From Contemporary Concepts to Valid Christology

Someone once said that all problems in Christian doctrine are an extension of the Christological question.

Jesus Christ is revealed to us through his ministry, his acts and teachings. However, the objective reality of the person of Jesus Christ is as mysterious to us as the Person of God.

All we have is our subjective perceptions of that reality, the latter being most certainly more diverse than our limited sensory perception can reveal to us. There are various concepts of that transcendent reality that have evolved over hundreds and thousands of years. There are certain concepts of the natural phenomena of what we consider as the outer world around us, as well as the concepts of what we refer to as the inner world of our thoughts and feelings, and emotions. There are various concepts of God, too.

The concepts have the tendency to evolve and change with time. Until recent relatively rapid development of natural sciences over the past several centuries, human thought had evolved for thousands of years, primarily as a philosophical discourse, culminating in the complex philosophical systems of the Late Antiquity, personified by many thinkers, including Plato, Plutarch and Plotinus.

Middle Platonism (Plutarch), and later Neo-Platonism (Plotinus and Porphyry), as an evolving philosophical approach, synthesizing Platonism with Egyptian and Jewish theology, has eventually become the most advanced and sophisticated philosophical conception, describing the universe, fundamentally characterized by its unity, as one system. Such worldview had been the most advanced, so to speak scientific, vision of the universal reality at the time when Jesus began his ministry.

The philosophical categories of the Middle Platonism and later Neo-Platonism became native to the most prominent philosophical thinkers during the early Christian years. As a generally metaphysical and epistemological philosophy, Neo-Platonism included elements of theistic monism. Its universal system had as its integral parts the invisible world and the phenomenal world. Neo-Platonism proposed, in a syncretic way, that there is one God, who has many manifestations in the diverse religious traditions. The effect of Middle Platonic and Neo-Platonic philosophical systems must have been truly revolutionary back then, perhaps comparable only to the explosive power of the scientific revolution of the recent centuries.

Various heresies of the early Christian years, including Gnosticism and Arianism, and later debates between the Arianism and Trinitarianism, after the legalization of the Church in the fourth century, made an organized comprehensive explanation of Jesus and his ministry essential. Although the officially adopted Trinitarian version of Christianity as the state church of the Roman Empire had evolved for several centuries before it received a coherent systematic description, eventually it was formulated in line with the most advanced comprehensive and the most scientific epistemological beliefs of the time.

At the forefront of the contemporary thought at that time were the Middle Platonic and Neo-Platonic ideas as the most advanced and systematic view on the world, which included not only phenomenological reality but also the invisible reality of the transcendent One. Cyril of Alexandria himself had acknowledged the fact that Middle Platonist writers influenced the second and third century Christian views on Jesus and his ministry. 

Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376 – 444), who was the Patriarch of Alexandria from 412 to 444, was enthroned when the city was at the height of its influence and power within the Roman Empire. He is among the Church Fathers and the Doctors of the Church, and his reputation has resulted in his titles Pillar of Faith and Seal of all the Fathers. According to Cyril, he discerned a Christian view of God not only in some of Plato, but also in Plotinus (AD 205- 270), the founder of the Neo-Platonist philosophy, and in his disciple Porphyry (AD 234–c. 305).

The traits of impact of Greek philosophy on Cyril’s Christology surface especially in his handling of the doctrine of the Trinity and the issues of divine immutability and impassability. Neo-Platonism, that paradigm of the most sophisticated systematic knowledge of that time, the wide range of philosophical categories, which lie at the heart of the most comprehensive logically verifiable worldview, were the natural milieu of the rational discourse at the time. The theistic monism of the Neo-Platonist ideas had provided fundamental elements to the development of the Christian doctrine, including the Trinitarian formulation.

The philosophical schools of the early Christian centuries were eclectic, so Christian thinkers did not import entire systems of thought from any particular philosopher or school. They did, however, think within and operate prevailing tools, language and conceptuality in their desire to communicate as clearly and meaningfully as they could what was on their minds concerning Jesus, his teachings, and his works. For much of the time it was a case of speaking a native language, born of a native conceptuality.

The Greek concepts of the world and God were not some arbitrarily chosen philosophies to emphasize God’s characteristics at the background of the Church Fathers’ theology. Those categories and notions were part of their rational thinking and most naturally happened to be the pinnacle of the human thought at that moment.

The contemporary concepts of God had determined the Christology of the early Fathers. Their Christology eventually would become a dogmatic view on Jesus and his ministry and, eventually, a foundation and source of many problems in Christian doctrine. The immutability of the Christian doctrine stems from the early Christian thinking patterns. But, as the thinking patterns and concepts of God and the world continued to evolve and developed, the original Christology of the Fathers remained the same, an unchanged and unmodified reflection of the Neo-Platonic worldview and its characteristic paradigm of thought and respective set of philosophical categories of that time.

However, the person of Jesus Christ, once perceived and portrayed within the context of the worldview, greatly influenced by the Neo-Platonist thinkers, has now become mostly a mystery to us. Mostly because we are trying to comprehend and explain Jesus from our contemporary worldview using our present-day, scientific concepts of the universe while trying, at the same time, to consider the Neo-Platonist ideas as also fully relevant. Perhaps, it is time to acknowledge the Neo-Platonism-based Christology is no longer fully relevant and because of that, no longer valid the way it used to be two thousand years ago.

Our current scientific concepts have formed over the past several centuries, which is approximately the same period of time it took for the Middle-Platonic and Neo-Platonic views to dominate the philosophical systems of the Late Antiquity. Natural-scientific concepts have dramatically evolved and eventually lead to drastic changes in our view of the world and human being. Perhaps, the effect of the scientific revolution on our worldview is comparable in its magnitude to the effect produced by the works of the Middle Platonic writers. Back then, it helped create a unique spiritual environment, which proved essential for the development of modern day Christology. Today, we have been suffering a dramatic shift in our mentality with regard to our concepts of the universe, humanity, culture, religion, spirituality, consciousness, and God. The old days’ Christology is lagging behind our modern day concepts and results in our finding it increasingly difficult to relate the teaching and the works of Jesus Christ to our everyday lives.

Our contemporary concepts run into the traditional Christological formulae and prevent us from seeing the person of Jesus and from understanding his words and deeds in such a way that it would connect with our contemporary understanding of the nature of the universe and the human being.

So far, our notion and the vision of the nature and person of Jesus Christ have gradually evolved, but mostly through various dramatic Protestant movements and localized modifications to Christian tradition in both the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Churches. Thanks to those alterations and general simplification of the religious ways throughout the Christian world, the person of Jesus remains accessible albeit increasingly difficult to relate to in our everyday lives. Mostly because the Protestant tradition has lost its momentum and the Orthodox is being generally neglected or abused.

There is an urgent need to meet Jesus as if for the first time, so much the old perceptions of the events, concerning the life and death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, have become generally irrelevant to our contemporary worldviews. The old time Christology does not seem to correspond to the spiritual needs of today’s world, which has outgrown the Neo-Platonic concepts and has new concepts now, verified and organized, and ready to be fully applied to construe the canonical Gospels and the epistles of the undeniable New Testament. 

 

There is a need to revisit the Scriptures and look at Jesus Christ anew. The modern day concepts have given us novel prevailing tools, language and conceptuality of systematic scientific worldview. In our today’s desire to communicate as clearly and meaningfully as we can what is on our minds concerning Jesus, his teachings, and his works, we need to operate these tools, language and conceptuality fully.

Through consistently operating the scientific concepts we will be able to discern and communicate the message of Christ in the most relevant way with regard to our modern day problems and formulate a new Christology, which is a novel perception of that reality, we call Jesus Christ. Without new Christology, there will be no Christ.  

Freedom in the Name of God

The liberal and libertarian ideas, that people have certain natural and/or God-given rights, put a great emphasis on the individual, as opposed to the whole of social body. Such natural rights, as the right to personal autonomy and property rights, and the right to the utilization of previously unused resources, emphasize self-centered individual consumption oriented behavior as a “natural right” thus trying to find grounds for individualistic values in the laws of nature.  There are also claims that such rights are “God-given” and that “freedom” is one of the essential characteristics of God and since Man was created in the image of God it is intrinsically a human characteristic, too. Hence the idea of the “metaphysical” freedom which is generally backed by perceptions based upon subjective personal meditative and emotional experience of its adherents. Both such claims are fundamentally wrong. Neither the laws of nature, nor the laws of God, teach us that freedom, as an absolute category, can be ascribed either to the characteristic features of relationships between any given set of natural elements, as parts of a certain system, or to the essential characteristics of God, according to the names by which the supernatural entity is referred to.

That is why freedom as a philosophical category has not been fully appreciated. Both in extra-Biblical antiquity and within the Bible, freedom is mentioned in the context of the philosophy of power and power relationships within a given community. Mostly it refers to issues pertaining to the relations between slaves and their masters. There is no reference to the idea of freedom as such in the names or titles of God. There is something more fundamental in the way the ancient Hebrew thinkers thought about God.

There are many names of God in Hebrew in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. The name has a fundamental importance in the Scriptures. As it is known, in the Hebraic mindset, naming and being are linked together to form a unity. Naming denotes the essential characteristic of the named and the right use of a name establishes a right relationship with the thing named. Thus is the traditional sacred nature and a very special treatment of the names of God.

According to the Rabbinic tradition, the number of divine names that require special care is seven: El, Elohim, Adonai, Yhwh, Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, Shaddai, and Ẓeba'ot. The sacredness of the divine names has always been especially recognized by the professional Hebrew scribes who wrote the Scriptures, or the chapters for the phylacteries. Before transcribing any of the divine names a scribe would first prepare mentally to sanctify them and after that, once he begins a name, he would not stop until it is finished. He must not be interrupted while writing it, even to greet a king. If an error is made in writing it, it may not be erased, but a line must be drawn round it to show that it is canceled, and the whole page must be put in a genizah ("storage") and a new page begun.

Of all the names of God in the Old Testament, Yhwh occurs most frequently (6,823 times) and is considered to be the distinctive personal name of the God of Israel. The name Yhwh, as the Name proper, was known in the earliest rabbinical works simply as Hashem (the Name); also as Shem ha-Meyuḥad ("the Extraordinary Name"); as Shem ha-Meforash ("the Distinguished Name"); as Shem ben Arba' Otiyyot ("the Tetragrammaton" or "the Quadriliteral Name"); and as Yod He Waw He (spelling the letters of Yhwh). The pronunciation of the written Name was used only by the priests in the Temple when blessing the people. Outside the Temple they used the title "Adonai". The restriction upon communicating the Name proper probably originated in Oriental etiquette. In the East even a teacher was not to be called by name.

The word Yhwh, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), in appearance is the third person singular imperfect of the verb "to be", meaning, therefore, "He is," or "He will be," or, perhaps, "He lives,". The root idea of the word being, probably, "to blow", "to breathe". Therefore, the meaning of the name given in Ex. 3:14, where God is represented as speaking in the first person, is "I am" or "I who lives". The overall meaning of the name would be "He who is self-existing, self-sufficient", emphasising the idea of existence as such, without any cause, beginning, and ending. More precisely, it means "He who lives", since the abstract conception of pure existence was mostly foreign to Hebrew thought at that time.

The idea of life was intimately connected with the name Yhwh from early times. God of many Semitic tribes was regarded to be an essentially living entity, as contrasted with the lifeless gods of the heathen. Living God is Himself the source and author of life.  Thus is the common formula of an oath: "Hai Yhwh" ("As Yhwh lives") as in Ruth 3:13. Unfortunately, life was viewed as closely tied to the deities, which were guarding particular  tribes or nations. Once a tribe was convinced that their El (“God”, “The Strong One”) had deserted them or turned out to be too weak to protect the people from other “gods” and their people, there were only two ways to deal with the situation. Either find and pay allegiance to another divine creature to be protected by them or give up and resign yourself to your miserable fate, hoping at the mercy of your captors. According to ancient beliefs, no one was immune to possible discontinuation of harmonious relationship with their gods and supernatural powers, and the relationship between the latter ultimately determined the fate of the people, divided among the respective divine entities.

Yhwh contains the idea of a perpetual existing reality. It is something, which is a supernatural fabric of the existence itself, personified in a Supreme Being of such nature and characteristics that it knows not a fragmented, itemized, or disjointed state but only a state of unique oneness, unparalleled exclusivity and unity. What was revealed to Moses while he was living with the Midianites in the desert, after he had left Egypt to save his life and before he returned to Egypt to lead his people out, became a groundbreaking prophetic insight into the nature and character of God. That insight ingeniously combined various ancient Semitic and Egyptian religious concepts and philosophical worldviews. As a result, the name Yhwh ("He who is the only one who is truly and eternally self-existing and self-sufficient, essentially alive") became the proper Name of God denoting the most essential characteristic of God. Existence itself became validated as a thing worthy in itself. Yhwh, being the God of Israel, also has all the other divine names, previously used by the Hebrew people, beginning from Abraham, combined in the Name. It was built upon traditional religious beliefs but also brought about the category of pure existence to the forefront of the Hebrew thought and on the wake of this intellectual and spiritual revival validated the people’s will to obtain liberation from slavery, the national survival and faith in their inevitable future prosperity. 

One might think that the liberation of the people from the Egyptian slavery would need to be heralded by proclamations of freedom and liberty, or that certain natural or God-given rights needed to be invoked by Moses to stir the national urge to live and exist. But, no, that was not the concept that Moses had drawn from his contemplation of the natural as well as supernatural phenomena in the desert. Combined with all the other ancient Semitic characteristics of God, what saved the Jews from national demise in Egyptian captivity and led them throughout their history was no other idea or notion but the notion of the reality of existential being.

Freedom and God

The word freedom has several synonyms. Liberty is one of them. Freedom is the quality, especially of the will or the individual, of not being totally constrained, exemption from external control, interference, or regulation. Liberty is generally considered a concept of political philosophy that seeks to identify the conditions in which an individual has immunity from the arbitrary exercise of authority. Whenever we talk about freedom, liberty or independence, we are dealing with the notion of free will, which is a philosophical term for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives.

Once considered one of the most intractable problems of philosophy, nomological determinism is invariably tied to the slow but steady progress of natural science, substantiating the claim that everything that happens is determined by antecedent conditions together with the natural laws.

Since the concept of the free will is directly related to human mind, the latter is the object of intensive contemporary scientific research in a multidisciplinary effort to study our brain and its functions and perhaps no aspect of human mind is more puzzling than consciousness and our conscious experience of self and world. The problem of consciousness is arguably the central issue in current theorizing about the mind.

Our incessant attempts at trying to understand who we are and how we interconnect with the world around us have practical aspects and are motivated by our desire to help our physical bodies combat various illnesses, overcome and prevent diseases, and even forestall aging so that we could lead longer, healthier, and more productive lives. But even when practical aspects are not very obvious, we find pleasure in discovering scientific truths about the laws that govern our bodies and demonstrate how interconnected are all the processes that take place inside our bodies and inside our brain, how we are connected to each other and to the world around us. Intrinsically, in a subtle way, we are all wired to do discoveries, including scientific discoveries, in order to better understand our place in the universe and our relationship with the whole of existing laws of nature, both visible and invisible. As a result, it leads to our worldview’s gradual evolution and eventually to the evolution of our activities and behavior.

Metaphysical ideas on free will (Determinism, Predeterminism, Incompatibilism, Compatibilism,  Metaphysical libertarianism, etc.) have been developed over a very long time period, mostly before the advent of modern sciences of mind, especially neuroscience, cognitive science, behavioral psychology, even molecular biology, and cell biology, which all have contributed to our understanding of various mental processes. Philosophical speculations still exist and will probably exist until we have viable scientific explanation and understanding of human thought, imagination, perception, awareness, and self awareness.

Many of our contemporary philosophical ideas of human consciousness, will, and the freedom of the will are founded on our understanding of the ancient wisdom writings, especially the Scriptures of religious texts, which we consider sacred and true, because numerous generations of people believed, and many people believe today as well, that they are revelations of our Creator, the Supreme Being we call God.

The fact that we refer to God as the Supreme Being means that we are talking about the Supreme Consciousness, a Supreme Mind. Philosophical ideas of free will revolve around a narrative about a "metaphysically free will" which means the notion of the freedom of will is ascribed to “supernatural” Supreme Mind. The idea of free will is based solely on our subjective perception of our self awareness. But, since there is no comprehensive scientific explanation as to what our perception, thought, and self awareness are, the idea of freedom or free will, being a figment of our imagination, will remain scholastic until it is substantiated or disproved by sciences. Until then, the only way to prove fallacious the notion of freedom in general and of the free will in particular is to look into the Scriptures themselves and find out what particular characteristics have been ascribed to God as the Supreme Being.

At first, the very ideas of freedom and free will seem to be beneficial and particularly useful to human society. The general concept has evolved into the idea of political liberty, which is a non-metaphysical concept at all. Even incompatibilist metaphysical libertarianism, which, in the face of the nomological determinism, asserts that free will might still exist and generally represents a bulk of non-materialist constructions, have gradually devolved into Political Libertarianism that takes individual liberty to be the primary political value and may be understood as a form of liberalism, which, as a political philosophy, “seeks to define and justify the legitimate powers of government in terms of certain natural or God-given individual rights”. “These rights include the rights to life, liberty, private property, freedom of speech and association, freedom of worship, government by consent, equality under the law, and moral autonomy...”

Who would oppose such a plethora of good sounding words? Unfortunately, as good and luring as they sounded, those words have always been better at luring people toward certain political concepts, ideologies, and, ultimately, political parties and individuals, who needed popular support, rather than at accurately reflecting the reality of certain given political situations or the character of the evolving social and political relationships.

The concept of freedom has always been misleading, in political philosophy just as in metaphysical philosophy. The danger of this misleading concept makes it necessary to disavow not only the very idea of political freedoms as such along with the ideology that it gives rise to, but the very idea of free will, also stripping the latter of its falsely donned divine authority.

The selfish nature of that philosophy is in conflict both with the scientific as well as Biblical viewpoint. The core doctrine of liberal and libertarian ideas begins with the recognition that people have certain natural and/or God-given rights and that deprivation of those rights is immoral. Among those natural rights are cited the right to personal autonomy and property rights, and the right to the utilization of previously unused resources. These two basic assumptions form the foundation of all liberal as well as libertarian ideals. The emphasis put by those ideas on the individual, putting him/her in opposition to the social body as a whole, opposes the laws of nature just as well as the laws that are revealed to us in the Bible.   

Freedom and God

Freedom has been considered to be one of the main characteristics of the essence of God. As man is created in the image of God and freedom is considered to be God's essential trait, therefore it has been presumed that freedom intrinsically is man's most innate, transcendental quality as well. If God is free, and man is created in God's image, then man, all human beings, are free or potentially can become free if they conform to the image of God. Freedom has become one of the most often mentioned issues of the modern religious discourse, moralizing with regard to our choosing what is good and opposing what is evil, taking the side of the  right and forsaking the wrong. Based upon the premise that God is absolutely free, this discourse sites man's freedom to act morally and ethically and his, or her, being responsible for the actions taken and therefore liable to punishment for not acting morally. Determinism is rejected upon the premise that if man is not free to chose what to do, right or wrong, good or evil, then he would not be subject to criticism for his actions, let alone judgement for his crimes and misdeeds. The whole idea of sin becomes redundant if the idea of intrinsic freedom is discarded, because sin is traditionally regarded as a misdeed, consciously and willingly performed by a person and therefore either a crime, if performed knowingly, or a mistake, if it was made unknowingly. In the former case, it is punished more severely, as a retribution for personal insistence in sin, as an acknowledged wrongdoing; whereas in the latter, when performed as a mistake, it is to be punished less severely.

Freedom therefore has become so widely  acknowledged as a real thing, first as a reference to God's essential quality and later on as a humanist idea of human's natural rights. It goes without saying in today's politicized dialogue between the secular and religious people that freedom is something real and empirically tangible, both as a religious concept and as a secular idea in relation to democratic principles.

Unfortunately, both parties are terribly wrong in this regard. Political freedoms are good to be proclaimed during an electoral campaign as a promise to free people from certain political, social, economic or cultural constrains, placed on certain individuals as a result of human social relationships' development taking a particular twist. Such freedoms, as well as constrains, are relative in that some people have more instances, constraining or determining their actions in one field or area of life and less in another, and some people have other instances, constraining them in their actions. The absence of these constrains is viewed as freedom from those particular instances in certain areas of life, but most often such relative freedoms are obtained at a cost, usually at the expense of the absence of similar constrains or limitations in other areas or spheres of our activity. Therefore, such freedoms should be looked upon not as an acquirement, whether factual or prospective,  of a certain degree of freedom as it is, but rather as a substitute of one set of constrains to another, most probably with the resultant overall amount of "freedom" being the same in the end as it was in the beginning but felt differently and perceived as a greater freedom mostly due to the novelty of the feeling.

 Freedom, philosophically speaking, is a culture-related universal category which denotes the capacity of a subject to act and behave in the absence of external goal setting. As long as the subject acts within a certain cultural environment, the latter is going to produce certain pressure upon the subject and set the parameters of the mentioned subject's development, behavior, and actions. Such parameters will determine the set of forming constrains and eventually the character and the personal qualities of the subject. In absolute terms, there is no such thing as freedom. There is a set of external factors that set the goals of the subject's personal development and his personal characteristics, and eventually his actions and behavior.

Since there is no way anybody can ever be absolutely free, as long as they are acting within a certain cultural environment people feel better when the overall amount of external goal-setting constrains and the quality of the constrains are such that it does not make them feel miserable now, at least not more miserable than they had felt before.

 This kind of approach to the idea of freedom is characteristic of the secular environment where the threat or possibility of a greater number of constraining factors is viewed as a sufficient stimulus to encourage people to act according to rules accepted in a given society. In religious environment, the idea of freedom is looked upon as an opportunity of an individual to be free regardless of present social or cultural constrains. Choosing to follow certain rules is not tied to the danger of less social freedom. Nor is it conditioned by the greater social or cultural freedoms, as a reward for compliance. But, as long as an individual does what is considered good and right from religious point of view, he or she is free by definition, regardless of how the set of external goal-setting constrains changes in the process. In this case, freedom is looked upon as the freedom from sin and from sinful nature, determining the instances of those constrains in that particular individual's life.

Freedom from sin, and from the power of the fallen carnal human nature is in the individual's ability to choose what is right and good. It is generally believed  that that choice is made because of the intrinsic transcendental freedom, given to man along with the "spirit" of life at the moment of his creation by God. Unfortunately, the concept of choosing, in absolute terms, does not refer to human beings, but to God alone. With regard to man, the idea of choosing anything at all, especially when it comes to issues of good versus evil and life versus death, is far from being an intrinsic characteristic, though. God is the one who does the choosing. With man it is a figurative expression, denoting the state of affairs rather than literally meaning a universally thoroughly weighted choice on his part. As soon as a choice is made by man, most often it ends up being a certain form of heresy. Heresy is choice, etymologically. And human choice is false by the very fact of its being a choice, and even more so if it is viewed as a free one.

The very precept of being free to choose is fallacious, because freedom in absolute terms is an illusion, and any choice thus claimed in the name of it is a lie. Since religion today derives its concept of freedom from the Biblical account of God, the only way to prove that that concept is wrong is by proving that the divine qualities and characteristics, presented in the Scriptures, absolutely have nothing to do with the philosophical notion of freedom.  

How to Beat the Banksters: Iceland paves the way how to deal with financial crises and financial fraudsters

How to Beat the Bankers: Iceland Paves the Way How to Deal with Financial Crises and Financial Fraudsters

One of the most noteworthy stories related to the world of finances is of course the bankruptcy of Iceland in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 where the Icelandic authorities resorted to inflation-targeting to allow borrowing beyond what the economy’s gross domestic product (GDP) could pay for.

After the privatization of the banking sector completed in 2000, the economy was thrown into a tailspin when over a five year period, private bankers borrowed about 120 billion dollars. An economic bubble was created, which caused the house prices to double, and made a small percentage of Iceland's population rich enough to buy overseas investments, mansions, yachts, and private jets, while leaving an unpardonable debt for all the Icelanders.

In response to the failed banking system, on 9 October 2008 the Icelandic Financial Supervisory Authority took control of Kaupthing, the main bank in the country. Later on, the government officials were forced to resign, the old government was liquidated, and a new government was put in its place. By March 2010, Iceland's people voted to deny payment of the 3,500 million Euro debt created by the bankers, and about 200 high-level executives and bankers
responsible for the economic crisis in the country were either arrested or were facing criminal charges.

Reykjavík District Court sentenced former CEO of Glitnir Lárus Welding and the bank’s former company division manager Guðmundur Hjaltason to nine months in prison on Friday, December 30, 2012.

They happened to be the first high ranking bankers from Iceland's three largest lenders to be sentenced to jail for their activities linked to the country's financial and economic collapse in 2008.

The two former chief executives are indited for their roles in approving the €35m (€59 m at today’s exchange rate) loan just three months before the collapse of the bank.

The domestic parts of the country's three biggest banks were saved, while their international arms were liquidated.

Bondholders who had lent money to Iceland were "burned" with significant losses, but given control of the remains of the banks.

According to a wide range of reports dedicated to the intricacies of the financial crisis in Iceland, Glitnir was Iceland’s third-largest bank before its collapse in October 2008. The trial has marked the start of prosecutions brought in Iceland against bankers after the collapse of its three largest lenders ( Kaupthing, Glitnir, and Landsbanki) forced the Nordic island into an international bailout following their massive expansion leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

Glitnir was the first of Iceland’s three major lenders to fail in October 2008. Together, Glitnir, Kaupthing Bank hf and Landsbanki Islands hf had balance sheets ten time the size of the island nation’s $13 billion economy.

Geir Haarde, the country's former prime minister, was found guilty of negligence leading up to the financial crisis but escaped jail.

Fortunately, some of the perpertrators of the Icelandic financial fraud did not come out to be so lucky.

Hreidar Mar Sigurdsson, the former chief executive of the largest Icelandic bank Kaupthing was arrested back in 2010.

That turned out to be the first high-profile arrest since the country's financial collapse in 2008.

Gudmundur Hjaltason, Glitnir’s former head of corporate finance, was found guilty in the case, in which prosecutors said they had in early 2008 approved a loan to a company that had a stake in the bank outside the usual decision-making process, eventually leading to a loss of about €54m.

Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson, the former boss of the Icelandic investment company that owned stakes in Hamleys, House of Fraser, All Saints and frozen food chain Iceland had been charged with fraud and faced allegations in Reykjavik that
he exerted undue influence on Glitnir. Mr Johannesson’s influence on the UK high street resulted in him being named by trade magazine Retail Week in 2007 as the third most powerful retailer in Britain. Mr Johannesson’s investment
company, FL Group, was the largest shareholder in Glitnir.

Lárus Welding, the former CEO of Glitnir, was indicted alongside Mr Jóhannesson before Christmas in connection with another loan Glitnir made shortly before its demise. Mr Welding helped to negotiate Landsbanki's €90m takeover of Merrion Capital, the Irish stockbroker back in 2005, when he was Landsbanki's most senior London-based executive, according to sources in Dublin. Before he joined Glitnir in 2007, Mr Welding was a senior executive at Landsbanki, that owned Ireland's Merrion Capital from 2005 to 2008.

Halldor Kristjansson and Sigurjon Arnason, Landsbanki's former joint chief executives, have been quizzed by Icelandic prosecutors as part of investigations into the collapse of Landsbanki.

After Landsbanki had been swept up in the financial crisis of 2008 its failure affected hundreds of thousands of UK savers who had deposits with its internet banking subsidiary, Icesave. The Landsbanki winding-up board is taking legal action against not only PwC, the global accounting group, in Iceland but also PwC in the UK over the bank’s failure.

The collapse of Iceland’s banks led to a 10 per cent fall in economic growth, a big rise in unemployment and a halving in the value of its currency. But all the bankers and politicians put on trial so far have denied wrongdoing, claiming they were caught out by a global credit crunch.

So far, despite widespread popular anger in western countries at the behavior of banks leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, only low-level executives at big banks or top managers at small lenders have faced prosecution in countries such as the UK and US.

Perhaps the most high profile case in the US was the conviction in June 2011 of Lee Farkas, the chairman of Taylor, Bean & Whitaker, a relatively small mortgage lender in Florida.

Iceland has learned her lesson well, though. In February 2011, a new constitutional assembly settled in to rewrite the Iceland's constitution, aimed to avoid future possible entrapment by debt-based currency foreign loans.

According to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Iceland now is slowly emerging from a deep recession following the collapse of its main banks. The economy stopped contracting by late 2010 and a consumption and business investment-led recovery was projected to gather momentum, lifting economic growth to 3 percent by 2012.