Urbanus meaning

Meaning

Citizen, Civilized

Etymology

From urbanus, "of the city", from urbs, city.

The name Urbanus occurs only once in the Bible, namely in Romans 16:9, where Paul greats him among several other People of the Way living in Rome and calls him "our fellow worker in Christ". The term Christ means Anointed and simply referred to any native Jewish king, which means that any reference to Christ, and particularly any campaigning for Christ, as the term "fellow worker" implies — i.e. making Judea great again, or in the very least independent from Rome: an autonomous Judea under a Jewish king — was nothing short of high treason against the Roman empire and punishable by death in the most creative ways. All this makes it highly unlikely that Paul was listing the actual personal names of some of his real friends and fellow revolutionaries in a letter that was pretty much public as soon as he released it. That it turn means that our name Urbanus is code (see for more on the Pauline code, see our articles on Antipatris, Onesimus, Philemon, Aeneas).

The name Urbanus is Latin and obviously derives from the adjective urbanus, meaning "of the city", from the noun urbs, city, from the Proto-Indo-European root "werb-", or "gerd-", both meaning to enclose. From similar or comparable PIE roots come familiar words like garden, choir, and χαιρω (chairo), to rejoice, and its noun χαρις (charis), collective joy or social felicity, the very thing by which, Paul declared, salvation comes (Ephesians 2:8).

The name Urbanus emphasizes the concept of holiness, which is separateness and particularly separateness from the animal wilderness, which is also why the New Jerusalem is a city and not a nature park or a beach resort. The name Urbanus is similar to Πολιας (Polias), Of The City, which was an epithet of Athena, and comparable to η Ημερα (e Emera), the Civilized One, which was an epithet of Artemis.

Cities are not simply "mountains" or masses of people, but rather intricately functioning mechanisms of people that are meticulous governed by formal law but also codes of social conduct. Words like "police" and "politics" derive from the Greek equivalent of the Latin urbanus, namely πολιτης (polites), from πολις (polis), city. Our word "polite" derives from the Latin politus, meaning polished, the passive participle of the verb polio, to polish or smooth. The origin of that verb is formally unknown but as much as it brings to mind our noun πολις (polis), city, it also reminds of the familiar command to "Clear the way for YHWH in the wilderness; make smooth in the desert a highway for our God" (Isaiah 40:3). This quoted in the New Testament uses the noun τριβος (tribos), smoothness (Matthew 3:3, Mark 1:3 and Luke 3:4).

The name Urbanus means Citizen, but in the sense of being Civic or Civil, from the Latin adjective civicus, from civus, citizen, from the PIE root "key-", to settle down. It's similar to the word "courteous", from "court" (around which capital cities sprang), from the Latin cors, of the same root as words like hortos, garden, and cohors, cohort. These words are the sophisticated counterpart of words like "pagan", from paganus, rustic, from pagus, field or area outside the city, hence the pun in Luke 2:8, or "heathen", from heath — hence the pun in the names Heathcliff and Catharina (from καθαρος, katharos, pure), from the novel Wuthering Heights, which is a modern version of the Beauty and the Beast theme, which in the 20th century spawned the Pretty Girl and Big Ape genre (Tarzan, King Kong), in turn a part of the wave of innovated retellings of ancient classics, for readers of the industrial age: from Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus, to Star Wars (the Judaic rebellion versus the evil Roman Empire) and even Noah's ark in stories like Battlestar Galactica.

Probably even more punacious: when Jesus said, "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), he used the word πλατυς (platus), which not only means broad, it also means flat or rude, the opposite of being civil and polite. This word is also the source of the name Plato, which essentially means Populism, which is the sort of detailed ignorance that has blinded humanity for millennia and has spawned the ever ill-advised and utterly doomed series of intellectual blunders from speculative philosophy to capitalism to fascism.

Platonism is the umbrella term for any school of thought in which power is concentrated in one point of authority (in one guy, one small group, one class; see our article on Tyrannus) and from which the rest of society is tyrannized and controlled. Platonism creates the world in its own image and has no faculty with which to manage the unforeseen or unsuspected. That's unfortunate for Platonism because since Platonism is essentially designed to maintain the status quo, and to keep in power those who are in power, it also has no way to prepare or defend against the inevitable future. Platonism is satanism, not only a vapid pack of lies but also doomed to destruction. Hence Platonism relies heavily on law enforcement and ultimately makes slaves of everybody. The purpose of the Gospel of Christ, to the emphatic contrary, is ελευθερια (eleutheria), or freedom-by-law (Galatians 5:1).

All forms of government on earth (except one) are forms of Platonic tyranny, and all eventually destabilize and turn to dust. The only exception is the Hebrew Republic, which has been going strong for millennia and shows no signs of weakening. Unlike anything Platonic, the Hebrew Republic is based on the free flow of information and the global conversation between all people, regardless of origin, culture, language and even the religion of one's youth (Galatians 3:28, Colossians 3:11) — although it must be said that certain things can only be done in Hebrew and Hebrew comes with embedded patterns that makes not only science much easier but also finance and formal governance. This is how we know that in the New Jerusalem, the language is Hebrew, and joining the inner core of the New World's global Republic requires the learning of Hebrew, which is a thing that anybody can do.

See for more on the importance of learning Hebrew our article on Jesus. For more on the Hebrew Republic, see our article on Gog and Magog.