So people ask me, "Gabe, what is so heretical about your book?" And so I give them the following reasons: (Spoiler Alert.) "In my book...."
1. Jesus was not conceived as the result of a union between God or an archangel or the Holy Spirit or some unknown Roman soldier and a virgin. He was conceived the old-fashioned way, as the result of a union between a lawfully married husband and wife. Yes, Joseph and Mary, who were Jewish, were married before Jesus was conceived, and he was the firstborn son of Joseph, not God, and he was Jewish, too. On the other hand, it is quite possible that he was conceived on the night that Joseph and Mary got married, and that up until the honeymoon, Mary was a virgin. That does happen sometimes, that women keep their virginity until after the wedding ring is securely on their fingers. But that does kind of takes the magic out of it, doesn't it?
2. Jesus was not an only child. (Actually, many Protestants already know this.) He had brothers and probably sisters, and all five brothers were named in the canonical gospels. Ergo, Mary did not stay a virgin after he was conceived. If there really were a real "Virgin Mary," it would be Miriam, Jesus' fiancee, who waited for thirteen years to marry him.
3. There was no Slaughter of the Innocents. King Herod had other troubles than with tiny peasant boys. Several of his grown sons tried hard to usurp his throne and he had to have them executed. There were factions that campaigned against him, and they had to be put down. Five would-be Messiahs rose up during his last few years on the throne, and they and their thousands of followers had to be executed. What were a handful of little peasant toddlers going to do to him, that he should call for their extermination?
4. Jesus was educated, had gone to school, knew how to read and write, and knew his scriptures and his Oral Law which was made into the Talmud. In fact, I have a little book called The Wisdom of the Talmud and many of the sayings written therein were things that Jesus was said to have quoted in the regular Bible. Since it is highly unlikely that Jewish scholars would have quoted Jesus, Jesus would have quoted them.
5. The Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes were actually Essenic hymns, not things that originated with Jesus. Actually, very little of what was written in the Bible are things that originated with Jesus. He was a great quoter.
6. Judah did not betray Jesus. Jesus asked him to turn him in to the Jewish authorities if the Romans were going to arrest him for treason, because he stood a better chance of getting a fair trial if he went before Jewish judges than Roman ones. Judah did what Jesus asked, and has taken the heat for the "betrayal" ever since.
7. It was not Jesus' intention to die for our sins. Judaism already had mechanisms in place for the expiation of sins. It was Jesus' intention to, if necessary, trade his life for the lives of his followers, friends, disciples and loved ones, since, if you cut off the head of a snake, the body will die. King Herod, when he was alive, had a nasty habit of executing all of the would-be Messiahs' followers, but by the time his son, Prince Antipas, came to rule Judea, dissidents were imprisoned, not executed, and he was still in power when Jesus rose to prominence. However, it was entirely possible that the thousands of people who followed Jesus would be put to death if he led an uprising against the Herodians, the Romans and the Status Quo, and Jesus wanted to avoid that. Therefore, since "it is better for one man to die for many, than for many to die for one man," Jesus was willing to offer his life, if he had to, to save the lives of thousands.
8. The Jews were not to blame for Jesus' death. They weren't even present at the time that Pilate ordered his execution. Pilate worked out of Antonia's Fortress, the Roman military headquarters in Jerusalem, a place where no decent Jewish person would go, because it was made for and inhabited by the Roman military who were pagans. The people who clamored for Jesus' death were, therefore, Romans.
9. Jesus did not suffer greatly after the trial. Whether he was God's biological son or not, he was God's favorite son, and God, as his spiritual father, simply would not allow his son to suffer, any more than you or I would allow our children to suffer.
10. Jesus did not die on the cross, nor were crucifixions nearly as gruesome as they have been made out to be. The object of a crucifixion was to make the felon serve as an example to the public, and let them die slowly. Jesus "died" way too quickly, which is why I say that he was knocked out and then, through a series of amazing events (thunderstorm, earthquake, the fortuitous presence of enough people to help him, who was unconscious, down from the olive tree) he was rescued and escaped. His disciples, being frightened little men, would not have known that he escaped, would have believed the prophesy about how the Messiah was supposed to be three days in the grave before arising from the dead, and they could only write what they believed was true, whether it was really true or not. And that is how the stories began.
So the question on the table is, do these heretical ideas warp, ruin and otherwise destroy the story of Jesus as the Son of God.? No. Even if Jesus was not the only begotten Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God...and on the third day he rose again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom shall have no end, he was and continues to be the Son of God and God's favorite son. He might have died on the cross or olive tree, or he might have died in his sleep some thirty-three years later in Britain just before the Jewish Wars broke out. He might have bodily ascended into heaven from a mountaintop during Penacost, or his immortal soul might have floated gently up to be enveloped in the folds of the Aurora Borealis and thence become One with God on his 66th birthday. He might have been a blissed-out and benign demigod, or he might have been an average man who gives hope and divine forgiveness to other average men. We don't know. We cannot know. And that's all right. Even without the dog and pony show, the smoke and mirrors, and the ecumenical song and dance, he was and is still the spiritual Son of God and an inspiration to what we all should be.
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
The Animals on the Roof
So I keep hearing that people in the Middle East like to put their animals on the flat roofs of their homes instead of, say, in a barn or corral. And I am thinking, "Why on earth would you want your chickens, ducks, geese, cows, goats, donkeys and sheep up on a roof? How would they get there? The stairs? And how would they get down? The goats, I can see, because they like to climb, but cows? And how would you get your ducks and geese to stay there? Chickens, I understand, flutter, but ducks and geese can fly. It just doesn't make sense." The only reason I can think of as to why one would keep one's domesticated animals on the roof was to keep them away from predators. But if cows, sheep and donkeys can climb stairs, so can wild animals who are meat-eaters.
In my book, Hezzie the donkey lived in the workshop on the first floor, presumably safe and sound and locked in a stall. But then again, I based the town of Parazah partly on the little Jewish eastern European villages and partly on big city ghettos where people live in apartments above their shops, and there is nothing to say that it wasn't like that at all. Apartments have been around for thousands of years, and the ancient Persians invented what are basically strip malls, and who is to say that people didn't live on the second floor?
Furthermore, Jesus' mother did not strike me as the kind of girl who was particularly adept at country life. She was from the more affluent town of Arimathea, and was a suburban princess, not someone who was accustomed to gathering eggs or milking cows. This is also why shops and marketplaces were invented, because not everyone makes cheese, beheads chickens or putters around in a vegetable garden if they can possibly avoid it. The one concession I made to the country life was that Mariyam made the family's beer, because back then, that's what women did, along with making bread. But otherwise, Jesus' families were townies, and speaking as a townie, we just don't do cows and chickens and vegetable gardens, as a general rule.
In my book, Hezzie the donkey lived in the workshop on the first floor, presumably safe and sound and locked in a stall. But then again, I based the town of Parazah partly on the little Jewish eastern European villages and partly on big city ghettos where people live in apartments above their shops, and there is nothing to say that it wasn't like that at all. Apartments have been around for thousands of years, and the ancient Persians invented what are basically strip malls, and who is to say that people didn't live on the second floor?
Furthermore, Jesus' mother did not strike me as the kind of girl who was particularly adept at country life. She was from the more affluent town of Arimathea, and was a suburban princess, not someone who was accustomed to gathering eggs or milking cows. This is also why shops and marketplaces were invented, because not everyone makes cheese, beheads chickens or putters around in a vegetable garden if they can possibly avoid it. The one concession I made to the country life was that Mariyam made the family's beer, because back then, that's what women did, along with making bread. But otherwise, Jesus' families were townies, and speaking as a townie, we just don't do cows and chickens and vegetable gardens, as a general rule.
Friday, April 18, 2014
When is a Gospel is not Gospel?
Now, I don't pretend to know anything about theology or religion. I didn't go to Hebrew School or a Bible college or some kind of seminary. I didn't even go to Sunday School. In religion, there is too much fuzziness, too much debate, too much that is unknown. That is why, when I wrote The Heretic's Gospel, I concentrated on the known: archaeology, history, politics, mythology and human nature. Things you can point to and look at and hold in your hand and quantify.
Besides, if you look at the word "Gospel," you would see that one of its meanings is "God's Word." And I know that's how, for most of my life, I viewed the New Testament. To me, it was the Truth, a factual record of the actual events that occurred some, now, two thousand years ago. Like most people, I took the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John at face value, as gospel, as it were, as though it were dictated by God.
And then I began to think about it.
The oldest narrative, according to Wikipedia, is the Gospel According to Mark. Mark was a "companion" of Simon Peter, so he didn't know Jesus, but only knew what Simon Peter (Shlomo) had told him. The Gospel According to Mark was written, according to scholars, between 66 AD and 70 AD. Even if Mark had written it in his middle-age, and even if Jesus had died on a cross some thirty-three years before Mark wrote his book, we are talking about a thirty-three to thirty-seven year gap between Jesus' ministry and the telling of his story. This is the year 2014. Thirty-seven years ago, it was 1977. My son David was two years old in 1977. I was there, and I don't remember much. And if I had a friend who had a friend whom he had told all about me, I seriously doubt that my friend's friend would remember all of the niggling details of my life some thirty-seven years ago.
After that, we have the Gospel According to Matthew, written between 80 AD and 90 AD. I read somewhere that Matthew had written his gospel for money, and based his book on what he had read in The Gospel According to Mark. Matthew, if he did write that book, at least knew Jesus, whom Mark had never met. Still, he also would have been in his early old-age by the time he wrote it. I'm sixty, and I have trouble remembering stuff. Unless Matthew had a fantastic memory, he probably got stuff wrong, too, which is why there are such differences between the two gospels.
Directly after Matthew's book on Jesus was published, Luke published his own book, The Gospel According to Luke. Luke was a Gentile physician, according to the stories told of him, and a friend of Paul of Tarsus, who, like Mark, had never met Jesus. So we are talking at least three degrees of separation. And Luke was an educated man, well-versed in Greek mythology, and he put many mythic flourishes in his book, probably in order to enhance sales, to tell a better story, and to appeal to the Greek Gentiles. His book was written between 80 and 100 AD.
The last canonical gospel, The Gospel According to John, was written, according to Wikipedia, in 200 AD. Obviously, if Wikipedia is correct, John didn't write it, because he would have had to have been around 183 years old when he did. So it was written by somebody else and ascribed to him. And possibly, that person knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew John who knew Jesus. Six degrees of separation. On the other hand, some experts say that the book was written in 90 AD. However, considering that John was a half-mad recluse, and was probably thirteen years old when he hung around Jesus in the early thirties, he would have been in his early seventies when he wrote his book, if indeed he did, which would be a good reason why it reads as crazy as it does.
After that, we have The Gospel According to Mary (written between 120 and 180 AD), The Gospel According to James (written in 145 AD), The Gospel According to Philip (written no earlier than 150 AD), The Gospel According to Judah (circa 180 AD), The Gospel According to Thomas (circa 340 AD) and The Gospel According to Nicodemus (written in around 350 AD.) Many of these books were found with the Gnostics, a sect that competed with Roman Catholic Christianity, and since Roman Catholicism won, the influence and theology of the Gnostics all but vanished.
So, what happens when a bunch of people who view the same event are asked to write about said event? They tend to have different viewpoints that have been influenced by where they were standing at the time, what they heard, what they smelled, how they felt, and their previous experiences. For example, let's say that six people, a nurse, a lawyer, a mechanic, a barista, a homeless person and a politician, see a car accident between a Mercedes and a Ford on the corner of Sixth and Main. The nurse, who was outside of a medical clinic on the northwest corner, would have a different view of the accident, than the lawyer standing outside his office on the southeast corner. The mechanic on the northeast corner would see, smell, hear and perceive a different reality than the barista serving her customers on the southeast corner. The homeless person may have been sitting on the curb and he would see a different accident than the politician whose limo was next to the Mercedes in question. And of course, the Mercedes driver and the Ford driver would have two entirely different and conflicting stories to tell.
Furthermore, it is likely that blame would be assigned according to the witnesses' biases. The nurse, the lawyer and the politician may see the Mercedes driver as completely innocent, just because they all tend to be well-off. The mechanic, the barista and the homeless person may see the Ford driver as completely innocent, because they all tend to have limited means. And biases affect viewpoint and memory. Which is why the evidence is so important. Evidence is like Science, and Science (theoretically) doesn't care. And that is what the cops are for, to take witness statements, but also to gather evidence by measuring the tire-marks, gathering evidence of paint and then leaving it to the experts to know what happens when a Ford hits a Mercedes and when a Mercedes hits a Ford.
So what's the point? The point is that people wrote the Gospels, and people have flawed memories and biases and agendas. So really, there are no Gospels, since the Gospels, as well as the entire Bible, were written by people and not dictated word-for-word by God.
Besides, if you look at the word "Gospel," you would see that one of its meanings is "God's Word." And I know that's how, for most of my life, I viewed the New Testament. To me, it was the Truth, a factual record of the actual events that occurred some, now, two thousand years ago. Like most people, I took the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John at face value, as gospel, as it were, as though it were dictated by God.
And then I began to think about it.
The oldest narrative, according to Wikipedia, is the Gospel According to Mark. Mark was a "companion" of Simon Peter, so he didn't know Jesus, but only knew what Simon Peter (Shlomo) had told him. The Gospel According to Mark was written, according to scholars, between 66 AD and 70 AD. Even if Mark had written it in his middle-age, and even if Jesus had died on a cross some thirty-three years before Mark wrote his book, we are talking about a thirty-three to thirty-seven year gap between Jesus' ministry and the telling of his story. This is the year 2014. Thirty-seven years ago, it was 1977. My son David was two years old in 1977. I was there, and I don't remember much. And if I had a friend who had a friend whom he had told all about me, I seriously doubt that my friend's friend would remember all of the niggling details of my life some thirty-seven years ago.
After that, we have the Gospel According to Matthew, written between 80 AD and 90 AD. I read somewhere that Matthew had written his gospel for money, and based his book on what he had read in The Gospel According to Mark. Matthew, if he did write that book, at least knew Jesus, whom Mark had never met. Still, he also would have been in his early old-age by the time he wrote it. I'm sixty, and I have trouble remembering stuff. Unless Matthew had a fantastic memory, he probably got stuff wrong, too, which is why there are such differences between the two gospels.
Directly after Matthew's book on Jesus was published, Luke published his own book, The Gospel According to Luke. Luke was a Gentile physician, according to the stories told of him, and a friend of Paul of Tarsus, who, like Mark, had never met Jesus. So we are talking at least three degrees of separation. And Luke was an educated man, well-versed in Greek mythology, and he put many mythic flourishes in his book, probably in order to enhance sales, to tell a better story, and to appeal to the Greek Gentiles. His book was written between 80 and 100 AD.
The last canonical gospel, The Gospel According to John, was written, according to Wikipedia, in 200 AD. Obviously, if Wikipedia is correct, John didn't write it, because he would have had to have been around 183 years old when he did. So it was written by somebody else and ascribed to him. And possibly, that person knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew John who knew Jesus. Six degrees of separation. On the other hand, some experts say that the book was written in 90 AD. However, considering that John was a half-mad recluse, and was probably thirteen years old when he hung around Jesus in the early thirties, he would have been in his early seventies when he wrote his book, if indeed he did, which would be a good reason why it reads as crazy as it does.
After that, we have The Gospel According to Mary (written between 120 and 180 AD), The Gospel According to James (written in 145 AD), The Gospel According to Philip (written no earlier than 150 AD), The Gospel According to Judah (circa 180 AD), The Gospel According to Thomas (circa 340 AD) and The Gospel According to Nicodemus (written in around 350 AD.) Many of these books were found with the Gnostics, a sect that competed with Roman Catholic Christianity, and since Roman Catholicism won, the influence and theology of the Gnostics all but vanished.
So, what happens when a bunch of people who view the same event are asked to write about said event? They tend to have different viewpoints that have been influenced by where they were standing at the time, what they heard, what they smelled, how they felt, and their previous experiences. For example, let's say that six people, a nurse, a lawyer, a mechanic, a barista, a homeless person and a politician, see a car accident between a Mercedes and a Ford on the corner of Sixth and Main. The nurse, who was outside of a medical clinic on the northwest corner, would have a different view of the accident, than the lawyer standing outside his office on the southeast corner. The mechanic on the northeast corner would see, smell, hear and perceive a different reality than the barista serving her customers on the southeast corner. The homeless person may have been sitting on the curb and he would see a different accident than the politician whose limo was next to the Mercedes in question. And of course, the Mercedes driver and the Ford driver would have two entirely different and conflicting stories to tell.
Furthermore, it is likely that blame would be assigned according to the witnesses' biases. The nurse, the lawyer and the politician may see the Mercedes driver as completely innocent, just because they all tend to be well-off. The mechanic, the barista and the homeless person may see the Ford driver as completely innocent, because they all tend to have limited means. And biases affect viewpoint and memory. Which is why the evidence is so important. Evidence is like Science, and Science (theoretically) doesn't care. And that is what the cops are for, to take witness statements, but also to gather evidence by measuring the tire-marks, gathering evidence of paint and then leaving it to the experts to know what happens when a Ford hits a Mercedes and when a Mercedes hits a Ford.
So what's the point? The point is that people wrote the Gospels, and people have flawed memories and biases and agendas. So really, there are no Gospels, since the Gospels, as well as the entire Bible, were written by people and not dictated word-for-word by God.
The Gabriel Stone - A Sudden Insight
About fourteen years ago, well over 2000 years after the date in which it was written, archaeologists found a (roughly) three-foot high limestone tablet upon which was written, in ink, a prophesy about the death and resurrection of the Messiah. This was the "Gabriel Stone," also called the "Jeselsohn Stone," because it is currently owned by David Jeselsohn. But the hero of this Messianic tale is not Jesus of Nazareth, but Simon bar Yosef of Peraea, who, according to the story, was told by the Archangel Gabriel that he would be crucified and would die, and then would be resurrected after three days.
I won't go into the religious implications of this. Suffice it to say that, since it predates Jesus' death and resurrection, the Gabriel Stone has the potential to totally upend Christianity today. But then again, so would the realization that there were four failed Messiahs before Jesus and probably many more in the two thousand years, since. And I am talking "Messiahs" in the Jewish sense: A warrior-king and wise administrator who will rebuild the Temple, gather the people of Israel back to the Promised Land, restore Jerusalem as the center of the political and religious universe, and restore all of the treasures, including the lost Ark of the Covenant. Judaism already has mechanisms in place for the forgiveness of sins and admission into Paradise, and has had said mechanisms for over five thousand years. Only Christianity makes belief in Christ a condition for salvation. The Jews are much more open-minded.
But why was the story about Simon bar Yosef of Peraea written in ink on a piece of stone? Most stones that have come down to us were painted or carved, not written on in ink. Ink was used on paper or parchment. On the other hand, paper and parchment are relatively hard to manufacture, tend to rot, and are expensive compared to a relatively permanent slab of marble, limestone, sandstone or some other stone made by God. So why was the story of Simon bar Yosef written in ink on a piece of stone?
To answer that, we first have to travel back in time to First Century Israel. It is a bogus claim based on antisemitism and Gentile conceit that Jesus and the other Jewish people of First Century Israel were illiterate. Hebrew Schools, or Yeshivas, began some thirty years before Jesus was born, and those are just the public schools. The Jews as a people had been able to read the Torah and write in Hebrew for hundreds if not thousands of years before that. Jesus would have been no exception.
Furthermore, the Torah was not the only book around at the time. There were plenty of other books, most of which have probably been lost to Time. Nonetheless, we know about, and may have even read, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Argonautica, and the Metamorphosis by Ovid, and books by Seneca and Pythagoras and hundreds of other Greek and Roman authors. And what were the original books of the Old Testament, like Esther and Job and the Song of Songs, if not books?
So, let us mentally wander through the marketplaces of First Century Israel. There is a produce stand with baskets of oranges and apples and dates and strawberries. There is the stand with barrels of olives and bins of spices. There is the booth with bolts of fabric in vibrant colors. There is the Importer's booth with goods from Syria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Babylon and Cyprus. And then there is the Book-Seller's booth with a wide selection of books, both new and used, both scrolls and a new type of book, the codex, which has pages of paper or parchment with words written on them that people can read.
But how do you know what book to read? It's possible that the book-seller has read them all and can tell you all about them, but this would take time and this is a busy and very crowded marketplace.
The answer is advertising.
Now, I have in my possession posters of my books. I don't know what to do with them, but they are advertising. They look like the shiny and colorful covers of my books, but they are made of paper. If I wanted to make my posters more permanent, I would back them with cardboard or put them in a frame. But First Century Israel didn't have cardboard or wooden frames, at least as far as we know. If one wanted permanence in the First Century, one could use stone, which could be adorned with paint or words written in ink and then leaned up against a wall as advertising. This actually makes good sense because wind doesn't usually blow away stone tablets, they're too large for a thief to slip them into his pocket, and stone tablets don't bend or tear apart.
What is more, according to Wikipedia, the Gabriel Stone contains a "series of short prophesies written in the first person," for a total of 87 lines. Most of the words are missing- ink is by no means a permanent medium. A translation of it can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/4471612/Messiah-Stone-Translation. The first person, the speaker, is the Archangel Gabriel, and he is speaking to Simon bar Yosef of Peraea. Interestingly, it was written in Hebrew, not Aramaic, the mother-language of that time. And according to some of the rabbinic sages, Gabriel was the only one of the archangels who spoke Aramaic. If he had written it, which is highly unlikely, then why wouldn't he have written it in Aramaic instead of Hebrew? Obviously, it was written by a person to be read by all Jewish folk, not just the Aramaic-speaking ones, but the Greek ones, the Roman ones, the Egyptian ones and whoever else happened to be milling around the marketplace.
It would make sense to me that the Gabriel Stone is an advertised excerpt of a much larger book, a fictional account written by someone who knew Hebrew and about angels and archangels and resurrection and the spirit, the way that portions of a modern novel might be printed on a poster, in order to entice a potential customer into buying the entire book. I think that the actual book, of which the excerpt was only a part, was written by an Essene or Pharisee, since both of these sects believed in angels, resurrection and the spirit, and that it was written to be part propaganda and part novel, much like many Christian books nowadays predict Armageddon and the End of the World. And since Simon bar Yosef did not actually rise from the dead and fulfill his destiny as the Messiah, this book, which, in my book, I call Gabriel's Prophesy, was written before the crucifixion of Simon bar Yosef in roughly 4 BCE, perhaps as a way to drum up support for his cause.
I won't go into the religious implications of this. Suffice it to say that, since it predates Jesus' death and resurrection, the Gabriel Stone has the potential to totally upend Christianity today. But then again, so would the realization that there were four failed Messiahs before Jesus and probably many more in the two thousand years, since. And I am talking "Messiahs" in the Jewish sense: A warrior-king and wise administrator who will rebuild the Temple, gather the people of Israel back to the Promised Land, restore Jerusalem as the center of the political and religious universe, and restore all of the treasures, including the lost Ark of the Covenant. Judaism already has mechanisms in place for the forgiveness of sins and admission into Paradise, and has had said mechanisms for over five thousand years. Only Christianity makes belief in Christ a condition for salvation. The Jews are much more open-minded.
But why was the story about Simon bar Yosef of Peraea written in ink on a piece of stone? Most stones that have come down to us were painted or carved, not written on in ink. Ink was used on paper or parchment. On the other hand, paper and parchment are relatively hard to manufacture, tend to rot, and are expensive compared to a relatively permanent slab of marble, limestone, sandstone or some other stone made by God. So why was the story of Simon bar Yosef written in ink on a piece of stone?
To answer that, we first have to travel back in time to First Century Israel. It is a bogus claim based on antisemitism and Gentile conceit that Jesus and the other Jewish people of First Century Israel were illiterate. Hebrew Schools, or Yeshivas, began some thirty years before Jesus was born, and those are just the public schools. The Jews as a people had been able to read the Torah and write in Hebrew for hundreds if not thousands of years before that. Jesus would have been no exception.
Furthermore, the Torah was not the only book around at the time. There were plenty of other books, most of which have probably been lost to Time. Nonetheless, we know about, and may have even read, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Argonautica, and the Metamorphosis by Ovid, and books by Seneca and Pythagoras and hundreds of other Greek and Roman authors. And what were the original books of the Old Testament, like Esther and Job and the Song of Songs, if not books?
So, let us mentally wander through the marketplaces of First Century Israel. There is a produce stand with baskets of oranges and apples and dates and strawberries. There is the stand with barrels of olives and bins of spices. There is the booth with bolts of fabric in vibrant colors. There is the Importer's booth with goods from Syria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Babylon and Cyprus. And then there is the Book-Seller's booth with a wide selection of books, both new and used, both scrolls and a new type of book, the codex, which has pages of paper or parchment with words written on them that people can read.
But how do you know what book to read? It's possible that the book-seller has read them all and can tell you all about them, but this would take time and this is a busy and very crowded marketplace.
The answer is advertising.
Now, I have in my possession posters of my books. I don't know what to do with them, but they are advertising. They look like the shiny and colorful covers of my books, but they are made of paper. If I wanted to make my posters more permanent, I would back them with cardboard or put them in a frame. But First Century Israel didn't have cardboard or wooden frames, at least as far as we know. If one wanted permanence in the First Century, one could use stone, which could be adorned with paint or words written in ink and then leaned up against a wall as advertising. This actually makes good sense because wind doesn't usually blow away stone tablets, they're too large for a thief to slip them into his pocket, and stone tablets don't bend or tear apart.
What is more, according to Wikipedia, the Gabriel Stone contains a "series of short prophesies written in the first person," for a total of 87 lines. Most of the words are missing- ink is by no means a permanent medium. A translation of it can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/4471612/Messiah-Stone-Translation. The first person, the speaker, is the Archangel Gabriel, and he is speaking to Simon bar Yosef of Peraea. Interestingly, it was written in Hebrew, not Aramaic, the mother-language of that time. And according to some of the rabbinic sages, Gabriel was the only one of the archangels who spoke Aramaic. If he had written it, which is highly unlikely, then why wouldn't he have written it in Aramaic instead of Hebrew? Obviously, it was written by a person to be read by all Jewish folk, not just the Aramaic-speaking ones, but the Greek ones, the Roman ones, the Egyptian ones and whoever else happened to be milling around the marketplace.
It would make sense to me that the Gabriel Stone is an advertised excerpt of a much larger book, a fictional account written by someone who knew Hebrew and about angels and archangels and resurrection and the spirit, the way that portions of a modern novel might be printed on a poster, in order to entice a potential customer into buying the entire book. I think that the actual book, of which the excerpt was only a part, was written by an Essene or Pharisee, since both of these sects believed in angels, resurrection and the spirit, and that it was written to be part propaganda and part novel, much like many Christian books nowadays predict Armageddon and the End of the World. And since Simon bar Yosef did not actually rise from the dead and fulfill his destiny as the Messiah, this book, which, in my book, I call Gabriel's Prophesy, was written before the crucifixion of Simon bar Yosef in roughly 4 BCE, perhaps as a way to drum up support for his cause.
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Jesus was Married!
http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/10/5600450/papyrus-gospel-of-jesus-wife-likely-wasnt-forged-scientists-claim
I have long said that Jesus was married, which puts a whole nuther spin on Christianity. But really, it only makes sense. Most young Jewish men in First Century Israel were married with children, and to not be married was to bring shame to the family. The only thing is that, unlike Dan Brown, I just don't think that Jesus' wife was Mary Magdalene because she was just not respectable enough, given that she was rumored to be demon-possessed, to be a preacher's or rabbi's wife. That role requires considerable decorum. I think that Jesus' wife was Mary (Miriam), the sister of Lazarus (Lazar.)
Here's the thing. Back then, children were betrothed to each other in arranged marriages. People didn't just "fall in love" and then marry the object of their affection the way that they do now because people fall in and out of love all the time, and basing a marriage on that is just too risky. Instead, one's parents or a paid matchmaker set the whole thing up. In fact, there was a First Century rabbi who was famous for being a perfect matchmaker, and so much so that even now, young women go to his tomb in Israel and ask him to find them a suitable husband. And we are talking two thousand years later! That is some impressive street cred!
But why Miriam? Because Miriam was respectable enough to be the wife of a preacher or rabbi. There was no taint of dishonor or demon-possession attached to her name. In fact, she doesn't get much of a mention at all in the canonical gospels, except that Jesus acknowledges that she had the better part, being able to sit at his feet and listen to his stories, as compared to her sister Martha, who was bitterly busy doing things.
Plus, Miriam was probably the true Virgin Mary. The alleged "Virgin Mary," Mariyam, who was Jesus' mother, was not a virgin. She was a married woman and mother of at least six sons and possibly additional daughters. (I gave Jesus three sisters.) And you don't have kids if you are a virgin. Well, maybe technically the first time, but certainly not by the second or third or fourth or fifth or sixth. And Mary Magdalene may not have been a virgin, either, given her reputation. I purposefully make that unclear in my book. But Miriam, the sister of Lazarus, if she were truly Jesus' fiancee, was probably was a virgin, and aside from Jesus and possibly Little John (John the Apostle), the only true virgin in the book.
Furthermore, as I have said before, one has to take into account the early Catholic Church. By closely editing, if not actually changing the content of, the canonical gospels and early letters in order to conform to their agenda, the founding fathers of the Catholic Church were able to affect the way that subsequent generations thought and felt about Jesus and his whole narrative and the way that we view Christianity today. The requirement over the passage of centuries is that we buy the whole New Testament lock, stock and barrel, unquestioningly, and take it on faith, and if we don't, well, the Catholic Church (and man Protestant churches) have a way of being extremely nasty about it. Even thinking something that went against the Church dogma was considered a sin. The Catholic Church has many fine qualities, but they do have a very long history of suppression, mind control and denial. And yes, since the Reformation, a multitude of other churches have sprung up, but the foundation for faith and the Christ Narrative was laid by the Catholic Church. They taught us what to think about the whole Jesus story.
It is like what the Board of Education in Texas was trying to do a few years back when they decided to demote, if not delete, the contributions that Thomas Jefferson made to the Cause of Independence. And when American textbooks failed to mention the contributions to American society made by women, native Americans, Jews, Catholics, blacks, Mexicans, Italians or the Asian communities. "If we don't mention it, it doesn't exist." Or even the more recent example of the Bush Wars, which were trumped up on the most fabricated of excuses, sold to the American public on false pretenses, cost us trillions of dollars and millions of lives, and if we didn't want to go to war or questioned the veracity of greedy psychopathic men, then we were branded "traitors." And that is now. Just imagine the power to control data and public opinion in a world where there is no Internet or Wikipedia or a society that celebrates the questioning of authority. And you really don't have to work hard to imagine it. There are plenty of places today that are ruled by people who tell their countrymen what to think, or face prison or the death penalty, so what makes anyone think that it have been any different over the past two thousand years?
I have long said that Jesus was married, which puts a whole nuther spin on Christianity. But really, it only makes sense. Most young Jewish men in First Century Israel were married with children, and to not be married was to bring shame to the family. The only thing is that, unlike Dan Brown, I just don't think that Jesus' wife was Mary Magdalene because she was just not respectable enough, given that she was rumored to be demon-possessed, to be a preacher's or rabbi's wife. That role requires considerable decorum. I think that Jesus' wife was Mary (Miriam), the sister of Lazarus (Lazar.)
Here's the thing. Back then, children were betrothed to each other in arranged marriages. People didn't just "fall in love" and then marry the object of their affection the way that they do now because people fall in and out of love all the time, and basing a marriage on that is just too risky. Instead, one's parents or a paid matchmaker set the whole thing up. In fact, there was a First Century rabbi who was famous for being a perfect matchmaker, and so much so that even now, young women go to his tomb in Israel and ask him to find them a suitable husband. And we are talking two thousand years later! That is some impressive street cred!
But why Miriam? Because Miriam was respectable enough to be the wife of a preacher or rabbi. There was no taint of dishonor or demon-possession attached to her name. In fact, she doesn't get much of a mention at all in the canonical gospels, except that Jesus acknowledges that she had the better part, being able to sit at his feet and listen to his stories, as compared to her sister Martha, who was bitterly busy doing things.
Plus, Miriam was probably the true Virgin Mary. The alleged "Virgin Mary," Mariyam, who was Jesus' mother, was not a virgin. She was a married woman and mother of at least six sons and possibly additional daughters. (I gave Jesus three sisters.) And you don't have kids if you are a virgin. Well, maybe technically the first time, but certainly not by the second or third or fourth or fifth or sixth. And Mary Magdalene may not have been a virgin, either, given her reputation. I purposefully make that unclear in my book. But Miriam, the sister of Lazarus, if she were truly Jesus' fiancee, was probably was a virgin, and aside from Jesus and possibly Little John (John the Apostle), the only true virgin in the book.
Furthermore, as I have said before, one has to take into account the early Catholic Church. By closely editing, if not actually changing the content of, the canonical gospels and early letters in order to conform to their agenda, the founding fathers of the Catholic Church were able to affect the way that subsequent generations thought and felt about Jesus and his whole narrative and the way that we view Christianity today. The requirement over the passage of centuries is that we buy the whole New Testament lock, stock and barrel, unquestioningly, and take it on faith, and if we don't, well, the Catholic Church (and man Protestant churches) have a way of being extremely nasty about it. Even thinking something that went against the Church dogma was considered a sin. The Catholic Church has many fine qualities, but they do have a very long history of suppression, mind control and denial. And yes, since the Reformation, a multitude of other churches have sprung up, but the foundation for faith and the Christ Narrative was laid by the Catholic Church. They taught us what to think about the whole Jesus story.
It is like what the Board of Education in Texas was trying to do a few years back when they decided to demote, if not delete, the contributions that Thomas Jefferson made to the Cause of Independence. And when American textbooks failed to mention the contributions to American society made by women, native Americans, Jews, Catholics, blacks, Mexicans, Italians or the Asian communities. "If we don't mention it, it doesn't exist." Or even the more recent example of the Bush Wars, which were trumped up on the most fabricated of excuses, sold to the American public on false pretenses, cost us trillions of dollars and millions of lives, and if we didn't want to go to war or questioned the veracity of greedy psychopathic men, then we were branded "traitors." And that is now. Just imagine the power to control data and public opinion in a world where there is no Internet or Wikipedia or a society that celebrates the questioning of authority. And you really don't have to work hard to imagine it. There are plenty of places today that are ruled by people who tell their countrymen what to think, or face prison or the death penalty, so what makes anyone think that it have been any different over the past two thousand years?
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