in creation are all minds as one. And in our memory is the recall how dear our brothers are to us in truth, how much a part of us is every mind, how faithful they have really been to us, and how our Father’s Love contains them all.

In thanks for all creation, in the Name of its Creator and His Oneness with all aspects of creation, we repeat our dedication to our cause today each hour, as we lay aside all thoughts that would distract us from our holy aim. For several minutes let your mind be cleared of all the foolish cobwebs which the world would weave around the holy Son of God. And learn the fragile nature of the chains that seem to keep the knowledge of yourself apart from your awareness, as you say:

I will accept Atonement for myself,
For I remain as God created me.

“What benefits new books bring us! I would like a basket full of books telling the youth of images which fall from heaven for me every day. This desire is natural. This prodigy is easy. For, up there, in heaven, isn’t paradise an immense library?

But it is not sufficient to receive; one must welcome. One must, say the pedagogue and the dietician in the same voice, ‘assimilate.’ In order to do that, we are advised not to read too fast and to be careful not to swallow too large a bite. We are told to divide each difficulty into as many parts as possible, the better to solve them. Yes, chew well, drink a little at a time, savor poems line by line. All these precepts are well and good. But one precept orders them. One first needs a good desire to eat, drink and read. One must want to read a lot, read more, always read.

Thus, in the morning, before the books piled high on my table, to the god of reading, I say my prayer of the devouring reader: ‘Give us this day our daily hunger…’”

– Gaston Bachelard, ”Introduction”, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, Pages 25-26”

Gaston Bachelard (June 27, 1884 – October 16, 1962) was a French philosopher. He made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. To the latter, he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break. Wikipedia

(Courtesy of Bob Brezsny)