Dyslexic Agnostic Insomniac

My wife and I spent a wonderful couple of days visiting friends, drinking champagne and Bordeaux, eating cheese and other munchiettes; discussing politics and pondering the meaning of life. After several excellent vintages, the inevitable jokes, puns and wordplays began. As we blew through our repertoires of witticisms, we had to resort to older ones, as in the blog’s title. One of those rhetorical excursions got me thinking about the nature of God, or more germane to The Psalter, what the earliest Christians thought about God.

It’s one thing to wonder if there’s a god, or whether God might be something unfathomable; or a white-bearded, fatherly figure in the sky, or even the Higgs Boson God particle. But consider the earliest Christians and what they thought about the Messiah and his relationship to God. Some thought Jesus was God incarnate. Others believed he was simply a man who was so perfect that God adopted him. Still other Christians believed Jesus came to earth only in spirit form. Of course, the Jews believed Jesus was simply one of the dozens and dozens of self-proclaimed messiahs that appeared every time they were sorely oppressed.
To explain their many different beliefs, Christians began writing Gospels. Within a few generations, there were at least forty Gospels, which contradicted each other, and hundreds upon hundreds of letters, treatises, etc. The Jesus-is-God sect proclaimed their God-man philosophy orthodox and vilified all other beliefs as heretical. Then they came up with pejoratives to slur other Christianities. They labeled the Nazorenes (Christian Jews) as Ebionites—meaning the poor ones. However, in their connotation, Ebionite meant poor in spirit. For their part, the Ebionites smeared the God-man’s champion, Paul, claiming that he had been a Greek priest of Mithras--a competing God-man religion--who had been jilted by a wealthy Jewish widow. So he travelled to the holy land to become a Christian, since the Jews wouldn’t accept him.

The Melkites viewed themselves as the original Christians and pooh-poohed all other pretenders, much to the God-man sect’s chagrin. So the God-man group transmuted the term Melkite into an insult meaning usurpers, or those who claimed their title falsely. Elementary school name calling was rampant. Imagine trying to choose a local church when each of the hundreds of choices had different opinions about who Jesus was; and had their own Gospels and scriptures to prove their point. One of The Psalter’s characters expressed his confusion:

“…I don’t understand you Christians. How can you judge what’s true and what is not?”
“That’s why we ordain priests. We study to find the truth.”
“It’s one thing to search for truth in the words of [God] and quite another to seek it out amidst a haystack of lies. Moreover, a Christian must discern which priest speaks falsely and which tells the truth? Your religion is too complicated for a simple man like me.”

Of course, it’s even more complicated, if you’re a dyslexic agnostic insomniac.

The Psalter