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Jiang’s messenger model says prophets do not ask to be worshiped as God; they announce that the divine spark is in people and free them from slavery, tyranny, and poverty, before later figures organize the message into empire.
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Jiang’s messenger model says prophets do not ask to be worshiped as God; they announce that the divine spark is in people and free them from slavery, tyranny, and poverty, before later figures organize the message into empire.
Augustine systematizes Paul into the Church as beyond history, where kings fight for land but the Church decides heaven and hell.
The central Christian problem in this lecture is why Jesus had to die: Paul ties it to original sin and forgiveness, but the later doctrine that Jesus is God makes divine self-sacrifice conceptually puzzling.
Jiang says Augustine reconceptualizes original sin by shifting from Paul's mistake-and-redemption model to the claim that humans are themselves the mistake and must be trained into obedience.
Paul's proto-Christianity recasts the Messiah from a prophet of war into a prophet of peace, letting diaspora Jews assimilate into Roman society while retaining Jewish identity.
The Jewish-Roman war of 66 to 73 CE created three conditions favorable to Paul's church: temple destruction, destruction of James' group, and fear among diaspora Jews.
Paul's church was seen as an escape mechanism for diaspora Jews from repeated Roman-Jewish wars.
Paul is presented as the real founder of Christianity because he is the New Testament figure with the Hellenized Jewish toolkit needed to synthesize Hebrew, Greek, and Roman materials.
"...later on after some time is, you'll have a figure like Paul emerge who needs, I can turn this into my own empire, and..."
"...is the main architect of the Catholic Church, okay? He takes Paul's ideas and systemizes it. He teaches us in the City of God..."
"...to die? And this idea was first understood and discussed by Paul. Okay? And Paul's idea is this. God created us and gave us..."
"...now we can begin anew. All right? That's the idea that Paul is presenting. Why Jesus? Why Jesus is the Messiah, and why he..."
"time of a man named Tertullian, who lived about the second century, he argued for the Holy Trinity, which is that God, Jesus, and..."
"...is a radical reconceptualization of the idea of original sin. Remember, Paul introduced the idea of original sin to us, where—why did Jesus have..."
"He's saying that God is not guilty. In fact, first of all, we didn't make a mistake. We are the mistake, all right? We..."
"...will lead them in a final victory against the Romans. So Paul saw Jesus as an opportunity to basically divorce the Jewish diaspora from..."
"...important for us to understand is most people refuse to follow Paul. Okay, only very small, minor people actually follow Paul. Most people who..."
"...early Christian groups around. But what we know is that eventually Paul's group, which again is the smallest of these groups, would eventually triumph,..."
"...it means to be a Jewish person. And as it happened, Paul had a new definition of what it meant to be a Jewish..."
"...brother of Jesus. If he's dead, there's no more authority. Therefore Paul can claim as he does to be the real authority, okay? And..."
Rome fails to build a bureaucracy, Byzantium survives behind walls, and Western Europe is ruled by a stranger empire: a church that claims the sky, the soul, and the right to make impossible doctrine...
The Renaissance is not only money, trade, city-states, books, and paintings.
A source-grounded reading of Augustine as empire's theologian: the Church escapes history, curiosity becomes sin, love becomes disease, passivity becomes goodness, and Arabia appears as the next place where fugitives from authority will prepare...
Christianity wins twice in this lecture: first as a Roman-compatible institution, then as a strange formula that trains people to treat symbols as reality.
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