In Part I we heard a story mentioning Metatron. I'm not sure what counts as canonical for Metatron but in this story, the worrying point is that he's sitting in heaven, like God. Has a shiny throne, like God. Going around giving orders, like God.
Other places in the Talmud describe Metatron may sometimes be a stand-in for God when God's busy, which eventually became the "voice of god" concept at some point before Good Omens and Dogma. At various points the Talmud expresses a strong exhortation about how far you should, or shouldn't, go in worshipping Metatron in God's place, which is the sort of thing you have to be careful about in a monotheistic religion.
This starts to explain what happens when the up-until-this-point great Rabbi Elisha Ben Abuyah turns up in heaven and points at Metatron and says "God!" and everything goes wrong. He's clearly broken some major taboo. Or rather, we think, the people writing down this story what to be REALLY EMPHATIC that worshipping Metatron is Wrong with a capital Wrong.
You might think, "Oh look, look how monotheistic everyone was in 100-200CE, they wrote a special story about how even hinting about any sort of dualism cosmology is especially verboten." But then, you might think, if that was true, they probably wouldn't have made such a big deal out of it. Probably, some sort of dualism was actually quite a common belief among Jewish communities at the time, and the people writing it vehemently disagreed and wanted to warn everyone away from it.
The rabbis who wrote this describe how Elisha Ben Abuya had this revelation (or one of several other theologically interesting but completely contradictory origin stories) and then turned to sin for the rest of his life, and went around deliberately breaking prohibitions and luring people away from study and hiring sex workers just to prove how much of a Rabbi he wasn't. And never mention any of his many teachings without ostentatiously not mentioning him by name.
And probably, in real life, not a metaphor, he belonged to some different strain of Judaism which believed something like that. There are different theories as to what exactly. One theory was, what Jewish offshoot was running around Israel in 100CE? One that had wide appeal but was antithetical to the Rabbis continuing what they thought of as mainstream Judaism. One that, to Jews, seemed uncomfortably comfortable with the idea of a being "like God, but God junior?" I.e. was this Christianity?
However, according to Daniel Boyarin who's lecture inspired these posts, no, you can show with similarities between writings at different times that the mystical idea of a metatron-like figure (who may have been previously or subsequently human) existed earlier, and despite being suppressed by the people making the best records, probably survived into both 100CE Christianity and 100CE Judiasm in different forms. So this story about "no, no, don't worship Metatron" isn't a coded reference to Jesus, but rather Metatron-as-Enoch, ancestor of Noah, who is described in some texts as being taken up into heaven and given wide ranging authority and maybe taking the angel name Metatron.
Other places in the Talmud describe Metatron may sometimes be a stand-in for God when God's busy, which eventually became the "voice of god" concept at some point before Good Omens and Dogma. At various points the Talmud expresses a strong exhortation about how far you should, or shouldn't, go in worshipping Metatron in God's place, which is the sort of thing you have to be careful about in a monotheistic religion.
This starts to explain what happens when the up-until-this-point great Rabbi Elisha Ben Abuyah turns up in heaven and points at Metatron and says "God!" and everything goes wrong. He's clearly broken some major taboo. Or rather, we think, the people writing down this story what to be REALLY EMPHATIC that worshipping Metatron is Wrong with a capital Wrong.
You might think, "Oh look, look how monotheistic everyone was in 100-200CE, they wrote a special story about how even hinting about any sort of dualism cosmology is especially verboten." But then, you might think, if that was true, they probably wouldn't have made such a big deal out of it. Probably, some sort of dualism was actually quite a common belief among Jewish communities at the time, and the people writing it vehemently disagreed and wanted to warn everyone away from it.
The rabbis who wrote this describe how Elisha Ben Abuya had this revelation (or one of several other theologically interesting but completely contradictory origin stories) and then turned to sin for the rest of his life, and went around deliberately breaking prohibitions and luring people away from study and hiring sex workers just to prove how much of a Rabbi he wasn't. And never mention any of his many teachings without ostentatiously not mentioning him by name.
And probably, in real life, not a metaphor, he belonged to some different strain of Judaism which believed something like that. There are different theories as to what exactly. One theory was, what Jewish offshoot was running around Israel in 100CE? One that had wide appeal but was antithetical to the Rabbis continuing what they thought of as mainstream Judaism. One that, to Jews, seemed uncomfortably comfortable with the idea of a being "like God, but God junior?" I.e. was this Christianity?
However, according to Daniel Boyarin who's lecture inspired these posts, no, you can show with similarities between writings at different times that the mystical idea of a metatron-like figure (who may have been previously or subsequently human) existed earlier, and despite being suppressed by the people making the best records, probably survived into both 100CE Christianity and 100CE Judiasm in different forms. So this story about "no, no, don't worship Metatron" isn't a coded reference to Jesus, but rather Metatron-as-Enoch, ancestor of Noah, who is described in some texts as being taken up into heaven and given wide ranging authority and maybe taking the angel name Metatron.