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Originally Posted by Southtown
Extremely impressive. If you can send me resources for any of that I would be grateful. I have been trying to build an essay regarding the Christian distortion of the Jewish Messiah. All that you have said above is true. Christianity was the result of Pagans trying to make sense of the Gospel as conveyed by Paul. They erred the same way as the rest of us; they didn't know the Hebrew roots. Why were the Jews expecting a Messiah? How were they supposed to know when they found him? You are on the right trail, padawan.
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Pythagoreans were vegetarian, until the 18th century all vegetarians were not called vegetarian but Pythagoreans.
Many scholars and theologians believe that the earliest Christians were vegetarian, as the Desert Fathers almost definitely were, and some significant early Christian groups even had versions of the Gospel of Matthew that clearly point to Jesus being vegetarian.
The Gospel of the Ebionites differs from the now traditional version of Matthew in places referring to meat by using similarly spelt vegetarian friendly terms; there is no academic consensus as to which version has the more original wording.
As the canonical New Testament seems to argue that vegetarianism is a personal choice, and many early Christian writers also stated that it was, the early Christians would seem to have taken this position without a New Testament based theological motivation for doing so.
Modern Christian vegetarianism argues that passages from the Old Testament and Book of Enoch assert that vegetarianism was God's ideal, but there is no evidence either for or against the idea that early Christians used the same argument, and there is the alternative possibility that early Christian vegetarianism originated due to the influence of Pythagoreanism.
Pythagoreanism also saw deep value in mathematics; geometry was seen as having a high spiritual significance in and of itself, as well as being a mechanism to encode mystical teachings.
The Feeding of the 5000 and of the 4000 have long been thought to encode some deeper meaning; more mainstream interpretations regard the numbers involved as references to the Torah feeding the Jews and Jesus' ministry feeding the Gentiles.
The use of numbers as cryptic references to deeper teaching could be argued to demonstrate Pythagorean influence in and of itself, but the encrypted presence of mystical diagrams would be a much stronger argument in favour of the existence of such influence.
The Catch of 153 fish is one of the most notable situations where a diagram can be derived from the text following basic consistent rules; using the Isopsephia of the text to dictate sizes, the account of the event can be described geometrically - the resulting diagram not only describes the event, but simultaneously has another, more mystical, interpretation as described in Plato's Timaeus.
153 itself is a significant number in Pythagoreanism, and had a strong connection to fish, as it was one part of the 'measure of the fish - a reference to the Vesica Piscis (whose name means flesh of the fish) and the square root of 3.
JQ
