Timaeus meaning

Meaning

Highly Prized

Etymology

From the noun τιμη (time), value.

Related names

• Via τιμη (time): Bartimaeus, Timon, Timothy

The name Timaeus occurs only once in the Bible, and that in the curiously redundant statement that Timaeus was the father of Bartimaeus, whose name means exactly that: Son Of Timaeus (Mark 10:46). We don't hear from Timaeus after that, but his son was of course famously healed from blindness by Jesus the Nazarene, who passed by him on his way out of Jericho (Mark 10:52).

Much more urgently, however, is that Timaeus is also the name of a famous book by Plato. The Bible writers fought a war on two fronts, namely against the polytheism of deep antiquity and the equally ill-advised speculative "rationalism" of the Platonic schools. There's nothing wrong with rationalism, of course, but what's wrong with Platonism is that it imagines the whole of mankind in obedience to one leader: tyranny, in one word. The emphatic opposite of Platonism (or the Platonic Republic) is the Proper Republic, where naturally talented and well learned experts float to the top of their various fields and exchange information with fellow experts so as to draft policies that are good for everybody. For a proper Republic to exist there must be ελευθερια (eleutheria), freedom-by-law, and certainly no law-by-tyranny, which is the kind that requires law enforcement. If your country has police, then you live in a Platonic Republic, not a proper one (1 Corinthians 15:24).

Creating a proper Republic is extremely difficult, and so far the only people in the world to have succeeded in doing so are the Hebrews (see our article on Gog and Magog for more on the Hebrew Republic). All other forms of government — Democrats, Republicans, Constitutional Monarchies, Communists, Socialists, you name it — are all the same: they are all slightly varying versions of the Platonic Republic. They are also all unstable and will all come to an end. And this means that our precious human world will either go up in smoke or it will become entirely Hebrew.

In New Testament times, the intellectual battle between the Hebrew and Platonic republics was mostly waged on the interface between traditional Jews and Hellenized ones, and the Hellenized ones were mostly referred to by their own version of Moses, namely Homer, who was greatly respected by the Hebrews (who respected all Scripture: 2 Timothy 3:16) but who also was quite blind, or so tradition holds. The difference between the Hebrew version of Isaiah 61:1-2 and the Greek one that Jesus cites in Luke 4:18-19 is that the latter adds "recovery of sight to the blind", which is an obvious jab to the Homeric tradition. See our article on the name Jesus for a closer look at what the New Testament thinks of the Greek Septuagint.

The Hebrew Bible was produced by myriads upon myriads of scribes, poets and editors, who listened to the vast oral traditions that wafted through society — stories that had emerged around campfires amidst countless more stories that were forgotten: stories that had emerged from an ocean of stories, but which had touched the hearts of many, and were told and retold, embellished and trimmed, until they became as commonly applied as single words. These were the archetypes and tropes in which humanity tells its own story (Psalm 12:6). All identity is narrative, and the identity of the people of the fertile crescent was caught, crystalized, honed and cut like diamonds from the rough oral traditions into the texts we have today. These texts are the DNA of human consciousness, and all minds that seek themselves find themselves somewhere in there (like widely differing cell types that all operate out of the same genetic code).

The Platonic Republic, to the diabolical contrary, rests on the idea that humanity needs to be forcibly organized by forcible leaders, who silence the majority and form the world according to their own image. In modern times, this idea resulted in the Enlightenment — that is to say: the scientific part of the Enlightenment was of course entirely Hebrew: a proper Republic. Until capitalism weaseled its way into the academia and told it what to preach, science was purely Republic, in which no single voice could tell anyone how things were. But the political and philosophical and theological part of the Enlightenment was the disaster that divided humanity into the stupid masses and the enlightened elite. Soon there was talk of Übermensch and Untermensch and not long after that, books were burned and its readers were herded into trains and shipped east where they were gassed and burned like vermin.

In Christ, there are no Greeks or Jews (Galatians 3:28, Colossians 3:11), no Christianity, no Judaism, no Islam, no Homerians, no Atheists. Only in satan are such things. In the New Jerusalem, there are no temples (Revelation 21:22). In Christ, there is only unity, and in unity there is only God (John 17:20-26, Isaiah 45:5-7, Ephesians 4:3-6).

Earnest as ever but not without his signature sense of humor, Jesus warned about the widespread delusion that had started with the speculative "rationalism" of Plato, and which would compete with the popular autonomy of the Hebrew Republic until the former would nearly overwhelm the latter, by saying: "Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it" (Matthew 7:13). The name Plato derives from the word for broad: πλατυς (platus). John the Revelator envisioned this conflict in the blood-curdling report that "they came up on the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city ... " (Revelation 20:9).

The Revelator also saw a "star" called Wormwood fall into the sea (Revelation 8:11), and here at Abarim Publications we suspect that with that he foresaw the pending disaster that was the Enlightenment — but see our article on αψινθος (apsinthos), wormwood, for more on that.

The Greek name Timaeus comes from the word τιμη (time), meaning value:

For a meaning of the name Timaeus, both NOBSE Study Bible Name List, and Liddell and Scot (A Greek-English Lexicon) read Highly Prized.