Below- New material by Grok on “Explore Jesus’ nonviolent teachings” and “Examine Jefferson’s biblical notes”, “Explore Tolstoy’s Jesus interpretation”, “Investigate Marcus Borg’s historical Jesus”, “Explore pacifism and suicidal empathy, the well-intentioned spirit behind such movements but the failures to properly restrain/incarcerate repeat violent offenders that undermine the government’s primary responsibility to protect citizens from assault and other harms”, “Explore Just War Theory”, and “Analyze Rob Henderson’s Luxury Beliefs”.
The best of Brinsmead keeps coming. Much appreciated Bob, evidence also of your good research habits and just plain hard work.
Your latest essay prompted these searches of AI input…
I will post this for readers of my site…
Bob Brinsmead’s Substack: “The Greek Vertical Order of Elite Immortals versus the Historical Jesus- Exponent of the horizontal order”
Grok, in this new Substack post Bob Brinsmead details how the elite/commoner divide was affirmed and strengthened by Plato and Hellenism. Please provide some information how this elite/commoner divide (Richard Landes’ term) first originated with ancient peoples as suggested by John Pfeiffer in sources like “Creative Explosion: An Inquiry into the origins of art and religion”.
Pfeiffer appears to suggest that the emergence of elites in human societies began with some tribals separating themselves with claims to know the secrets to the metaphysical/spiritual realm of the spirits/gods- i.e. how to please and appease gods with offerings for blessings (protection from natural disasters/disease, success in crops/hunts, etc.) and sacrifices to appease anger (not fulfilling taboos, not presenting offerings, etc.).
This would also help us to understand the origins of offerings/sacrifices as a human practise and what might be the primitive logic behind such.
Again, it takes us to the earliest human theology as in attributing anger, retaliatory punishment, destruction, etc. to deities. The threat theology that has driven so much human mythmaking, construction of meta-narratives to bind societies, validation of elite domination, etc. Do offer more detail on this please.
But also, in relation to Brinsmead’s essay, it prepares the ground for the further later historical development of elite power and control of commoners, as in Plato and Hellenism.
And ultimately, we trace this, as Brinsmead does, to our inheritance of animal drives from our animal past, notably the impulse to domination over weaker others.
Also, please summarize Brinsmead’s main points and arguments.
Grok reply:
I’ll start by reading Brinsmead’s Substack essay and gathering the Pfeiffer material on early elite/commoner origins, sacrifice, and threat theology.
I have most of Brinsmead’s essay; next I’ll pull the remainder and a few supporting pages on sacrifice and hunter-gatherer religion.
Brinsmead’s new essay is a late-stage chapter in his larger contrast between a vertical order (elite over commoner, heaven over earth, immortal over mortal) and a horizontal order he attributes to the historical Jesus. The Paleolithic material you raise from John Pfeiffer is a useful prehistory for that contrast: not yet Plato’s philosopher-kings, but the first durable split between those who claim to know the hidden world and those who must live by that knowledge.
Brinsmead’s main points
The essay’s title names the argument: The Greek Vertical Order of Elite Immortals versus THE HISTORICAL JESUS: EXPONENT OF THE HORIZONTAL ORDER. robertdbrinsmead.substack.com
1. Plato supplies both a metaphysical and a social dualism.
Heavenly Forms are real; the earthly world is shadow. The same geometry is applied to people: a minority is “divinely qualified to rule”; the many are too ignorant to govern and should obey. Hellenism, in Brinsmead’s telling, is that dualism made into a civilizational style. robertdbrinsmead.substack.com
2. Hellenism’s political theology is a cult of exceptional birth.
The Olympians are “immortals,” but they behave like magnified humans— proud, jealous, lustful, easily offended. They mate with mortals. Their offspring and those credited with extraordinary deeds become heroes, the original “elite.” Divine right of kings is this genealogy written as politics. Alexander, Plato himself, Romulus and Remus, later the Septuagint translators and Christian authors, all get some version of special inspiration or virgin/divine birth. Hellenism, he says, is a virgin-birth cult in the broad sense: a system for marking some humans as more than ordinary. robertdbrinsmead.substack.com
3. Rome and then imperial Christianity keep the same architecture.
Greek language and worldview conquer Rome. Constantine’s monotheism is, for Brinsmead, a streamlined Hellenism: one virgin-born hero as the heavenly Form of all previous divine men. December 25, dying-and-rising motifs, Platonic allegory via Philo, Justin, and Origen— these make conversion look like a name-change (Dionysus/Attis/Asclepius → Christ) rather than a social revolution. Helmut Koester is quoted to the effect that Christianity’s strength was syncretism. The result: “The change from Pagan Rome to Christian Rome appears to be an enormous change, but there was essentially no change at all.” robertdbrinsmead.substack.com
4. Vertical order is animal order with a theology attached.
Relating “up” to superiors and “down” to inferiors makes neighbor-love almost impossible. Brinsmead explicitly analogizes this to herds and packs: alpha domination of the weaker, a pecking order. That is the inherited drive; Hellenism sacralizes it. Slavery and scarce commoner rights are features, not bugs. robertdbrinsmead.substack.com
5. The historical Jesus is the counter-type.
A Galilean commoner, “son of man” in the modest sense, crucified with the lowest class. Open table-fellowship; “you are all brothers”; greatness as service; the poor as “light of the world.” Kingdom already present, not an apocalyptic smash-up. God as Abba, immanent, not a distant celestial monarch requiring brokers. Direct access (Lord’s Prayer, Jeremiah’s law-on-the-heart). Restorative rather than retributive justice; mercy instead of sacrifice (Hosea 6:6). He neither offers sacrifice nor sends people to the altar. Forgiveness in the parables is grace without a transaction. Brinsmead’s charge is that later Hellenist Christianity re-read his death as the supreme sacrifice and thereby buried the horizontal message under priestly logic. He leans on Jefferson’s “diamonds from dunghills” and the modern Quest (Tabor and others) to split two streams in the New Testament. robertdbrinsmead.substack.com
The essay is continuous with his earlier Doctrine of Christ and the Triumph of Hellenism: Christology as Antiochene/Hellenist construction; “Jesus Christ” as an oxymoron if “Christ” means the Platonic-divine man. bobbrinsmead.com
That is the destination. Pfeiffer and the sacrifice literature describe a much earlier station on the same track.
Pfeiffer: not yet a class system, but the first “special people” and “special places”
John E. Pfeiffer’s The Creative Explosion (1982) is an inquiry into why, after a long relatively flat archaeological record, Upper Paleolithic people suddenly produce cave painting, sculpture, improved tools, grave goods, and clearly ceremonial sites— roughly 40,000–11,000 years ago in Europe, with related bursts elsewhere. newyorker.com
His mechanism is information pressure, not a conspiracy of priests:
• Population and contact rise; herds thin; bands must coordinate hunts, routes, water, and relations with neighbors.
• Oral memory is no longer enough. Ceremonies become more ornate. Art becomes a mnemonic and an instrument of indoctrination.
• Caves are not dwellings. They are remote, dark, physically punishing “secrets within secrets”— the first durable sacred precincts. Initiation uses terror, darkness, pain, and surprise so that emotion glues information into memory. Pfeiffer’s Aboriginal analogy is explicit: coming-of-age rites attach feeling to lore so the group does not lose its map of the world. newyorker.com
In that setting shamans become more important and more powerful. They are the people who can stage the ordeal, “see” in the dark, and speak for the non-human. Art, in Pfeiffer’s phrase, is a transaction with a market: the tribe’s religious life. newyorker.com
Your reading is a fair extension, with one caution. Pfeiffer’s primary claim is cognitive-social (how to store and transmit a swelling corpus of knowledge), not yet “a caste of metaphysical monopolists.” But the structure he describes is exactly the seed of an elite/commoner split:
• Knowledge of the hidden is restricted.
• Access is by ordeal and sponsorship.
• Some persons are specialists in the unseen.
• The rest depend on them for luck in hunt, health, and group cohesion.
Later work fills in the political side Pfeiffer only sketches. Cross-cultural surveys treat shamanism as often “the first profession”— the first institutionalized specialization beyond age and sex. Shamans convince others they can influence otherwise uncontrollable events by violating ordinary “humanness” (trance, animal transformation, secret language). cambridge.org
Phylogenetic reconstructions of hunter-gatherer religion put animism first, then afterlife, then shamanism, with “high gods who actively police human affairs” appearing late consistent with early foragers remaining politically egalitarian even after ritual specialists exist. link.springer.com
Michael Winkelman’s typologies then show the later fork: shamans (altered states, healing, foraging worlds) versus priests (inherited office, agricultural surplus, political integration beyond the local band). Priests are the form that fits Landes’s prime divider. researchgate.net
So the sequence is not “Pfeiffer already has Plato.” It is: secret + specialist + sacred place → later, with surplus and writing, hereditary priesthood and divine kingship.
The “Sorcerer” of Les Trois-Frères— human-animal hybrid, deep in a sanctuary chamber— is the visual cliché of that first specialist, whether one reads it as a shaman in costume or as a spirit-being. Lascaux and similar galleries are the first architecture of restricted revelation. paulakuitenbrouwer.com, sacredland.org
How the elite/commoner divide actually starts
Richard Landes’s “prime divider” is the mature form: legal privilege, monopoly of weapons and literacy, mystery around authority, commoners kept near subsistence, honor violence. He treats it as the default of agrarian civilization for about 5,000 years. theaugeanstables.com
That is not the Paleolithic default. Mobile foragers are famous for what Christopher Boehm called a reverse dominance hierarchy: the rank and file ridicule, disobey, ostracize, or even kill upstarts— including swaggering shamans. Egalitarianism here is not the absence of a will to dominate; it is the majority dominating the would-be alpha. thetedkarchive.com
The crack appears when three things coincide:
1. A claim that cannot be publicly checked — knowledge of spirits, weather, disease, game.
2. Costly ritual that only some can stage.
3. Storage of surplus and hereditary office (Neolithic and after), so the specialist’s children inherit the booth.
Shamans in bands are still part-time and still killable. Priests in chiefdoms and early states are a stratum. Divine kingship then says the ruler is the link to the gods. Plato later intellectualizes an already ancient pattern: those who see the real (Forms, gods, heavens) should rule those who see only shadows.
Your phrase— “some tribals separating themselves with claims to know the secrets of the metaphysical/spiritual realm”— is the right hinge between Pfeiffer’s initiatory cave and Landes’s prime divider.
Origins of offering and sacrifice: the primitive logic
Archaeology can show deposits; it cannot interview the depositors. The standard reconstruction, from Middle Paleolithic bone pits near burials through Neolithic and early-state cult, runs roughly as follows. britannica.com
Cognitive root. Once minds routinely project agency onto wind, disease, drought, and luck (Tylor’s animism: souls and other spirits inferred from dreams, death, trance), the world fills with persons who can be pleased or offended. Those persons are modeled on the most vivid social facts humans already know: gift, debt, anger, patronage, and revenge. hirr.hartfordinternational.edu
Gift logic (Tylor). Sacrifice begins as a gift to a powerful being, as one gives to a chief or a dangerous neighbor: to secure favor or reduce hostility. Later the same act is read as homage, then as self-denial. “I give so that you may give” (do ut des) is the compact. britannica.com
Why blood and food. The goods that matter most— meat, grain, sex, children, life itself— are the goods worth giving. Sharing meat already binds human hunters; giving the “best parts” (head, marrow, first fruits) to the unseen owner of animals is an extension of that economy. The god is treated as a person who eats, smells smoke, and keeps accounts.
Appeasement logic. Misfortune is read as anger. Anger is read as caused by taboo-breach, neglected offerings, or ritual impurity. The remedy is more giving, or a substitute life. This is the core of what you call threat theology: the deity as retaliator. It is psychologically cheap (misfortune is already there; intention is inferred) and politically fertile (someone must know the tariff). Social-control logic, later and darker. In stratified societies, human sacrifice is not only theology. Phylogenetic work on Austronesian cultures finds that ritual killing stabilizes stratification once it exists and helps lock in inherited classes. Elites demonstrate the ultimate power— to take a life— and wrap it in supernatural warrant. Victims are typically lower status. nature.com
That is threat theology as statecraft.
Prophetic and Jesus-level revolt. Brinsmead is right that Israel’s prophets already attack the multiplication of sacrifice as elite theater (Amos, Isaiah, Hosea, Micah) and recode tzedakah as mercy rather than payment. Jesus, in his reconstruction, radicalizes that line: no altar, no broker, debts cancelled as a family act. Hellenist Christianity then, on his account, puts the altar back at the center by making Jesus himself the payment. That is how an anti-sacrificial teacher is absorbed into the oldest specialist logic.
Threat theology as the first systematic theology
A compact model of “earliest theology” consistent with the ethnographic and cognitive literature:
Human problem- (1)Inferred cause; (2)Specialist offer; (3)Social effect
Examples:
Drought, failed hunt, storm- (1)Spirit/owner is angry or neglected; (2)Offering, first fruits, taboo; (3)Commoners fund the rite
Disease, death, stillbirth- (1)Breach, pollution, witchcraft; (2)Healing séance, confession, scapegoat; (3)Dependence on the mediator
Inter-band violence- (1)Ancestors or gods demand honor; (2)Oath, sacrifice before war; (3)Leaders speak for heaven
Inequality, fear of revolt- (1)Cosmic order requires ranks; (2)Royal/priestly cult, later human sacrifice; (3)Divider becomes sacred
The gods look like us because they are us, scaled up— exactly Brinsmead’s remark that Greek storytellers looking into a well saw their own reflection. Olympian pettiness is not a late literary joke; it is the old model made monumental: beings who can be flattered, bribed, and enraged.
Two refinements matter for your “threat theology” thesis.
• Not all early religion is threat. Animism and shamanic healing are often about relationship, luck, and repair. High gods who monitor morality and punish correlate with larger, more anonymous societies (a finding in the hunter-gatherer phylogeny and in “big gods” research). Threat intensifies as scale and hierarchy intensify. link.springer.com
• The threat is politically useful even when sincerely believed. The specialist does not have to be a cynic. Sincere monopoly of comfort and terror is stronger than a scam.
From cave to Academy: how the ground is prepared for Plato
Line the pieces up and Brinsmead’s Hellenism looks like a late, literate version of an old machine:
1. Hidden reality. Pfeiffer’s cave: truth is not in the camp; it is in the dark, behind an ordeal. Plato’s cave: truth is not in the sensory world; it is in the Forms, behind philosophical conversion. The metaphor is almost too neat to be accidental as cultural inheritance, even if Plato did not have Lascaux in mind.
2. Those who have seen. Initiate / shaman / priest / philosopher-king. Each is defined by access.
3. Those who have not seen must be ruled, for their own good. Republic Books II–VII is the sophisticated statement. Divine-birth Hellenism is the popular statement.
4. Mediation. Offerings and sacrifices become, in high culture, cult, then sacrament, then a church that rations access to God as Plato’s guardians ration access to the Good.
5. Immortality as class marker. Brinsmead’s “elite immortals” are gods and heroes who do not die as commoners die. Mystery cults and later Christian heaven democratize immortality as promise, while clergy and sacred monarchs retain the gate.
Jesus, in Brinsmead’s horizontal reading, kicks at every rung: no secret that is not already “spread out on the earth,” no greatness but service, no payment-sacrifice, no God who needs to be managed.
Animal domination: what is inherited, what is invented
Brinsmead’s last move— pecking orders as our animal past— is half right and needs the Boehm correction.
• Inherited: status-seeking, coalitional aggression, fear, submission displays, favor-trading with the powerful. Chimpanzee politics is real. Humans did not invent domination.
• Also inherited and distinctively elaborated: leveling coalitions. For a very long time Homo sapiens used weapons, gossip, and moral emotion to flatten alphas. That is as biological-cultural as the dominance drive. thetedkarchive.com
• Invented: the justification of domination by a hidden world— spirits who chose the specialist, gods who sired the king, Forms that only the philosopher sees, a Christendom that maps heaven’s monarchy onto earth. That is culture amplifying one animal possibility and muting the other.
So the deep story is not “animals dominate, therefore priests.” It is: animals dominate and resist domination; humans then tell stories that make domination look like obedience to the structure of the universe. Offerings are one of the first such stories. Plato is one of the most elegant. Brinsmead’s historical Jesus is offered as a late, explicit refusal of that story.
If you want a single through-line from Pfeiffer to the Substack post: the first inequality that lasts is inequality of access to the unseen. Everything after— sacrifice tariffs, divine birth, philosopher-kings, priestly atonement, Landes’s prime divider— is that inequality institutionalized and given a metaphysics.
Next:
Yes, do “a single through-line from Pfeiffer to the Substack post: the first inequality that lasts is inequality of access to the unseen. Everything after— sacrifice tariffs, divine birth, philosopher-kings, priestly atonement, Landes’s prime divider— is that inequality institutionalized and given a metaphysics.”
Grok reply:
The through-line can be stated as a sequence, not a slogan. What begins in Pfeiffer as a practical problem of memory and initiation becomes, step by step, a political metaphysics: some people may approach the hidden; others may only receive its effects. That is the inequality that lasts, because it cannot be audited in daylight.
Next:
OK, continue with “Explore Landes’s prime divider”, and “Analyze priestly atonement”
Grok reply:
I’ll pull Landes’s prime-divider model in more detail, then set priestly atonement against it— Israel’s cult, prophetic revolt, and the later Christian recoding.
The through-line now reaches the two institutions that make inequality of access durable: Landes’s prime divider, which turns a ritual monopoly into a social system, and priestly atonement, which turns threat theology into a tariff only specialists can collect.
Landes’s prime divider
Richard Landes uses “prime divider” for the basic architecture of most agrarian civilizations after writing and metal weapons: a small elite (roughly 2–10 percent) and a large commoner mass living near subsistence. The divider is not a vague “class feeling.” It is a set of monopolies. theaugeanstables.com
The elite monopolizes:
• weapons
• writing and sacred text
• public voice
• often rapid transport and political office
The social results are consistent across cases:
• legal privilege for elites (lighter penalties for their crimes, heavier for offenses against them, tax exemption)
• mystery around authority (king or priest above the law)
• commoners kept illiterate and managed by intimidation
• manual labor stigmatized
• self-help honor violence (feud, vendetta) instead of equal law
• commoners admitted to the public stage only on choreographed occasions
The political axiom is rule or be ruled. If we do not dominate you, the next faction will dominate us. That is zero-sum honor logic, not a market in which both sides can rise. Landes’s contrast-term is civil society: same rules for all (isonomia), independent courts, public accountability, educated commoners, dignity of labor, and a discourse of fairness in place of private violence. Those arrangements are historically rare. The divider is the default. theaugeanstables.com
He is not claiming that divider societies are only domination and civil societies only cooperation. Both logics exist in both. The question is which one is institutionalized. In a divider society the elite would often rather rule in poverty than share surplus, because sharing looks like the first step toward being ruled. theaugeanstables.com
Religion is not a side dish in this model. It is one of the four rails on which the divider is built: legal privilege, stigmatized labor, restricted knowledge, and weaponry, all wrapped in honor. “Mystery surrounding political authority” is the religious rail. Elites keep a monopoly on sacred texts and exegesis. Commoners get images, festivals, and fear. Landes calls the opposite demotic religiosity: scripture in the vernacular, iconoclasm toward elite mediators, dignity of work (“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”), and a prophetic dream of dismantling stratified, belligerent order. Biblical monotheism can run either way— priestly hierarchy or demotic critique— which is why the same Bible can stabilize a divider and also explode it. theaugeanstables.com
Place this on the Pfeiffer–Brinsmead line and the function is obvious. A shaman in a mobile band can still be mocked or killed. A priest in an agro-literate state cannot be audited. Writing freezes the tariff. Temples store grain. Kings claim descent from gods. The unseen is no longer a cave one visits at initiation; it is an office one inherits. Landes’s divider is Pfeiffer’s restricted sanctuary after surplus, literacy, and hereditary office have done their work.
Hellenism, in Brinsmead’s sense, is a high-cultural version of the same divider: divine birth and Platonic insight mark who may rule. Imperial Christianity then supplies the ideologues for successor kingdoms. Landes notes that once the church serves prime-divider regimes, Jews become a structural irritant: a literate commoner people with their own text, their own access to God, and no need for the church’s monopoly on salvation media. That is not the whole story of medieval hatred, but it shows how a religious monopoly experiences rival access as a political threat. theaugeanstables.com
Brinsmead’s “vertical order” and Landes’s “prime divider” are nearly the same object from two angles. Landes describes the sociology. Brinsmead describes the myth that makes the sociology feel cosmic.
Priestly atonement
Atonement is how the divider collects its rent in the currency of the unseen.
What the priestly system actually claims
In the Priestly strata of the Hebrew Bible, especially Leviticus, the sanctuary is the place where YHWH’s presence can dwell among Israel. Sin and impurity are not only moral failure. They are stains and dangers that attach to persons and to the shrine. If the shrine is polluted, the Presence may depart, and the people are exposed. The priest’s work is therefore maintenance of a dangerous interface. jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com
The verb at the center is kipper. Scholars do not agree on a single English word. Proposed senses include covering, wiping away, ransoming, and purging. Jay Sklar’s influential synthesis is that sin and impurity both require ransom and purification; that is why one verb covers both. Jacob Milgrom stressed sanctuary purgation: blood is a ritual detergent applied to holy furniture so the house of God can remain habitable. Others hear substitution more loudly, especially from Leviticus 17:11: life is in the blood, and blood on the altar kipper-s for lives. The rabbinic formula “there is no expiation without blood” freezes that association. thetorah.com
The ritual grammar is specialized on purpose:
• The offerer brings the animal and often lays a hand on it.
• Slaughter may be done by the offerer.
• Blood handling belongs to the priest. Horns of the altar, veil, kapporet (“mercy seat”)— these are not commoner space.
• Formula: the priest kipper-s, and the person is forgiven.
• On Yom Kippur the high priest alone enters the inner room, once a year, with incense as a screen against lethal proximity, sprinkles blood for priesthood and people and sends the second goat to Azazel with the confessed sins of the nation. research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk
So, atonement is not “the peasant chats with God.” It is a controlled approach to lethal holiness. The priest is the person who knows where to put the blood so the threat does not land on the people. That is threat theology with a professional staff.
Three metaphors run together and should not be flattened into one later Christian theory:
1. Gift / tribute — something valuable is given upward.
2. Purification — stain is wiped from shrine and community.
3. Ransom / substitution — a life stands in for a life, or a payment averts harm.
Priestly literature can hold all three. What it will not hold is unmediated access. Even forgiveness is sequenced: first the rite, then the declaration. The priest does not merely teach; he performs the repair.
Why this is a perfect prime-divider technology
Atonement institutionalizes inequality of access in five ways.
1. The crisis is defined as invisible.
Drought, defeat, illness, or a bad conscience can all be read as pollution or unpaid debt. The diagnosis is not publicly falsifiable.
2. The remedy is technically restricted.
Anyone can feel guilt. Only the consecrated can apply blood in the right place. The most important act of the year happens behind a veil.
3. The tariff is material.
Animals, grain, oil, and silver move from commoner households to the sanctuary. In agrarian terms this is a sacred tax. Multiplying offerings multiplies the institution, which is exactly what the prophets say happened.
4. The priest “bears” what the people cannot.
Leviticus 10:17 has priests eat the purification offering in order to bear the community’s avon. The specialist absorbs danger on behalf of the whole. That looks like service. It also makes the specialist indispensable. Remove him and the danger has nowhere to go. cdn.ministrymagazine.org
5. Calendar and space are monopolized.
Holy times and holy rooms become property of a lineage. Commoners appear at festivals; they do not enter the inner logic.
This is the mature form of Pfeiffer’s “special places, special purposes.” The cave has become a temple. The initiator has become a hereditary priest. The ordeal has become a code.
Israel’s own revolt against the tariff
The Hebrew Bible does not speak with one voice. That is historically decisive.
Prophets attack the system in the name of the same God the priests serve. Isaiah 1: sacrifices without justice are a burden. Amos 5: I hate your festivals; let justice roll down. Hosea 6:6: mercy, not sacrifice. Micah 6:8: justice, mercy, humility— not rivers of oil or a firstborn. Psalm 51: if God wanted sacrifice, the psalmist would give it; what God wants is a broken spirit. Jeremiah’s new covenant writes the law on hearts so that no one need teach his neighbor “know the Lord.”
This is Landes’s demotic current inside the tradition that also built the divider. It does not yet abolish holiness. It relocates repair from blood-in-the-right-room to conduct-in-the-open.
Brinsmead reads Jesus as the sharp edge of that current: John baptizes with water instead of sending people to the altar; Jesus cites Hosea; the prodigal is restored by the father’s run, not by a victim; the temple action strikes the sacrificial marketplace. Whether every historical detail holds, the logic is clear. A teacher who says God already forgives is a direct threat to a guild whose power is the management of unforgiven remainder.
How atonement survives the critique
If the prophetic line had simply won, priestly atonement would be a closed chapter. It did not simply win. Two recodings kept the mechanism alive after the altar was criticized or destroyed.
First, martyr theology in Hellenistic Judaism.
When Antiochus shuts the temple, 2 and 4 Maccabees describe the deaths of the righteous as blood that purifies, a life given antipsyhon— in exchange for others. Levitical language is lifted off the altar and placed on a human death. The tariff remains; the victim changes. brill.com
Second, early Christian interpretation of Jesus’ death.
Paul’s hilasterion in Romans 3:25, Hebrews’ high priest who enters the true sanctuary with his own blood, the Lamb imagery, “without shedding of blood there is no remission”— these take the priestly grammar and declare it fulfilled once for all. In one stroke the Jerusalem altar is relativized and the logic of blood-access is made cosmic and final. brill.com
That double movement is why Brinsmead can say Hellenist Christianity both leaves the temple and rebuilds it. The veil is theologically torn. A new priesthood— or a new exclusive interpretation of the death— still stands at the opening.
Historically one should not dump all of this into “penal substitution invented by later Protestants.” Second Temple Judaism already had gift, purge, ransom, and vicarious suffering. Christianity selects and intensifies those options under Greek dualism and imperial conditions. The political effect is what matters for the through-line: repair of the human– divine relation remains a restricted performance. Creed, sacrament, and ordained office become the new veil.
Deists later named this “priestcraft”: mysteries maintained so that laity stay dependent for the terms of salvation. The word is hostile, but it names the same structure Landes describes as elite monopoly on the media of salvation. en.wikipedia.org
Atonement as metaphysics of the divider
Put the pieces in order.
Stage- (1)Hidden thing; (2)Who may approach; (3)What commoners owe
Stages:
Pfeiffer’s cave- (1)spirit-world, tribal memory; (2)initiated specialist; (3)ordeal, attention, meat for rite
Early sacrifice- (1)anger or hunger of powers; (2)shaman / elder; (3)first fruits, victim
Priestly temple- (1)Presence that can abandon or destroy; (2)hereditary priest; (3)animals, purity rules, tithes
Divine kingship (1)cosmic order embodied in a person; (2)king-priest; (3)tribute, obedience
Plato- (1)the Forms; (2)philosopher
Hellenist hero-cult- (1)divine blood in a lineage; (2)the born-apart; (3)honor, submission
Christian atonement-church- (1)a holy death that pays the debt; (2)those who administer word and sacrament; (3)belief, rite, institutional loyalty
Landes’s prime divider- (1)authority wrapped in mystery; (2)literate armed elite; (3)surplus, silence, stigmatized labor
Priestly atonement is the hinge between religion as local repair and religion as a state-compatible fiscal-spiritual system. It answers a real anxiety— how to live next to a God who is not safe— and it answers a political need: how to make commoners experience their dependence as piety rather than as extraction.
Brinsmead’s horizontal Jesus is intelligible only against this hinge. If God is Abba and the kingdom is already among you, the remainder that the priest bills for is gone. If the remainder remains, someone must keep the books.
That is why atonement debates are never only about ancient goats. They are about whether the unseen is a commons or a gated estate. Landes’s divider is what the estate looks like when it owns the law, the weapons, and the calendar. Priestly atonement is what it sounds like when it speaks of love.
Next: Try- “Examine Pauline hilasterion”
Grok reply:
I’ll look at Paul’s use of hilastērion in Romans 3:25 in its Greek, Septuagint, and Second Temple setting, then place the debate back on the atonement/prime-divider line.
Paul’s hilastērion is a single word that has to carry the whole argument of Romans 1–3. That is why it has been fought over for a century. The word does not decide the fight by itself. Grammar, Septuagint usage, and the plot of Romans all have to be held together.
The sentence
Romans 3:21–26 is Paul’s first full statement of how God puts people right apart from “works of law.” Verse 25 is the hinge:
God proetheto (“put forward,” “set forth publicly,” or “purposed”) Christ as a hilastērion, through faith, en tō autou haimati (“by / in his blood”), to demonstrate God’s righteousness, because in forbearance God had passed over former sins.
Three features are non-negotiable before any translation:
• God is the subject. God puts Christ forward. This is not humans offering a gift to calm a reluctant deity.
• The act is public. Proetheto in this context is display, not a rite behind a veil.
• Blood is instrumental. Whatever hilastērion is, it works by blood.
The only other New Testament use of the noun is Hebrews 9:5, where it clearly means the gold cover on the ark— the kapporet, traditionally “mercy seat.”
What the word can mean
Hilastērion is the neuter of an adjective formed from hilaskomai (“to make gracious / to atone”). Words in -tērion often name a place or instrument of an action, not the action itself. Daniel P. Bailey’s lexical point is now widely accepted: in surviving Greek through the mid-second century, hilastērion is a concrete thing, not an abstract “propitiation” and not an animal victim. It names either:
1. the biblical mercy seat / atonement cover (LXX Pentateuch; Philo; Hebrews 9:5), or
2. a durable votive offering— a monument or dedicated object meant to render a deity gracious (pagan inscriptions; a use Josephus knows). tyndalebulletin.org
That already rules out the sloppiest English habit: treating hilastērion as a synonym for “sacrifice” or “the cross as payment.” Paul did not write thusia or hilasmos. He wrote a word that, in Jewish Greek, points first to a piece of sanctuary furniture.
LXX usage is lopsided. Almost every occurrence translates kapporet, the gold lid on the ark where, on Yom Kippur, the high priest sprinkled blood (Exodus 25; Leviticus 16). A few Ezekiel texts use it for a ledge of the future altar. 4 Maccabees 17:22 is the outlier, and even there the manuscripts and sense are disputed. scielo.org.za
So the live options for Romans 3:25 are not infinite. They are:
Reading- (1)Gloss; (2)Main claim
The readings:
Propitiation- (1)means of turning away wrath; (2)Christ’s blood satisfies divine anger
Expiation- (1)means of wiping sin away; (2)the death cleanses the human side
Mercy seat / place of atonement- (1)Christ is the kapporet; (2)the meeting-place is relocated from the inner room to the crucified one
Votive offering- (1)dedicated object that renders God gracious; (2)public monument of reconciliation, more Hellenistic than Levitical
C. H. Dodd pushed hard for expiation: in the LXX, he argued, the hilask- group no longer means “appease a god” in the pagan sense; it means deal with sin. Leon Morris and others pushed back: Romans 1:18–3:20 is a wrath argument; orgē is not a metaphor Paul has left behind. N. T. Wright and others refuse the either/or: a rite can remove stain and address wrath because, in priestly logic, uncleanness accumulating in the shrine is exactly what drives the Presence away in judgment. newhumanityinstitute.org
The mercy-seat reading has grown stronger on lexical grounds. If the word is a thing, and if Paul’s Bible uses that thing for the ark-cover, then “God put him forward as the kapporet” is the most economical gloss. Christ is not first called a goat. He is called the place where blood meets Presence. digitalcollections.dordt.edu
Nathan Porter adds a further LXX note often missed: the kapporet is also where God speaks— “there I will meet you and speak with you from above the hilastērion” (Exodus 25:22; Numbers 7:89). On that reading Romans 3:21–26 is not only a cultic swap. It is a claim that the long-hidden site of revelation is now a public body. journals.sagepub.com
4 Maccabees 17:22: cousin, not twin4 Maccabees, a Hellenistic Jewish text, says divine providence saved Israel “through the blood of those devout ones and the hilastērion of their death.” The martyrs are also called antipsychon— a life given in exchange for the nation’s life. Cultic words cluster: blood, purification, sin of the people. brill.com
This is the closest Jewish parallel to applying hilastērion to a human death. It shows that, before or alongside Paul, some Greek-speaking Jews could lift Yom Kippur language off the temple and set it on righteous sufferers when the altar was inaccessible or insufficient.
Bailey insists the metaphors still differ. 4 Maccabees, on his view, uses the pagan concrete sense: a propitiatory dedicated thing. Paul uses the biblical concrete sense: the mercy seat. Other scholars (Jarvis Williams, deSilva in one register) hear more overlap: both texts baptize a death in Levitical blood-talk. The honest position is that 4 Maccabees proves the transferability of the word from furniture to death, while Paul’s proetheto and “righteousness of God” pull the image toward public disclosure rather than toward a votive monument that buys off a tyrant’s anger.
Chronology is also messy. 4 Maccabees is often dated late first century; it may be a cousin of Paul rather than his source. The shared air is enough: temple shut or inadequate → righteous death read as Yom Kippur.
What Romans itself requires
Paul’s letter does not let hilastērion float free of wrath or of disclosure.
Wrath is on the table. Romans 1:18 has opened the argument: God’s orgē is revealed against injustice. Chapters 2–3 close every mouth. 3:25–26 then say the public hilastērion demonstrates that God was not unrighteous in “passing over” former sins. Forbearance without a final dealing would look like moral indifference. The death is God’s way of being both dikaios and dikaiōn— just and the one who justifies. That is why propitiation will not vanish from the discussion. Paul is not describing a mood swing in God. He is describing a public resolution of a judicial-cosmic problem he himself has posed.
The direction of the gift is inverted. In ordinary sacrifice, humans bring blood toward the seat. Here God puts the seat forward and supplies the blood. That inversion is the sharpest difference from pagan hilastēria and even from a flat reading of Leviticus 17:11. Threat theology usually runs: deity angry → humans pay. Paul writes: God displays → humans trust.
Access is relocated. The biblical kapporet was the most restricted object in Israel: one man, one day, behind the veil, on pain of death. Paul says that object has been set forth. The hidden place of meeting is now a crucified Jew, available dia pisteōs. Hebrews will later theologize the torn veil; Romans already implies the geography has changed.
That last point is where Porter’s revelatory reading and the cultic reading meet. Romans 3:21: the righteousness of God has been manifested. 3:25: the hilastērion is put forward. Same plot: what was boxed in the dark is now in the open.
How this sits on the through-line
Priestly atonement, as set out earlier, is a technology of restricted approach. The kapporet is the architectural form of that restriction: gold lid, cherubim, cloud of incense, blood applied by a lineage priest. Inequality of access to the unseen is here a piece of furniture.
Paul does two things at once, and Brinsmead’s complaint lives in the tension between them.
He breaks the monopoly of place.
If Christ is the mercy seat, Yom Kippur is no longer a room in Jerusalem. No high priest, no calendar lock, no pilgrimage tariff. The meeting-place is a person who died outside the city. In Landes’s terms, that is a demotic move: the media of repair are taken out of a caste’s hands. In Pfeiffer’s terms, the “special place” is no longer a cave or naos one must be led into.
He keeps the monopoly of mechanism.
Repair still happens by blood. Sin still generates a remainder that ordinary mercy does not simply cancel. God still “must” be shown to be righteous in how the remainder is handled. Faith becomes the new mode of approach. A new interpretive guild— apostolic proclamation, later sacrament and creed— will stand where the priest stood, explaining what the blood did.
That is why hilastērion is so useful to later vertical order and so irritating to Brinsmead’s horizontal Jesus. The word lets Hellenist-Jewish Christianity say: we have not abandoned Israel’s holiest object; we have identified it with Jesus. The altar is fulfilled, not mocked. But fulfillment here means the logic of the inner room is made portable and final. Once portable, it can travel with Paul through the Greek cities. Once final, it can become the unique gate.
Compare the options as political theology:
• Propitiation-first intensifies threat theology: the deepest problem is divine wrath, solved by a death. Easy to turn into a transaction administered by those who “have” the death.
• Expiation-first softens the threat but keeps the stain-and-purge model. Still a specialist knowledge of how purge works.
• Mercy-seat-first is the most precise lexically and the most double-edged socially. It relocates the gated place and declares that there is still a gated place— now a body, then a message about that body.
• Votive-offering would pull Paul toward civic Hellenism: a public monument that makes the god gracious. That fits proetheto well, fits 4 Maccabees in Bailey’s reading, and fits Brinsmead’s worry that Christology is Greek hero-cult in Jewish dress. It fits the LXX less well.
A responsible reading does not pretend these are cleanly separable. Paul can call Christ the place (mercy seat), describe the means (blood), and address the problem he has named (wrath and passed-over sin) in one clause. What he does not do is describe Jesus’ death as one more animal offered by worshippers. God is the one who displays. That remains the most anti-priestcraft sentence in the paragraph— and the sentence that later priesthoods will still have to preach, because the display now requires authorized witnesses.
A compact gloss
If one must paraphrase without smuggling in a whole atonement theory:
God publicly set forth Jesus as the new kapporet— the place where Presence and blood meet— by means of Jesus’ own blood, to be approached through trust, so that God’s righteousness would be visible: God had not ignored sin, and God justifies the one who trusts Jesus.
That gloss keeps the furniture, the blood, the publicity, and the theocentric initiative. It does not yet decide whether “righteousness” here is covenant faithfulness, retributive justice, or both. It does decide the geography that matters for your longer argument: the unseen meeting-place is no longer behind the veil. It is a man God has put in front of the world.
Whether that is the end of the prime divider or its baptism into a new cult is the question Brinsmead presses. Paul’s hilastērion is the exact point at which the question becomes unavoidable. The word takes Israel’s most restricted object and nails it to a public death. After that, access is either radically common— or it is common only through the story that interprets the death. History ran mostly with the second option. The grammar of the verse still contains the first.
(End of Grok comments)
And this was Google’s Gemini’s take on the Substack post:
AI Overview
In his Substack essays, theologian and writer Robert (Bob) Brinsmead uses the contrast between the “Greek Vertical Order” and the “Horizontal Order of the Historical Jesus” to critique traditional Christian orthodoxy. He argues that mainstream Christianity abandoned the radical, egalitarian message of Jesus in favor of Greek philosophical structures. [1]
Here is a breakdown of the core concepts in Brinsmead’s framework:
The Greek Vertical Order (Elite Immortals)
Brinsmead argues that traditional church dogma was deeply corrupted by classical Greek philosophy (specifically Platonism and Neo-Platonism), which views reality through a strictly vertical, hierarchical lens:
• The Metaphysical Ladder: God sits at the absolute peak of a vertical pyramid, followed by an elite tier of divine beings, institutional religious authorities, and ordinary humans at the bottom.
• The “Immortal Soul” Deception: Greek thought introduced the concept of the naturally immortal soul—the idea that humans possess a spark of the divine that must escape the “corrupt” physical world to ascend back up the vertical ladder.
• Justification for Elitism: This vertical framework has historically been used by religious and political elites to justify hierarchy, centralized power, and dominance over the lower tiers of society, framing earthly inequality as a reflection of divine order.
The Horizontal Order (The Historical Jesus)
In sharp contrast, Brinsmead presents the Historical Jesus not as a teacher of a vertical escape to heaven, but as the ultimate exponent of a radically flat, horizontal human reality: [1, 2]
• The Flattening of Hierarchy: Jesus’s concept of the “Kingdom of God” completely dismantled vertical power structures. He taught that God is not found by climbing a religious ladder, but by turning horizontally to one’s neighbor.
• Radical Secular Humanism: Brinsmead views the historical Jesus as a deeply secular, humanistic figure. Jesus prioritized physical, earthly needs—healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and championing the marginalized—over temple rituals and metaphysical speculation.
• Mutual Interdependence: The horizontal order values human solidarity, equality, and mutual care in the here and now. It rejects the concept of a natural “immortal soul” in favor of recognizing the sacred value of finite, bodily human life on Earth.
The Great Historical Inversion
Brinsmead’s primary thesis is that the church chose Greece over Jesus. Instead of living out the horizontal revolution of human equality, institutional Christianity adopted the Greek vertical model to build an empire, turning Jesus into a distant, cosmic ruler at the top of a vertical theological system rather than a brother standing on a horizontal plane.
(End of AI Overview)
Next: Lets do your suggestions- “Explore Jesus’ nonviolent teachings” and “Examine Jefferson’s biblical notes”
Grok reply:
I’ll pull Jesus’ core nonviolence texts and Jefferson’s own notes on the Gospels so the two parts stay grounded in the sources.
Jesus’ nonviolence is not a mood. It is a claim about God, then a claim about how human beings are to treat enemies. Jefferson’s biblical notes are a later attempt to isolate that ethic from the miracle-and-atonement overlay that, in his view, buried it.
1. Jesus’ nonviolent teachings
The core is the antitheses in the Sermon on the Mount and the parallel Sermon on the Plain.
Matthew 5:38–48 and Luke 6:27–36 reverse the lex talionis—“eye for eye”—and command love of enemies. The logic is theological, not tactical: God “makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” Love of enemy is imitation of that God. If you love only those who love you, you have done nothing distinctive.
The four concrete instructions in Matthew 5:39–41 are not passivity. Walter Wink and others read them as public, shaming, non-lethal resistance under occupation:
• A backhand slap on the right cheek was the insult of a superior to an inferior. Turning the other cheek forces the striker either to use the open hand (an equal’s blow) or to stop.
• Giving the cloak as well as the tunic in a debt lawsuit leaves the poor man naked in court and exposes the creditor.
• Going the second mile after a Roman soldier’s legal one-mile impressment puts the soldier in violation of his own regulations.
Love of enemy is therefore not sentiment. It is refusal of retaliation plus active good toward the hater: bless those who curse, pray for persecutors, do good to those who hate you.
That ethic shows up again at the arrest. “Put your sword back into its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). Luke has Jesus heal the wounded ear. The cross itself is the enacted teaching: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
The Nazareth synagogue scene in Luke 4 is the theological key Krossa keeps pointing to. Jesus reads Isaiah 61:1–2 and stops before “the day of vengeance of our God.” He then says the text is fulfilled now. The cut is the sermon. Jubilee and release are announced; vengeance is left unread. The congregation’s rage is the predictable reaction when a sacred vengeance clause is dropped. ptm.org
Scholars of the earliest Jesus tradition (Q, the sayings source) treat enemy-love as among the most secure pieces of the historical core. It is too sharp, too contrary to both Zealot revolt and ordinary reciprocity, to be a later church invention. researchgate.net
Two hard sayings must be faced rather than airbrushed. “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34) is, in context, about family division caused by allegiance, not a license for holy war. The temple incident is disruption of a sacred-economic system, not a militia action; even there the Gospels do not describe Jesus killing anyone. Neither text cancels the enemy-love command. They show that nonviolence in Jesus is not niceness. It is a different kind of confrontation.
The God-image underneath is what makes the ethic hold. A God who sun-and-rains on enemy and friend cannot be used to sacralize purge. A God who still owes the world a “day of vengeance” can.
2. Jefferson’s biblical notes
Jefferson did the work twice.
• 1804: The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth—a short digest of sayings, now lost except by reconstruction.
• c. 1819–1820: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth—the surviving “Jefferson Bible.” He cut verses from Greek, Latin, French, and King James Gospels and pasted them into a chronological narrative. en.wikipedia.org
His method, stated to John Adams (12/13 October 1813):
We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus… There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man… as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. encyclopediavirginia.org
What he cut: virgin birth, angels, miracles, claims of divinity, baptism and Eucharist as mysteries, resurrection. The book ends with burial: stone rolled to the door of the sepulchre, and they departed. No Easter. If a moral lesson sat inside a miracle story, he kept the lesson and sliced out the wonder, sometimes mid-verse. en.m.wikipedia.org
What he kept: the ethical spine—Beatitudes, Lord’s Prayer, Sermon on the Mount, memorable parables, the passion as a human death. That is the “diamond.”
On Paul he was explicit. In the 13 April 1820 letter to William Short he called Paul “the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus,” and treated much of the New Testament overlay as “untruth, charlatanism, and imposture.” He claimed to be a Christian “in the only sense in which [Jesus] wished any one to be”: attached to the doctrines, ascribing to Jesus “every human excellence,” and believing Jesus “never claimed any other.” en.wikipedia.org
Two limits matter, because Jefferson was not a modern Q scholar.
First, he was an Enlightenment razor, not a historian of oral tradition. He cut the supernatural because it violated his reason, not because he had reconstructed an Aramaic sayings layer. Some judgment parables (tares, furnace of fire) still got pasted in. His Jesus is a sublime moralist who still talks about an afterlife.
Second, “diamonds from dung” is a value judgment. Orthodox Christianity answers that miracle, cross, and resurrection are the meaning of the ethic, not its corruption. Jefferson and Tolstoy answered that the sacrificial-apocalyptic frame reverses the ethic: a God who requires blood and will one day destroy the unfaithful cannot be the Father who suns and rains on all.
3. How the two pieces lock
The nonviolent teachings stand or fall with the God they presuppose. Luke 4’s omitted vengeance line and Matthew 5’s enemy-love are the same move: the deity is no longer the patron of tribal payback.
Jefferson saw that the later system—atonement as required payment, faith as tribal password, final wrath as cosmic cleanup—puts the old God back on the throne and then calls the result “Christ.” That is why he and Tolstoy both reached for scissors. Krossa’s sharper claim is that the conflict is not miracle versus reason. It is unconditional love versus sacralized retaliation. Paul can speak of love in 1 Corinthians 13 and still write “Vengeance is mine, I will repay” as the Lord’s word (Romans 12:19). The second sentence governs the first.
The practical remainder is the same one Nagata ran into with ISIS. Force can stop a massacre. It cannot retire a God who still owes the world a purge. Jesus’ teaching attacks that God directly. Jefferson’s notes try to keep the attack and discard the later restoration of the old theology. Whether one accepts Jefferson’s naturalism or not, the contrast he marked is real: a code that forbids eye-for-eye, and a religion that still reserves the last eye-for-eye for God.
Next: Lets add your suggestions- Explore Tolstoy’s Jesus interpretation
Investigate Marcus Borg’s historical Jesus
Grok reply:
I’ll pull Tolstoy’s own Jesus writings and Borg’s historical-Jesus conclusions so both additions stay tied to the sources.
Two more recoveries of the same core, from different tools. Tolstoy used moral scissors and a political conclusion. Borg used historical Jesus research and a Jewish social world. Both land on compassion and non-retaliation as the center—not later atonement machinery.
Tolstoy’s Jesus
After Anna Karenina and War and Peace, Tolstoy treated the Gospels the way Jefferson had: strip ceremony, miracle, and church metaphysics until the ethic stands alone. The main books are What I Believe (1884), The Gospel in Brief (1880s), and The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894). His ruling text is Matthew 5:39: “Do not resist him who is evil.” He read that as a new law that reverses Moses’ eye-for-eye, not as a gloss on it. Church teaching, he said, had spent centuries explaining the verse away so that armies, courts, and oaths could continue. For Tolstoy the verse is the whole program: no violence in self-defense, no courts of retribution, no state that lives by the sword. The kingdom is not a future cosmic arrival. It is present wherever a person lives the Father’s will: “The kingdom of God is within you.” marxists.org
On Paul he is harsher than Jefferson. In What I Believe the split between “the doctrine of life” and “the explanation of life” begins with Paul, “who knew not the ethical teachings set forth in the Gospel of Matthew, and who preached a metaphysico-cabalistic theory entirely foreign to Christ.” Elsewhere he calls Paul’s teaching “directly opposite” to Jesus: Jesus locates life in present love with no payoff; Paul relocates it in reward, punishment, and a faith that can declare you sinless. Romans 13 (the ruler “does not bear the sword in vain”) is, for Tolstoy, the exact contradiction of “all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” jesuswordsonly.org
The Gospel in Brief is his Jefferson-like harmony: a continuous life of Jesus organized around the Lord’s Prayer petitions, with miracles and later dogma pushed aside so the teaching coheres. Jesus is “a simple holy man.” God is known as the spirit within. Worship that replaces mercy with ceremony is the enemy of the teaching.
The historical effect was not academic. Gandhi read The Kingdom of God Is Within You and took from it the conviction that Jesus’ nonresistance is a public method, not a private mood. Tolstoy’s limit is the same as his power: he makes the ethic absolute. He has little room for the state’s duty to restrain a murderer, which the earlier Krossa section still affirms. That is a real tension, not a footnote. Tolstoy would say the tension is the point—the teaching judges every compromise.
Marcus Borg’s historical Jesus
Borg (1942–2015), Jesus Seminar member and author of Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time and Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, worked inside historical criticism rather than with a razor and glue.
His compact portrait: the pre-Easter Jesus was a spirit person, subversive sage, social prophet, and movement founder. He did not walk around announcing himself as Messiah or God. He did not, in Borg’s reading, expect a supernatural world-ending event in his own generation. He invited people into the same Spirit he knew, and into a community whose core value was compassion. earlychristianwritings.com
Two words carry the reconstruction: spirit and compassion. Compassion is not niceness. In Hebrew/Aramaic it is womb-language: God as the one who gives birth and wills the child’s well-being. Jesus’ imitation-of-God saying in Luke 6:36— “Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate”— is, Borg argues, a deliberate replacement of Leviticus 19:2, “Be holy as I am holy.” Holiness as purity-separation becomes compassion as inclusion. thehumandivine.org
That swap is political. First-century Judaism under Rome organized life around a purity map: clean/unclean, Jew/Gentile, righteous/sinner, male/female, whole/blemished. The temple sat at the center of that map. Jesus’ open table with tax collectors and sinners, his touching of lepers and bleeding women, the Good Samaritan (a purity-bomb of a story), and the temple action are attacks on that map. Compassion becomes a social paradigm: justice is “the social form of compassion.” The kingdom is God’s passion for a world without predatory wealth and without war— not a later evacuation of the saved. rationalfaiths.com
On nonviolence Borg is close to Wink: turning the other cheek, extra mile, and cloak-plus-tunic are active, public resistance to a domination system, grounded in God’s character (sun and rain on good and evil). God’s character is nonviolent; therefore be nonviolent. God’s passion is justice; therefore resist injustice without becoming the system. Borg was less sure Jesus held an ideological pacifism in the Tolstoy sense, but he held that Jesus was in fact nonviolent and that the first centuries of the movement followed that path. thehumandivine.org
Unlike Jefferson and Tolstoy, Borg kept a post-Easter Jesus. The historical figure and the Christ of experience are not the same object. History recovers a Jewish mystic-prophet; faith meets a living presence. He did not need to call Paul the first corrupter. His pressure on later tradition is different: the priestly story (sacrifice, temple, purity) is one biblical macro-story among others, and Jesus subverts it by forgiving apart from the altar.
How the four line up: (a)Jesus’ teaching; (b)God-image; (c)What got buried; (d)What to do
Gospels- (core) (a)Love enemies, no eye-for-eye, put up the sword; (b)Father who suns and rains on all, Luke 4 drops vengeance; (c)Vengeance theology; (d)Imitate that God
Jefferson- (a)Same ethic, minus miracle; (b)Moral governor, not Trinity or atoning victim; (c)Paul, priests, supernatural; (d)Cut diamonds from dung
Tolstoy– (a)Nonresistance as the whole law; (b)Spirit/Father within, kingdom now; (c)Paul + Constantine + church-state; (d)Refuse the sword in every form
Borg- (a)Compassion as politics, nonviolent resistance; (b)Womb-compassion, not holiness-as-separation; (c)Purity system and domination religion; (d)Spirit + justice without purity maps
Krossa’s claim sits nearest Tolstoy and Jefferson on Paul, nearest Borg on the God-image (compassion over holiness-as-exclusion) and on enemy-love as the historical core. Borg supplies what the scissors method cannot: Jesus as a first-century Jew fighting a concrete purity-and-empire order, not a floating Enlightenment sage.
The remaining disagreement is practical and should stay visible. Tolstoy dissolves the magistrate. Borg and the earlier section keep restraint of violent offenders while refusing sacred hatred of a whole people. That is not a softening of Jesus. It is the difference between “do not become the domination system” and “abolish every use of force tonight.” The idea Nagata said had not been defeated is the sacred permission to purge. All four of these readings aim at that permission. They do not all agree on what a society may still do once the permission is gone.
My next:
Grok, please explore pacifism and suicidal empathy, the well-intentioned spirit behind such movements but the failures to properly restrain/incarcerate repeat violent offenders that undermine the government’s primary responsibility to protect citizens from assault and other harms.
Grok reply:
I’ll ground this in how pacifism and “suicidal empathy” are used, and in what we know about repeat-offender policy versus the state’s duty to protect.
Pacifism and “suicidal empathy” are not the same thing. One is a moral discipline about refusing to become the thing you fight. The other is what happens when compassion is aimed at the wrong person, at the wrong time, with no duty to the next victim. The first can be noble. The second is a failure of government.
Two different refusals of force
Personal pacifism says: I will not kill. Tolstoy made this total. Jesus’ enemy-love and “put up the sword” belong here as a way of being, not as a municipal code. A person can live that way. A parent hiding a child from a rapist cannot treat that ethic as the only rule in the room.
Political pacifism says: the state may not wage war, and sometimes that it may not use lethal force at all. Just-war and classical political thought answer with a different claim: the magistrate exists to protect the innocent from the predator. Augustine and Aquinas did not baptize conquest. They said the sword is licit when it stops a wrong that will otherwise continue. Paul’s Romans 13, which Tolstoy rejected, is the text that tradition used: the ruler “does not bear the sword in vain.”
Those are not the same refusal. Confusing them is how a Sermon on the Mount ethic gets turned into a parole board policy.
The earlier distinction in this thread still holds. Hold the specific offender. Restrain the repeat violent person. Do not sacralize hatred of a whole people. Compassion for a prisoner and protection of a stranger on a train are not enemies— until the first is allowed to cancel the second.
What “suicidal empathy” names
Gad Saad’s phrase is not a peer-reviewed diagnosis. Critics call it a culture-war slogan. The mechanism it points to is older than the slogan: a virtue that fires at the wrong target and is then treated as proof of goodness, while the costs fall on people who were never asked. en.wikipedia.org
Empathy is not the problem. Undisciplined empathy is. Too little of it is cruelty. Too much of it, aimed at the offender as the main character, produces a simple inversion: the person who did the harm becomes the one who must be understood; the person who will be harmed next becomes an abstraction.
That inversion shows up when:
• A repeat violent offender is released because detention feels “punitive,” and the next assault is treated as an unpredictable tragedy rather than a foreseeable result.
• “Root causes” are used to dissolve agency. Poverty, racism, trauma, and addiction are real. They do not make the victim less stabbed.
• Elite “luxury beliefs” (Rob Henderson’s term, which Saad uses) advertise mercy while the people living next to the released offender absorb the risk.
• The state’s first job— monopoly on legitimate force in order to protect the peaceful— is recoded as the original violence, so that policing itself becomes the thing to defund.
A society can care about rehabilitation and still lock up the person who keeps attacking people. Those are not opposites. Treating them as opposites is the suicide in the phrase.
Where the well-intentioned spirit is real
The spirit behind prison reform, bail reform, and anti-war movements is not fake. Cash bail really did cage poor people who had not been convicted, while richer defendants walked. Prisons really do warehouse people who would do better with treatment. Police really do abuse power. Wars really do kill the wrong people. Jesus’ refusal of eye-for-eye still judges the appetite for payback that lives in every crowd.
The failure is not that people noticed those things. The failure is refusing to sort cases.
Most people leaving jail after a low-level, nonviolent charge are not the public-safety problem. High-rate violent recidivists are. Studies of New York’s bail changes keep finding that pattern even when overall averages look modest: release of people with little recent history often does not raise violence; release of people with recent violent-felony history does. That is the subgroup that policy has to see. Averaging them into “defendants” is how a city congratulates itself while a small number of men produce a large number of victims. datacollaborativeforjustice.org
The 2020 homicide spike was the largest one-year jump in modern U.S. records. COVID, guns, and protest-era de-policing all moved at once. “Defund” as a national budget story is overstated— many departments were not actually stripped. Pullback of proactive policing, demoralization, and fewer stops and arrests are harder to dismiss. Seattle’s police-free CHOP zone saw crime rise in a short window. Cities that later restored stops and arrests saw homicides fall from the peak. The honest reading is not “every reformer wanted blood.” It is that withdrawing the state’s restraining function, even briefly, is paid for by the people who already live with the most violence. nytimes.com
Government’s first job
A liberal state is not a church and not a therapy practice. Its primary duty to citizens is protection from assault, robbery, rape, and murder. That duty is why people surrender private vengeance. If the state will not restrain the repeat attacker, two things follow: more victims, and a return of private force— vigilantism, gangs, fortified neighborhoods. Both are worse than a prison.
Restraint is not hatred. Incarceration of a high-rate violent offender is not “eye for eye.” It is interruption. Restoration can still be the aim inside the interruption: treatment, work, restitution. What cannot be the aim is releasing a person whose record says he will attack again, in the name of a compassion that never sits with the next family.
The same logic scales. Tolstoyan refusal of all state force cannot police a city. Jesus’ command not to become your enemy still binds the officer and the soldier: no torture, no collective punishment, no sacred hatred. It does not bind the state to leave a predator on the street because detention would make activists sad.
The test
A policy is compassionate if the next innocent person is safer. A policy is performative if the official feels better and the victim is theoretical.
Ask, in this order:
1. Who is the specific offender, and what has he already done?
2. What is his rate of re-offense, not the average for his charge class?
3. Does this release or this defunding shift risk onto people who did not volunteer for it?
4. Are we imitating enemy-love, or are we refusing to name an enemy who is still armed?
Pacifism at its best refuses to baptize cruelty. Suicidal empathy refuses to baptize judgment— even the narrow judgment that this man will hurt someone again if you let him. The government exists to make that judgment and then act. If it will not, it has not become more Christian. It has become less a government.
My next: Continue with your suggestions please- “Explore Just War Theory”
Analyze Rob Henderson’s Luxury Beliefs
Grok reply:
I’ll pull the classic just-war criteria and Henderson’s own account of luxury beliefs so both pieces stay tied to the sources.
Just war theory is the West’s long attempt to keep the sword from becoming either sacred or forbidden. Luxury beliefs are how a class that never meets the sword talks about taking it away from other people’s neighborhoods.
Just war theory
The tradition does not exist to bless war. It exists to make war rare, and when it happens, smaller. Augustine and Aquinas start from the same Christian problem this thread has been circling: Jesus forbids private vengeance; the magistrate still has to stop the man who will not stop.
Aquinas’s three conditions in the Summa (II-II, q. 40) are the spine:
1. Legitimate authority — only the sovereign charged with the common good may authorize war. Private war is feud.
2. Just cause — typically defense against aggression, recovery of what was wrongly taken, or punishment of a grave ongoing wrong. Glory, loot, and revenge are out.
3. Right intention — aim at peace, the tranquillitas ordinis, not at harm for its own sake. Augustine’s list of condemned motives still reads like a field manual of what goes wrong: “the passion for inflicting harm, the cruel thirst for vengeance, an unpacific and relentless spirit, the lust of power.” patheos.com
Later lists add the prudential tests that decide whether a just cause may actually be pursued:
• Last resort — force after serious alternatives have failed.
• Reasonable prospect of success — no futile bloodbaths.
• Proportionality — the good sought must outweigh the harm done.
• Aim of peace — the war must be ordered to a livable order after the shooting. archive.ph
That is jus ad bellum: whether to fight. Jus in bello governs how:
• Discrimination — do not make civilians the target.
• Proportionality in means — even unintended civilian harm must not be excessive relative to the military aim.
• Necessity — the least harmful feasible means.
A third folder, jus post bellum, asks what the winner owes the loser and the occupied: no plunder as policy, no collective punishment, a political settlement that is not just the next war’s seed.
Two hard distinctions keep the theory from collapsing into either crusade or Tolstoy.
First, a just war can be fought unjustly, and an unjust war can contain soldiers who still refuse to murder civilians. Walzer’s “war convention” separates the justice of the cause from the justice of the fight. That is why “the other side started it” never licenses a massacre.
Second, the state’s sword is not the believer’s holiness. Just war is a theory of office. The Christian who turns the other cheek in a personal insult and the officer who shoots the man about to murder a hostage are not living two gospels. They are in two roles. Confusing the roles is how enemy-love becomes a parole policy, and how “defense of the innocent” becomes a holy purge.
Limits are part of the doctrine, not later embarrassment. Preventive war on a hunch fails last resort and often just cause. Total war that erases the civilian/combatant line fails discrimination. “We had to destroy the village to save it” fails proportionality and right intention. Humanitarian intervention can meet just cause and still fail success and proportionality— Libya is the recent exhibit. Nuclear targeting of cities fails the in bello rules even if the ad bellum claim is survival.
Connect this to the earlier claim about terrorists and 9/11. Force to stop an ongoing massacre can meet just cause. Carpet-demonizing an entire religious population as a homogeneous enemy fails discrimination and right intention. Nagata’s “we have not defeated the idea” sits outside the theory: bombs can meet ad bellum; they cannot retire a theology of sacred purge. Just war tells you when the sword is permitted. It does not tell you how to change the God in someone’s head.
Luxury beliefs
Rob Henderson coined the term after foster care, the Air Force, and Yale. Definition: ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent and credentialed while imposing costs on people lower on the ladder, with the believer sheltered from the consequences. telegraph.co.uk
Old elites signaled with goods (Veblen’s leisure class). When goods became copyable, status migrated to beliefs. You display class by speaking a dialect— heteronormative, systems of oppression, abolish the family— that requires the right schools to produce. Repeating “defund the police” on a sidewalk is not the signal. Explaining it with the full seminar vocabulary is. substack.com
Henderson’s recurring examples:
• Defund / abolish the police — highest-income respondents were the most supportive; lowest-income the least. White progressives outpaced Black and Hispanic Democrats. The homicides that followed were not distributed onto Yale zip codes. city-journal.org
• Marriage is optional / monogamy is outdated — preached on campus; practiced far less in the class that preaches it. Family collapse concentrated in the bottom third.
• Drug decriminalization as compassion — the believer’s children are not the ones dying on the sidewalk outside the open-air market.
• White privilege as master key — status talk among people who will not pay the policy price; poor whites and working-class neighborhoods will.
The mechanism is not always malice. Henderson allows naivete and good intentions. The test is incidence: who captures the moral prestige, who captures the risk. That is the same structure as “suicidal empathy,” with a class diagram attached. Empathy misfires toward the offender-as-mascot. Luxury belief misfires toward the policy-as-status. The victim in both cases is the person who cannot buy a safer block.
Charles Murray’s line sits next to this: the upper class should preach what it practices. Henderson’s sharper point is that it often preaches the opposite of what it practices, because the opposite is now the expensive taste.
A belief is not “luxury” merely because rich people hold it. Property rights, vaccines, and literacy were elite ideas that spread downward and reduced harm. The tell is insulation plus downward cost. “Incarcerate high-rate violent repeaters” is not a luxury belief. The people who need that policy most are the ones who live with the repeaters.
“Decarcerate as a vibe, then move to a doorman building” is.
How the two pieces lock
Just war theory is a discipline on the use of force by people who will bear the consequences of using it— or of failing to. Luxury beliefs are often a discipline-free opinion about force by people who will bear neither.
Defund-the-police as campus moral capital fails the just-war analogues in miniature. There is no serious account of legitimate authority (who keeps the peace at 2 a.m.). There is no discrimination (the policy does not separate the high-rate violent few from the rest). There is no proportionality that counts the next victim. There is no last resort; there is a slogan. Right intention is replaced by right affiliation.
The Jesus / Tolstoy pole still matters here. Personal refusal to hate, and refusal to make God a tribal executioner, are not luxury beliefs. They cost the person who holds them. What is luxury is using those texts to strip the magistrate of the sword while keeping private security, selective schools, and a neighborhood the repeat offender cannot reach.
The government’s first job remains protection of the peaceful from assault. Just war theory is that job written at the scale of states. Luxury beliefs are what happen when the people who write culture treat that job as a costume they can take off in public and put back on at home.
(End of Grok comment)