Hero of the Week; St John

Economic segregation is the essential means of domestic separation of individuals from various exclusive regions of society in the United States today of course, while in past time other forms of segregation such as imperial or racial were more featured aspects of stratified societies. Some degrees of segregation are accepted as necessary for the smooth operations of capitalism, and individual rights are based on the premise of exclusive individual right of self-determination, ownership of property and such. Paradoxically correcting problems of economic segregation in one nation may be undermined but a flood of cheap labor immigrants designed to subvert remediation of social injustices. Only through correction of social injustices against individuals one nation at a time could a majority of free and responsible societies come into existence.

Various social theories such as Marxism may be advanced to deny individuality as worthy of economic rights individually at all of course, and that may be exploited by criminal alliances of government and global businesses to form traditional stratified societies camouflaged with deniability. Jesus transcended the entire issue of social stratification and segregation through the transcendent faith in a trans-temporal God that redeems from death and original sin with the penalty of everlasting hell. These brief sketches about heroic individuals have rediscovered this week the disciple John who is the author of the gospel according to John, three epistles (letters) and The Revelation.

The disciple John was imprisoned on the isle of Patmos offshore from Ephesus sometime likely in the 60’s, when the Roman authority may have mistaken him as leader of a lot of Christian converts in a neo-Jewish religion with revolutionary Jews in Judea and Jerusalem. Christianity in the first century after a period of tolerance was severally repressed and persecuted. The disciple John kept the faith and reported his first-person experiences with Jesus and His ministry to scribal ‘disciples’ of his own in the Church at Ephesus.

A Christian writer named Bruce Vawter reported the scholastic theory that the first book of the Gospel to be written was actually the Q or Quelle source that forms a large part of the material in the Books of Matthew and Luke was actually written by the disciple Matthew in Aramaic/Hebrew. John was probably aware of the Q source and the books of Luke and Mathew and Mark, yet his work differs somewhat because it was the work of the ongoing evangelist instead of a simple gospel compilation of the life of Jesus produced to continue the message of Jesus Christ beyond the end of the Apostolic era in the first century.

John must have made his way to Ephesus sometime after the crucifixion of Jesus as an evangelist and remained in Ephesus fairly permanently, and missing the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in AD70. If he imprisoned as a possible 60’s radical at Patmos he might have been in his 50’s then, if he was called by Jesus in his early 20’s to wander about Palestine for three years as a disciple.

John's ideas

In John 1/1-15 have interesting expressions that resemble some extent those descriptions that the Philosopher Plotinus attempted to write in his enneads about 190 years after John's circa 100 ad. publications on the relationship of God, the Creator or in Plotinus' terminology the Intelligence to cerated objects or existants. Cosmologists still have the trouble of explaining how the perfect came into being from the imperfect, or vice versa with a first cause. Why namely did a 'perfect' Higgs field through uncertainty become collapsed into a phase transition. Why did perfection of certainty develop uncertainty, how did absolute uncertainty become certainty temporarily, and why did it change partially into uncertainty and time with an inflaton?

Plotinus offers a different idea about that which exists and matter/energy that would approximately fit a relative description given about God in the passage above, or at least the order of creating. Sartre's more 'naive' existentialist/rationalist approach to describing first experience and subsequent being is an interesting correlative of Plotinian paradigms, yet neither requires a 'magic' or out of nowhere creation within pluralistic parameters necessarily, instead of a monistic evolution such as might be elucidated in Genesis One and Two or even within the enneads of Plotinus in an approximate and partial sense. Many of these 'theological/cosmological' ideas are still quite interesting and have been around a long time with the improvement today of a lot more scientific data to add to the data base.