(urth) This week in Google alerts

[Gerry Quinn]

From: Andrew Mason 

> I think there is lots of evidence for a person who played the role of
> the historical Jesus: it's not clear to me that we can detemine, from
> the actual content of the works, whether that person is indeed God
> incarnate or just a prophet. 
It is difficult even after the passing of a mere 2000 years.  It is suggested in one book that Allah may be another name for the Outsider.  Many of those who currently think so believe as Silk does in this regard.
> (I think that the true God, the Abrahamic
> Giod, is indeed active in that world, so if he was just a prophet, he
> was a prophet of the true God.)

> I'm beginning to incline to the 'just a prophet' view, because of the
> 'aspects of the Outsider' passage in OBW. These 'aspects' seem to be
> people through whom the Outsider reveals himself, and they are treated
> as if they are all equal in signficance, which would be odd if there
> was a person in that world who actually _was_ the Outsider, made
> manifest. Admittedly this is just the Rajan's view of things, so may
> be wrong; on the other hand, it is confirmed by the many voices which
> Silk hears during his enlightenment, which the Rajan identifes with
> the aspects.
The Catholic interpretation of God already includes several aspects, equal in significance.
I don’t think the universe of Urth is intended to contain a simulacrum of the Catholic Church of the twentieth century AD, with a Pope – android or otherwise - in the Vatican and all doctrines of today preserved intact.  The Rosary carried by Silk and other similar symbols in the books are *translations* by Wolfe of the semiotics of the far future (whatever the cycle) world into today’s equivalents.  He explains this process quite clearly in his afterword to, I think, the very first book in the series.  The Solar Cycle is a science fantasy.  It’s not a theological document, still less is it a hermetic scroll intended to embody Wolfe’s secret adherence to Gnosticism.
We are not told in the series whether Jesus was God Incarnate or a man possessed and enlightened by the Outsider.  In the language of the characters of the Solar Cycle, or at least the latter two parts of it, he was the latter.  If you want to translate the latter as the former, or as something more akin to the latter in our language, either seems perfectly reasonable without doing violence to the text as a whole.  That does not mean that every possible translation is reasonable.
- Gerry Quinn
 
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