Hi Robert, thanks for the welcome, the quote, and the advice of how to address a post directly to Bart.
There are quite a few ramifications wrapped up in my question.

For example, Jesus himself may actually have been working to avoid the very Jewish background assumptions that expected him to get married. He never did get married… at all… or even mention a temptation to, which may have been why he was said to have “brought a sword” separating you from your families if you wanted to “walk with him” and follow The Way he was living. Much more likely the wine of his lifestyle, too radical from current definitions not to disturb the “wineskin” others who were living and expected him to as well. Of course I do support the nuclear family and its stabilizing effects, but when it becomes possessively myopic and aloof, it can prevent being very interested in anyone else at all, or just the reverse cause some involved to become frustrated and desperate… ending up needing governing to keep using the very fear tactics Jesus was trying to tell us the Good News of not needing to live by any more.

Of course the quote you gave was simply translating Jewish belief, definition and writing, albeit with a good amount of wisdom in its explanation, into a Greek counterpart, and just a piece of the ancient Greek variety of loves, whether translated into Greek or not. I do agree with the part of it that recognizes that ordinary familiarity with any member of any group often numbs you out of recognizing any special attraction to them, often turning into possessive guarding of a close relation, or actually breeding tacit aversion, but when Jesus says to “love one another” and “as the Father has loved me, I also love you, go and do likewise…” I believe he is talking about a much wider KIND of love than marital commitment, and was living it in his male circulatory nature… reaching out to wider and wider groups to share in his wider understanding, and realizing that love COULD be the basis of a social understanding if not an actual refinement to the social order of an Angry God being the reason we do what we do, when the motivation of loving Eros could indeed be worked with and refined enough to help us all see each other positively (possibly learned from early philosophers like Zeno’s original stoic visions, passed down). When we are in contact with our own inner HUMAN love for one another, we are given the inner life motivation of reaching out to help, with loving feelings. A great way for life itself to take care of all of us through all of us, and give compassionate care to those around us who, if not abjectly in need, would certainly welcome the encouragement of a genuine friend… one who FEELS love for you, at many degrees and levels of Eros sharing, as the unique person you are, and is not dissuaded by societal fears imposed not to do so. The last line of the quote speaks of a fear of God and Law, but both of which Jesus Himself dismisses as not relevant to personal interaction (“Render to Caesar…”) We also need to remember here that sex by itself is not love but mating (it certainly can be blended with and into genuine love, but the drive for the male of any mammal male is to mate and move on and do it again, whether in more primitive environments or not). Every animal does it automatically. But learning how to associate degrees of Eros with affection based understanding of other people and their individual needs, wants, and desires and how you can help to some degree can help us control the drive to impregnate and not let that be the standard we judge our behavior from. Thus, without learning such love first, all we have left is a default trigger to impregnate, that then needs to be controlled with “obey or be punished threat” the reductionist reaction, and sadly, one which works all too well.

I have a deep and affirming appreciation of Jesus and believe, at a very basic MALE human level, he simply didn’t want to get fear mongered into a marriage that would lock him out of his Eros connective love for many many people… “I know mine and mine know me” seems to me to be talking about Eros connections, before anyone else tried to put a “right or wrong” on our own natural feelings. (or turn those words into a validation of any religious group’s identity or ideology, instead).

To get at what Jesus really meant by love takes not only an understanding of how he grew up and events in his life we were never given information on, but also of the cultures in the Mediterranean at that time, any of which could have given him other options which took him away from the expectations his Hebrew heritage expected of him before he became the itinerant preacher we are so familiar with. To understand Paul’s fear based idea of God can be linked to his fear of what was left of the 12 tribes dispersing like the 10 other tribes did, and wanting to stay together, pointing to “God’s Anger” rather than natural causes or assimilations, as the reason and the more “take no chances” way of dealing with the situation. Yet it was one he, and probably many other Hebrew leaders were very passionate about. Too much.

Regardless… thank you for your quote and a neat new way to look up old passages. I thank you Robert and look forward to interesting discussions with you and other forum members looking for the underlying truths as well, and what people made out of them centuries ago, so we can be real people first and roles and functions chosen FROM our genuine identities second. EJ

By the way, sorry I seem to be so long winded here, but the question is deep and has so many ramifications into our own lives today, that it’s easy to misunderstand what’s happened to us all… and why I really do appreciate having a forum and blog like this with such an objectively truthful man as Bart Ehrman!

Hi Robert:
Thanks for trying to understand what I’m talking about. The view I am exploring is of Jesus as the human being he actually is, underneath all the other ways of looking at him, and languages needed to get anyone’s impressions of who he was or what that meant in those contexts. Even in Jesus own day and age he had to ask his follower apostles “Who do men think I am?” As Bart has so courageously advanced to the public world, Jesus never did say he was God, (despite billions of the world’s people today thinking he must be) though he did relate to being a leader in terms of the Messiah the Jews were looking for (even though they wanted a more military “King” type of leader to help them establish a place of their own, where they didn’t have to live by anyone elses’ rules or laws or be rejected.)

In trying to understand Jesus, free of the meanings of many words (sometimes the words get in the way of understanding the person said to have said them) with their own associations and connotations, it is quite possible that Jesus was trying to bring about a better way of life than his own culture had expected of him to continue, possible from connections in that Mediterranean basin which included Hellenistic, Roman, Arab and of course other Hebrew influences. That Jesus spoke in parables so often means to me that he was trying to protect himself from saying things so directly that he would alienate people instead of showing them the better way of life he was trying to promote (Love based God and motivation for life, trust first and try to understand people, versus becoming a fighter in a negative polarity motivation of suspect and attack in which everyone else becomes an enemy to either get out of the way, ignore, or detest as a “danger.”

Have you ever enacted the simple college experiment of exploring the effect of transmitting information? Students coming together in small groups of 10 or 15 are given a piece of information, sometimes story like, to the first person, who then tells what he got out of it to the person next to him and so on, individually one at a time, until we then compare what the first person was given as information to what the last person was saying the information was. The result is usually quite different, and usually laughably so. And we learn when we involve ourselves in that kind of experiment, not only that we have to take most all of it with a grain of salt so to speak, but search for the core of the message by reading in between the lines to get to the intentions, and, that to be within the time frame of simply a half hour or so, in the same language, in the same culture and in the same group of students familiar with each other yields such a discrepancy that we need to better examine many of the ideas and messages we are told to accept without better examination.

Trying to reconstruct what we don’t know about Jesus (his early life, contacts, cultural influences, wise older male support, and so on) only from records we do have left, and then believing them and the languages used, leaves us at a distinct disadvantage, especially over not only days, or weeks, but years and decades and centuries (as Bart explains… often being copied by scribes adding their own efforts to “correct” mistakes.) Yet through all of it, and all the possible mistakes, the core message we get of Jesus and what Christianity is most about is the idea of “loving one another” and leaving most of us to try to make sense of that in terms of how we were raised or persuaded to define it. Bart can think and reason through the blinds keeping us from looking further. When I use the word Eros, I am trying to get to the more original idea of human love than the “sexual” context we have been raised by and on as if the two are interchangeable. In the view I am exploring here, Eros is whoever we are attracted to, and who is attracted to us, throughout our entire lives, regardless of any of the artificial categories we are referred to by during that time. In short, Eros is who we are originally, and sex just the mating default aspect of Eros. We often make the mistake today of thinking of anything “erotic” as in terms of “sexual” feelings, but in the view I am exploring sex is but an aspect of Eros… and while that can take many forms, it is worth the time trying to understand and offer it in the refined ways that understand our masculinity and femininity within their own contexts first, and how “teaching only love” as now deceased popular psychologist Wayne Dyer used to write about can make the better kind of world… the Gift of Christmas… all the time… working to develop a more Holy Spirit (attitude) of genuine empathy, respect and responsibility… as I do think Jesus may have been able to learn and was trying to share, given the contexts he had to work through at the time, and parables to say what he just couldn’t say directly without evoking meanings he wasn’t.

I hope this beginning of an explanation helps you see the view a little better, Robert. I’m putting together the early stoics attempts to create more Utopian (heavenly) way to organize (civilizational programmings) ourselves with Jesus attempts to refine not only his own background group of Hebrews, but all Humanity from basing our lives on fear and attack to “THE WAY” (what his gatherings called themselves before others, 30 years after Jesus called the “Christians”) which was based on living trust and working to understand each other. As you might imagine, I’m trying to write a book on the subject, and will keep you posted as to my progress in presenting it along with the good I believe it can do us all.

Hi Robert:
No, Kathy Gaca doesn’t make the direct connection between the Greek philosophers posing refinements to everyone’s Eros activities as laughable and something Jesus was trying to enlighten us about directly, much later. But that particular book is eminently worthy of any Truth Seeker’s efforts to trace how we started with emotional freedom as males, but have ended up, as Rousseau so famously put it, “born free, yet everywhere we are in chains” whether we recognize them or not (ref. also Plato’s story of the Cave as evidence of the kind of discrepancy many were trying to examine early human perceptions and worth finding just what tipped the scales in the other direction.) Ms Gaca points out many interesting facts with such an abundance of research and citations that only a dedicated student can fully appreciate the work that must have been put in to unearth it. Another interesting factoid she brings up is the early misconception the Pythagoreans posed about trying to regulate our ejaculations because they ignorantly if well intentionedly thought the semen had “tiny babies” in it, and that, in their early attempts to figure out how females got pregnant, may have recognized the vehicle, but not what was delivered. It lends a bit more clarity to why the early church chose to turn masturbation into a (man-made) sin, though that too is very difficult to trace, and many of the Catholic Religious I’ve advanced the question to either can’t or won’t say when the church first made that a mortal sin. As far as I can tell it is thought to “always have been that way” but most probably by people who never were allowed to see it any other way… either from the Pythagoreans mistaken views, or as a morph of Diogenes trying to take that Public and being severely criticized for offending most. This is quite an extensive topic, but Kathy does bring up Zeno and Chrysippus some of the earliest and most genuinely Stoic of the Stoic Philosophers and how they were trying to suggest communal living that shared all the women and young with all the men as one of the earlier attempts to organize humanity into a more utopian community. Fast forward to the “gatherings” of Jesus followers, later, as the Mass (gathering) of the catechumens (learners to specific understandings needed to join the group) vs the Mass of the Faithful (those ready to share all, together with each other) for the hopefully Utopian or heavenly kind of result, and the two seem to have sound possible connections worth searching into more deeply than to just accept current perceptions of church leaders) which brings up another quite interesting piece in the puzzle of Jesus ministry… (see new topic)