Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Sunday, January 1, 2017
MOOR BLAMELESS ETHIOPIANS
MOOR BLAMELESS ETHIOPIANS
While reading in "Nichomachean Ethics" by Aristotle, Book II, Ch. 6, the phrase "the blameless Ethiopians " recurred to me upon seeing "...for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue; 'for men are good in but one way, but bad in many.'"
The link below gives sources to "blameless Ethiopians":
https://shekereblog.wordpress.com/print-editions/the-blameless-aethiopians/comment-page-1/#comment-246
Gird up thy loins well, my brother! We are going for quite a real ride!
http://biblehub.com/kjv/1_peter/1-13.htm
Mankind began in Ethiopia. What was formerly known as, and called, "Ethiopia," originally by the ancient Greeks, the first literate Europeans.
Africa became "Africa," a name that was first given to a rather small, Mediterranean, Roman province, but which was later extended, and applied across the entire continent.
Mankind had a definite beginning in "Ethiopia" or in Africa, but God has no beginning, extending eternally from "everlasting unto everlasting."
In God "we" live, move, and abide infinitely. "We" being our energy, matter, space, and time, however it may be configured, contextualized.
"God" and "Ethiopia" conflate in the Bible in Genesis 1. For many centuries, the Bible was presumed to be history, before archaeology, linguistics, anthropology and other sciences proved it to be ahistorical.
Nevertheless even as metaphorical or, indeed, as metaphysical, as the "Septuagint," the first, Greek Bible, may have been or became in time, following Latin and numerous later translations, it retained, contained sufficient substance , sufficient essence, to succor many millions.
The Bible to survive, and to thrive, after its primordially pagan Roman persecutors became its principal , if unprincipled propagators, after the reign of Emperor Constantine, donned the vestments, regalia, rituals, resonance of Roman rulers.
Along the way, a resultant religion, "Christianity" was consolidated by and under pagan-Roman Emperor Constantine from disputing schools of interests, hermeneutics, into one "catholic" or universal religion.
Rome adopted the name of a yet-venerated, though obscure, itinerant, crucified prophet of provincial Jerusalem, Palestine, who was a revivalist Jew, although he was deemed to be a renegade by the ruling hierarchy of Jews, who had sought this heretical Jewish imposter's crucifixion, after the money-changers incident in their temple during their Passover.
By "revivalist" is meant "originalist"; that is, African or Ethiopian, as the Jews certainly were, whether traced from Abraham or through Moses. As there is "Nothing new under the sun," Jesus preached a oneness of man and God, as exemplified in nature and in the heavens, that was open and accessible to all mankind of which it subsisted and consisted.
Such a cosmology, philosophy, had no need of priests nor of protocols, necessarily, because mankind was as inseparable from God, as was atoms, water, light, wind, fire, stone, dirt, earth .
This was the primal religion of the "blameless Ethiopians." The very Ethiopians whose wisdom, beauty, and righteousness was so renowned that the Ancient Greeks, from Homer on down, 800 B.C. , forward, termed them "blameless."