The term "Amen"

[Daniel O. McClellan]

Originally Posted by dtango

I do enjoy the pseudo-scholar argument as it has given me lots of pleasure when the time comes to bring forward evidence of the ignorance of the scholars involved with the funerary texts.

First, it wasn't an argument, it was a conclusion. The argument is found in the rest of the sentence (that you ignored) and the other posts that you also ignored. Next, you obviously don't know Egyptian or Hebrew, so when you presume to boast about the ignorance of those who dedicate their professional lives to those languages, you make your argument sound so much more asinine. Third, I don't see you bringing forward any real evidence. Your comment from Gardiner was just an explanation in an alphabet chart, which is a far, far cry from showing that correlation is relevant to the name Amun.

Originally Posted by dtango

The translators of the Egyptian script have failed entirely and their Waterloo is a text entitled "The Dispute of a man with his Ba.”

No, there's just no equivalent in the English language to the concept represented by the word, and it's been in use in transliteration for so long that most readers are familiar with the term.

Originally Posted by dtango

You tell that to the author of the Revelation in the text of which Amen occurs as a proper name.

Revelation 3:14

And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write: “These things saith the Amen the faithful and true witness the beginning of the creation of God.”

That's not a proper name, that's called an epithet, and you're dealing with a Greek text, not a Hebrew text. What a Greek author has to say about the word "amen" really has little bearing on what the word meant for a millennium prior in Hebrew.

Originally Posted by dtango

In all available Greek manuscripts the last phrase reads : [/font]«η αρχή της κτίσεως του Θεού». [font=Verdana]Amen is the beginning of the building of the God. Not the beginning of the God’s creation.

And now you show that you obviously don't know a lick of Greek either. That's a rather naive etymological fallacy you're promoting, and it simply ignored the dozen or so other uses of that word in the New Testament that pretty definitively show it means "creation."

Originally Posted by dtango

God is a theologian’s creature –Egyptian theologians to be exact- and was originally built as Amen, then became YHWH, Allah and finally Jesus.

This is nonsense.

Originally Posted by dtango

The author of the Revelation knew by way of theological channels what Assmann found out by way of studying the Egyptian texts.

Maybe you should read Smith's God in Translation, or any other decent review of Assmann before you start praising his methodologies and conclusions.

Originally Posted by dtango

It is Jesus who is called Amen in the above passage, and therefore Amen, to the author of the Revelation, meant God.

Then why did the author specifically refer to God as separate from the Amen in the very same passage? You're just making stuff up, and it's quite clear to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of these texts or their languages.

[dtango]

Originally Posted by whoppers

It does require some familiarity with the language (not just with using a dictionary to translate a Hieroglyphic Pictographic Symbol) in order to understand the context and concepts that the translators (many of them well-known experts) are trying to translate, and for what reasons they have chosen one translation over another.

You said you are not an expert in Egyptian. Yet, you study my work and decide that I have no familiarity with the language and that I am just using a dictionary to translate the glyphs!
It sounds a bit unfair. Doesn’t it?
Besides, my main disagreement with the translators is that I refuse to accept the meanings they ascribe to a number of key words. I do consult the dictionaries but the meanings I my self ascribe to these key words spring from my study of comparative mythology and not from the dictionaries.

Originally Posted by whoppers

I think it's also important to realize that there were different, evolving traditions concerning religion in Egypt, and these will change how one views the situation.

I agree with you on this point. It is only in Egyptian –and in a very small scale in Greek- that we encounter funerary texts. In order for one to understand Egyptian religion should first manage to understand the funerary texts.

The funerary texts are records of the Egyptian oral popular traditions. They are not the work of the priests. The priests were only the scribes, not the authors of the texts. The translators were informed about the beliefs of the Egyptians before deciphering the hieroglyphic script and when they did they translated the texts in a way that the texts will conform with their preconceptions.

Originally Posted by whoppers

The issue of Maat is an important one. As the opposite of Isfet (which seems to represent chaos, injustice, disorder, lying, violence, etc - all the things which Atum seems to disavow having any hand in, besides bringing the very opposite into the world through Creation in which order and justice were established, from that text we discussed - 1130), Maat appears to be the things Atum established, or the principles of it: order, unity, justice, wisdom, virtue, honesty, etc. This is the idea of Maat - not a goddess - but as a principle, or something that can indwell people, like in the text you quote above: when being judged by the gods, he claims that there is "maat" in his body, he is saying that he is worthy of the afterlife and has led a good life, and all those good things of Maat (as a principle) are inside him. He didn't lie, he didn't cheat, he didn't steal. What he says makes absolute sense. So conditions of disorder, injustice, violence, etc. (Isfet) CAN indwell someone's makeup, just as the opposite (Maat) can indwell in someone's heart, or soul, or whatever.

All the above is for tourists’ consumption, like “Pyramids were built to be used as tombs of the Pharaohs.”
Reading Egyptologtists’ excuses is of no use. You have to read the texts and form your own opinion.
Egyptologists labelled the funerary texts “magical incantations” because they are either unable to understand them or they are lying in order no to molest religion.

Originally Posted by whoppers

I assume that Egyptology gains in knowledge as the years go by, just as any other field does that is trying to interpret and understand a culture long gone, which has left material and written remains that are not always obvious or all-encompassing in giving a unified theology. Like the Hebrew Bible - which nowhere gives a statement of it's overall theology, it must be teased out from the individual parts, or by examing the whole.

The Hebrew Bible as well as the Egyptian funerary texts are primarily based on oral tradition. Scholars and theologians did edit the texts but to a degree permitting detection of their interference. For understanding the Torah there is the Oral Torah and from the fact that some scribes and redactors of the Egyptian texts were making corrections in them we know that some priests did understand the texts while some others did not.

I’ll provide an example so that you will see where the misunderstanding is located.
The man who went successfully through the test of judgment says that after his judgment he will plough his field, he will harvest, he will drink, eat, and make love.
Some scribes or redactors of the texts add the negative particle “not” before the verb “make love” because they know that the gods prohibited sex and since the man after his judgment will go to live where the gods live, it was considered unthinkable for him to say that he will have sex there.

Of course, the text was correct: sex was permitted only for those found pure in their judgment!

Originally Posted by whoppers

I think the Middle Kingdom Period shows that lower class people were not "evil" - especially in light of text 1130 from above. Perhaps earlier they were seen as unworthy of immortality, but this idea seems to have changed. I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say about the Creation stories. There were several of them, different stories, and some of them quite old. The 1130 text is a Creation story, in a way - or talks about what happened during Creation, at least. Atum is trying to show how he brought order and justice for all out of the chaos of the initial state of things.

The funerary texts have nothing to do with the Old, the Middle or the New Kingdom. They are copies of some very old texts of which the date of the initial recording we do not know.
As regards creation stories, I cited some in post #13 but in post #22 I only made some reference to the gods’ estates which the translators render as “mounds”.

The gods’ estates is a piece of information found in popular traditions, they are not theological fantasies. The story of the gods told by popular traditions is a complete story where each section of it is followed by the next section which is a reasonable continuation. Each section serves as an explanation for the section that follows, thus the gods’ estates part of the story serves to explain why gods are called shepherds.

Hear what Plato had to say (“The Crito,” 109b):

Sometime, the gods divided by lot, between themselves, the regions of the entire earth without quarreling….
…and when they settled they were feeding us as herds, as possessions and cattle theirs; without using violence, as do the herdsmen when they take the herds to pasture ground hitting them…

[dtango]

Originally Posted by Daniel O. McClellan

First, it wasn't an argument, it was a conclusion.

Originally Posted by Daniel O. McClellan

[...]
Next, you obviously don't know Egyptian or Hebrew, so when you presume to boast about the ignorance of those who dedicate their professional lives to those languages, you make your argument sound so much more asinine.

It is an argument, my dear friend, and it is known as “Argumentum ad hominem.”
You are committing a logical fallacy.

Originally Posted by Daniel O. McClellan

Third, I don't see you bringing forward any real evidence.

The evidence you can find in my blog “dtango.wordpress.com” in articles both in Greek and English. You seem to be acquainted with Egyptian so go on and comment on my translations.

Originally Posted by Daniel O. McClellan

Your comment from Gardiner was just an explanation in an alphabet chart, which is a far, far cry from showing that correlation is relevant to the name Amun.

In any case, I thank you for confirming the authenticity of the statement.

Originally Posted by Daniel O. McClellan

The argument is found in the rest of the sentence (that you ignored) and the other posts that you also ignored.

I guess that you mean the following:“Amun was conflated with several other deities, and when we hit the syncretism of the Hellenistic period he became identified with several others. His form and function was different from generation to generation within the same culture. When you cross cultures you get even different conceptualizations. The same is true of every culture's deities.”
However, what actually matters is the origin of the idea of the One and Only God. Theologians’ theories are for theologians, not for the people. Who was Plato’s Demiurge? Where did Plato learn about his Creator God? Not from Homer or Hesiod, of course, but from the Egyptian priesthood. Plato in his “Timaeus” describes how the Demiurge fashioned the skull of humans (73e):

And bone He compounded in this wise. Having sifted earth till it was pure and smooth, He kneaded it and moistened it with marrow; then He placed it in fire, and after that dipped it in water, and from this back to fire, and once again in water; and by thus transferring it many times from the one element to the other He made it so that it was soluble by neither. This, then, He used, and fashioned thereof, by turning, a bony sphere round about the brain; and therein he left a narrow opening;

Here follows an extract from “The Great Hymn to Khnum”:

He made hair sprout and tresses grow,
Fastened the skin over the limbs;
He built the skull, formed the cheeks,
To furnish shape to the image,
He opened the eyes, hollowed the ears,
He made the body inhale air;
He formed the mouth for eating,
Made the [gorge] for swallowing (Translation by Myriam Lichtheim)

Would it had made a difference if the name of the One God, the Creator, was Khnum instead of Amen-Ra?

Originally Posted by Daniel O. McClellan

No, there's just no equivalent in the English language to the concept represented by the word (ba), and it's been in use in transliteration for so long that most readers are familiar with the term.

For two hundred years the term had been translated as “soul.” Only recently they decided to use the transliteration instead in order to avoid their usually ridiculous translations. Which term has no equivalent in English? “caretaker,” “witness in defence,” “man at the head”?

Originally Posted by Daniel O. McClellan

That's not a proper name, that's called an epithet, and you're dealing with a Greek text, not a Hebrew text. What a Greek author has to say about the word "amen" really has little bearing on what the word meant for a millennium prior in Hebrew.

You forgot to provide the meaning of the supposed epithet.
Greeks still say «Αμήν» and Hebrews “Amen”!

Originally Posted by Daniel O. McClellan

And now you show that you obviously don't know a lick of Greek either. That's a rather naive etymological fallacy you're promoting, and it simply ignored the dozen or so other uses of that word in the New Testament that pretty definitively show it means "creation."

We are not talking of the language of Plato but of the language I was taught at at school.

Originally Posted by Daniel O. McClellan

Maybe you should read Smith's God in Translation, or any other decent review of Assmann before you start praising his methodologies and conclusions.

Assmann bases his conclusions on the text and I respect his views because of that.

Originally Posted by Daniel O. McClellan

Then why did the author specifically refer to God as separate from the Amen in the very same passage? You're just making stuff up, and it's quite clear to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of these texts or their languages.

And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write: “These things saith the Amen the faithful and true witness the beginning of the creation of God.”
The author does not refer to God at all.
Amen is the “faithful” and “true witness” “the beginning of the creation of God”
Amen is the beginning of the creation of God.
Did God start his creation with Amen?
or
Amen is the beginning of the creation of the God by the theologians?
One way or the other everything begins with the Amen!

[blooming bud]

There is a fine line of belief, faith and simply KNOWING. AMEN...(So be it) God bless us all