RELIGION AND ANCIENT DRUG USE
Traditional society (i.e., Christian America) is VERY threatened by psychoactive drugs -- often equating them with Satan -- and it is easy to see why. What if the chemical/neurological basis of religious belief can be isolated AND controlled? What if one could take a pill and all of that ossified network of catechisms and ritual could be rendered plastic again, thus allowing one's brain to develop all new patterns?
It is not at all surprising that established religions are the most vocal opponents of psychoactives. Of COURSE a high priest in an established religion would feel threatened by a simple little plant that allows just anybody to talk to god. Kind of screws up the monopoly. In other words, YOU can't experience a transport of religious ecstasy--YOU'RE not QUALIFIED!
In short this theory of the origin of religion is that the initial founders of a given religion got higher than a fucking kite at some point, and then tried to tell people about it. Predictably, what they said often sounds like complete gibberish. (Try reading translations of early Vedic writings sometime!) But, place what they said in the context of an acid trip or similar experience, and it suddenly makes a lot more sense ("the light of all lights manifesting inside the wheel of all wheels", "the eternal dance of all dances, interpenetrating, creating and destroying simultaneously" blah blah blah).
An example of this is those many-armed Hindu dancers statues. Looked at in the wrong context, a person could spend years trying to explain the reason for the multiple arms. Put in the context of an acid trip, however, the arms become trails, and they become the FINEST PIECE OF HALLUCINOGENIC ART IN HISTORY: a three dimensional representation of a four dimensional event--a geodesic of acid trails preserved in bronze.
THE JESUS WAS A MUSHROOM THEORY (I kid you not!)
Mushrooms (Particularly Aminita Muscaria) were also quite a wonder in anceint times. Where did they come from. The ancient people had no immediate concept of spores. So a mushroom was considered a "virgin birth". Also they immediately noticed that mushrooms came after the rains and they would pick them in the early hours of the morning. This was the "MANNA FROM HEAVEN" that the Israelites would gather. The word "Manna" means "What is it". Well, after consuming it you would probably be wondering "What is it" as you were talking to God.
(Gen 3:3 KJV) "But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die." (Gen 3:4 KJV) "And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:" (Gen 3:5 KJV) "For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."
John Allegro authored one of the most interesting books on the origins and sources of religion. It is called "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross" and was published in 1970. Allegro was one of a team of researchers hired by the State of Israel and the British government to decipher the "Dead Sea Scrolls" when they were discovered in the 1950's. Allegro was hired because he was a biblical scholar and was familiar with ALMOST EVERY SINGLE MAJOR LANGUAGE including SUMERIAN, EGYPTIAN, HEBREW, CUNIEFORM.
His ultimate conclusion (and he was kicked off the team for his opinions) was that Jesus was a Mushroom consumed by the Essenes and covered up to keep the Roman authorities in the dark about the fertility cult of the Essenes. Allegro claims that the ancient people considered the rain similar to God's sperm in that it would fertilize the soil (of Mother Earth) and allow the crops to grow. If the rain was a source of "Heavenly Sperm" then there must be a giant Penis in the sky producing this "Heavenly Sperm", assumed the ancients. Well, after the rain, the mushroom would grow, allowing them to "Talk to God" and the mushroom looked like a miniature Penis growing up from the ground. This, Allegro adds, was to them the "Son of God come down in the flesh to show the way to himself".
HISTORY OF DRUGS AND THE "RELIGIOUS" EXPERIENCE
1) There are over 3,500 psychoactive plants in the New World alone. There are also numerous psychoactive animals, from bufotene secreting toads to tetrodotoxin-containing puffer fish.
2) Primitive humans were hunter-gatherers.
3) From #1 & #2 above, we can conclude that it was not so much a matter of primitive humans having to grope around to locate psychoactive plants and animals as it was having to work hard to AVOID accidentally ingesting them--the landscape was literally strewn with little landmines of one form or another!
4) The effect of psychoactive agents on the human brain is often to produce a state of religious ecstasy.
5) Virtually every "primitive" culture studied in the New World uses psychoactive plants and/or animals in its religious rituals (e.g. peyote cults in America, sweat lodges using marijuana as the source for the smoke, DMT users in the Amazon, Haitian voodoo practitioners, etc).
6) Mystery cults in ancient Greece consumed a beverage containing ergot that, not surprisingly, resulted in seizures and visions.
7) The Central American indians' name for psilocybin mushrooms was "teonanacatl", literally "flesh of the gods".
8) References to "soma" in ancient Vedic religious texts have been convincingly linked to the consumption of psychoactive mushrooms. This is further bolstered by the presence--at considerably higher than background level concentrations--of preserved spores of psychoactive mushrooms in ancient temples.
9) "Witches" during the middle ages were actually expert herbalists who used brews containing henbane, belladonna, datura, and other psychoactives, possibly even including hallucinogenic toads (e.g. "skin of frog"...).
Again and again the relationship between religion and psychoactives is obvious. And even in those cases where drugs are not used, esoteric techniques/rituals that induce brain chemistry changes ARE used: fasting, whirling (a la Dervishes), pain (a la the Kavandi of India, the Hopi Sun Dance), chanting, sensory deprivation (sitting in a cave), conscious dreaming, etc.
When the conquistadors landed in Central America, the priests accompanying them were horrified because when they tried to convey to the "savages" the wonders of the Christian god they got NOWHERE because the people they were talking to were eating peyote and mushrooms and seeing THEIR God(s) just fine--and in 4 dimensions with Dolby surround sound and full color, thank you very much, rather than some sterile bullshit in a book. This did NOT sit well with the priests, and they launched a war on drugs that makes Bush & Co's current assault on the Bill of Rights look downright civilized in comparison (at least Bush et al aren't skinning pot smokers alive, or gouging out their eyes with flaming pokers, or crushing their limbs).
Now, some may argue that this is all well and good, but that THEIR religion wasn't just caused by some potheads a couple thousand years ago, but is, instead revealed truth from whatever God du jour they happen to believe in. Yeah, right, the only difference between a modern religion that doesn't use drugs in its ceremonies and a more "primitive" religion that does employ drugs is TIME. It seems to be the case that as time goes on, what started out as a fresh new religion (e.g. a "cult" or "heresy") becomes increasingly orthodox and stale. First the drugs are forbidden for all but the priests/shamans of the religion. Then, at some point, the use of the drugs fizzles out completely, to be replaced by dessicated and pointless rituals from which nobody can get high on a bet. There are always exceptions: there are still orders of monks even within the Catholic church who practice sensory deprivation [it's DARK in those monasteries] and extended chanting to achieve a state of religious ecstasy.
There was a joke going around in the 60's that when Time magazine asked on its cover "Is God Dead?" they just weren't looking in the right places--had they asked the average street person in Haight-Ashbury they'd probably have gotten "God? Naw, he's not dead: I smoked some hash with him last Tuesday. What a cool dude".
Religion and drug use have a long and tangled history together. As long as man has had an idea of sacredness, of the existence of the divine, he has been aware that certain plants allowed him to participate in the sacred world in a very concrete way. Various forms of shamanism, the Vedic soma sacrifice and some Greek mystery religions all involved the experiencing the effects of hallucinogenic plants.
Man may have discovered hallucinogens by imitating the behavior of animals. The indigenous peoples of Siberia and the Asian rain forests watched reindeer graze among a species of mushroom known as amanita muscaria, or fly agaric. The animals would begin acting strangely, exhibiting profound mental disturbances. The natives may have tried the mushrooms out of curiosity, only to discover the hallucinatory effects they later employed in their shamanism. Some native users of amanita also discovered the efficacy of drinking the urine of those who consumed the mushroom. Apparently the digestive process isolates the active hallucinogenic ingredient, known as an alkaloid, from the mushroom body. It is excreted in a concentrated form. Interestingly, ceremonial urine drinking is also mentioned in the Rg-veda, a 3,500 year old collection of hymns celebrating Soma, the god-narcotic of ancient India. Called soma, this most ancient of all hallucinogens has been identified as amanita.
Hallucinogens occur in a variety of forms in nature. Flowering plants with hallucinogenic effects include belladonna, nightshade, and jimson weed. Hallucinogenic fungi include fly agaric, psilocybc· mexicanu and claviceps purpurea, or ergot. All of these plants contains alkaloids, chemicals that are responsible for their psychotropic effects.
Claviceps purpurea, ergot, has been particularly famous in European history. Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye and other grains. The ergotine alkaloids found in claviceps are mainly derivatives of lysergic acid, which would later be synthesized in the laboratory as LSD. Periodic ingestion of grains infested with claviceps results in a disease known as "ergotism." Ergotism is of two types: gangrenous and convulsive. Gangrenous ergotism, also known as "St. Anthony's Fire," is characterized by horrific hallucinations and dry gangrene of extremities, which eventually wither and fall away. The symptoms of convulsive ergotism include vertigo, tingling, hallucinations and convulsions.
Despite the dangers of poisoning and hallucinations, however, man managed to find both medical and religious uses for ergot. Medieval midwives used ergot to control uterine contractions during labor. Spanish conquistadors reported in 1651 that consumption of ololliqui and tlitliltzin were an important part of Aztec religious ritual. These substances have since been determined to be the seeds of turbina corymbosa and ipomoea violcea, both of which contain ergine, which is raw LSD. Hernandez, the personal physician of the King of Spain, commented, "When the priests wanted to commune with their gods and receive messages from them, they ate these plants to produce a delirium, and a thousand visions and satanic hallucinations appeared to them."
In ancient Greece, initiation into the Elusian mysteries also involved the deliberate ingestion of claviceps paspali, a close relative of the fungus that causes St. Anthony's Fire. Initiates entered into a dark cave for their initiation and emerged the next day. They reported feeling nauseous, sweating and trembling, and having been overwhelmed by a great vision,
"A sight amidst an aura of brilliant light that suddenly flickered through the darkened chamber. Eyes had never before seen the like, and apart from a formal prohibition against telling what had happened, the experience itself was incommunicable, for there were no words adequate to the task. Even a poet could only say that he had seen the beginning and end of life and known that they were one, something given by God, the division between earth and sky melted into a pillar of light."
Another famous hallucinogenic plant is peyotl, also known as peyote. Peyote, which forms the sacramental basis for many modern Native American religious groups, has a history of ceremonial use dating back 8,000 years. Peyote, the "flesh of the gods," was used by the Aztecs until Spanish missionaries banned its use and drove any ceremonial practice underground. It languished in obscurity until the late nineteenth century, when it was reintroduced to the Plains Indians in an attempt to revitalize their culture, which had been ravaged by whites and their ways.
In 1953 Aldous Huxley ingested mescaline crystals dissolved in water. At first, nothing happened, and then slowly he noticed a "slow dance of golden lights" in his field of vision. Geometric patterns formed behind his closed eyes. He observed a vase with three flowers, admiring their vivid colors., when suddenly his perception of them changed-- now not just a still-life, but "...what Adam had seen on the morning of creation-- the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence." The flowers were "transfigured"-imbued with "grace." According to Huxley, the drug lifted him from the constraints of his ego and recentered his identity squarely within "Mind-at-large." He perceived "all in all.., all (as) actually each." Even the folds of his trousers were ripe with some profound meaning: they were "living hieroglyphs that (stood) in some way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being." He felt that they, like all things, were charged with Eckhart's istigkeit-- "is-ness."
Very little is known about the actual actions of hallucinogens on the brain. Some scientists have speculated that hallucinogens inhibit the production of serotonin.. Others have pointed out the chemical similarities of certain alkaloids to adrenochromes, chemicals that mimic the effects of adrenalin.
Physiological questions about how psychedelics work aside, other researchers in the late 1950' a also began to notice the "religious" aspects of hallucinogenic experience reported by some of the more adventurous psychiatrists and their patients . It soon became a challenge for the psychiatric establishment to account for the testimony of these noveau "mystics." Scientists began to plan experiments to test empirically whether or not hallucinogens could really produce mystical experience.
The most notable of these was conducted by Waiter H. Pahnke, whose "Good Friday" experiment, sensationalized in the press as the "Miracle of March Chapel," involved twenty Divinity students from Andover-Newton Theological School. Pahnke, already a Bachelor of Divinity and an M.D., did the study as a Ph.D. dissertation in the Philosophy of Religion. Pahnke "set out to determine whether the transcendent experience reported during psychedelic sessions was similar to the mystical experiences reported by saints and famous religious mystics." Believing that "...in the mystical experience there are certain fundamental characteristics which are universal and not restricted to any particular religion or culture (although particular cultural, philosophical or religious conditions could influence both the interpretation and description of these phenomena),"
VISIONS OF GRANDEUR
Vision is "a religious experience that involves the senses. The quality of the experience suggests that the content of the perception is real, a direct, unmediated contact with a non-ordinary aspect of reality that is external and independent of the perceiver." Visionary experience has always been sought after by religious seekers, hallucinogenic substances have played a vital role in this pursuit. Still, visionary experience is often regarded in religious tradition as at best a "way station," an intermediate stage, on the way to full mystical union. Mystics are unanimous in warning that visions are not an end unto themselves -- St. John of the Cross says that "the soul can never attain to the height of divine union, so far as it is possible in this life, through the medium of forms or figures."
Why should visions be accepted as anything other than pathological hallucinations and delusions? Evelyn Underhill writes that when considering the value and importance of these experiences, the central question is whether visions "represent merely the dreams and fancies, the old digested percepts of the visionary, objectivized and presented to his surface mind in a concrete form; or, are the representations-- symbolic of some... force.., some 'triumphing spiritual power' external to the visionary?" Is vision only "a pictured thought... or the violent effort of the self to translate something impressed upon its deeper being, some message received from without, which projects this sharp image and places it before consciousness?"
What are the psychological dynamics of vision? The experience of vision is an exercise of the extreme creative power of the religious imagination. Vision is the spontaneous imaginative recreation (or recasting) of information that transcends human language and concepts. This information is strictly intuitive-- that is, it is "known" intimately and not through the mediation of conceptual thought. The visionary simply has a sudden realization of truth, truth-as-such, and simultaneously converts it into symbols elastic enough to retain some vestige of realized Truth after the experience is over. In other words, what the visionary perceives is his own pre-conscious translation of an encounter with a literally unimaginable reality.
Here is a list of the perceptual phenomena characteristic of the visionary experience:
1) The perception of dazzling light
2) The appearance of visionary figures and/or symbolic forms
3) The transfiguration of the outer world
4) A loss of self-identity sometimes culminating in the experience of unity or union with the divine
5) Pervasive feeling of "all-rightness" of the universe and humble gratitude
6) Sympathetic understanding of previously obscure mystical pronouncements
In the throes of visionary experience the mechanisms of dreaming take control. One's inner eye is not presented with the half-formed, diaphanous images of conscious imagination; rather the mind is filled with vivid, autonomous and durable phantasmagoria. The same dynamic is present in exterior vision, in which these contents are projected out into the world. It is as if one descended, fully conscious, into the dream state. This may be born out by the content of various visions, which may include repressed material (as in the temptations of St. Anthony), elaborate symbolic fantasies (Black Elk, Hildegard of Bingen).
There are those who object to a facile beatification of those who have mystical experiences on hallucinogens. To protest, however, purely on the grounds that drugs were used is to ignore a long tradition in religious history. Many cultures have believed that drugs can offer a chance to authentically participate in the sacred. Religious rituals involving the ingestion of hallucinogenic plants always involved elaborate preparation and staging. The ritual provided orientation and direction for the depersonalizing effects of the drug, similar in intent to the years of preparation for mystical experience provided by meditative practice.
Are such phenomena pure hallucination or actually more than ordinarily accurate perceptions of reality? Timothy Leary, in a paper on the inducement of religious experience via drugs, advances the hypothesis that those subjects claiming to have ineffable religious experience actually have a direct awareness of the processes which physicists and biochemists and neurologists measure... some such perceptions are witnessing the breakdown of macroscopic objects into vibratory patterns, visual nets, and the collapse of external structure into wave particles..."
The world and its activities are suffused with layers of information we cannot access, and of which we are not aware. Only rare spiritual personalities can penetrate the subtle and causal levels, apprehending the meaning behind things. This information, which transcends language and conception, is what is experienced as vision.
Today's secularized world-view is informed by science, which performs the traditional functions of myth by providing answers about what we are and from where we came. Since man has been man he formed his understanding of life through mythological motifs, finding in the myth both dimensional perspective and emotional force necessary to interpret his world... The new scientific knowledge concerning molecule and galaxy, DNA and RNA, forcefield and wavelength, provides the stuff of mythmaking and constitutes the present domain of sacred knowledge.
With enough Knowledge out there, eventually people will return back to a state of self-interpretation of spirituality instead of being told what God wants or has said.
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Friday, December 29, 2006
RELIGION'S EVOLUTIONARY BASIS
The evolution of consciousness as a means to survival required the ability to give meaning or importance to objects and events, of distinguishing between foreground and background, dangerous and safe. It is this subset of consciousness, the mechanism that created ‘important’ and ‘meaningful’, that resulted in religious sentiment. Because humans depend to such a large degree on consciousness, the part of the brain that creates the experience of ‘meaningful’ works overtime.
Since early humans lived very closely with Nature it began with shamanic practices. We are curious and with our higher creativity we need to categorize things, study things, know things, and affect our surroundings, from creating clothing to adapting caves for habitation, to the creation and use of fire.
Religion, most broadly defined, is the belief in supernatural agents. These supernatural agents inevitably possess counter intuitive properties, (e.g. a tree that can understand human language, a person who is dead yet still alive, a being who is simultaneously one entity and three entities, a woman who can become pregnant while remaining a virgin). Irrespective of their other qualities, all supernatural agents are said to possess minds. This tells us that religious ideas are rooted in our innate social inference systems. Our incredible talent for discerning the moods, motives and psychological states of others – our ‘mind reading’ ability. We tend to see minds when none are actually there. The disposition towards religion is the price that we pay for our specific mental architecture.
As our form of civilization developed and we moved away from that intimate relationship with Nature, we began to personify the Spirits and energies around us. Hence early gods tended to be glorified animals, transitional beings between pure shamanic beliefs and today's human shaped monotheistic deities. With the moving away from nature we still had a need to know things, we still had a need to feel nurtured, protected, as we had in the wilds by the Nature Spirits. It would be natural, perhaps, for those Nature Spirits to evolve humanistic qualities, since human beings were now living in larger and larger communities, and interacting with different peoples from lands far removed from their own.
Along with a vivid imagination that includes mild hallucinations, visions of a loved one deceased, alive and well, or hearing her voice in the rustling of leaves ... we came to the idea that the dead live on somehow, and become one with the powers beyond. Or all the dead together have the power to rule over the living, favoring good people, haunting bad ones, and so they must be offered sacrifices, which make them go on supporting the humans, caring for us, averting draughts and famines. Death was the origin of religion.
Religions are pre-scientific theories that provide believers with explanations for the many puzzling features of the world around them. Religion is a spin-off from the hard-wired, modular cognitive inference systems characteristic of our species. In other words, religious tendencies are more a by-product than a product of our cognitive evolution.
It can be argued that religion itself has been an evolutionary benefit because it's helped to keep groups organized. But it can also be argued that religion has had a detrimental effect on evolutionary development because it's caused ignorance, war, and stagnation of intellectual and technological development. However the case for consciousness as an evolutionary advantage is very clear (at that point in history). Consciousness clearly helped humans survive and thrive. That said, now that we are of an advanced state of consciousness and have scientific explanations for the wonders around us, religion and its detrimental effects are no longer required and should be treated as an odd curiosity from our past and not taken seriously.
Since early humans lived very closely with Nature it began with shamanic practices. We are curious and with our higher creativity we need to categorize things, study things, know things, and affect our surroundings, from creating clothing to adapting caves for habitation, to the creation and use of fire.
Religion, most broadly defined, is the belief in supernatural agents. These supernatural agents inevitably possess counter intuitive properties, (e.g. a tree that can understand human language, a person who is dead yet still alive, a being who is simultaneously one entity and three entities, a woman who can become pregnant while remaining a virgin). Irrespective of their other qualities, all supernatural agents are said to possess minds. This tells us that religious ideas are rooted in our innate social inference systems. Our incredible talent for discerning the moods, motives and psychological states of others – our ‘mind reading’ ability. We tend to see minds when none are actually there. The disposition towards religion is the price that we pay for our specific mental architecture.
As our form of civilization developed and we moved away from that intimate relationship with Nature, we began to personify the Spirits and energies around us. Hence early gods tended to be glorified animals, transitional beings between pure shamanic beliefs and today's human shaped monotheistic deities. With the moving away from nature we still had a need to know things, we still had a need to feel nurtured, protected, as we had in the wilds by the Nature Spirits. It would be natural, perhaps, for those Nature Spirits to evolve humanistic qualities, since human beings were now living in larger and larger communities, and interacting with different peoples from lands far removed from their own.
Along with a vivid imagination that includes mild hallucinations, visions of a loved one deceased, alive and well, or hearing her voice in the rustling of leaves ... we came to the idea that the dead live on somehow, and become one with the powers beyond. Or all the dead together have the power to rule over the living, favoring good people, haunting bad ones, and so they must be offered sacrifices, which make them go on supporting the humans, caring for us, averting draughts and famines. Death was the origin of religion.
Religions are pre-scientific theories that provide believers with explanations for the many puzzling features of the world around them. Religion is a spin-off from the hard-wired, modular cognitive inference systems characteristic of our species. In other words, religious tendencies are more a by-product than a product of our cognitive evolution.
It can be argued that religion itself has been an evolutionary benefit because it's helped to keep groups organized. But it can also be argued that religion has had a detrimental effect on evolutionary development because it's caused ignorance, war, and stagnation of intellectual and technological development. However the case for consciousness as an evolutionary advantage is very clear (at that point in history). Consciousness clearly helped humans survive and thrive. That said, now that we are of an advanced state of consciousness and have scientific explanations for the wonders around us, religion and its detrimental effects are no longer required and should be treated as an odd curiosity from our past and not taken seriously.
Friday, December 22, 2006
SEX BEGOT RELIGION
Religion appears to be as old as humanity itself. Artifacts recovered from late Paleolithic burial sites show indisputable evidence of religious practice. Neanderthal man, who died out around 32,000 years ago, buried his dead with some kind of relatively sophisticated ceremony. The one thing that all primitive people seem to have possessed regardless of their ethnic, lingual, cultural, or geographic separation is some kind of religion.
Just when, where and how did religion begin? A tantalizing clue, is a direct connection between religion and sexuality. More evident in primitive peoples, it is also present in more advanced societies, although great effort has been made to ignore or disguise it. Maybe that answer lies in our unique sexuality. Although the mechanisms of human reproduction are essentially the same as those of all other species of the class mammalia, and there are about 15,000 of them, the way in which the sex drive manifests itself in humans is unique and extremely more complex.
It's almost impossible to imagine the sort of life the earliest humans lived. But on the basis of what knowledge we do have it was anything but the earthly paradise described so naively in the Bible. In all probability it was, a short, meager life of relatively low expectations lived out in comparative isolation. The world of our earliest ancestors probably encompassed no more than a few square miles at most. They appear to have mostly lived in fenced in, or walled in, compounds probably not much larger than an average city block. Outside of this compound lay an unknown and hostile world full of danger and full of death.
Hunting and food gathering parties would routinely venture out and return safely, but on occasion some individual, a child fetching water perhaps, would stray too far never to be seen again. Just what had become of them was, I’m sure, the subject of much creative speculation. Humans were rare in those days, and our early ancestors knew only a few other individuals. Their life experiences were limited in range and narrow and scope. Contact with other tribe either planned or accidental, usually meant a fight to the death.
Although they did not fully understand the human reproductive process, they knew full well that it was a crucial factor if the tribe was to survive and prosper. Therefore the issuance of new life was of the utmost importance. They knew very well that there is not only safety but also power in numbers. For example, in Genesis 9:1 following the alleged “great flood” God exhorts Noah and his sons to, "be fruitful and multiply...fill the earth." Therefore, it is not at all difficult to see how the act of giving birth took on a mystical or even reverential quality for the early humans. It surely must have been the cause for great joy and celebration. In this we see the first glimmering of religion.
The fact that religion was present in almost all early human societies has been interpreted by some people as proof of God's existence. This is just wistful thinking because it could just as logically be argued that religion is proof of man's ignorance. One of the most important functions of all religions is to supply answers to questions that people have not been able to answer satisfactorily from experience and/or observation. The irony of the evolution of the human brain is that as intelligence increased so did ignorance. In order to have ignorance it is first necessary to have enough intelligence to understand just what it is that we are ignorant of.
It was not obvious to early humans that the male had anything to do with procreation. They did realize that for some unknown reason females who had not had sexual intercourse with a male did not become pregnant. This realization led eventually to the understanding and appreciation of the necessary male contribution to the process. For many thousands of years procreation was viewed as exclusively a female function, thereby assuring them a special position in early human societies. It was also obvious that after achieving the age at which they could bear children females bled at regular intervals from the same part of the body from which they gave birth. To compound these mysterious occurrences the periodic bleeding stopped whenever pregnancy took place and just as mysteriously resumed following birth.
A connection was made in the minds of early humans between bleeding and giving birth. But bleeding could also result in death. A primitive people with no knowledge of medicine facing tremendous odds against survival, bleeding becomes a risky business indeed. Blood became precious as a carrier of life as well as a harbinger of death. It appeared to have mystical powers.
The fact that a woman's menstrual cycle seemed to parallel the lunar cycle made it easy to assume a relationship existed between the moon and giving birth, thereby enhancing the apparent mystical or supernatural quality. Uterine blood was believed to be the “moon flower” that contained the soul of future generations. This belief survives with the biblical injunction against contact with menstrual blood, the woman's "flower" which of course precedes the fruit of her womb as a flower precedes the fruit of a tree.
The word "adam" for example, derives from the ancient Hebrew word "adoma" which literally translated means "bloody clay", not red earth as some modern theologians would have us believe. In fact, in most ancient languages words for menstruation also meant such things as incomprehensible, supernatural, sacred spirit, and even deity. Like the Latin "sacer", old Arabian words for pure and impure both applied to menstrual blood. In many primitive societies it was believed that human souls were made of menstrual blood which assumed human form when the female became pregnant. The Great philosopher Aristotle subscribed to this view as did Pliny. The supernatural power of the menses were taught as fact in European medical schools as recently as 200 years ago. Religious cults such as Jehovah's Witnesses hold that human blood carries spiritual significance. They go so far as to forbid blood transfusions even in cases where a life might be saved.
It is not surprising that blood red became a sacred color with many people. The Maori of New Zealand, made things sacred by applying the color red to them. The Andaman islanders used red paint to cover the sick in order to heal them. This custom can be traced all the way back to prehistoric times. In ancient tombs the furnishings show definite traces of having been reddened with ochre, as have the remains of their human occupants. This practice was intended to create a closer resemblance to earth mother's womb from which the dead could be born again. We hear the phrase "born again" bantered about by many Christian fundamentalist. I'm sure most of them are naively unaware of its full implications.
Egyptian Pharaohs acquired divinity by imbibing the blood of Isis. The hieroglyphic sign for this ambrosia was the same as the sign for the female sex organ -- the loop which forms the top of the Egyptian cross or ankh. We are familiar with that sign today for we see it on many bumpers as the sign of the fish, practically the same as the Egyptian hieroglyphic sign for the same organ. You may want to tell your Christian friends what they are really displaying on their cars.
Even the gods were dependent on the menstrual blood for sustenance. In ancient Greece it was the supernatural red wine given them by mother Hera. In India the great mother Kali-Maya invited the gods to partake of communion by drinking her menses. In the north the god Thor reached the land of eternal life by bathing in a river of the menstrual blood of the primal matriarchs. Celtic kings became gods by drinking the red mead offered by Queen Mab.
The influence of sex in the origin of religion seems to be clearly delineated by prehistoric fertility figures depicting the female form that emphasizes her sexuality and usually her pregnancy. When we add to these earliest figures the importance of menstrual blood both for living and dying, both for humans and gods, we have a strong case not only for the sexual origin for religion but also for the female origin of deities. We find remnants of this concept even in religions that reject the notion completely. The earliest trinities were three women - one young, one matronly, and one old. In time they were changed to two men and a woman and later, as religion changed along with culture, they became three men, the father, the son and the holy ghost.
It is indeed intriguing that there should be so much evidence of this ancient past still existing in our culture today in spite of the efforts of some religions to hide their sexual origins or propensities. For example, we use the word "venerable" to describe a worshipful or reverential attitude, it comes from the same root as "venereal", their common root is Venus, the Roman love goddess.
The words "testament" and "testicles" derive from a common origin testis which means "witness". The steeple, that "venerated" structure universally recognized as a symbol of Christian churches, is also a phallic symbol as is the minaret from which the faithful are regularly summoned to prayer. The phallus, or penis, gives "testimony" to the embodiment of generative power.
To some people sex is repulsive, which no doubt accounts for the great effort they make to suppress all things sexual. But much of that effort might also be compensation for their own frustration or fear of their own sexual drive, and a powerful drive it is. In the memorable words of Havelock Ellis, one of the pioneers in the study and understanding of human sexuality, "sex is not merely the means of procreation, it is also the solvent of isolation, the experience through which a solitary human being, caged in the prison of himself or herself, comes closest to escaping from this lonely cell through physical and spiritual union with another”.
Among the oldest common terms for sexual intercourse are "knowing" and "having". This suggests that the basic goal of sexual activity is not only procreation or even erotic pleasure, but something else. It is the union with another person and the sharing with oneself - the creating of a bond as in marriage.
People moved from this sort of sexual relationship to a similar relationship with God, thereby uniting with him to achieve some sort of cosmic unity. One example is the song of Solomon, an erotic love song describing sexual union between God and human beings. Many gospel songs are in reality contemporary expressions of the same type of relationship sought with Jesus. Actually, they are love songs from humans to Jesus and vice versa.
Although many people have tried hard to deny the sexual origin of religion, a little research and study, supplemented by a generous dose of common sense, will reveal that religion hasn't progressed very far from its beginnings.
Just when, where and how did religion begin? A tantalizing clue, is a direct connection between religion and sexuality. More evident in primitive peoples, it is also present in more advanced societies, although great effort has been made to ignore or disguise it. Maybe that answer lies in our unique sexuality. Although the mechanisms of human reproduction are essentially the same as those of all other species of the class mammalia, and there are about 15,000 of them, the way in which the sex drive manifests itself in humans is unique and extremely more complex.
It's almost impossible to imagine the sort of life the earliest humans lived. But on the basis of what knowledge we do have it was anything but the earthly paradise described so naively in the Bible. In all probability it was, a short, meager life of relatively low expectations lived out in comparative isolation. The world of our earliest ancestors probably encompassed no more than a few square miles at most. They appear to have mostly lived in fenced in, or walled in, compounds probably not much larger than an average city block. Outside of this compound lay an unknown and hostile world full of danger and full of death.
Hunting and food gathering parties would routinely venture out and return safely, but on occasion some individual, a child fetching water perhaps, would stray too far never to be seen again. Just what had become of them was, I’m sure, the subject of much creative speculation. Humans were rare in those days, and our early ancestors knew only a few other individuals. Their life experiences were limited in range and narrow and scope. Contact with other tribe either planned or accidental, usually meant a fight to the death.
Although they did not fully understand the human reproductive process, they knew full well that it was a crucial factor if the tribe was to survive and prosper. Therefore the issuance of new life was of the utmost importance. They knew very well that there is not only safety but also power in numbers. For example, in Genesis 9:1 following the alleged “great flood” God exhorts Noah and his sons to, "be fruitful and multiply...fill the earth." Therefore, it is not at all difficult to see how the act of giving birth took on a mystical or even reverential quality for the early humans. It surely must have been the cause for great joy and celebration. In this we see the first glimmering of religion.
The fact that religion was present in almost all early human societies has been interpreted by some people as proof of God's existence. This is just wistful thinking because it could just as logically be argued that religion is proof of man's ignorance. One of the most important functions of all religions is to supply answers to questions that people have not been able to answer satisfactorily from experience and/or observation. The irony of the evolution of the human brain is that as intelligence increased so did ignorance. In order to have ignorance it is first necessary to have enough intelligence to understand just what it is that we are ignorant of.
It was not obvious to early humans that the male had anything to do with procreation. They did realize that for some unknown reason females who had not had sexual intercourse with a male did not become pregnant. This realization led eventually to the understanding and appreciation of the necessary male contribution to the process. For many thousands of years procreation was viewed as exclusively a female function, thereby assuring them a special position in early human societies. It was also obvious that after achieving the age at which they could bear children females bled at regular intervals from the same part of the body from which they gave birth. To compound these mysterious occurrences the periodic bleeding stopped whenever pregnancy took place and just as mysteriously resumed following birth.
A connection was made in the minds of early humans between bleeding and giving birth. But bleeding could also result in death. A primitive people with no knowledge of medicine facing tremendous odds against survival, bleeding becomes a risky business indeed. Blood became precious as a carrier of life as well as a harbinger of death. It appeared to have mystical powers.
The fact that a woman's menstrual cycle seemed to parallel the lunar cycle made it easy to assume a relationship existed between the moon and giving birth, thereby enhancing the apparent mystical or supernatural quality. Uterine blood was believed to be the “moon flower” that contained the soul of future generations. This belief survives with the biblical injunction against contact with menstrual blood, the woman's "flower" which of course precedes the fruit of her womb as a flower precedes the fruit of a tree.
The word "adam" for example, derives from the ancient Hebrew word "adoma" which literally translated means "bloody clay", not red earth as some modern theologians would have us believe. In fact, in most ancient languages words for menstruation also meant such things as incomprehensible, supernatural, sacred spirit, and even deity. Like the Latin "sacer", old Arabian words for pure and impure both applied to menstrual blood. In many primitive societies it was believed that human souls were made of menstrual blood which assumed human form when the female became pregnant. The Great philosopher Aristotle subscribed to this view as did Pliny. The supernatural power of the menses were taught as fact in European medical schools as recently as 200 years ago. Religious cults such as Jehovah's Witnesses hold that human blood carries spiritual significance. They go so far as to forbid blood transfusions even in cases where a life might be saved.
It is not surprising that blood red became a sacred color with many people. The Maori of New Zealand, made things sacred by applying the color red to them. The Andaman islanders used red paint to cover the sick in order to heal them. This custom can be traced all the way back to prehistoric times. In ancient tombs the furnishings show definite traces of having been reddened with ochre, as have the remains of their human occupants. This practice was intended to create a closer resemblance to earth mother's womb from which the dead could be born again. We hear the phrase "born again" bantered about by many Christian fundamentalist. I'm sure most of them are naively unaware of its full implications.
Egyptian Pharaohs acquired divinity by imbibing the blood of Isis. The hieroglyphic sign for this ambrosia was the same as the sign for the female sex organ -- the loop which forms the top of the Egyptian cross or ankh. We are familiar with that sign today for we see it on many bumpers as the sign of the fish, practically the same as the Egyptian hieroglyphic sign for the same organ. You may want to tell your Christian friends what they are really displaying on their cars.
Even the gods were dependent on the menstrual blood for sustenance. In ancient Greece it was the supernatural red wine given them by mother Hera. In India the great mother Kali-Maya invited the gods to partake of communion by drinking her menses. In the north the god Thor reached the land of eternal life by bathing in a river of the menstrual blood of the primal matriarchs. Celtic kings became gods by drinking the red mead offered by Queen Mab.
The influence of sex in the origin of religion seems to be clearly delineated by prehistoric fertility figures depicting the female form that emphasizes her sexuality and usually her pregnancy. When we add to these earliest figures the importance of menstrual blood both for living and dying, both for humans and gods, we have a strong case not only for the sexual origin for religion but also for the female origin of deities. We find remnants of this concept even in religions that reject the notion completely. The earliest trinities were three women - one young, one matronly, and one old. In time they were changed to two men and a woman and later, as religion changed along with culture, they became three men, the father, the son and the holy ghost.
It is indeed intriguing that there should be so much evidence of this ancient past still existing in our culture today in spite of the efforts of some religions to hide their sexual origins or propensities. For example, we use the word "venerable" to describe a worshipful or reverential attitude, it comes from the same root as "venereal", their common root is Venus, the Roman love goddess.
The words "testament" and "testicles" derive from a common origin testis which means "witness". The steeple, that "venerated" structure universally recognized as a symbol of Christian churches, is also a phallic symbol as is the minaret from which the faithful are regularly summoned to prayer. The phallus, or penis, gives "testimony" to the embodiment of generative power.
To some people sex is repulsive, which no doubt accounts for the great effort they make to suppress all things sexual. But much of that effort might also be compensation for their own frustration or fear of their own sexual drive, and a powerful drive it is. In the memorable words of Havelock Ellis, one of the pioneers in the study and understanding of human sexuality, "sex is not merely the means of procreation, it is also the solvent of isolation, the experience through which a solitary human being, caged in the prison of himself or herself, comes closest to escaping from this lonely cell through physical and spiritual union with another”.
Among the oldest common terms for sexual intercourse are "knowing" and "having". This suggests that the basic goal of sexual activity is not only procreation or even erotic pleasure, but something else. It is the union with another person and the sharing with oneself - the creating of a bond as in marriage.
People moved from this sort of sexual relationship to a similar relationship with God, thereby uniting with him to achieve some sort of cosmic unity. One example is the song of Solomon, an erotic love song describing sexual union between God and human beings. Many gospel songs are in reality contemporary expressions of the same type of relationship sought with Jesus. Actually, they are love songs from humans to Jesus and vice versa.
Although many people have tried hard to deny the sexual origin of religion, a little research and study, supplemented by a generous dose of common sense, will reveal that religion hasn't progressed very far from its beginnings.
Thursday, December 21, 2006
THE GOD EXPERIMENTS
I just read a fascinating article in Discover magazine, about scientists testing various theories as to the religious experience. Is it genetic, chemical, psychological? Many if not all of these fit into my own theory of the origin of religion which briefly goes something like this:
When we as a species became self-aware it was wonderful, we then became aware of our own death, this was terrifying. In order to cope we reassured ourselves and each other of an afterlife. We buried our loved ones. Then ritual burials followed. This required facilitators 'knowledgeable in such matters'. These people gained respect and power. Power corrupts. Mystics became leaders/kings/priests. As populations increased and tribes began warring, people needed a common bond to differentiate them from the others and to maintain populations. Playing on our natural ability to wonder in awe and be paralyzed by fear, they created elaborate lies & myths to maintain power and enrich themselves. They perpetuated theese myths from one generation to the next.
Think about it, you are whatever religion you are because (more likely than not) your parents raised you that way. You had no choice. You were not educated in several religions and then at an appropriate age given the choice of which you subscribe. You have been the victim of indoctrination and brain washing. The only way we can rid the world of the injustice, ignorance and hypocrisy that religion is, is when we have the courage to break the chain and not force religion on our children. Logic will not work as our pyche is very complex...
Below is a condensed overview of the article. Most tie into the awe & fear aspect that makes us human. If only we hadn't manipulated these sensations into tyrannical religions for power and wealth.
DISCOVER, December 2006 By John Horgan
Religion is arguably the most complex manifestation of the most complex phenomenon known to science, the human mind. Religion's dimensions range from the intensely personal to the cultural and political. Additionally, researchers come to study religious experiences with very different motives and assumptions. Some of them hope that their studies will inform and enrich faith. Others see religion as an embarrassing relic of our past, and they want to explain it away.
Many researchers view the brain as the key to understanding religion. Others focus on psychological, genetic, and biochemical origins. The science of religion has historical precedents, with Sigmund Freud and William James addressing the topic early in the last century. Now modern researchers are applying brain scans, genetic probes, and other potent instruments as they attempt to locate the physiological causes of religious experience, characterize its effects, perhaps replicate it, and perhaps even begin to explain its abiding influence.
The theories described below illustrate the diversity of scientific approaches to understanding religion. The field suffers from vague terminology, disagreement about what exactly "religion" is, and which of its aspects are most important.
INVENTING GOD
Stewart Guthrie, an anthropologist at Fordham University in New York. Noting the plethora of gods that populate the world's religions, argues that the belief in supernatural beings is a result of an illusion that arises from our tendency to project human qualities onto the world. Religion "may be best understood as systematic anthropomorphism," he writes in his book, Faces in the Clouds. Anthropomorphism is an adaptive trait that enhanced our ancestors' chances of survival. If a Neanderthal mistook a tree creaking outside his cave for a human assailant, he suffered no adverse consequences beyond a moment's panic. If the Neanderthal made the opposite error—mistaking an assailant for a tree—the consequences might have been dire. In other words, better safe than sorry. Over millennia, as natural selection bolstered our unconscious anthropomorphic tendencies, they reached beyond specific objects and events to encompass all of nature, until we persuaded ourselves that "the entire world of our experience is merely a show staged by some master dramatist."
ORGASMIC GOD
Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has focused on the tendency of people from different religious traditions to report similar mystical experiences, which typically involve sensations of self-transcendence and "oneness." These commonalities indicate that the visions stem from the same neural processes, Newberg hypothesizes. To test his theory, he scanned the brains of more than 20 adherents of spiritual practices using a variant of the PET scan. He found similarities between rapture and orgasm though it isn't total. The hypothalamus, which regulates both arousal and quiescence, seems to play a larger role in orgasms, while the brain's frontal lobes, the seat of higher cognitive functions, are apparently more active during spiritual practices. He concludes, an "evolutionary perspective suggests that the neurobiology of mystical experience arose, at least in part, from the mechanism of the sexual response."
CEREBRAL GOD
A neuroscientist in Ontario, Persinger attempts to explain religious experiences with a pathological slant. Our sense of self, is ordinarily mediated by the brain's left temporal lobe. When the brain is mildly disrupted—by a head injury, psychological trauma, stroke, drugs, or epileptic seizure—our left-brain self may interpret activity within the right hemisphere as another self, or what he calls a "sensed presence." Depending on our circumstances and background, we may perceive a sensed presence as a ghost, angel, demon, extraterrestrial, or God. Religion (or at least the experience of God), might be a cerebral mistake. Some patients, when their temporal lobes were stimulated, reported hearing voices and seeing apparitions—not overtly religious experiences, certainly mysterious ones. Persinger has tested 600 subjects, and as many as 80 percent "sense a presence" while being stimulated, compared with 15 percent of a control group.
PSYCEHDELIC GOD
Dean Hamer, head of gene structure, National Cancer Institute, is endeavoring to link religion to a specific gene. In the 1980s, a study of 84 pairs of twins—53 identical and 31 fraternal—who had been raised separately. The study was the first to suggest a genetic component to what the researchers called "intrinsic religiousness," which includes the tendency to pray often and to feel the presence of God. Hamer sought to build on these findings by linking religiousness to a specific stretch of DNA. Hamer focused on genes called monoamines. The monoamines, which include serotonin and dopamine, help to regulate mood. psychiatric drugs, Prozac and Thorazine affect monoamines, as do psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline, which can produce mystical visions. Eventually Hamer found a gene called VMAT, that corresponded to higher scores for what he had defined as spirituality. The gene manufactures a protein that binds monoamines into packages, called vesicles, for transportation between neurons. Hamer calls the VMAT variant "the spiritual allele," or more dramatically, "the God gene" (also the title of his book).
CHEMICAL GOD
Rick Strassman traces spirituality to a single compound, dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. He proposes that DMT secreted by our own brains plays a profound role in human consciousness. Specifically, that endogenous DMT triggers mystical visions, psychotic hallucinations, alien-abduction experiences, near-death experiences, and other exotic cognitive phenomena.First synthesized in 1931, DMT is the primary active ingredient of ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic tea ingested as a sacrament by Amazonian Indians. (Although DMT is a controlled substance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that members of a church in New Mexico can ingest ayahuasca for religious purposes.) Like LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin, DMT resembles serotonin. But what makes DMT unique among psychedelics is that trace amounts of it naturally occur in the human body. He speculates that endogenous DMT—perhaps produced in excess or improperly regulated by the body—contributes to schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. From 1990 to 1995, Strassman supervised more than 400 DMT sessions at the University of New Mexico. Many of his subjects reported quasi-religious sensations of bliss, ineffability, timelessness, and reconciliation of opposites; a certainty that consciousness continues after death of the body; and contact with "a supremely powerful, wise, and loving presence." Others underwent classic near-death experiences, feeling themselves leaving their bodies and moving through a tunnel toward a radiant light. Forty-seven percent encountered otherworldly beings, variously described as clowns, elves, robots, insects, E.T.-style humanoids, or "entities" that defied description. These bizarre beings were not always friendly. One of Strassman's subjects claimed to have been eaten alive by insectoid creatures.
WHY THE INTEREST
Science cannot tell us if God exists only in our imaginations or as an entity beyond our comprehension. So why do some scientists continue the search for the roots of religious experience? Because such studies offer the potential to alter our lives. These findings could lead to methods—call them "mystical technologies"—that reliably induce the state of spiritual insight that Christians call grace and Buddhists, enlightenment. Treatments for depression and other mental illnesses.
WHICH IS WORSE RELIGIOUS OR GOVERNMENT MIND-CONTROL?
Suppose scientists found a way to give us permanent, blissful, mystical self-transcendence. Would we want that power? Before Timothy Leary touted LSD as a route to profound psychological and spiritual insight, the CIA was studying its potential as a brainwashing agent. Persinger warns that in the wrong hands, a truly precise, powerful God machine, capable of implanting beliefs or signals that seem to come straight from the Almighty, could be the ultimate mind-control device. "Just think of the practical impact," he says. "People will die for this."
When we as a species became self-aware it was wonderful, we then became aware of our own death, this was terrifying. In order to cope we reassured ourselves and each other of an afterlife. We buried our loved ones. Then ritual burials followed. This required facilitators 'knowledgeable in such matters'. These people gained respect and power. Power corrupts. Mystics became leaders/kings/priests. As populations increased and tribes began warring, people needed a common bond to differentiate them from the others and to maintain populations. Playing on our natural ability to wonder in awe and be paralyzed by fear, they created elaborate lies & myths to maintain power and enrich themselves. They perpetuated theese myths from one generation to the next.
Think about it, you are whatever religion you are because (more likely than not) your parents raised you that way. You had no choice. You were not educated in several religions and then at an appropriate age given the choice of which you subscribe. You have been the victim of indoctrination and brain washing. The only way we can rid the world of the injustice, ignorance and hypocrisy that religion is, is when we have the courage to break the chain and not force religion on our children. Logic will not work as our pyche is very complex...
Below is a condensed overview of the article. Most tie into the awe & fear aspect that makes us human. If only we hadn't manipulated these sensations into tyrannical religions for power and wealth.
DISCOVER, December 2006 By John Horgan
Religion is arguably the most complex manifestation of the most complex phenomenon known to science, the human mind. Religion's dimensions range from the intensely personal to the cultural and political. Additionally, researchers come to study religious experiences with very different motives and assumptions. Some of them hope that their studies will inform and enrich faith. Others see religion as an embarrassing relic of our past, and they want to explain it away.
Many researchers view the brain as the key to understanding religion. Others focus on psychological, genetic, and biochemical origins. The science of religion has historical precedents, with Sigmund Freud and William James addressing the topic early in the last century. Now modern researchers are applying brain scans, genetic probes, and other potent instruments as they attempt to locate the physiological causes of religious experience, characterize its effects, perhaps replicate it, and perhaps even begin to explain its abiding influence.
The theories described below illustrate the diversity of scientific approaches to understanding religion. The field suffers from vague terminology, disagreement about what exactly "religion" is, and which of its aspects are most important.
INVENTING GOD
Stewart Guthrie, an anthropologist at Fordham University in New York. Noting the plethora of gods that populate the world's religions, argues that the belief in supernatural beings is a result of an illusion that arises from our tendency to project human qualities onto the world. Religion "may be best understood as systematic anthropomorphism," he writes in his book, Faces in the Clouds. Anthropomorphism is an adaptive trait that enhanced our ancestors' chances of survival. If a Neanderthal mistook a tree creaking outside his cave for a human assailant, he suffered no adverse consequences beyond a moment's panic. If the Neanderthal made the opposite error—mistaking an assailant for a tree—the consequences might have been dire. In other words, better safe than sorry. Over millennia, as natural selection bolstered our unconscious anthropomorphic tendencies, they reached beyond specific objects and events to encompass all of nature, until we persuaded ourselves that "the entire world of our experience is merely a show staged by some master dramatist."
ORGASMIC GOD
Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has focused on the tendency of people from different religious traditions to report similar mystical experiences, which typically involve sensations of self-transcendence and "oneness." These commonalities indicate that the visions stem from the same neural processes, Newberg hypothesizes. To test his theory, he scanned the brains of more than 20 adherents of spiritual practices using a variant of the PET scan. He found similarities between rapture and orgasm though it isn't total. The hypothalamus, which regulates both arousal and quiescence, seems to play a larger role in orgasms, while the brain's frontal lobes, the seat of higher cognitive functions, are apparently more active during spiritual practices. He concludes, an "evolutionary perspective suggests that the neurobiology of mystical experience arose, at least in part, from the mechanism of the sexual response."
CEREBRAL GOD
A neuroscientist in Ontario, Persinger attempts to explain religious experiences with a pathological slant. Our sense of self, is ordinarily mediated by the brain's left temporal lobe. When the brain is mildly disrupted—by a head injury, psychological trauma, stroke, drugs, or epileptic seizure—our left-brain self may interpret activity within the right hemisphere as another self, or what he calls a "sensed presence." Depending on our circumstances and background, we may perceive a sensed presence as a ghost, angel, demon, extraterrestrial, or God. Religion (or at least the experience of God), might be a cerebral mistake. Some patients, when their temporal lobes were stimulated, reported hearing voices and seeing apparitions—not overtly religious experiences, certainly mysterious ones. Persinger has tested 600 subjects, and as many as 80 percent "sense a presence" while being stimulated, compared with 15 percent of a control group.
PSYCEHDELIC GOD
Dean Hamer, head of gene structure, National Cancer Institute, is endeavoring to link religion to a specific gene. In the 1980s, a study of 84 pairs of twins—53 identical and 31 fraternal—who had been raised separately. The study was the first to suggest a genetic component to what the researchers called "intrinsic religiousness," which includes the tendency to pray often and to feel the presence of God. Hamer sought to build on these findings by linking religiousness to a specific stretch of DNA. Hamer focused on genes called monoamines. The monoamines, which include serotonin and dopamine, help to regulate mood. psychiatric drugs, Prozac and Thorazine affect monoamines, as do psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline, which can produce mystical visions. Eventually Hamer found a gene called VMAT, that corresponded to higher scores for what he had defined as spirituality. The gene manufactures a protein that binds monoamines into packages, called vesicles, for transportation between neurons. Hamer calls the VMAT variant "the spiritual allele," or more dramatically, "the God gene" (also the title of his book).
CHEMICAL GOD
Rick Strassman traces spirituality to a single compound, dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. He proposes that DMT secreted by our own brains plays a profound role in human consciousness. Specifically, that endogenous DMT triggers mystical visions, psychotic hallucinations, alien-abduction experiences, near-death experiences, and other exotic cognitive phenomena.First synthesized in 1931, DMT is the primary active ingredient of ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic tea ingested as a sacrament by Amazonian Indians. (Although DMT is a controlled substance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that members of a church in New Mexico can ingest ayahuasca for religious purposes.) Like LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin, DMT resembles serotonin. But what makes DMT unique among psychedelics is that trace amounts of it naturally occur in the human body. He speculates that endogenous DMT—perhaps produced in excess or improperly regulated by the body—contributes to schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. From 1990 to 1995, Strassman supervised more than 400 DMT sessions at the University of New Mexico. Many of his subjects reported quasi-religious sensations of bliss, ineffability, timelessness, and reconciliation of opposites; a certainty that consciousness continues after death of the body; and contact with "a supremely powerful, wise, and loving presence." Others underwent classic near-death experiences, feeling themselves leaving their bodies and moving through a tunnel toward a radiant light. Forty-seven percent encountered otherworldly beings, variously described as clowns, elves, robots, insects, E.T.-style humanoids, or "entities" that defied description. These bizarre beings were not always friendly. One of Strassman's subjects claimed to have been eaten alive by insectoid creatures.
WHY THE INTEREST
Science cannot tell us if God exists only in our imaginations or as an entity beyond our comprehension. So why do some scientists continue the search for the roots of religious experience? Because such studies offer the potential to alter our lives. These findings could lead to methods—call them "mystical technologies"—that reliably induce the state of spiritual insight that Christians call grace and Buddhists, enlightenment. Treatments for depression and other mental illnesses.
WHICH IS WORSE RELIGIOUS OR GOVERNMENT MIND-CONTROL?
Suppose scientists found a way to give us permanent, blissful, mystical self-transcendence. Would we want that power? Before Timothy Leary touted LSD as a route to profound psychological and spiritual insight, the CIA was studying its potential as a brainwashing agent. Persinger warns that in the wrong hands, a truly precise, powerful God machine, capable of implanting beliefs or signals that seem to come straight from the Almighty, could be the ultimate mind-control device. "Just think of the practical impact," he says. "People will die for this."
Saturday, December 16, 2006
POPE BANS THE BIBLE - KEEP EM IN THE DARK
How often have you seen images of the quaint nuclear family sitting by the fireplace on a Sunday morning serenly reading from the bible? It was once punishable by death! The main enemy of christiandom and more specifically the Catholic church is free thought and education. Besides centuries of suppressing literacy in order to keep knowledge (hence power) in the church. Their mantra - ignorance is bliss. It was the reasoning behind the liturgy being recited in Latin only. People didn't know Latin and were dependant on the church to interpret it's meaning for them.
Most people don't know this but it was once outlawed for a lay person to even own a bible. They didn't want their beloved bible open for interpretation by the masses, or to find the many inconsistancies contained therein. Knowledge is power, and power by the people dangerous. Now we have bibles in every motel room. How'd that happen?
This is by no means a complete list.
Pope Innocent III stated in 1199: ... to be reproved are those who translate into French the Gospels, the letters of Paul. They are moved by a certain love of Scripture in order to explain them clandestinely and to preach them to one another. The mysteries of the faith are not to explained rashly to anyone. Usually in fact, they cannot be understood by everyone but only by those who are qualified to understand them with informed intelligence. (We're too stupid to understand that which we don't know)
COUNCIL OF TOULOUSE - 1229 A.D. Canon 14. We prohibit also that the laity should be permitted to have the books of the Old or New Testament... but we most strictly forbid their having any translation of these books. (what are they afraid of?)
The Council of Tarragona of 1234, canon II, ruled that: "No one may possess the books of the Old and New Testaments in the Romance language, and if anyone possesses them he must turn them over to the local bishop within eight days after promulgation of this decree, so that they may be burned lest, be he a cleric or a layman, he be suspected until he is cleared of all suspicion."
In 1408 the third synod of Oxford, England, banned unauthorized English translations of the Bible and decreed that possession of English translation's had to be approved by diocesan authorities. The Oxford council declared: "It is dangerous, as St. Jerome declares, to translate the text of Holy Scriptures out of one idiom into another, since it is not easy in translations to preserve exactly the same meaning in all things. We therefore command and ordain that henceforth no one translate the text of Holy Scripture into English or any other language as a book, booklet, or tract, of this kind lately made in the time of the said John Wyclif or since, or that hereafter may be made, either in part or wholly, either publicly or privately, under pain of excommunication, until such translation shall have been approved and allowed by the Provincial Council. He who shall act otherwise let him be punished as an abettor of heresy and error."
Around 1454 Gutenberg printed an edition of the Latin Vulgate Bible on the first moveable-type printing press. With this new printing technology books could now be printed faster and cheaper than ever before, a fact that Protestants soon took advantage of. Within a hundred years there was a virtual explosion of Protestant Bibles coming off the new presses. (Once people got the good book in thier hands, just as predicted, everybody had their on interpretation, contrary to the Infallible one. Chaos ensues! Film at eleven!)
William Tyndale completed a translation of the New Testament from the Greek in 1525, which church authorities in England tried their best to confiscate and burn. After issuing a revised edition in 1535, he was arrested, spent over a year in jail, and was then strangled and burned at the stake near Brussels in October 6th, 1536.
Coverdale's "Great Bible", was published in 1539 and had over 21,000 copies printed in seven editions in only a single year. Published with the authorization of King Henry VIII, whose likely motivation was the realization that the Bible was an effective means of combating papists. (It's all about politics, stupid!)
The English parliament in 1543 passed a law forbidding the use of any English translations other than the "Great Bible". Tyndale's New Testament was specifically prohibited, and later Wycliffe's and Coverdale's Bibles were also banned. It was decreed a crime for any unlicensed person to read or explain the Scriptures in public.
Responding to the increasing flood of Protestant Bibles in English, the very first complete Bible in English to be produced by the Catholic Church was the Douay Rheims, a translation from the Latin Vulgate, which was finally completed in the early 17th century. The New Testament was finished in 1582, and the Old Testament was finished in 1609-10. Note that it had been over two centuries since Wycliffe had completed his English Bible! (If you can't beat 'em, join 'em)
Memorandum of a proclamation made at Paul's Cross 1531, against the buying, selling or reading of the following books: The revelation of AntiChrist. An exposition into the VII chapter of the Corinthians. The first book of Moses, called Genesis. A prologue in the second book of Moses, called Exodus. A prologue in the third book of Moses, called Leviticus. A prologue in the fourth book of Moses, called Numeri. A prologue in the fifth book of Moses, called Deuteronomy. The New Testament in English, with an introduction to the epistle to the Romans. The primer in English. The psalter in English. (In other words no bibles!)
Pope Pius IV had a list of the forbidden books compiled and officially prohibited them in the Index of Trent of 1559. This is Rule IV: Since experience teaches that, if the reading of the Holy Bible in the vernacular is permitted generally without discrimination, more damage than advantage will result because of the boldness of men, the judgment of bishops and inquisitors is to serve as guide in this regard. Bishops and inquisitors may, in accord with the counsel of the local priest and confessor, allow Catholic translations of the Bible to be read by those of whom they realize that such reading will not lead to the detriment but to the increase of faith and piety. The permission is to be given in writing. Whoever reads or has such a translation in his possession without this permission cannot be absolved from his sins until he has turned in these Bibles.
The Dogmatic Constitution issued by Pope Clement XI 1713:
The following statements are condemned as being in error:
79. It is useful and necessary at all times, in all places, and for every kind of person, to study and to know the spirit, the piety, and the mysteries of Sacred Scripture.
80. The reading of Sacred Scripture is for all.
81. The sacred obscurity of the Word of God is no reason for the laity to dispense themselves from reading it.
82. The Lord's Day ought to be sanctified by Christians with readings of pious works and above all of the Holy Scriptures. It is harmful for a Christian to wish to withdraw from this reading.
83. It is an illusion to persuade oneself that knowledge of the mysteries of religion should not be communicated to women by the reading of Sacred Scriptures. Not from the simplicity of women, but from the proud knowledge of men has arisen the abuse of the Scriptures and have heresies been born.
84. To snatch away from the hands of Christians the New Testament, or to hold it closed against them by taking away from them the means of understanding it, is to close for them the mouth of Christ.
85. To forbid Christians to read Sacred Scripture, especially the Gospels, is to forbid the use of light to the sons of light, and to cause them to suffer a kind of excommunication.
Remember now those statements were condemned as error! I love the 'sacred obscurity of the word of god' description. I suppose with home reading there was no passing of the plate! Or you can't handle the truth!
POPE LEO XII 1824: In virtue of Our apostolic office, We too exhort you to try every means of keeping your flock from those deadly pastures. Do everything possible to see that the faithful observe strictly the rules of our Congregation of the Index. Convince them that to allow holy Bibles in the ordinary language, wholesale and without distinction, would on account of human rashness cause more harm than good. ("try every means"! now that's harsh!, and 'convince them' sounds awfully sinister)
Pope Pius VIII 1829: We must also be wary of those who publish the Bible with new interpretations contrary to the Church's laws. They skillfully distort the meaning by their own interpretation. They print the Bibles in the vernacular and, absorbing an incredible expense, offer them free even to the uneducated. (I take it his main objection was they were giving them away for FREE! Why there's money to be made!)
Pope Gregory XVI 1844: In particular, watch more carefully over those who are assigned to give public readings of holy scripture, so that they function diligently in their office within the comprehension of the audience; under no pretext whatsoever should they dare to explain and interpret the divine writings contrary to the tradition of the Fathers or the interpretation of the Catholic Church. ("should they dare"! Dare what? To expose your fallicies?)
Leo XIII, 1897: All versions of the Holy Bible, in any vernacular language, made by non-Catholics are prohibited; and especially those published by the Bible societies, which have been more that once condemned by the Roman Pontiffs.
Code of Canon Law, went into effect in 1918: Reiterated all the above but added this tidbit! "By the very law are forbidden: books which attack or ridicule any of the Catholic dogmas, books which defend errors condemned by the Holy See, or which disparage Divine worship, or tend to undermine ecclesiastical discipline, or which purposely insult the ecclesiastical hierarchy, or the clerical and religious states. (Sticks and stones may break my bones...)
His Holiness Pope Pius XI, 1930: "...These counterfeit champions of the inspired book hold the Bible to be the sole source of Divine Revelation and cover with abuse and trite sarcasm the Catholic and Roman Church." It's ok to be sarcastic just don't be trite about it!)
The current Code of Canon Law, which went into effect in 1983: Books of the Sacred Scriptures cannot be published unless they have been approved either by the Apostolic See or by the conference of bishops (this is in 1983 mind you!)
Far from championing the spread of the Bible, and the translation into the vernacular, the Catholic Church has a history of repression and censorship in this regard. It was really the combination of the reformation and the advent of the printing press that "let the cat out of the bag." It seems that Bibles could be printed faster than they (and their authors or owners) could be burned. Since Catholicism could no longer contain the Bible and keep it out of the hands of the laity, the issue has become one of authority to interpret. The laity was then able to discern the truth for themselves, and the biblical truth was often at odds with Catholic teaching.
Most people don't know this but it was once outlawed for a lay person to even own a bible. They didn't want their beloved bible open for interpretation by the masses, or to find the many inconsistancies contained therein. Knowledge is power, and power by the people dangerous. Now we have bibles in every motel room. How'd that happen?
This is by no means a complete list.
Pope Innocent III stated in 1199: ... to be reproved are those who translate into French the Gospels, the letters of Paul. They are moved by a certain love of Scripture in order to explain them clandestinely and to preach them to one another. The mysteries of the faith are not to explained rashly to anyone. Usually in fact, they cannot be understood by everyone but only by those who are qualified to understand them with informed intelligence. (We're too stupid to understand that which we don't know)
COUNCIL OF TOULOUSE - 1229 A.D. Canon 14. We prohibit also that the laity should be permitted to have the books of the Old or New Testament... but we most strictly forbid their having any translation of these books. (what are they afraid of?)
The Council of Tarragona of 1234, canon II, ruled that: "No one may possess the books of the Old and New Testaments in the Romance language, and if anyone possesses them he must turn them over to the local bishop within eight days after promulgation of this decree, so that they may be burned lest, be he a cleric or a layman, he be suspected until he is cleared of all suspicion."
In 1408 the third synod of Oxford, England, banned unauthorized English translations of the Bible and decreed that possession of English translation's had to be approved by diocesan authorities. The Oxford council declared: "It is dangerous, as St. Jerome declares, to translate the text of Holy Scriptures out of one idiom into another, since it is not easy in translations to preserve exactly the same meaning in all things. We therefore command and ordain that henceforth no one translate the text of Holy Scripture into English or any other language as a book, booklet, or tract, of this kind lately made in the time of the said John Wyclif or since, or that hereafter may be made, either in part or wholly, either publicly or privately, under pain of excommunication, until such translation shall have been approved and allowed by the Provincial Council. He who shall act otherwise let him be punished as an abettor of heresy and error."
Around 1454 Gutenberg printed an edition of the Latin Vulgate Bible on the first moveable-type printing press. With this new printing technology books could now be printed faster and cheaper than ever before, a fact that Protestants soon took advantage of. Within a hundred years there was a virtual explosion of Protestant Bibles coming off the new presses. (Once people got the good book in thier hands, just as predicted, everybody had their on interpretation, contrary to the Infallible one. Chaos ensues! Film at eleven!)
William Tyndale completed a translation of the New Testament from the Greek in 1525, which church authorities in England tried their best to confiscate and burn. After issuing a revised edition in 1535, he was arrested, spent over a year in jail, and was then strangled and burned at the stake near Brussels in October 6th, 1536.
Coverdale's "Great Bible", was published in 1539 and had over 21,000 copies printed in seven editions in only a single year. Published with the authorization of King Henry VIII, whose likely motivation was the realization that the Bible was an effective means of combating papists. (It's all about politics, stupid!)
The English parliament in 1543 passed a law forbidding the use of any English translations other than the "Great Bible". Tyndale's New Testament was specifically prohibited, and later Wycliffe's and Coverdale's Bibles were also banned. It was decreed a crime for any unlicensed person to read or explain the Scriptures in public.
Responding to the increasing flood of Protestant Bibles in English, the very first complete Bible in English to be produced by the Catholic Church was the Douay Rheims, a translation from the Latin Vulgate, which was finally completed in the early 17th century. The New Testament was finished in 1582, and the Old Testament was finished in 1609-10. Note that it had been over two centuries since Wycliffe had completed his English Bible! (If you can't beat 'em, join 'em)
Memorandum of a proclamation made at Paul's Cross 1531, against the buying, selling or reading of the following books: The revelation of AntiChrist. An exposition into the VII chapter of the Corinthians. The first book of Moses, called Genesis. A prologue in the second book of Moses, called Exodus. A prologue in the third book of Moses, called Leviticus. A prologue in the fourth book of Moses, called Numeri. A prologue in the fifth book of Moses, called Deuteronomy. The New Testament in English, with an introduction to the epistle to the Romans. The primer in English. The psalter in English. (In other words no bibles!)
Pope Pius IV had a list of the forbidden books compiled and officially prohibited them in the Index of Trent of 1559. This is Rule IV: Since experience teaches that, if the reading of the Holy Bible in the vernacular is permitted generally without discrimination, more damage than advantage will result because of the boldness of men, the judgment of bishops and inquisitors is to serve as guide in this regard. Bishops and inquisitors may, in accord with the counsel of the local priest and confessor, allow Catholic translations of the Bible to be read by those of whom they realize that such reading will not lead to the detriment but to the increase of faith and piety. The permission is to be given in writing. Whoever reads or has such a translation in his possession without this permission cannot be absolved from his sins until he has turned in these Bibles.
The Dogmatic Constitution issued by Pope Clement XI 1713:
The following statements are condemned as being in error:
79. It is useful and necessary at all times, in all places, and for every kind of person, to study and to know the spirit, the piety, and the mysteries of Sacred Scripture.
80. The reading of Sacred Scripture is for all.
81. The sacred obscurity of the Word of God is no reason for the laity to dispense themselves from reading it.
82. The Lord's Day ought to be sanctified by Christians with readings of pious works and above all of the Holy Scriptures. It is harmful for a Christian to wish to withdraw from this reading.
83. It is an illusion to persuade oneself that knowledge of the mysteries of religion should not be communicated to women by the reading of Sacred Scriptures. Not from the simplicity of women, but from the proud knowledge of men has arisen the abuse of the Scriptures and have heresies been born.
84. To snatch away from the hands of Christians the New Testament, or to hold it closed against them by taking away from them the means of understanding it, is to close for them the mouth of Christ.
85. To forbid Christians to read Sacred Scripture, especially the Gospels, is to forbid the use of light to the sons of light, and to cause them to suffer a kind of excommunication.
Remember now those statements were condemned as error! I love the 'sacred obscurity of the word of god' description. I suppose with home reading there was no passing of the plate! Or you can't handle the truth!
POPE LEO XII 1824: In virtue of Our apostolic office, We too exhort you to try every means of keeping your flock from those deadly pastures. Do everything possible to see that the faithful observe strictly the rules of our Congregation of the Index. Convince them that to allow holy Bibles in the ordinary language, wholesale and without distinction, would on account of human rashness cause more harm than good. ("try every means"! now that's harsh!, and 'convince them' sounds awfully sinister)
Pope Pius VIII 1829: We must also be wary of those who publish the Bible with new interpretations contrary to the Church's laws. They skillfully distort the meaning by their own interpretation. They print the Bibles in the vernacular and, absorbing an incredible expense, offer them free even to the uneducated. (I take it his main objection was they were giving them away for FREE! Why there's money to be made!)
Pope Gregory XVI 1844: In particular, watch more carefully over those who are assigned to give public readings of holy scripture, so that they function diligently in their office within the comprehension of the audience; under no pretext whatsoever should they dare to explain and interpret the divine writings contrary to the tradition of the Fathers or the interpretation of the Catholic Church. ("should they dare"! Dare what? To expose your fallicies?)
Leo XIII, 1897: All versions of the Holy Bible, in any vernacular language, made by non-Catholics are prohibited; and especially those published by the Bible societies, which have been more that once condemned by the Roman Pontiffs.
Code of Canon Law, went into effect in 1918: Reiterated all the above but added this tidbit! "By the very law are forbidden: books which attack or ridicule any of the Catholic dogmas, books which defend errors condemned by the Holy See, or which disparage Divine worship, or tend to undermine ecclesiastical discipline, or which purposely insult the ecclesiastical hierarchy, or the clerical and religious states. (Sticks and stones may break my bones...)
His Holiness Pope Pius XI, 1930: "...These counterfeit champions of the inspired book hold the Bible to be the sole source of Divine Revelation and cover with abuse and trite sarcasm the Catholic and Roman Church." It's ok to be sarcastic just don't be trite about it!)
The current Code of Canon Law, which went into effect in 1983: Books of the Sacred Scriptures cannot be published unless they have been approved either by the Apostolic See or by the conference of bishops (this is in 1983 mind you!)
Far from championing the spread of the Bible, and the translation into the vernacular, the Catholic Church has a history of repression and censorship in this regard. It was really the combination of the reformation and the advent of the printing press that "let the cat out of the bag." It seems that Bibles could be printed faster than they (and their authors or owners) could be burned. Since Catholicism could no longer contain the Bible and keep it out of the hands of the laity, the issue has become one of authority to interpret. The laity was then able to discern the truth for themselves, and the biblical truth was often at odds with Catholic teaching.
Friday, December 15, 2006
DONATION OF CONSTANTINE (or not!)
PAPAL DECEPTION
The gift that kept on giving. According to a deed known as the Donation of Constantine (Latin, Constitutum Donatio Constantini or Constitutum domini Constantini imperatoris), Emperor Constantine I of Rome gave Pope Sylvester I sovereignty over a significant portion of Western Europe. The Donation became an essential part of Middle Ages real estate policy, as sources were rarely questioned at the time. The era was "the golden age of forgeries." The Donation grants Pope Sylvester I and his successors, as inheritors of St Peter, the dominion over the city of Rome, Italy, and the entire Western Roman Empire, while Constantine would retain imperial authority in the Eastern Roman Empire from his new imperial capital of Constantinople. The text claims that the Donation was Constantine's reward to Sylvester for instructing him in the Christian faith and baptizing him.
TALK ABOUT A QUICK CLAIM DEED
In later years, historical facts were clouded by legend. It was considered inappropriate that Constantine was baptized only on his death-bed and by a bishop of questionable orthodoxy, and hence a legend emerged that Pope Silvester I (314-335) had cured the pagan Emperor from leprosy. According to this legend, Constantine was baptized after that and donated buildings to the Pope. In the 8th century, the "Donation of Constantine" first appeared. Poof! It's a mircale. Why hadn't the church produced such a powerful document sooner?
LAND EQUALS POWER
Its precise purpose is not entirely certain, but it was clearly a defense of papal interests, perhaps against the claims of either the Byzantine Empire, or the Frankish king Charlemagne, who had assumed the former imperial dignity in the West and with it the title "Emperor of the Romans". Written during the papacy of Stephen II, around 752. In the High Middle Ages, this document was used and accepted as the basis for the Pope's temporal power.
QUESTION AUTHORITY
This document was used by medieval popes to bolster their claims for territorial and secular power in Italy. It was widely accepted, though the Emperor Otto III denounced the document as a forgery. The poet Dante Alighieri lamented it as the root of papal worldliness in his Divine Comedy. However, by the mid 15th-century, with the revival of Classical scholarship and textual critique, the Church had begun to realize that the document could not possibly be genuine. The Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla proved in 1440 that the Donation must be a fake by analyzing its language, and showing that while certain imperial-era formulas are used in the text, some of the Latin in the document could not have been written in the 4th century. Also, the date given in the document does not add up, as it refers both to the fourth consulate of Constantine (315) as well as the consulate of Gallicanus (317). More recent scholars have further demonstrated that other elements, such as Sylvester's curing of Constantine, are later legends.
POWER GRANTED BY A MAN & NOT GOD AFTERALL
For hundreds of years, the Vatican used the document to buttress territorial claims in land struggles with the Holy Roman Empire. The Donation persisted until 1929. Under pressure from Benito Mussolini, the Vatican finally ceded the remainder of its "gift" which had once encompassed not only Rome but a belt across central Italy from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic–back to Italy.
RAY OF LIGHT
That a pope bolstered by the confidence of a non-questioning flock would have the gaul to forge a document some 400 years after the fact and get away with it, just goes to show how foolish & naive the christian mindset is. I figure at least 2 commandmants were broken in its fabrication. One must wonder what other fallacies are perpetuated by the infallible one.
The gift that kept on giving. According to a deed known as the Donation of Constantine (Latin, Constitutum Donatio Constantini or Constitutum domini Constantini imperatoris), Emperor Constantine I of Rome gave Pope Sylvester I sovereignty over a significant portion of Western Europe. The Donation became an essential part of Middle Ages real estate policy, as sources were rarely questioned at the time. The era was "the golden age of forgeries." The Donation grants Pope Sylvester I and his successors, as inheritors of St Peter, the dominion over the city of Rome, Italy, and the entire Western Roman Empire, while Constantine would retain imperial authority in the Eastern Roman Empire from his new imperial capital of Constantinople. The text claims that the Donation was Constantine's reward to Sylvester for instructing him in the Christian faith and baptizing him.
TALK ABOUT A QUICK CLAIM DEED
In later years, historical facts were clouded by legend. It was considered inappropriate that Constantine was baptized only on his death-bed and by a bishop of questionable orthodoxy, and hence a legend emerged that Pope Silvester I (314-335) had cured the pagan Emperor from leprosy. According to this legend, Constantine was baptized after that and donated buildings to the Pope. In the 8th century, the "Donation of Constantine" first appeared. Poof! It's a mircale. Why hadn't the church produced such a powerful document sooner?
LAND EQUALS POWER
Its precise purpose is not entirely certain, but it was clearly a defense of papal interests, perhaps against the claims of either the Byzantine Empire, or the Frankish king Charlemagne, who had assumed the former imperial dignity in the West and with it the title "Emperor of the Romans". Written during the papacy of Stephen II, around 752. In the High Middle Ages, this document was used and accepted as the basis for the Pope's temporal power.
QUESTION AUTHORITY
This document was used by medieval popes to bolster their claims for territorial and secular power in Italy. It was widely accepted, though the Emperor Otto III denounced the document as a forgery. The poet Dante Alighieri lamented it as the root of papal worldliness in his Divine Comedy. However, by the mid 15th-century, with the revival of Classical scholarship and textual critique, the Church had begun to realize that the document could not possibly be genuine. The Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla proved in 1440 that the Donation must be a fake by analyzing its language, and showing that while certain imperial-era formulas are used in the text, some of the Latin in the document could not have been written in the 4th century. Also, the date given in the document does not add up, as it refers both to the fourth consulate of Constantine (315) as well as the consulate of Gallicanus (317). More recent scholars have further demonstrated that other elements, such as Sylvester's curing of Constantine, are later legends.
POWER GRANTED BY A MAN & NOT GOD AFTERALL
For hundreds of years, the Vatican used the document to buttress territorial claims in land struggles with the Holy Roman Empire. The Donation persisted until 1929. Under pressure from Benito Mussolini, the Vatican finally ceded the remainder of its "gift" which had once encompassed not only Rome but a belt across central Italy from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic–back to Italy.
RAY OF LIGHT
That a pope bolstered by the confidence of a non-questioning flock would have the gaul to forge a document some 400 years after the fact and get away with it, just goes to show how foolish & naive the christian mindset is. I figure at least 2 commandmants were broken in its fabrication. One must wonder what other fallacies are perpetuated by the infallible one.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
MISSIONARY MADNESS AROUND THE WORLD
This essay is divided into two parts. General slaughter in the name of Christ and the missionary attempt to conquer the world.
I. EVIL VIA CHRIST'S POLICY OF FORGIVENESS
CHRISTIAN JUSTICE SYSTEM
Because Christians believe that Jesus Christ suffered for the sins of others, they use this belief for their own purposes by "letting Christ suffer while they, the Christians, go on committing sin and crime." That is why the Christians go on slaughtering the Non-Christians, worry-free and with a clean conscience, because Christ will take care of their sins and crimes. The three major efforts were against Muslims, witches & Jews.
CRUSADES
Many people think that the crusades were holy wars to liberate holy lands from non-Christians. But many crusades were against other Christian sects. The drowning of 6,000 Protestants in the Netherlands in 1568, slaying 30,000 Protestants in the German city of Magdeburg in the 17th century - followed by a 30 year war between Catholics and Protestants in which more than 40% of the population (mostly Germans) were decimated. In reality, the Crusades was an attempt to force together all the known world and all mankind under the bishop of Rome, the Catholic Pope. They inspired the most bloodthirsty cruelty, and the greediest vandalism of medieval men.
WITCH BURNINGS
Pope Innocent VIII's infamous Witch Bull of 1484, launched several centuries of persecution of so-called witches all over the world to the tune of several hundred thousand dead (80% women). It was initiated to rid their dominion of so-called heretics and was directly related to their mandate to re-populate Europe after the Black Death, because their serfs were decreased by one third, thereby reducing the Church's profit by one third. The Salem Witch Hunts 1691-1692 saw the burning of a number of "witches" alive by the Puritans. But did you know that they were all proven innocent? Of course, this was found out after they were burned. The Malleus Maleficarum (the Witches Hammer or Handbook of the Inquisitors) was perhaps responsible for more widespread bloodshed than any other publication (Christian or otherwise). The policy of torturing, burning and hanging of supposed heretics has been the church's policy for centuries, whenever they could get away with it. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries about a half a million people were executed.
PERSECUTIONS OF THE JEWS
There is a long history of the persecution of Jews by Christians: burning of synagogues in the 4th century, killings of Jews who would not convert to Christianity, extermination of Jewish communities in European countries, extermination camps during World War II in Yugoslavia, headed by a Franciscan Friar and run by Catholics; equal to the German kilns of Auschwitz — killing about half a million people.
HITLER USED THE BIBLE AS JUSTIFICATION
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter... How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison...For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those (the Jews) by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited" (Adolf Hitler, speech April 12, 1922)
II. MISSIONARY MADNESS
SPREADING JOY AROUND THE WORLD
The Christian missionary mindset is generally depicted as simple religious folk with a pure desire to peacefully spread their gospel and message of love. In reality, their methods usually leave behind a native population stripped of their culture and often decimated. With Christianity failing in the west, the evangelists seek new and greener fields in the poor and uneducated sections of third world countries, backed by huge coffers. Convinced that to bring civilization and religion to the poor natives is a noble cause, even if they don't want it. Missionaries often intermix military & missionary campaigns in their fervor to "civilize the heathens", whose only crime is that they're not Christians. This mood of conquering the heathens by any means, at any cost, is supported in the Bible:
"Thou shalt save alive nothing that breathest. But thou shalt utterly destroy them..." (Deut 20)
"But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me." (Luke 19.27)
Why should the Christian Missionaries want to collect converts? Because the nature of religions exclusivity (Islam and Christianity) is to make every one like them in terms of religion. They have no use, whatsoever, for pluralism or respect for other religions; in fact what they have is pure contempt for other religions. Further, this exclusivity attachment and attitude comes straight from the horse's mouth i.e. from their scriptures. For instance, in the Bible Matthew 28:19-20, Mark 16:15-16, and Luke 24:46-47 every Christian is commanded to make converts and it is the duty of every Christian to uphold these commands of the Bible.
Christian missionaries have oppressed many cultures, building churches atop temples, mosques and shrines. The major churches in Rome are built atop pagan temples, the Vatican itself is built on the ruins of a Mithra (the Roman Sungod) temple. The major Christian holy days are all taken from the pagan holy days. Many historians and religious scholars have concluded the entirety of Christianity is borrowed from other religions and cultures and is fraudulent — Christ is an amalgamation of a number of personalities existing prior to the [presumed] time of Christ.
In fact, most of the civilizations which were overrun by zealous Christians in their conversion fervor, were highly evolved in their moral standards, with complex social structures, high standards of cleanliness and hygiene, decorative art and evolved sciences, and content with their own religion. The arrival of Christianity actually caused them to move backwards. We need only look to Europe, for the Dark Ages happened when the Church was in control. The Age of Enlightenment (Renaissance) began when the common people were freed from the tyranny of the Christian church.
GENOCIDE IN RWANDA
The hatred and division between the Hutus and Tutsis was propagated by the missionaries as favorable for their objectives of conversion to Christianity. A substantial number of priests, nuns and even Bishops were convicted (by war crimes tribunals) for being responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Tutsis. One priest burned down his own church to kill hundreds of Tutsis who had taken sanctuary there. “Sister Maria Kisito, who received 12 years, and her Mother Superior, Sister Gertrude, 15 years, were convicted of aiding in the slaughter of some 7,000 people who sought refuge at their convent. Of course the Catholic Church has claimed their clergy were acting independently of the church, even though much of the most notable genocide occurred in churches and it is well known that the church's policy has been for centuries to divide and convert, to sew dissention between ethnic groups and then move in and take advantage of the chaos to offer Christian solace and conversion. In the end nearly one million civilians were butchered.
TAHITI & THE PACIFIC
In 1797, the first missionaries hit the shores of Tahiti. Fourteen years later they had not made one convert. Finally the Christians devised an ingenious plan, which ‘converted’ the entire island in one day. They reduced the local chief to an alcoholic and backed him in a war against other island chiefs, gave him firearms, while the other islanders only had clubs. The understanding was that with his victory all would be forced to convert. Then, a reign of terror followed where non-believers were killed. It was declared illegal by the Christians for anyone to decorate themselves with flowers, to sing, to surf or dance. Within 25 years the native culture of Tahiti and the entire Pacific was extinguished.
The Polynesians and Melanesian people were very cultured and intertwined with the processes of creation. They decorated everything with intricate wood carvings and flowers. Yet by 1850 all this was gone, the only remaining vestige were the grass skirts and swaying hips for the tourists. Prior to 'conversion' the local dances were mostly performed by men, the church turned them into sex shows for tourists.
HAWAII
Not only did the missionaries and the Europeans bring the Bible to Hawaii they also brought diseases to the native population. The Hawaiians, had no idea what private property meant. The missionaries decided the land belonged to them, with the help of American military a coup d'etat was implemented. The missionary party formed a provisional Government and endeavored to make a treaty with the United States looking for annexation. The missionaries ended up large landowners, not the natives, who had lived there for thousands of years. Put simply, the missionaries stole their land. They banned all Hawaiian religious practices, walking barefoot, and even surfing. It's rumored they introduced the mosquito in the hopes that this would force the natives to wear more clothes!
COLUMBUS & THE CARIBBEAN ISLANDS
Christopher Columbus, a trader of African slaves, is best known as the ‘so-called’ discoverer of America. In his personal log, Columbus wrote that, his purpose in seeking undiscovered worlds was “to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the heathens." On his first voyage Columbus described the natives as follows: "Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they never say no; rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts..." Whichever island he touched his men killed indiscriminately whatever animals and natives they found. The natives were either killed or enslaved. Columbus commented "ought to be good servants... and would easily be made Christians,” because he saw his affairs as the "fulfillment of prophecies in Isaiah." If natives objected Columbus would responded "…with the help of God, we shall … make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church..." In less than a decade after Columbus' first landing the native population of the island of Hispaniola (Santo Domingo & Haiti) dropped by a third to a half. Before the next century ended, the populations of Cuba and other islands had been virtually exterminated.
NORTH AMERICA - VIRGINIA
The Charter for the Virginia Colony stated that its purpose was to bring the Christian religion to those in ignorance of true knowledge of God.The following is but one description from Christian accounts from one of the earliest settlements of English Christians, in Roanoke, Virginia in 1584: Arthur Barlowe, one of the first Christians ever to set foot on Virginia soil "...we were entertained with all love and kindness and with as much bounty, ...as they could possibly devise. We found the people most gentle loving, and faithfull, void of all guile and treason...a more kind and loving people there cannot be found in the world, as farre as we have hitherto had triall." Their Christian treatment of these loving peoples "...we burnt, and spoyled their corne, and Towne, all the people beeing fledde." (what a fine christian example that set)
MIDWEST
The missionaries who entered Indian country were sent there to "civilize" the native people. They acquired this position by treaty and were given vast amounts of land and guaranteed subsidies administered by the federal government out of tribal money. "Civilizing" meant taking children away at 5-12 years ols and forcing them to live without father, mother, sister or brother in missionary schools. This practice continued up until the mid 1970's. Participation was "optional" but missionaries controlled the annuities of food and trust money. Families that did not surrender their children did not receive food or payments. Very young children caught in this situation were brainwashed to treat their parents as savages and barbarians and they suffered terribly under this psychological torture. This is why it is called a Red Holocaust and fits the United Nations accords for genocide.
Missionary work was very big business. It afforded the building of careers, growth of denominational influence in regions that formed economic bases of support. Churches were established through lucrative payments from Indian funds and lands, which were deeded for use as farms, timber production and for sale in financing further ventures, not the least of which was buying selling and working their slaves. It is especially telling that while almost no Indians voluntarily lived among the colonists, the number of whites who ran off to live with the natives was a problem often remarked upon. Historian James Axtell has concluded that they "...stayed because they found Indian life to possess a strong sense of community, abundant love, and uncommon integrity" (unlike those holy hypocrites)
CALIFORNIA MISSIONS
The brutality of the Franciscan missionaries (founder Junipero Serra, who was to be made a saint) was criminal. Even Serra's supporters acknowledge that the methods employed to convert the Indians would be unthinkable for missionaries to use today. Serra aimed not just to convert the Indians but to eradicate Indian culture as well. One Franciscan insists that although a group of massacred Indians no doubt "deserved" to be killed "Oh, how happy a thing had it been, if you had converted some before you killed any!"
MEXICO CITY
Unlike European cities of the late 1400’s, which were filled with squalor and disease (most Europeans never took a bath in their entire life, hence the invention of French perfume) Mexico was clean. The twin cities of Tenochtitlan and Tlateloico, know today as Mexico City, maintained high standards: wastes were hauled away by barge and composted for fertilizer, a thousand men swept and washed the streets every day. Refined Aztecs, who bathed daily, found it advisable to hold flowers to their noses when they met Europeans. Hernan Cortez felt that this was by far the most beautiful city on earth, stated: “All of these houses have very large and very good rooms and very pleasing gardens of various sorts of flowers…” The Christian visitors were astonished by the personal cleanliness and hygiene of the colorfully dressed populace, and by their extravagant (to the Christians) use of soaps, deodorants, and breath sweeteners. As a consequence of Columbus' ‘discovery’ less than a century after his voyage the city had been sacked, its buildings and beautiful gardens burnt. The city's inhabitants were either dead or slaves to a Church-approved colonial feudal government, or directly to a Church which burned at the stake any survivors unwilling to be converted.
THE PHILIPPINES
Shortly after the Spanish American war of 1898, the US obtained legal right to the Philippines. President McKinley stated that "military occupation of the islands is declared to be to protect the people" to "uplift and civilize and Christianize them and by God's grace do the very best we could for them.” The Filipinos had not requested this, but their will was ignored. The resistance to this American ‘help,’ was met with military might. The US command stated that, "it may be necessary to slaughter one-half of the rebellious Filipinos in order to bring the other half into subjection." Well over 200,000 Filipinos lost their lives. The Methodist church, great champions of this war of ‘divine mission,’ did not distinguish imperialism from the mission of evangelization. The cries of "God wills it," were the religious justification for the assertion of political power fused with missionary zeal. Reverend William Oldham declared that "the roar of the (American) cannon was the voice of Almighty God declaring (the Philippines) shall be freed."
BURMA and THAILAND
In Akha traditional culture, five people serve as the government in one village. This multiperson leadership system in villages was eliminated and replaced by single pastors who rule the villages with an iron fist, allowing no dissent or return to the traditional ways. These changes have sewn havoc amongst the locals. A Thai speaks out on mission activities:
“There would be no traditional practices, songs, or dances at all now, possibly something would be allowed at Christmas. The woman who practices the traditional knowledge and medicine for the village was stopped. She was told that it was evil and that she could no longer treat people’s illnesses. In the name of their religious beliefs, and quite in contradiction with the spirit of those beliefs, the missionaries are eradicating Akha culture in village after village."
“Now we want to raise a question, how good is Christianity then? If that is good enough, why there are so many groups, teaching about Jesus and yet fighting one another? First they divided our people now they are dividing our villages and families. We seem to be like a prey for them. Better not to have one of them than having all of them.”
VIETNAM
Perhaps, you remember seeing the news videos of Buddhists burning themselves with gasoline in the 1960’s? Do you know why they burned themselves? They were protesting the discriminatory treatment and torture by the fanatical Catholic South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem, installed by the U.S. military. With the Vaticans influence, led by Cardinal Spellman, democratic elections were stopped in Vietnam, and Dim installed. This was followed by the ill-fated Vietnam war. Do you think that the government of the U.S.A. stands for democracy in every country? Actually they are only for democracies that elect a government favorable to or are cooperative with U.S. foreign policies. If they are not agreeable with and subordinate to U.S. interests, then covert U.S. forces make arrangements for other leaders to take power.
CHINA
Although most everyone has heard of the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, few know that this rebellion was directly a reaction of the Chinese people to the Christian missionaries who swarmed into the country in order to convert the poor, illiterate, and defenseless Chinese. The rebellion was of course suppressed by the countries that were patronizing the converting missionaries. "Lots of foreign missionaries followed the warships of foreign aggressors to China in and after the Opium War, and actually foreign aggression and missionaries' activities are combined into one. It is the foreign missionaries that should answer for the consequences to their actions because their monstrous evils exasperated the Chinese people and eventually fused the outburst of the Yi He Tuan (known as Boxers) Movement". The Holy See, disregarding the strong opposition from the Chinese people, "canonized" two infamous missionaries, which reveals the Vatican's vicious intention to intervene in China's internal affairs through religious activities.
INDIA
India's first major contact with Christianity began when Vasco da Gama, from Portugal, landed with gunboat and priests in 1498… The newcomers were not only merchants but also devout Christians ordered by the Pope: "to invade, conquer, and subject all the countries which are under rule of the enemies of Christ, Saracens (Moslems who fought against the Christian Crusaders in the middle ages) or Pagan" Hindus were forced to convert or faced torture and death. When the Zamorin (head of the Hindu population) sent another Brahmin (Hindu Priest) to Vasco to plead for peace, he had his lips cut off and his ears cut off. The ears of a dog were sewn on him instead and the Brahmin was sent back to Zamorin in that state. The Brahmin… had brought with him three young boys, two of them his sons and the other a nephew. They were hanged from the yardarm and their bodies sent ashore.
Francis Xavier, a Jesuit Priest, came soon after Vasco da Gama, with the firm resolve of uprooting Hinduism from the soil of India and planting Christianity in its place. "As soon as I arrived in any heathen village, when all are baptized, I order all the temples of their false gods to be destroyed and all the idols to be broken to pieces. I can give you no idea of the joy I feel in seeing this done." The Church had a special way of dealing with converted Hindus who were suspected of not observing Christian rites with appropriate rigour and enthusiasm, “…the culprits would be tracked down and burnt alive.” It is recorded that between 600 and 1,000 Hindu temples and shrines were destroyed, but many consider these numbers to be on the conservative side.
”Children were flogged and slowly dismembered in front of their parents whose eyelids had been sliced off to make sure they missed nothing. Extremities were amputated carefully, so that a person could remain conscious even when all that remained was a torso and a head.”
No body knows the exact number of Goans subjected to these diabolical tortures. The abominations of these inquisitions continued from 1560 until a brief respite was given in 1774, but four years later, the inquisition was introduced again and it continued un-interruptedly until 1812 — the inquisition in Goa wend on for over two-hundred and fifty years. At that point in time, in the year of 1812, the British put pressure on the Portuguese to put an end to the terror of the Inquisition and the presence of British troops in Goa enforced the British desire.
Dr. Trasta Breganka Kunha, a Catholic citizen of Goa writes, "Inspite of all the mutilations and concealment of history, it remains an undoubted fact that religious conversion of Goans is due to methods of force adopted by the Portuguese to establish their rule. As a result of this violence the character of our people was destroyed. The propagation of Christian sect in Goa came about not by religious preaching but through the methods of violence and pressure. Mission activity in India comes in the guise of helping the downtrodden, sick and helpless. In reality the aim is the same — to convert all to Christianity and in the wake destroy all the cultures and religions that lie in the way.
WHY WE NEED GLOBAL SEPERATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
Secular government, first seen in the United States of America, was a reaction to the theocratic tyrannies that pervaded the Dark Ages of Europe all the way to the founding of the American nation. Separation of religion and government were an effort to ward off and prevent any Christian theocracy from taking control in modern times. Now the Christian tactics have changed, but their underlying premise that ‘Christianity is the only true religion’ nullifies all their attempts of portraying themselves as tolerant and loving. The reality is that Christianity has not changed its theology, it has only changed its techniques of conversion. Christian evangelists are now using vast amounts of wealth,billions of dollars, to spread their propaganda.
There is no need to abuse, attack, or condemn the Non-Christian religions. The plain truth is the Christian Missionaries work with usage of lies, falsehood, and hypocrisy. The social improvement facade is only a camouflage or disguise for conversion work.
Now-a-days, in most civilized countries, open and outright utterance of ignoble and unflattering slurs and put downs on the basis of race, religion, creed, or other affiliation is not tolerated because it has been legislated as illegal.
Nearly every single day, rhetoric similar to the words below confirm the reality that Christianity, while posing as a religion of love, peace and tolerance is anything but that.
"These have their idols and their superstitions, their idol-bearing temples and shrines where they conduct their noisy foolish rituals and ceremonies. They generate a lot of evil. They are totally ignorant that Jesus Christ came to overcome death. There is a great need to propagate the Christian Gospel amongst them."
Imagine how different the world would be today without the tyrrany & downright evil inflicted by these holier than thou hypocrites & downright evil men of god.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am grateful to the following website which i have borrowed heavily: http://www.burningcross.net/crusades/christian-missionary-atrocities.html
I. EVIL VIA CHRIST'S POLICY OF FORGIVENESS
CHRISTIAN JUSTICE SYSTEM
Because Christians believe that Jesus Christ suffered for the sins of others, they use this belief for their own purposes by "letting Christ suffer while they, the Christians, go on committing sin and crime." That is why the Christians go on slaughtering the Non-Christians, worry-free and with a clean conscience, because Christ will take care of their sins and crimes. The three major efforts were against Muslims, witches & Jews.
CRUSADES
Many people think that the crusades were holy wars to liberate holy lands from non-Christians. But many crusades were against other Christian sects. The drowning of 6,000 Protestants in the Netherlands in 1568, slaying 30,000 Protestants in the German city of Magdeburg in the 17th century - followed by a 30 year war between Catholics and Protestants in which more than 40% of the population (mostly Germans) were decimated. In reality, the Crusades was an attempt to force together all the known world and all mankind under the bishop of Rome, the Catholic Pope. They inspired the most bloodthirsty cruelty, and the greediest vandalism of medieval men.
WITCH BURNINGS
Pope Innocent VIII's infamous Witch Bull of 1484, launched several centuries of persecution of so-called witches all over the world to the tune of several hundred thousand dead (80% women). It was initiated to rid their dominion of so-called heretics and was directly related to their mandate to re-populate Europe after the Black Death, because their serfs were decreased by one third, thereby reducing the Church's profit by one third. The Salem Witch Hunts 1691-1692 saw the burning of a number of "witches" alive by the Puritans. But did you know that they were all proven innocent? Of course, this was found out after they were burned. The Malleus Maleficarum (the Witches Hammer or Handbook of the Inquisitors) was perhaps responsible for more widespread bloodshed than any other publication (Christian or otherwise). The policy of torturing, burning and hanging of supposed heretics has been the church's policy for centuries, whenever they could get away with it. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries about a half a million people were executed.
PERSECUTIONS OF THE JEWS
There is a long history of the persecution of Jews by Christians: burning of synagogues in the 4th century, killings of Jews who would not convert to Christianity, extermination of Jewish communities in European countries, extermination camps during World War II in Yugoslavia, headed by a Franciscan Friar and run by Catholics; equal to the German kilns of Auschwitz — killing about half a million people.
HITLER USED THE BIBLE AS JUSTIFICATION
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter... How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison...For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those (the Jews) by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited" (Adolf Hitler, speech April 12, 1922)
II. MISSIONARY MADNESS
SPREADING JOY AROUND THE WORLD
The Christian missionary mindset is generally depicted as simple religious folk with a pure desire to peacefully spread their gospel and message of love. In reality, their methods usually leave behind a native population stripped of their culture and often decimated. With Christianity failing in the west, the evangelists seek new and greener fields in the poor and uneducated sections of third world countries, backed by huge coffers. Convinced that to bring civilization and religion to the poor natives is a noble cause, even if they don't want it. Missionaries often intermix military & missionary campaigns in their fervor to "civilize the heathens", whose only crime is that they're not Christians. This mood of conquering the heathens by any means, at any cost, is supported in the Bible:
"Thou shalt save alive nothing that breathest. But thou shalt utterly destroy them..." (Deut 20)
"But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me." (Luke 19.27)
Why should the Christian Missionaries want to collect converts? Because the nature of religions exclusivity (Islam and Christianity) is to make every one like them in terms of religion. They have no use, whatsoever, for pluralism or respect for other religions; in fact what they have is pure contempt for other religions. Further, this exclusivity attachment and attitude comes straight from the horse's mouth i.e. from their scriptures. For instance, in the Bible Matthew 28:19-20, Mark 16:15-16, and Luke 24:46-47 every Christian is commanded to make converts and it is the duty of every Christian to uphold these commands of the Bible.
Christian missionaries have oppressed many cultures, building churches atop temples, mosques and shrines. The major churches in Rome are built atop pagan temples, the Vatican itself is built on the ruins of a Mithra (the Roman Sungod) temple. The major Christian holy days are all taken from the pagan holy days. Many historians and religious scholars have concluded the entirety of Christianity is borrowed from other religions and cultures and is fraudulent — Christ is an amalgamation of a number of personalities existing prior to the [presumed] time of Christ.
In fact, most of the civilizations which were overrun by zealous Christians in their conversion fervor, were highly evolved in their moral standards, with complex social structures, high standards of cleanliness and hygiene, decorative art and evolved sciences, and content with their own religion. The arrival of Christianity actually caused them to move backwards. We need only look to Europe, for the Dark Ages happened when the Church was in control. The Age of Enlightenment (Renaissance) began when the common people were freed from the tyranny of the Christian church.
GENOCIDE IN RWANDA
The hatred and division between the Hutus and Tutsis was propagated by the missionaries as favorable for their objectives of conversion to Christianity. A substantial number of priests, nuns and even Bishops were convicted (by war crimes tribunals) for being responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Tutsis. One priest burned down his own church to kill hundreds of Tutsis who had taken sanctuary there. “Sister Maria Kisito, who received 12 years, and her Mother Superior, Sister Gertrude, 15 years, were convicted of aiding in the slaughter of some 7,000 people who sought refuge at their convent. Of course the Catholic Church has claimed their clergy were acting independently of the church, even though much of the most notable genocide occurred in churches and it is well known that the church's policy has been for centuries to divide and convert, to sew dissention between ethnic groups and then move in and take advantage of the chaos to offer Christian solace and conversion. In the end nearly one million civilians were butchered.
TAHITI & THE PACIFIC
In 1797, the first missionaries hit the shores of Tahiti. Fourteen years later they had not made one convert. Finally the Christians devised an ingenious plan, which ‘converted’ the entire island in one day. They reduced the local chief to an alcoholic and backed him in a war against other island chiefs, gave him firearms, while the other islanders only had clubs. The understanding was that with his victory all would be forced to convert. Then, a reign of terror followed where non-believers were killed. It was declared illegal by the Christians for anyone to decorate themselves with flowers, to sing, to surf or dance. Within 25 years the native culture of Tahiti and the entire Pacific was extinguished.
The Polynesians and Melanesian people were very cultured and intertwined with the processes of creation. They decorated everything with intricate wood carvings and flowers. Yet by 1850 all this was gone, the only remaining vestige were the grass skirts and swaying hips for the tourists. Prior to 'conversion' the local dances were mostly performed by men, the church turned them into sex shows for tourists.
HAWAII
Not only did the missionaries and the Europeans bring the Bible to Hawaii they also brought diseases to the native population. The Hawaiians, had no idea what private property meant. The missionaries decided the land belonged to them, with the help of American military a coup d'etat was implemented. The missionary party formed a provisional Government and endeavored to make a treaty with the United States looking for annexation. The missionaries ended up large landowners, not the natives, who had lived there for thousands of years. Put simply, the missionaries stole their land. They banned all Hawaiian religious practices, walking barefoot, and even surfing. It's rumored they introduced the mosquito in the hopes that this would force the natives to wear more clothes!
COLUMBUS & THE CARIBBEAN ISLANDS
Christopher Columbus, a trader of African slaves, is best known as the ‘so-called’ discoverer of America. In his personal log, Columbus wrote that, his purpose in seeking undiscovered worlds was “to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the heathens." On his first voyage Columbus described the natives as follows: "Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they never say no; rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts..." Whichever island he touched his men killed indiscriminately whatever animals and natives they found. The natives were either killed or enslaved. Columbus commented "ought to be good servants... and would easily be made Christians,” because he saw his affairs as the "fulfillment of prophecies in Isaiah." If natives objected Columbus would responded "…with the help of God, we shall … make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church..." In less than a decade after Columbus' first landing the native population of the island of Hispaniola (Santo Domingo & Haiti) dropped by a third to a half. Before the next century ended, the populations of Cuba and other islands had been virtually exterminated.
NORTH AMERICA - VIRGINIA
The Charter for the Virginia Colony stated that its purpose was to bring the Christian religion to those in ignorance of true knowledge of God.The following is but one description from Christian accounts from one of the earliest settlements of English Christians, in Roanoke, Virginia in 1584: Arthur Barlowe, one of the first Christians ever to set foot on Virginia soil "...we were entertained with all love and kindness and with as much bounty, ...as they could possibly devise. We found the people most gentle loving, and faithfull, void of all guile and treason...a more kind and loving people there cannot be found in the world, as farre as we have hitherto had triall." Their Christian treatment of these loving peoples "...we burnt, and spoyled their corne, and Towne, all the people beeing fledde." (what a fine christian example that set)
MIDWEST
The missionaries who entered Indian country were sent there to "civilize" the native people. They acquired this position by treaty and were given vast amounts of land and guaranteed subsidies administered by the federal government out of tribal money. "Civilizing" meant taking children away at 5-12 years ols and forcing them to live without father, mother, sister or brother in missionary schools. This practice continued up until the mid 1970's. Participation was "optional" but missionaries controlled the annuities of food and trust money. Families that did not surrender their children did not receive food or payments. Very young children caught in this situation were brainwashed to treat their parents as savages and barbarians and they suffered terribly under this psychological torture. This is why it is called a Red Holocaust and fits the United Nations accords for genocide.
Missionary work was very big business. It afforded the building of careers, growth of denominational influence in regions that formed economic bases of support. Churches were established through lucrative payments from Indian funds and lands, which were deeded for use as farms, timber production and for sale in financing further ventures, not the least of which was buying selling and working their slaves. It is especially telling that while almost no Indians voluntarily lived among the colonists, the number of whites who ran off to live with the natives was a problem often remarked upon. Historian James Axtell has concluded that they "...stayed because they found Indian life to possess a strong sense of community, abundant love, and uncommon integrity" (unlike those holy hypocrites)
CALIFORNIA MISSIONS
The brutality of the Franciscan missionaries (founder Junipero Serra, who was to be made a saint) was criminal. Even Serra's supporters acknowledge that the methods employed to convert the Indians would be unthinkable for missionaries to use today. Serra aimed not just to convert the Indians but to eradicate Indian culture as well. One Franciscan insists that although a group of massacred Indians no doubt "deserved" to be killed "Oh, how happy a thing had it been, if you had converted some before you killed any!"
MEXICO CITY
Unlike European cities of the late 1400’s, which were filled with squalor and disease (most Europeans never took a bath in their entire life, hence the invention of French perfume) Mexico was clean. The twin cities of Tenochtitlan and Tlateloico, know today as Mexico City, maintained high standards: wastes were hauled away by barge and composted for fertilizer, a thousand men swept and washed the streets every day. Refined Aztecs, who bathed daily, found it advisable to hold flowers to their noses when they met Europeans. Hernan Cortez felt that this was by far the most beautiful city on earth, stated: “All of these houses have very large and very good rooms and very pleasing gardens of various sorts of flowers…” The Christian visitors were astonished by the personal cleanliness and hygiene of the colorfully dressed populace, and by their extravagant (to the Christians) use of soaps, deodorants, and breath sweeteners. As a consequence of Columbus' ‘discovery’ less than a century after his voyage the city had been sacked, its buildings and beautiful gardens burnt. The city's inhabitants were either dead or slaves to a Church-approved colonial feudal government, or directly to a Church which burned at the stake any survivors unwilling to be converted.
THE PHILIPPINES
Shortly after the Spanish American war of 1898, the US obtained legal right to the Philippines. President McKinley stated that "military occupation of the islands is declared to be to protect the people" to "uplift and civilize and Christianize them and by God's grace do the very best we could for them.” The Filipinos had not requested this, but their will was ignored. The resistance to this American ‘help,’ was met with military might. The US command stated that, "it may be necessary to slaughter one-half of the rebellious Filipinos in order to bring the other half into subjection." Well over 200,000 Filipinos lost their lives. The Methodist church, great champions of this war of ‘divine mission,’ did not distinguish imperialism from the mission of evangelization. The cries of "God wills it," were the religious justification for the assertion of political power fused with missionary zeal. Reverend William Oldham declared that "the roar of the (American) cannon was the voice of Almighty God declaring (the Philippines) shall be freed."
BURMA and THAILAND
In Akha traditional culture, five people serve as the government in one village. This multiperson leadership system in villages was eliminated and replaced by single pastors who rule the villages with an iron fist, allowing no dissent or return to the traditional ways. These changes have sewn havoc amongst the locals. A Thai speaks out on mission activities:
“There would be no traditional practices, songs, or dances at all now, possibly something would be allowed at Christmas. The woman who practices the traditional knowledge and medicine for the village was stopped. She was told that it was evil and that she could no longer treat people’s illnesses. In the name of their religious beliefs, and quite in contradiction with the spirit of those beliefs, the missionaries are eradicating Akha culture in village after village."
“Now we want to raise a question, how good is Christianity then? If that is good enough, why there are so many groups, teaching about Jesus and yet fighting one another? First they divided our people now they are dividing our villages and families. We seem to be like a prey for them. Better not to have one of them than having all of them.”
VIETNAM
Perhaps, you remember seeing the news videos of Buddhists burning themselves with gasoline in the 1960’s? Do you know why they burned themselves? They were protesting the discriminatory treatment and torture by the fanatical Catholic South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem, installed by the U.S. military. With the Vaticans influence, led by Cardinal Spellman, democratic elections were stopped in Vietnam, and Dim installed. This was followed by the ill-fated Vietnam war. Do you think that the government of the U.S.A. stands for democracy in every country? Actually they are only for democracies that elect a government favorable to or are cooperative with U.S. foreign policies. If they are not agreeable with and subordinate to U.S. interests, then covert U.S. forces make arrangements for other leaders to take power.
CHINA
Although most everyone has heard of the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, few know that this rebellion was directly a reaction of the Chinese people to the Christian missionaries who swarmed into the country in order to convert the poor, illiterate, and defenseless Chinese. The rebellion was of course suppressed by the countries that were patronizing the converting missionaries. "Lots of foreign missionaries followed the warships of foreign aggressors to China in and after the Opium War, and actually foreign aggression and missionaries' activities are combined into one. It is the foreign missionaries that should answer for the consequences to their actions because their monstrous evils exasperated the Chinese people and eventually fused the outburst of the Yi He Tuan (known as Boxers) Movement". The Holy See, disregarding the strong opposition from the Chinese people, "canonized" two infamous missionaries, which reveals the Vatican's vicious intention to intervene in China's internal affairs through religious activities.
INDIA
India's first major contact with Christianity began when Vasco da Gama, from Portugal, landed with gunboat and priests in 1498… The newcomers were not only merchants but also devout Christians ordered by the Pope: "to invade, conquer, and subject all the countries which are under rule of the enemies of Christ, Saracens (Moslems who fought against the Christian Crusaders in the middle ages) or Pagan" Hindus were forced to convert or faced torture and death. When the Zamorin (head of the Hindu population) sent another Brahmin (Hindu Priest) to Vasco to plead for peace, he had his lips cut off and his ears cut off. The ears of a dog were sewn on him instead and the Brahmin was sent back to Zamorin in that state. The Brahmin… had brought with him three young boys, two of them his sons and the other a nephew. They were hanged from the yardarm and their bodies sent ashore.
Francis Xavier, a Jesuit Priest, came soon after Vasco da Gama, with the firm resolve of uprooting Hinduism from the soil of India and planting Christianity in its place. "As soon as I arrived in any heathen village, when all are baptized, I order all the temples of their false gods to be destroyed and all the idols to be broken to pieces. I can give you no idea of the joy I feel in seeing this done." The Church had a special way of dealing with converted Hindus who were suspected of not observing Christian rites with appropriate rigour and enthusiasm, “…the culprits would be tracked down and burnt alive.” It is recorded that between 600 and 1,000 Hindu temples and shrines were destroyed, but many consider these numbers to be on the conservative side.
”Children were flogged and slowly dismembered in front of their parents whose eyelids had been sliced off to make sure they missed nothing. Extremities were amputated carefully, so that a person could remain conscious even when all that remained was a torso and a head.”
No body knows the exact number of Goans subjected to these diabolical tortures. The abominations of these inquisitions continued from 1560 until a brief respite was given in 1774, but four years later, the inquisition was introduced again and it continued un-interruptedly until 1812 — the inquisition in Goa wend on for over two-hundred and fifty years. At that point in time, in the year of 1812, the British put pressure on the Portuguese to put an end to the terror of the Inquisition and the presence of British troops in Goa enforced the British desire.
Dr. Trasta Breganka Kunha, a Catholic citizen of Goa writes, "Inspite of all the mutilations and concealment of history, it remains an undoubted fact that religious conversion of Goans is due to methods of force adopted by the Portuguese to establish their rule. As a result of this violence the character of our people was destroyed. The propagation of Christian sect in Goa came about not by religious preaching but through the methods of violence and pressure. Mission activity in India comes in the guise of helping the downtrodden, sick and helpless. In reality the aim is the same — to convert all to Christianity and in the wake destroy all the cultures and religions that lie in the way.
WHY WE NEED GLOBAL SEPERATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
Secular government, first seen in the United States of America, was a reaction to the theocratic tyrannies that pervaded the Dark Ages of Europe all the way to the founding of the American nation. Separation of religion and government were an effort to ward off and prevent any Christian theocracy from taking control in modern times. Now the Christian tactics have changed, but their underlying premise that ‘Christianity is the only true religion’ nullifies all their attempts of portraying themselves as tolerant and loving. The reality is that Christianity has not changed its theology, it has only changed its techniques of conversion. Christian evangelists are now using vast amounts of wealth,billions of dollars, to spread their propaganda.
There is no need to abuse, attack, or condemn the Non-Christian religions. The plain truth is the Christian Missionaries work with usage of lies, falsehood, and hypocrisy. The social improvement facade is only a camouflage or disguise for conversion work.
Now-a-days, in most civilized countries, open and outright utterance of ignoble and unflattering slurs and put downs on the basis of race, religion, creed, or other affiliation is not tolerated because it has been legislated as illegal.
Nearly every single day, rhetoric similar to the words below confirm the reality that Christianity, while posing as a religion of love, peace and tolerance is anything but that.
"These have their idols and their superstitions, their idol-bearing temples and shrines where they conduct their noisy foolish rituals and ceremonies. They generate a lot of evil. They are totally ignorant that Jesus Christ came to overcome death. There is a great need to propagate the Christian Gospel amongst them."
Imagine how different the world would be today without the tyrrany & downright evil inflicted by these holier than thou hypocrites & downright evil men of god.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am grateful to the following website which i have borrowed heavily: http://www.burningcross.net/crusades/christian-missionary-atrocities.html
Sunday, December 10, 2006
THE TWISTED HISTORY OF SCRIPTURE
The Bible is a lot of things to a lot of people, but to Christians it is a source of inspiration and a guide to daily living. To others, the Bible is a historical document and a source of controversy. To others the Bible is a self-contradictory mish-mash of arcane rules and proscriptions, mostly relevant to long-dead cultures in far away places. I favor the latter.
The Bible has meaning to all its readers, but it is important to consider that the meaning it has is formed by the prejudices the reader brings to it.
READ BETWEEN THE LINES
To really understand the Bible and what it intends to say to present generations, it is necessary to understand who wrote it and why, and the cultural context in which it was written. The story is an interesting one, in no small part because the story is so much messier than most of its advocates would have you to believe. And its very messiness is why it is a story rarely told in any completeness to Christian audiences.
MY DADDY CAN BEAT UP YOUR DADDY
The overriding theme of the Bible storylines is the theme of cultural conquest. Conquest by the Hebrews over their enemy neighbors, culturally by the Jews over the Israelites (used here to mean members of the ten "lost" tribes), the Christians over the Jews, the Catholics over the Gnostics, Marcionites, and other pre-Catholic factions, and on and on. And the story of the editing and translation of the final form of the Bible into what today is regarded as holy scripture is a story not just of cultural conquest, but of political intrigues, and not just between competing bishops, but with secular political authority itself.
TOO MANY COOKS IN THE KITCHEN
The effect of its origins, as selected parts of whole bodies of scripture, written by at least a hundred and fifty different people in dozens of different places at different times, many centuries apart, and for different reasons, colors what its authors wrote. Yet that simple fact is widely ignored, both by people who naively follow what they read in it as the inerrant word of God, and by more liberal scholastic theologians, who seek to understand its historical context as well as a body of doctrinal scripture, which they often blindly follow, even though they know full well its messy origins.
Origins of the Earliest Scripture - Prehistory to 1850 B.C.E.
Scholars have traced the roots of many of the Old Testament stories to the ancient pagan myths of the ancient Mesopotamian cultures. Many religious myths abounded, seeking to explain what was then unexplainable. From this context comes the oldest complete literary work we have, dating back at least 7,000 years. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Many of the stories in that epic were
eventually incorporated into the book of Genesis. The creation of man in a wondrous garden, the introduction of evil into a naive world, and the story of a great flood brought on by the wickedness of man.
THERE IS NO THERE THERE
The patriarchs first appear with Abraham, who led members of his tribe from the city of Ur, to the "promised land" of Canaan, sometime between the 19th and 18th centuries B.C.E. The problem is that we don't really have any good archeaological evidence to support the story, and there is much archaeological evidence to contradict it. The population was extremely sparse - no more than a few hundred people in the entire region, and the sole occupants of the area during this time were nomadic pastoralists. We know from clear archaeological evidence that the peoples known as the Phillistines never even entered the region until the 12th century B.C.E., and the "city of Gerar" in which Isaac, the son of Abraham, had his encounter with Abimelech, the "king of the Phillistines" (in Genesis 26:1) was in fact a tiny, insignificant rural village up until the 8th century B.C.E. It couldn't have been the capital of the regional king of a people who didn't yet exist!
I'D WALK A MILE FOR A CAMEL
This isn't the only problem with the account of the Age of the Patriarchs, either. There's the problem of the camels. We know from archaeological evidence that camels weren't domesticated until about the late second millenium B.C.E., and that they weren't widely used as beasts of burden until about 1000 B.C.E. - long after the Age of the Patriarchs. And then there's the problem of the cargo carried by the camels - "gum, balm and myrrh," which were products of Arabia - and trade with Arabia didn't begin until the 8th century B.C.E. Yet another problem is Jacob's marriage with Leah and Rachel, and his relationship with his uncle, Laban, all of whom are described as being Arameans. This ethnic group does not appear in the archeological record prior to 1100 B.C.E., and not a significant group until the 9th century B.C.E.
The Exodus Story, the First Great Revision of Judaism - about 1200 B.C.E.
With all that is known of Egyptian history, there is no evidence from the records that the events of Exodus ever occured, either archaeologically or documentarily in the manner in which the Bible describes the events. The reality is that if a series of plagues had been visited upon Egypt, thousands of slaves escaped in a mass runaway, and the army of the Pharaoh were swallowed up by the Red Sea, such events would doubtless have made it into the Egyptian documentary record. During this time, the region which was to become the land of Israel was populated by one of two groups (we're not sure which), either the Apiru or Shoshu peoples. The former were known to have originated as intinerant nomads, or the Shosu, a more cohesive, well-defined group. The linguistic association of Apiru (sometimes Habiru) with the word, "Hebrew" is obvious.
WILL WORK FOR FOOD
Famine was a frequent occurence. When crops failed it was not uncommon for people to flee the region and head for refuge where crops were dependable. The nearest such place was the Nile delta in Egypt. Time and again. Every time there was a famine in Judah, Israel or Canaan, refugees headed for Egypt. The event was so common, and the refugees so numerous, that they eventually became a substantial minority group. They were called Hyksos, and very clear from the archaeological record. The story of the expulsion of the Hyksos is easily the closest parallel we have from either the Egyptian record or the archaeological record to the story of the Exodus as recorded in the Bible. There are problems, though. Besides the Exodus story line, the biggest problem is the dates: the Bible places the Exodus at about 1200 B.C.E., yet the story of the Hyksos culminates in 1570 B.C.E. It is quite likely that the story of the Hyksos is the story that eventually, through generations of revisionistic retelling, became the myth of the Exodus -- another example of history being rewritten to flatter the storytellers than to record the unvarnished truth. Anyway, the Hyksos grew in influence until they eventually took control of Egypt, which they ruled, with considerable cruelty and tyrrany during the Fifteenth Dynasty, beginning in 1670 B.C.E. The Egyptians had finally had enough, though, and rebelled against the rule of the Hyksos and drove them out a century later in 1570 B.C.E.
NO ROOM AT THE DESERT INN
There never was a "wandering in the desert for 40 years," either. Extensive archaeological surveys of the Sanai desert have never shown any encampments dating from the time of the Exodus, either before, during or after the time of the Ramsean pharoahs. At least two sites mentioned in the exodus story have been positively identified and carefully and extensively excavated, but no evidence of late bronze-age occupation or encampment has been found at either site. Additionally, the Sanai Desert was literally dotted with Egyptian military outposts, it is inconceivable that they could have remained undetected for forty years. The story of the Exodus is clearly mythmaking designed to portray a possible forced expulsion of oppressors as an escape of victims.
PIGS BE GONE
By the 12th century B.C.E., the Hebrews assumed an identity unique enough in the archaeological record to become discernible.. There is little to go on - pottery shows an impoverished lifestyle, with little decoration and use other than as storage and cooking vessels. Yet one thing is clear - the bones of pigs become absent from the archaeological record. The prohibition on eating pork is therefore the oldest archaeologically supported feature of Jewish culture. It is representative of the beginnings of the transformation of the god "El" into "El-ohim," the god of gods, the god of Israel.
LAND OF TWO GODS
In the northern Mesopotamian area their god was "El-ohim," Historians call this early unknown author as "E,". He first has El introducing himself to Abraham as "El Shaddai" (El of the Mountain). He also appears as El Elyon, or El of Bethel, and his name is also preserved in such Hebrew names as Isra-El and Ishma-El. The word Elohim was originally a plural of El. To the south, the Canaanite god Yahweh is likewise being transformed. The unknown author known as "J" has god being familiar with and comfortable with Abraham, and he casually appears to Abraham in Genesis 18, introducing himself as Yahweh. But "E'" can't have God being so casual, and so god first appears as a voice, commanding Abraham to settle in Canaan. Yahweh, in his transformation from a pagan Canaanite god to the god of the Jews, becomes a cruel and vindictive god in the hands of author "J." He commands Abraham to sacrifice his first born son, an act which is not at all surprising given the nature of the pagan religions of the time. Many of these pagan religions (and remember that Yahweh got his start as a Canannite pagan god) considered the first-born to be the seed of a god. Yet Elohim in the north continues to be a much more subtle god, who directs the affairs of men by revelation of the voice, hidden from the view of mere mortals. There is a tension among these peoples, both of whom identify themselves as culturally decendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. One people, perhaps, but two gods.
ISRAEL 1.0
The people of the north, with a much more favorable geography and climate, eventually prosper and establish trading links with their neighbors. Their wealth eventually comes to greatly exceed that of the south - to the extent that they become a nation in their own right - the nation of Israel. Israel prospers to the extent that it becomes a significant trading nation - greatly eclipsing its poorer neighbor, Judah. The archaeological record clearly shows Israel to be a major regional power, one that certainly attracted the interest of its neighbors. By now, the Egyptian hegemony in the region has faded, and the geopolitical vacuum was filled by Assyria. The Assyrians eventually assumed control of the region, with two provincial areas, Israel and Judah. Israel's capital at various times was Megiddo, Samaria and Seschem, and Judah had its capital at Bethel or Hebron. Jerusalem, up until this time, was a tiny agricultural village of insignificance, and, until the Assyrian deportations, was certainly not a cultural center.
HOOKED ON PHONICS
By the end of the eighth century, B.C.E., a Hebrew alphabet appears, and literacy rapidly spreads among the wealthier Hebrews. Finally, after centuries of oral tradition, writing becomes widespread for the first time, and culturally changes everything. The myths are written down and compared. And the two gods come into open conflict with each other. Widespread literacy and the geopolitical events of the day, changed everything. Israelite rebellion against the Assyrians brought repression in the north, and with it, waves of refugees into the south. With the arrival of waves of refugees, Jerusalem is quickly transformed from a tiny agricultural village of no particular significance into a major town, with a religious influence of its own. The arriving Israelites with their gods with El at the helm, and the Judeans, with their single god Yahweh, are now forced to reconcile their religious differences. It is also from this era that the myths of the Old Testament become frozen in the form in which they have come down to us. Writing them down now froze those myths, and it is from this time they came to us unaltered for the most part. For the first time, the Biblical record begins to correspond with the archaeological record.
The Deuteronomist and the Second Great Revision, With the Rise of the Temple State and the Third Great Revision 742-600 B.C.E.
A century after the first books of the Pentatuch was written the gods of the Old Testament are harmonized into a singular being, this having been done by the third major writer of the Old Testament books, a writer (or more probably group of writers) called by scholars "D" the Deuteronomist. If we are going to have a monotheistic religion here, we can't go around having two competing gods, so something must be done. The tribes of Israel and Judah had a choice to make, and Joshua warned them that Yahweh was a jealous god. Which god would it be? In essence, there was no difficulty making a choice. Yahweh was the more powerful, having demonstrated his power by intervening on their behalf in Egypt, and in the desert at Sinai. The choice was easy. It was Yahweh. So the second great revision of Judaic religion has happened. In the original Pentatuch, written in the 8th century B.C.E., there isn't a clearly monotheistic statement to be found, but by the time of the writings of the Deuteronomist, a century or so later, the Deuteronomist has Joshua threatening the Israelites and making sure they became monotheistic under threat of being destroyed. The Deuteronomist pulls off this neat harmonization of two competing gods by having the Israelites reminded that their fathers had promised Yahweh that he would be their god, and so they made him their elohim, their high God. So now, Elohim, who originally was the king of the gods of Fertile Crescent, is now Yahweh, the god of Israel. If you have two conflicting gods, its a neat trick to just get rid of the conflict by declaring they're the same being. A god has to have a home, and the home of the god Yahweh was in heaven. But his priests on earth had to have a place for the ritual sacrifices that were handed down as part of the ritual of the "El" pantheon, as well as the original pagan Canaanite god, Yahweh, which of course had been descended into the Hebraic monotheism. This place was the temple, of course, whose construction was attributed to Solomon, a mythical king. The reality is that it was built at least a century later than the period attributed to the rule of Solomon. The whole story of Solomon, his father David and the events surrounding that dynasty were created during this era to explain the fading splendor of Jerusalem and provide a centering myth around which to rally the culture towards a monotheistic religion, under assault from the Assyrian culture.
Isaiah
In the year 742 B.C.E., a member of the Judean royal family had a vision. In it, he saw Yahweh sitting on his throne, directly above the temple in Jerusalem. In the vision, Isaiah is commanded to bring a new message to Israel. King Tigleth Pilesar of Assyria had designs on Israel, and now the god of Israel had to take up the duties of defending the people of his covenant. Isaiah was commissioned by his god to carry the message to Israel that he is the only god there is; this comes as a great problem to the Israelites who see Isaiah's concept of God as being the very god who had aided the Assyrians in their victories against them. Isaiah is largely rejected with his message, and Yahweh becomes a pensive, introspective god, who invites his followers to enter into a dialogue with him. Isaiah's second innovation was the notion that the commandments of the god should be integrated into the very lives of those who follow him, and not just be restricted to temple observance and ritual. Only by doing so would Yahweh be appeased and Israel saved. This also did not have much resonance in the lives of the average Hebrew. In punishment for disregarding the prophet's message, Yahweh conveniently permits King Sargon II of Assyria to occupy the northern portion of Palestine and deport the population. Suddenly, the warnings of Isaiah are taken a bit more seriously as the ten "lost" tribes of Israel are marched off into forced assimilation in Assyria and Palestine becomes the land of the Jews. The reality of course, is that Sargon was punishing Israel for its insurrection and refusal to pay tribute. Yet even as Sargon occupied Israel his own empire was beginning to crumble and Babylonian power was increasing. The temple and the political process become allied in the fight against the military power of their neighbors. There is no longer an Elohim cult, and the Israelites are long gone. The Hebraic religion and culture becomes a Jewish one.
Jeremiah's Failed Prophesy and The 4thGreat Revision 586 B.C.E. to 538 B.C.E.
Jeremiah's message was that God is dependent on man to carry out his wishes in the world, a view very much in contrast to the writers of Exodus, who had Yahweh being a powerful, independent and even capricious god. He predicted that Babylon would conquer Palestine and the occupants would spend 70 years in captivity. Well, the captivity happened, but it didn't last 70 years. We know from secular sources that it was from 586 to 538 B.C.E., a period of only 48 years. By 600 B.C.E., the Babylonians were capturing bits of Palestine. By 586, Jerusalem itself was conquered and the temple destroyed. But as conquests of the period went, it was not a bitter one, as only some of the Hebrews were taken into captivity and those who were, were not forced to assimilate. Many were allowed to remain in Palestine. Archaeological surveys indicate that at most, about 10% of the population was forced into exile, most of them being the most economically and politically useful.
Ezekiel
Among the first in 597 B.C.E. was a young priest known as Ezekiel. Ezekiel claimed to have had a great vision. It was a typical Yahwehian affair, a great and horrible thing, in which was revealed a plan of action. And in Ezekiel's case, the plan of action was unique, indeed. He first had to eat the word of God. Yes, he was required to eat and swallow the scroll containing the word. This was to make it a "part of" himself. Then his wife died, and Ezekiel was forbidden to mourn. Instead, he had to lie down on one side for 390 days and then on the other for 40. On another occasion, he was required to eat excrement. For a period of five years, he spoke to no one. Yahweh had not just become a violent and jealous god, he was also demanding and irrational at times. No wonder Ezekiel complained about the burden of being a prophet.It seems that Yahweh could not only allow his chosen people to be taken captive, he seemed to have made a circus performer out of his prophets. The irrationality of all this was not lost on the Jews. Exiled as many of them were in Babylon, it seemed that the whole world was topsy-turvy, and practice of their religion was impossible outside their homeland. They resented their captivity and relished the thoughts of dashing out the brains of Babylonian babies.
Second Isaiah or Isaiah 2.0
But a new prophet preached tranquility. Scholars know him as Second Isaiah, he also preached that God was unknowable, hence the irrationality of trying to understand him as Ezekiel had gotten in trouble for. Yet this newer incarnation of Yahweh was a more tranquil god, who transcended the pettiness of human politics, and declared himself to be the god that Egypt and Assyria would ultimately worship alongside Israel. So Yahweh's jurisdiction seems to be transformed once again, from the god of the Jews, then all of Israel, to the whole world, and now back to just Palestine, Egypt and Assyria. The numerous writers of this period became known to scholars as the Priestly writers, or "P." They gave us the books of Numbers and Leviticus, and also gave their interpretations to the events described by "J" and "E," including the account of the creation, taken from the Babylonian myth, Enuma Elish, a decendant from the Epic of Gilgamesh. "P" subscribes to the Ezekielian vision that God is unknowable and unseeable; it is from this revision that we now have Moses shielding himself from the sight of God by hiding behind a rock. It is also from this period that we have the Levitical proscriptions, the cleanliness laws, which do not define sin, but instead define simply what is Hebraic as opposed to the hated paganism (read: Babylonian) religions (it would only be the Christians centuries later who would assume the Levitical proscriptions to have been descriptions of sin). All this new material was inserted into the Pentatuch about the time Cyrus conquered Babylon in 538 B.C.E. and allowed the Jews to return to Palestine.The returning Jews wished to rebuild the temple and reestablish the kingdom it all its glory, but they had a problem. Being still governed by foreigners, they weren't allowed a king. They solved this problem by instead heaping their veneration on the high priest. This would be the pattern of religious practice they would maintain, even during periods when they escaped foreign domination and were able to have their own kings, until the destruction of the Second Temple, centuries later. It was during this period, about 400 B.C.E., that the Torah finally became canonized as scripture.
Greek Influence and the 5th Great Revision of Judaism - 323 B.C.E. to 45 C.E.
Hellenism by now was becoming a major cultural influence. Successive waves of Greek influence, first brought by Alexander the Great, had brought with it a knowledge of the great Greek philosophers. For several centuries running, right up to and including the time of Christ, the major cultural influence was Greek. The Roman Empire brought the Roman form of government, but it was the Greek ideas that the Romans spread. Which brought a systematic philosophy the likes of which the Jews had never seen. Skeptical and secular in many ways, it made a great deal of sense. So again our Hebrew culture is presented with a problem. How can the Jewish god, who by now had acquired a great deal of mythological and philosophical baggage, be reconciled with the unspeakable, unknowable god(s) of the Greek philosophers? The first to sense the tension were the authors of Wisdom of Solomon and the other Wisdom books. The author of Solomon, a Jew living in Alexandria, warned Jews to be true to Yahweh, and that it was fear of Yahweh, not Greek philosophy that constituted true wisdom. Yet the logic and reason of Greek philosophy was too great to be ignored.
Philo Dough
The first attempt at reconciliation was by Philo of Alexandria (30 B.C.E. to 45 C.E.), a Hellene who wrote in elegant Greek, but was probably ignorant of Hebrew and Aramaic, as the Jewish lingua franca had by now become, yet he was also an observant Jew. In his own mind there must have existed a microcosm of the conflict so evident around him. Aristotle had considered history to be unphilosophic. It had nothing to tell us about the nature of God. And to Plato, God was so unknowable and unreachable, it was only man's gift of reason that made him kin to the Gods. How then could Philo reconcile the umanist nature of Aristotelian interpretation with the great epic of Exodus? And how could Plato's unknowable, unreachable God be manifesting himself with such drama as to terrify the Exodian Hebrews.Philo gets around the problem by creating a distinction between the essence of God (ouisa), and God's activities in the world (dynameis or energeiai). The essence of God, as Plato had said, is shrouded in impenetrable mystery. But the power, and evidence of God's existence is everywhere in evidence. To Philo, the stories of the Pentatuch were allegorical, in keeping with the secular nature of history as Aristotle had taught. So the great myths of Genesis and Exodus should not be taken literally. What they had to tell us was hidden in inner meaning; and the spirit of intuitive apprehension was the way of knowing that meaning. It was a neat theological trick, but none of this made any sense to the Semitic Jews. But to Hellenized Romans, searching as they
were for a highly moralistic philosophy of living, it made a great deal of sense. They didn't have to have a literally jealous, blatant, thundering God, but one of unknowable subtlety would do quite nicely. Just give us a plan for living. And so Jewish schools of thought based on Philo's interpretations began to spring up. This dichotomy between the ethnic Jews and the converts to Philo's school of Judaism was to have important consequences for development of Christianity a couple of centuries later.
The Christian Era and the Last Great Revision of Judaism - 30 C.E. to appx. 73 C.E The conflict between the Hellenism and the traditions Judaism was nowhere more obvious than in northern Palestine. This region apparently didn't even consider itself to be Jewish, but rather a separate nation that had been annexed, involuntarily, by Israel. So here you have Hellenized Semitics under the control of Jewish kings, looking elsewhere for philosophical guidance. It was a volatile mix. Into this little region, called Galilee, was born a stubborn iconoclast. He resented the Roman occupation but accepted its rule. He was an intellect who understood at least the rudiments of the Cynic school of Greek philosophy and the complex theology of the Semitic Jews around him. But he would have none of it. He felt that there had to be a better way to live. He grew up a suburb of the capital of Galilee, in a place called Nazareth. His name was Jesus.
Negative Evidence Principle
At least, that's the mythology that has grown up around this figure. For all his influence on the world, there's better evidence that he never even existed than that he did. We have absolutely no reliable evidence, from secular sources, or that the events surrounding his life as described in the four Gospels ever happened. Indeed, when scholars apply the Negative Evidence Principle, it begins to look like the result of late first-century mythmaking.
The Negative Evidence Principle is not foolproof. It is not a proof in itself, but is rather a guideline. Here's how the N.E.P. works - it states that you have good reason for not believing in a proposition if the following three principles are satisfied:
First, all of the evidence supporting the proposition has been shown to be unreliable.
Second, there is no evidence supporting the proposition when the evidence should be there if the proposition is true.
Third, a thorough and exhaustive search has been made for supporting evidence where it should be found.
As for the first point, the only somewhat reliable, secular evidence we have of Jesus comes from Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian. A prolific writer - he frequently wrote several pages on the trial and execution of individual common thieves, but on Jesus, he is silent except for two paragraphs, one of which is a known interpolation, and the other is highly suspect. Other references to Jesus in secular writings are ambiguous at best, or known to be later interpolations, or both. The earliest references to Jesus in the rabbinical literature come from the second century, even though known historical figures such as John the Baptist merit considerable discussion, even though his impact on Judaism was minimal. There are no references to Jesus in any of the Roman histories during his presumed lifetime. That he should be so thoroughly ignored is unlikely given the impact the gospel writers said he had on the events and politics of the Jewish kingdom. So we have to turn to Christian literature for help.
KEEPING UP APPEARANCES
At this point, caution is called for in examining first century Christian literature. This caution is made necessary by the fact that during this era, it was not considered wrong to write your own material and ascribe it to someone else, someone you consider your philosophical mentor, in whose name and style you are writing. Indeed it was a skill taught in the schools. This practice has made modern scholarship enormously difficult in dealing with who actually wrote what and when. Though difficult it is not insoluble, and modern scholarship has developed techniques, to find out who is saying what, when and why. The results have been quite surprising.
The writings of Paul accepted as genuinely his (Galatians I and II and Thessalonians I and II, Corinthians, Romans, Philemon, Phillipians, and possibly Colossians) are by far the most pristine of any early Christian literature we have. They were probably written beginning in the fifth decade of the first century - well after the events of Jesus' life. When the letters are examined in isolation, it becomes apparent that Paul was ignorant of the doctrine of the virgin birth, that he never spoke in terms of having lived in Jesus' time, nor that Jesus worked any miracles and he appparently did not associate the death of Jesus with the trial before Pilate. Only in Galatians 1:19 does he make reference to a contemporary Jesus, and then only in terms of James being the "Lord's brother." The term "Lord's" is questionable as the word "Lord's" did not have currency until the late 2nd century. So the Pauline letters, aren't good witnesses for a Jesus of the first half of the first century. What makes this particularly interesting, is that other non-Canonical early Christian pre-Gospel literature make the very same omissions.
Later Christian writings were written well after the events they describe, none earlier than at least the seventh decade at the earliest. And none of them are known to have been written by the authors to which they are ascribed. Most are second or third-hand accounts. There was plenty of time for mythmaking by the time they were written, so they're clearly not reliable witnesses.
The next stricture of the Negative Evidence Principle is that there isn't any sound evidence where there should be. First, there are no records whatever of Jesus' life in the Roman records. That's surprising,since he stirred up so much unrest. There at least ought to be a record of his arrest and trial, or some of the political notoriety the gospel writers describe. Yet the Roman histories are silent, even though they are quite thorough (Flavius Josephus alone wrote dozens of volumes, many of which survive, and he is far from the only historian of Palestine in this period whose writings have survived in some form). Second, there is no reliable account in Josephus. Josephus the historian wrote extensively about John the Baptist, but on Jesus, his two small references are seriously doubted by scholars as being genuine. Unfortunately, the writings of Josephus have come down to us only through Christian sources, none earlier than the fourth century, and are known to have been revised by the Christians. There are a number of reasons why the two references in Josephus are doubted, first the use of the Christian reference to Jesus being the Messiah is unlikely to have come from a Jewish historian, especially from one who treated other Messianic aspirants rather harshly; second, commentators writing about Josephus earlier than Eusebius (4th Cent. C.E.) do not cite the passage; third, Origen mentions that Josephus did not believe that Jesus was the messiah. The earliest secular literary evidence for a religion based on the man we call Jesus comes from many decades after Jesus' supposed death (from about 70 C.E.). Why, if he had as much influence, and caused as much a stir as the Bible says he did, do we not know of him at all from reliable, contemporary testimony?
The third stricture of the N.E.P. holds that we must have conducted a thorough and exhaustive sweep for evidence where there should be evidence. Thousands of scholars, religionists, crusaders, apologists and skeptics alike have searched for such evidence since the earliest days of the Christian era. That they haven't found any reliable evidence that should have been there says that the third stricture has been clearly satisfied. So based on the Negative Evidence Principle, we have good reason to doubt the historicity of Jesus and that lack of reliable evidence suggests no good reason to accept it.
How is it, then, that the movement began? Why did it grow as it did? There was considerable intellectual ferment in Palestine at the time of the Jesus movements. Many secular scholars and scholars from non-Judeo-Christian traditions have proposed that it is likely that the Jesus myth began as a social movement to 'reJudify' Judaism. Remember that at this point, the temple was thoroughly corrupt, the high priest was a Roman political appointee, and many Jews felt that their culture and religion were under threat. The most prominent movement to 'reJudaify' Judaism was the Essenes. Founded in the second century B.C.E., the Essenes were either founded by or greatly influenced by a "Teacher of Righteousness," to which the Dead Sea Scrolls make constant reference without ever naming. One individual who fits the scanty evidence is a Yeishu ha Notzri, Jesus or Jesua, or Yeshua or Joshua ben Pantera or Pentera or Pandera or Pandira, who apparently had some influence.
WILL THE REAL SLIMSHADY PLEASE STAND UP
There are even several first-century Christian references to this supposed miracle worker. If he was the Teacher of Righteousness, his impact on the movement towards Jewish reform was considerable. And if he was the Teacher of Righteousness, it would answer a lot of interesting questions, such as the scattered first century Christian and Talmudic references to Yeishu ha Notzri, known to first-century Christians as Jesus or Jesua ben Pantera. Among them are a quote from Origen, saying that his arch-rival Celsus had heard from a Jew in Jerusalem that "Jesus Ben Pantera" was born of Mary as the result of a rape by a Roman soldier named Pantera, and had borne the baby in secret (most scholars now regard this claim to be a first-century legend resulting from misinterpretation of the facts). That the first century Christians may have feared there was some truth to this rumor is evidenced by the fact of Mark's obvious embarrassment regarding the origins of Jesus; Mark, the first writer of a canonic gospel, never mentions Joseph as the actual husband of Mary. Note also that it was both Roman and Jewish custom to include a patrilineal surname as part of a person's full name; yet nowhere in the New Testament does the surname of Jesus, (or Joseph, for that matter) appear. There is at least one Talmudic reference to Jeshu as being the illegitimate son of an adultress named Mary Magdala. There are several interesting references to a Yeishu ha Notzri (note the resemblance of the name to "Jesus of Nazareth"), who traveled around and practiced magic during. As these references are Talmudic (from the Baraitas and the Gemara), and therefore presumed by Christian scholars to be anti-Christian; Christian apologeticists have simply dismissed them. But if they are genuine, and they really do refer to Jesus, they add evidence that the Jesus of Nazareth story is really based on the life of Yieshu ha Notzri. Evidence points to him being the founder of the Notzri as the sects were known, and as the Jesus Movements to modern scholars. It must be noted here is that the version of the Talmud still used by most modern Christian scholars, is normally the version known to have been heavily edited by Christians by the 16th century - presumably to remove the dangerous references to Yeishu ha Notzri and his followers, the Notzrim, the account of which is absent from this version. But the pristine version, still used by Jewish scholars, gives us some rich detail. Yeishu ha Notzri was considered by the temple authorities to be a troublemaking heretic. They put him on trial and convicted him of heresy, sentenced to wander the city for 40 days, with a crier going before him, shouting that if anyone had reason why he should not be executed, they should come forward. When none did, he was stoned to death, and his body hung from a tree on the eve of passover, in 88 B.C.E. Note the death on the eve of passover. Note also the hanging of the body from a tree - at the time, a sign of despicability, with its resemblance to the crucifixion myth.
ESSENTIAL ESSENES
The Essene movement was one based on a very strict asceticism. Followers were expected to live in monastic isolation, eating a rough diet of hard, primitive foods and living in very simple, rough accomodations, in the harsh climate and isolation of the Judean desert. Since not a lot of people had a taste for that, it was not exactly a wildly popular movement, yet its social ideals had a great deal of popular appeal. Many people began to adopt the social ideals if not the religious asceticism. Many organized themselves into small groups for social sharing and discussion. By the first century, the Notzri movement had become widespread. It is of considerable importance to note here that it is also known from Talmudic sources and elsewhere that the first century Christians also referred to themselves as Notzrim - lending strong support to the Yeishu ha Notzri theory as the source of the Jesus myth. What they had in common was that they were a social reform movement, and often refered to a 'Jesus' or 'Jeshua' or 'Yeishu' or 'Yeshua' as their inspiration, but we know from contemporary descriptions that they were clearly not a religion, even though they incorporated many religious values.
What is interesting about the Jesus Movements as the source of Christianity and the Jesus myth, is that they were the source of Gnosticism, which for many decades, was considered by scholars to be a Christian heresy which arose in the second century. we now know that its mythology was Jewish, not Christian, its metaphysics was Neo-Platonic and Neo-Stoic, and it shared ideas from Egyptian, Greek, Jewish and "Hermetic" mystery religions, and was an outgrowth of the Jesus Movements. Yet, when one reads the Nag Hammadi gospels we have today, we also read constant references to Jesus, including such stories as the Last Supper and the Crucifixion - evidence that the Gnostic gospels themselves borrowed from later Christian sources. But the Jesus myth's widespread popularity among the Gnostics by the first third of the first century leads to the suggestion that, unless a wholesale and dramatic conversion took place (for which there is no evidence whatever), the Jesus myth was already widespread among the Gnostics by the time Jesus was supposed to have lived and died. He wasn't a contemporary divine Messiah-figure. At least not yet.
The destruction of the Second Temple 66-73 C.E. made central authority for doctrine impossible. So now every local rabbi was on his own. Each had his own response to the rise of Christianity and the diaspora into which Judaism was forced. In certain places at certain times, various rabbinates established local schools and influenced local movements, but as a whole, Judaism split into local factions, each struggling to maintain the tradition as best it could. In the main, the maintenance of a Jewish identity and the basic cultural traditions was possible, but the rigid adherence to a single doctrinal viewpoint was not, since there was no central authority against which to measure local ideas against a common doctrinal standard. So it's not surprising that nearly as many schools of thought arose in the Judaism of the diaspora as occurred in Protestantism, a millenium and a half later.
The Road To Damascus And The Origins of Christianity - Appx. 50 C.E. to 140 C.E.
In about 50 C.E., a remarkable event occurred, which ultimately changed the course of human history. Saul of Tarsus was "converted" to a new religious vision of his own and evangelized the local Jesus group as Paul the Apostle. Scholars agree that this group became the first Christ Cult and there was a variety of Pauline-inspired cults prior to their consolidation under a single authority centuries later into the Catholic church. There is also little doubt that Paul, the Gnostics and members of the Jesus Movements, all considered Jesus, a long dead figure, their highly revered founder. None of these writers directly quote people who claimed to have seen Jesus in mortal flesh. Instead, what had changed was that with the advent of Paul, Jesus had now become available for visionary appearances, and, having been shown on the right-hand of God in Paul's visions, was clearly a divine being, not just a great teacher and prophet, as the Gnostics had heretofore held. By accepting Paul's vision and taking the relatively small step of transforming Jesus from a great teacher of righteousness and great prophet into an actual divine being, Gnosticism became a form of Christianity, albeit one with a very different theology from the catholicised Christianity of later centuries. The form of divinity they eventually accepted, however, was that Jesus was a wholly spiritual being who only "seemingly" appeared to his followers as a man, and exposed himself to persecution and death on the cross. This lack of mortality became known to the catholic Christians as the "docetic" heresy of the Gnostics. It would survive into the sixth century, in spite of repeated attempts by the church and the Empire to stamp it out. Paul's writings are among the earliest Christian writings that have survived intact, and quite probably because they were the first Christian writings in the sense that we know Christianity. They date to within two decades of the presumed date of the crucifixion. Of the books attributed to Paul, only a few are generally agreed by scholars to be the product of his pen, Galatians I and II and Thessalonians I and II, Corinthians, Romans, Philemon, Phillipians, and possibly Collosians. The rest of the New Testament books attributed to him were written by later authors seeking to ride on his credibility and authority.
What's remarkable about these writings is that when considered apart from the rest of the New Testament, they paint an interesting and very different picture of Paul himself and of very early Christianity than that accepted by most Christians. That Paul was ignorant of important details of the life of Jesus or, more likely, those details are simply myths that were incorporated into Christianity after Paul.
YUP, YOU'RE GAY
Then there's the Paul-as-repressed-homosexual theory, the foremost proponent? Christian bishop Spong. This controversial theory is widely reviled by conservative Christians - but it certainly fits the evidence! Saul, the pre-conversion Roman Jew, was a man with an intense self loathing. He doesn't tell us why, but time and again, he describes himself as a sinner who was far beyond any possible redemption. A man who stood condemned in the eyes of God. A man clearly destined for hell, and there's nothing he himself could do about it, especially since his body's "member" would not cooperate. Something was eating at Saul. It clearly related to behavior. Over the centuries, many suggestions have been made as to the source of that self loathing. Few of them are really convincing, they all seem to have serious problems - except for one: that Paul was a repressed homosexual. Homosexuality was not widely condemned at the time, yet possibly his personal interpretation of Levitical proscriptions drove him to consider himself a sinner. Yet when he experiences his conversion, he realizes that by the grace of God, his homosexuality no longer matters, for God loves him, the same as all men. Paul speaks of his shame and his self loathing: his words have a startlingly deep resonance with every gay man who was ever brought up in a Christian environment. This theory alone explains all the strange aspects of Paul's attitudes towards sexuality - the proclivity to a monastic degree of chastity, the extreme mysogony, the fact that he remained single and urged others in his situation, whatever that was, to do likewise, and the frequent discussions of how the "members" of his body do not cooperate with his spiritual goals, and his despair over his inability to effect the changes he would like. All of these evidences are consonant with the repressed-gay theory.
There is no factual evidence to indicate that Paul was gay. The evidence is purely circumstantial, as is much of the evidence widely accepted in Biblical scholasticism. Whether Christians find the theory irksome, troublesome or disturbing, or whether the author of this essay is gay, is really quite irrelevant to reality. If this theory is true, it may well be that the whole of the Christian edifice of sexual doctrine, and even of Christianity itself,is built on the foundation of the self-loathing of a repressed gay man, unable to change himself or find salvation within himself, but finding salvation only in the grace of God. Again, if this theory is true, try to imagine how world history might have been different had Saul not been born gay and suffered the self-loathing.
IT'S ALL PAUL'S FAULT
He utters the doctrines that pretty much will shape Christianity in the centuries ahead, but does not relate any of the 'faith promoting' miracle stories or details of Jesus' life that one would expect of an evangelist seeking converts in a first-century world hungry for the evidence of spirituality offered by miracles and magic. This, of course,is because the miracle stories didn't yet exist. Those stories would come from the gospel writers. The gospel writers were converts to the new Christ cults. 20 years since Paul's conversion, and the new religion has been spreading like wildfire. We also know that none were writing from Palestine, but were all in the Diaspora, and none had traveled to Palestine. Paul traveled to Jerusalem to discuss with Peter the doctrines of his new church, and how they should be applied to gentiles as well as Jews. Peter and Paul had a heated discussion as to just who this new gospel should be preached to, whether gentiles should be included with Jews. Paul returned to Antioch apparently satisfied that he had convinced Peter and James of his point of view.
JUST A SPOON FULL OF SUGAR MAKES THE MEDICINE GO DOWN...
Judaism was under direct threat from Roman persecution and a new version of Judaism had to be concocted that would be so appealing that people would want to belong to it, and so captivating that people would not want to abandon it, even in the face of persecution, and be politically inoffensive so as to hopefully escape the attentions of the Roman persecutors. It had to abandon the temple worship since there was no temple anymore, and it had to be able to survive the onslaught of foreign ideas which were widely available, from Roman, Hellene, pagan and oriental sources, not to mention the many attractive mystery religions of the Roman Empire. The result is that the new religion had the features of what in our day is called a meme - an idea that actually behaves like a virus - it infects, reproduces and spreads itself, and most importantly, has the ability to evolve to adapt to fluid circumstances.
COUNTER-CULTURE
The ideas of Paul and other early conversants apparently communicated back to the local Jesus movements many of which had been converted to the members of the new Christ cult, many of whom were inspired to write against the "docetic" heresy of the Gnostics, claiming as it did, that Jesus was a purely spiritual being who never had a physical body, and only "seemed" to be in mortal flesh. Bishop Ignatius letters contain the first references to "the Gospel," to Mary the Virgin, to the baptism and crucifixion of Jesus, to Jesus being the seed of David, and God being his father. The popularity of the Isis cult, with it's virgin mother of God story, was the inspiration for including a virgin birth for Jesus. The first to mention the role of Pilate, giving us our first reference date for Ignatius' physical Jesus to have lived in the first century. The myth of a first-century historical Jesus is quite likely originated with Ignatius. Building upon the myth created by Ignatius, and to make a flesh-and-blood, historical Jesus real to believers and thereby make the docetic heresy untenable, additional myths surrounding the life of Jesus had to be and were liberally borrowed by the gospel writers from the pagan religions that surrounded them, probably because of the appeal these myths clearly had had for the followers of the pagan religions. Virtually every story surrounding Jesus, whether it be the virgin birth (borrowed from the myth of the birth of Tammuz, a pagan god, from the virgin Myrrha), the miracle stories (found in the Bacchus and Isis cults), the betrayal and crucifixion, were all parts of the pagan religions. The liberal plagiarizing of these stories from the mystery religions was one of the many embarrassing facts pointed out by Celsus.
IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME
Some myths were the result of simple misinterpretations by gospel writers who had never been to Palestine - Nazareth, for example, was not a place name, but simply a corruption of the name "Notzri," with the name not meaning "of the town of Nazareth," but "of the Notzrim", Nazareth as a place name did not exist until Emperor Constantine's mother searching for the holy sites in Palestine in the fourth century, simply invented the name for a pre-existing village. Among religions incorporating a crucifixion myth, were the mystery religions of Attis, Adonis, Dionysus. Dionisus was depicted as being given a crown of ivy, dressed in a purple robe, and was given gall to drink before his crucifixion. The depiction on a Greek vase from the 5th century B.C.E. even shows a communion being prepared. The fact that these stories are today almost exclusively associated with the myth of Jesus of Nazareth, show how both myth and history is often outright expropriated - and even rewritten - by the victors, in their own way.
PULP FICTION
By the late second century, the vast library of gospels, most of which contradicted each other to various degrees, led bishop Iraneus to angrily rail against most of them, and argue forcefully that there were only four legitimate gospels, the ones we know today as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. His reasoning might seem a bit obscure to us today - he argued that as there were four elements (earth, water, wind and fire) and there were four cardinal points of the compass (north, south, east and west), so there should be considered only four gospels. The Gospel of John was included on his list even though it was clearly a Gnostic gospel, but he included it because it argued against the docetic heresy of the Gnostics, asserting the physicality of Jesus at every possible opportunity. Doing so was a very ecumenical move on Iraneus' part, offering a way into the fold for the Gnostics, if they would just give up their heresy.
GOSPEL OF MARK
The first of the canonic gospels was that of Mark. We don't know much about the author but we do know that the author was a simple man, not highly literate in Greek and not particularly well educated, but a man who was thoroughly steeped in Jewish mythology and religion. Not being particularly well educated, his was a world of superstition, demons, of possession, of miracles and gods of the Roman world, and all these had an effect on how he wrote his gospel. It is also clear that his gospel was greatly influenced by the stories circulating in the Christian community as to just who this Jesus was. The Christians were suffering intense persecution at the time at the hands of Nero, and so Mark wrote what he hoped would be a gospel to strengthen the Christian community and give it hope in times of trial. In so doing, he wrote a gospel that was long on the suffering of Jesus and those who follow him, and short on temporal salvation. Jesus was mythologized not as a carpenter, but rather as a carpenter's son - a blatant attempt to confer social status, by not relegating him to the status of a simple craftsman, but as someone who rose far above his circumstance. Joseph is not mentioned, but Jesus is rather referred to as "the son of Mary," a description (being the "son of" a woman) was normally reserved for the illegitimate - so it is clear that Mark is intent on telling what he regards as the truth, even if he has to tell half-truths to achieve his goal. Mark never explains the circumstances of Jesus' birth, but merely says that Jesus came from Nazareth - a misunderstanding of the term "Notzri" making this mistake was easy as he heard that Jesus had been a Notzri, but had apparently not understood what it meant, and assumed it to be a geographical reference. There is nothing in Mark about virgins or wise men or being born in a manger. This is because as Mark writes, the myths surrounding Jesus' birth had yet to be incorporated. He included other myths because they elevated Jesus in the minds of his readers, an important goal if his audience were to consider the hero of the story to be worth dying for.
GOSPEL OF MATTHEW
The next gospel was Matthew. The author of Matthew was a well-educated conservative Jew, trained in the nuances of the Levitic tradition, and to show Judaism that there was an alternative to the Rabbinic tradition; i.e., that salvation through Jesus was possible. It was Matthew's conservatism that was the source of the hellfire and damnation in Fundamentalist Christians. Indeed, without Matthew in the canon, there would be few other biblical references to it. His primary source was Mark. He incorporated many of Mark's myths, changing bits of the story line here and there to better make the points for his Jewish audience. For example, to make his case that Jesus was the promised Messiah, he heightened the miraculous and altered the detail, to the point of obvious error. The geneology he begins with deliberately left out detail in order to have seven generations each from Abraham to David and David to the Exile, and the Exile to Jesus. His geneology conflicts with other genealogies in the Old Testament. If he was aware of these discrepancies, his attempt to deify Jesus for a Jewish audience certainly overruled them.
GOSPEL OF LUKE
The next gospel was Luke. The consummate scholar. Fluent in Greek, almost certainly a gentile himself, Luke saw the need to write a gospel to explain the new religion to the gentile community, and so he wrote one. Like Matthew before him, he had a copy of Mark and used it liberally, quoting long sections and adding twists of his own to suit his needs. Luke was an evangelist. His mission was to make this Jewish sect a relevant religion for the gentiles in the search of a strict moral code by which to live. Judaism required circumcision, an obvious disadvantage. Christianity was simply a natural and harmless outgrowth of the respected Jewish tradition. Because Luke was writing for an official Roman audience and not just prospective gentile converts, he was careful to portray Rome in as good a light as possible. For example, Luke has Herod's soldiers scourging Jesus, not Rome's soldiers as does Mark. The Kingdom of Christ being described by Jesus is proclaimed as being "not of this world," an obvious attempt to assuage Roman suspicions of a conspiracy at work within the bowels of this new cult.
GOSPEL OF JOHN
The last gospels was John. Though a favorite of the literalists, this anti-authoritarian Gnostic gospel ironically takes great delight in poking fun at literalist authority. Skillfully crafted, the work of a true scholar and a deeply religious man, who well understood that myth and meaning are the substance of scripture, not the literality of the words themselves. John wrote in the early to middle years of the second century, fully four to six generations after the events he recorded allegedly had transpired. He wrote with an eye to the growing rift between Judaism and Christianity, and sought to heal it by fashioning a mythology that would be acceptable to both. Quoting liberally from respected Jewish literature and by incorporating the mythology of Jesus he sought to fulfil Jewish law and prophesy. A gospel that broke so completely with the gospels that proceeded it, by directly appealing to the Jews who found themselves uncomfortable with the tightening screws of orthodoxy. The complete set of myths that are so central to the beliefs of many Christians, particularly fundamentalist Protestants originate here. Here is a Jesus whose very being seems to shout, "I am the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets made flesh."
Heresies of Gnosticism and the Revisionism of Marcion - 140 C.E. to 312 C.E.
Right from Paul's time, the Christ cults grew disputatious, as each local bishop had his own ideas and sought to see them accepted. The cult became cults as the new "heresies" spread.By the end of the first century, Romans hungry for a workable moral code began to look to the Christ cults for a spiritual home. Judaism still had appeal, but required circumcision, an obvious disadvantage. Indeed, membership in the Christ cult was a pleasurable affair, not requiring much in the way of embarrassing ritual and offering much interesting discussion and amiable camaraderie involving the community gathering together for a meal and discussion and ritual worship in private among friends.
But which cult to join? Each local group its own ideas. By the end of the first century, the smug confidence of the local bishops in their own ideas was about to be shattered by the very success of the Christ Cults. The doctrinal gulf between various groups calling themselves Christian had grown too great to be ignored, especially between the Gnostic Christians and those respecting the ecclesiastical and doctrinal authority of the bishops. It became obvious that something needed to be worked out.
Finally, in 140 C.E. the leaders got together with ideas of what Christianity was. The controversies enormous, and the debate uncompromising. Marcion said the Jewish god was not worthy of worship. He was to be replaced by Christ, who had revealed the law that Christians should follow, as understood and interpreted by Paul. He was a god of justice and salvation, very unlike the Jewish concept of the angry, fiery, vengeful Jahweh. By now, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke as well as the many others had appeared, written by followers of the new Christ cults, and Marcion brought with him an abbreviated version of Luke, together with ten letters of Paul, to form the first canon of the New Testament. It was the first Christian scripture. The other intellectuals rejected Marcion's ideas, primarily because they were Gnostic and docetic, and therefore rejected the Apostolic myths. But even more radical was his flat-out rejection of early "apostolic" writings where it was obvious that the writer did not share the current vision of Jesus as the savior of mankind. One of the intellectuals, Polycarp, called Marcion "the first-born of Satan" and others, especially Tertullian and Justin wrote extensively against his views. But that opposition did not stop Marcion. He was spectacularly successful, especially in the Eastern half of the empire. The church proved to be as durable as it was popular - it survived into the fifth century, in spite of official and papal persecution.
By the dawn of the fourth century, the local bishops could no longer rely on their watered-down doctrines for support and authority, and feeling the threat from Gnosticism especially in the form of Marcionism, began to contend with each other regarding doctrine. The bishops of the principal congregations headquartered in Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Caesaria, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Carthage proceeded to squabble with each other incessantly.
An Unlikely Savior Saves The Church -- And Spawns The Greatest Revision Yet - 313 C.E. to appx. 430 C.E.
In 313, Emperor Constantine and his co-emperor Lucinius issued the The Edict of Milan which had the effect of legalizing Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. Constantine was a deeply superstitious man, but also a consumate politician. He was a practitioner of several religions, trying to keep his religious bases covered, even after his 'conversion.' Constantine apparently viewed Christianity as just one of the many cults of his realm, and he seemed to practice them all, with roughly the same depth of commitment. He wasn't actually baptized until he was on his death bed.Constantine understood well the fact that the Christians were becoming so numerous as to represent a considerable political threat should they get their act together and become organized. In 312, a year before the Edict of Milan, he fought the battle of Milvan Bridge. Among his soldiers were many, if not a majority of Christians and they were already carrying on their swords and shields the Christian Chi-Rho sign. Well, to hear the stories, the heavens opened up, and the Emperor himself had a great vision, including the famous quote from God himself, "In this sign you shall conquer." And he was granted victory in his battle, which proved pivotal in his struggle to consolidate the empire. Rather than a grand vision, it's more likely that he simply looked out on all his soldiers with the power they represented, with so many of them bearing the Chi-Rho symbol on their shields, and he saw the light. He still apparently remained personally converted to the Mithraic sun-cult. As a monument to his victory at Milvan Bridge, some years later, he raised a triumphal arch, which survives to this day. It still bears on it a dedication to the "Unconquered Sun" (a reference to Mithra) and referred to Jesus Christ "driving his [the sun's] chariot across the sky." He commanded the Christians to hold their services on Sun-day, and to commemorate the birth of their savior on December 25 - the birthday of Mithra.
FIRST COUNCIL OF NICEA
Constantine became the sole Roman emperor in 324 and convened the First Council of Nicea the following year. His commandment to the bishops: Get your act together and quit squabbling. Come up with a consistent doctrine that would be universal, i.e.catholic - note the small "c", and could be understood and practiced by all. Of course, the bishops complied. Rather than risk Imperial disfavor and banishment from the Empire and almost certain death, they all met at Nicea, squabbled, squabbled some more, hammered out a few common doctrines, declared themselves in agreement, and departed totally unconverted to each other's views. The emperor who himself was totally ignorant of the issues, hearing that his bishops had finally agreed on a common doctrine, was pleased. The bishops were certainly pleased to hear that the emperor was pleased. And then they went about preaching the same old contentious doctrines as before. Argument and dissension continued for the next six decades with various factions finding themselves in and then out of Imperial favor at various times, in various places and for various reasons. It was eventually Imperial politics and the wealth of the Roman bishopric, which it shared with the smaller congregations along with instructions for its use, more than theology, that finally governed the form that Christian doctrine would take, as various bishops found themselves in and out of imperial favor at various times.
WHEN IN ROME
By 430, the council of Nicea had become an ongoing affair, designed to stamp out various "heresies" (in particular, the Gnostics) and create a formal, universal, i.e. catholic church organization, organized in a manner similar to the political structure of the Roman Empire itself. The Council of Nicea became, in essence, the enforcer of the official, politically compatible view of how things ought to be, and in essence, the forerunner of the Inquisition. This is why the Catholic Church today resembles in its government the government of the Roman Empire. The headquarters of the church was eventually established at Rome, and the head of the church became known as the Pope. Constantine sent his mother off to Palestine to "find" and build basilicas over the sacred sites of the church's early history, and return with faith-promoting "relics" which of course, local entrepreneurs were happy to produce. The newly established headquarters in Rome set about persecuting the Gnostics (crucifying many of them and sending many others to the lions).
BLOOD & GORE THAT'S WHAT'S SELLS TICKETS
In order to popularize the church with the masses, the doctrinal emphasis was changed significantly. These changes were reflected in the art of the Christian church. When early, pre-Constantine Roman Christians met secretly in Rome, the art they produced eflected the pastoral nature of Jesus' teachings. Scenes of Jesus feeding the multitudes, blessing the children, and healing the sick were the themes in the art of that period. After the conversion of Constantine, the character of the art suddenly and dramatically changed to reflect the change in doctrinal emphasis. Gone are the sweet, pastoral scenes of a meek Jesus patiently ministering to his followers. Instead, images of the crucifixion and the scourging of Jesus in the court of Pilate become common. This was to help the suffering masses identify with Jesus who was said to have suffered on their behalf. The church had became a political instrument -- be patient with your suffering under Roman rule, the masses were told, and a better life for you is prepared for you if you believe in Jesus the Savior. The emporer may not provide good living in this life, but Jesus would in the next.
It is at this time that the Chi Rho and the symbol of the fish, representing the miraculous nature of Jesus' message is replaced by the cross, at the time a symbol of death and suffering, as the principal emblem of Christianity. The political message of the new symbol couldn't have been clearer at the time - join up and Jesus will relieve your suffering in the next world even if the Emperor doesn't do so in this. Fail to join, and you're on your own - and the consequences could be dire. For obvious reasons, the new religion spread quickly in far-off corners of the empire that had barely heard of it before.
Creation Of The Bible As We Know It &Yet Another Revision - 320 C.E. to 1330 C.E. In the midst of all this intellectual turmoil in the church, Constantine gave to Eusebius, the bishop of Caesaria a little assignment. Put together some scriptures for the emperor to present to the new churches he was constructing at his new capital of Constantinople in time for his new festival of the resurrection, to be called "Easter." Fifty copies, please. Eusebius, who was easily the most notorious documentary revisionist of his time, thoughtfully complied. We do not know which books of the hundreds available that he supplied the emperor, nor how much he revised them,we do know that Eusebius realized that it was only a matter of time before the "inspired oracles" as he called them, would have to be gathered together for Christians to study in common worldwide in the form of a scriptural library, a bible. Eusebius was deeply worried about the contradictions they contained and the political dynamite that could ensue should those contradictions become a matter of dispute among the masses, or, far worse, in the mind of the Emperor. Eusebius did, in fact, make extensive modifications of the works he was concerned about, as we have a few earlier texts with which to compare some of his work. As correlation and standardization were the orders of the day (under the less-than-gentle hand of the Council of Nicea), Eusebius could clearly see a very Imperial problem was brewing, and was determined to head it off if he could. Eusebius' revisionism is particularly unfortunate for modern scholars, in that the only versions we have of many early Christian documents are ones known to have passed through his scrutiny.
Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Caesaria, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Carthage all had their own ideas as to what was or should be scripture. And they certainly didn't agree, in spite of the heavy hand of the Council of Nicea. Eventually, after the split with Rome, the compilation of Eusebius was to become the standard bible of the Eastern church. The strongly anti-docetic message of the four gospels favored by Iraneus no doubt played a role in their inclusion. The task of compiling and translating a bible for the Roman, or Western church fell to Bishop Jerome of Dalmatia (340-420 C.E.), a few decades later. Jerome was highly educated and had devoted his life to the study and translation of scripture. He was a deeply devout adherent to the Roman faction, and the fact that the Roman church was wealthy and influential probably had something to do with his being the choice, since he had spent years in the cause of translating scripture into Latin and standardizing what are now New Testament texts for the benefit of the Roman church. We can presume from the politics here that this certainly colored his choices.
Melito of Sardis had compiled a list of Hebrew scriptures that Jerome is known to have much admired. Yet Augustine, himself a credentials, intervened and convinced Jerome to include works on a list compiled by himself (Augustine), which was similar to one compiled by Athanasius, the author of the first Apostolic Creed. Jerome's choice of New Testament works was governed by his choices in the works he'd already translated and standardized for Damasus at Rome. Jerome's compilation and translation into Latin became known as the Vulgate (popular [language]) Bible. It was to become the standard Bible of the Roman Catholic church till the sixteenth century. It is still available, published by the Catholic Church in the original Latin, and as the Douai Version, one of the numerous English translations of the Vulgate Bible to appear in the 16th century as noted below. After the death of Constantine, subsequent emperors, including Constantine's son, attempted to stamp out the Christian cult, but under Constantine's rule, it had become too entrenched, and too powerful and popular to be readily suppressed. The power of the papacy increased with the decline of the Roman imperium as Roman rule was being challenged on all sides - the Vandals, the Huns. The Goths rose in revolt, finally sacking Rome itself in 410 AD. The myth of Roman invincibility was shattered by the sacking, and Roman power and prestige would never recover.
By the middle of the Fifth Century, the Huns themselves threatened to sack Rome, but Roman military power had declined to the point where Pope Leo Magnus felt himself forced to intercede with Atilla, the powerful Hun leader. Totally unarmed, dressed in his papal vestments, he met with Atilla in what is now northern Italy and persuaded him that the power of God would strike him and his troops down if the sacking took place. Atilla's troops, never before exposed to malaria, had no immunity and had already begun to suffer. Atilla apparently began to take the Pope's threat seriously. In the end, Atilla was brought down by the humble mosquito, but it was God who got the credit, and the disgraced Roman emperors, impotent and cowardly in the face of the threat, sort of just skulked out of town and the pope, seeing an unrivaled opportunity, scooted over into their seat. After sacking Rome, the Goths assumed power in the provinces as the Christianized Visigoths until displaced by the rising Islamic caliphates in Spain and Constantinople two centuries on - but it was the pope who permanently remained the center of political power in Rome itself. The pope, the new political ruler by default of what was left of the Roman Empire, set about strengthening the church, converting the pagans and Christianizing Europe to consolidate his power and that of the church, while the political entity known as the Roman Empire slowly crumbled away. The process, interrupted occasionally by various wars and rebellions, proceeded apace for the next two centuries.
KEEP EM IN THE DARK
While the Latin bible was widely available for those who could afford a copy, Latin as a spoken, understood language eventually began to die out among the people. So, with that dying out, access to the bible by the common man died out as well, for bibles were available in Latin, but were not being translated into the rapidly diverging local languages. The church eventually exploited this situation by making the reading of the Bible by the common man a crime, at times even punishable by death. This law was intended to enhance the local power of the priesthood. And enhance that power it did. Not only did they have the political power of Constantine's legacy behind them, the priesthood also now held the keys to the church in their hands, both figuratively and literally. They couldn't have been more happy with that situation. They could often engage in acts of cruelty, repression or corruption and not be called to account by an ignorant and often superstitious congregation. Rebellions against the authority of the pope, including the Cathar Church, a rival to Catholicism which appeared in France, were ruthlessly put down. But in spite of the papal decree against it, there were occasional attempts made to get at least small portions of the scripture into the hands of the masses. The first attempts at an Old English translation appear with Aldhelm, who in 709 published an Anglo-Saxon translation of Psalms, and the Venerable Bede, who is said to have finished a translation of the Gospel of John on his deathbed 26 years later. Unfortunately, the latter translation has not survived.
The Protestant Revision and the English Bibles - 1330 to 1611
In the 13th and 14th centuries, translations of Psalms appeared by William of Shoreham and Richard Rolle, in Middle English. Their popular translations would plant the seeds for the struggle to come to break the stranglehold of the clergy and put the Bible in the hands of the lay people. John Wycliffe (1330-1384) was repulsed by papal corruption and its demands on the English for money. A true man of the people, he decided that the best way to cop a snook at the Pope would be to publish the Bible in English. By the time of his death, the translation from the Vulgate was done, and John Purvey, a close associate, thoroughly revised and 'corrected' it, with a view to publishing it. It became the first and was the only English-language bible till the 16th century.
In 1516, a monk-scholar by the name of Erasmus at Oxford published the first translation from Latin into Greek of the New Testament. What his source documents were, we do not know for certain, but it was probably the Vulgate.
A scholar by the name of William Tyndale had the ambition of translating into English the entire bible, not from the Vulgate, but from the original Greek and Hebrew. This became his life's work. Tyndale learned his Greek from Erasmus. His study of the Greek New Testament by Erasmus probably influenced his later work. Because the Roman Catholic church opposed his translation of the Bible into English, Tyndale was forced to leave England for Germany in 1524. For the next two years, staying one step ahead of Papal persecution, he managed to complete his first translation of the New Testament, which was then printed and smuggled into England and snapped up by an eager public.Tyndale worked for years on his Hebrew translations of the Old Testament, finally completing them in 1534 and revising his New Testament in 1535. While not as violently opposed as were the earlier works, he was still betrayed by the Romanists, and was strangled and burned at the stake after months in prison in 1536. His last words were reputedly, "Lord, please open the King of England's eyes!"
King Henry VIII was the first English king to ask that a bible be placed in the hands of the common man. His motive was also likely to have been to thumb his nose at the Pope, as a result of the fact that the Pope had refused to grant him a divorce. The bible chosen was The Great Bible, a work edited by the less-than-scholarly Miles Coverdale. Coverdale was an associate of Tyndale, and his Bible was the first to be an officially approved bible in English. Coverdale was no scholar, but had based much of his work on that of Tyndale who was. A flood of translations and revisions followed, the most notable being the Rogers bible appeared in 1537 and the Taverner's Bible in 1539. Yet it was another bible was to become the family Bible. Called the Geneva Bible, because it was cheaply mass produced in Geneva, Switzerland, it was a decidedly one-sided translation favoring the views of the notorious French religious tyrant of that city, John Calvin. It had but one virtue - it was cheap, and could thus be afforded by the masses. It became popularly known as the "breeches bible" because of Genesis 3:7, where Adam and Eve "sewed figge leaves together and made themselves breeches."
The King James Version - 1604 to the present
In 1604, King James of England called a conference at Hampton Court. The agenda was to organize the production of a bible that would satisfy the needs of all -- the clergy, the king, the common man. An ambitious goal, considering the widely disparate points of view each with a political investment. The King James Version first appeared in 1611. Though the frontispiece written by the conference declares it to be a new translation, that's not really what it was. In fact, it was a revision of the Bishop's Bible of 1602, which itself was a revision of the Bishop's Bible of 1568, which was a revision of Coverdale's less than scholarly Great Bible, which was a rewrite of the Tyndale and Wycliffe bibles which themselves had been translated on the run. The King James Version did not gain immediate acceptance. It took a half century to displace the bibles that came before it, especially the Great Bible from which it was descendant, and the notorious Geneva bible of the masses which influenced it. Yet it retains much of the beautiful English prose of the Tyndale and Wycliffe bibles, and hence its enduring popularity.
Conclusions
To base one's religion on a scripture as deeply suspect as the Bible, and declare it to be absolutely inerrant and reliable, is to build one's religion on what is clearly a foundation of sand. If the lessons of recent Biblical scholarship mean anything, it is that the history of Christianity and the Bible it spawned is a very messy one that seriously calls into question the divinity, if not the validity of the message. To deny that fact is to simply deny reality.
OPEN YOUR EYES PEOPLE
Yet many people continue to do just that, even in the face of evidence that they and the religion they support are clearly wrong in holding that the origins of Christianity are divine and unsullied by human politics, greed and arrogance. It can only be said that doing so is to display a form of ignorance. What then of the fundamentalist groups that do so, loudly and insistently? Clearly, they believe what they believe, not because it is true, but for other, less sound reasons, the primary reason being that the truth requires the painful admission that they are wrong.
Clearly, believing because they want to believe, not because it is true, Christians around the world are making these fundamental errors. It is a sure prescription for ignorance, not wisdom.
TIME TO GROW UP...FAIRY TALES ARE FOR KIDS
It's a dedication to the truth, that enables human progress. This is because humility is the basis of all intellectual advancement, spiritual or scientific. The ability to admit that you are wrong is the absolute prerequisite to gaining understanding. The presumption that the answer is revealed and must then be supported by seeking evidence, is a sure way to lead civilization down the blind alley of arrogant egotism and the institutionalized error that prevented the Catholic church from acknowledging for three centuries that it was wrong to punish Galileo for defying the pope in publishing the Dialog, when Galileo was right about the sun being the center of the solar system and everyone who read the book knew it. That is the position in which the dogmatic Christian now finds himself. It is up to the Christian to be honest with himself as to what this means for his faith. Believe what you want to believe, because it is what you have heard all your life, or accept what is real, regardless of how painful that may be.
There is no god. Never was. Get over it for Christ's sake.
Amen.
I used the following website article for most of the this article. I condensed, rearranged and added my own comments, please see http://www.bidstrup.com/bible.htm for the original.
The Bible has meaning to all its readers, but it is important to consider that the meaning it has is formed by the prejudices the reader brings to it.
READ BETWEEN THE LINES
To really understand the Bible and what it intends to say to present generations, it is necessary to understand who wrote it and why, and the cultural context in which it was written. The story is an interesting one, in no small part because the story is so much messier than most of its advocates would have you to believe. And its very messiness is why it is a story rarely told in any completeness to Christian audiences.
MY DADDY CAN BEAT UP YOUR DADDY
The overriding theme of the Bible storylines is the theme of cultural conquest. Conquest by the Hebrews over their enemy neighbors, culturally by the Jews over the Israelites (used here to mean members of the ten "lost" tribes), the Christians over the Jews, the Catholics over the Gnostics, Marcionites, and other pre-Catholic factions, and on and on. And the story of the editing and translation of the final form of the Bible into what today is regarded as holy scripture is a story not just of cultural conquest, but of political intrigues, and not just between competing bishops, but with secular political authority itself.
TOO MANY COOKS IN THE KITCHEN
The effect of its origins, as selected parts of whole bodies of scripture, written by at least a hundred and fifty different people in dozens of different places at different times, many centuries apart, and for different reasons, colors what its authors wrote. Yet that simple fact is widely ignored, both by people who naively follow what they read in it as the inerrant word of God, and by more liberal scholastic theologians, who seek to understand its historical context as well as a body of doctrinal scripture, which they often blindly follow, even though they know full well its messy origins.
Origins of the Earliest Scripture - Prehistory to 1850 B.C.E.
Scholars have traced the roots of many of the Old Testament stories to the ancient pagan myths of the ancient Mesopotamian cultures. Many religious myths abounded, seeking to explain what was then unexplainable. From this context comes the oldest complete literary work we have, dating back at least 7,000 years. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Many of the stories in that epic were
eventually incorporated into the book of Genesis. The creation of man in a wondrous garden, the introduction of evil into a naive world, and the story of a great flood brought on by the wickedness of man.
THERE IS NO THERE THERE
The patriarchs first appear with Abraham, who led members of his tribe from the city of Ur, to the "promised land" of Canaan, sometime between the 19th and 18th centuries B.C.E. The problem is that we don't really have any good archeaological evidence to support the story, and there is much archaeological evidence to contradict it. The population was extremely sparse - no more than a few hundred people in the entire region, and the sole occupants of the area during this time were nomadic pastoralists. We know from clear archaeological evidence that the peoples known as the Phillistines never even entered the region until the 12th century B.C.E., and the "city of Gerar" in which Isaac, the son of Abraham, had his encounter with Abimelech, the "king of the Phillistines" (in Genesis 26:1) was in fact a tiny, insignificant rural village up until the 8th century B.C.E. It couldn't have been the capital of the regional king of a people who didn't yet exist!
I'D WALK A MILE FOR A CAMEL
This isn't the only problem with the account of the Age of the Patriarchs, either. There's the problem of the camels. We know from archaeological evidence that camels weren't domesticated until about the late second millenium B.C.E., and that they weren't widely used as beasts of burden until about 1000 B.C.E. - long after the Age of the Patriarchs. And then there's the problem of the cargo carried by the camels - "gum, balm and myrrh," which were products of Arabia - and trade with Arabia didn't begin until the 8th century B.C.E. Yet another problem is Jacob's marriage with Leah and Rachel, and his relationship with his uncle, Laban, all of whom are described as being Arameans. This ethnic group does not appear in the archeological record prior to 1100 B.C.E., and not a significant group until the 9th century B.C.E.
The Exodus Story, the First Great Revision of Judaism - about 1200 B.C.E.
With all that is known of Egyptian history, there is no evidence from the records that the events of Exodus ever occured, either archaeologically or documentarily in the manner in which the Bible describes the events. The reality is that if a series of plagues had been visited upon Egypt, thousands of slaves escaped in a mass runaway, and the army of the Pharaoh were swallowed up by the Red Sea, such events would doubtless have made it into the Egyptian documentary record. During this time, the region which was to become the land of Israel was populated by one of two groups (we're not sure which), either the Apiru or Shoshu peoples. The former were known to have originated as intinerant nomads, or the Shosu, a more cohesive, well-defined group. The linguistic association of Apiru (sometimes Habiru) with the word, "Hebrew" is obvious.
WILL WORK FOR FOOD
Famine was a frequent occurence. When crops failed it was not uncommon for people to flee the region and head for refuge where crops were dependable. The nearest such place was the Nile delta in Egypt. Time and again. Every time there was a famine in Judah, Israel or Canaan, refugees headed for Egypt. The event was so common, and the refugees so numerous, that they eventually became a substantial minority group. They were called Hyksos, and very clear from the archaeological record. The story of the expulsion of the Hyksos is easily the closest parallel we have from either the Egyptian record or the archaeological record to the story of the Exodus as recorded in the Bible. There are problems, though. Besides the Exodus story line, the biggest problem is the dates: the Bible places the Exodus at about 1200 B.C.E., yet the story of the Hyksos culminates in 1570 B.C.E. It is quite likely that the story of the Hyksos is the story that eventually, through generations of revisionistic retelling, became the myth of the Exodus -- another example of history being rewritten to flatter the storytellers than to record the unvarnished truth. Anyway, the Hyksos grew in influence until they eventually took control of Egypt, which they ruled, with considerable cruelty and tyrrany during the Fifteenth Dynasty, beginning in 1670 B.C.E. The Egyptians had finally had enough, though, and rebelled against the rule of the Hyksos and drove them out a century later in 1570 B.C.E.
NO ROOM AT THE DESERT INN
There never was a "wandering in the desert for 40 years," either. Extensive archaeological surveys of the Sanai desert have never shown any encampments dating from the time of the Exodus, either before, during or after the time of the Ramsean pharoahs. At least two sites mentioned in the exodus story have been positively identified and carefully and extensively excavated, but no evidence of late bronze-age occupation or encampment has been found at either site. Additionally, the Sanai Desert was literally dotted with Egyptian military outposts, it is inconceivable that they could have remained undetected for forty years. The story of the Exodus is clearly mythmaking designed to portray a possible forced expulsion of oppressors as an escape of victims.
PIGS BE GONE
By the 12th century B.C.E., the Hebrews assumed an identity unique enough in the archaeological record to become discernible.. There is little to go on - pottery shows an impoverished lifestyle, with little decoration and use other than as storage and cooking vessels. Yet one thing is clear - the bones of pigs become absent from the archaeological record. The prohibition on eating pork is therefore the oldest archaeologically supported feature of Jewish culture. It is representative of the beginnings of the transformation of the god "El" into "El-ohim," the god of gods, the god of Israel.
LAND OF TWO GODS
In the northern Mesopotamian area their god was "El-ohim," Historians call this early unknown author as "E,". He first has El introducing himself to Abraham as "El Shaddai" (El of the Mountain). He also appears as El Elyon, or El of Bethel, and his name is also preserved in such Hebrew names as Isra-El and Ishma-El. The word Elohim was originally a plural of El. To the south, the Canaanite god Yahweh is likewise being transformed. The unknown author known as "J" has god being familiar with and comfortable with Abraham, and he casually appears to Abraham in Genesis 18, introducing himself as Yahweh. But "E'" can't have God being so casual, and so god first appears as a voice, commanding Abraham to settle in Canaan. Yahweh, in his transformation from a pagan Canaanite god to the god of the Jews, becomes a cruel and vindictive god in the hands of author "J." He commands Abraham to sacrifice his first born son, an act which is not at all surprising given the nature of the pagan religions of the time. Many of these pagan religions (and remember that Yahweh got his start as a Canannite pagan god) considered the first-born to be the seed of a god. Yet Elohim in the north continues to be a much more subtle god, who directs the affairs of men by revelation of the voice, hidden from the view of mere mortals. There is a tension among these peoples, both of whom identify themselves as culturally decendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. One people, perhaps, but two gods.
ISRAEL 1.0
The people of the north, with a much more favorable geography and climate, eventually prosper and establish trading links with their neighbors. Their wealth eventually comes to greatly exceed that of the south - to the extent that they become a nation in their own right - the nation of Israel. Israel prospers to the extent that it becomes a significant trading nation - greatly eclipsing its poorer neighbor, Judah. The archaeological record clearly shows Israel to be a major regional power, one that certainly attracted the interest of its neighbors. By now, the Egyptian hegemony in the region has faded, and the geopolitical vacuum was filled by Assyria. The Assyrians eventually assumed control of the region, with two provincial areas, Israel and Judah. Israel's capital at various times was Megiddo, Samaria and Seschem, and Judah had its capital at Bethel or Hebron. Jerusalem, up until this time, was a tiny agricultural village of insignificance, and, until the Assyrian deportations, was certainly not a cultural center.
HOOKED ON PHONICS
By the end of the eighth century, B.C.E., a Hebrew alphabet appears, and literacy rapidly spreads among the wealthier Hebrews. Finally, after centuries of oral tradition, writing becomes widespread for the first time, and culturally changes everything. The myths are written down and compared. And the two gods come into open conflict with each other. Widespread literacy and the geopolitical events of the day, changed everything. Israelite rebellion against the Assyrians brought repression in the north, and with it, waves of refugees into the south. With the arrival of waves of refugees, Jerusalem is quickly transformed from a tiny agricultural village of no particular significance into a major town, with a religious influence of its own. The arriving Israelites with their gods with El at the helm, and the Judeans, with their single god Yahweh, are now forced to reconcile their religious differences. It is also from this era that the myths of the Old Testament become frozen in the form in which they have come down to us. Writing them down now froze those myths, and it is from this time they came to us unaltered for the most part. For the first time, the Biblical record begins to correspond with the archaeological record.
The Deuteronomist and the Second Great Revision, With the Rise of the Temple State and the Third Great Revision 742-600 B.C.E.
A century after the first books of the Pentatuch was written the gods of the Old Testament are harmonized into a singular being, this having been done by the third major writer of the Old Testament books, a writer (or more probably group of writers) called by scholars "D" the Deuteronomist. If we are going to have a monotheistic religion here, we can't go around having two competing gods, so something must be done. The tribes of Israel and Judah had a choice to make, and Joshua warned them that Yahweh was a jealous god. Which god would it be? In essence, there was no difficulty making a choice. Yahweh was the more powerful, having demonstrated his power by intervening on their behalf in Egypt, and in the desert at Sinai. The choice was easy. It was Yahweh. So the second great revision of Judaic religion has happened. In the original Pentatuch, written in the 8th century B.C.E., there isn't a clearly monotheistic statement to be found, but by the time of the writings of the Deuteronomist, a century or so later, the Deuteronomist has Joshua threatening the Israelites and making sure they became monotheistic under threat of being destroyed. The Deuteronomist pulls off this neat harmonization of two competing gods by having the Israelites reminded that their fathers had promised Yahweh that he would be their god, and so they made him their elohim, their high God. So now, Elohim, who originally was the king of the gods of Fertile Crescent, is now Yahweh, the god of Israel. If you have two conflicting gods, its a neat trick to just get rid of the conflict by declaring they're the same being. A god has to have a home, and the home of the god Yahweh was in heaven. But his priests on earth had to have a place for the ritual sacrifices that were handed down as part of the ritual of the "El" pantheon, as well as the original pagan Canaanite god, Yahweh, which of course had been descended into the Hebraic monotheism. This place was the temple, of course, whose construction was attributed to Solomon, a mythical king. The reality is that it was built at least a century later than the period attributed to the rule of Solomon. The whole story of Solomon, his father David and the events surrounding that dynasty were created during this era to explain the fading splendor of Jerusalem and provide a centering myth around which to rally the culture towards a monotheistic religion, under assault from the Assyrian culture.
Isaiah
In the year 742 B.C.E., a member of the Judean royal family had a vision. In it, he saw Yahweh sitting on his throne, directly above the temple in Jerusalem. In the vision, Isaiah is commanded to bring a new message to Israel. King Tigleth Pilesar of Assyria had designs on Israel, and now the god of Israel had to take up the duties of defending the people of his covenant. Isaiah was commissioned by his god to carry the message to Israel that he is the only god there is; this comes as a great problem to the Israelites who see Isaiah's concept of God as being the very god who had aided the Assyrians in their victories against them. Isaiah is largely rejected with his message, and Yahweh becomes a pensive, introspective god, who invites his followers to enter into a dialogue with him. Isaiah's second innovation was the notion that the commandments of the god should be integrated into the very lives of those who follow him, and not just be restricted to temple observance and ritual. Only by doing so would Yahweh be appeased and Israel saved. This also did not have much resonance in the lives of the average Hebrew. In punishment for disregarding the prophet's message, Yahweh conveniently permits King Sargon II of Assyria to occupy the northern portion of Palestine and deport the population. Suddenly, the warnings of Isaiah are taken a bit more seriously as the ten "lost" tribes of Israel are marched off into forced assimilation in Assyria and Palestine becomes the land of the Jews. The reality of course, is that Sargon was punishing Israel for its insurrection and refusal to pay tribute. Yet even as Sargon occupied Israel his own empire was beginning to crumble and Babylonian power was increasing. The temple and the political process become allied in the fight against the military power of their neighbors. There is no longer an Elohim cult, and the Israelites are long gone. The Hebraic religion and culture becomes a Jewish one.
Jeremiah's Failed Prophesy and The 4thGreat Revision 586 B.C.E. to 538 B.C.E.
Jeremiah's message was that God is dependent on man to carry out his wishes in the world, a view very much in contrast to the writers of Exodus, who had Yahweh being a powerful, independent and even capricious god. He predicted that Babylon would conquer Palestine and the occupants would spend 70 years in captivity. Well, the captivity happened, but it didn't last 70 years. We know from secular sources that it was from 586 to 538 B.C.E., a period of only 48 years. By 600 B.C.E., the Babylonians were capturing bits of Palestine. By 586, Jerusalem itself was conquered and the temple destroyed. But as conquests of the period went, it was not a bitter one, as only some of the Hebrews were taken into captivity and those who were, were not forced to assimilate. Many were allowed to remain in Palestine. Archaeological surveys indicate that at most, about 10% of the population was forced into exile, most of them being the most economically and politically useful.
Ezekiel
Among the first in 597 B.C.E. was a young priest known as Ezekiel. Ezekiel claimed to have had a great vision. It was a typical Yahwehian affair, a great and horrible thing, in which was revealed a plan of action. And in Ezekiel's case, the plan of action was unique, indeed. He first had to eat the word of God. Yes, he was required to eat and swallow the scroll containing the word. This was to make it a "part of" himself. Then his wife died, and Ezekiel was forbidden to mourn. Instead, he had to lie down on one side for 390 days and then on the other for 40. On another occasion, he was required to eat excrement. For a period of five years, he spoke to no one. Yahweh had not just become a violent and jealous god, he was also demanding and irrational at times. No wonder Ezekiel complained about the burden of being a prophet.It seems that Yahweh could not only allow his chosen people to be taken captive, he seemed to have made a circus performer out of his prophets. The irrationality of all this was not lost on the Jews. Exiled as many of them were in Babylon, it seemed that the whole world was topsy-turvy, and practice of their religion was impossible outside their homeland. They resented their captivity and relished the thoughts of dashing out the brains of Babylonian babies.
Second Isaiah or Isaiah 2.0
But a new prophet preached tranquility. Scholars know him as Second Isaiah, he also preached that God was unknowable, hence the irrationality of trying to understand him as Ezekiel had gotten in trouble for. Yet this newer incarnation of Yahweh was a more tranquil god, who transcended the pettiness of human politics, and declared himself to be the god that Egypt and Assyria would ultimately worship alongside Israel. So Yahweh's jurisdiction seems to be transformed once again, from the god of the Jews, then all of Israel, to the whole world, and now back to just Palestine, Egypt and Assyria. The numerous writers of this period became known to scholars as the Priestly writers, or "P." They gave us the books of Numbers and Leviticus, and also gave their interpretations to the events described by "J" and "E," including the account of the creation, taken from the Babylonian myth, Enuma Elish, a decendant from the Epic of Gilgamesh. "P" subscribes to the Ezekielian vision that God is unknowable and unseeable; it is from this revision that we now have Moses shielding himself from the sight of God by hiding behind a rock. It is also from this period that we have the Levitical proscriptions, the cleanliness laws, which do not define sin, but instead define simply what is Hebraic as opposed to the hated paganism (read: Babylonian) religions (it would only be the Christians centuries later who would assume the Levitical proscriptions to have been descriptions of sin). All this new material was inserted into the Pentatuch about the time Cyrus conquered Babylon in 538 B.C.E. and allowed the Jews to return to Palestine.The returning Jews wished to rebuild the temple and reestablish the kingdom it all its glory, but they had a problem. Being still governed by foreigners, they weren't allowed a king. They solved this problem by instead heaping their veneration on the high priest. This would be the pattern of religious practice they would maintain, even during periods when they escaped foreign domination and were able to have their own kings, until the destruction of the Second Temple, centuries later. It was during this period, about 400 B.C.E., that the Torah finally became canonized as scripture.
Greek Influence and the 5th Great Revision of Judaism - 323 B.C.E. to 45 C.E.
Hellenism by now was becoming a major cultural influence. Successive waves of Greek influence, first brought by Alexander the Great, had brought with it a knowledge of the great Greek philosophers. For several centuries running, right up to and including the time of Christ, the major cultural influence was Greek. The Roman Empire brought the Roman form of government, but it was the Greek ideas that the Romans spread. Which brought a systematic philosophy the likes of which the Jews had never seen. Skeptical and secular in many ways, it made a great deal of sense. So again our Hebrew culture is presented with a problem. How can the Jewish god, who by now had acquired a great deal of mythological and philosophical baggage, be reconciled with the unspeakable, unknowable god(s) of the Greek philosophers? The first to sense the tension were the authors of Wisdom of Solomon and the other Wisdom books. The author of Solomon, a Jew living in Alexandria, warned Jews to be true to Yahweh, and that it was fear of Yahweh, not Greek philosophy that constituted true wisdom. Yet the logic and reason of Greek philosophy was too great to be ignored.
Philo Dough
The first attempt at reconciliation was by Philo of Alexandria (30 B.C.E. to 45 C.E.), a Hellene who wrote in elegant Greek, but was probably ignorant of Hebrew and Aramaic, as the Jewish lingua franca had by now become, yet he was also an observant Jew. In his own mind there must have existed a microcosm of the conflict so evident around him. Aristotle had considered history to be unphilosophic. It had nothing to tell us about the nature of God. And to Plato, God was so unknowable and unreachable, it was only man's gift of reason that made him kin to the Gods. How then could Philo reconcile the umanist nature of Aristotelian interpretation with the great epic of Exodus? And how could Plato's unknowable, unreachable God be manifesting himself with such drama as to terrify the Exodian Hebrews.Philo gets around the problem by creating a distinction between the essence of God (ouisa), and God's activities in the world (dynameis or energeiai). The essence of God, as Plato had said, is shrouded in impenetrable mystery. But the power, and evidence of God's existence is everywhere in evidence. To Philo, the stories of the Pentatuch were allegorical, in keeping with the secular nature of history as Aristotle had taught. So the great myths of Genesis and Exodus should not be taken literally. What they had to tell us was hidden in inner meaning; and the spirit of intuitive apprehension was the way of knowing that meaning. It was a neat theological trick, but none of this made any sense to the Semitic Jews. But to Hellenized Romans, searching as they
were for a highly moralistic philosophy of living, it made a great deal of sense. They didn't have to have a literally jealous, blatant, thundering God, but one of unknowable subtlety would do quite nicely. Just give us a plan for living. And so Jewish schools of thought based on Philo's interpretations began to spring up. This dichotomy between the ethnic Jews and the converts to Philo's school of Judaism was to have important consequences for development of Christianity a couple of centuries later.
The Christian Era and the Last Great Revision of Judaism - 30 C.E. to appx. 73 C.E The conflict between the Hellenism and the traditions Judaism was nowhere more obvious than in northern Palestine. This region apparently didn't even consider itself to be Jewish, but rather a separate nation that had been annexed, involuntarily, by Israel. So here you have Hellenized Semitics under the control of Jewish kings, looking elsewhere for philosophical guidance. It was a volatile mix. Into this little region, called Galilee, was born a stubborn iconoclast. He resented the Roman occupation but accepted its rule. He was an intellect who understood at least the rudiments of the Cynic school of Greek philosophy and the complex theology of the Semitic Jews around him. But he would have none of it. He felt that there had to be a better way to live. He grew up a suburb of the capital of Galilee, in a place called Nazareth. His name was Jesus.
Negative Evidence Principle
At least, that's the mythology that has grown up around this figure. For all his influence on the world, there's better evidence that he never even existed than that he did. We have absolutely no reliable evidence, from secular sources, or that the events surrounding his life as described in the four Gospels ever happened. Indeed, when scholars apply the Negative Evidence Principle, it begins to look like the result of late first-century mythmaking.
The Negative Evidence Principle is not foolproof. It is not a proof in itself, but is rather a guideline. Here's how the N.E.P. works - it states that you have good reason for not believing in a proposition if the following three principles are satisfied:
First, all of the evidence supporting the proposition has been shown to be unreliable.
Second, there is no evidence supporting the proposition when the evidence should be there if the proposition is true.
Third, a thorough and exhaustive search has been made for supporting evidence where it should be found.
As for the first point, the only somewhat reliable, secular evidence we have of Jesus comes from Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian. A prolific writer - he frequently wrote several pages on the trial and execution of individual common thieves, but on Jesus, he is silent except for two paragraphs, one of which is a known interpolation, and the other is highly suspect. Other references to Jesus in secular writings are ambiguous at best, or known to be later interpolations, or both. The earliest references to Jesus in the rabbinical literature come from the second century, even though known historical figures such as John the Baptist merit considerable discussion, even though his impact on Judaism was minimal. There are no references to Jesus in any of the Roman histories during his presumed lifetime. That he should be so thoroughly ignored is unlikely given the impact the gospel writers said he had on the events and politics of the Jewish kingdom. So we have to turn to Christian literature for help.
KEEPING UP APPEARANCES
At this point, caution is called for in examining first century Christian literature. This caution is made necessary by the fact that during this era, it was not considered wrong to write your own material and ascribe it to someone else, someone you consider your philosophical mentor, in whose name and style you are writing. Indeed it was a skill taught in the schools. This practice has made modern scholarship enormously difficult in dealing with who actually wrote what and when. Though difficult it is not insoluble, and modern scholarship has developed techniques, to find out who is saying what, when and why. The results have been quite surprising.
The writings of Paul accepted as genuinely his (Galatians I and II and Thessalonians I and II, Corinthians, Romans, Philemon, Phillipians, and possibly Colossians) are by far the most pristine of any early Christian literature we have. They were probably written beginning in the fifth decade of the first century - well after the events of Jesus' life. When the letters are examined in isolation, it becomes apparent that Paul was ignorant of the doctrine of the virgin birth, that he never spoke in terms of having lived in Jesus' time, nor that Jesus worked any miracles and he appparently did not associate the death of Jesus with the trial before Pilate. Only in Galatians 1:19 does he make reference to a contemporary Jesus, and then only in terms of James being the "Lord's brother." The term "Lord's" is questionable as the word "Lord's" did not have currency until the late 2nd century. So the Pauline letters, aren't good witnesses for a Jesus of the first half of the first century. What makes this particularly interesting, is that other non-Canonical early Christian pre-Gospel literature make the very same omissions.
Later Christian writings were written well after the events they describe, none earlier than at least the seventh decade at the earliest. And none of them are known to have been written by the authors to which they are ascribed. Most are second or third-hand accounts. There was plenty of time for mythmaking by the time they were written, so they're clearly not reliable witnesses.
The next stricture of the Negative Evidence Principle is that there isn't any sound evidence where there should be. First, there are no records whatever of Jesus' life in the Roman records. That's surprising,since he stirred up so much unrest. There at least ought to be a record of his arrest and trial, or some of the political notoriety the gospel writers describe. Yet the Roman histories are silent, even though they are quite thorough (Flavius Josephus alone wrote dozens of volumes, many of which survive, and he is far from the only historian of Palestine in this period whose writings have survived in some form). Second, there is no reliable account in Josephus. Josephus the historian wrote extensively about John the Baptist, but on Jesus, his two small references are seriously doubted by scholars as being genuine. Unfortunately, the writings of Josephus have come down to us only through Christian sources, none earlier than the fourth century, and are known to have been revised by the Christians. There are a number of reasons why the two references in Josephus are doubted, first the use of the Christian reference to Jesus being the Messiah is unlikely to have come from a Jewish historian, especially from one who treated other Messianic aspirants rather harshly; second, commentators writing about Josephus earlier than Eusebius (4th Cent. C.E.) do not cite the passage; third, Origen mentions that Josephus did not believe that Jesus was the messiah. The earliest secular literary evidence for a religion based on the man we call Jesus comes from many decades after Jesus' supposed death (from about 70 C.E.). Why, if he had as much influence, and caused as much a stir as the Bible says he did, do we not know of him at all from reliable, contemporary testimony?
The third stricture of the N.E.P. holds that we must have conducted a thorough and exhaustive sweep for evidence where there should be evidence. Thousands of scholars, religionists, crusaders, apologists and skeptics alike have searched for such evidence since the earliest days of the Christian era. That they haven't found any reliable evidence that should have been there says that the third stricture has been clearly satisfied. So based on the Negative Evidence Principle, we have good reason to doubt the historicity of Jesus and that lack of reliable evidence suggests no good reason to accept it.
How is it, then, that the movement began? Why did it grow as it did? There was considerable intellectual ferment in Palestine at the time of the Jesus movements. Many secular scholars and scholars from non-Judeo-Christian traditions have proposed that it is likely that the Jesus myth began as a social movement to 'reJudify' Judaism. Remember that at this point, the temple was thoroughly corrupt, the high priest was a Roman political appointee, and many Jews felt that their culture and religion were under threat. The most prominent movement to 'reJudaify' Judaism was the Essenes. Founded in the second century B.C.E., the Essenes were either founded by or greatly influenced by a "Teacher of Righteousness," to which the Dead Sea Scrolls make constant reference without ever naming. One individual who fits the scanty evidence is a Yeishu ha Notzri, Jesus or Jesua, or Yeshua or Joshua ben Pantera or Pentera or Pandera or Pandira, who apparently had some influence.
WILL THE REAL SLIMSHADY PLEASE STAND UP
There are even several first-century Christian references to this supposed miracle worker. If he was the Teacher of Righteousness, his impact on the movement towards Jewish reform was considerable. And if he was the Teacher of Righteousness, it would answer a lot of interesting questions, such as the scattered first century Christian and Talmudic references to Yeishu ha Notzri, known to first-century Christians as Jesus or Jesua ben Pantera. Among them are a quote from Origen, saying that his arch-rival Celsus had heard from a Jew in Jerusalem that "Jesus Ben Pantera" was born of Mary as the result of a rape by a Roman soldier named Pantera, and had borne the baby in secret (most scholars now regard this claim to be a first-century legend resulting from misinterpretation of the facts). That the first century Christians may have feared there was some truth to this rumor is evidenced by the fact of Mark's obvious embarrassment regarding the origins of Jesus; Mark, the first writer of a canonic gospel, never mentions Joseph as the actual husband of Mary. Note also that it was both Roman and Jewish custom to include a patrilineal surname as part of a person's full name; yet nowhere in the New Testament does the surname of Jesus, (or Joseph, for that matter) appear. There is at least one Talmudic reference to Jeshu as being the illegitimate son of an adultress named Mary Magdala. There are several interesting references to a Yeishu ha Notzri (note the resemblance of the name to "Jesus of Nazareth"), who traveled around and practiced magic during. As these references are Talmudic (from the Baraitas and the Gemara), and therefore presumed by Christian scholars to be anti-Christian; Christian apologeticists have simply dismissed them. But if they are genuine, and they really do refer to Jesus, they add evidence that the Jesus of Nazareth story is really based on the life of Yieshu ha Notzri. Evidence points to him being the founder of the Notzri as the sects were known, and as the Jesus Movements to modern scholars. It must be noted here is that the version of the Talmud still used by most modern Christian scholars, is normally the version known to have been heavily edited by Christians by the 16th century - presumably to remove the dangerous references to Yeishu ha Notzri and his followers, the Notzrim, the account of which is absent from this version. But the pristine version, still used by Jewish scholars, gives us some rich detail. Yeishu ha Notzri was considered by the temple authorities to be a troublemaking heretic. They put him on trial and convicted him of heresy, sentenced to wander the city for 40 days, with a crier going before him, shouting that if anyone had reason why he should not be executed, they should come forward. When none did, he was stoned to death, and his body hung from a tree on the eve of passover, in 88 B.C.E. Note the death on the eve of passover. Note also the hanging of the body from a tree - at the time, a sign of despicability, with its resemblance to the crucifixion myth.
ESSENTIAL ESSENES
The Essene movement was one based on a very strict asceticism. Followers were expected to live in monastic isolation, eating a rough diet of hard, primitive foods and living in very simple, rough accomodations, in the harsh climate and isolation of the Judean desert. Since not a lot of people had a taste for that, it was not exactly a wildly popular movement, yet its social ideals had a great deal of popular appeal. Many people began to adopt the social ideals if not the religious asceticism. Many organized themselves into small groups for social sharing and discussion. By the first century, the Notzri movement had become widespread. It is of considerable importance to note here that it is also known from Talmudic sources and elsewhere that the first century Christians also referred to themselves as Notzrim - lending strong support to the Yeishu ha Notzri theory as the source of the Jesus myth. What they had in common was that they were a social reform movement, and often refered to a 'Jesus' or 'Jeshua' or 'Yeishu' or 'Yeshua' as their inspiration, but we know from contemporary descriptions that they were clearly not a religion, even though they incorporated many religious values.
What is interesting about the Jesus Movements as the source of Christianity and the Jesus myth, is that they were the source of Gnosticism, which for many decades, was considered by scholars to be a Christian heresy which arose in the second century. we now know that its mythology was Jewish, not Christian, its metaphysics was Neo-Platonic and Neo-Stoic, and it shared ideas from Egyptian, Greek, Jewish and "Hermetic" mystery religions, and was an outgrowth of the Jesus Movements. Yet, when one reads the Nag Hammadi gospels we have today, we also read constant references to Jesus, including such stories as the Last Supper and the Crucifixion - evidence that the Gnostic gospels themselves borrowed from later Christian sources. But the Jesus myth's widespread popularity among the Gnostics by the first third of the first century leads to the suggestion that, unless a wholesale and dramatic conversion took place (for which there is no evidence whatever), the Jesus myth was already widespread among the Gnostics by the time Jesus was supposed to have lived and died. He wasn't a contemporary divine Messiah-figure. At least not yet.
The destruction of the Second Temple 66-73 C.E. made central authority for doctrine impossible. So now every local rabbi was on his own. Each had his own response to the rise of Christianity and the diaspora into which Judaism was forced. In certain places at certain times, various rabbinates established local schools and influenced local movements, but as a whole, Judaism split into local factions, each struggling to maintain the tradition as best it could. In the main, the maintenance of a Jewish identity and the basic cultural traditions was possible, but the rigid adherence to a single doctrinal viewpoint was not, since there was no central authority against which to measure local ideas against a common doctrinal standard. So it's not surprising that nearly as many schools of thought arose in the Judaism of the diaspora as occurred in Protestantism, a millenium and a half later.
The Road To Damascus And The Origins of Christianity - Appx. 50 C.E. to 140 C.E.
In about 50 C.E., a remarkable event occurred, which ultimately changed the course of human history. Saul of Tarsus was "converted" to a new religious vision of his own and evangelized the local Jesus group as Paul the Apostle. Scholars agree that this group became the first Christ Cult and there was a variety of Pauline-inspired cults prior to their consolidation under a single authority centuries later into the Catholic church. There is also little doubt that Paul, the Gnostics and members of the Jesus Movements, all considered Jesus, a long dead figure, their highly revered founder. None of these writers directly quote people who claimed to have seen Jesus in mortal flesh. Instead, what had changed was that with the advent of Paul, Jesus had now become available for visionary appearances, and, having been shown on the right-hand of God in Paul's visions, was clearly a divine being, not just a great teacher and prophet, as the Gnostics had heretofore held. By accepting Paul's vision and taking the relatively small step of transforming Jesus from a great teacher of righteousness and great prophet into an actual divine being, Gnosticism became a form of Christianity, albeit one with a very different theology from the catholicised Christianity of later centuries. The form of divinity they eventually accepted, however, was that Jesus was a wholly spiritual being who only "seemingly" appeared to his followers as a man, and exposed himself to persecution and death on the cross. This lack of mortality became known to the catholic Christians as the "docetic" heresy of the Gnostics. It would survive into the sixth century, in spite of repeated attempts by the church and the Empire to stamp it out. Paul's writings are among the earliest Christian writings that have survived intact, and quite probably because they were the first Christian writings in the sense that we know Christianity. They date to within two decades of the presumed date of the crucifixion. Of the books attributed to Paul, only a few are generally agreed by scholars to be the product of his pen, Galatians I and II and Thessalonians I and II, Corinthians, Romans, Philemon, Phillipians, and possibly Collosians. The rest of the New Testament books attributed to him were written by later authors seeking to ride on his credibility and authority.
What's remarkable about these writings is that when considered apart from the rest of the New Testament, they paint an interesting and very different picture of Paul himself and of very early Christianity than that accepted by most Christians. That Paul was ignorant of important details of the life of Jesus or, more likely, those details are simply myths that were incorporated into Christianity after Paul.
YUP, YOU'RE GAY
Then there's the Paul-as-repressed-homosexual theory, the foremost proponent? Christian bishop Spong. This controversial theory is widely reviled by conservative Christians - but it certainly fits the evidence! Saul, the pre-conversion Roman Jew, was a man with an intense self loathing. He doesn't tell us why, but time and again, he describes himself as a sinner who was far beyond any possible redemption. A man who stood condemned in the eyes of God. A man clearly destined for hell, and there's nothing he himself could do about it, especially since his body's "member" would not cooperate. Something was eating at Saul. It clearly related to behavior. Over the centuries, many suggestions have been made as to the source of that self loathing. Few of them are really convincing, they all seem to have serious problems - except for one: that Paul was a repressed homosexual. Homosexuality was not widely condemned at the time, yet possibly his personal interpretation of Levitical proscriptions drove him to consider himself a sinner. Yet when he experiences his conversion, he realizes that by the grace of God, his homosexuality no longer matters, for God loves him, the same as all men. Paul speaks of his shame and his self loathing: his words have a startlingly deep resonance with every gay man who was ever brought up in a Christian environment. This theory alone explains all the strange aspects of Paul's attitudes towards sexuality - the proclivity to a monastic degree of chastity, the extreme mysogony, the fact that he remained single and urged others in his situation, whatever that was, to do likewise, and the frequent discussions of how the "members" of his body do not cooperate with his spiritual goals, and his despair over his inability to effect the changes he would like. All of these evidences are consonant with the repressed-gay theory.
There is no factual evidence to indicate that Paul was gay. The evidence is purely circumstantial, as is much of the evidence widely accepted in Biblical scholasticism. Whether Christians find the theory irksome, troublesome or disturbing, or whether the author of this essay is gay, is really quite irrelevant to reality. If this theory is true, it may well be that the whole of the Christian edifice of sexual doctrine, and even of Christianity itself,is built on the foundation of the self-loathing of a repressed gay man, unable to change himself or find salvation within himself, but finding salvation only in the grace of God. Again, if this theory is true, try to imagine how world history might have been different had Saul not been born gay and suffered the self-loathing.
IT'S ALL PAUL'S FAULT
He utters the doctrines that pretty much will shape Christianity in the centuries ahead, but does not relate any of the 'faith promoting' miracle stories or details of Jesus' life that one would expect of an evangelist seeking converts in a first-century world hungry for the evidence of spirituality offered by miracles and magic. This, of course,is because the miracle stories didn't yet exist. Those stories would come from the gospel writers. The gospel writers were converts to the new Christ cults. 20 years since Paul's conversion, and the new religion has been spreading like wildfire. We also know that none were writing from Palestine, but were all in the Diaspora, and none had traveled to Palestine. Paul traveled to Jerusalem to discuss with Peter the doctrines of his new church, and how they should be applied to gentiles as well as Jews. Peter and Paul had a heated discussion as to just who this new gospel should be preached to, whether gentiles should be included with Jews. Paul returned to Antioch apparently satisfied that he had convinced Peter and James of his point of view.
JUST A SPOON FULL OF SUGAR MAKES THE MEDICINE GO DOWN...
Judaism was under direct threat from Roman persecution and a new version of Judaism had to be concocted that would be so appealing that people would want to belong to it, and so captivating that people would not want to abandon it, even in the face of persecution, and be politically inoffensive so as to hopefully escape the attentions of the Roman persecutors. It had to abandon the temple worship since there was no temple anymore, and it had to be able to survive the onslaught of foreign ideas which were widely available, from Roman, Hellene, pagan and oriental sources, not to mention the many attractive mystery religions of the Roman Empire. The result is that the new religion had the features of what in our day is called a meme - an idea that actually behaves like a virus - it infects, reproduces and spreads itself, and most importantly, has the ability to evolve to adapt to fluid circumstances.
COUNTER-CULTURE
The ideas of Paul and other early conversants apparently communicated back to the local Jesus movements many of which had been converted to the members of the new Christ cult, many of whom were inspired to write against the "docetic" heresy of the Gnostics, claiming as it did, that Jesus was a purely spiritual being who never had a physical body, and only "seemed" to be in mortal flesh. Bishop Ignatius letters contain the first references to "the Gospel," to Mary the Virgin, to the baptism and crucifixion of Jesus, to Jesus being the seed of David, and God being his father. The popularity of the Isis cult, with it's virgin mother of God story, was the inspiration for including a virgin birth for Jesus. The first to mention the role of Pilate, giving us our first reference date for Ignatius' physical Jesus to have lived in the first century. The myth of a first-century historical Jesus is quite likely originated with Ignatius. Building upon the myth created by Ignatius, and to make a flesh-and-blood, historical Jesus real to believers and thereby make the docetic heresy untenable, additional myths surrounding the life of Jesus had to be and were liberally borrowed by the gospel writers from the pagan religions that surrounded them, probably because of the appeal these myths clearly had had for the followers of the pagan religions. Virtually every story surrounding Jesus, whether it be the virgin birth (borrowed from the myth of the birth of Tammuz, a pagan god, from the virgin Myrrha), the miracle stories (found in the Bacchus and Isis cults), the betrayal and crucifixion, were all parts of the pagan religions. The liberal plagiarizing of these stories from the mystery religions was one of the many embarrassing facts pointed out by Celsus.
IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME
Some myths were the result of simple misinterpretations by gospel writers who had never been to Palestine - Nazareth, for example, was not a place name, but simply a corruption of the name "Notzri," with the name not meaning "of the town of Nazareth," but "of the Notzrim", Nazareth as a place name did not exist until Emperor Constantine's mother searching for the holy sites in Palestine in the fourth century, simply invented the name for a pre-existing village. Among religions incorporating a crucifixion myth, were the mystery religions of Attis, Adonis, Dionysus. Dionisus was depicted as being given a crown of ivy, dressed in a purple robe, and was given gall to drink before his crucifixion. The depiction on a Greek vase from the 5th century B.C.E. even shows a communion being prepared. The fact that these stories are today almost exclusively associated with the myth of Jesus of Nazareth, show how both myth and history is often outright expropriated - and even rewritten - by the victors, in their own way.
PULP FICTION
By the late second century, the vast library of gospels, most of which contradicted each other to various degrees, led bishop Iraneus to angrily rail against most of them, and argue forcefully that there were only four legitimate gospels, the ones we know today as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. His reasoning might seem a bit obscure to us today - he argued that as there were four elements (earth, water, wind and fire) and there were four cardinal points of the compass (north, south, east and west), so there should be considered only four gospels. The Gospel of John was included on his list even though it was clearly a Gnostic gospel, but he included it because it argued against the docetic heresy of the Gnostics, asserting the physicality of Jesus at every possible opportunity. Doing so was a very ecumenical move on Iraneus' part, offering a way into the fold for the Gnostics, if they would just give up their heresy.
GOSPEL OF MARK
The first of the canonic gospels was that of Mark. We don't know much about the author but we do know that the author was a simple man, not highly literate in Greek and not particularly well educated, but a man who was thoroughly steeped in Jewish mythology and religion. Not being particularly well educated, his was a world of superstition, demons, of possession, of miracles and gods of the Roman world, and all these had an effect on how he wrote his gospel. It is also clear that his gospel was greatly influenced by the stories circulating in the Christian community as to just who this Jesus was. The Christians were suffering intense persecution at the time at the hands of Nero, and so Mark wrote what he hoped would be a gospel to strengthen the Christian community and give it hope in times of trial. In so doing, he wrote a gospel that was long on the suffering of Jesus and those who follow him, and short on temporal salvation. Jesus was mythologized not as a carpenter, but rather as a carpenter's son - a blatant attempt to confer social status, by not relegating him to the status of a simple craftsman, but as someone who rose far above his circumstance. Joseph is not mentioned, but Jesus is rather referred to as "the son of Mary," a description (being the "son of" a woman) was normally reserved for the illegitimate - so it is clear that Mark is intent on telling what he regards as the truth, even if he has to tell half-truths to achieve his goal. Mark never explains the circumstances of Jesus' birth, but merely says that Jesus came from Nazareth - a misunderstanding of the term "Notzri" making this mistake was easy as he heard that Jesus had been a Notzri, but had apparently not understood what it meant, and assumed it to be a geographical reference. There is nothing in Mark about virgins or wise men or being born in a manger. This is because as Mark writes, the myths surrounding Jesus' birth had yet to be incorporated. He included other myths because they elevated Jesus in the minds of his readers, an important goal if his audience were to consider the hero of the story to be worth dying for.
GOSPEL OF MATTHEW
The next gospel was Matthew. The author of Matthew was a well-educated conservative Jew, trained in the nuances of the Levitic tradition, and to show Judaism that there was an alternative to the Rabbinic tradition; i.e., that salvation through Jesus was possible. It was Matthew's conservatism that was the source of the hellfire and damnation in Fundamentalist Christians. Indeed, without Matthew in the canon, there would be few other biblical references to it. His primary source was Mark. He incorporated many of Mark's myths, changing bits of the story line here and there to better make the points for his Jewish audience. For example, to make his case that Jesus was the promised Messiah, he heightened the miraculous and altered the detail, to the point of obvious error. The geneology he begins with deliberately left out detail in order to have seven generations each from Abraham to David and David to the Exile, and the Exile to Jesus. His geneology conflicts with other genealogies in the Old Testament. If he was aware of these discrepancies, his attempt to deify Jesus for a Jewish audience certainly overruled them.
GOSPEL OF LUKE
The next gospel was Luke. The consummate scholar. Fluent in Greek, almost certainly a gentile himself, Luke saw the need to write a gospel to explain the new religion to the gentile community, and so he wrote one. Like Matthew before him, he had a copy of Mark and used it liberally, quoting long sections and adding twists of his own to suit his needs. Luke was an evangelist. His mission was to make this Jewish sect a relevant religion for the gentiles in the search of a strict moral code by which to live. Judaism required circumcision, an obvious disadvantage. Christianity was simply a natural and harmless outgrowth of the respected Jewish tradition. Because Luke was writing for an official Roman audience and not just prospective gentile converts, he was careful to portray Rome in as good a light as possible. For example, Luke has Herod's soldiers scourging Jesus, not Rome's soldiers as does Mark. The Kingdom of Christ being described by Jesus is proclaimed as being "not of this world," an obvious attempt to assuage Roman suspicions of a conspiracy at work within the bowels of this new cult.
GOSPEL OF JOHN
The last gospels was John. Though a favorite of the literalists, this anti-authoritarian Gnostic gospel ironically takes great delight in poking fun at literalist authority. Skillfully crafted, the work of a true scholar and a deeply religious man, who well understood that myth and meaning are the substance of scripture, not the literality of the words themselves. John wrote in the early to middle years of the second century, fully four to six generations after the events he recorded allegedly had transpired. He wrote with an eye to the growing rift between Judaism and Christianity, and sought to heal it by fashioning a mythology that would be acceptable to both. Quoting liberally from respected Jewish literature and by incorporating the mythology of Jesus he sought to fulfil Jewish law and prophesy. A gospel that broke so completely with the gospels that proceeded it, by directly appealing to the Jews who found themselves uncomfortable with the tightening screws of orthodoxy. The complete set of myths that are so central to the beliefs of many Christians, particularly fundamentalist Protestants originate here. Here is a Jesus whose very being seems to shout, "I am the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets made flesh."
Heresies of Gnosticism and the Revisionism of Marcion - 140 C.E. to 312 C.E.
Right from Paul's time, the Christ cults grew disputatious, as each local bishop had his own ideas and sought to see them accepted. The cult became cults as the new "heresies" spread.By the end of the first century, Romans hungry for a workable moral code began to look to the Christ cults for a spiritual home. Judaism still had appeal, but required circumcision, an obvious disadvantage. Indeed, membership in the Christ cult was a pleasurable affair, not requiring much in the way of embarrassing ritual and offering much interesting discussion and amiable camaraderie involving the community gathering together for a meal and discussion and ritual worship in private among friends.
But which cult to join? Each local group its own ideas. By the end of the first century, the smug confidence of the local bishops in their own ideas was about to be shattered by the very success of the Christ Cults. The doctrinal gulf between various groups calling themselves Christian had grown too great to be ignored, especially between the Gnostic Christians and those respecting the ecclesiastical and doctrinal authority of the bishops. It became obvious that something needed to be worked out.
Finally, in 140 C.E. the leaders got together with ideas of what Christianity was. The controversies enormous, and the debate uncompromising. Marcion said the Jewish god was not worthy of worship. He was to be replaced by Christ, who had revealed the law that Christians should follow, as understood and interpreted by Paul. He was a god of justice and salvation, very unlike the Jewish concept of the angry, fiery, vengeful Jahweh. By now, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke as well as the many others had appeared, written by followers of the new Christ cults, and Marcion brought with him an abbreviated version of Luke, together with ten letters of Paul, to form the first canon of the New Testament. It was the first Christian scripture. The other intellectuals rejected Marcion's ideas, primarily because they were Gnostic and docetic, and therefore rejected the Apostolic myths. But even more radical was his flat-out rejection of early "apostolic" writings where it was obvious that the writer did not share the current vision of Jesus as the savior of mankind. One of the intellectuals, Polycarp, called Marcion "the first-born of Satan" and others, especially Tertullian and Justin wrote extensively against his views. But that opposition did not stop Marcion. He was spectacularly successful, especially in the Eastern half of the empire. The church proved to be as durable as it was popular - it survived into the fifth century, in spite of official and papal persecution.
By the dawn of the fourth century, the local bishops could no longer rely on their watered-down doctrines for support and authority, and feeling the threat from Gnosticism especially in the form of Marcionism, began to contend with each other regarding doctrine. The bishops of the principal congregations headquartered in Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Caesaria, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Carthage proceeded to squabble with each other incessantly.
An Unlikely Savior Saves The Church -- And Spawns The Greatest Revision Yet - 313 C.E. to appx. 430 C.E.
In 313, Emperor Constantine and his co-emperor Lucinius issued the The Edict of Milan which had the effect of legalizing Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. Constantine was a deeply superstitious man, but also a consumate politician. He was a practitioner of several religions, trying to keep his religious bases covered, even after his 'conversion.' Constantine apparently viewed Christianity as just one of the many cults of his realm, and he seemed to practice them all, with roughly the same depth of commitment. He wasn't actually baptized until he was on his death bed.Constantine understood well the fact that the Christians were becoming so numerous as to represent a considerable political threat should they get their act together and become organized. In 312, a year before the Edict of Milan, he fought the battle of Milvan Bridge. Among his soldiers were many, if not a majority of Christians and they were already carrying on their swords and shields the Christian Chi-Rho sign. Well, to hear the stories, the heavens opened up, and the Emperor himself had a great vision, including the famous quote from God himself, "In this sign you shall conquer." And he was granted victory in his battle, which proved pivotal in his struggle to consolidate the empire. Rather than a grand vision, it's more likely that he simply looked out on all his soldiers with the power they represented, with so many of them bearing the Chi-Rho symbol on their shields, and he saw the light. He still apparently remained personally converted to the Mithraic sun-cult. As a monument to his victory at Milvan Bridge, some years later, he raised a triumphal arch, which survives to this day. It still bears on it a dedication to the "Unconquered Sun" (a reference to Mithra) and referred to Jesus Christ "driving his [the sun's] chariot across the sky." He commanded the Christians to hold their services on Sun-day, and to commemorate the birth of their savior on December 25 - the birthday of Mithra.
FIRST COUNCIL OF NICEA
Constantine became the sole Roman emperor in 324 and convened the First Council of Nicea the following year. His commandment to the bishops: Get your act together and quit squabbling. Come up with a consistent doctrine that would be universal, i.e.catholic - note the small "c", and could be understood and practiced by all. Of course, the bishops complied. Rather than risk Imperial disfavor and banishment from the Empire and almost certain death, they all met at Nicea, squabbled, squabbled some more, hammered out a few common doctrines, declared themselves in agreement, and departed totally unconverted to each other's views. The emperor who himself was totally ignorant of the issues, hearing that his bishops had finally agreed on a common doctrine, was pleased. The bishops were certainly pleased to hear that the emperor was pleased. And then they went about preaching the same old contentious doctrines as before. Argument and dissension continued for the next six decades with various factions finding themselves in and then out of Imperial favor at various times, in various places and for various reasons. It was eventually Imperial politics and the wealth of the Roman bishopric, which it shared with the smaller congregations along with instructions for its use, more than theology, that finally governed the form that Christian doctrine would take, as various bishops found themselves in and out of imperial favor at various times.
WHEN IN ROME
By 430, the council of Nicea had become an ongoing affair, designed to stamp out various "heresies" (in particular, the Gnostics) and create a formal, universal, i.e. catholic church organization, organized in a manner similar to the political structure of the Roman Empire itself. The Council of Nicea became, in essence, the enforcer of the official, politically compatible view of how things ought to be, and in essence, the forerunner of the Inquisition. This is why the Catholic Church today resembles in its government the government of the Roman Empire. The headquarters of the church was eventually established at Rome, and the head of the church became known as the Pope. Constantine sent his mother off to Palestine to "find" and build basilicas over the sacred sites of the church's early history, and return with faith-promoting "relics" which of course, local entrepreneurs were happy to produce. The newly established headquarters in Rome set about persecuting the Gnostics (crucifying many of them and sending many others to the lions).
BLOOD & GORE THAT'S WHAT'S SELLS TICKETS
In order to popularize the church with the masses, the doctrinal emphasis was changed significantly. These changes were reflected in the art of the Christian church. When early, pre-Constantine Roman Christians met secretly in Rome, the art they produced eflected the pastoral nature of Jesus' teachings. Scenes of Jesus feeding the multitudes, blessing the children, and healing the sick were the themes in the art of that period. After the conversion of Constantine, the character of the art suddenly and dramatically changed to reflect the change in doctrinal emphasis. Gone are the sweet, pastoral scenes of a meek Jesus patiently ministering to his followers. Instead, images of the crucifixion and the scourging of Jesus in the court of Pilate become common. This was to help the suffering masses identify with Jesus who was said to have suffered on their behalf. The church had became a political instrument -- be patient with your suffering under Roman rule, the masses were told, and a better life for you is prepared for you if you believe in Jesus the Savior. The emporer may not provide good living in this life, but Jesus would in the next.
It is at this time that the Chi Rho and the symbol of the fish, representing the miraculous nature of Jesus' message is replaced by the cross, at the time a symbol of death and suffering, as the principal emblem of Christianity. The political message of the new symbol couldn't have been clearer at the time - join up and Jesus will relieve your suffering in the next world even if the Emperor doesn't do so in this. Fail to join, and you're on your own - and the consequences could be dire. For obvious reasons, the new religion spread quickly in far-off corners of the empire that had barely heard of it before.
Creation Of The Bible As We Know It &Yet Another Revision - 320 C.E. to 1330 C.E. In the midst of all this intellectual turmoil in the church, Constantine gave to Eusebius, the bishop of Caesaria a little assignment. Put together some scriptures for the emperor to present to the new churches he was constructing at his new capital of Constantinople in time for his new festival of the resurrection, to be called "Easter." Fifty copies, please. Eusebius, who was easily the most notorious documentary revisionist of his time, thoughtfully complied. We do not know which books of the hundreds available that he supplied the emperor, nor how much he revised them,we do know that Eusebius realized that it was only a matter of time before the "inspired oracles" as he called them, would have to be gathered together for Christians to study in common worldwide in the form of a scriptural library, a bible. Eusebius was deeply worried about the contradictions they contained and the political dynamite that could ensue should those contradictions become a matter of dispute among the masses, or, far worse, in the mind of the Emperor. Eusebius did, in fact, make extensive modifications of the works he was concerned about, as we have a few earlier texts with which to compare some of his work. As correlation and standardization were the orders of the day (under the less-than-gentle hand of the Council of Nicea), Eusebius could clearly see a very Imperial problem was brewing, and was determined to head it off if he could. Eusebius' revisionism is particularly unfortunate for modern scholars, in that the only versions we have of many early Christian documents are ones known to have passed through his scrutiny.
Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Caesaria, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Carthage all had their own ideas as to what was or should be scripture. And they certainly didn't agree, in spite of the heavy hand of the Council of Nicea. Eventually, after the split with Rome, the compilation of Eusebius was to become the standard bible of the Eastern church. The strongly anti-docetic message of the four gospels favored by Iraneus no doubt played a role in their inclusion. The task of compiling and translating a bible for the Roman, or Western church fell to Bishop Jerome of Dalmatia (340-420 C.E.), a few decades later. Jerome was highly educated and had devoted his life to the study and translation of scripture. He was a deeply devout adherent to the Roman faction, and the fact that the Roman church was wealthy and influential probably had something to do with his being the choice, since he had spent years in the cause of translating scripture into Latin and standardizing what are now New Testament texts for the benefit of the Roman church. We can presume from the politics here that this certainly colored his choices.
Melito of Sardis had compiled a list of Hebrew scriptures that Jerome is known to have much admired. Yet Augustine, himself a credentials, intervened and convinced Jerome to include works on a list compiled by himself (Augustine), which was similar to one compiled by Athanasius, the author of the first Apostolic Creed. Jerome's choice of New Testament works was governed by his choices in the works he'd already translated and standardized for Damasus at Rome. Jerome's compilation and translation into Latin became known as the Vulgate (popular [language]) Bible. It was to become the standard Bible of the Roman Catholic church till the sixteenth century. It is still available, published by the Catholic Church in the original Latin, and as the Douai Version, one of the numerous English translations of the Vulgate Bible to appear in the 16th century as noted below. After the death of Constantine, subsequent emperors, including Constantine's son, attempted to stamp out the Christian cult, but under Constantine's rule, it had become too entrenched, and too powerful and popular to be readily suppressed. The power of the papacy increased with the decline of the Roman imperium as Roman rule was being challenged on all sides - the Vandals, the Huns. The Goths rose in revolt, finally sacking Rome itself in 410 AD. The myth of Roman invincibility was shattered by the sacking, and Roman power and prestige would never recover.
By the middle of the Fifth Century, the Huns themselves threatened to sack Rome, but Roman military power had declined to the point where Pope Leo Magnus felt himself forced to intercede with Atilla, the powerful Hun leader. Totally unarmed, dressed in his papal vestments, he met with Atilla in what is now northern Italy and persuaded him that the power of God would strike him and his troops down if the sacking took place. Atilla's troops, never before exposed to malaria, had no immunity and had already begun to suffer. Atilla apparently began to take the Pope's threat seriously. In the end, Atilla was brought down by the humble mosquito, but it was God who got the credit, and the disgraced Roman emperors, impotent and cowardly in the face of the threat, sort of just skulked out of town and the pope, seeing an unrivaled opportunity, scooted over into their seat. After sacking Rome, the Goths assumed power in the provinces as the Christianized Visigoths until displaced by the rising Islamic caliphates in Spain and Constantinople two centuries on - but it was the pope who permanently remained the center of political power in Rome itself. The pope, the new political ruler by default of what was left of the Roman Empire, set about strengthening the church, converting the pagans and Christianizing Europe to consolidate his power and that of the church, while the political entity known as the Roman Empire slowly crumbled away. The process, interrupted occasionally by various wars and rebellions, proceeded apace for the next two centuries.
KEEP EM IN THE DARK
While the Latin bible was widely available for those who could afford a copy, Latin as a spoken, understood language eventually began to die out among the people. So, with that dying out, access to the bible by the common man died out as well, for bibles were available in Latin, but were not being translated into the rapidly diverging local languages. The church eventually exploited this situation by making the reading of the Bible by the common man a crime, at times even punishable by death. This law was intended to enhance the local power of the priesthood. And enhance that power it did. Not only did they have the political power of Constantine's legacy behind them, the priesthood also now held the keys to the church in their hands, both figuratively and literally. They couldn't have been more happy with that situation. They could often engage in acts of cruelty, repression or corruption and not be called to account by an ignorant and often superstitious congregation. Rebellions against the authority of the pope, including the Cathar Church, a rival to Catholicism which appeared in France, were ruthlessly put down. But in spite of the papal decree against it, there were occasional attempts made to get at least small portions of the scripture into the hands of the masses. The first attempts at an Old English translation appear with Aldhelm, who in 709 published an Anglo-Saxon translation of Psalms, and the Venerable Bede, who is said to have finished a translation of the Gospel of John on his deathbed 26 years later. Unfortunately, the latter translation has not survived.
The Protestant Revision and the English Bibles - 1330 to 1611
In the 13th and 14th centuries, translations of Psalms appeared by William of Shoreham and Richard Rolle, in Middle English. Their popular translations would plant the seeds for the struggle to come to break the stranglehold of the clergy and put the Bible in the hands of the lay people. John Wycliffe (1330-1384) was repulsed by papal corruption and its demands on the English for money. A true man of the people, he decided that the best way to cop a snook at the Pope would be to publish the Bible in English. By the time of his death, the translation from the Vulgate was done, and John Purvey, a close associate, thoroughly revised and 'corrected' it, with a view to publishing it. It became the first and was the only English-language bible till the 16th century.
In 1516, a monk-scholar by the name of Erasmus at Oxford published the first translation from Latin into Greek of the New Testament. What his source documents were, we do not know for certain, but it was probably the Vulgate.
A scholar by the name of William Tyndale had the ambition of translating into English the entire bible, not from the Vulgate, but from the original Greek and Hebrew. This became his life's work. Tyndale learned his Greek from Erasmus. His study of the Greek New Testament by Erasmus probably influenced his later work. Because the Roman Catholic church opposed his translation of the Bible into English, Tyndale was forced to leave England for Germany in 1524. For the next two years, staying one step ahead of Papal persecution, he managed to complete his first translation of the New Testament, which was then printed and smuggled into England and snapped up by an eager public.Tyndale worked for years on his Hebrew translations of the Old Testament, finally completing them in 1534 and revising his New Testament in 1535. While not as violently opposed as were the earlier works, he was still betrayed by the Romanists, and was strangled and burned at the stake after months in prison in 1536. His last words were reputedly, "Lord, please open the King of England's eyes!"
King Henry VIII was the first English king to ask that a bible be placed in the hands of the common man. His motive was also likely to have been to thumb his nose at the Pope, as a result of the fact that the Pope had refused to grant him a divorce. The bible chosen was The Great Bible, a work edited by the less-than-scholarly Miles Coverdale. Coverdale was an associate of Tyndale, and his Bible was the first to be an officially approved bible in English. Coverdale was no scholar, but had based much of his work on that of Tyndale who was. A flood of translations and revisions followed, the most notable being the Rogers bible appeared in 1537 and the Taverner's Bible in 1539. Yet it was another bible was to become the family Bible. Called the Geneva Bible, because it was cheaply mass produced in Geneva, Switzerland, it was a decidedly one-sided translation favoring the views of the notorious French religious tyrant of that city, John Calvin. It had but one virtue - it was cheap, and could thus be afforded by the masses. It became popularly known as the "breeches bible" because of Genesis 3:7, where Adam and Eve "sewed figge leaves together and made themselves breeches."
The King James Version - 1604 to the present
In 1604, King James of England called a conference at Hampton Court. The agenda was to organize the production of a bible that would satisfy the needs of all -- the clergy, the king, the common man. An ambitious goal, considering the widely disparate points of view each with a political investment. The King James Version first appeared in 1611. Though the frontispiece written by the conference declares it to be a new translation, that's not really what it was. In fact, it was a revision of the Bishop's Bible of 1602, which itself was a revision of the Bishop's Bible of 1568, which was a revision of Coverdale's less than scholarly Great Bible, which was a rewrite of the Tyndale and Wycliffe bibles which themselves had been translated on the run. The King James Version did not gain immediate acceptance. It took a half century to displace the bibles that came before it, especially the Great Bible from which it was descendant, and the notorious Geneva bible of the masses which influenced it. Yet it retains much of the beautiful English prose of the Tyndale and Wycliffe bibles, and hence its enduring popularity.
Conclusions
To base one's religion on a scripture as deeply suspect as the Bible, and declare it to be absolutely inerrant and reliable, is to build one's religion on what is clearly a foundation of sand. If the lessons of recent Biblical scholarship mean anything, it is that the history of Christianity and the Bible it spawned is a very messy one that seriously calls into question the divinity, if not the validity of the message. To deny that fact is to simply deny reality.
OPEN YOUR EYES PEOPLE
Yet many people continue to do just that, even in the face of evidence that they and the religion they support are clearly wrong in holding that the origins of Christianity are divine and unsullied by human politics, greed and arrogance. It can only be said that doing so is to display a form of ignorance. What then of the fundamentalist groups that do so, loudly and insistently? Clearly, they believe what they believe, not because it is true, but for other, less sound reasons, the primary reason being that the truth requires the painful admission that they are wrong.
Clearly, believing because they want to believe, not because it is true, Christians around the world are making these fundamental errors. It is a sure prescription for ignorance, not wisdom.
TIME TO GROW UP...FAIRY TALES ARE FOR KIDS
It's a dedication to the truth, that enables human progress. This is because humility is the basis of all intellectual advancement, spiritual or scientific. The ability to admit that you are wrong is the absolute prerequisite to gaining understanding. The presumption that the answer is revealed and must then be supported by seeking evidence, is a sure way to lead civilization down the blind alley of arrogant egotism and the institutionalized error that prevented the Catholic church from acknowledging for three centuries that it was wrong to punish Galileo for defying the pope in publishing the Dialog, when Galileo was right about the sun being the center of the solar system and everyone who read the book knew it. That is the position in which the dogmatic Christian now finds himself. It is up to the Christian to be honest with himself as to what this means for his faith. Believe what you want to believe, because it is what you have heard all your life, or accept what is real, regardless of how painful that may be.
There is no god. Never was. Get over it for Christ's sake.
Amen.
I used the following website article for most of the this article. I condensed, rearranged and added my own comments, please see http://www.bidstrup.com/bible.htm for the original.
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