A Tail of Three Donkeys and a Horse.

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Thomas123
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A Tail of Three Donkeys and a Horse.

Post #1

Post by Thomas123 »

All four are quadrepeds.
All four were used as methods of travel.

1. The Palm Sunday, Jesus donkey.
2. The donkey trip of Aquinas before his death.
3. The classic Saul/Paul horse journey.
4. The talking donkey of the Old Testament.

My favourite is 4.

Have you any considerations that you want to share regarding this general chat topic.

I have been reading extensively during Lockdown and I keep bumping into these quadrepeds.

Thank You.

Zzyzx
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Post #11

Post by Zzyzx »

.
Thomas, my daughter is sixty. My tractor is a 1966 International 424. I don't take either on road trips.

Though I don't keep animals, quite a few critters cohabit my few acres, which suits me fine unless or until they start messing with my 'stuff'. Relocated a raccoon today that had become a nuisance.

Sorry that I can't be of much help in discussion of donkeys or horses.
.
Non-Theist

ANY of the thousands of "gods" proposed, imagined, worshiped, loved, feared, and/or fought over by humans MAY exist -- awaiting verifiable evidence

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Post #12

Post by Thomas123 »

Have a guess, and four cherries wins a prize!

My Guess ( not very confident)
1.A Balaam rode a donkey to meet a Balak? NO
2. The Jesus figure entered Jerusalem on a donkey? NO
3 Saul fell off horse going to Damascus to arrest Christians? YES
4.Aquinas had donkey accident on journey to Lyon? YES

A budgie might do better!
Have a go and give reasons for your answers, please!

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Difflugia
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Post #13

Post by Difflugia »

Outside of petting zoos, my two encounters with donkeys were while I was working in China. On a trip to one of the popular, touristy Great Wall spots, I was poking around "behind the scenes" and talking to the vendors selling film and the like (which should give some idea how long ago this was). One guy had a donkey that was apparently well-treated and friendly, so I shared some of my candy with it, to the great amusement of both the donkey and its caretaker. Unfortunately, there were very few restrooms, so my hands smelled like donkey for much of the afternoon.

The second was with an ex-donkey. One of my Chinese coworkers had travelled to the job from a town some distance away. After a weekend trip home, he brought some of the local delicacies back with him to share, one of which was pickled donkey. For reasons that were pretty evenly divided between politeness and curiosity, I tried some. I'm kind of thinking that they didn't really have separate donkeys for working and pickling and that when a donkey stopped being one, it became the other. If that donkey had been a chicken, it would have been boiled into soup.
Thomas123 wrote:3 Saul fell off horse going to Damascus to arrest Christians? YES
This is the one answer of yours that I'll disagree with. It looks to me like the source materials for the Paul parts of Acts were the Pauline epistles and Luke's imagination. Any detail not from one is from the other and "Saul" was a fabrication by the author of Acts to give the Hellenized Paul a more Jewish-sounding backstory. Based on how Luke treated details from the sources we know (Mark, Matthew, Paul), I assume that any detail not attested somewhere else has been fabricated.

It looks to me like Luke's source for the "road to Damascus" conversion story is Galatians 1:11-23. What "persecuted the Church" means is vague and lost to history. How God "reveal[ed] His Son in [Paul]" was never hinted at. All we know (such that we even know that) is that Paul had some sort of conversion experience, which could simply have been an epiphany while doing some late reading by lamplight. He hung out in Roman Arabia for a bit and then stayed in Damascus for three years before going to Jerusalem. "Paul the traveller and Roman citizen," as the title of the book by Sir William Ramsay puts it, is mostly a fictional adventurer dreamed up by Luke.

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Post #14

Post by Thomas123 »

Great stories and great insight, Difflugia. I wasn't too confident with Saul. That's the spirit of the thread ,consider something while thinking about something else, like the apple and gravity.
More please!

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Post #15

Post by Thomas123 »

Saul" Horse no horse'

Everyone has an opinion. I might have to revise mine.
Case for a horse...falling to the ground,serious injury, journey of 135 miles by a man of means.
Case for no horse, a devout Jew ,praying at noon ...who knows!

Great stuff around the place....look at this

https://www.baslibrary.org/bible-review/13/4/14

" A specialist in Victorian literature, I had the opportunity, perhaps once a year, to teach Gerard Manley Hopkins’s great poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland.� At the close of the first part, the poet begs God to bring all men finally to adore Him, either quickly, as in Paul’s case, or slowly, as in the case of Augustine:

Whether at once, as once at a crash Paul,
Or as Austin, a lingering-out sweet skill…a

I could be a dramatic lecturer, and I would describe for my class St. Augustine’s mother praying for 30 years for her son’s conversion, whereas Paul, when riding to Damascus, was knocked off his horse by a blinding light and a great noise, and was immediately converted."

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Post #16

Post by Thomas123 »

https://www.massexplained.com/what-horse/

The ingenuity and imagination of people is a sight to behold!

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Post #17

Post by Thomas123 »

Action and incident fade in their clarity after very little time.
Little things like the weather and the time of day act as memory preserve for some of my own special moments. Great battles were fought on sunny days and Saul had his encounter at high noon.

Think of travel incidents that are recorded in our recent past and you get a hint at the problem. I think of the death of James Dean, the car chase of OJ Simpson, maybe even Yankey Doodle, or the epiphany of Tyson Fury, the Gypsy King, of heavyweight boxing.
When you put together the emotive nature of people's interest in these events ,together with conjecture and the lack of witness, their edges start to blur quickly and the real mindset of the participants disappears into public conjecture and hypothesis. We must stay real about these things and even then it might be best to have a low expectation of insight.

I am intrigued with the mindset of Aquinas, on his last journey...more later.

Tyson Fury
"“And just as I was heading towards that bridge at 190mph in this Ferrari – it would have crushed like a Coke can if I’d have hit it – I heard a voice saying: ‘No, don’t do this Tyson…"

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Post #18

Post by Thomas123 »

https://www.biography.com/religious-fig ... as-aquinas
Aquinas
"I can do no more. Such secrets have been revealed to me that all I have written now appears to be of little value." Saint Thomas Aquinas never wrote again.

In January 1274, Saint Thomas Aquinas embarked on a trip to Lyon, France, on foot to serve on the Second Council, but never made it there. Along the way, he fell ill at the Cistercian monastery of Fossanova, Italy.


Looks like another donkey ride might be falling by the wayside.
Aquinas was behaving particularly strangely in his last year, not very old, but prone, perhaps to fasting and stress. I knew a person like that once, she went out like a light in the end.
Have you any info on this before we 'drop this dead donkey!'

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