I see. Well, in that case, the question would be: what was the interpretation of Christians before they split between Catholics and Orthodox Christians?
AND, as I mentioned before, what is the Jewish opinion, at least the "mainstreamed" one? Sorry for being annoying maybe, but I'm curious.
Well, first, the "different churches" point isn't just about the different denominations; it would also apply to different groups and individuals even within them. That goes for the time before the Catholic/Orthodox divide too. Don't forget that Christians have
always disagreed with each other about quite fundamental things, from New Testament times onwards. Also, the first great division within Christendom was not that between Catholic and Orthodox, but the fifth-century split between the Chalcedonian and the non-Chalcedonian churches, which were also split among themselves (Monophysites, Nestorians, etc).
Anyway, most Christians in that period would certainly have thought that the words attributed to God in the Old Testament were literally spoken by him (or at least on his behalf, perhaps by the Logos or by an angel). That went for the laws of Leviticus too. But most of them would have thought that these laws were not binding upon Christians, at least after the first century AD when Paul's views on this matter were definitive.
There were some who disagreed, though. The Marcionites believed that the God of the Old Testament was evil, and distinct from the loving God of the New Testament, so they rejected the Old Testament completely and removed the excessively Jewish bits from the New Testament. The Marcionite churches were popular and were still around in the fourth or fifth centuries, and perhaps even later. Many gnostics also believed something similar. So for these people, the laws of Leviticus would have been laid down by the evil or ignorant deity of the Old Testament, and not by the Christian God at all.
I'm afraid I can't tell you anything about Jewish interpretations, though.
And as for this Peter/James discussion (yes, I realize that discussion has gone into another direction but...) No one denies the fact that Jesus proclaimed Peter explicitly as a Pope of the newly estabilished Church, all written in NT, Matthew 16:18 and John 21, 15-16. ALL Christian churches consider them a saint and associate him with the foundation of Church in Rome, even if the differ on the significance of this and of the Pope in present-day Christianity.
I think an awful lot of people would deny that; the title "Pope" does not appear in any of the passages you mention, and the extent and nature of Peter's power is not fully specified in any of them. That's quite apart from the argument over the extent to which these passags apply to Peter's successors, of course. And finally, you can't be certain that these events took place at all. Certainly I think most scholars would be very dubious about the historicity of John 21 and I'm sure a lot would be about Matthew 16 too. So one could certainly deny that Jesus said anything like this to Peter, and even if one thought that he did, one could deny that he meant anything like what papal apologists have argued he did since the fourth century (it was Damasus I who first argued that Matthew 16:18 applied to all of Peter's successors at Rome).
1. I heard that both Zoroastranism(sp)? and Mitheraism(sp)? came from Persia. Is that true?
2. Which is older, Mitheraism or Zoatranism?
3. Are they related to each other in some way?
I don't know enough about it to say. However, the origins of Mithraism are highly debated by scholars. Basically, Mithraism is known to have existed from the late first or early second century AD until the fourth or fifth; it existed within the Roman empire and can be understood as one of the mystery religions. It was inspired by Persian religion to at least some extent. Mithras - the central figure of Mithraism - was based upon a Persian god called Mitra, who had been worshipped in Persia for about a thousand years before the birth of Jesus. So it had Persian roots, and Mithraist temples show that worshippers were aware of these roots and even celebrated them: Mithras is always portrayed as wearing a distinctive Persian hat. But it doesn't follow from this that other elements of the religion were Persian or very ancient. And scholars disagree over whether Mithraism was basically the cult of Mitra transferred to the Roman empire (in which case it was a very ancient religion) or whether it really originated in the Roman empire but with elements taken from Persian religion (in which case it didn't really exist before the first or second centuries AD). I think today scholars tend towards the latter, but I don't know a great deal about it.
Either way, I think Zoroastrianism is older than Mithraism, even on the assumption that Mithraism was not a Roman invention. I certainly can't tell you anything about how they might have related to each other, though, except that I'm sure that's something scholars can't agree about either.
I seem to recall something about one of the Church Fathers writing that God is the "unsignifying significant" and meaning that everything else in the universe is part of chains of symbology that eventually point back to God. Who, if anyone, was this, and is there some kind of context and/or source material you can point me to? Or is it more likely that I'm just misremembering something?
I haven't been able to find anything like this. It reminds me of Irenaeus' claim that Jesus is the invisible (God) made visible, and even more of Marius Victorinus that God is mere potentiality (he transcends actuality) but Jesus is that potential made actual. Maybe that's what you're thinking of?
Alternatively, perhaps you're thinking of the hierarchies of Pseudo-Dionysius, according to which every individual in the ecclesiastical and celestial hierarchies reflects the source of those hierarches (God) in some way:
Pseudo-Dionysius said:
In my opinion a hierarchy is a sacred order, a state of understanding and an activity approximating as closely as possible to the divine. And it is uplifted to the imitation of God in proportion to the enlightenments divinely given to it. The beauty of God – so simple, so good, so much the source of perfection – is completely uncontaminated by dissimilarity. It reaches out to grant every being, according to merit, a share of light and then through a divine sacrament, in harmony and in peace, it bestows on each of those being perfected its own form. The goal of a hierarchy, then, is to enable beings to be as like as possible to God and to be at one with him. A hierarchy has God as its leader of all understanding and action. It is forever looking directly at the comeliness of God. Hierarchy causes its members to be images of God in all respects, to be clear and spotless mirrors reflecting the glow of primordial light and indeed of God himself. It ensures that when its members have received this full and divine splendour they can then pass on this light generously and in accordance with God’s will to beings further down the scale.
That's the closest parallel I can think of to your semiotic chains. I don't think any of the church fathers said anything quite like what you're suggesting, though.
