Dominion

Tom Holland

• I don’t really know what to make of this book yet, it’s not as easy to read as I thought it would be, maybe that’s just me. I kind of find that there’s a fair bit of waffle, I’ll have to maybe review it a bit to see.
• I think I’m starting to see the influence that ‘belief’ have on things, but I suppose the ‘general consensus’ of people is always obscured by the information available (writings from certain people).
• It’s interesting to read about the innovations in Christianity. For instance, Origen, introducing the Greek notion of analysisng myth. In Alexandria where he was born there was a grand mixing of cultures, most Jews spoke Greek and were slowly becoming more urbanised.
• Holland describes how he drew on philosophy to make the faith more credible:

  • The genius of Origen was to create out of the inheritance of Greek philosophy an entire new universe of the mind – one in which even the least educated could share.

  • ”Scripture was like a mansion with an immense number of locked rooms, and an equal number of keys, all of which lay scattered about the house. This haunting image, so Origen declared, had been suggested to him by his Hebrew teacher; and yet, in his own efforts to track down the keys, to open the locked doors, he relied on methods that derived from a very different source. In the great library of Alexandria, scholars had long been honing methods for making sense of ancient texts: treating their subject matter as allegory, and their language as an object of the most methodical study. Origen, in his own commentaries, adopted both techniques. Jewish the great mansion of the Old Testament may have been; but the surest method for exploring it was Greek”

• On re-reading the start of chapter 3, Paul is the introduction of 1) that Jesus is the Son of God, not any Caesar and that 2) Only acceptance of this is needed to become christian.

  • ”Paul had achieved a similar feat [as Alexander cutting fabled knot]. A single deft stoke, and the tension that had always been manifest within Jewish scripture, between the claims of the Jews upon the Lord of all the Earth and those of everyone else, between a God who favoured one people and a God who cared or all humanity, between Israel and the world, appeared resolved.”

• What I’m still puzzled by is how the imagery or ‘message’ of the crucifixion-that Christ takes on the lowliest form of death, that of a slave, or criminal- symbolises that “He was love”.
• Holland emphasises an envy that the Galatians might have had for the Jewish God. He seemed kind, benevolent, a bit unlike Gods of the time.