AW! Epistles
From A G Adedipe
Abstract
Sunday, 13 February 2005
I came across your website while searching for more information on the census of Quirinius (Cyrenius) and the errors of luke with the search engine.
I am VERY impressed with the information on your website and I have downloaded some information on my computer. I used to be an xtian until I got sick and tired of the cover-ups and pat answers to fundamental questions by the xtian church and clergy on the SYNCRETISM in the non-monolithic religions and sects (over 15,000) that make up christianity. I simply refused to follow the social consciousness and be a lemming.
I got to know for the first time on your website that the name Jesus is actually derived from Iesous which is the Greek form of Joshua (Yahshua). Xtians behave as if the name Jesus is so special and just dropped from the spiritual realms.
Now I saw a short letter in the e-pistles section that was sent to you by one of your readers named Dave Woodward in which he asked you about your views on Dr Barbara Thiering’s books. Then you refered to her as having gone CRACKERS! Daves reply to the answer you gave sounded like somone who was undecided and had the FEAR of CHANGE and I will quote him: “Thanks very much. EXACTLY what I WANTED, though I hadn´t thought to trouble you to the extent that you have gone to. I wouldn´t describe myself as a fan of Barbara´s so much as simply making the initial approach to the Essene territory through her books.” A family friend bought Jesus The Man by Barbara for my father in 1997 from England and I have read the book from cover to cover, in fact, I have a copy right here with me and I made judicious use of the reference materials from Qumran and the index with maximum effect and I must tell you that her works might have marginal errors but were well researched and lasted for over 20 years of studying the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Essenes.
Interestingly enough, after digesting the contents of your website, I discovered that YOU and Barbara agree on MANY issues with regards to the links the man called John the baptist and Yahshua (Jesus) had with the Essenes and the references to the Manual of Discipline, The Temple Scrolls, The War Scrolls etc.
In the introductory/forward pages of Jesus the Man, Barbara herself said the Persher (allegories) interpretations are exact and NOT subjective. You infered in your reply to Dave that she was using subjective interpretations perhaps to cover-up for the xtian church, but I am aware that she has been very critical of the cover-up by the christians and she even stated that she was dissatisfied with many of the answers relating to the apparent miracles and supernatural events in the bible. She also mentioned the presence of Subtexts used in the bible which indicates that the bible passages have more than one meaning. In my opinion, these “miracles” sound very stupid! Examples are:
- Jesus drove demons from a man who was possessed into 2000 pigs which then ran off a cliff into the sea and got drowned. Now this is an extreme act of CRUELTY to animals which in our current time would land ‘Jesus’ in JAIL for cruelty to animals under existing laws of the land. This does NOT fit the image of a spiritually evolved personality! A so-called “Son of God” xtians want us to believe.
- Jesus came to a fig tree in spring (which was NOT the season for a fig tree to produce fruit) and commanded it to produce fruit but the fig tree did NOT, perhaps out of FRUSTRATION, he cursed the tree and it withered (dried up). This looks like the use of BLACK MAGIC. Period! He was said to have turned water to wine which was the FIRST of the 7 “miracles” he performed; he fed 4000 and 5000 with 5 and 7 loaves with 2 fish and there was some left over in baskets; he walked on water and many so called miracles, yet he could NOT make the fig tree produce fruit!
- He was said to have been BORN (Luke 2:1-7) during the Census of Quirinius (Cyrenius) in March 6 CE (6 AD). According to the “persher” what this refers to is the initiation ceremony equivalent to the Jewish Bar Mitzvah when is carried out at the age of 12 for boys which indicates that he was born as a baby at about the month of March, 7 BCE. The book The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh also confirms some of these persher interpretations of the so called miracles and supernatural events.
I came across a material written by some christian theologians claiming that Quirinius must have been governor twice based on some documents found but that document does NOT even contain the name of the person being refered to! These people keep suffering from intellectual indigestion.
Just as I stated earlier, you and Barbara have made valid points in your works but I think we need to look at your views with a bird’s eyeview. I would love you, Barbara and other scholars who have written about the Essene connections of xtianity and Yashua (jesus) to meet one-on-one and UNDERSTAND your DIFFERENCES and SIMILARITIES so that you can have harmonized points of view (as much as possible). I say this because some theologians and xtian bible apologists have been making references to the DIFFERENCES between the teachings of jesus and the customs of the Essenes BUT have inadvertently talked/mentioned the INSTITUTIONALISED similarities between them like the non-mosaic custom of baptism etc. In fact, one of them wrote an article in one of the popular national newspapers in my country in reply to an article earlier written by a contributor who stated the links Jesus and the xtians had with the Essenes and the PAGAN origins of the now over commercialised christmas and easter along with information on the non-christian cross and the savior gods of the ancient world. What the apologist didn’t see was that he had shot himself in the foot by admitting that there were similarities between jesus and the Essenes while he desperately talked about some of the differences.
It is in this light that I would want YOU, Dr Barbara and others to present a formidable front so that cynics/xtian apologists will Not engage in their usual act of deflecting questions and also say that those who are against their so-called “son of god” who has died for the sins of mankind are NOT united and when people peceive this, people will just hang on to their primordial believes because of FEAR OF CHANGE and INDECISSION. In professional public relations, it is well known that perception is STRONGER than reality.
Already a significant number of people I have come in contact with have thanked me for giving them reference materials on the mangled origins of the christian religion and the links of “Yashua” and his family with the Essenes. They indeed feel liberated that at last the truth is out!
I am presently compiling materials for use in writing articles to national newspapers in my country stating EXPLICITLY the Essenic links of Yashua, the meaning of Iesous (Jesus) which is actually Joshua (Yashua), AND many other points.I would therefore like to seek your permission to quote your works and website.
Please let me have your reply to my e-mail as soon as you have the chance to reply me.
PS Dr Magee, you used AD and BC in your works and refered to the use of BCE and CE as fatuous (very silly or stupid) but I have used it in my e-mail to you because I think the use of Advance Date/Backward Counting and Before Current Era/Current Era is all semantics, but your view is very interesting and well noted because even in the English language, words and expressions that were considered improper are now used formally and formal words and expressions of the past are now out of use.
Thanks for your appreciative letter.
On Barbara Thiering. I have both of her books, Jesus the Man and Jesus of the Apocalypse. Her scholarly studies of the Essenes and their calendar are useful, and I have no reason to doubt them. That is why we agree on much of the Essene material. It is accepted scholarship. It is her reading of esoteric meaning behind the words of the testaments that is crackers in my view. I cannot see that her peshar readings are objective, though she has convinced herself, it seems, that they are. So try to distinguish between her scholarly examination of discovered facts, and her imagined reading of texts that no one except herself believes.
Reading supposed subtexts can be nothing other than subjective unless she has a papyrus with the code on it. She has not, but thinks she can deduce it. The madmen who follow Leo Strauss in the USA and have started to take over the world for a modern Judaeo-Christian fascism also took it that the Greek philosophers and their successors wrote with subtexts, and Strauss decoded them too. His fascistic disciples agree, but no one with any sense and compassion. It is a dangerous business to get into. The Essenes had codes but they were not as mathematical and subtle as these readers of subtexts think. They were much more simple parallels, puns and use of what an Essene would consider obvious, but no foreigner unversed in the Jewish scriptures and their Essenic interpretations could possibly understand. Thus, it seems clear that the miracles were not supernatural events at all, but often were coded parables. As I have suggested, for example, the fig tree was Rome. The feeding miracles and the water into wine miracle were Eucharists that the Church had to hide. The Church began as being Essene and made use of the Essene penchant for coding when it had to write down the first gospel—Mark’s.
Being born in 7 BC is more likely in the sense that you explain than the biblical idea.
As for forming a popular front, it requires sufficient agreement on the main matters, but I think Baigent, et al, and Thiering are quite wrong in propagating, what I think is a pseudo-mystical, pseudo-Christian myth that Jesus gave rise to a blood line. The evidence is that senior Essenes did not marry, so why should Jesus have married? Mary Magdalene is a nonentity in the first gospel. What evidence is there that she is so important that she married Jesus in the traditional sense of it? As I have again suggested, any such marriages were ritual ones, binding and committing the Essenes to God and the Land. The same tradition entered Christianity as the marriage of nuns to Jesus Christ, the new God.
You misunderstand the working of scientific scholarship. It depends on disagreement, on being skeptical until one view prevails. That has to be on the basis of evidence, but Christians, even Christian scholars, often ignore whatever evidence does not suit their beliefs. That is not scientific, and not honest. People like you must make your own synthesis of these views, deciding for yourself on a reading of all the evidence what is most convincing. It is an utter contradiction to me to claim that Jesus married in the normal sexual and procreative sense of it, when all the evidence tells us that the senior Essenes were chaste and celibate to avoid any impurity that would prevent them from ascending directly to the level of the angels when the kingdom came.
Christians will use any apparent disagreements among their opponents, that is true, but the deception depends on believers not knowing to what extent Christianity is itself utterly spallated. You mention a figure of 15,000, but I have read it is now nearer 35,000 different sects. Ask any Christian a few questions and you quickly learn that they are not Christians at all, but some sort of vague spiritualists with no idea about their own sect’s particular views, and differences from other sects. I found out that a friend of mine, a sixty year old lifelong Catholic woman had no idea of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. She believed, contrary to the teaching of the Church, that the host was merely symbolically the body of Christ, the Protestant view. She had been brought up in Catholic schools and had Catholicism beaten into her by the Sisters of Mercy. Another Catholic friend, much more studious, tells me that very few Catholics know anything in detail about doctrine. Most are ignorant of it, just believing vaguely in the overall Christian myth.
On the similarities and differences of Christianity and the Essenes, I have a page that lists them in some detail. I assume you have read it, but if not you will find it useful in these arguments with Christians seeking liberation.
On permissions, the details are given on the first or home page of the site. Essentially the pages are free to use providing they are freely given, ie not used for profit, and are attributed to their source.
On AD or CE, I agree with you. That is why it is fatuous to change it! CE means common era, but it happens to be what was previously called Anno Domini, since the year of the Lord. It is the same in meaning but its representative letters have been changed. How does that make it easier for a Jew or Moslem, or anyone else to use? The interpretation, I teasingly suggested, has at least the merit of reminding people how the years are counted.
Thanks for your interesting letter. If you get any publicity in your national press, then we should be glad to know of it.
Thanks once more for the reply you sent to my e-mail. If you remember, I was the one that talked about Barbara Thiering’s book-Jesus the Man and the strong links of “Yashua” with the Essenes. I have not contacted you since then because I have been steadily reading all the info on your AWESOME website. At the time I made my first contact with you, I had already downloaded a significant part of the info from your website and read some details, BUT nothing prepared me for the MASSIVE details on HOW Persia created early Judaism, starting with the establishment of the Temple State by Cyrus the Great, using the returnees/colonists and Ezra the Persian! Darius II, continued the show, until the Greeks conquered the Persian Empire. Right from the early 80’s, I had started reading about other religious paths and asking questions about our existence on Earth, and I was disatisfied with the concept of the partial Jewish god, the hellfire stuff, and the many PAT answers the xtian clergy gave to spiritual issues. They perhaps thought some of us were babies or we were stupid! Now, I am in my 30s, and it would be fruitless for anybody without “full FACTS and FIGURES” or who engages in “circular reasoning” to use mind-control tactics on me. I have always had great respect for people who accept thier errors and offer sincere apologies. Most of the biblicists who hide under false institutionalised teachings have NOTHING to be ASHAMED or AFRAID of, by accepting that their scriptures contain massive myths with a strong Babylonian/Chaldean, Sumerian and ancient Persian influence! The day I found your website listed on Google.com, while searching for more info on the so-called Errors of Luke, i.e the birth of “jesus’(Yashua or Joshua!) during the Census of Quirinius (Cyrenius) in the year 6CE(AD)—was indeed a GREAT day for me because the website SHED MORE light on many of the things that I already knew.
Well, it is flattering to read so many complements. Thank you for them. On one of the pages, I mention the Rev Laurence Mills, who said a hundred years ago what you are saying about Christian theologians. If God has used the Persians to deliver His revelation, then the clergy have no business in maintaining an untruth—that the Egyptians wanted the kudos and replaced themselves for the Persians.
Indeed Dr Magee, the picture of the Persian origins of early Judaism in the 5th Century BCE, is NOW clearer to me, especially when you read the beginning of Ezra chapter 1 and Isaiah chapter 45, where it was stated that God had chosen “his” annointed one—that is, Cyrus the Persian king , who, as we know was a strong adherent of the Persian religion with Ahuramazda as the Universal God, to “liberate” the Jews from exile, and restore the Temple. Why would the Jewish god, choose the Ruler of the Persian Empire, of which the Jews were still under colonial rule, to set up a Temple State for “It’s” Chosen People? It is Very CLEAR that the passage is a “symbolic” statement (propaganda?) refering to the imposition of a new religion among the Jews. Ezra 7:25-26 even gives an account of Ezra’s relationship with Artaxerxes II, the king of Persia and God bringing into light a law or decree stating punishment for offenders! Even the details from the Epic of Gilgamesh and other Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform writings, show that MUCH of the Old testament was lifted or drew inspiration from older legends! Indeed the dimensions of the so-called Noahs ark would have turned the wooden boat into an Engineering DISASTER, meaning that the boat would NOT have sailed properly! The website below will interest you:
http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/bibleanalysis.html
It does seem to be wilful misreading of the texts that all this has been skipped over for hundreds of years, even in this age of historical science and archaeology. Thanks for the website tip. I’ll take a look.
Another MAJOR observation is the “visit’ (or was it also an allegory) of the MAGI to see the baby Jesus and his parents. What the Xtian clerics have been running away from, is that these people were NOT just “wise men” from the East or astrologers who saw a moving star, BUT the MAGI are the Chief Priests of the Zoroastrian religion of Persia! With the knowledge that the Pharisees, Sadducees and the Essenes; all Jewish sects had links with ancient Persia and Zoroastrianism and the Parsis of Iran, India and Pakistan have similar rituals with the Essenes, the TRUTH is out for all of us living in the 21st Century to see! I want to also congratulate Prof. Zeev Herzog ,the Israeli achaeologist and other prominent Jewish people who have come out to speak the truth. There is NOTHING to be ashamed of, since most ethnic groups on our planet actually have myths about their religions and origins. I also must not fail to acknowledge the works of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), the Jewish Dutch rationalist philosopher and religious thinker, who stated that Ezra is Moses! Judaism, the Non-monolithic “christianity” of over 25,000 different groups and sects worldwide—some, exhibiting very antagonistic tendencies towards one another, and Muslims, who have different groups and divergent sects and beliefs as well, ALL have ancient Persian religious roots! PERIOD.
Yes, I say somewhere that, though Newton and Spinoza were contemporaries, Newton’s discoveries have been taught to schoolboys for decades, but the Church has conveniently forgotten the discoveries of Spinoza. That has to be deliberately false teaching. Obfuscation and omission.
The Xtians and Muslims inadvertently copied Persian propaganda in the Jewish scriptures and ended up shooting themselves in the FOOT! The 7th/8th Century Arab Muslims, especially had SHOT themselves in the GROIN many times over, by plagiarizing other peoples works, and even claiming that a proof that the Quran was from God and has NO ERRORS, is that it contains scientifically accurate information about Embryology, yet in Quran 86:6-7, it is stated that: “man was created from ejected liquid(sperm)—Proceeding from between the backbone and the ribs”. This echoes the scientific error of the Greeks—Hippocrates and Galen, who believed semen originates, from the brain down the spinal cord, before passing through the kidneys and finally out of the body. (Hippocratic Writings, Penguin Classics, 1983, p. 317) There are Muslim medical doctors who are aware of this, but for fear and social reasons, most of them cannot come out boldly to say it, but end up living a life of DOUBT. This belief and many more errors in the Quran were widespread before, during and after Mohammed’s birth and death! This shows how tribal religions were formed in the past for political control of the masses.
That is interesting. I am often asked why I do not do the same for the Islamic religion as I do for Christianity, but I just do not have time to study it, not having been brought up with it as Moslems have. It is up to Moslems to be brave enough to speak up for truth.
Thanks to the internet and modern communications, for making it possible to GET this information that wasn’t available on a massive scale in the past! Genuine information is INDEED the enemy of the clerics and bible apologists in the 21st Century and beyond! While reading the materials downloaded from your website, I made extensive use of my Microsoft Encarta and the internet to do further studies with maximum effect. Many details on askwhy.co.uk were well affirmed by these sources.
Tut! Tut! You mean you did not believe them! Well, I am only kidding really, or half kidding because I do not deliberately put anything in the pages meant to mislead, but you are quite right to check what I say. Science has to be open so that it can be checked. And honest people allow the checking and do not hide behind threats and the coat tails of God.
I have always known that much, if not all of the biblical history was based on “myths", propaganda and “mangled history". Like I indicated in my last e-mail to you, I used to be an Xtian, but I got fed up with the tendency of the clergy to deflect attention, and I refused to be a lemming! This confirms the truth in the 2 statements: “YOU are WHAT you KNOW” and “MAN, KNOW THYSELF".
And, Man, Heal thyself!
Kindly keep your website up and running, because you are a great asset to the liberation of mankind from the shackles of ignorance. I also just read the Discussion under Jewish Mythology that you had with Walter Mattfeld and it was revealing. I want to say that there are THOUSANDS of people worldwide, who are interested in Knowing the FULL truth about the Persian influence on early Judaism, contrary to Walter’s thinking or perception in the final paragraph that: “I guess society is happy with things the way they are, don´t bother us with the truth, we already know what the truth is. Inspired by your efforts in your website, I, like you, hope some of the research against the bible´s historicity will be helpful to the “few stragglers” who chance to cross it (a needle in a haystack). Those sure of their faith will consider my site blasphemous and mark it off their favorites list. The more open-minded “may” return to read further articles and become informed". End of quote. In one of my e-mails to Craig Winn of prophetofdoom.net, I indicated your website address for him to view and I have contacting some of my friends and some journalists in my country about your website and I will contact you if I have any more information that will be relevant.Thank You.
Thanks again for your kind words. Christian scholars are paid by well endowed departments to uphold the faith. It follows that they have to lie and to fabricate evidence because of the job they are expected to do for their payment. If there is any God, surely he must want the truth to be told, not a lot of pious lies and inventions. They cannot think like this without losing their stipends and sinecures.
PS: Dr Magee, I tried to find out the LITERAL meaning of EZRA in Persian, but couldn’t find it. Kindly assist me with the meaning.
I assume it is the same as Zara, as in Zarathustra (Zoroaster).
PPS: I read on the AskWhy website that you had a “failing” health. I hope YOU are well now. There is a product (’Xeronine” is the active substance in it) that helps to rejuvenate the cells of the body and organs, and also prevents the cells from dying off quickly. The product is called “TAHITIAN NONI” and you can log on to www.tni.com (there is a video presentation on the website) to GET more info on How it prevents many ailments and you will be able to lay your hands on a bottle from one of the distributors in the UK. Thousands of people worldwide have benefited from this product because it WORKS!
Well, my health has been not too bad for the last few months, but my pancreas is half eaten away, I am told, so I have to take care. Thanks for the tips. I shall look into them.
