>>6263005 (pb)
>We recently observed Jesus DEATH in the form of the Passover.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
For more than 2000 years, Christ represents the composite hero of the West as the "Truthful Individual" who acts upon the Truth. In the earliest Christian manuscripts, the Greek word for "Christ" was "Chrēstós”, which means useful, benevolent, or “kind one."
Among Christ’s most important teachings to humanity are what follows:
1) Christ taught us to treat others as we would expect to be treated (the "Golden Rule").
2) Christ exposed the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees.
3) Christ exposed the corruption of the "money changers."
4) Christ’s path to the Truth was by solitary quiet discernment ("Prayer").
5) Christ voluntarily accepted his suffering as a prerequisite for "being"
6) Christ used free will to refuse, not only sinful temptations, but also conscription by “the Authorities” to commit violence against the innocent.
These mythological truths permeate Western culture whether you believe or not that Christ was a historical figure. This is not a religious statement, but rather one based on logic and reason (Logos). The power of "the State" itself depends on obscuring these fundamental Truths.
While Christianity is a “composite” religion influenced by diverse cultural and mythological antecedents, the "logos" is inherent to the story of Christ and is of central importance to Western civilization.
Historically, the ancient Greek word, "logos” has held a wide range of meanings primarily connected with rational thought and its expression through oral speech. In Hellenistic philosophy, logos, was elevated to a stable cosmic principle (archê) as the central mediating instance between the empirical world and the realm of ultimate reality and at the same time the unifying rational principle of the cosmos and of human society. In the Hebrew Scriptures the creative divine Word, had a semiautonomous existence (Isa. 55:11; Wis. 18:15) and became identified with Wisdom (Sir. 24:3), a personal or personified entity, whose mediating role in creation and salvation was assigned, in the Christological hymns of Colossians and Ephesians, to Christ, the logos made flesh, who had already assumed a central place among the titles of Christ in the Apologists.
Origen was the first Christian philosopher-theologian to write systematic theology to explain how all the things taught in the Bible can be true, and to show how those truths relate to one another. Origen revitalized Greek logos theology by reanchoring it within Hebrew scripture, reconciling the concerns of Irenaeus with the philosophical leanings of the Apologists. and formulates the ontological status of the logos, which as mediator between God and creation exhibits both a transcendent and an imminent aspect.
The Logos creates the world at God's behest (ComJn 1.110; CCels 2.9); he is its immediate creator while the Father is the creator-in-chief (CCels 6.60); he can even be seen as an instrument used by God in creation (ComJn 2.70-2). The Logos's role in creation is such that the Logos can be seen as an instrument at the service of the creative task. The words (logoi) of Christ that will not pass away (Matt. 24:35) are associated with the permanent seminal principles (logoi) of created things (CCels 5.22), which Origen even identifies with the Logos (ComPs Praef. [PG 12.1097]).
The name of Son is the principal name of Christ, the one identifying him as a person in relation to the Father. The other names nest within this, as it were. In the chain of epinoiai the title Wisdom precedes that of Logos. Their relation again suggests the Stoic concept of immanent and expressed Logos. Origen notes that God creates all things in Wisdom but through the Son (ComJn 2.90).