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.

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?

Mary Magdalene - Feminist and Heroine, Part One

Not much is actually known about Mary Magdalene. She wrote a gospel, which ended up in the Apocrypha or was otherwise excluded from the canonical Bible, possibly because it was so fragmented as to be unusable. She hung around with Jesus and the other disciples. For centuries, she was assumed to have been the adulteress whom Jesus saved from the mud pit, and a prostitute, and there are those who speculate that she was actually Jesus' wife. So there are a couple of speculative points that I would like to make because Mary figures prominently in Book Two.

In First Century Israel, as in most centuries before the first century in Israel, people were known by their first name and the name of their father. Simon Peter was actually "Shelomon bar Yonas," or "Solomon the son of Jonas."  The Virgin Mary would have been "Miriam beth Issac" or possibly "Miriam beth Joseph" to show that she was of the House of Issac or the House of Joseph, just as Queen Esther was originally Hadassah beth Avigail. And, for the sake of argument, Jesus was "Yeshua bar Yosef," or "Jesus the son of Joseph," or "Jesus bar Abbas," as in "Jesus the Son of God."  The "bar," ben" and "beth" conferred legitimacy.

But what if one were illegitimate?  There would be no father's name to attach at the back of one's first name, because that father was unknown. This was the case when it came to Leonardo DaVinci, who was illegitimate and came from the town of Vinci. He was, basically, "Leonardo of Vinci." The town of Vinci was adopted as his last name.

Now, there are several disciples who didn't have last names, and one could assume from this that they were illegitimate. Philip did not have a last name. Neither did whichever disciple it was who had a twin. (I would look it up, but I'm lazy.)  And neither did Mary. The name "Magdalene" refers to the town in which she lived - Magdala, which is either Greek or Latin. If she had been legitimate, she would have been listed as "Mary beth _____" (fill in the father's name there) as Matthew was listed as "Matthias ben Alphaeus."

Mary was also for years and years assumed to have been a prostitute. This assumption started, I understand, rather belatedly in the Middle Ages, when the chauvinistic Catholic Church was at its prime. (The Catholic Church also conveniently forgot that there were other Jewish women's names than just "Mary," and don't even get me started on the whole mishegoss about the Virgin Mary.)  In my book, however, Mary is a working girl who makes a living in the fish market making garum, a very stinky precursor of Worchestershire Sauce. (Look it up. Worchestershire Sauce has anchovies.)

Now, I used to live near National City, California, at a time when one of their biggest employers was the tuna industry. Tuna boats went out, fishermen caught tuna, brought their haul back to port, and it was made into Bumble Bee Tuna or maybe Chicken of the Sea. But aside from providing jobs to National City, what the tuna industry mostly contributed to the general ambiance of the town was the overpowering smell of fish. I am sure that the fishermen and the people who turned it into cans of tuna absolutely reeked of fish, morning, noon and night, even after a hot bath and layers of cheap perfume, because fish is oily and the oil can get into the skin. Since Magdala was a major fishing town on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, it would be fair to assume that it, too, reeked of fish. Probably even a tower of fish. (Magdala's real name, in Aramaic, was Migdal Nunaiya, which means "Tower of Fish.")

And what does fish smell like?  Well, I don't mean to be indelicate here, and meaning no disrespect, but fish can smell like certain women's private parts. Hence, the mythic and historical connection between sailors, fishermen, the Sea and the Goddess of Love and her surrogates, the prostitutes.

Furthermore, it doesn't seem that Mary was married, because she seems to have had the time to wander throughout Galilee and Judaea with Jesus and his other disciples, and she couldn't have done that if she were married, much less married with children. And single women, especially of a certain age, are suspected of all sorts of immorality and indecent behavior, even now, when idiot male politicians seem to think that women in general are incapable of knowing what is best for themselves and their own bodies. And a single woman, especially one who doesn't have a father, doesn't have to ask any man for permission to do anything. Therefore, if Mary wanted to wander around the countryside with thirteen men to whom she was not related, well, she could, but people, being as nasty-minded then as they are now, would assume that she was sexually servicing those same men. Therefore, even without smelling like fish, it would naturally be assumed that Mary was a prostitute, or at least a very easy lay.

In my book, however, Mary is more of a nun. Her mother was a prostitute, which is why Mary doesn't have a legitimate last name, but in my book, Mary defied the assumed and degrading course laid out for her and worked at the fish market instead of on the streets. This would also explain why Mary doesn't hold men in particularly high regard, but considers herself equal to them, or better, and she especially doesn't want to be sold into marriage or in any way beholden to a man. She is proudly independent, self-sufficient, brilliant, ambitious, and testy, as any woman with half of a brain would be testy given such an repressive and chauvinistic environment. Additionally, while I don't know if Mary was originally called "Mary of Migdal Nunaiya" and that this was shortened to "Mary the Nun," but it is interesting to speculate. Regrettably, I did not include this insight in my book because I just thought of it and the book has been out for months.

There is one last reason why Mary might have been considered a prostitute, quite aside from the fishy smell and her tendency to hang out with a bevy of unrelated men. She was beautiful. Drop dead gorgeous. With the kind of body that just naturally made men think of sin. I'm thinking Sophia Loren-like, a statuesque and very curvy beauty. This was both a blessing and a curse, because no matter how moral and upright and saintly a woman is, if she is built, and I am talking built, then men will naturally assume that she is just as interested in having sex with them, as they are in having sex with her. Especially a gorgeous woman who wanders around the countryside with a bevy of men, unchaperoned. And onlookers will see her and think that she is in some way sexually active and predatory, whether she really is or not. This happens now, and since people haven't changed in tens or hundreds of thousands of years, it is very probably that they thought so, then.

There has been some suggestion, by those who have read my book, that Mary was gay. Now, that would be an interesting twist, and one that would turn the Catholic Church and the evangelists on their ear. And I did suggest that, at the time, the people who met this very independent, self-sufficient, testy woman thought that she was a prostitute, a Sapphic (a lesbian), a witch and possessed by seven demons because she refused to conform to the norms of the time (get married, have kids, be a perfect cook and housewife, etc..)  And she does get chummy, in my book, with Martha the sister of Lazarus. But I don't come right out and say that she is gay, any more than I say that she has a sexual history with men. Some secrets are meant to be kept.

To be continued.

9,000 Year-Old Stone Judaean Masks

http://news.yahoo.com/ancient-masks-display-jerusalem-160209806.html?soc_src=mediacontentstory

Interesting story about eleven stone masks, dating from 7000 BCE, found in the Judaean desert. These eleven human faces, graven in stone, varying in their appearance, seem to have holes at the base so that sticks can be inserted. What the article did not say was how much these masks weigh. They look fairly heavy, so it is unlikely, in my opinion, that they would be hand-held during rituals, but might have been put on sticks and propped up as part of the scenery or background, although the scientist who found them did not seem to think so. They do not have the megaphone mouths of later Roman or Greece mask design and appear to have been unpainted. (Neolithic people had access to natural pigments and were prolific colorists.)

Given that these masks date from 7,000 BCE, these masks were made at roughly the same time that small figurines were made of the white clay in the area later known as the District of Galilee. They pre-date the prohibition of the making of "graven images."

Foods Never to Eat

http://travel.yahoo.com/ideas/8-animals-eaten-alive-around-232347504.html

And of course, none of these are kosher.

Once More into the Breeches, My Friends!

So you know how, in all of the religious movies and pictures, Jesus and his friends are all wearing ankle-length tunics and an open coat or sometimes a toga?  In my book, however, Jesus and his working-class friends, with the exception of Mary of Magdala, wear short tunics and cotton breeches. Pants, in other words. Short pants, long pants, puffy pants, Bermuda shorts, or whatnot, but pants. "Pants?" you might ask?  "Why pants?"

Well, there are many reasons here. First off, togas.  Togas, those things that drape over the shoulder like a bed-sheet, were worn by the Romans, usually Roman citizens and senators. Slaves, provincials and non-citizens were not allowed to wear togas. Some of the Jewish aristocracy, aka Sadducees, wore togas, but only if they were Roman citizens, which was something that was conferred upon them after the payment of many shekels, like getting a knighthood bestowed upon one by the Queen because one has contributed to the glory of the British Empire, or because one has paid a ton in taxes. So, since Jesus and his friends were not Roman citizens or senators, they didn't wear togas. Couldn't. Weren't allowed. Doing so might result in their arrests if for no reason than on suspicion of putting on airs.

Secondly, the Persian Empire had conquered Israel several hundred years before Jesus' time, and those people wore pants. Puffy pants, but pants. Check out the pictures of ancient Persians. (Or for that matter, cavemen and the people who inhabited Britannia.  Pants have been around for a very long time. They're not hard to make.)  Probably even the Hittites and the Sumerians wore pants. Pants are infinitely more masculine and modest than skirts or long tunics. Ask any Scotsman and he will tell you that this is true, especially in a high wind. Furthermore, many of the Persian kings and emperors were friendly toward the Jewish people, the Book of Esther notwithstanding. And the Jewish people were very modest. The Romans, not so much. So it is entirely possible that the Jewish people adopted the Persian habit of wearing pants, and why not? They had more ethnically in common with the Persians than they did with the Romans, who were the enemy de jour, after all.

Thirdly, there are no pictures of First Century Jewish people in Israel, at least not that have been dug up so far. Mosaic Law forbade Jewish people from painting pictures or carving statues or engraving images of people lest they be worshiped as gods. Major no-no. And Jesus was Jewish. So the earliest pictures that we have of First Century Jewish folk came about through Christian artists after Jesus' death, usually by several hundred years. And all that the artists of that time had to go on, when it came to fashion, were pictures of First Century Romans, slaves and Gentiles, all dressed in Roman garb with nary a pair of pants in the bunch. Therefore, it is entirely possible that First Century Jewish men wore pants since there is no proof that they did not. And if they did, then probably Jesus did, at least most of the time.

The Passion of the Christ

https://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-news/10-things-might-not-known-passion-christ-011942797.html

Movies like "The Passion of the Christ," "The Greatest Story Ever Told," and "The Son of God," which I think is the title of the movie being released by Roma Downey and her husband, are precisely the reason I wrote "The Heretic's Gospel." Those movies show a very European Jesus, a god-man completely without a sense of humor or imperfections of any kind. Perpetually calm, sanctimonious, ethereal, and not the sort of man that I, personally, can relate to. Call me an iconoclast, but I like the idea that Jesus is more down-to-earth, more like the Common Man, more indicative of the fact that God exists in all of us. I can't relate to someone who believes with all of his heart that he is God's gift to the world, who is so above-it-all that he can't possibly relate to me and the things that I have gone through. But someone who has lived this life, made mistakes, gets angry and embarrassed, has doubts, and tries to make amends, that is the sort of person I can get behind with all my heart. THAT is the sort of person that I can believe in.