Rome meaning

Meaning

Teat, Udder: Infantile, Primitive

Collective Strength, Flow, Fluency, Uttering

Exalted But Deceived

Etymology

From ruma, teat, udder (or throat).

From ρωμη (rome), strength, or ρεω (rheo), to flow, or ερεω (ereo), to fluently utter.

From רום (rum), to be high, and/or רמה (rama), to be deceived.

Related names

• Via רום (rum): Abiram, Abram, Adoniram, Ahiram, Amram, Aram, Aramean, Aram-maacah, Aram-naharaim, Aram-zobah, Arimathea, Armageddon, Armoni, Arni, Arumah, Beth-haram, En-rimmon, Gath-rimmon, Hadadrimmon, Hadoram, Hiram, Huram-abi, Jarmuth, Jehoram, Jeremai, Jeremoth, Jerimoth, Joram, Jorim, Malchiram, Paddan-aram, Ram, Ramah, Ramath-lehi, Ramath-mizpeh, Ramoth, Ramoth-negev, Rephan, Reumah, Rimmon, Rimmon-methoar, Rimmono, Rimmon-perez, Romamti-ezer, Rumah, Shemiramoth, Tabrimmon

• Via רמה (rama): Jeremiah, Meremoth, Mirmah, Ramathaim-zophim, Ramiah

In the New Testament, the name Ρωμη (Rhome), or Rome, occurs 8 times. The nominal adjective Ρωμαιος (Rhomaios), or Roman, occurs an additional 12 times. The adjective Ρωμαικος (Romaikos), or Roman (referring to the Roman language, i.e. Latin), occurs once, in Luke 23:38. The adverb Ρομαιστι (Romaisti), or Romanly (referring to something written in the Roman way, i.e. Latin) occurs once, in John 19:20 only. For all these 22 occurrences, see full concordance.

Today the city of Rome is the capital of Italy, but in the classical world of the Bible, there was only Rome, the city-state whose territory and influence radiated out from its eponymous core city. As such, Rome became the symbol of global governance — and Julia, as in Romeo and Julia, the free-spirited social culture embodied by a young maiden whom the waxing government (Romeo) sincerely woes and diligently avoids to violate, stifle or tempt into doing something foolish. The same perilous relationship exists between the cross-slash-government-bearing Christ (Isaiah 9:6) and his battered Bride (Revelation 19:7).

The Roman Empire (from 27 BC onward) emerged out of the Roman Republic (from 509 BC onward), which in turn came out of the Roman Kingdom (from the founding of the city of Rome in 753 BC according to legend). Rome's celebrated founders, Romulus and Remus, descended from Aeneas, a prince of Troy and survivor of the famous battle of Troy, which took place around the same time that Moses led Israel out of Egypt. This suggests that both Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid review the same happenings as the Torah does, and the obvious differences between these great foundational texts are due only to the differing perspectives of the cultures in which these stories crystalized.

The Book of Genesis was finalized in the 6th century BC, when Rome was about to abandon its monarchy and begin to partake in the great Republican experiment from which our modern world emerged; see our article on παρθενος (parthenos), Virgin.

Genesis tells how the patriarch Abraham emerged as first of a global people, quite alike Jesus would much later, received amidst the peoples of an old and dark reality as a herald of an unstoppable enlightenment (Genesis 12:3). Significantly, Abraham's brother Nahor (whose name means Strength, rather like the noun ρωμη, rome; see below) had a wife named Milcah (means queen or monarchy) and a concubine named Reumah — in Hebrew: ראומה; in the Greek Septuagint: Ρευμα and in the Latin Vulgate: Roma (Genesis 22:24).

Closely similar to the name Reumah is the name Ramah, which belongs to the place where Rachel was buried. The prophet Jeremiah famously connected Ramah with Rachel weeping over her children (Jeremiah 31:15) and Matthew applied this prophecy to Herod's genocide of the children of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:18). Herod, of course, was an Edomite by descent but a loyal client king of Rome.

In our article on the name Philippi we point out:

There is as much resemblance between the Biblical story of Noah and the epic of Gilgamesh as there is between the story of Romulus and Remus and that of Cain and Abel — note the expulsion theme that dominates both stories, the defining act of fratricide, and the detail that Romulus turned into Quirinus, which probably means spear, as does the name Cain (see our article on the name Quirinius).

In our article on the names Silas (and Silvanus and Silvia), we note:

The name Rhea Silvia belongs to the birth mother of Romulus and Remus (by rapist father Mars), who were set adrift on the Tiber and subsequently saved by an accommodating she-wolf and raised by a shepherd couple.

All this obviously follows the same key points (albeit forming different connect-the-dots patterns) as the Bible does, from tree-filled Paradise to the Virginal mother (whose name Mary may also have served to comment on the Marian Reforms, after Gaius Marius, after Mars), the formative infant on the waters (God's creative Spirit, Noah, Moses, Jesus walking), to the righteous shepherd and man's-best-friend-theme (from Joshua's friend Caleb to Jesus' Hellas).

As we discuss at length in our article on the name Hellas, the ancients reviewed the evolution of consciousness (which largely coincides with the evolution of writing — see our article on the name YHWH) in terms of the evolution of agriculture, with the Hebrews inventing the "farm" of mass literacy, and the derivation of the Greek and Latin alphabets from the original Hebrew one as the domestication of various farm animals from their wild forbears, so that the Iliad is rather about the advent of the Greek alphabet, and the Aeneid about the Latin one.

More precise: the alphabet allowed peoples to preserve their narrative legacies, which factually defined their collective identities (see Psalm 16:10), which in turn greatly improved the formation of their living and waxing cultures. In other words, the alphabet did for human societies what DNA did for organic bodies. This means that the legend of the battle of Troy tells much rather of the battle between social legacies than between physical armies. Likewise, the Torah's story of the Exodus much rather speaks of the derivation of the proto-alphabet from the dominant hieroglyphic notation, and its subsequent break out and ultimate victory, than about the departure of 600,000 physical men and their families and cattle.

Despite obvious topological concurrence, there is no obvious paint-by-number correlation between the Latin, Greek and Hebrew mythical libraries, but in general and on average, the Hebrew library represents the Adamic Farmer, extended into Abel the Shepherd and perpetuated in Seth. The Greek language and its narrative corpus is then the dog — κυων (kuon) — who assists the Shepherd to herd animals that do know their shepherd and merely need to be guided from up front (sheep; προβατον, probaton), whereas Latin is the dog that herds animals that don't know their herders and have to be forcibly driven from behind (pigs; see χοιρος, choiros). Hence Hebrew emphasizes wisdom, social unity and practical functionality, Greeks emphasize ελευθερια (eleutheria), or freedom-by-law (more on this below), and the Romans emphasize obedience to a violent state.

Rome is often seen as the quintessential nemesis of the Body of Christ — Rome was obsessed with law and insisted on total submission to the Caesar and the State, whereas Christ insists on personal sovereignty and submission only to the Creator — which made some authors equate Rome with Gehenna and the emperor with satan. That obviously leads to some theoretical challenges (see our article on Augustus), but still, the existential tension between Rome and Jew (between centralized empire and free individual) was revisited in the 20th century, when Hitler based the house style of his Nazi empire on that of the Romans. The only real difference between Augustus and Hitler is that Augustus won.

The name Rome is hugely old, and its actual origin will likely continue to elude scientific certainty. Still, probably the best bet is the Etruscan term ruma-x, meaning "one from [the] Ruma", where Ruma was the name of an important Etruscan tribe. This tribal name (or gens) in turn had probably something to do with the name Rumon, of the river now called Tiber. This name Rumon was probably related to an Etruscan term that meant udder or teat, which in turn may have been imported from an earlier language (say, Umbrian), and was ultimately passed onto Latin to become ruma, udder.

In the waxing Latin basin, our word ruma was met by (or perhaps yielded) the identical noun ruma, an alternate form of rumen, meaning throat, from which comes the verb ruminor, to chew over again (hence our English word ruminant), and, significantly, the verb ruminatio, to mull over in one's mind, to rethink, to contemplate. All this is significant in a Biblical context, because chewing the cud was one of two qualities that defined kosher animals (Leviticus 11:3). Ruminus was an epithet of Jupiter, and its feminine counterpart, namely Rumina, was the goddess of nursing mothers. The Roman historian Livy notes that Romulus and Remus were set on the overflowing waters of the Tiber and subsequently saved by the famously lactating she-wolf, there "where the fig-tree Ruminalis — formerly, they say, called Romularis — now stands" (History of Rome, I.1.4). And see our article on συκη (suke), meaning fig tree, for a look at the profundity of the fig tree this foundational scene.

All this also means that the name Galatian (possibly from γαλα, gala, milk) may in some way have been used as synonym of Roman — in the sense that both may mean milk-boy or infantile; the familiar term "land of milk and honey" refers to two stages of learning: milk is for beginners and honey for grown-ups (see this honey-part explained in our article on the name Deborah, the judge who was seated near Ramah).

Since Rome was probably originally named after the river on whose banks it was built, see our article on the name Tigris for a discussion of the importance of rivers in the story of the evolution of human consciousness.

However, just like a rose would smell as sweet by any other name, so is there a huge difference between the formal origin of any name, and the meaning of this name in a subsequent story. For all we know, the name Rome may ultimately have originated in the Neanderthal word for Tiny Gnat, but was preserved by the next tenants of the valley because it sounded like the word for Great Bull in their own, completely unrelated language.

Ancient stories are not preserved because of their origin (or else we would still have all Julius Caesar's writings, which we don't) but rather because these stories continuously rang bells with audiences, who subsequently demanded their costly copies and referred to them in their own written reflections. The libraries of the ancients, including the Bible, were preserved solely by the merit of the continued appreciation of the market at large; they are, quite literally, mankind's Greatest Hits. The name Rome, likewise, was preserved not because of its actual etymology but because of what it continuously meant to peoples, even in their own languages. If the name of Rome hadn't been very profound to whoever ruled it, or was ruled by it, it would certainly have been changed.

As noted above, the mother of Romulus was called Rhea Silvia, whose name Rhea relates to the verb ρεω (rheo), meaning to flow, significantly both of water and of words. This duality is not simply a cute coincidence. Particularly the Hebrew language sports a clear and deliberate connection between the hydrological cycle — mist rises from the sea and forms clouds that rain over land and in turn make rivers that flow back to the sea — and human cognition: see our article on the verb נהר (nahar), which means both to flow (what rivers do) and to shine (what lamps and stars do).

Or in other words: every time the Bible mentions mist (e.g. Genesis 2:6), clouds (hence Jesus' ascension and return), rivers (hence baptism) or seas, it's actually saying something about human mentality and cognition:

Nobody in a Greek audience would have missed the fact that the name Rome is identical to the noun ρωμη (rome), strength or might, but would with equal confidence have associated the sort of strength conveyed by our noun to strength that comes in numbers: collective or bundled strength, the strength of a fast-flowing stream or strong-blowing wind.

The noun ρημα (rema), meaning a fluent verbal uttering, is used 69 times in the New Testament: see full concordance. Its -μα-part is a common Greek suffix that makes a noun that describes the result or instance of the action of the verb: a verbal flowing. This Greek suffix in turn derives from a similar PIE one, meaning that the name Rome reminded of a flowing of words to most speakers of most Indo-European languages — particularly also those who knew the story of Rhea Silvia, which was pretty much everybody when Rome had become an ever expanding republic.

Our verbs ρεω (rheo), to flow (both of water and of words and thus of mind), and ερεω (ereo), to verbally convey, are part of a widely attested Proto-Indo-European root "srew-", meaning to flow or stream. This root "srew-" in turn appears to descend from a parent root "ser-", which also means to flow (hence the Latin serum). Significantly, because of the appearance in the various Indo-European languages of several distinct clusters of meanings, described by words that are all clearly based on the basic "ser-" element, several additional but identical PIE roots "ser-" have been proposed: roots with general meanings of to guard, to bind, to serve (hence our English words servant and to serve), even to take or grasp or steal and plunder.

Here at Abarim Publications we doubt that all these Indo-European words indeed stem from a cluster of up to five different but identical PIE roots. Instead, we surmise that all these meanings were expressed in one single idea: namely that of a convergence of dynamic elements and particularly the aligning of the momentums of these elements: whether air-molecules that jointly become wind (and in Greek and Hebrew, the words for wind are also the word for spirit: רוח, ruah and πνευμα, pneuma), or rain drops that become water flowing within river banks (the word מורה, moreh, means both rain and teacher, and stems from the same verb as the familiar word Torah), or thoughts flowing within a language's verbal definitions, or men aligning within social codes and pooling their various resources into a culture.

Rome wasn't named after some local trickle, but after social convergence, after the vast reserves of buried strength that resurrects when men submit to common law and so bundle their forces and resources. Even language arises only when men stop simply vocalizing their own concerns, like howling hounds, and begin to carefully listen to the sounds their neighbors make, so as to imitate them and synchronize with them and finally arrive at a shared way to call things. All words are agreements, and words can only be achieved when vast populations begin to mentally contract like interstellar clouds and seek for a common center of mental gravity. This social contraction, this collective seeking for a common center, is of course expressed by the word love — not personal or romantic love but humanistic or general love: the αγαπη (agape) described 1 Corinthians 13

Particularly when the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire, Rome didn't simply promote a natural social convergence by means of love, but tried to forcibly compress society by violence and seduction, which only increased social pressures and ultimately caused its demise. The defining apparatus of Rome essentially revisited the proverbial Tower of Babel, which is why John the Revelator equated Rome with Babylon (Revelation 18:2, also see Habakkuk 1:6-11). Contrarily, the social convergence that will cause the descent of the New Jerusalem to earth's surface is based on ελευθερια (eleutheria), or freedom-by-law, which is a liberty of action by merit of a mastery of the rules (more on this below).

Alphabetic writing began to arise in the administrative servant class of the great palatial estates of the late Bronze Age, and the Bronze Age Collapse was most probably helped along by the shift in power away from the illiterate rulers and toward the literate administrators. Post-collapse, the formidable efforts of these alphabetic pioneers were completed in the Hebrew alphabet — that is the Phoenician abjad augmented with vowel notation; see our article on YHWH — and from the Hebrew alphabet came the Greek and Latin ones. Throughout the final millennium before Christ, Hebrew was the linga franca of the world's wisdom class, whereas Greek and Latin were the vulgar languages of the masses, patiently domesticated and endowed with their own alphabets (sit! heel! roll over!) by their Hebrew shepherds.

It's not often enough emphasized but every language has innate intelligence, and acts like a kind of autonomous beast within a much larger ecosystem of living languages (see Daniel 10:20-21). Every language consists of etymological webs and associations that informs the mind that speaks and thinks in that language. Said otherwise: certain leaps of intuition are more natural to a mind that ponders in Hebrew than a mind that ponders in Latin. This is one of the reasons why nearly half of the Nobel Prizes go to people of Jewish descent: their mind and subconsciousness run on verbal software that is vastly more intelligent than any other language.

During the first millennium after Christ, Hebrew remained one of the academic languages but now competed with Latin and Greek. This was not because the Greek and Latin languages had become equal animals, but because Greek and Latin lacked the innate intelligence to recognize the superiority of Hebrew. Up to our modern times, Semitic (Hebrew, Arabic and algebraic notation) has remained the language of the world's actual farmers (Zechariah 8:23, Psalm 2:8, Isaiah 11:10), whereas Greek and Latin became the farmer's shepherd- and pig-dog, both creating their own realities within a much larger world, whose complexities and mechanisms neither comprehends.

Our name Rome, in Hebrew, clearly reminds of the extensive רום (rum) stock of words:

But our name equally clearly reminds of the רמה (rama) stock:

This means that to a Hebrew mind, the name Rome means both Exalted and Deceived, or even Exalting and Deceptive. This is quite remarkable because the Biblical name for Greece, namely Hellas, could likewise be interpreted as meaning both Enlightened (via הלל, halal, to shine) and Profaned (via חלל, halal, to profane). The criticism so expressed bears witness that the Hebrew shepherds appreciated the budding literacy of the very early Romans — the city of Rome came to pass by merit of the literacy of its ruling class — but warned that the mind that ran on Latin software could never be more than a useful pet in the global House of Jacob (and no, a world that's wholly Jewish is not a world solely peopled by Hasidic diamond merchants but a world that's wholly literate, wholly divorced from celestial cycles and scheduled upon a Sabbath-based calendar, and wholly impressed with the sanctity of γαμος, gamos, marriage, which also describes the relationship between God and man).

Also note the parallel between our name Rome and the noun רמון (rimmon), meaning pomegranate (see for a more extensive look at this word the full Dictionary article of the root רום, rum). Widely regarded as a fertility symbol (and possibly inspiring the symbol of the orb that represents the whole human cosmos), the pomegranate was introduced to Rome via Carthage. This is obviously significant because the alphabet came to Rome along the same route: via the Phoenician alphabet.

As we discuss in greater length in our article on the name Hannibal, the demise of the Roman Republic began with the Punic Wars, which in turn began with the deterioration of the twin-brotherly love between Rome and Carthage — the poets insisted that these two great cities were indeed founded in the same year 753 BC, which may seem like a great way to start, but which in fact connected these two cities to the very strong and ancient twin-legend that ultimately demanded the demise of one. This in turn may have prompted Cato to insist that Carthage, rather than Rome, was to be destroyed.

Crucially, Greek mythology (which was likewise imported to Rome to provide the basis of Roman mythology) related the pomegranate to the underworld (the number of seeds Persephone consumed determined the number of months she was to reside in the realm of the dead). The formation of the Roman Empire from the collapsed Roman Republic was described in terms of resurrection, and even the name Augustus relates the rebirth of the light and the return of agricultural life in the spring.

The Greek word for pomegranate is ροα (roa), which relates (whether formally or intuitively) to our verb ρεω (rheo), to flow. The final generation of the line of Cain is peopled by the brothers Jabal, Jubal and Tubal-cain (means global-Cain). These three names all come from the verb יבל (yabal), meaning to flow. Closely relate to these names, the noun יבול (yebul) denotes produce from the soil.

The name Rome is significant in several different languages, but tends to gravitate toward meanings that reflect the earliest beginnings of literacy, or rather the making of a cultural sophistication that relates to the Semitic culture the way a domestic dog relates to the humans whose house it serves.

In Latin and pre-Latin languages, the name Rome reminds of words for Teat and thus of Suckling, which places it in close proximity to the name Galatia, which relates to Greco-Roman words for milk (hence English words like galaxy and lactose).

In Greek, the name Rome is identical to the noun ρωμη (rome), Collective Strength, which in turn looks like it has to do with the verbs ρεω (rheo), to flow, and ερεω (ereo), to verbally convey. Noun ρημα (rema) means Uttering.

In Hebrew, the name Rome looks like it has to do with the verb רום (rum), to be High or to Elevate, but equally so with the verb רמה (rama), to be Deceived or to be a Deceiver.

Modern linguistic theory explains that speech and script literally change one's mind (Romans 12:2, Ephesians 4:23, Isaiah 40:31). When our eyes review our environment, our minds automatically attach words to the things we see, and that gives us a much more elaborate reflection on our world than when we would not have words. Indeed, our language puts our mind in an augmented reality, in all the VR sense of the word, with invisible labels popping up over items that explain to the user much more about the item that what can be directly seen. In other words: our environment is quite alike a text, and a mind that can't read this text doesn't pick up on the information in the text, whereas a mind that can read, sees the same text but also reaps all its information.

A language forms when very early humans can point at some visible item and compare what everybody calls that thing. That means that a natural spoken language has very few terms for things that cannot be pointed at because they are invisible because they are abstract (love, war, anger, loyalty, and so on). An abstract idea can only become a visible "object" when this abstract idea is manifested as a word written on paper. When an idea is a written word, it can be "pointed at" and so discussed and debated as if it were some object held in one's hand. Script makes invisible things as real as visible things. That in turn means that a literate person has a completely different mind than an illiterate person. The mind of a literate person is populated with thoughts about abstract things, and so a literate person lives in a wholly different world than an illiterate person (and of course any animal that has no language at all).

Jesus explained that prior to the flood, people "did not know" (Matthew 24:39), which also means that the flood describes the "drowning" of Unknowing Man in favor of Knowing Man. And if you are wondering how the patriarchs Jabal and Jubal, and Über-smith Tubal-cain could have survived the flood, so as to provide Israel with a life-saving Nehushtan and a bronze-filled Tent of Meeting, compare Genesis 6:19-20 to Jude 1:10.

The only reference to writing in Homer speaks of "fatal tokens; many murderous signs incised in a folded tablet" (Il.6.169), and in the same vein, Paul speaks of "the ministry of death in letters engraved on stones" and further submitted that "the letter kills" (2 Corinthians 3:6-7).

All this relates the pomegranate to alphabetic writing, and both to the rise of the culture that would culminate in the city of Rome.

When Paul called Timothy his true child in the Faith (1 Timothy 1:2) and Titus his son in the Common Faith (Titus 1:4), he wasn't referring to 21st century Christianity. Said otherwise, modern Christians may generously imagine Paul's Common Faith to be on a solid par with their own creeds and religious leanings, but no, it isn't. Not by a long shot.

Probably the first point we need to make is that the word Christian — χριστιανος (christianos) — means "under Christ" and not "in Christ" (see our article on the name Christian(ity) for a lengthy explanation of this). The difference may seem subtle but change the name "Christ" for "Noah's ark" and the distinction becomes urgently clear.

Christ is not a name but a title and it was never reserved for Jesus. The word Christ is a fairly common word which means Anointed and which occurs all over Greek versions of the Old Testament, as the common synonym for Jewish King. This word Christ is a translation of the Hebrew word Messiah, which also means Anointed and which also, simply, is a synonym for the rightful Jewish King. That means that in Biblical times, the word Christian described someone who identified with a subjection to a rightful Jewish king only, and thus automatically someone who rejected Roman domination.

In Biblical times, the word Christian described someone of strong nationalistic and probably violent leanings, someone who wanted a Jewish king on the Jewish throne, and make Judea autonomous from the Roman empire. Jesus actively avoided these people (John 6:15), and the followers of Jesus were doubtlessly shocked and frustrated to be confused with them (this confusion started in Antioch and lasts until today; Acts 11:26).

There is a huge difference between being in Christ, under Christ, or nowhere near Christ. This difference is not subtle or even complicated, but let's have a closer look at it:

Our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ, the founder and perfecter of our Faith (Hebrews 12:2), is the perfect image of the Creator (Hebrews 1:3, Colossians 1:19), whose qualities and character are recognized by studying physical reality (Romans 1:20). In Christ are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3), meaning that Christ, like the God he is the image of, is not in any way divided or limited. Subsequently, the devotion to Christ by his followers, likewise, is not in any way divided or limited, and thus certainly not represented by any religion: not Christianity, not Judaism, not Islam, not even something as vague as Theism, Atheism, Humanism, Philosophy, Science or even something vaguer still, like masculinity or femineity, mastery or submission, kosher or goy (Galatians 3:28, Colossians 3:11).

Instead, Jesus Christ, and the subsequent Body of Christ in whom Jesus Christ (the perfect image of the Creator) is incarnate, rather embodies all knowledge about everything — absolutely positively everything — preceding all of created reality (John 1:3), filling all of created reality (Ephesians 4:10) and keeping all of created reality together (Colossians 1:17). In Christ everything is summed up (Ephesians 1:10) and Christ, subsequently, gives understanding in everything (2 Timothy 2:7).

When Paul spoke of the Common Faith, he meant the mastery of the knowledge of everything about everything, a mastery that results in a freedom-in-everything; a freedom that is comparable to a freedom-of-speech that follows from a mastery of (and adherence to) the common rules of language, or a freedom-to-jam that follows from a mastery of (and adherence to) the common rules of music, or a freedom to drive anywhere in our modern towns that follows from a mastery of (and adherence to) the common rules of traffic.

Mastery of (and adherence to: John 15:10) the law that describes absolutely everything gives freedom in absolutely everything (James 2:12).

Paul preached the Gospel of Freedom (see Galatians 5:1 and 2 Corinthians 3:17). The Greeks called this kind of freedom ελευθερια (eleutheria), or Freedom-By-Law, and revered it as the democratic ideal.

Jesus traced his biological descent solely through Mary, who was a close cousin of Elizabeth (Luke 1:36), who was a Levite (Luke 1:5). This means that Jesus, physically, was a Levite, not a Jew, which is fortunate, or else Jesus could not have been a High Priest. Yet, Jesus clearly traced his "human nature" through Joseph, David and Judah (Romans 1:3), even though none of these had physically anything to do with Jesus. The solution to this conundrum is that "human nature" is a legal matter, not a biological matter. And this also explains Jesus' dual genealogy — via Solomon (Matthew 1:6), as well as via Nathan (Luke 3:31), which is impossible in a biological sense but not in a legal sense.

Biologically, a human is a beast (Psalm 49:20, 73:22, Ecclesiastes 3:18, 2 Peter 2:12, Jude 1:10) and one becomes human only when one embraces the principle of law in the most general sense, including law of language and social codes; any kind of algorithmic mentality that allows a formal assessment of invisible realities and thus a calculated predictability of future states (Hebrews 11:1). Better yet: only the here-and-now can be observed, and all else is abstract, and thus literally non-existent to creatures that have no law or language. Only languages have past and future tenses. And that means that lawless animals literally only have a present, and the past and future are populated only by beings-of-law (which is also why Abel "still speaks, even though he is dead"; Hebrews 11:4, see Matthew 22:32).

Luke explains all this with one word, when he declares that Joseph was Jesus' father-by-law (Luke 3:23). In this statement, Luke uses the word νομιζω (nomizo), meaning to "legalize" in the sense of to make a matter of law (which is empirical: true in a statistical or algorithmic way). This verb comes from the noun νομος (nomos), meaning law.

Paul preached the Gospel of Freedom-By-Law, of wisdom and mastery, of autonomy and sovereignty, of being able to govern the entire human cosmos (and even the animal world; Romans 8:19, Colossians 1:23) through an intimate familiarity with (and thus a being one with) the Logos, having a complete understanding of how everything works — not by any single individual (except Jesus himself) but as a collective, a Body that is alive with the breath and mind of Jesus (1 Corinthians 2:16); a living collective of sovereigns who together know everything (1 John 2:27), and who are able to retrieve all insight about anything at all from the minds of others, through the deploy of utter mental discipline and social protocol based on love and entire devotion.

Paul did not preach Christianity (or Judaism, or Humanism, or Science); he preached Universal Mastery. When men first began to call upon YHWH (Genesis 4:26), they first rejected polytheism and acknowledged that the universe is governed by a single perfect Law, which perfectly reflects the nature of the Creator, who is One. Calling upon YHWH begins with the understanding that creation is a so-called closed system (that's the first law of thermodynamics), in which all elements always work together into a unified whole, that can be known and thus predicted by those in the know (Romans 8:28).

Abraham's celebrated righteousness stemmed from his understanding that this Oneness, which is described by this unified Law, can be consciously known by man, because of which man can know all of creation, and thus the Creator. And this is where the formal dialogue between God and man commenced, when the Word of God came to Abraham and began to speak intelligently with him, and informed him of qualities of a predictable future (Genesis 15:1).

In Abraham, this formal dialogue begins, and in Jesus, this formal dialogue completes. In Jesus, the Word of God, and thus the whole of creation and thus the Creator Himself, is entirely known (John 1:18).

The Bible is a multi-dimensional fractal matrix, and (quite like the universe), both compressible into a singularity (Matthew 7:12) and expandable into an infinite library (John 21:25). The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the apex of all knowledge and is comparable to the summit of a mountain: it matters not from which side we climbed the mountain, or from which valley we started. All that matters is that we arrived there, and are able to embrace everybody who too has arrived there, from whatever side, from whatever valley (Psalm 2:6, 3:4, Matthew 17:1).

Love is certainly not some private and mushy feeling but "whatever it is" that results in spontaneous (i.e. unforced and natural) social convergence; whatever it is that impels isolated tribes of cavemen to reach out to their neighbors, shake hands, form languages, build towns and finally attain citizenship in heaven (Philippians 3:20). Since the Big Bang, creation has diverged and will go on until the Heat Death (that's the second law of thermodynamics). Love results in a convergence (which starts with the formation of DNA and the subsequent generation of life), which is an apparent contradiction of creation's signature divergence, but a confirmation that Love indeed conquers Death (John 3:16, 2 Timothy 1:10, Revelation 1:18).

Love is "whatever it is" that calls people out of their natural state of spiritual diaspora (see our article on the name Nazareth), and directs them into unity. Love made very early man give up his study of war (Isaiah 2:4), and greet strangers like kin (Leviticus 19:34, Matthew 25:35). Love is what resulted in spoken language first and then script, and what will finally result in an utterly unified mankind: a global Body of Christ, which is the perfect image of the Creator (Revelation 21:22), who is One (Deuteronomy 6:4).

This is why Love believes all things (1 Corinthians 3:7), why God is Love (1 John 4:8), and why Christ, like Love, fulfils the law (Romans 13:8-10, Matthew 5:17-19).

And that means that someone who is incapable of algorithmic thought — someone who does not understand what law is, or how it works; someone who is therefore incapable of rational and predictive thought and thus thinks, like any animal, in private and emotional and immediate terms — is incapable of beginning to understand what the fulfillment of law might be all about, namely a Love and Peace that transcend all knowledge and comprehension (Ephesians 3:19, Philippians 4:7).

And this (long story short) means that the Gospel of Jesus Christ cannot be understood, let alone accepted, by people who have no concept of Law and lawfulness — i.e. algorithmic thought, which is thought based on rules that result in an identical reality every time, and so allow predictability and a unification by communication. People who have no concept of Law and lawfulness accept "governance" from their private emotions or imaginary herds of warring deities who can't even make peace and harmony in their own realms, let alone in the realm of man. Law and lawfulness is the syntax of the Gospel, the plowed acre in which the Gospel can be sown. Without law there is no fulfilment of law, and so, evangelists must first teach lawfulness before they can teach the Gospel.

God and man meet in the Holy of Holies (Exodus 25:22), and Jesus is our High Priest (Hebrews 2:17). The court immediately surrounding the temple building was the Priestly Court, which was the court for temple servants who were already fluent in law. Outside the outer wall of the Priestly Court, but within the outermost wall of the Temple complex at large, was the Outer Court (Ezekiel 42:14, Revelation 11:2), or the Court of the Gentiles, and see this important term "gentile" explained in our article on εθνος (ethnos), meaning nation, tribe or people; a term that obviously also includes Israel, since Israel was obviously also allowed on the Outer Court. This Outer Court is from where Jesus drove the corrupt sellers and money changers (Matthew 21:12-16, John 2:13-25).

The Holy of Holies housed the perfect Law, and there the Law was fulfilled (where God meets man, which is what Jesus personifies). Outside the outermost wall of the Temple complex was the lawless world — where humans were like animals, wholly emotional and wholly in the here and now, unable to hope for a particular future or learn from the past. And in between these two extremes was a stepped spectrum: the Sanctuary and Inner Court were populated by lawful people, and the Outer Court was populated by people who had decided to abandon the darkness of lawlessness but who still were not wholly up to snuff with what law is, what is does and what it might accomplish — and what it can't accomplish, namely its own fulfilment, which is what most of us have known since Paul and the rest of us since Kurt Gödel.

In the Outer Court, aspiring proselytes were exposed to various crafts and teachings (compare Nehemiah 8:8 with Ezra 10:9 or 1 Esdras 9:38) but also to complex economy — not only a buying and selling (instead of bartering) but also the ever volatile equivalency of currencies in accordance with the estimated values of these currencies' native economies (which in turn required a vast intelligence network). Obviously, the wonderful world of information-carried-by language works in many ways the same as the world of value-carried-by-money (Psalm 12:6, Revelation 3:18).

To the authors of the New Testament, the city of Rome was merely the latest instalment of the eternal capital of the eternal Outer Court: the nexus of the whole flow of human economy (hence the Brazen Sea, 1 Kings 7:23-26, which in section 2 of the Midrash Tadshe is indeed equated with "the world" at large). Proverbially called Babylon the Great (Revelation 17:5), this eternal capital had begun to form nearly immediately after the Great Flood in the character of Nimrod, the proverbial "mighty hunter before YHWH" (Genesis 10:8-10). This Mighty Hunter (from צוד, sud, to hunt or fish; making Nimrod the original "fisher of men") had originally functioned faithfully as a ramp toward the Inner Court, so as to guide its pilgrims onto the Temple itself, but had since then become a little too happy with his job. Seeing how the lost tend to cling to their saving guide, and with a little insisting could be made to believe that the guide was the actual attraction, the Mighty Hunter became a usurper; its emperor once the servant of YHWH (Jeremiah 25:9) but now his enemy (Isaiah 14:12).

The Outer Court had once heralded the Great Light to come (Isaiah 9:2, Psalm 96:8, Ezekiel 28:15-16), but had since then become a merciless fly-trap, from which only the lawfully perfect could emerge (Matthew 23:13). Later keepers of the Outer Court had pointed out the folly of this, and had begun to offer consolatory diversions and entertainment, which made one's stay in the Outer Court all the more enjoyable but which also made the gate to the Inner Court ever smaller and harder to find (Matthew 7:13-14). In our modern times, the school is no longer a boot camp but has become a pleasure garden, and once in, very few have the resolve to press on (John 14:6). The quest for the Inner Gate has slipped out of vogue and The Way has become forgotten (Isaiah 6:9, 2 Timothy 3:7).

For the two millennia between Augustus and Hitler, the whole world was Roman, and the Narrow Gate to the Temple was hidden from plain sight. That time is over now.

The eternal Christ, and the subsequent Body of Christ, is the Temple and Inner Court; the unified formal knowledge of everything about everything. Roman Christianity is the Temple's Outer Court: a place under Christ but not in Christ, where pilgrims know of Christ but don't know Christ, and receive training in matters of lawfulness from the Anointed priests (Exodus 19:6, Psalm 105:15) who know Christ and are in Christ and venture out of their own inner court to serve the pilgrims outside (Psalm 84:10). Or at least, that was the idea. Contrary to the idea, violent men killed the priests of Christ, boarded up the Way Further In, declared themselves the world's shepherds, and reinstated the beastly lawlessness of the outer darkness.

Roman Christianity began when in the 4th century AD, Roman politicians demanded a god that they could see (Exodus 32:1), began to shop around for relics and inaugurated a descent from the summit of collective but singular omniscience (that's Christ and the Body of Christ, the actual Temple) back down into the valley of limitations and factions and competition. Their first massive blunder was to forge a breach away from the Judaistic traditions that had formed and will forever explain the Scriptures like a proper language of imagery and metaphors. The result was an understanding of the Bible in some absurd "literal" way (while to those who actually knew the Word, the Bible remained a multi-dimensional fractal matrix, infinite in its every direction).

The Bible insists that men should not try to paraphrase or summarize the miracle of the living and active Revelation (Hebrews 4:12, Deuteronomy 4:2, Revelation 22:18-19, Proverbs 30:5-6, Matthew 5:17-19), at least not in some other way than the compression submitted by the Word itself (Matthew 7:12 and 22:36-40). But since they did not understand the Scriptures (Matthew 22:29), they drafted their creeds, catechisms and statements of faith, and so blatantly violated the First Commandment (Exodus 20:4).

The people who truly were in Inner-Court Christ were forced to withdraw from Outer-Court Christianity. These were the people who knew that there is no difference between:

1. A man who looks out over the living world, sees the might of a bull and attempts to capture this power by making a statue of that bull, static and void of dynamic context, and
2. A man who looks into the living Scriptures, sees the might of a word or statement and attempts to capture this power by making a creed of that word, static and void of dynamic context.

The people of the Inner-Court knew that there is no such thing as Salvation By Creed, and when Outer-Court Christianity breached from its Inner-Court Jewish roots, it reverted to the tribal idolatry and polytheistic paganism of Roman Imperial Theology.

The next fatal blunder of Christianity was to allow a separation of state and church, as if such a thing were ever possible. In Christ is all knowledge of statecraft and thus all government — and that's the whole point. The mastery of the Way Things Work allows the Body of Christ to govern the entire cosmos, righteously and fairly (Psalm 8:6, Isaiah 9:6, Luke 12:32, 1 Corinthians 6:2, Revelation 20:4). Christianity, now relieved of the "burden" of statecraft, went on to rule a make-belief kingdom with paper crowns. Those in Christ who actually possessed knowledge of statecraft mournfully withdrew and watched in horror as violent and ignorant men appropriated the world's thrones, and turned the global economy into a den of robbers, enslaving whoever came to study lawfulness.

Humanity is saved through Faith (Ephesians 2:8), which comes from hearing the Word of Christ (Romans 10:17). The purpose of salvation is not (as is often suggested) so that the thus privileged get to float off into heavenly bliss while the botched and bungled get to burn in hell after a lifetime of being exploited. Instead, the purpose of salvation is to be useful here-and-now: to go into the world, and while tending and feeding the individual lambs, make disciples out of the nations (Matthew 28:19). Indeed, the Body of Christ is not charged with making disciples out of all human individuals, but out of the world's governments, so that the world's governments are the disciples of Christ that shepherd the sheep of their pastures. Hence the Lord made Abraham the father of a multitude of nations (Genesis 17:4). He promised to shake all nations, with the coming of the desire of all nations (Haggai 2:7; see Psalm 2:1 and Revelation 21:26). And the Lord restored access to the Tree of Life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations (Revelation 22:2).

People who are happy about the separation of church and state obviously understand neither.

If we skip the subsequent crusades and the invention of modern banking by the Knights Templar (the sectarian collective that comprised up to 50 Jewish and Arabic administrators for every one actual Christian knight, who was mostly illiterate and largely clueless), the next fatal blunder of Christianity came with the advent of the printing press, and specifically in the understanding that there was a difference between religious or godly writings, and worldly or ungodly writings. There isn't, of course. All writing is godly — even, and especially, extra-Biblical stories such as that of Jannes and Jambres, which Paul specifically mentions in 2 Timothy 3:8 so as to make sure that nobody thinks he's talking about Canonized Scriptures only.

Words don't grow on trees, and alphabetic script allows ordinary people to ponder abstractions all the way up to God, the ultimate abstraction. As was painfully confirmed in our modern age by groups like Cambridge Analytica, all writings (i.e. all shared, bought and sold literature; all transacted documentation, pre-sifted, liked-and-disliked by the commercial market at large) tells us something about the great human cosmos, what goes on in the deepest crevices of the human soul, and what concerns the ordinary folks whom the Body of Christ has been equipped to blissfully govern. We know from Princeton's Global Consciousness Project that all minds, somehow, work together. That means that writers of imagined fiction probably (naturally and spontaneously) tap into humanity's collective subconsciousness. That means that mankind's collective truth crystalizes not so much in our academic and scientific libraries but rather in our fiction. Or said otherwise, only when we humans learn how to truly understand our fiction, we will truly understand our dreams (Daniel 2:30, Genesis 37:19, Matthew 1:20-21). Then all that was lost will be found, all stolen brought home, even every whispered word clearly heard (Matthew 12:36).

All living beings have the breath of life, and all writing is likewise God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16, see Genesis 2:7 and John 20:22). The Breath of God gives the People of Christ insight into the world of our beloved fellow humans, whom we are to domesticate, shepherd and feed (John 21:15). It's a cruel folly to demand that mere sheep should understand these things; shepherds are to understand these things, and they are to comfort those who mourn (Matthew 5:4). God gave the gift of faith to his shepherds, and the gift of shepherds to his sheep.

The next fatal blunder of Christianity was to allow a breach between science and religion. As if inspired revelation could ever be at odds with scientific confirmation! As if God would ever lie, one way or the other! As if Christ is divided! As if Gideon didn't test and retest (Judges 8:23), or king Solomon didn't teach about observable reality (1 Kings 4:33), or Paul did not insist to investigate all things and hold on to the good (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

Modern Christianity is an eviscerated husk, a multi-billion dollar feel-good farce put up by entertainers (Romans 2:24). People think that the depravity of Christianity hit rock bottom when church leaders began to sell indulgences in exchange for time-served in purgatory. But no, rock bottom is when people who earnestly seek salvation are promised salvation upon repeating some esoteric spell or undergoing some watery ritual, then encouraged to put their hope in candles and icons, and then are told to sit down and enjoy the show. Because no, we confess that "Jesus is Lord" (Romans 10:9) not by stating as much (or else any parrot could be saved), but by the total sum of all our words that continuously emerge from our resurrected hearts (Matthew 12:34): all of them and the whole of it. In Christ, the whole torrent of the continuous flow of all our uttered speaking always amounts to "Jesus is Lord". Likewise, we don't get baptized once, but continuously, in the streams of living water that flow without end from within all of us combined (John 7:38).

Everybody knows that "by grace we are saved and that not of ourselves" (Ephesians 2:5-8), but what very few emphasize is that the word used is χαρις (charis), meaning joy — not a private elation or internal feelings of ecstasy, but social felicity. Grace is a living the way a choir sings: collective, harmonious and wonderful. The covenant commenced in Abraham. His son was Isaac, which means He Will Cause Laughter. That's grace: collective joy and social felicity.

Despite its many lovely qualities, modern Christianity is largely pagan and largely inert, and in many ways wholly the same as the worship of Baal (means Lord) in the days of Elijah (compare 1 Kings 18:26 with Matthew 7:21).

When John the Baptist sent his disciples to investigate whether Jesus was the One or whether mankind would have to wait for the real Messiah (Matthew 11:3), Jesus didn't explode in anger, whip out a résumé or smite the unbelievers with fire from heaven. Instead, he calmly invited John's men to look around and see what was happening: the blind received sight [and were no longer blind], the lame walked [and were no longer lame], the lepers were cleansed [and were no longer leprous], the deaf heard [and were no longer deaf], the dead were raised up [and were no longer dead], and the poor had the gospel preached to them [and ... ?].

"Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also — and greater works than these he will do, because I go to the Father" (John 14:12).

A very simple test will determine whether you are truly saved and have actually entered the Body of Christ, or whether you are not at all saved and spend your Sunday mornings in a theatre to be deceived by entertainers. Here it goes:

If you know what needs to be done and don't depend on some higher-upper giving you instructions, and if you are continuously (24/7) surrounded by people who were once blind but can now see, or were once lame but can now walk, or were once leprous but are now healthy, or were once deaf but can now hear, or were once dead but are now alive, or were once hungry but are now well fed, or were once cold but now clothed, or were once despised and rejected but are now incorporated and enjoyed, or were once poor but are now active and productive members of a vibrant, transparent and just economy, and if you and your people continuously subject yourselves to the Scriptures (that combs through your thoughts the way a comb goes through hair) and have formed your own unique perspectives on the Scriptures, and speak to each other in Scripture quotes and songs, and help whoever you can wherever you can, regardless of anybody's creeds and allegiances, so that people from all over the place line up to be seen and healed by you — then you are in the Body of Christ.

If not, then not.

Fortunately for all of us, there is a movement growing in the world of churches who are sick and tired of ritualistic glorification of ignorance, of being mere islands of Sunday-morning pre-fab construction-kit Christianity, who have started to open their doors every day of the week and invite teachers to instruct their people in the basics of algorithmic (i.e. scientific) thought, economic theory, healthy lifestyles and communal living. Collective Bible studies no longer emphasize creed and dogma, but are driven by the joy of experiencing Scripture the way it is: eternal yet new every morning, radiantly living and always active, sorting thoughts like a comb does hair.

For the sheer joy of it, neighborhood study groups all over the world embrace classical Hebrew and Greek, complexity theory and information theory. People everywhere are getting to know the wonders of their neighboring communities. People are learning how to script and how to use blockchain and how to serve their societies by simply doing. Entire villages pool their resources and repair their own infrastructures. Oceans are getting cleaned and deserts have started to bloom. Instead of competing with their neighbors, folks have begun to invest in their neighbors. Whole hoods have begun to manage their own energy use and storage. They're turning basements and empty buildings into indoor farms. All over the world, churches are becoming oases of unifying thought, displacing conventional schools, companies and bodies of government. The walls are coming down! The prisoners are breaking out!

Mists are rising and clouds are gathering! All over the world the bells are ringing! Rome has fallen! The world is free, and thank God Almighty, she is alive and well!