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head of joaquin said:A very good reading.
One wonders why Genesis got incorporated into the gospel at all. There really is no connection and the mythos is about something totally different, even to the point of a somewhat ironic God.
Christianity missed the boat when it rejected Marcionism, which created a canon that didn't include the Hebrew scriptures. The Hebrew scriptures are wonderful and insightful texts about the human condition, which dwarf any other narrative from antiquity in complexity and moral fullness; but they are unrelated to the Christian gospel of transformation through God's love.
Well, I think there is some reason for this. I think it's plausible that Christianity arose out of some currents in Jewish Gnosticism, and rapidly absorbed elements of the syncretic cults so common in the Hellenistic world.
I suspect, but cannot prove, that there is a continuity in the mystical undercurrents among what became Judaism and Christianity.
head of Joaquin said:Genesis 1 and 2 are complex accreted narratives that bring together a number of different motifs from various traditions over a long period of time. It's really not a single narrative but a number of stories that can't be harmonized, despite the best efforts of the redactor. So in a real sense, Genesis 1 and 2 doesn't have a single meaning and cant have one. It has disparate, contradictory motifs packed together making it evocative and elusive. That's why millennia later, we still read it with interest, unlike the single minded "theology" of works like Hesiod "Works and Days." It's that fact that Genesis isn't a unitary text that makes it so interesting to us.
I actually think Usrai (assuming he is the redactor) did a pretty good job in uniting the narratives of the various sources. P and D seem to have a natural way of being combined. J and E are a little more difficult. I like to read it specifically because I think the techniques he used to combine the various sources may speak somewhat to mystical themes he thought important.