u/TheGreenAlchemist

I have often read Contra Celsus and I think it is interesting the degree of confusion Celsus appears to get into establishing what Christians believe in what position, sometimes stating something we think is orthodox and sometimes assuming gnostic concepts apply to all Christians. It seems like in Alexandria during his lifetime, if he asked some Christian their opinions, he was getting gnostics answering him just as often as proto-orthodox Christians. Origen finds it strange how frequently he quotes Ophites and assumes their opinions apply to all Christians, saying that in his own time he had looked around for Ophites who could explain their diagram but never found any, guessing they may be entirely extinct. They somehow both came across the same mystery diagram, indicating it must have been making the rounds quite a bit.

This all seems to indicate that in Alexandria the number of people in different gnostic sects was huge and that adding them all together were similar in number to the orthodox Christians, or perhaps even more numerous. Has any scholar tried to make demographic estimates of the sects in the 2nd century?

Alright here's my theory. Omen is the "Treasure of Mariejois", which is the embers from the original mother flame, which Imu stole a long time ago, but didn't know how to replicate.

We have clearly established now what Imu's gimmick in fighting is. He has big armories that he summons weapons from. When he wants guns he pulls out guns, when he wants the legendary weapons he teleports them from his chamber, when he wants to fire blasts at an opponent, he doesn't blast energy, he summons bullets and bombs and flings them at people really hard.

The totality of all this is Omen, and Imu says "Omen is just my military might", which I think means what it says on the box, Omen is all his weapons, taken as a collective, including their power source.

So what then is all this fire he's always summoning, that can increase people's power and burn things? It is just another weapon he is summoning. That weapon is the Treasure of Mariejois, which is an almost entirely burnt out Mother Flame from the Void Century.

What does Doflamingo say about the Treasure of Mariejois? It's a "power that has a short shelf life" and is "rotting away". This refers to the fact Omen is nearly burnt out. When Imu said he wanted to go fight in the field, the Gorosei said he mustn't do it. Some people have interpreted this as saying that the very act of leaving the castle hurts Imu and that the only risk is him having to return at some point after a time limit. But it seems to me their level of concern is far beyond just the idea that Imu might not succeed, or altruistic concern that they don't want him to get hurt.

I think actually the reason they're afraid is that Imu fighting a lot will use up the remaining flame. If he goes out and is flinging Omen around, the power that sustains not just him, but all the Elders and Knights and Mariejois collectively, will get that much closer to depleting, and the entire world would crumble if it totally burnt out. As soon as Imu hits the field his transformation starts relying on Omen and he's immediately pulling from the little bit left and is already exhausted and gets worse as soon as he starts blasting fire around. He suffers more from exhaustion than from any of the actual attacks he takes. The power source he's relying from was already burning on fumes and had "nearly rotted away" as Doflamingo said, to the point that where he said the government might as well tell people about it because it will be useless soon.

As soon as Vegapunk had sparked a new mother flame, the Elders activated an ancient weapon to test it out. People have said this is Uranus and that Uranus is the treasure that Doflamingo was talking about. This does not actually make sense. Without a mother flame, Uranus is just dead weight. Doflamingo did not have any way to get a new mother flame. So when he said he'd use it to take over the world, he certainly was not talking about some object he might not be able to even turn on.

Vegapunk had created many things from the government, including the very important Pacifistas. The Elders said that they would happily discard all of this for the sake of getting one Mother Flame. Is that all for the sake of being able to use Uranus? I think it is because the entire power source that powers every covenant and sustains the lives of every immortal as about to burn out and they need to get something plugged in as an alternative immediately or else they're totally screwed. That's why they were willing to throw completely unlimited resources at Vegapunk, who they didn't even trust, and then were willing to kill him off and lose all his inventions as well, just to get this one thing the only irreplaceable thing that really mattered to them in the end.

Doflamingo's plan was to use Ope-Ope surgery to transplant the covenant mark that connects Imu to the Mother Flame onto himself, and then use the immortality surgery to hopefully lock it in such that it won't further decay and he won't risk dying from burnout. Note he said "If I had the Ope Ope, I would have been able to use the National Treasure to take over the world". He does not say, as some people misremember, "If I had the Ope Ope fruit and also the National Treasure, I could use both of them to take over the world". The Ope Ope was a prerequisite for using the National Treasure, not a secondary thing to be used alongside it.

This complies with the Harley text as follows:

1. First world: this is an era that commenced in the indefinite past, when the first mother flame was originally created. This is "people succumbed to greed and touched the forbidden sun" The whole ancient kingdom and high tech infrastructure of the world was built on it's back.

(Elbaf mural shows people lighting and stoking it, then a large war. This is the transition between first and second world)

2. Second World: sun stoked the fire of war. Mother flame gets stolen by Imu and used for weapons leading to the destruction of all technology in the world, including that which would be necessary to keep stoking the mother flame. It then lasts 800 years of slow degradation until present.

(Elbaf mural shows Imu holding a new freshly lit up mother flame, while the united forces of the world oppose him. This is the transition between second and third world).

3. Third World: sun returns (new mother flame), Sun god rises to meet it and takes it back from Imu leading to good results for the world. We will see a very optimistic epilogue with a place like Egghead where Mariejois is now, with the flame powering things that will make people happy, while the rest of the world stays similar but more free.

My prediction for the immediate plot based on this: Imu will lose this fight from running out of power, and he will not just have to retreat, but the entire infrastructure of everyone with covenants will run out of power. This will put all these characters out of commission for the next couple arcs, letting the Strawhats do more piraty things (collect Poneglyphs etc) without further confrontation with the government. Then Imu will come back once York finally gets the new flame running and Imu will have a reason to be more powerful for round two, explaining how he will continue being a credible villain even after losing here.

The West Coast of the US is a similar distance from Japan as the East Coast is to Europe. During and after Hideyoshi's reign Japanese technology and centralization was not that much worse than Europe's and it seems to me like if it had been marked as a major priority, their naval capacity could have been improved enough to send fleets of similar size to the Spanish conquistadors to the West Coast. They could have potentially gained engineering assistance from the Dutch for this if needed.

Let's say in a counterfactual situation where Hideyoshi had been convinced that Japan could gain great benefits from holdings in the Americas, and had decided to work on this project instead of Korea, how plausible is it that a Japanese colonial project could have been successful?

There is an interesting discourse I've read, "Against Faustus" by Augustine. Faustus being a Manichean teacher he had studied under earlier in life. This document dwells primarily on "source criticism", if you could call it that, with Faustus arguing that the Apostles were real, but that the gospels were written by "obscure semi Jews" living long after the time of the Apostles, who "compiled rumors and beliefs" about Jesus and then gave them the names of known Apostles to give them credibility. Augustine commits to a 100% dedicated defense of Apostolic authorship. Discussion on this topic probably makes up almost half the volume of the treatise.

I presume this opinion that the gospels were pseudonyms must have been common for Manicheans. But who are earlier references to this theory: "the Apostles were real people, but the authors of the gospels weren't them, and they are later works named this way to give credibility." -- an opinion much more mainstream today.

When I've read pagan anti-Christian works, they often accepted the Apostles as authors but just believed they had no credibility. When did this kind of "source critical" mode of arguing against Orthodox Christianity originate? And were these early antecedents influential on early modern scholars, or did the idea basically come about independently?

The narrative that Moses was condemned for striking a rock seems so odd and disproportionate, and more than that, kind of detached from the overall narrative. Moses dying before he reaches the promised land is important to the story; him hitting a rock instead of simply calling to the rock on the other hand, could be skipped and I doubt anyone would feel like there was anything missing in the story. The whole thing is so strange that I have seen some apologists argue that this isn't really the reason and it was more of a straw that broke the camels back.

But thinking about it from the documentarian point of view, perhaps the story of the rock is from one document, his punishment is from another, and connecting the two is just a flimsy connection made by the editors? If so what might have been the original idea behind this, and the older authors thought process on why Moses deserved punishment?

I don't really understand how it is that the Yonko who live in the New World seem to be able to get to Paradise any time they feel like, or even how they go backwards on the Grand Line? Since Log Poses only point in one direction.

Does every single ship in their fleet have an eternal pose for every single possible location?

And every one of them goes through Fishman Island every single time? What does it even mean for Fishman Island to be "owned" by Whitebeard or Big Mom if their biggest rivals are just zipping through it all the time? And how could it be that they "hadn't seen any pirates for a while" if these giant fleets with hundreds of ships are having to cross on a pretty regular basis?

And they never bump into each other? Like when Kaido and Whitebeard and Shanks were all trying to go to Marineford at the same time, there was no concern they might reach Fishman Island at the same time and totally trash it?

Is this just something that's unexplained or is there some explanation i've missed, like they have specific routes they own and Fishman Island is just for "regular" pirates crossing?

Jesus renamed his disciple Simon "Kepha" meaning Rock. Was this already a known name in Jewish circles, in which case, it would be like Simon being renamed "Rocky"? Or would this have been clearly a title to people, reading more like "The Rock".

Likewise to Greek speaking Jews, did Peter read mainly as a name or as a word?

This strange statement is in Proverbs. I had read someone say this is literally against winking, and the other of "year of living biblically" had followed it in this manner. Trying to find out what this is actually about, I see all kinds of interpretations in apologetics, like "winking means turning a blind eye to evil", "winking was a signal to accomplices to start doing some bad deed", "it was considered a lewd gesture", etc. These all seem to hang in the air with no evidence cited to support them. What do we think the real meaning of this was intended to be?

Hi, a couple years ago I did a sake omakase, and I wrote down a particular sake I liked the most, but I've lost the list. Could you think of you might be able to identify it?

It was from a funky/unpasteurized sake tasting.

It was like a "half nigori" -- it had some haze, but semi-clear and not thick at all. They said it was an unusual sake that was half way between junmai and nigori.

I *think* it was unpasteurized; it had some very funky flavors at any rate. It was not nearly as sweet as the usual nigori.

I think, in bottles, it was somewhere in the $40-50 range if you bought it at a typical store.

The name was Japanese with no English tag line given. The bottle was green.

Has there ever been any modern novel written in Kana? I don't mean children's books, but rather a book for adults, written in a manner similar to Tales of Genji and other ancient works using Kana, as a literary exercise? Somewhat like how there was a book in English a few decades back that was written without using the letter E, or a book in Hebrew that didn't use a single line break?

I was reading some texts recently and they mentioned this translation. This wikipedia snippet might be considered representative:

>The meaning which the Greek of John 8:44 most naturally conveys is that of the pre-Hieronymian translation "You are from the father of the Devil,"^([2]) and so it is generally understood by Greek Fathers, though in various ways they escape attributing a father to the devil. Hilgenfeld, Volkmar, and DeConick consider that the Evangelist shows that he embraced the opinion of the Valentinians and some earlier Gnostic sects that the father of the devil was the Demiurge or God of the Jews. But this idea was unknown to Heracleon, who here interprets the father of the devil as his essentially evil nature; to which Origen objects that if the devil be evil by the necessity of his nature, he ought rather to be pitied than blamed.

I have seen this claim repeated on this sub as well by various people. If this is what the text is most naturally interpreted as, and was parsed this way by Church Fathers (though they are not specified here), how is it that this seems like lost translation? Did people stop reading it this way at a certain point? I have not found one translation reading it like this, including "literal" translations. Who were the fathers who were reading it this way? What interpretation did they give it, and what did the original composer likely mean?

This seems like a classic case of "trying the same things and expecting a different result". Did they think the other emperors just hadn't got the right formula? Did they not really expect to become immortal and just expected more limited medical benefits, and thought previous attempts had indeed achieved this?

It's well known that Ethiopian Christianity has an unusual canon that includes books common in the early Christian era that went into disuse elsewhere. The Ethiopian Jews also use a Tanakh with many of these same books. What was the direction of influence in this situation, Christianity vs Judaism?

Did Ethiopia already have a notable Jewish population when it first became Christianized, and they simply used the books that were already popular among the pre-Christian Jews there locally?

Or did Ethiopia have few Jews locally, adopted their Christian canon based on what the first Christian missionaries there were using, and then the Ethiopian Jews were established there later and came to adopt the books the early Christians there valued?

Was Ethiopians Judaism well established before Christianity existed?

I was thinking about how in ancient Hebrew people's names are often "x bar y". Was there actually a language that Greeks were exposed to that has a lot of "bar" sounds? When people mock foreign languages today, they usually make some kind of effort to approximate what they sound like to them.

I read a children's book/story as a kid that had a kind of messed up plot. This wild kangaroo in Australia was captured by humans and forced to fight other kangaroos. Eventually he is matched to fight a kangaroo and while they're fighting he realizes he's been fighting his father. After they fight they make some kind of plan and eventually escape.

I think this was in some sort of remedial reading textbook (3rd grade) so it was probably more of a short story/children's book than a novel.

Since it was aimed for 3rd graders, I'm probably exaggerating in my mind how heavy the slavery element was emphasized.

The Talmud also uses Gehenna as an afterlife punishment but it used it to refer to a purgatory with a strict time limit. This doesn't match up with the Christian tradition and it also doesn't line up with the view Josephus attributes to the Pharisees. Was this concept current in 2nd temple times? Did it come about later? If so, when and why?