Christianity
A Summary of Christianity at AskWhy! Paper Abstracts Piped from Yahoo!
Abstract
These abstracts are taken from the actual AskWhy! pages and piped here via Yahoo! Pipes. They allow you to get a flavour of each page to see whether it might be of interest without having to load every one. An aid to browsing the website! The Heading in each case is a link to the page.
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Abstract
These abstracts are taken from the actual AskWhy! pages and piped here via Yahoo! Pipes. They allow you to get a flavour of each page to see whether it might be of interest without having to load every one. An aid to browsing the website! The Heading in each case is a link to the page.
AW! Christianity Abstracts
Abstracts from each page on the Christianitydirectory of the AskWhy! main website.
Personal Introduction by Dr M D Magee
The gentile Christian bishops did not tell the truth but deliberately obscured it. Pious lying is not simply an ‘aberration’ of Christianity, it is its very foundation. These original pious lies were not merely whims of over enthusiastic converts but were deliberate deceptions needed to refute the stories about the real Jesus that people were bringing back from Palestine. There never was a Jesus of faith until the first Christians invented him by telling pious lies about another Jesus—the Jesus of history. Again the oral tradition was strong and could neither be ignored nor denied because too many people were telling the truth. In the lead up to the Jewish War and its aftermath, many Jews left Palestine to join their brothers in the wider empire. They knew the story of Jesus the Nazarene and told it freely. It was a different story from that of the first gentile bishops.
Did I Die to Show You How to Torture and Kill?
Modern redneck fundamentalist Christians have little or no conception of Jesus as a pacifist unwilling to use fatal force. They are quite sure Christ was Rambo. Yet their Christ was supposed to have been the God of Love Himself, and died proving that murderous humans will even kill their own God. Not that it taught them anything. This is a simple reminder of the horrors of Christianity.
Is Christianity Satanic?
Modern Christians are sure they have been saved by having faith in a loving God. The God himself, when speaking on earth as an incarnated man, as Christians believe, never said it would be that easy. Maybe “the saved” ought not to be so certain!
What is religion? It is a puzzle
Occasionally, religious people feel the awe everyone used to feel, and, because it is now so unusual, think it is supernatural. Yet, it is the exact opposite—it is entirely natural, although it signals to us the ‘superness’ of Nature. A belief in God is not necessary for people to be religious. Are Buddhism and Confucianism religions? They are so described, but Buddha and Confucius were agnostics, and Confucianism has been faithful to its founder’s agnosticism. Was Stoicism, one of the greatest of moral systems, a religion? Stoics were indifferent to gods and were concerned only with the life of people here on earth.
Criticism of the Christian Bible
The most important theme of the Old Testament is the fall of man. That of the New Testament is the career of the Christian saviour, Jesus. In the Old Testament, the first man, Adam, disobeyed God, who cursed him and his offspring, introducing sin—original sin—into the world. To lift the curse, that He Himself placed on mankind, God had to manifest Himself on earth as the Son and be sacrificed, thus propitiating the sin committed at the beginning of human history—though not everyone’s but only those who believe unquestioningly the fancies of the Christians. Christians need these Jewish legends to justify their God’s sacrifice, which otherwise is inexplicable. So they say the bible is the inspired or even infallible word of God.
Absurdities of the Infallible Bible
The absurdities of the bible are used to indoctrinate children still. It all began with Adam and Eve who led the human race into sin! When God made woman in the Yehouistic creation story, he cut out one of Adam’s ribs and made it into a woman. So, women are inferior beings, only made as an afterthought. Few preachers would say it was a myth, but the truth is the exact opposite. Males are the afterthought—the first sex was the female. Everyone begins life as a female but by birth about half develop features of maleness. Here a few biblical absurdities and contradictions are considered.
Some Contradictions of the Inerrant Bible
Catholic Christians do not pretend that the bible is infallible. Many American Protestant Christians sects do. To imagine the bible is infallible is to make it into an idol, and those who so regard the bible are idolators. Yet is is not at all hard to find manifest contradictions in the bible that Protestant ministers have to excuse or explain away somehow. They obviously succeed to the satisfaction of their gullible flocks, but not of anyone intelligent. Here some of the biblical contradictions.
Is the Bible Fact or Fiction?
The “truth of the bible is of vital importance to all of us”, Christians tell us—a matter of life and death, meaning eternal life and eternal death, because it promises believers eternal life. It is the core of the Christian scam. Christians therefore claim evidence for the truth of the bible is overwhelming, and one offers us over 40 major archaeological discoveries which endorse scripture. Christians are also fond of claiming biblical critics have been “roundly defeated by scholars”. The skeptic wants to know what position these “scholars” held vis-a-vis biblical truth. Were they objective or did they have a biblical axe to grind? Here the evidence offered is examined.
Miracles, Myths and Mysteries of Christianity
The New Testament is mystery not history. Christianity is based on myths, miracles and mystery. That is why belief is so important to it. Without the supposed God-required necessity of unquestioning faith, no one could possibly believe any of it, except in the same way as anyone believes fairy tales—as entertainment. The content of this page is in the public domain and can be freely copied and copied wherever you wish, though a link to www.askwhy.co.uk would be appreciated if it is possible. Anyway, help yourself!
Revising the Jesus of History for the Future of Faith
For Christianity, history is more central than in any religion because Christians claim Jesus of Nazareth appeared on earth as God incarnate, died and was resurrected, and these are indisputable historical facts. Unfortunately, people, some of them Christians, keep disputing these facts of history, and as more people note the alternatives, the Christian world experiences a crisis of faith. The plan of some Christian revisionists is to discard the Jesus of History.
An Overview of the Origins of Christianity
Christians believe that Jesus was an ethical teacher, a reformer of Judaism, who was cruelly treated and slain by the old guard, jealous of their tradition. Ethically there was little in it that did not exist in classical philosophy but it brought with it the features of the oriental mysteries that were already popular in the empire and in particular the Jewish scriptures which impressed the Greeks with the sense of purpose shown by the oriental God over an apparently long period of time.
The Quest for the Historical Jesus
The four gospels are our chief source of direct information about Jesus. These, however, are always tendentious, often contradictory and sometimes demonstrably wrong. Moreover, the events Jesus prophesied in them did not come to pass. Instead, he endured the ignominy of a Roman crucifixion. Within the movement which sprang up after his death, a process or metamorphosis took place by which the proclaimer became the proclaimed, the rebel was acclaimed as God, and the Christs of faith began to rise, like bad odours, from the corpse of the Jesus of history. In the quest for the historical Jesus there are more bad odours generated by Christian scholars than feasible pictures, but Christians do not mind, as long as the exasperated doubter gives up the quest and remains within the fold of the believing flock. A survey of the quests for the historical Jesus.
The Third Quest for the Historical Jesus
The Third Quest has been so named since perhaps the 70s. A distinguishing feature is the involvement of Jewish scholars trying to recover the historical Jesus. The heavenly kingdom is about God, not Jesus himself, and is on earth. Jesus is a Jew, and the early kingdom movement—the expectation of God’s earthly rule and Israel’s liberation from foreign oppression—is not the founding of a religion called Christianity but a Jewish phenomenon. The historical Jesus and the Jesus of the early church bear little resemblance to one another. The church had to deliberately distort the stories brought by Jews from Judaea after the diaspora of 70 AD. Even more tenuous is the connexion between the historical Jesus and later Christianity. Continuing surveying the quest for the historical Jesus.
Did Jesus Christ ever Live?
Robert M Price, a former evangelist turned battling skeptic, asks, “Was Christ a Fiction?”. Price declares he was in more ways than one. The worst way is that Jesus is really the fly used by evangelists, priests and other crooks to catch people to control them. Apologists’ say there was “too little time between the death of Jesus and the writing of the gospels for legends to develop”, but 40 years is quite sufficient. In any case, apologists cannot face the argument that Jesus never existed because their whole mentality presupposes a Jesus who died around 30 AD. That Christ is mythical means there was no Jesus alive in Pontius Pilate’s time to give rise to a legend but instead, Pilate’s time was later selected as the time when Jesus lived. Orally transmitted legends usually come from the generation before last.
Historical Criticism and Sacred History
Christians cannot honestly ground their faith in the truth of a “sacred history” recognized by natural criteria as pseudo-historical or false. They try to show that the method for verifying events used by historical criticism with regard to biblical narratives, and in particular with regard to the resurrection narratives, is inappropriate. Such objections are variations of the assertion that the historical-critical method is based on arbitrary presuppositions. This accusation is unjustified. In their desire to be justified by holding “sacred history” to be true, Christians forego God Himself in favour of literary idolatry.
The Gospels
Christianity distinguishes itself from other monotheistic religions in its devotion to a divine being who, it is claimed, appeared at a known time and place in history and whose life and teachings are accurately known because they were recorded by people alive at the time. Yet, if anyone today claimed to be a Son of God, we should consider them to be deluded or a charlatan. The clergy agree that all gods are myths other than their own, but what makes the Christian god an exception to the rule? They say the holy book of Christianity, the bible and particularly the gospels, show it. Who though could believe a book published today that abounded in miracles? Here is the first part of an examination of the gospels.
TheGospels—Matthew, Luke and John
Christians might believe that in the gospels they have independent accounts of the ministry of Jesus. One observer, they might argue, could have been mistaken but could four? But Matthew, Mark and Luke are not independent. Matthew and Luke are mostly based on Mark and Q, a missing source, but Q, though earlier, seems to be a collection of wise sayings with little or no narrative, so can add relatively little to the gospel story, which is largely narrative. The few sayings of Jesus in Paul’s epistles, which pre-date the gospels, stem from Q—roughly the version of Matthew—suggesting it was the earliest Christian text. There is evidence for Q also in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas. The fourth gospel, John, seems to stem from a different tradition from the other three especially in its account of the last week in Jerusalem but is too late to be of primary interest.
The Gospel of Mark
The Gospel of Mark is considered the first written gospel, it has ‘priority’ over Luke and Matthew because they used Mark in composing their own gospels twenty or so years later. Mark was not a companion of Jesus, possibly not an inhabitant of Palestine and possibly not a Jew. His gospel includes garbled bits of Essene and later material, is confused in its geography and sociology and has a false ending. Nevertheless, if Mark’s is the first gospel to be recorded, if it is considered accurate enough by two more gospel writers to be reproduced by them in large measure and, if Mark really wrote down what Peter said, as church tradition has it, then Mark should contain the essence of the Aramaic oral tradition, the story of the Nazarenes as perceived by Peter, supposedly Jesus’s right hand man.
The Gospel of Mark, Marcan Priority and the Source Q
For over a hundred years most scholars have been satisfied that the shortest and clumsiest gospel, Mark’s, was the first one, an idea called the ‘Priority of Mark’. A lost source, Q, alongside Mark explains most of the problems of commonality between Matthew and Luke while allowing them such different approaches. Matthew has arranged his material in a non-narrative way to give Jesus several major discourses, the most famous of which is the Sermon on the Mount. Sayings from these discourses appear all over the place in the other two gospels. If Matthew was the original author, as a few still think, it is hard to see that later evangelists would be so cavalier with his work. Why also should Luke be so respectful of Matthew’s words when he thought his order was wrong? If Luke and Matthew knew nothing of each other’s work but used common sources, such things are not problems.
The Hellenistic Background to Christianity
Wicked Pagan Greece produced a line of unsurpassed moralists, a strange mystery to Christians for whom there is only one ethical route in the whole universe. Socrates and Plato believed in one God and were highly moral idealists. Athens was not so much the city of vice as the greatest morality making center the world has ever known. It culminated in the Stoic School which produced Christ-like austere moralists such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and gave many educated Romans a high moral character. The Stoics ridiculed the idea of spirit and free will, which Christians insist are the indispensable bases of any moral conduct. For one hundred and fifty years, Rome had Stoic emperors whose ethical level exceeded any in the history of Christendom. Of the twenty nine Pagan Roman emperors twenty one were admirable men of good character.
Pious Fraud: Manipulating the Good News
If Nero persecuted Christians, it was the only example of Roman intolerance up to the Jewish War. Origen, the early Christian apologist, declared that the number of martyrs was inconsiderable. The Christian fathers, Acts, Justin and Origen all say little or nothing about the Christian persecutions of Nero, because the victims were predominantly Jews. Acts concludes by saying that Paul was not forbidden to teach in Rome, he did it with all boldness—and the year was around 64 AD. How Christians have manipulated their good news to create myths—aka lies—still told.
Bultmann on the Judaism of Jesus
The Persians started Judaism, and conditioned the Jews to think of Yehouah as a universal god, but when Judaea became an independent country under the Maccabees, Yehouah was proclaimed the Jewish national god. Jesus the Jew restated that Jews can make no demands of God. They must dedicate their whole person to Him, be His abject slaves as the Persians wanted 500 years before. God put fear in the people’s hearts, fear of His retribution, an inducement to submit and be obedient. The prophets and the Deuteronomistic Historian had emphasized that the covenant had never been fulfilled except by a remnant of the people. Its fulfilment was always a future promise—at the End of the World. Jesus was expecting the world to end, of that there is no doubt. Reflexions on the Judaism of Jesus described by Rudolf Bultmann in Primitive Christianity
Hellenization of Judaism
If Hellenization is a process, it must have at one extreme the purely Greek culture, religion and all. At the other extreme was a stubborn adherence to the rules imposed by Ezra. Palestinian Jews, “the Hebrews”, had reason for concern when they saw their temple taken over by “the Greeks”—Hellenized Jews. It was only a question of time before Yehouah became Zeus, and surely that is the point about the “Abomination of Desolation”. It is simplistic to say that “Jews were unique and did not lose their identity”. The early success of Christianity was precisely because it appealed to those Hellenized Jews that were crossing the boundary from Judaism.
From Judaism to Christianity 1
Christians believe the Jewish scriptures prophesy Jesus, whom they call Christ, the Greek word for messiah. The Christ Myth of the Christians was devised to create a christ, necessarily Jewish, potentially acceptable to non-Jews, and the Jesus Myth was crudely refashioned for that purpose. What was its origins? As shown by the presence of Magi at the nativity, the Persian religion influenced the notion of a Saviour (Saoshyant) delivering the world from evil, and the shepherds at the nativity of Jesus copied the shepherds at the earthly birth of the Persian God, Mithras. Jewish prophets indeed pictured a God-sent warrior king leading the Jews to leadership of the world, but the Christian messiah is depicted as meek and pacific. Messianic prophecies, read them in their full context, either do not pertain to a pacific teacher or are not messianic!
Classic Authors on the Jewish Sects
The gospels show Jesus as an independent healer and preacher fervently opposed by the Pharisees, one of the sects of pious Jews, but the Pharisees were not the only sect of the Jewish religion. Jesus himself belonged to another sect. Jews had split into various sects each believing its approach was right, particularly the four philosophies of the Jews described by Josephus. These philosophies were religious, but also political—their attitude to the Roman invaders and their Greek culture. Educated Jews associated with these sects just as today people identify with a political party, and an understanding of Jesus and the gospel stories requires an awareness of the Jewish sects and Jesus’s relationship to them.
Pliny on the Essenes
“They teach the rewards of righteousness are to be earnestly striven for… how much they exceed all other men that addict themselves to virtue, and this in righteousness, and indeed to such a degree, that as it hath never appeared among any other men… [They hold] all things in common, so that a rich man enjoys no more of his own wealth than he who hath nothing at all… they are excluded from the common court of the temple, but offer their sacrifices themselves.” What the classical authors, Pliny, Philo and Josephus had to say about the Essenes, the Galilaeans and the Zealots
Hippolytus of Rome on the Essenes
“And when they have taken their seats in silence, they set down loaves in order, and next some one sort of food to eat along with the bread, and each receives from these a sufficient portion. No one, however, tastes these before the priest utters a blessing, and prays over the food.” What Hyppolytus of Rome had to say about the Essenes, and also the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Zealots. The later books of this ten part work were found in the monastery of Mount Athos, Greece, in 1842—at first thought to be forged, they are now generally accepted. Though these sections from chapter 13 of book 9, relating to Jewish sects, are plainly heavily indebted to Josephus, they contain additional material either from another source or edited out of the copies of Josephus we now have.
Essene Life and Beliefs 1
Each year, at the annual renewal of the covenant held at Pentacost, the wilderness chaste brotherhood (called priests and levites) and the village Essenes (called people and Israelites) congregated in the desert for a covenant renewal ceremony. New members were admitted to be instructed by the Master, when they would hear the Essene interpretation of the law of Moses and commit themselves to it. They were taught they were living in the last days (End Time) and that strict adherence to the law was essential to enter God’s kingdom or, as the Scrolls more often called it, “house” or “sanctuary”. Those who were saved were those who held fast to the community’s rules, followed the law, listened to the righteous teacher and confessed before God. The life and beliefs of the Essenes.
Messianic Hymns
The messianic hymns date to the end of the reign of Herod, when the Christian messiah was born. The figure in the self-glorification hymn is the messiah, but the first person account makes the author tantamount to God. Besides self-glorification is a confession of enduring suffering, echoing the suffering servant of Isaiah. Servants of God in heaven were angels, on earth priests (kohanim), when faithful, living angels. About 50 Essene kohanim lived in the Essene quarter of Jerusalem between 30 BC and 70 AD. Celibate, they had stricter purity laws than those of Jerusalem Temple priests. Essenes were faithful servants who had suffered wrongly, and the suffering servant could be an Essene interpolation specifically of the experience of an Essene leader about thirty years before the crucifixion. These hymns suggest that the Qumran community had identified the Jewish messiah with God and with the suffering servant before the Christian churches had done. The church reflected already existing Essene theology.
Virgil, Menehem Nasi of the Essenes and the Son of God, the emperor Augustus
The second beast of Revelation persuaded the whole world to worship the first beast, the Roman empire. Augustus had statues of the goddess Roma erected in temples. The beast’s heads were the actual emperors thus far, and one, the first, Julius Caesar, was mortally wounded, threatening the life of the beast itself. It dates the redaction to 69 AD when the Jewish war was being fought, the purpose of it being anti-Roman propaganda. The Oracle of Hystaspes was being used as a vehicle to parody Augustus and the Roman empire as dragons opposed to the true God and Son of God of the Christians. Essenes hated the Romans, and were convinced they would be the agents of Roman destruction, yet the Essene leader, Menehem, was a “friend” of Herod. Odd? Not really because the Essenes were a secret organization. Menehem was a mole. Did the Essenes know about Roman propaganda? Menehem must have known of the poems eulogizing Augustus as a god and saviour, and been outraged by it.
Christian and Essene Common Features 1
The Essenes held assemblies and congregations, words translated as “church”. Jesus says, “tell it to the church” (Matthew 18:17) before there was a Christian church. We infer that Jesus was an Essene. Essenes also had bishops, deacons, elders, priests, disciples, scriptures, gospels, epistles, psalms, hymns, mystery, allegory, and so on, long before Christianity. Both communities used the same phraseology. Christ and his apostles had nothing to originate with respect to doctrines, precepts, church polity, or ecclesiastical terms. The Essenes and Christians could not have existed at the same time as separate institutions, they were too similar. The latter must have emerged from the former. There are differences, particularly those indicated in Christian documents, though some were later changes by the gentile Church. Others are genuine because Nazarenes were a variety of Essenes. Notes on the common features between Essenes and Christians
Similarities and Differences between Jesus and the Essenes 1
The objective of Jesus as the head of the Nazarenes was exactly what Christians have always said it was. He was trying to convert the sinners of Israel before the End. What has come to us of his attempt has come from some of his converts. He was a professional Essene, but preaching to the masses. The people who recorded Jesus’s doctrine had only a partial knowledge of it. He had no time to explain to them the finer points of Essene theology. His object was to have them repent and be ritually purified by baptism, ready for God’s Appointed Time, which would be soon! The Essenes had exactly the same aim. The differences are only apparent, because we have only an incomplete idea of the views of both Jesus and the Essenes, and the church has made its own changes later. What we do know overlaps far more than can be explained by accident.
The Cult of Joshua
The Jews might have had a cult of a god or demi-god named Joshua. Joshua was an old cult name for God, evolved from the idea of a Jewish saviour or messiah based on the Persian Saoshyant. The Joshua who “returned” with Zerubabel was a mythological personification of the saviour Joshua showing the eschatological significance of the “return” portrayed to the “returners”, the Persian colonists. The name Iesous (Jesus), throughout the Septuagint, was the Greek translation of the Hebrew name Jehoshua or Joshua. Jesus is Joshua—in Greek—and, in the original Acts and Hebrews, the scriptural Joshua is called Jesus. Most modern Christians do not know this, so what was clear to the first Christians is obscure to modern ones. Christian clergymen are not keen to make it known that Jesus is Joshua because their flocks might come to see that Jesus was not as unique as they make out, and it might seem he was trying to be Joshua!
Essenes and the Qabalah 1
The medieval Qabalists were disenchanted with life, seeking to build a bridge from this Vale of Tears to God. They renounced the world and sought the spiritual, the hidden and the unknown. Only the elect could benefit. Commentators say that Qabalah drew upon ideas form various places, yet they can be found together in Essenism. Much of the Dead Sea Scrolls is visionary and reminiscent of the Qabalah. The Qabalist rejection of life and inclination to asceticism is supposed to be the influence of the medieval Christian monasteries, but the Essenes and Therapeutae were there before the Christians. Qabalists mortified flesh to subjugate desire, but the Essenes had done it first, and were so successful they laughed at their Roman torturers. Through constant prayer and Torah study, Qabalists sought to reach God. So too did the Essenes. Among the parallels is that between the Metatron of Qabalah and the Melchizedek at Qumran.
Essenes as Militant Nationalists
In 104 BC, Alexander Jannaeus succeeded Aristobulus as king. The Hasids had split into two parties, the Essenes and the Pharisees. Alexander Jannaeus was a rough soldier with no pious pretensions, but pleased the Essenes because he was so opposed to their enemies, the Pharisees—he crucified 800 of them—and the Greeks. This antagonism of the Pharisees and the Essenes is the true birth of Christianity. Essenes hated foreign rule. A scroll fragment includes the sentence “The Lord is ruler… to Him alone belongs sovereignty”. Josephus wrote of the followers of Judas of Galilee that they called no man Lord but God, just like Christians, and condemning foreign rulers. Judah was a theocracy. An opponent of Herod, Sadduc, joined Judas of Galilee in revolt. The Zealots were incensed by foreign gifts to the Temple, and it was the eventual refusal of the junior priests to offer foreign sacrifices that triggered the Jewish war. Discussing the revolutionary and nationalist activities of the Essenes
Galileans: Supporters of Judas of Galilee - Zealots
Galileans were the supporters of Judas of Galilee, the people whom Josephus soon was calling Zealots. Jesus was also always called a Galilean and led a band of Galileans! But this simply meant they came from Galilee—Christians say. They had the same motto too—“they called no man Lord but God”. This brings us to the question of the tribute money. “Shall we give or not?” Jesus was asked. The same question had incensed the original Galileans so much they had replied, “Never!” Judas had therefore rebelled and set up his revolutionary movement—the Galileans. They were plainly the same Galileans in the gospels, and Jesus was one of them.
Nazarene
Origen of Caesarea (185-254 AD) lived thirty miles from Nazareth, but could not find it. He concluded that many places mentioned in the gospels never existed. Before Constantine, Nazareth was attested only by the New Testament evangelists. Yet “Nazarene” was a word people understood. In the Qumran scrolls, the Hebrew word “nasi” is a messianic leader. The Nasi had the role of the messiah at the sacred meal of the council of the Essene community. In Ezekiel, nasi means the coming Davidic prince, the messiah. The plural “nesiim” means clouds, enabling the Nasi to come in the nesiim, reminding us of Daniel, but logically it means “princes”—the saints and angels of the heavenly host. Nasi seems to be the origin of “Nazarene”. Nazarenes were followers of the messianic leader, the Nasi, either Essenes or their converts.
False Prophets: Biblical Prophecies and Mother Shipton’s Exposed
Prophecies against Tyre and Egypt failed. Ezekiel prophesied that Nebuchadrezzar would destroy Tyre and it would never be found again, but two hundred and fifty years after Nebuchadrezzar, Alexander had to seige a strong commercial city into submission. S Jerome, in the fourth century AD, thought Tyre was the finest city of Phoenicia. He was astonished that Ezekiel’s prophecy had so utterly failed. Ezekiel 29 puts Nebuchadrezzar’s siege of Tyre in the past tense, so, the book was not finished until after the events it prophesied! The author admits he was wrong in this prediction and that the Lord would recompense the king of Babylon with Egypt for his troubles against Tyre, another failed prophecy! Jeremiah’s prophesied ignominious end for King Jehoiakim was belied in Kings. Haggai and Zechariah prophesied glory for Zerubbabel, yet he disappeared. Biblical prophecies are most often wrong or are obvious fakes, and messianic prophecies are the same.
John the Baptist 1
Essenes believed that all Israel should be given the chance to join the perfect of Israel in the last days. The Rule of the Congregation speaks of “the many of Israel in the last days when they shall join the community”. John the Baptist and Jesus were therefore offering all Jews the chance to repent and rejoin the chosen of God, those who would be saved in the coming holocaust. So, publicans and soldiers came to John asking him what they should do to be saved. The answer was the same for all Jews—sincerely repent and receive baptism. The Essene High Priest, who called the annual festival of the renewal of the covenant, rather than the Master, seems to have been their titular head. If, after the baptism of Jesus as Nasi, John the Baptist became the High Priest, it would explain why he was able to question Jesus’s progress in Matthew.
John, Jesus and the Essenes 1
Christians scholars pretend that Christianity is uniquely revealed. Honest history shows it is not. It evolved from Essenism. John and the Qumran community have striking resemblances and differences when Essene life is read from their rule book, the Manual of Discipline. The differences are enough for Christian preachers and scholars to claim no connexion, though it is plain in the deeds of John and Jesus. They were Essenes doing what Essenes were supposed to do when their prophetic readings of the signs showed God was about to end the world. John and Jesus believed it and so tried to persuade Jews to repent and be baptized before it was too late. Baptism was the mark of repentance. To distinguish the messiah from his herald, the bible says Jesus did not baptize. If Jesus had not baptized it would never have continued, yet Christians continued to baptize—and with water not spirit. Today some Christians even call themselves Baptists!
The Mandaeans, Followers of John the Baptist
Sabians, baptizers, identified with the Mandæans, believed “there is no God but God”, like the band of Galileans and later the Christians. Mandæans say Jesus is a false messiah, but the true one was Enosh-Uthra, the “good man”, John the Baptist, who came in the days of Pilate, healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, and raised the dead. So, John does the same miracles as Jesus, contrary to the fourth gospel—“John did no miracle”. In Christian tradition, miracles are reserved for Jesus and baptism for John, though Christ did baptize. In Mandæan tradition, John does both, and looks much like the gospel Jesus. It makes sense. As successive Essene Nesiim, John and Jesus had similar characteristics particularly healing Jewish apostates, and so were mixed up. Enosh-Uthra taught a dualism of truth and error, light and darkness, and life and fiery death, Essene teaching. After unmasking Christ, who was crucified, He ascended to the Abode of Truth, but will return at the End.
The Messiah and the Star of Bethlehem
From Jesus’s birth, Jewish rebels were leading armed struggles against the Romans and claiming to be the Messiah, a king. Yet in the midst of all this, God chose to send Jesus as the Messiah, a king. God might have intended to sacrifice himself as His son but he chose a strange time to do it, a time when Jesus the true Messiah could not be distinguished from deluded men who suffered the same fate—crucifixion. Jesus looks to be one of many messianic pretenders to the throne of Israel. If he was, then someone has deceived us. If he was not, God looks incompetent, for if He wanted to save mankind why did he do it in a way that leaves deception, or simply error, a large possibility? Nor did the Jewish War end these messianic claims, several more arose, until bar Kosiba, the Son of the Star, another messiah, led a four year rebellion with disastrous results for all Jews. Notes on the meaning of the Star of Bethlehem
The Revelation of Jesus 1
The myth of Jesus is convincingly explained from the historical fact of apocalyptic fervour among some Jews in the first century. Jesus obviously thought the end of the world was due and that it was his duty to help defeat the cosmic forces of evil by defeating them here on earth. The forces of evil to Jews at the time were their idolatrous Roman oppressors, and the Jews who collaborated with them. If the seven epistles and the epilogue are removed from Revelation, and obvious cosmetic additions made by Christians, such as blasphemous references to Jesus as God also, what remains is a Jewish apocalypse—nothing less than the beliefs of Jesus. If Christianity began with an apocalyptic Jewish sect, it would hardly be surprising that it had an eschatological tradition and mythology behind it. The Jewish sect was the Essenes, who saw themselves as prophets because they were forever watching for signs of the end of the world.
The Revelation of Jesus Restored
If the seven epistles and the epilogue are removed from Revelation, and obvious cosmetic additions made by Christians, such as references to Jesus alongside or instead of references to God, are also removed, the result is a barely unadulterated Jewish apocalypse—nothing less than the beliefs of Jesus. Revelation restored.
The Seven Churches of the Revelation of Jesus
Clues in the seven letters to churches show that these chapters are from that period when Christianity and Judaism were dividing. Read properly, the letters offer an important insight into this division. They are written from the Jewish side of the divide and the “Nicolaitans” were Hellenised Jews. It was the wing of the church that Paul took it upon himself to represent. The seven letters are from the same school as the epistle of James, placing their emphasis on works rather than faith, and they criticise those who are tempted, mainly by the Nicolaitans, into apostasy. Doubtless the Nicolaitans, like Paul, put emphasis on faith. If the Nicolaitans are the Hellenized Jews, like Paul, who were changing the nature of the original Essene beliefs, then these letters are meant to butress the faithful against the apostates.
Birth Narratives 1.1
The Virgin Birth is unknown to Paul. The earliest Christian writings, Paul's Epistles, do not mention it. Jesus was of the seed of David according to the flesh (Rom 1:3), and Jesus was born of a woman under the law (Gal 4:4). By any natural standard, Jesus was illigitimate—her husband did not impregnate Mary so Jesus was not the son of her husband. He was therefore not a son of David as the genealogies seek to show. Nor was Jesus a son of David because he himself, according to the synoptic gospels, denied it. If Paul was right in saying, “Christ was descended from David according to the flesh”, Christians have to conclude he meant Mary’s flesh so as not deny the miraculous birth. Then the genealogies of Joseph are spurious and superfluous. Joseph is unnecessary to the story, and Mark did not mention him at all. But Christians like the idea of a Davidic descent of Jesus, and believe it, even though God as the Son denied it.
Birth Narratives 2.1
The virgin birth narratives spoiled the purpose of the genealogies, so must have been needed. It was because Jesus had been called Ben Pandera, Son of the Panther, a black man. A virgin (Greek, parthenos) birth explained the rumour that Jesus was a bastard. Pandera was a slur on the word parthenos, Christians said. But Pagan demi-gods were often sons of virgins, so the pun is an unlikely invention of Pagans, though not the opposite. Even normal birth by the impure route was too ignominious for the Christian Son. It had to be spotless, or immaculate, and the mother had to remain a virgin. So, Christians quickly took Mary to be as intact as a pious nun, a perpetual virgin like Pagan goddesses, even after Jesus had been born. Yet Luke describes Jesus as Mary’s first-born, and all the gospels mention brothers of Jesus and sisters too.
Birth Narratives 3.1
Why were Jesus’s family assessed for tax by the Romans when Quirinius taxed Judæa. Galilee, where they lived, was not ruled by the Romans but by the puppet king Herod Antipas? Roman custom was to register people for a census at their place of residence not at their place of birth which imposed absurd burdens on people. If Matthew was written in Alexandria in Egypt, its birth narrative humours the large Jewish population there—the Jewish Son of God was sheltered in Egypt. Matthew exalted Jesus to the equal of Moses by giving him an equal history. No historian mentions Herod’s massacre. Even Luke, reputed a good historian by theologians, does not mention it. In Matthew, Magi saw the “star” and rejoiced with great joy. Soon they fell down worshipping Jesus. An interpolation disguises the rejoicing being over the prophesied man of destiny. The “star” is human. Essenes had twelve leaders and three priests, these latter were probably the three wise men.
Christmas 1
Christians never think it strange that the birth date of Jesus is the birth date of many of the incarnated gods of antiquity. That Pagans venerated the birthday of Christ as the birthday of their gods is beyond coincidence. At the winter solstice, the sun seemed to stop declining in the sky for three days. Its was at crisis point. It might die! Then it began to rise on the 25 December, the sun’s rebirth. Both the year and the day of Christ’s birth are unknown. There is no reason to suppose that Jesus the Nazarene was born on Christmas Day. The importance of 25 December to Pagans made Christians think it must have been the birthday of their messiah. When Constantine made Jesus a god, 25 December, the birthday of the sun gods and particularly that of the chief rival to Christianity, Mithras, was selected as his birthday. By celebrating at the same time as Pagan religions, the bishops accaepted Christ as a sun god, hoping to pull in Pagans worshippers. What are the origins of the various ingredients of the now traditional nativity scene?
The Trappings of Christmas
Christians never think it strange that the birth date of Jesus is the birth date of many of the incarnated gods of antiquity. That Pagans venerated the birthday of Christ as the birthday of their gods is beyond coincidence. At the winter solstice, the sun seemed to stop declining in the sky for three days. Its was at crisis point. It might die! Then it began to rise on the 25 December, the sun’s rebirth. Both the year and the day of Christ’s birth are unknown. There is no reason to suppose that Jesus the Nazarene was born on Christmas Day. The importance of 25 December to Pagans made Christians think it must have been the birthday of their messiah. When Constantine made Jesus a god, 25 December, the birthday of the sun gods and particularly that of the chief rival to Christianity, Mithras, was selected as his birthday. By celebrating at the same time as Pagan religions, the bishops accaepted Christ as a sun god, hoping to pull in Pagans worshippers. What are the origins of the various ingredients of the now traditional nativity scene?
Sun Gods as Atoning Saviours 1
The doctrine of salvation by crucifixion had an astronomical origin. The sun is hung on a cross or crucified when it passes through the equinoxes. The sun god exists as twins, a bright twin and a dark twin, summer and winter, bright and dark. People in northern climates were saved by the sun’s crucifixion when it crossed over the equatorial line into the season of spring, at the vernal equinox at Easter. The sun that is crucified is the dark winter sun, lacking the warmth and brightness of the summer. It is resurrected as, or supplanted by, its twin, the bright warm fertilizing summer sun that continues on to ascend into heaven. In the hot climates of the ancient near east, the summer sun is the wicked sun. Crucified was the salvific cool winter sun that had brought the rains, and his death was bewailed by people forlorn until he came again in the autumn. In Ezekiel, women outside the temple gates bewailed the death of Tammuz. Christianity confused the two traditions.
All the Marys!
Mary is a peculiarly popular name in the gospels. Prominent women were called Mary. Why? Perhaps it was a title—“mar” meaning “lord”, “master”, and “marthah” meaning “lady”, “mistress”, “Martha”. L Y Rahmani says “marah” is the diminutive form of Martha. Antipope Benedict XIII ordered destroyed an ancient treatise called Mar Yesu, “Lord Jesus”. Martha, Miriam and Mary are the same name, differing only in suffixes which indicate a woman. They mean “lady”. Catholics, always called Mary “Our Lady”. Martha is the Aramaic of the Hebrew Maria, and Miriam is another form of the title. Possibly Lady as the Essene equivalent of Lord or Master denoted a senior female in the order. Notes on the several Marys that appear in the gospels
Miracles I
The age of miracles is gone. It has died as science and human understanding has progressed. People today are ready to accept that some things are uncaused, and any such event could not therefore have been caused by God. Uncaused events are known in science such as the emission of an electron by an excited atom, or a sub-atomic particle by an unstable atomic nucleus. Nature is the miracle. Understand her and there is no need of all the other petty conjuring tricks that simple, primitive and uneducated people call miracles. Illiterate, ignorant and superstitious people recount miraculous acts, invent a god to bring order into an imperfect world, then have him violating his own laws for trivial reasons. The wonders of nature ought to inspire observers with amazement at Nature, not some figmentary Creator assumed to be necessary to explain it. The wonders of Nature are not, for Christians, miraculous enough.
Exorcisms and Healing Miracles 1
Unless Bethany was a leper colony, Jesus could not have been dining with a leper. Nor would he anyway—leprosy was unclean. Either leper is a code word or the event did not happen in reality. For the rabbis, leprosy in the Jewish scriptures was often a euphemism for spiritual uncleanness or immoral behaviour, not necessarily for a physical ailment. Christians always regard the spikenard as a perfume, even though it is described correctly as an ointment, and so fail to realize that it is for the leper not for Jesus. In fact, nard is an oil from the plant Nardostachys jatamansi which is a member of the valerian family. Its active constituents include camphor and patchouli. The conclusion of the story is that “the poor” will have everlasting life. It is another kingdom parable. The healing miracles of Jesus
Baptism, a Coronation Ceremony
Jesus arrived for baptism and was acknowledged as the Son of God by a dove and a voice from heaven. If Jesus was already a god, a perfect being, why should he need to undergo baptism for remission of sins? The true explanation—that Jesus was being crowned the Nasi as successor to John the Baptist—is more coherent. Oriental tradition will have been the source of the dove’s descent at Christ’s baptism, and a bird also descends at ancient Middle Eastern coronation ceremonies, normally a hawk, but changed here to a dove because Mark wanted to symbolize that Jesus signaled “a renewal” of the world. The Community Rule refers to “a renewal” at the appointed end. The world was not utterly destroyed but was renewed as it was after the flood. The ceremonies used by the Nazarenes to ordain their men of renown
The Transfiguration
Jews believed that scriptural figures would appear at the end time, and two attend the transfiguration, Moses and Elijah. Peter witnessed it all, but still addressed Jesus as Rabbi, not kurios, the form required of a god. Both supernatural beings were prophets who, like Jesus, fasted for forty days and met Yehouah on a mountain. The Essenes regarded Moses as a prophet—the first prophet. When we read, “Listen to him”, Mark presents Jesus as the eschatological prophet, the last prophet, who Moses prophesied as “That Prophet”. Peter had declared Jesus as the messiah and Jesus had explained his objectives. The next stage is logical—the crowning of the messiah. This is a ceremony of ordination—a coronation. God enthroned Moses at Sinai as His vice-regent. An enthronement is a coronation, and here is the coronation of Jesus as messiah—the prophet, priest and king.
Lesser Puzzles of Jesus’s Ministry
Were the disciples of Jesus fishermen or were they appointed by him as fishers of men? The gospel explicitly says, “I will make you fishers of men”. It is code. The disciples were never fishermen but all were fishers of men whatever their jobs beforehand. Evidence that Jesus was homosexual, like the evidence for his being married, is circumstantial. Nazarenes were converts to Essenism mainly from apostasy, and might normally have become village Essenes. They accepted Essene teaching, but were not willing to put up with the hard celibate and monastic regime of the devout Essene leader. Pious Essene leaders like Jesus could not indulge in heterosexual activity, something impure given by God as a punishment. Homosexuality did not lead to procreation. Jesus’s circumstances as an Essene fit better with his being homosexual than with his being married. If he were one of the village Essenes that did marry, then plainly he could have done, but then he could not have been an Essene leader.
The Poor Men, Jesus and Christianity 1
Origen classified the Ebionites as those who believed in the virgin birth and those who rejected it. Both the Jewish sabbath and the Christian Lord’s Day were holy to them, and they expected the establishment of a messianic kingdom in Jerusalem. Eusebius describes as Ebionites those who held the brother of Jesus, James the Just, in special regard. They had no regard at all for Paul, and Christ was not divine but a plain, naturally conceived man who achieved righteousness through his character. Can it be coincidence that “The Poor Ones” was a name of the followers of James in the Jerusalem Church in the New Testament? Paul claims the only condition James imposed upon him in his missions to the gentiles was to remember the poor. He is reminding him to send money not for any poor but for “The Poor”, the Nazarenes, who, after the defeated uprising, had a lot of widows to support.
Was Mary Israel, Bride of God? 1
In Jewish tradition, the bridegroom is God and the bride or the children of the bridechamber are the children of Israel. God and Israel are betrothed or married. Essenes did not permit divorce at all, so God could not divorce his bride, Israel. Yet pious Jews despaired that Judaea was ruled by Rome, a Satanic power, and so the bride was unfaithful and unfit for marriage. God was staying away from the Bridal Chamber—the Holy of Holies of the temple. When Jesus called the Jews, “this adulterous generation”, he was not accusing them all of committing adultery, but was using the hierogamos metaphor to declare Israel unfit for God. The bride had been illegally taken by another, Rome, and Jesus and the Nazarenes wanted to recover the virtue of Israel by liberating Jerusalem. Then the marriage could go ahead, and the gates of the kingdom would open.
Joseph and Aseneth, Israel as Bride—Introduction
P Reissler long before the Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered declared Joseph and Aseneth as Essene. When Aseneth was distressed, Joseph prayed for her in Essene terms, contrasting light and darkness, truth and error, and life and death. The use of the title, “the Just”, for Joseph might suggest an Essene origin. Modern Christian scholars pooh-pooh the idea because they are desperate to disassociate Christian origins from the Essenes who, to any objective observer, had so many affinities with the Nazarenes that a close link, even if not identity, can be safely supposed. Joseph and Aseneth as an example of the Essene ritual wedding.
The Messianic Meal 1
Jesus has a reputation of being a wine bibber and glutton, always entertaining, eating and drinking. It is the Christian way of disguising that Jesus always conducted “masses” with his converts in the form of the messianic meal, called by Christians, the Eucharist. But, early on, it degenerated. Years after the Last Supper no miraculous event had occurred and the messianic meal of the Essenes degenerated among gentiles into a free meal and a chance to get drunk. Paul had to give them a deeply venerable way of thinking about it. Urging decorum, he told them it was a sacred meal involving the body of Christ, and falsely explained its origins at the Last Supper. He gave as his new interpretation of old Essene liturgy that Jesus told his disciples to break bread and pass a cup “in remembrance of him”.
The Sermon on the Mount and the Renewal of the Covenant
Each year all the camps—the village communities—assembled probably at Qumran for the Feast of the Renewal of the Covenant, the principle holy day of the year, to renew the covenant and to allow initiates to be regraded. It was held at Pentecost, the feast of the new wheat, the Jewish feast of weeks, in about the beginning of June. The Festival of the Renewal of the Covenant of the Essenes and the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospels have much in common. Jesus’s newly baptized Nazarene followers were being read the rules. In Matthew, Jesus calls his followers, the “children of God”. When he talks about children in the gospels, he means the repentant, or the children of Israel. The Essenes were fond of calling themselves “children” also, though the word is usually translated in the masculine making them “sons”. The words used in Matthew are purely Essene even to the use of “poor in spirit”.
God’s Visitation
The Qumran Community was an apocalyptic sect, expecting the end of the world. A cosmic battle would be fought between the forces of Light and Good and the forces of Darkness and Evil, Truth and Lies, God and Belial. In Persian religion, the devil, called by the Essenes Belial, and his dark angels rose from the abyss to attack the good spirit and the angels of light. Eventually Belial would be defeated. God would send a deliverer, the Saoshyant, to herald the end of evil and a new age. The Jewish messianic ideal of a saviour was Persian. God’s visitation, “a day of the Lord”, followed. The kingdom of God dawned and people were judged on the balance of the spirits within them, good men being saved and the wicked condemned. Mankind was purged of falsehood—the earth flooded with molten metal which burned up the wicked but was like warm milk to the righteous. Those who had been true to God’s commandments, His Chosen Ones or Elect, were ressurected into God’s presence to enjoy a messianic banquet and blissful eternal life. The Essene belief in the visitation of God on the Day of His Vengeance.
The Kingdom of God 1
Jesus took up the same message as John the Baptist. It was the same message. Faith was not sufficient to enter the kingdom as theologians later claimed. Jews who wanted to be amongst “the Righteous” had to repent. He made no claim to be the messiah but simply continued John’s call to the misled Jews—they should repent in preparation for the coming kingdom—the time had come, the kingdom of God was near, repentance was needed. Christian scholars writing decades before the Dead Sea Scrolls noted that Jesus’s teaching of the kingdom of God had intensive elements from Persia. The kingdom was a technical term Aryan priests and theologians used for the eschatological end. God’s kingdom was on earth, though it would have been cleansed and renewed by God’s holy fire, but only the messiah and righteous Jews could bring it about. Salvation was the gift of God but it had to be earned by righteousness or sincere repentance. What Jesus meant when he spoke of the kingdom of God.
Parables of the Kingdom
Essenes regarded scripture as mysterious. The use of the phrase, “mystery of the kingdom of God”, emphasizes the link between the gospel and the Essene scrolls. Paul often uses the word “mystery”—sometimes translated as “secret”—in his epistles. The Essenes used the pesher method whereby old documents were interpreted as prophetic of current events. The Habakkuk Commentary of the Dead Sea Scrolls is of this type. The Essene sages sought to read in the scriptures the hidden things of God and, having discovered them, they sought to conceal them from unrighteous ears. This is the real significance of the parables of Jesus. They look like simple moralistic folk tales but there is more to them than meets the eye… or ear! Those that had ears to hear, those who had been taught and had grasped the method, would understand references intended to baffle the ignorant.
The Defeat of the Jerusalem Garrison 1
The miracle of the fig tree preceded the entry into the city but it was not a miracle. It was not the season for figs so why should Jesus expect to find sustenance on it? For those with ears to hear it shouts out that the story is a parable. The fig tree was the Roman Empire. Jesus says the fig-tree would be barren forever, Rome would be impotent. Jesus goes on to say that they could throw “this mountain” into the sea if they had faith. What was “this mountain” other than the might of Rome. A mountain is a common metaphor for an empire and is so used in Revelation. Jesus was about to attack Jerusalem. He reassured his followers with a morale boosting speech using a fig tree as a metaphor for Rome that they would succeed in defeating the gentile if they had faith in God. Later, he Roman fig-tree had withered! How Jesus and his band of Nazarenes defeated the Roman garrison of Jerusalem.
Defeat and Capture
During the period when he taught in the temple, the priesthood could have ordered the temple guards to take him with no more ado, as the gospel admits when Jesus eventually is arrested. There must have been more to it and it was that Jesus had control of the temple and the city. Romans were military masters and would have deliberately attacked on the sabbath, guessing that Jews would be thrown into confusion. Had Pilate’s troops counter attacked and slaughtered Galilaeans in the temple while they were offering sacrifices? It had happened before. Now, Jesus and the Nazarenes were in hiding, and Jesus feared he might be arrested. It is cloak and dagger stuff. Elaborate precautions are taken to keep secure the location of the safe house—even the disciples did not know where it would be. If the Romans had retaken the city and Jesus was in hiding, he could not have simply been arrested and a betrayal would have made more sense.
Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread
Frank Daniels thinks the festival of unleavened bread started on 14 Nisan and continued until the 21 Nisan, following Exodus. He sought to reconcile the gospel differences about the timing of the last supper and the crucifixion of Jesus. Mark indicates that the Passover lamb was killed during the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. These passages confirm that 14 Nisan was the first day of Unleavened Bread, matching Exodus rather than Leviticus, but it was the day when the lambs were slaughtered. Daniels claims the Nazarenes’ lamb had already been slaughtered on the afternoon of 13 Nisan, and would be prepared and eaten on the evening of 14 Nisan, one day earlier than normal in anticipation of Jesus’s fate. Why deny that all this activity took place on the afternoon that the lambs were normally killed—the afternoon of 14 Nisan in preparation for the Seder that same evening (15 Nisan), following Jewish practice.
The Mystery of Barabbas
For Christians, the peculiar incident of the release of Barabbas, a robber, is another callous event in the narrative of the death of the Son of God for the sins of mankind. It proves that the Jews, by their rejection of Jesus, were no longer the Chosen People of God. Instead the followers of Jesus were. The thesis presented here is that Jesus, the Son of God, was Jesus, the king of the Jews, a man who believed that by capturing Jerusalem from the Romans and cleansing the temple, God would send a miracle to free his chosen people, the Jews. In Roman law, a man who is acclaimed king is a seditionist, so Barabbas and bar Abbas are both revolutionaries. Can we really accept that Pilate offers the crowd the choice of Jesus Barabbas, a seditionist, or Jesus bar Abbas, the son of his father, God, a different seditionist? Is this really historical?
The Committal of Jesus before the High Priest
The Jewish “trial” of Jesus was really a committal hearing because Jesus’s crimes were not religious but political, and the punishment for such crimes in Roman law was death. Whether he blasphemed or not was irrelevant. Christians have written volumes about the illegality of the Jewish trial of Jesus. Yet few of them appreciate a gospel purpose was to concoct a Jewish trial to place the guilt of Jesus’s death on to the Jews not the Romans. Scenes of the trial before the Sanhedrin are to incriminate the Jews, though it had to turn the prisoner over to the Roman authorities, and put the manifest crimes of Jesus before Pilate irrespective of any blasphemy he had committed—which they did. How likely was a senior holy man of a fanatically pious sect, like Jesus, to blaspheme? He was crucified because in Roman law he was a traitor to the empire.
The Trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate
Having been turned over to the Romans by the priests, Jesus Barabbas was quickly brought for trial. The Romans had built and administered the greatest empire the world had seen by being systematic, organised and thorough. Admittedly, they were a severe and cruel people but they had a sense of justice, and Roman law is still the model for civil law everywhere. Is it credible that they felt threatened by a man who told moral tales and thought he had a kingdom in heaven? Christians insist it is, but the Roman governors of Judaea had a lot more to concern them than mendicant preachers. Judaea had been in turmoil since even before the Romans annexed it in 6 AD, and only a quarter of a century after the crucifixion of the Christian god from Galilee, the Jews rose as a nation against their foreign rulers in a bloody war. When Jesus was crucified as a king, the problem for Roman governors was constant rebellion in Judaea.
The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ
The most important event of the career of the historical Jesus was his manner of death. Jesus was crucified. The Christian explanation is that a travelling holy man, the only begotten son of God himself, impoverished, docile and peace loving, who scarcely ever lost his temper, was thought such a threat to the rulers of Judaea that they sentenced him to hang on a cross, a death reserved for slaves and traitors. Christians say that Jesus was neither. He was not a criminal at all. But somehow this divine teller of parables had given the authorities the impression he wanted to be a Jewish king—to rival Caesar in one of his dominions—when all he really wanted to do was to save mankind from its sins. The Roman governor of Judaea even ordered the hanging man to be labeled with a sign saying “The King of the Jews”.
Christian Symbols: the Cross as a Religious Sign in History.
Early Christianity had little knowledge of a cross except as a symbol of the old Paganism. The earliest depictions of the Christian saviour were as the good shepherd, carrying a lamb or ram, and Jesus was first worshipped as a lamb—the Lamb of God. The ram or lamb, always denoted the victorious sun as he passed through the sign Aries, giving new life to the world, when he was worshipped as the Lamb of God. Only in 707 AD did the Council of Constantinople decree that the lamb, or ram, was to be replaced by a cross with a man nailed to it. The decree identifies beyond doubt the astronomical Aries with the Christian saviour, linking the ancient sun superstitions with modern Christianity. The Cross as a religious symbol through the ages.
Post Crucifixion
Scholars used to accept that the Jewish plot against Jesus was a construct of the gentile Church to disassociate Jesus from the Jews whom Romans considered trouble makers. By having Jesus murdered by his own people, the Jews rejected him. The corollary was that gentile Romans were relieved of the murder of the Christian god. That is why Paul never writes in his letters that Christ was executed by Roman authority in Jerusalem as a rebel. The real founder of the gentile church was Paul, to judge by Christian legends, and he keeps the circumstances of Jesus’s death hidden. Either he did not know them or he did not want to tell. Nor is the substance of a Jewish plot, in the gospels, even vaguely comparable with the extensive evidence that Jesus was involved in a sedition. Yet Christians stick by their tendentious Christian myth that led, via the pogroms, to the Holocaust.
The Jewish Idea of Resurrection
Jesus said the kingdom of God was at hand. The children of Israel had to be repentant, then the righteous would be resurrected and would rule in God’s kingdom. Resurrection from the “dead” was possible because, for God, the righteous never died but slept, and resurrection became simply an awakening into everlasting life. They certainly were not alive and in heaven, because only Enoch himself dwelt with God. The adventure of Jesus took place in a culture which did not believe that people, or at least righteous people, were dead, but merely in a profound sleep from which they would be aroused at the eschaton. The discussion of the first and second deaths in Revelation confirms this.
The Resurrection Of Jesus Christ
John tells us Mary first saw Christ, after his resurrection, at the tomb. Matthew says it was on her way home she first saw him. Luke says that Jesus, unrecognized, accompanies two disciples on their way to Emmaus, and reveals himself to them in the breaking of bread. If Matthew was right about an appearance of the risen Jesus on a mountain in Galilee, then Luke was wrong about his appearance in Jerusalem on the night of the resurrection when he told the disciples not to leave the city. If Luke was right, Matthew was wrong. No one knows who was right and who was wrong, or whether both were wrong. Christians persuade themselves that all this is coherent.
Belief in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ
The gospels were mainly written before the end of the first century AD, and agree that what convinced the disciples that Jesus had risen were the empty tomb and the appearances of the risen Jesus. Christian belief now depends mainly on Jesus’s appearances rather than the empty tomb which had been what impressed the original followers. Christians claim the appearances were not late inventions of the Church because the first appearances in the gospels of the risen Christ were not to the apostles but instead to women, and the evidence of women was not considered strong in Jewish legal practice. But that is good evidence surely that they were late inventions, because they were invented in a non-Jewish milieu, the gentile Roman provinces where the bishops were trying to recruit female godfearers, of which there were many.
The Apostolic Age Begins 1.1
Luke’s main purpose in Acts is to show that Christianity is the fulfilment of Judaism. It depicts the spread of the gospel as under divine protection and accompanied by signs and wonders even though Jesus had said clearly that there would be no such signs. The particular sign of the miraculous conversion of Paul is repeated several times. Acts fails to mention that James is Jesus’s brother, though Paul in a letter written much earlier admits it. Nor does Acts say anything about the martyrdom of James, and wrongly says Peter succeeded Jesus as the leader of the Jerusalem Church when all other evidence shows it was James. The lie was inserted by the Church of Rome, traditionally founded by Peter, to give it greater authority. It also aims to show that Romans are friendly and sympathetic people except when Jews annoy them.
The Apostolic Age Begins 2.1
Paul only knew Jesus through his visions but arrogantly he claimed to know him better than Apostles that had known him in the flesh. He taught that the Torah had been superseded by the death on the cross of a divine being, Jesus, in atonement of men’s sins. Faith in this was the only way to be saved. These were the ideas of the mystery religions and Gnosticism. The New Testament has Jesus as the pre-existent Son of God, divine in his own right—Paul’s aim, though he hesitated in claiming outright divinity for Jesus. Paul’s stories were credible only to people influenced by paganism. The Nazarenes had a lot of such people among them—the publicans and sinners—Jewish backsliders and apostates receptive to Hellenistic culture. Paul’s teachings were heretical in that, to achieve his ambition, he wanted the requirements of the Mosaic Law to be eased for his gentile converts. The leader of the Church at Jerusalem, James the Just, refused.
The Parousia
Before Jesus, there was only one Lord—God! The “coming of the Lord” was the coming of God—God’s visitation at the End Time. Every biblical instance of “coming on a cloud” is God coming! If Jesus, used it, this “cloud” language was prophesying the coming of God, not Jesus’s own return. The word “Parousia” means a theophany of God, not of some MacArthur saying he will return. Only by promoting their crucified leader to the level of God did the Christians change the coming from that of God to that of Jesus. The first Christians expected the Parousia “soon”, and 2000 years later they are still expecting it “soon”. If Christians were misguided or wrong on such a crucial issue as Christ’s return, how can anyone believe anything they say? Can they be trusted to tell us the truth about salvation and immortality?
The Acts of Peter 1
The earliest tradition, as Acts implies several times, was to continue as before, the only difference being that the general resurrection had begun with the raising of Jesus, so that Jews had better repent and be baptized quickly. Peter and the other disciples saw it as their duty to persuade the froward Jews to rejoin the fold—it was urgent! The instructions to repent and be baptized were just as before—in God’s name. Jesus’s followers were mainly unsophisticated people but they were still in Palestine and they would not have baptized converts in Jesus’s name when Jesus and John the Baptist were careful to baptize them in God’s name. To baptize in Jesus’s name would have outraged Jews. The gift of repentance and baptism was not the Holy Ghost but entry into God’s kingdom. Hope for the kingdom had receded and Luke offers a more diluted gift.
Saul (Paul) and the Hellenist Faction 1
The main sources of information about Paul are his epistles and the Acts of the Apostles. The epistles naturally are partially autobiographical and show him in the best light, and the Acts of the Apostles is partisan. Paul apparently spent three years as a novice Essene, but failed the novitiate because he lacked Essene humility. But, having evaded Harith’s soldiers, Paul returned to Jerusalem knowing a great deal more about Essene philosophy, and the basis of Jesus’s teaching, than did the apostles, who were not trained Essenes but converted Jews. In 15 days there, he saw only two apostles, James and Peter, implying that the Nazarenes were hard to find and not at all prominent. The church at Antioch had no trouble in supporting the church in Jerusalem, suggesting that membership of the Jerusalem church was small. Paul left and did not return for another 14 years. The true apostles wanted nothing to do with him.
Paul, Friend of the Romans 1
Saul had gone to Tarsus which was less than 100 miles from Antioch across the Mediterranean. He was telling stories about a new dying and rising god, like Attis with whom the gentiles were familiar, which were gladly received. On the law of Moses, Acts says James’s decrees had been delivered, so Paul, who must have had copies, merely had to produce them to show that circumcision was not mandatory if James had accepted abrogation of the Law. The decrees must have said the opposite of Luke’s pretence—the law had to be obeyed. That Paul circumcised Timothy proves James’s real decree. Paul acted in full harmony with the law, even though Luke claimed the law—and so circumcision—was not obligatory for gentiles. The career of Paul of Tarsus.
How Paul Invented Christianity
Paul made the Jewish leader, Jesus, who expected God’s visitation to save the Jews from foreign oppression, into the saviour of an Hellenistic mystery cult. Paul was the cult leader. He transferred the divine title of God to the messiah, and substituted effort of will by faith. Faith is a cop out. It is empty without works, as James wrote, even in the New Testament. All modern Christians prefer faith because works means doing something—doing God’s will, actually measuring up to the law, or measuring up to the criterion of loving your enemy. Paul’s rejection of will undercut Jesus, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, because it is the effort involved in trying to do God’s will that is salvific. Trying to fulfil the law, and trying to love others is what takes people closer to God, not any self-indulgent faith. Paul distorted the value of the law, and he taught in opposition to Jesus. Jews stepped away and ignored him. The Christianity of Christ himself was destroyed.
The Evolution of Paul’s Christology
Paul believed the crucifixion of Jesus for our sins was the crucifixion of the world, which would soon end. The new age is an age of the spirit, so a God’s words spoken as a man were irrelevant. Paul knew better than God. Paul maintained Jesus had been resurrected from the dead, glorified with the title Lord of God Himself, and sat in heaven on God’s right hand. The death of a sinless man atoned for human sin, so people could be magically righteous, and be eligible for entry into heaven. The Christian God incarnate, Jesus, had not taught this. Jesus’s teaching was no effortless magical cure for sin. His cure was repentance and strictly upright living until the world ended. A big effort was needed, but it was worth it. Salvation for Christ was not easy. Paul made it as easy as a declaration of faith in Christ. Christians had a hard option offered by God, and an easy one offered by Paul. They took the easy one unconcerned what God thought of it.
The Evolution of Paul’s Christology
Paul’s argument was to reject Torah observance, and so refute the beliefs of the Jerusalem Church. Jewish Christians, as proved by the epistle of James the Just, thought what people did in their lives determined whether they were righteous or not and would enjoy immortality. Jews had to conform with the law. For Paul, the law had become a curse, and Christians were freed of it. Gentile Christians could not be bothered with the Jewish law, but even so felt they should lead exemplary lives on the model of Christ. Then they would ascend to heaven and join the Lord, meaning God. Paul was not interested in the living Jesus or what he had taught, and disparaged those who had known him. In the gospels Jesus was a firm believer in God’s law, as any good Jew, and paticularly God’s own son must have been! Christians ignore this fundamental contradiction in their religion. Christianity has followed Paul. Whatever the Son of God thought was irrelevant.
Christian Origins Discussion with Rabbi Rosen
Rabbi Rosen offers a few words about Christian Origins in the Essenes
Christian Origins Discussion with Rabbi Rosen
Rabbi Rosen continues the discussion about Christian Origins in the Essenes
Christian Origins Discussion with Rabbi Rosen
Rabbi Rosen continues the discussion about Christian Origins in the Essenes
Paul, Jews, Judaizers
According to Paul, Christians had no law to obey. The law was for the Jews. Paul declared the law to be “a law unto death” and not the measure of God’s will. Is Paul really saying the law is death for the Jews? For 2000 years Christians have believed it, but now that Jews are politically important to Americans, Christian revisionists have a different story. It is that Paul had one set of rules for Jews—the law—and another set of rules—the atoning sacrifice of Christ—for gentiles. Paul did not deny that the law was for the Jews but it was not for his own converts. Whether Jews or gentiles, they were saved by faith, and all of Paul’s tirades against the Jews were really against the apostles of Christ trying to tell them the truth about what Christ had taught.
The Gentile Church 1.1
The ravishing of Judaea in 70 AD left the followers of Paul able to recover the ground lost when he had been humiliated by the leaders of the Church in Jerusalem barely ten years before in 58 AD. With the dispersion of the Jerusalem Nazarenes and the Jewish Christians of the Empire becoming apostates, the heresies of Paul had no one to oppose them and they became the mainstream. The propagators of Christian beliefs became those who followed Paul and not those who had known Barabbas and his original claims. Christianity was now centred on Rome where it developed as a gentile religion. Paul assured gentile men that circumcision was no longer necessary, and so the male godfearers of Judaism converted to Christianity. The many women proselytes of Judaism, like ripe fruits, dropped into the Christian basket.
The Gentile Church 2
The institutional church consolidated the power of bishops, then established the dogma of the creeds. Bishops declared themselves the successors to the apostolate and the prophetic spirit was restricted to their office. Irenaeus regarded every bishop as appointed by the apostles through the successive laying on of hands. From the beginning, the Eucharist, with the overseer blessing bread and wine, was the main Christian ritual. It was the “love feast”, simply a fellowship meal—the Christian version of the Essenic messianic meal. As late as 170 AD, Celsus noted that the Christians had no altars, but by 200 AD, the table of the Agape had become the altar. A sharing of food in fellowship had become a Pagan ritual with its mystery and sacraments. The expectation of the kingdom of God was extinct. Believers found spiritual sustenance now in their belief in heaven.
The Gentile Church 3
Admission into the Christian church was not free to everyone as modern Christians claim. The Essenes had had a novitiate of two or three years, and the Church’s Orders of Discipline had the same. Initiation was by baptism, deferred until the converts were fully instructed. A Christian had to remain as a novice for the two or three year period that they were being instructed. Converts to Christianity knew the risk of persecution, though it was not systematic or continuous. The start of the Christian myth of persecution was 64 AD when Nero punished “Christiani”—not necessarily Christians, but messianic Jews—and continued intermittently for the next 250 years. Following in the Essene tradition, these “Christiani” would not break under torture, and were highlighted by the Church in its later martyrologies.
Satan in the Evolution of Christianity 1
Rabbinic Judaism was a different religion from what Judaism had been originally, and even different from Pharisaism, except that it remained liberal in outlook. Rabbinism bases GodÂ’s role in a personal struggle with evil on the assistance that God has to offer. Yet, the Jewish Qabala, which emerged about 1150 in Provence, had retained the dualism of the Jewish religion before Jamna, where Rabbinic Judaism was devised. In the Sefiroth of the Qabala, ten good principles are set against ten wicked ones. The Rabbis had not succeeded in getting rid of Satan. The form of Judaism that was closer to the original was Essenism, and it became Christianity. The Persian traditions of dualism and apocalyptic, no longer prominent in Judaism, passed into Christianity, and still characterise the religion today. Christianity is more true to Zoroastrianism than Rabbinic Judaism, though both have the same roots. Christianity in relation to the evolution of the idea of Satan.
Satan in the Evolution of Christianity 2
The Gnostics said Satan was a son of God, and god of the material world and the Jews. They pointed to His atrocities recorded in the Jewish scriptures, the chronicle of the wickedness of Yehouah, who had made the material world for his amusement. People had to be deluded to imagine that this was a Good God! He killed off the whole human race bar a few favoured individuals through a gigantic flood. The real God was symbolized by a snake, as Moses knew when he set up a golden image of it for Israelites to revere. Yehouah, had usurped the position of the true spiritual God. He was an evil god, while the serpent, with his promise of giving knowledge or gnosis to man, was a messenger of the true God, free of violent passions but full of love and mercy. Yehouah freely accepts responsibility for evil as well as good in the world. Why then do Christians perpetuate the view that evil is caused separately by Satan, a different supernatural monster?
Persecution of Christians I
Romans found Christians from their founder on to be dangerous anarchists ready to bring about the end of the world. The church was eschatological. It thought the world wicked and soon to end when God’s kingdom would start. Christian praxis was to decide what would cause God to bring about the Judgement Day, then do it. As they hated the Roman state and wanted to end it, they set the capital alight. Jesus himself had sought to do the same by capturing Jerusalem for the Jewish God. Christians who confessed to starting the fire, then named names so that many more were brought into the same condemnation. They hated the “human race”, according to Tacitus. Some Christians cavalierly defied authority to die as martyrs. The myth of Christian persecution.
Persecution of Christians II
Police surveyance of Christianity was not because it was a new religion. Rome was tolerant of religious differences. The Church preached the coming End of the wicked World. Only Christians would be saved. To Romans, they exulted in disaster. The Church created the myth of incessant persecution, but when Christianity was persecuted, it was as a subversive organization. Christians did not see themselves as part of the Roman state and culture. What is more subversive than this? And soon it did subvert the empire. Romans saw Christians as a fifth column, especially of the Persians who menaced the east. They would foment disloyalty at the moment of extreme danger from external enemies. Decius knew that the loyalty of Christians was to the Church not to the Roman state and he determined to expose it by making all loyal citizens sacrifice to the emperor and the gods on a prescribed day each year. But simply throwing incense on the altar was acceptable! Christians determined to be martyrs refused to do even this.
Celsus and Origen
Celsus saw the Christian recruiting rogues, thieves, burglars, poisoners, despoilers of temples and tombs, saying that these were their proselytes because Christ was sent to save sinners. Christians would not accept there was a just Pagan, and God would not look on the just man only the unjust one who had repented. The strong and successful are not always good and the wretched are not always wicked, but though Celsus was wrong on these points, modern Christianity has virtually forgotten them. The modern Christian morality of Christian leaders in the world is to take revenge for the cruel death of innocent people by inflicting a cruel death on other innocent people. Punishment of crimes is just in any world, not just Celsus’s, but killing someone else in revenge is not justice—except to modern Jews, Christians and Moslems.
Hellenistic Magic and Jesus 1
In the Hellenistic world, the definition of magic was not firmly fixed. Sometimes magic and religion could be viewed as antagonistic, while at other times magic could be viewed as a kind of religion. A source of magic formulæ are “tabellæ defixionum”, thin sheets of lead, inscribed with a curse invoked through a god and nailed into place, often at a place of execution or a grave. The peak of magical activity judging from the popularity of the curses was in the third and fourth centuries AD, coming to a peak just as Christianity was made the state religion of Rome.
Hellenistic Magic and Jesus 2
The idea that Jesus was a magician is so old it goes back to his own lifetime—it is found in the gospels! The miracles of the gospels were considered as magical, and so there was no clear distinction between Jesus and other magicians. Celsus saw all the novel cults growing at the time as being the work of magicians, and put Christianity among them. Origen thought magic had spread to other races than the Magi, to the destruction and ruin of those who used it. He differentiated the magi with their demonic formulae from the Christians with their use of divine power. When Celsus claimed Jesus performed miracles as magic stunts and tricks, Origen countered that Jesus did his miracles, not to show his own powers, but “to call the spectators to moral reformation”. Origen was not denying Christians were magicians, but that they were better magicians because of the power on which they called.
Alexandria
The library of Alexandria was the most famous library of classical antiquity. It was in the Museum (Greek, mouseion), a temple devoted to the Muses. Ptolemy Philadelphus housed up to a hundred scholars permanently in the Brucheium, part of the complex of the Museum, studying maths, geometry, medicine and astronomy, observing, measuring, lecturing, collecting and editing Greek literature, and translating Assyrian, Persian, Egyptian, Jewish, Indian, and other works. The Alexandrian Museum was a place for scholars from different cultures to meet and exchange learning, and a repository for the knowledge. It was the emporium of religious dogmas throughout the East and a place for the disciples of nearly every system of religious faith then existing, but no substantial account of it survives the advent of Christian state power. Christians would have no rivals once they gained power. In 391 AD, they destroyed it.
Paul and the Mysteries in Apologetics 1
Apologists say Christianity could not have been influenced by Paganism because it was an exclusive faith that demanded the sole attention, not only of the devotee, but everyone else as well! Christianity was not tolerant! Paganism on the other hand was tolerant of other tolerant religions. The gentile convert had to give up their Pagan beliefs, even if they had been sincerely held for a lifetime. Christians think converts just wiped their minds clean of all previous Pagan contamination and were born again pristine and unencumbered as Christians. The plain impossibility of this in reality is sure proof that before long Pagan practices were being introduced into Christianity, no doubt with a new interpretive gloss.
The Silent Jesus 1
Each Pagan saviour god had overcome death to assure the initiate immortality. Paul knew of the death of a righteous Jewish leader seeking to throw off the Roman yoke and saw the chance to start a syncretistic religion based on Judaism and the mysteries. This leader had the title Jesus or saviour, and was thought by Hellenized Jews to have been the Jewish Messiah (christos, in Greek). So, Paul made Jesus Christ into Christianity’s saviour god, saying he had died and been resurrected as a redeeming act, promising resurrection and eternal life to the believer. But Paul could not account for all the Christian centres in the empire. Many existed before he got there. Rome had Jewish Christians by the 40s, and a churchman remarked that Romans believed in Christ without benefit of the apostles. Soon after the crucifixion, Christian communities existed all over the eastern Mediterranean, their founders unknown. They were Hellenized Jews of which Paul was one.
Christian Fraud
The gentile church began corrupt. The original Christianity was that of the Jerusalem church, that of the Ebionim or Essenes, a sect of Judaism. The Essenes were pre-Christian! Was the gospel story composed by Therapeutan monks? Eusebius, in a moment of unusual honesty, affirmed that the Therapeutan monks were Christians before the birth of Christ. It is said that much of the fable of Jesus Christ can be found in the Book of Enoch, a book much admired by the Dead Sea Essenes. Today there are protestant movements which reject Christianity and are attempting to return to the beliefs of the Ebionim. The fraudulent way that Christianity developed, believing lies can be for the glory of God
Mystery Religions I
From the first century BC religious tolerance for eastern religions improved. Suppression did occur spasmodically but usually not for religious reasons but because some scandal outraged the Romans. Eastern mystery religions were no less spiritually satisfying than modern ones—they offered just as much in ceremonial, indeed more, than modern religions and sought equally to influence people’s lives. Devotees of Dionysus would have been just as intense in their beliefs as pious Christians today. The initiation into one of the mysteries was possibly the highlight of a believer’s life.
Mystery Religions II.1
“I am the Resurrection and the Life” is essentially what the Egyptians chanted about their god Osiris. The resurrection of Osiris was the basis of the Egyptian’s firm hope of eternal life. Every year Egyptians mourned for days over the slaying of Osiris and then rejoiced exceedingly over his resurrection. The resurrection of Osiris was the basis of the Egyptian’s firm hope of eternal life.
Mystery Religions III
Adonis’s mainly female devotees would join with Astarte each year weeping for her lost son slain by a boar. They then rejoiced when he was restored to life. Attis was a comely young shepherd whom Cybele loved. The worship of Attis was always linked with that of the Great Mother of All Things, Cybele, the supreme deity. Attis died either slain by a boar sent by Zeus, like the Syrian god Adonis, or by bleeding to death under a pine tree, after castrating himself in a madness sent by Cybele out of jealousy. Every spring, the death of the god was mourned until he was resurrected by the Great Mother, when grief turned to joy. At this festival the pious male devotees of Cybele castrated themselves, holding up their bloody organs to the heavens to make themselves eligible for the priesthood, the Galli. Christians disparage the worship of Adonis and Attis as minor and restricted to women, unless it is too suspiciously like the worship of Jesus.
Mystery Religions IV.1
Resurrection is central to Christian belief and unique to Christianity as a sign of God’s revelation. Christian apologists assure their flocks Christianity is the only God-given religion, grounded on events that actually happened in history—the mystery cults were nonhistorical. They could not have imitated what God himself had given Christians, and the death and resurrection of the Christian god had no parallel in any Pagan mystery religion. Therefore, Pagan religions could not have had the same idea and, if anyone finds evidence that they had, then they must have been projecting Christian ideas into Paganism. Yet, Jesus’s death and resurrection did have parallels in the Pagan mystery religions. The Pagan mystery religions had a doctrine of salvation. The saviour died violently for those he would deliver, then was restored to life.
The Eleusinian Mysteries
The Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece were the oldest and most revered of all the celebrations of the ancient Mediterranean. Annually in September, in honour of Demeter and Persephone, the city of Eleusis, 15 miles (25 km) west of Athens, hosted the Greater Mysteries from Mycenaean times until about 400 AD. A procession moved along the sacred way with the mystai and acolytes carrying an effigy of the boy god Iacchos (Dionysos), depicted as a torch-bearing youth. Evidently there was a close connexion between the Eleusinian mysteries and those of Dionysos. An account of the Mysteries of Eleusis
Saviours 1
God sent his Son Jesus Christ into the world to be worshipped as a God pandering to the superstitious tendencies of the people. How do Christians know that God did not send Pagan saviours into the world for the same reason? Why would He be less inclined to accommodate their ignorance than those of the first Christians. Millions of believers admit both a god and a saviour but do not accept Jesus of Nazareth as either. Often, their messiah appeared before Jesus and must have a claim of originality, and behaved in a superior, more God-like way. Christians say these other incarnated gods and crucified saviours were either imaginary or ordinary human beings wrongly elevated by divine titles. Only Jesus Christ was divine! Yet, the same kind of evidence is offered to prove their beliefs by all of them. They cannot be distinguished by it.
Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth 1
The Christian dispensation is believed to have been ushered in by the birth of a child, and the portrait of that child in the Roman Catacombs as the child of Mary is the youthful Sun God in the mummy image of the child king, the Egyptian Karast, or Christ. The alleged facts of our Lord’s life as Jesus the Christ, were equally the alleged facts of our Lord’s life as the Horus of Egypt, whose very name signifies the Lord… John G Jackson’s 1941 essay on the origins of Christianity in the myth of Christ
Lucian on Christians and other Charlatans
Christianity grew in a Pagan world in which the common people, Christians aimed to convert, were boundlessly superstitious and ignorant, and charlatans, conjurers and mountebanks, like Alexander of Abonotichus, the prophet of Æsculapius, filled their endless desire for the supernatural with trickery and illusion. Christians said Alexander was a disciple of the devil, but believed as much as his followers in his miracles, contesting only who was behind them. Some must have converted to the new prophet, as the tension between them suggests, but their dogma that all gods other than Yehouah and His Son were false had already taken a firm root among the Christian believers. It survived. Alexander made the mistake of not converting to Christianity. He would then have been a saint.
Mithras 1
Mithras is a Greek form of the name of an Indo-European god, Mithra or Mitra (Old Persian, Mica). Roman writers believed that Mithraism came from Persia and that Mithraic iconography represented Persian mythology. Mithraism was once called the mysteries of the Persians. Christian apologists say Iranian Mithraism was not continuous with Roman Mithraism. There is nothing in this. An invented religion need have no common features with any other but there are many, militating against Roman Mithraism being invented. In Rome, Mithras was a sun god, and, in Persia, he was a god of the morning sun. The Roman Mithras killed the Primæval Bull. A Primæval Bull died in the Persian religion. The Roman Mithras wore a Phrygian cap. Phrygia was in the Persian empire for 200 years. Modern scholars have traced Mithras in Persian, Mittanian and Indian mythology. The Mitanni gave us the first written reference to Mithras in a treaty with the Hittites. These and much more suggest a continuity of belief from India to Rome in a myth of a sun god killing a bull.
The Copy Cat Saviour 1
Christians adopted Pagan words. Even Christian textbooks teach it because Justin Martyr, almost at the outset of gentile Christianity, conceded it when he said Christians did not claim anything about their saviour that the Greeks did not say about theirs. In the Hellenistic period, Mediterranean people often had saviours, born as humans but behaving as gods, doing wonderful things for mankind. Christians used Pagan concepts and terms but claimed them exclusively for their own god, denying them to others because they gave them new meaning! There you have it. The Christian is not denying the concepts and terms used by them have been taken from earlier Pagan religions, but that they applied only to Jesus and had a new twist. The apologetic argument is that Christianity gave ancient words and deeds new meaning.
The Copy Cat Saviour 2
An apologist says only mad people would have worshipped a god nailed to a cross as a common terrorist. He is right. Christians have no idea what the worshippers of Mithras thought or did, though it would have been dualist—recognising a cosmic struggle between good and evil, in which humans must chose their role. Christians imagine Roman and Persian Mithraism had no point of contact except the name, but some admit the Persian Mithras had some features of a dying and rising god. Christianity itself began as Judaism for gentiles, and still has many common features with its parent, yet it has differed from Judaism. Christian vandalism has left us with not much evidence about the mystery religions, but that in itself is evidence. Why were they so keen to destroy everything about them, if they thought they were stupid and primitive? Christianity has too many themes of Pagan religions to be uniquely revealed.
Veneration of Images
All educated people had by 500 BC concluded that images were not gods. Relative worship is paid to a sign, not for its own sake but for the sake of the thing signified. Only grossly stupid peasants could have thought that an image could hear prayers, but most of Christendom was grossly stupid. Proof is the way Christians treated their holy icons. The inference from the words of many prayers is that the picture itself was being addressed. Icons were taken on journeys as a protection. They hung in a place of honour in every room and over every shop. Through and by the icon, God worked miracles. Icons were crowned with garlands, perfumed and kissed. Lamps burnt before them and hymns were sung in their honour. They were applied to sick persons by contact, and placed in the path of a fire or flood to stop it by magic. Christendom was much more ignorant than Paganism.
Miracles, Prophecies and Precepts
One of the worst follies ever seen under the sun and one displaying the greatest ignorance of history, science, and human nature is the mistake of evangelical conversion or “getting religion”. Do the thousands of people who still undergo this conversion process at the hands of some charismatic preacher know that it is an old Pagan custom? It was practised before anyone was ever converted to Christianity. The process was essentially the same as that now in vogue amongst modern evangelical churches, and the effect the same. People are made suggestible and gullible with stories of miracles and prophecies and subject to the precepts of some odious manipulator. God must be indifferent to the means whereby people come to the Christian truth. God must be concerned only with ends not with means.
Christian Mythology 1
Plato sets forth the doctrine of the Trinity in his Phaedon, written four hundred years BC. His terms conform most striking with the Christian doctrine on this subject. If Plato expressed the Christian Trinity four hundred years BC, how then was it divinely originated with the incarnation of Jesus? The Christian image of Jesus is derived from a forgery issued to counter the publication of the Acts of Pilate, which proved that Jesus was a bandit, justly executed under Roman law. This forgery is called the Letter of Lentulus, Lentulus being a Roman of higher rank than Pilate to discredit the latter. Myths about Jesus himself and Christianity
Social Myths of Christianity
Christians raided Africa expressly to enslave. Christianity had nothing to do with abolishing slavery, nor giving the world education. The conditions of poor people have improved despite Christianity. Just as Christianity took it over, the Roman empire had started elementary schools for the children of the workers, at public expense. For those capable of benefit, the Empire had provided free higher education too. The son of a worker paid nothing. When the Christians took over, the empire had a network of primary schools, and most Romans could read in the first decades of Christian power. By 480 AD nearly every school was closed. From 580 AD until 1780 AD, over ninety percent of Europeans were illiterate and ignorant. Few people except scholars realize how the development of civilization was broken off when Greece and Rome fell and how it was suspended during the long domination of Christianity.
The Fall and Atonement
God was used to humanity offering Him sacrifices, at first human beings then later on animals and cereals. So God planned that He too would be sacrificed as a human whose blood would be the redeeming agent, and could be commemorated forever in the holy mystery of the holy communion. Symbolic human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism is implicit in the Christian mass or holy communion. By believing it, Christians are no longer stopped from entering Heaven because of original sin. The sacrifice of God saw to the redemption of sinners in the world, and made people pure again. God suffered a sacrificial death as satisfaction for Adam’s crime. If God is almighty, what is the point of such a travesty?
The Wandering Jew
The story of the eternal Jew really became popular in the seventeenth century when a pamphlet was printed in Leyden in 1602 alleging that the bishop of Schleswig had met the Wandering Jew at Hamburg in 1542. His name was Ahasuerus, a cobbler beside whose shop Jesus paused to rest while carrying the cross along the Via Dolorosa. After telling him to clear off, he got the reply, “I go quickly but you will wait until I return”. Reports of the Wandering Jew began to appear regularly from all over Europe, just like the flying saucer “flaps” today.
Pontius Pilate
“Truth, what is that?” So the Roman Governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, questioned a rebel brought before him charged with treason, according to the New Testament story. The rebel was Jesus the Nazarene. Pilate condemned him to death. Pilate became the best ever known Roman administrator. The Jewish assembly, the Sanhedrin, had arrested Jesus and convicted him of blasphemy. In Jewish law, the penalty was death, but the Sanhedrin had no power of execution, so took the prisoner to Pilate, accusing Jesus of treason against Rome. Pilate was not convinoed but, under pressure from the Jewish authorities, agreed to pass the death sentence. He disclaimed responsibility by washing his hands in front of a Jewish crowd. This is the Christian myth of Pilate.
Apollonius of Tyana
Eusebius was concerned at the popularity of the life of Apollonius, and felt it his duty to denigrate it, but he was in a tricky situation. He could not merely pooh-pooh the miracles of Apollonius because the miracles of Jesus had no better authority. Indeed, Jesus was a man who appeared to consort with prostitutes and riff-raff, drank wine excessively, feasted prodigiously and died as a criminal, whereas Apollonius was abstemious and saintly and had been honoured as a god in his own life. Eusebius accused Apollonius of being a sorcerer, and his admirers of being ignorant quacks and liars!
Constantine and the Conversion of Europe
The oration given by Eusebius to Constantine in 336 AD reveals the relation between Church and state that Constantine had sought from the Christians as the condition for his acceptance of Christianity. There was one ruler in heaven, God, and one divine law, the Christian law. In return, the Christian leaders accepted the absolute rule on earth of the Roman Emperor, God’s viceregent on earth, and there was one secular law, the law of Rome. Eusebius declared Constantine as the earthly reflexion of the Word of God—the principle by which God gave order to the world. He was Christ reincarnate! The Jewish Ebionite leader who despised wealth became a potentate in heaven and a real potenate on earth as the Roman Emperor. Christ as Emperor was the concept of Christ for the next millennium.
The Evolution of Christian Doctrine 1
God had sent a law for people via His prophet, Moses. The law of Moses is the law of God. Christians think God is a half-wit. Having sent a law to make people good, He sends His son to repeal it. In fact, God the Son clearly says the Mosaic law is obligatory for all time. No one should relax it or teach anything against it. Who does teach against it, claims to be a devout Jew, and is believed by the Christians more than their own God? Paul! How can Christians say they worship the Son of God and an aspect of God Himself, yet ignore what he said on earth, on excuse of Paul, a mere man? There is no honest way of rejecting the direct words of Christ, God the Son, in favour of those of a fallible man, even if they think he is great. Paul makes goodness and salvation easy, but Christ affirms it is hard.
The Patristic Age 1
The logos was an ancient Greek speculation used by the Stoics from Persian arta. No modern believer, Jew or Christian, will doubt that the bible preceded the Greek philosophers, but it did not. Heraclitus wrote about logos a century before the bible began to be written by the Persians, and even longer before the Ptolemies cast Genesis in more or less the shape it is now in. Logos remained order and truth, as it was for the Persians (arta, asha), but became cosmic reason, reality’s shape, natural laws and meaning. Humans comprehended God and reality by the logos in them. To Philo, logos was the first emanation of God, His “first begotten son” (De Agric 57)!
The Gnostics 1
The collapse of the Persian empire led to the formation of a plethora of Zoroastrian based sects, among which were Gnosticism, Judaism, Essenism and eventually Christianity. In Zoroastrianism, the holy angels kept a Book of Life with every man’s good and wicked deeds listed, to be weighed in the balance at Judgement Day. This is also in the Christian Book of Revelation, showing that Christianity owes it to Zoroastrianism. So, salvation cannot be by God’s grace alone, or by faith alone. In Christianity, men are intrinsically bad because of the original sin of Adam, and works do not save them, only the acceptance of a faith in Christ. Gnosticism was similar. Men are intrinsically wicked but some of them have a spark of the divine and can be saved. Gnosis—mystic knowledge—reveals salvation to them.
The Gnostics 2
Many Christians were Gnostics. Catholicism was neither the older nor the more genuine form of Christianity. Gnosticism is more purely dualistic than the Christianity that has come down to us. The world is the creation of the evil spirit, but humans have a spark of divine light in them. It links more clearly with the Essene world view, and the source of Judaism, Zoroastrianism. Essenes saw men as having different proportions of good and evil in them, but even the most evil man could be saved by choosing righteousness. For Gnostics, a divine spirit had entered the body of Jesus, but did not die on the cross, ascending instead to the divine realm. So, Gnostics rejected the atoning suffering and death of Christ and the resurrection of the body. Salvation was through divine knowledge which ignited the divine spark. For Christians, it was purely through faith in the return of Christ at his Parousia.
The Gnostics 3
Men have a divine spark which wants to return to the unknown God. Each has to seek the divine spark within—the spiritual being trapped within themself. Gnostics had been spiritual beings but had been made to live in bodies through falling from the spiritual world above into the material universe, which is wholly evil. Reawakened by knowledge, the divine element in humanity can return to its proper home in the spiritual realm. It is a recasting of the return of Righteous Jews to the Perfect Israel expected by the Essenes. The serpent in the Garden of Eden imparted gnosis to Adam and Eve, who were therefore punished by God. Gnostics commonly saw the God of the Old Testament as the evil deity who created the material world, and they venerated all those who defied him.
The Gnostics 4
The Jesus of the Nag Hammadi writings is not a saviour from sin but a guide to spiritual understanding. Christians called Jesus “the express image of God’s person”, admitting Jesus was the angel Michael. The books of Thomas the Twin are addressed to the reader as the spiritual twin or equal of Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas says Christ teaches the Gnostic will “become as I am”. In short, a “Son of God” like Jesus and therefore a god. The enlightened Gnostic became the equal of Christ, and therefore equal to God, the beliefs of the Cathars. Eventually the church leaders who defined themselves as orthodox banned the heretics—but who is to know now who were the more heretical at the beginning. Most Gnostic churches considered themselves to be Christian.
Did Christians Destroy Classical Culture and Create the Dark Ages? 1
Once the Empire was administered by Christians, public libraries had their Pagan books progressively replaced by Christian books. Christians closed Pagan temples and academies, destroying or scattering their libraries. Even as early as 235 AD Christians, like Sextus Julius Africanus, were in powerful and influential positions in Rome. By 391 AD, an edict of Theodosius prohibited visiting Pagan temples and even looking at their ruins. In Alexandria, Pagans revolted, led by the philosopher Olympius. They locked themselves inside the temple of the god Serapis—the Serapeion. Christians violently sieged and captured the building, demolished it, burnt its famous library and profaned its images. Christians try to deny that they ravaged the Pagan learning accumulated over the whole of previous history. Since this vandalism started the Dark Ages, it is difficult to prove…
The Times of Justinian, called by Christians, the Great 1
Theodora met Justinian who grew insatiably passionate about her and, at first taking her as a mistress, later married her just before his elevation to the rank of Patrician. Euphemia, the Empress, though a simple uncultured country woman of barbarian origins deplored Justinian marrying a prostitute and forbade it on the grounds of its unlawfulness. Justinian intimidated the Roman aristocracy into proclaiming him Emperor jointly with his uncle. Thus it was that the lowest class of woman became empress of Rome. Justinian could have picked any woman in the Empire, high class, cultured, modest, chaste, even virginal but it never seemed to occur to him that his choice of consort was shocking even in shocking times.
Phallic, Sexual, and Fertility Elements in Christianity 1
The sexual act is not only the acme of physical bliss, it is necessary for the continuation of life. As humans came to think about their experiences, they wanted to celebrate sexuality—a demonstration of it showed to the gods what they needed—procreation became a religious act. The god or goddess was interested in its happening, not in its prohibition. By human intercourse, people prompted the fertility of mother earth, and the sexual act became necessary for the success of all reproduction. Sowers of seed had sex with their wives before they sowed to ensure the fertility of the grain. Then the act was ritualised in seasonal rites in the temples. First, upright stones stood for the phallus, then gods were fashioned with an exaggerated erect phallus. This god was a healing god, particularly of diseases and defects of the reproductive organs.
Phallic Elements in Christianity 3
Women no longer sat on the organ of Priapus, being driven to the sad extreme of rejecting love for life under the promise of a certain place in a fancied heaven. Matrons no longer gave each other phallic cakes, but they had to go to church after childbirth to be purified of their sin. Yet, as late as 1896, Cypriot peasants were still, once a year, solemnly anointing the corner stones of the ruined temple of Aphrodite at Paphos! In Aphrodite's great temple, a white conical stone, anointed in feast-days, had been the emblem of the goddess. Ancient phallic idols were turned into Christian saints, and became objects of intense veneration. To cure infertility, women would rub off a few particles of the phallic object and drink them with water or wine, or simply hung garlands round it in Indian fashion, or they poured wine over the phallus and called it holy vinegar.
Pagans and Christians 1
Christianity used Paganism as a source of spare parts. The holes in Christianity were filled with adaptations from Paganism. Pagan rites and ideas were “received” into the Church. It is a curious god this Christian one, that refuses to allow any other gods but cannot think of any new dates for his own festivals. He choses ones used for millennia by the gods he condemns and renames those old gods as Christian saints and lets them carry on with their old jobs! Every important church festival coincides with an ancient solar or Pagan festival. Pagan gods were made saints. Christianity had no burial customs, and so Pagan customs extended into the Christian era. Richly endowed graves have been found underneath Cologne Cathedral and the Abbey Church of S Denis—the sanctified God, Dionysus—in Paris.
Pagans and Christians 5
Many churches have a tradition that its site was chosen by the Devil. The tradition really reflects the fact that the situation of the church was that of a pre-existing Pagan temple. Peasants could not comprehend Christian exclusivity. They could see nothing wrong in worshipping their old gods as well as the Christian Gods, or even worshipping “God and the Devil at once”. The north door of Christian churches, a feature of Norman ones, is “the DevilÂ’s door”, and is often now blocked off. Pagan gods and believers in Paganism were called Devils by the Christians, so the DevilÂ’s door was the door Pagans used to enter the church! What better place to get them for conversion than in the church? Every aspect of country life was Pagan. Candles were burnt at sacred springs—the clergy wanted them burnt in the churches before the holy relics. Sacred trees were dressed with offerings, pleas and charms to bring luck and cure sickness. Pagan gods were invoked in common speech used for the days of the week.
The Dark Ages
The Roman Christians from the fourth century set about destroying the Pagan culture that had given us Classical and Hellenistic Antiquity. The Dark Ages resulted. In only a few hundred years, only the topmost levels of the clergy could read and write. Many of the monks copying their bibles were simply copying the shapes of the letters, imagining them to be holy symbols from God. They prove it by making copying errors which could not have been made by a literate man, mistaking a gothic “f” for an “s”. No literate person could mistake the two. The seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries have left a scanty literature. Europe had sunk into the crassest ignorance and superstition. Defenders of Christianity are desperate to maintain that Christians kept alive learning in the Dark Ages. The skeptic wants to know why then they should have been so dark for so long.
The Church in the Middle Ages 1
Changing the world for the better could hardly arise in the medieval Christian milieu. The Catholic emphasis was on death, not the spiritual consequences foreseen, but on the physical manifestation of death, on the corpse corrupting and being eaten with worms. It showed how disgusting and sinful the world was. Equality meant that everyone ended up as putrefying corpses, whereas it had meant to the Essenes that everyone should aspire to heaven, even on earth. Catholic clergy held to the wickedness of the world because it explained how awful the world really was, and it drove the despairing people into church to receive the magic salvific rites of the mass, at a price. Life was terrible but it was God given, and, the clergy taught, was spoiled only by human sin. The imminent Last Judgement offered all the reforming needed. By emphasising material and visible corruption, the even greater horrors of hell kept the masses faithful.
Christianity and Fascism
Christians have been desperate to distance themselves from European fascism and Nazism, and apologists like to argue that fascist leaders were not practising Christians. Yet, all the Nazi leaders were born, baptized, and raised Christian, mainly in authoritarian, pious households where tolerance and democratic values were not valued. Catholic Nazis, besides Hitler, included Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Joseph Goebbels. Hermann Goering had mixed Catholic-Protestant parentage, while Rudolf Hess, Martin Bormann, Albert Speer, and Adolf Eichmann had Protestant backgrounds. Roughly two-thirds of German Christians repeatedly voted for candidates who promised to overthrow democracy. Protestants had given the Nazi party its main backing leading up to 1933. Evangelical youth was especially pro-Nazi. 90 percent of Protestant university theologians supported the Nazis. Christians were Nazis and took part in Nazi atrocities. Any who turned to outright criticism of fascism made their last appeals from the death cell.
Jesus Cults Ancient and Modern
The comet was the ultimate sign of the times. It signified the end of the world for the believers. That the signs of the times told of the end of the world was the belief of the Essenes at the time of Jesus and it was the belief of the first Christians who adopted much of Essene philosophy. Everyone would die except for the saved, the perfectly holy people—the Essenes initially, then the Christians. A characteristic of these cults is the cult of personality of some charismatic leader, almost invariably male, who uses the childish naievety of his followers to boost his own ego, status and lifestyle.
Christianity and Civilization
Toynbee reminds us an old and persistent view is that Christianity was the destroyer of the civilization it grew up in. Gibbon thought so. James Frazer did, Julian the Apostate did, and Toynbee joins Gibbon in supposing Marcus Aurelius perhaps did too. But Toynbee keeps persuading us history shows Christianity is eternal. Civilization is the means and religion is the end. A civilization may break down and break up, but the replacement of one higher religion by another will not be a necessary consequence. Christianity will endure and grow in wisdom and stature as the result of a fresh experience of secular catastrophe. Toynbee sees Christianity as the spiritual heir of all religions.
History and Meaning of Salvation 1
Salvation depended on people living a holy life until Paul decided that faith in the atoning death of Christ was sufficient. For the Jew, obeying the law, being righteous, saved them. A young man asked how to inherit eternal life. Jesus said without obeying the law, and being poor, he could not be saved. Being rich was what mattered to him. Christ’s own life showed salvation depended on doing something—loving others and not accumulating wealth. Paul thought the law was too hard for Hellenized Jews and was worse for gentiles. He dropped it, making it easier to get converts, and for Christianity to spread. Paul made salvation into the mystery of God being magically obliged to save the faithful just for professing their faith in Christ!
History and Meaning of Salvation 2
Salvation depended on people living a holy life until Paul decided that faith in the atoning death of Christ was sufficient. For the Jew, obeying the law, being righteous, saved them. A young man asked how to inherit eternal life. Jesus said without obeying the law, and being poor, he could not be saved. Being rich was what mattered to him. Christ’s own life showed salvation depended on doing something—loving others and not accumulating wealth. Paul thought the law was too hard for Hellenized Jews and was worse for gentiles. He dropped it, making it easier to get converts, and for Christianity to spread. Paul made salvation into the mystery of God being magically obliged to save the faithful just for professing their faith in Christ!
The Path to Secular Christianity
Christ is the Christian God, but He told them they had to be Christs to be saved. The myth of Christ expresses dictums for living which are social and so objective not purely subjective like faith. One was to love each other and another was to love God, and a third was that loving God was loving each other. These principles of Christ abolished the gap between God and man. Salvation depended on people living this practical holy life until Paul, the antiChrist, subverted Christ by teaching that faith in the atoning death of Christ was sufficient. Since then Christian churches have taught love while tolerating and even supporting every imaginable atrocity. Metatron has shown the error. Christ proclaimed God was real not transcendental. God is society. Recounting the path of secular or Metatronic Christianity.
Secular Christianity, Christs and Nietzsche’s Übermenschen
Nietzsche severely criticized Christianity, and formulated a theory of leadership by men he called “Übermenschen”, correctly “overmen”, but usually given as “supermen”. Secular Christianity considers Christ to have taught people how to behave to bring about an ideal world, a kingdom of God, God as Society. By aiming to be a Christ, to be like Christ, as perfect a man as it is possible to be, a Son of God, humans would ascend to a higher level. Nietzsche's supermen were his idea of people being Christs, like the Cathar Perfects, ones who tried to imitate Christ. He also spoke of the “ascent to naturalness”. In Adelphiasophism, Nature is a metaphorical goddess, and the best society would be a more natural one, so the higher level becomes the metaphorical holy family of the Goddess, God and the Son—Nature, Society and a perfected Mankind.
The Secret Testament Revealed 1
The Secret Testament extracted from Dr M D Magee’s The Hidden Jesus, an historical interpretation of the gospel of Mark, which was disguised by the early gentile bishops trying to hide the truth about their new god
The Original Gospel of Jesus
The kingdom of God was the Roman province of Judaea, what had been Persian Yehud, set up by the Persians as the temple state of the Jews (Juddin), subject peoples of the Persians. When the Greeks tried to Hellenize the temple and the religion of the Jews, the Hasids resisted, preferring the original Persian practices. The Hasids split into the Essenes, immovably traditionalist, and the Pharisees, more reformist. But the Essenes developed practices making social intercourse and therefore trade and exchange with non-Jews possible, if awkward, whereas Pharisees extended the law into more and more minor areas in an attempt to keep the original Persian Law inviolable. One thing the Essenes thought was quite wrong, was the acceptance by Jews of conquest by the Romans. Only God could rule His kingdom. That is what Jesus believed. “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s”, meant Caesar had no right to rule Judaea. Jesus was an Essene and a rebel against Rome. This is the Secret Testanment hidden by the Church. The critical principles and their use in making this reconstruction of Mark’s gospel are explained in The Hidden Jesus You must get it!
