Religion Shitpost #3: Random shit: Alphabets, Zealots, Gnostics

Apr 8, 2021

I'm just posting some random interesting shit I've run across in my deep dive into the 1st-2nd century origins of Christianity as we know it. I don't have an solid conclusions yet. I keep discovering that things I thought I knew are just common misconceptions; none of this is earth-shattering or even surprising, but it does muddy the waters somewhat.

(Originally I wrote this series in all lowercase to make a point: Ever wonder who decides which words get capitalized? In the Bible's case it was scribes and priests in the middle ages. And now it's commie bastards doing it. Linguistic propaganda.)

How hard could it be to read 1500+ year old gospels handwritten in ancient Greek...?



Here are a couple of verses from John 8 from the Codex Alexandrinus (a manuscript copy from the 400's). Below is an English translation and modern Greek from the 'parallel gospel' linked below (apparently the product of a huuuuge deep dive).



Spaces would be nice but Uncial is a nice looking script. The old Irish script that's popular today is based on this. It's basically sloppy semi-cursive capital lettering without a lot of frills. It's much closer to the English/Latin alphabet I know than to modern lowercase Greek.

Once I found a reference point ("9" in the margin for chapter 9) I started seeing words like kai (and), abraam, and ioudaioi (jews). Jesus is abbreviated "ic"; I guess they put the dots above instead of after the letters - "j.c." - and some versions use combined letters t+p (resembling an ankh) or x+p (the chi-rho, a common Catholic symbol).

Not as hard as Chinese, lol.

(Has China's writing system crippled their society? How do you communicate when you see a new word and you don't even know how to pronounce it to ask what it means? How do you invent new words? Why do they maintain a type of writing the rest of the world abandoned 3000 years ago? Is it slavish adherence to tradition, or a deliberate tool of linguistic propaganda and control? Are emojis and icons a Cultural Marxist trick to infect western zoomers and boomers with this mental virus? What about the Russians with their based trad-greek-based alphabet, do they laugh at functionally illiterate English speakers arguing on Facebook/Reddit about dumb shit like spelling, pronunciation, and capitalization? Was it a slippery slope from mixed case lettering straight to "womxn" and "latinx" hell? Is it getting worse because we're becoming a literary digitalized society? How many people subconsciously listen to videos/podcasts to avoid the wankery of the modern written word?)

Links
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncial_script
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_uncials
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Alexandrinus
- https://ebible.org/eng-web/helps/ParallelGospels.pdf


Another interesting thing - one of the lesser known 12 Apostles was Simon the Zealot. What's a Zealot? A member of a violent Jewish radical group that targeted Pagans and Romans throughout the 1st century. Apparently they started the war that led to the destruction of the temple in the year 70. (Was that the apocalypse Jesus warned about?)

Maybe when Jesus preached about peace and love, he meant relative to the Zealots.

 

I was looking into 2nd-century Gnosticism out of curiosity about 'alt-christian' beliefs. However, I'm beginning to wonder how badly our knowledge of it has been clouded by 20th-century neo-gnostics. This is potentially disturbing stuff. Aleister Crowley was a key figure. There had been some prior interest in Gnosticism in the late-1800's Theosophist and Spiritualist movements, and in some French breakaway-catholic parishes associated with Freemasonry. Some of these groups joined forces with Ordo Templii Orientis around 1910. Crowley took a leading role in the main neo-gnostic church. Around 1945, Los Angeles O.T.O. leader Jack Parsons (a NASA rocket scientist by day) along with L. Ron Hubbard and some Hollywood floozy, performed the notorious 'Babylon Working' O.T.O. sex magic ritual. This may have been instrumental in the formation of Hubbard's new religion. There's also a Gnostic church organization that publicly disavows any connection to Ordo Templii Orientis... but it has similar origins, has used "Illuminati" and "Templar" names (Deus Ex shit, lol) and it sounds like another Hollywood religion. There's also a UFO/alien thread in these neo-gnostic groups all the way back to Crowley 100 years ago. Makes you think... are the aliens angels.. or demons.. or is it all Hollywood bullshit?

Obviously the old Gnostic scrolls rediscovered in the 20th century were of great interest to neo-gnostics. But how can anyone trust that particular people among them haven't misrepresented or fabricated the old texts?