The Christian "Odes of Solomon" are poems written in Syriac somewhere in around the 2nd Century AD. You can read them here: The Odes of Solomon
Scholars are divided on whether they are mainstream, orthodox Christian songs or Gnostic ones, but my own careful analysis did not turn up anything that was conclusively Gnostic.
Ode 23 sounds like it is making an apocalyptic prediction about a letter from God, a theme resembling the sealed scrolls in the Book of Revelation. In the prediction, Christ inherited everything and then the persecutors became extinct:
Then in Ode 42, the composer begins talking about approaching the Lord with his hands extended like a cross, and soon afterwards the Lord's voice takes over the narration. This kind of change of narrative voice happens in some of the other Odes as well.
In Charlesworth's 1977 translation of Ode 42 (below), all the persecutors die, they sought Christ because He lives, and then Christ speaks with their mouths and threw His yoke of love on them:
Harris' 1911 translation runs:
FYI, the a vowel in Harris' Syriac text is not over the ܣ , which means that Malpana's explanation leads to the conclusion that Verse 5 says that "they sought after me who acknowledged me..."
Regardless of which translation is better, the Ode still presents the idea that the enemies died, and my question for the thread is when did the composer of the Odes mean that this happened?
Did the Odes' author mean that Christ's persecutors died in the First Century AD and were died at the time when he wrote the Odes? John Munter seemed to have this explanation in mind when he commented on this passage, saying that it
Another interpretation could be that the author was describing Christ's mid-1st Century descent into Hades, a dimension that existed in a form outside time, so that the persecutors were dead while Christ was there in Hades. In other words, Christ entered into Hades and had a supernatural experience wherein the enemies had already died, as Hades existed on a plane separate from our normal chronological one on earth.
In The Odes and Psalms of Solomon, J.R. Harris sees Ode 42 containing an account of Christ's under-world triumph [wherein] death cast Him up, and let go the feet with the head. Christ is the head, and the feet are those members of His who are imprisoned in Hades.[/quote]Harris writes that after the opening of Ode 42, the writer
A third interpretation could be that Ode 42 is making a prediction about apocalyptic events like the Second Coming and the Last Judgment, at which point all of the Christ's persecutors would have died.
Scholars are divided on whether they are mainstream, orthodox Christian songs or Gnostic ones, but my own careful analysis did not turn up anything that was conclusively Gnostic.
Ode 23 sounds like it is making an apocalyptic prediction about a letter from God, a theme resembling the sealed scrolls in the Book of Revelation. In the prediction, Christ inherited everything and then the persecutors became extinct:
Dr. John Roller theorizes in "The Doctrine of Immortality in the Early Church":
Then in Ode 42, the composer begins talking about approaching the Lord with his hands extended like a cross, and soon afterwards the Lord's voice takes over the narration. This kind of change of narrative voice happens in some of the other Odes as well.
In Charlesworth's 1977 translation of Ode 42 (below), all the persecutors die, they sought Christ because He lives, and then Christ speaks with their mouths and threw His yoke of love on them:
Harris' 1911 translation runs:
The main difference is that in Charlesworth's translation, the enemies die and then seek Christ and join with Him, whereas in Harris' translation, the enemies die and those who hope in Christ join with Him. I shared the Syriac test with two people with knowledge of Syriac and they took Harris' idea that the text referred to the persecutors' deaths and referred to those who were for Christ seeking Him, not to the idea that the persecutors began seeking God. MalpanaGiwargis wrote:
Does anyone here have a decent understanding of written Aramaic/Syriac?
FYI, the a vowel in Harris' Syriac text is not over the ܣ , which means that Malpana's explanation leads to the conclusion that Verse 5 says that "they sought after me who acknowledged me..."
Regardless of which translation is better, the Ode still presents the idea that the enemies died, and my question for the thread is when did the composer of the Odes mean that this happened?
Did the Odes' author mean that Christ's persecutors died in the First Century AD and were died at the time when he wrote the Odes? John Munter seemed to have this explanation in mind when he commented on this passage, saying that it
I take Munter to mean that the verse about the death of the persecutors reflects that the author was not trying to make the Odes look like a text from the 1st century when the persecutors were still alive.
Another interpretation could be that the author was describing Christ's mid-1st Century descent into Hades, a dimension that existed in a form outside time, so that the persecutors were dead while Christ was there in Hades. In other words, Christ entered into Hades and had a supernatural experience wherein the enemies had already died, as Hades existed on a plane separate from our normal chronological one on earth.
In The Odes and Psalms of Solomon, J.R. Harris sees Ode 42 containing an account of Christ's under-world triumph [wherein] death cast Him up, and let go the feet with the head. Christ is the head, and the feet are those members of His who are imprisoned in Hades.[/quote]Harris writes that after the opening of Ode 42, the writer
A third interpretation could be that Ode 42 is making a prediction about apocalyptic events like the Second Coming and the Last Judgment, at which point all of the Christ's persecutors would have died.
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