invertigo hayfever

yeah, at least in my experience i feel like there is a much more conscious acceptance that judaism evolves and argues with itself over time. I mean, as i understand it that's basically what the talmud is, a collection of teachings & arguments over many many years.

i don't feel like i have much grounding to offer thoughts on the growth of judaism through the medieval period, but i do feel pretty comfortable in my general assertion that most of what makes christianity like that is that it enjoyed majority state sponsorship in the eurasian world from like year 200 onwards.

becoming/aligning with power sources in that way encourages firmer concretization of belief, and appeals to "ancient traditions" to give validity, in a way that judaism never really had in the medieval period.

sure! yeah!

WELL ok i was being flippant there but basically since the earliest actual texts that we now consider the "book of revelation" were in themselves solely textual, any visuals associated with those texts can only really be dated back to the medieval era (as that's the earliest visuals we got).

the interpretation of revelation 4, for example, as a physical space of "living creatures" that are covered with eyes and wings & etc was really a medieval idea, since to interpret that space as literal/physical you had to first have a conception of the bible as a historical text that described literal events.

that idea -- that the bible was literal and historical -- is a bit of a medieval/late antique innovation that came out of a need for a singular unified church.

you're totally right that obviously like... the modern memes or whatever are a bit of a reaction against a the idea of angels as "humans with wings", but i'd argue even that visual concept is more of a grecoroman idea than a medieval christian idea (pulling from the Winged Victory imagery in grecoroman art).

so uhhhhhhh what am i saying here. i'm saying that basically there WAS no clear interpretation of those passages in Revelation until early medieval christians decided there had to be clear interpretations. Before that point it would have likely been extremely up to interpretation.

and of course, afterward it was still very up to interpretation, which leads to conflicting visuals over time as christianity fragmented and the idea of a "unified faith" became even more of a fantasy than it was at the beginning. so the idea of "biblically accurate" anything is a bit of a false idea, and there's no real evidence that the "original intended depictions" of angels were... anything.

they might have been winged humans but they might not have been. kind of impossible to say, even with the text, since the earliest texts (like the dead sea scrolls) are still from like year 300 BC, probably thousands of years after the origins of the abrahamic faith.

Isaiah describes seraphim with multiple wings and stuff, Ezekiel describes angels as having multiple animalistic faces, and Daniel describes them as having the appearance of molten brass. Even just going by literal OT textual descriptions, coming up with a unified, "accurate" description of angels is an difficult problem.

yeah! I didn't learn about this until recently. Fun little historical artifact there