Seal Suggests Jewish Temple Business Transacted in Aramaic not Hebrew

Israeli archaeologist Ronny Reich of Haifa University has found near the Western Wall under Jerusalem’s Old City a rare clay seal that they say came from the Jewish Temple 2,000 years ago—between the first century BC and 70 AD—because it bears the inscription “pure for God”. The upper terminus is set by the closing of the temple by the Romans after the Jewish War.

This is the first such seal found dating from this period. Very many seals from apparently earlier periods are known, but regrettably so many of them are fakes, no one can be sure that any are genuine unless they have been found in situ. As it is, Reich, the co-director of the excavation opines that seal indicates temple ritual, signifying that Temple officials had approved some thing for temple use, like oil or a sacrificial beast. Offerings to God—for the benefit of the priests, in fact—had to be pure and perfect.

Curiously, though, the inscribed words are written in Aramaic and not Hebrew, as one might expect for ritual relics associated with the Jewish religion for which Hebrew was and still is the sacred language. The part of the Jewish Talmuds called the Mishna mentions the use of seals as tokens by diaspora pilgrims, who would have predominantly spoken Greek or Aramaic. However, it would have been the local people, Palestinian Jews, who gave animals, it being far more convenient for pilgrims from afar, maybe overseas, to give money. Presumably a priest was only capable of judging whether an animal was suitable for sacrifice, and logically they would have had seals inscribed in Hebrew. It suggests that Hebrew was only nominally the sacred language, Aramaic serving in practice.

Not Christian, Rich Christian, Poor Christian, Christian

“Blessed are the Poor” is not…
”Blessed are the Rich!”

Having read the gospel message of the active life of Christ, just how can American billionaire Republicans and their kin here in the UK succeed in fooling everyone that they can be Christians at all? Yet they pass off the message that the capitalist dog-eat-dog system of treating people as objects for exploitation is compatible with Christ’s teaching of treating people as objects of kindness and love. Nothing seems so easy as the ease by which the rich perpetually fool the poor into believing what is utterly against their best interests, including the nature of Christianity.

Neoconservative Atheist Christopher Hitchens on Zionism

Naughty boy British establishment Trotskyist turned celebrity American establishment neoconservative, and professional atheist, Christopher Hitchens died on 15 December 2011 of cancer of the œsophagus. A brilliant wordsmith and controversialist, Hitchens was a consistent anticommunist whose move to the US led to his abandonment of left wing communism in favour of open Bush/Cheney neoconservatism—a common path for Trotskyists in the USA—but he did seem to remain anti-Zionist throughout:

I am an anti-Zionist. I’m one of those people of Jewish descent who believes that Zionism would be a mistake even if there were no Palestinians.

One of the advantages of a Marxist and internationalist training is that it exposes one to the early writings of those Jewish cosmopolitans who warned from the first day that Zionism would be a false messiah for the Jews and an injustice to the Arabs. Nothing suggests to me that they were wrong on these crucial points.

And likening the United States leaders to the shabbos goy, the sabbath day gentile for the state of Israel:

The non-Jew who is paid a trifling fee to turn out the lights or turn on the stove, or whatever else is needful to get around the more annoying regulations [for Jews] of the Sabbath. How the old buzzard must cackle when he sees the gentiles actually volunteering a bribe to do the lowly work! And lowly it is, involving the tearing-up of international law and UN resolutions and election promises, and the further dispossession and eviction of a people to whom we gave our word…

Saint David Cameron Tells the British to Practice What He Preaches

David Cameron, British Tory Prime Minister, in a speech to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, said, “Britain is a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so”, thereby proving that he either hasn’t a clue about what Britain is like outside his own narrow circle of rich boys, or he is trying to get Britain to go the way of the US, trying to foment sectarian squabbling to detract attention from the greed of his own class and the incompetence of his own government.

Lecturing Church of England clergy in Oxford, he claimed that Britain is in a “moral collapse” requiring a “return to Christian values” and condemned “passive tolerance” of immoral behaviour, in, for example, the summer riots, Islamic extremism, City excess and Westminster scandals. Well the balance here is admirably fair, but what about his own response. He’s been the ruler of the UK for the last two years, and, even if his knowledge of working people’s lives is negligible, he ought to have the knowledge and the power to sort out his own lot, the banking and financial sectors and the feeble opportunists who become MPs these days for their own aggrandizement and not through any idea of community service.

Cameron argues that the King James translation of the Bible is responsible for much of the English we have used in the last 400 years, something that few would disagree with, although its influence was forced home through periods of intense Protestant sectarianism, and the witch hunts, leaving people with little choice but to toe the line and be devout little Calvinists, Anglicans or Methodists, or suffer unpleasant consequences. Besides that, he thinks our politics have been steeped in the bible too. Well certainly all that Protestant intoleration and indoctrination shaped the growth of capitalism, and the British Parliamentary system, but it takes quite a bit of one-eyedness to see how this springs from the teaching of Christ—it being almost diametrically opposite to his teaching—although material wealth, and by implication greed, is deemed as God given in the Jewish religion from which Christianity emerged. Even so, rich Jews had a sacred duty to leave something for the poor. But those like Philip Green, the chain store owner—along with his wife who lives in the tax haven of Monaco, accumulators of around £4 billion—considers his duty to be to evade the payment of around £200 million a year to the British exchequer. And is Cameron’s fondness for invading Arab countries anything to do with morality, or just greed driven opportunism like that of his predecessor, Tony Blair?

Cameron pleads that he is not attacking members of other religions—and none—by claiming Britain is a Christian country, but merely that “the Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today”. It would take a clever man to be able to say which parts of the bible have had the dominant effect on anyone’s morals in the last 400 years. The Christian bible, supposedly centred on the person of Christ, considered by Christians to have been God incarnate, teaches that the poor are blessed and the rich have as much chance as a camel getting through the eye of a needle of entering into God’s presence. Instead they have always taught the same pseudo-mystery as the ancient dying and rising gods like Adonis and Attis—merely by dying and rising up again, we are saved from future death, just as the world renovates itself from death every year.

So Pauline Christianity requires no morals at all. Salvation is assured by faith in the myth. Christ required Christians to be moral. He explicitly tells the rich that they cannot remain rich and be saved. The whole purpose of Christian life is service of other people. That is what we should all do—it is the purpose of society—and not waste our talents on exploiting those who are less fortunate and less talented than us, for personal gain. It is something that Cameron, if he chose, could give a lead on. Ha! That is not the morality he means. He is coming from the Old Testament, the Jewish scriptures, which demanded obedience of the law. That is Christianity to him, and it is selectively applied—it applies to poor jobless rioters, but not to bloated financiers who do nothing useful but electronically shipping junk bonds hither and thither, getting bonuses for every pointless criminal transaction.

Cameron thinks faith is neither a “necessary nor sufficient condition for morality”but could be a “helpful prod in the right direction”. That might be so as long as he knows what the right direction is, but he evidently does not know it, or he does not know the direction indicated by the God of the Christians, though he professes to be one. Cameron continues:

Whether you look at the riots last summer, the financial crash and the expenses scandal, or the ongoing terrorist threat from Islamist extremists around the world, one thing is clear—moral neutrality or passive tolerance just isn’t going to cut it anymore.

And:

The absence of any real accountability, or moral code, allowed some bankers and politicians to behave with scant regard for the rest of society. And when it comes to fighting violent extremism, the almost fearful passive tolerance of religious extremism that has allowed segregated communities to behave in ways that run completely counter to our values has not contained that extremism but allowed it to grow and prosper.

At first glance, it looks deceptively fair, but again, the buck stops with him—he is the one to whom everyone is accountable in a modern secular society. He as leader of the Queen’s government has had the authority to act where his newly promoted moral stance could have an obvious effect, in the city of London, and in taxing the rich proportionately to their wealth so that “we are indeed all in it together” as leaders like him keep chanting, and redistributing the money in this manner in the tried and tested way—by stimulating the base of the economy, creating jobs in essential public works as J M Keynes showed.

If his audience are to be willing to distinguish right from wrong, then he should show them that he can, by rectifying the imbalance of wealth in the country. He has no intention of doing any such thing. While showboating about not agreeing with the Euro Zone countries, he continues supporting city bankers and his own bloated capitalist interests, glorying in the praise of the media barons whose sole purpose is to confuse and indoctrinate the ordinary person.

Needless to say, despite his new found interest in the value of Christianity to Britain, he was less insistent about its place in his personal life. He admitted to the flock of CofE shepherds he was a “committed but vaguely practising Church of England Christian” who, while he would stand up for the values and principles of his faith, was “full of doubts and, like many, constantly grappling with the difficult questions when it comes to some of the big theological issues”. He means that he is not going to accept the codswallop of heaven and hell, and therefore has no worries about his failure to practice what the incarnated Christian God taught, except vaguely, of course.

Greek Terracotta Figurines on Delos Testify to Pre-Christian Religious Tolerance

In the second century BC, residents on the Greek island of Delos saw nothing wrong with using others’ gods in their prayers. Caitlin Barrett, Cornell assistant professor of classics and author of Egyptianizing Figurines From Delos: A Study in Hellenistic Religion, examined terracotta figurines found on Delos to determine what influence Egypt’s religion had on the Hellenized inhabitants and their daily lives.

Terracotta figurines are potential evidence for the religious ideas of a wide swath of the population, not just the rich. Such inexpensive figurines were accessible to many because they could be made rapidly and in bulk. Figurines of Egyptian gods appear as offerings at Greek gods’ temples on Delos and vice versa. Barrett explains:

The fact that somebody’s dedicating a figurine of a Greek goddess like Aphrodite to an Egyptian goddess like Isis suggests that the two were associated, or at least that their worship wasn’t considered incompatible. Greeks saw these other gods not as alternatives to the Greek pantheon but as something compatible with their own traditions.

The religious wars raging around the globe today and ingrained religious intolerance attest to the current rigidity of religions, the consequence of the intolerant tradition of Judaism with its jealous god entering the west via Christianity—Judaism for goyim—and displacing the tolerance of Hellenism. At this earlier period the tendency in Egypt and Greece was the other way—towards toleration. Barrett notes:

What’s interesting is the degree to which these foreigners—Italians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Syrians and Jews—interacted with each other’s deities and the cross pollination among worshipers.

Although most of the figurines were produced by local craftspeople, many of them have iconography reminiscent of Egyptian deities. The Græco-Macedonian Ptolemies ruling Egypt at this time worshiped the Greek gods, while ceremonially serving the traditional Egyptian pantheon. Barrett says:

This led to the creation of syncretic imagery that combined aspects of both Greek and Egyptian traditions, and that could speak to members of this heterogeneous population. Some of that imagery wound up becoming hugely popular in the rest of the Mediterranean as well.

Delian craftsmen used techniques of figurine manufacture and conventions of artistic style that derive from Greek traditions, while conveying concepts that are fundamentally Egyptian. Barrett explains that Egyptians depicted children like adults with a finger to their mouth—because babies put their fingers in their mouths—rather than smaller and with the features of a child. However, in truth, Later Greek writers misinterpreted figurines of Harpocrates as a child to mean, from the characteristic gesture of his forefinger to his lips, that he was silencing people, and he became thought of as the god of silence and secrecy. To the Egyptians he was the symbol of the reborn sun and early vegetation, whence the upturned torch in the illustration (not a figurine from Delos), and his being a child (in the illustration having childish features and an Egyptian side lock of hair).

To pretend that Christianity avoided any trace of syncretism, as fundamentalists argue, is quite absurd. Many, perhaps most, Christian traditions and calendar dates copied ones already in use by older religions. Christmas is merely the most obvious example. It is a massive shame Christianity did not adopt and practice Hellenistic toleration too.

Significant Numbers of Black American Catholics Think Church is Racialist

A study, coauthored by Notre Dame social scientists, Darren W Davis and Donald B Pope-Davis, focusing on African American Catholics, challenges common assumptions about one of the Black community’s less popular Christian churches. Commissioned by the National Black Catholic Congress and the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Church Life and Office of the President, it tested whether anecdotal accounts that Black Catholics were becoming increasingly disengaged from their religion were true. It is historic in that it is the largest sample of African American Catholics ever surveyed on their faith. Although the focus of the survey is on African American Catholics, a comparison is made with white Catholics, yielding notable findings about them too. Among the findings of the survey are:

• On almost every measure of religious engagement, African American Catholics are considered stronger in their faith than white Catholics:
  • 78 percent of Black Catholics report that their parish meets their spiritual needs compared to only 69 percent of white Catholics.
  • 76 percent of African American Catholics say their parish meets their emotional needs, compared to 60 percent of white Catholics.
  • 48 percent of African Americans attend church at least once per week, compared to only 30 percent of white Catholics.
• A major difference in the religious engagement between African American Catholics and white Catholics is the importance each group attaches to social networks in the parish.
  • 29 percent of African Americans considered it was important that friends attended their church, while only eight percent of white Catholics considered it important.

African American’s increased appreciation of religious social interactions and tendency to attend all Black parishes contributes to their satisfaction. Davis commented:

This finding also shows up among African American Catholics who attend predominantly black parishes. A greater sense of community that comes from worshipping with others who share cultural heritage heightens religious engagement. Whatever forces are working against white Catholics’ religious identity and engagement were set in motion decades ago and those forces do not appear to be working against African American Catholics. Thus, it is quite possible that understanding African American Catholicity may inform us about the religious challenges of white Catholics. Too often we approach questions of religiosity in a vacuum. Comparable studies of religiosity are critical.

While there is generally high satisfaction with various aspects of Mass and church service, such as preaching, music, readings and prayers, Catholics’—both white and black Americans—level of satisfaction with these aspects of Mass are noticeably lower than Protestants. Pope-Davis noted:

This finding is interesting because we often hear anecdotal complaints about the Catholic Mass as quiescent, but most Catholics do not share this view. But, relative to the components of Protestant church service, Catholics are not as satisfied.

Racial Discontent

Despite their high level of religious engagement, African American Catholics are not completely satisfied with the scope of racial inclusiveness in the Church:

• About one in four African American Catholics perceive racism in their parish:
  • 32 percent say they are uncomfortable because they are the only person of color in their parish
  • 26 percent say that fellow parishioners avoid them because of their race,
  • 24 percent say that fellow parishioners reluctantly shake their hands
  • 25 percent say they have experienced racial insensitivity toward African Americans from their priest.
• African American Catholics see room for growth in the racial positions of the Catholic Church:
  • 37 percent are satisfied with the targeting of black vocations
  • 38 percent are satisfied with the Church’s emphasis on black saints
  • 40 percent are satisfied with promoting black bishops
  • 40 percent are satisfied with the Church’s support for issues like affirmative action
  • 44 percent are satisfied with the Church’s position on problems in Africa
  • 45 percent are satisfied with the promotion of racial integration in the Church.
• But 23 percent of African Americans consider the Catholic Church racist against African Americans.

Davis points out:

Asking questions about abstract racism in the Church breaks down somewhat when asked about specific elements of the Church. This is not that unusual in survey research. But, it is clear that while there are still challenges for many African American Catholics in their parishes, the views of the institutional Church are more jaundiced or jaded.

The survey also uncovered notable national demographic trends that are evident within religious denominations that have great consequences for the future church:

• 53 percent of African American Catholics and 53 percent of African American Protestants are at least 45 years old, compared to 63 percent of white Catholics and 62 percent of white Protestants
• 33 percent of African American Catholics and 35 percent of African American Protestants are married, compared to 21 percent of white Catholics and 14 percent of white Protestants.
• A larger percentage of African American Catholics have college degrees than African American Protestants, but a larger percentage of Catholics are college educated.

Summary

The US’s estimated three million Black Catholics are highly educated and deeply engaged in the church. They value the social and communal aspects of religious worship and some are concerned about the status of racism within the church—some are discontent about racial inclusiveness in the church. Nearly one in four respondents felt that the Catholic Church is racist against African Americans. More than 31 percent say they are uncomfortable because they are the only person of color in their parish, and about a quarter say that fellow parishioners avoid them because of their race, that fellow parishioners reluctantly shake their hands and that they have experienced racial insensitivity from their priest.

The research team hopes that the information gathered in the survey will help the Catholic church respond more efficiently to the needs of parishioners. Pope-Davis observed:

The forces that shape white Catholicity are different from the forces that shape African American Catholicity.

Wailing Wall Built in Roman Times Coins in Foundations Show

Israeli archaeologists have uncovered ancient coins near the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City which challenge the assumption that all of the walls of the Second Temple were built by Herod, the Roman puppet king of Judah, in his long project to reconstruct the Jerusalem Temple. The Western Wall was the perimeter and retaining wall of the Jewish Temple destroyed by Jerusalem’s Roman conquerors in 70 AD. Also called the Wailing Wall, it is now a shrine for pious Jews. Ignorant people think it is part of Solomon’s temple, while others, largely on the basis of the bible, say it was built by king Herod, the gospel baby killer. Even archaeologists and scholars largely agreed that Herod had built the Temple and its retaining walls in an enormous project begun about 22 BC and completed by his death in 4 BC. Every Jerusalem tour guide has Herod as the answer to the question, “Who built this massive wall?”

In 2011, Israeli archaeologists reported they had found ancient coins buried under the foundations of the Western Wall minted 20 years after King Herod’s death in 4 BC. Eli Shukron, an archaeologist from the Israel Antiquities Authority who led the dig, with Professor Ronny Reich of Haifa University, explained:

Until today, accepted wisdom said that all the walls were built by Herod. When we found these coins which were dated about 20 years after Herod’s death, we understood that it couldn’t have been him who built this part of the wall.

No wall can be built without first laying down its foundations, so anything found beneath them must have been dropped or put there before the foundations were laid. In fact, these coins were not directly under the foundations of the wall, but in an underground ritual bath (mikveh) filled in to allow the foundation stones of the Western Wall to be laid across part of it. These coins were in the part not built on, but were beneath the infill, so were dropped or put there before the mikveh had been filled in so that the wall’s base could be constructed. The Israel Antiquities Authority said in a statement:

This bit of archaeological information illustrates the fact that the construction of the Temple Mount walls and (the adjacent) Robinson’s Arch was an enormous project that lasted decades and was not completed during Herod’s lifetime.

According to Israel Antiquities Authority, of the several coins found, the latest of them were struck by the Roman Prefect of Judea, Valerius Gratus, in the year 17/18 AD. By that time, Tiberius was emperor, and Jerusalem had been ruled by Roman governors for a decade. As construction could not have started before then, the coins may back up Josephus’s story that the wall was finished by Agrippa II, Herod’s great grandson. Or the building of the wall might have been much later by Hadrian, who rebuilt Jerusalem and made it into a gentile city called Ælia Capitolina.

Josephus wrote that, when the work finally ended in 63 AD, 18,000 builders and masons were unemployed. To avoid trouble, Agrippa set them to paving the streets of Jerusalem. But it was only postponing the trouble, for soon the streets were paved, and again there was an army of tough men unemployed. According to Josephus, their agitation was important in bringing on the Jewish war against the Romans beginning in 66 AD, which led to the closure and partial demolition of the temple.

The mikveh and the coins were discovered metres from the Western Wall during controversial excavations of a 2,000 year old drainage channel which stretches from a site near the Western Wall and close to the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam and known to Moslems as Haram al-Sharif or the Noble Sanctuary. It then runs under the Old City walls to end in the Arab neighbourhood of Silwan. Jerusalem has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six Day War, so Palestinians consider excavations there as being an illegitimate and provocative desecration of a Moslem holy place.

Fundamentalist Right Wing Authoritarian Christian Fails Apologetics!

I happened to chance upon a website by an historian who turned out to be one of the varieties of fundamentalist right wing authoritarian Christians, one Nathan Albright. The page was a review of a book critical of Christianity, so this “historian” gave it a very bad notice. I have no idea what this book was otherwise about or whether it was any good, but what interested me was what this blogger’s review revealed about himself. So I put a comment on the page saying that his own views seemed shockingly confused for a Christian historian. He kept speaking of “biblical law”, so I asked him whether he meant the law of Moses, asking what relevance that had to a Christian, expecting him to say something about its relevance to the way Jesus must have thought, having been raised as a pious Jew, but not expecting a Christian to consider the Mosaic law valid since God incarnated on earth, as Christians are supposed to believe.

He also spoke of “biblical punishments”, a curious concept, I thought since the right to punish was God’s own right, according to Christ, and the punishments prescribed in the Old Testament were diametrically opposed to anything that the God of love could have required His earthly slaves to practice. I continued:

Is the bible God? Are you God to know just what punishments God might choose to mete out? Christ makes a firm point that it is not for us to judge, and for what it is worth 1 Peter says we ought not even to revile others. If you think the laws of the Jews still reproduced in the Old Testament are as important as the lessons delivered by the Christian incarnated God, uttered from his own lips, then you should be a Jew not a Christian. Your whole emphasis on law is wrong. Christ teaches personal morality. When that is right, there is no need for law. So while you refer to the book’s author as being “so incoherent and self-contradictory”, you should be aware that you are no different.

In his further criticisms, he seemed particularly occupied by the author’s opinions of the Gnostics, and a strong desire to distance Christianity from Gnosticism, so I turned to this, and persisted with some other phrases that concerned him:

While it might be true that Gnostics were not Christians, there is much in the New Testament that is gnostic showing that early Christians took some ideas from the Gnostics, and in the confusion of the earliest Christian centuries there was much hybridizing between local churches and sects. In any case, Gnosticism and Judaism both had Persian roots, and Christianity itself incorporates many concepts of the Persian religion, including that of the Saviour (Persian, Saoshyant). You also seem to dislike the author’s alleged “left agenda”. What constitutes a “left agenda”? It is of some interest in the world right now, with protests everywhere in the world at the way the social contract has been torn up so that most people can be left destitute while a few have so much it would take a lifetime to give away. For that indeed was what Christ, your own God, told you to do, and inasmuch as that is an egalitarian measure, it counts as being left wing, doesn’t it? No Christian can leave most of the population of the world destitute while enjoying the life of Riley themselves. Certainly “obedience” is a quality that the rich value in the poor, but did the Good God grant us free will so that we have to be uncritically obedient to “our betters”? Indeed can it seriously be argued that a Good God will punish us for not obeying Him, even though he apparently gave us that very right?

Amusingly, he reviled the writer for “choosing for herself which selective quotation she wants to make”. To which I commented:

Coming from a Christian, who pointedly cites several selected quotations, some from the Jewish scriptures, not the Christian ones, to suit his own interpretation, it looks like a spoof.

The inadvertant spoofiness of the writer revealed itself several times later, because he was evidently a perfect example of Christ’s parable about the mote and the beam. He was utterly blind to his own failings, failings that he saw in spades in others though he himself was the one who had them in spades.

The rest of the exchange went as follows. I concluded my initial comment thus:

Christ taught morality and morals are those practices we adopt to make living together agreeable. That is the meaning of Christian love, the attention the Good Samaritan paid to the accosted Jew—concern, kindness, care, attention, help, benevolence, protection—and the meaning of his being a Samaritan is that he was considered an enemy by Jews. I expect that can be written off, by a Christian so-called, as left wing too.

Your knowledge of God’s law and biblical history appears shockingly weak, let me provide you some information of where you woefully fall short.

You are spoofing us again, surely. You say you are a Christian and an historian, so your Christianity takes precedent over your history. That is the reason why there is no such thing as a “Christian scholar”. Christianity is antithetical to scholarship. What of history? You say my history falls woefully short, but yours is simply woeful.

The concept of a savior or deliverer is not borrowed from Mithratic Persian religion as you falsely claim, but was present in biblical religion from the earliest times (see Genesis 3:16-17).

What is the relevance of this citation to the precedence of Persian or Jewish religions?

Do you, allegedly a historian think Genesis was written in “the earliest times”? Genesis is most unlikely to be even the oldest book in the bible? As an historian you go on evidence, don’t you? What is your evidence for believing Genesis was written in the earliest times? No one could write at all in the earliest times, and the earliest evidence for recording data comes from Mesopotamia, not Palestine. Some of the myths of Sumer and Babylon are recorded in Genesis, myths like “the Flood”, but no serious historian considers them historical. They are old myths, and they have been copied from the early civilizations of Mesopotamia which preceded the Jews and Judaism by at least a millennium. The bible itself reports the beginning of Judaism, considering it as a return from exile, actually a deportation of people from Mesopotamia, during the Persian period! The law was then read out to them by Ezra in a foreign tongue. So the bible was compiled after this event. Judaism is therefore later than, and dependent on, the concepts of Persian religion.

You assume that the Jewish scriptures and Christian scriptures are different, following after the Marcionite heresy. This is a mistaken assumption.

It is not an assumption as anyone who can read can confirm for themselves. If they are the same, if not in fact, in meaning, then what was the point of Christ? Just a human sacrifice? Now you cite Paul (2 Timothy 4:16-17), but you mean to cite chapter 3. If Paul wrote the pastoral epistles, he plainly referred only to the scripture then extant, what Christians call the Old Testament, so his mention of “all scripture” seemed to allow for other scriptures that did not gain entry to the Jewish canon. As Paul was considerably influenced by the Gnostics that you despise so much, he might have even meant some of the Gnostic writings. He certainly could not have meant by it “what would be called both the Old Testament and the New Testament by most Christians”, at a time when the New Testament did not exist. If these epistles are post Pauline works, as seems more likely, they could have been written when some at least of the New Testament already existed, but then the Church was obviously plugging its New Testaments—the gospels in particular—in addition to those the Jews and the early Christians knew, mainly the Jewish scriptures written in Greek, the Septuagint, which are incidentally, the oldest Jewish scriptures known.

Therefore, a quotation from Mosaic law is fully applicable for Christians today (though to be interpreted through the lenses of Christianity to be sure).

Your own failing as a Christian is emphasized here in what you add as an incidental comment. If God appeared on earth to do more than to be sacrificed as an atonement, then Christ’s teaching must have been meant to supersede or at least correct the previous law. Parts of the gospels suggest he did intend that, and many Christians throughout the history of Christendom have believed it. Christ himself, however, as a devout Jew, denied it. Yet he introduced an entirely new emphasis on love and poverty that are not obvious in the Jewish scriptures. If you as a Christian are to follow the line you are preaching, your passing parenthesis is crucially important to Christianity, for the whole point of love, to Christ, God to Christians, is that the Mosaic law has to be read with loving intent. If there is no such reading available, then love should prevail. No modern Christian, even sincere ones, would consider much of Leviticus as being even remotely applicable today, and have no qualms about ignoring it. Yet some of Christ’s own teachings are restatements of some Levitical laws. Christians, for example, have to be perfect like their father in heaven, but most of them consider it too hard even though Christ himself said it as a paraphrase of Leviticus. That, they ought to aim to do, as Christians, but do not, and murdering people whether witches or homosexuals or adulterers, and so on, are not at all loving and ought to be rejected by Christians with barely a thought about it. It is easier to believe what Christ himself plainly taught than to go back uncritically to the Mosaic laws. If you are a Jew, then fine, stick by Moses, but to be a Christian you ought to stick by Christ. In neither case would you stick by Paul, as almost all Christians do, even to the exclusion of God Himself, in the shape of Christ.

The left-wing agenda I am referring to is a hostility to authority.

So Christ was not hostile to authority, even though he took a whip to people going about their lawful business in the temple court, tipping up their tables and scattering their animals and birds. Come on, historian. Take off the Christian blinkers. Christ was hanged as a man opposed to Roman authority. That very act of rampaging through the temple was a criminal act under Roman law. Indeed, it was the very act of defying authority, and that was a capital crime.

It would include the support of those revolutionaries against social order,

…except in the case when God is doing it, eh?

You are at liberty to peruse my blogs myself, though you will find much reference to biblical law that troubles you as an antinomian.

Perhaps I shall, but you are spoofing again, for you are, as I have noted just now, like all Christians, an antinomian when the nomos does not suit you.

You say I am very mistaken on some aspects of historical analysis yet you, as an historian, still use Justin Martyr’s absurd excuse (ca 150 AD) for Christian practice mimicking that of extant religions—it was all Satan’s doing. I take it that Satan is that terribly powerful wicked God that Christians believe is responsible for evil in the world. A bit like Ahriman, the evil Persian God. In fact, just like Ahriman! Yet Christians abhor the Persian religion as being dualist, unlike “monotheistic” Christianity. And what about the Jewish scriptures, which you tell us teaches the same as Christ did? There in Isaiah, the Good God admits he is responsible for evil. The truth is that both religions stem from the Persian one, but in the post Persian age of growing monotheism tried unsuccessfully to eliminate Satan. He is too valuable an excuse for criminality for Christians to let go of.

Genesis is a far older text than anything in the Persian or Gnostic religious traditions.

I have disputed this, so offer me some proof.

I suggest you take some remedial biblical history to improve your own weak understanding.

Spoof, hilarious! Where do you get it all? You are the historian, and supposedly a Christian, but you need more than remedial work. Your root and branch comprehension is that of a bible thumping fundamentalist. One of the first things historians must do is question their sources. You cannot do it. The bible is your God, which is why you keep referring to biblical law.

Like most Gnostics, your virulent hatred of Judaism and biblical law leads you astray because it causes you to reject true apostolic Christianity.

What persuades you that I am a Gnostic and hate Judaism? Your credentials as a historian are in tatters. You haven’t a clue what impartial means. You have your own conclusions ready before you begin. But then, that is typically Christian.

As a part-Levite and part-Jew who was circumcised on the eighth day and who keeps the biblical sabbath laws, food laws, and other laws as part of my Christian beliefs, I have no qualms with being considered a one-house Messianic Jew, though I myself was raised in a Christian background.

Ah, so you are a Jew, and not a Christian at all.

You must consider Christ a Jew rather than a Christian (for the two great commandments of personal morality you claim belief in, “Honor God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your spirit” and “love your neighbor as yourself”, spring directly from the Mosaic law, specifically Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

Indeed, but what Jesus did that was novel and crucial was to link the two inseparably. He was asked for the greatest commandment and gave these two! It identifies every human being as meriting the love of God Himself. Christ was a man but was God too. The whole point of Christianity is that people must be treated as if they were God, for inasmuch as Christ is God, God could be any man and every man. Any Christian knows this, especially any Christian who has read his New Testament as far as Matthew 25:31-46. Apparently few have, or have not understood what they read, in two millennia.

Matthew, Acts, and the letters of the New Testament (especially Romans, Hebrews, James, and Revelation) are full of quotations and obvious references to Old Testament law being valid and applicable to Christians.

You are a historian but seem not to know, as I have already said, that there were no Christian scriptures until these people had written them, so all they could cite as scripture were the Jewish scriptures. Moreover, all the first Christians, not just Christ were Jews, so what else would they use other than the Jewish holy books. If Christianity was merely a form of Judaism, then why did the two religions ever split? Why did Jews reject Christ as the messiah, and still do? Christianity began as a Jewish heresy, and those Jews who tried to do as you seem to want to do, keep Jewish while being Christian, were rejected by the gentile Churches as Judaizers. The real Christians were the Ebionites. Perhaps you are trying to be one of these, but they rightly rejected Paul as a scoundrel out for himself.

Paul himself used an obscure Mosaic law about not muzzling oxen while they tread the field twice to justify Christians paying tithes and offerings to support the New Testament ministry.

Thank you. Paul was the first TV evangelist!

When you meet your maker in judgment, you can at least say you were warned.

Warned by a tribe of crooks and perverts who have consistently in the history of Christendom, all bar a few exceptions who did try, practiced the opposite of Christian teaching. Come on! You claim to be a historian. Try reading a little of the vile history of Christianity instead of biblical mythology.

The fundamentalist Christian historian did reply again to the comments I made in the preceding exchange, but ended with a warning that I was treading on his toes, so I began my replies to him on that warning.

In view of your curiously defensive attitude, I had better start at the end of your last reply to me, to give you a chance to delete my further comments before you read them.

I should note that my blog (like the Bible) has moral rules that include no insulting of Christianity or blasphemy. You are therefore in violation of my laws on my realm. Take heed to yourself. If you wish to continue conversing on this blog you will obey my rules. Is that simple enough for you to understand?

It seems to me that obeying your rules means agreeing with your own particular delusions. Anything critical immediately offends your delicate sensitivities. Well, as you say, this is your blog, and you did not even have to publish my initial comments, which you plainly found distasteful, from the tenor of your replies. I have understood throughout that you are the master here, and can delete whatever you do not like. It may be fine for your ego, but it is an admission that you cannot argue your corner. As a Christian apologist, you admit failure. Now is the chance for you to delete the rest of may reply, but, never fear, I shall not waste it.

The historian posted this reply up to this point then terminated the correspondence without posting the rest by adding the following note right here:

Editor: No, forbidding others to speak on a forum or editing/deleting their posts is not a sign that one cannot argue, only that one does not wish to cast pearls before swine, encourage internet trolls (such as you are), or to engage in pointless debate with fools. Nonetheless, since you accurately understood that you were offensive both in the tone and in the content of your messages, why did you not show some wisdom and moderate that tone if you wished to have a genuine discussion? I suppose you’ll have to answer that question for yourself.

Mr Albright persist in his psychological projection to the very end, conscious of offensiveness in my posts, but apparently as polite as saint himself! If an internet troll means arguing with nonsense, then I have no choice but to accept the insult, while wishing there were a lot more of us. Albright added to his editorial the following short “reply”.

Isn’t this much better? Perhaps you should stick to #OWS blogs where people like your nonsense.

So it is plain enough what his politics are. For anyone interested in all this, the points of my reply that he chose to omit continued as follows.

You say I “have no sense of balance” because I do not narrate the good things of Christianity besides the bad. Well I have noted several times that your own attitude comes over as a spoof, because you are utterly blind to your own biases. Here is another instance. If I must balance my selecting the bad aspects of Christianity with the good ones, then why don’t you, as a scholar, have the same duty to balance your rosy tinted presentation of Christianity with the blood and burnt flesh of the real history of it. It would be a violation of your laws, master. But your laws are a reflexion of Christianity as a whole, unbalanced and tendentious. No doubt you see your own role and duty to be to apologize for your beliefs. Well, I see mine as rectifying your unbalanced view. If that makes me “unfit to be a scholar or a gentleman”, then that is your view, but I submit that I am thereby the better Christian, because Christ was here to rectify what He as God perceived had gone wrong in His plan. You are the Caiaphas or the Pontius Pilate. Christ was a reformer, if not indeed a revolutionary, but you cannot abide any contradiction.

You refer to Christians scholars naming Harrison, Kitchen and Albright. The Harrison I know of is not the one you mention, but Kitchen and Albright were so biased and indeed bent that whenever they opine about anything impinging on Christianity or Judaism, they are hardly worth reading. Albright did a lot of damage with his archaeological tinkering over many decades, not least a faulty pottery sequence that misdates everything to suit the mythical chronology of the bible. Kitchen should stick to Egyptology.

There is internal textual evidence that Genesis springs from very old times, including its reference to a river that dried up about 3500 BC and its use of “and these are the generations” to divide its contents into cuneiform tablets kept generation after generation.

Genesis is a collection of stories, from Mesopotamia, as I have already said. Mesopotamia is where writing was developed and in its advanced form of lettering it became cuneiform. You are therefore accepting that much of this book’s content is Sumerian, Akkadian or Babylonian, the culture being essentially unchanging over tens of centuries.

“The evidence for Genesis’ considerable antiquity” you think is conclusive is not even valid. On your reasoning, the Last days of Pompeii must have been written in the first century AD, because it records an event of that time, but we all know it was written in the last century of the second millennium, almost 2000 years later. No historian will simply accept the internal contents of any source as being concrete evidence of its date. All history is falsely dated on that criterion. So, if Genesis is genuinely ancient, as you claim, it is not Jewish, and if it is not genuinely ancient, it could be Jewish, but simply records copies of some ancient tales from elsewhere. In the main we know what they are because the same tales have been found, dated variously because they were narrated repeatedly over many centuries as religious myths, in the valleys of the two rivers where they were set down originally.

Abraham and his family were descended from Mesopotamian society.

Abraham and his family was a story, an allegory in all likelihood of the event called by Jews the “return from exile”. The Nuzi tablets record laws pertaining to the ANE over millennia, so useless for dating any particular event. The Hittite treaties indeed show “the Bible’s covenant formula”, but again you use a treaty format that remained in use for over a thousand years in the ANE to date a particular time in that interval that suits you. Note too, that if the covenant was a treaty format, it was a covenant between two powers on earth, the Jews and the Persians, at the time of Ezra (a Persian) not the imaginary Moses. Does God lack originality that he has to use a treaty formula for his holy covenant?

Again, I am a scholar, and you’re just a troll.

Projecting again, Spoofer!

You are following the wrong scholars when you say that Judaism began after the exile. After all, the return from the exile merely restored the temple that had existed some time before.

Evidence, please? There is none! The so called Second Temple is the first Jewish one, even if a temple preceded it. The Deuteronomic history was written as a foundation history of the Jewish Temple State centered on Jerusalem, called Yehud. Most of it is fiction, the rest is loosely based on Assyrian king lists in the hands of the Persians. Its purpose is plainly to intimidate the Jews. Be obedient and they will multiply and prosper, fail to be obedient and they will be destroyed, and will be lucky if a righteous remnant remains living. That theme is the purpose of the history. There is no evidence for a state of Judah until just before Samaria was destroyed by the Assyrians, and incorporated into the empire. Judah remained as a rump puppet state, lasting independently only for a few decades. It was repopulated by colonists from Persia, who came with instructions to start a new religion.

You say I and people like me try to minimize the bible, and you say that because you have coined it, being biblical maximalists. The ones like me whom you call minimalists are actually doing what you are supposed to do wearing your historian’s hat. Find the truth, based on evidence and not merely on the myths in a tendentious ancient religious story book.

Since the Bible extends well into the second and third millennium BC, it is far before the Persian religion.

You have shown that some of the stories in the Genesis go back to ancient Mesopotamia, and I concur with that, but tell me how that is evidence that the bible was written then, any more than Bulwer Lytton was a contemporary of Pliny the Elder.

[The Persian religion] had its Satanic-inspired reformation in the seventh and sixth century BC.

I see you are now bragging that you are a personal friend of Satan, otherwise how would you know that little gem, Mr Historian?

If you wish to be a scholar, seek out scholarship.

Tee hee! Spoofer!

You falsely claim that Paul was influenced by the Gnostics. Far from it. His words were twisted by the gnostics (yourself included) to be hostile to the law (see 2—Peter 3:15-16).

Why do you, a so-called historian, keep citing valueless anonymous works as evidence? Even when you get the citation right, they rarely do what you claim. Where in this citation is the word “Gnostic”? As a fundamentalist, you will imagine that this is Peter the Rock speaking, but no scholar believes it is. You say Paul was a trained Pharisee on his own say so. That is not wise for a historian, especially a Jewish or semi-Jewish one, as modern Pharisees (scholarly rabbis) with few exceptions cannot see any such training in Paul, and his defection into anti-Semitism and self aggrandisement does not say a lot for Pharisees, if this claim is true. God, incidentally, in his earthly incarnation as Christ, seemed to disdain, if not detest, the Pharisees, so it is hard to understand why Christ’s supposed followers should defect into the arms of a supposed Pharisee called Saul of Tarsus. Tarsus was, of course, a cosmopolitan merchant city and a center of pagan religions, like that of Attis, the dying and rising god.

You cite Acts in defence of Paul’s acceptance of the law while being a Christian, yet the instance you cite is one that belies your claim. The Jews from Asia, a place where Paul had been active, so they knew his reputation directly, rioted against him because he had been violating the law. He had to agree to a Nazarite vow to try to appease them, but it didn’t. Elswhere he admits it or is ambiguous, and becomes increasingly anti-Semitic, the first self-hating Jew maybe?

You additionally claim that he believed in numerous nonbiblical scriptures.

No, I made no such explicit claim. Read what I said again. I am referring to scriptures which did not enter the Jewish canon, like the Enoch books, which you note yourself were Gnostic.

Jude himself quoted Gnostic works against the gnostics.

Quite so, and he quoted from Enoch favorably as scripture against those of whom he disapproved.

Now you say the Hebrew scriptures were a fixed canon after “about 440-420 AD”. You mean BC, but you are wrong even so. The Rabbis meeting at Jamnia in the first century AD fixed the canon. Before then, the Torah was definite, of course, the Prophets mostly, and the Writings quite flexibly.

Again, I’m sure your lack of belief in predictive prophecy lead you to reject historians like Joesephus.

I must admit I never knew Josephus was a prophet.

And falsely claim that Daniel was written in the second century BC because it would have been otherwise impossible for your puny and corrupted mind to understand how the various Ptolemeic and Seleucid kings could be written of ahead of time.

You are very good on “puny and corrupted minds”, aren’t you, Nathan? Paragraphs follow in which you preach to someone in your imagination, so mean nothing to me.

Evil exists as a corruption of good. It is not dualist because evil does not have an independent existence except upon a corruption of the original order.

That is what the Persian religion says.

Satan is not the equal of God.

And yet God chooses to let him off the leash. From where most of us stand, unaffected by your ability to persuade yourself of anything at all, Satan looks to be God’s equal. And, as I said, he is a great convenience for Christians who want to plead their failings are not their fault. In any event, he is a supernatural being, like the angels, demons, saints, etc, of which there are millions. So much for the boast of monotheism.

God is responsible for evil, but is not evil Himself.

Is He then perfectly good? Can something evil come out of something supposedly perfectly good?

The Persian religion falsely has an Ahura Mazda in a conflict with an equal evil god, an idea that is blasphemous in biblical religion, where Satan is a rebellious servant whose fate and end are already decided and merely await consummation. Again, your lack of understanding leads you astray.

Curious, I thought I introduced the idea of Persian dualism to this discussion. And, of course, in the interest of balance, the biblical contention that the wicked Satan is a slave under instruction from the Good God is blasphemous in the Persian religion.

I believe that the Bible is the very inspired Word of God, and the only credible source for learning about Him. Clearly you do not. The fact that you speak foolishly about what you do not understand pardons my speaking (as Paul did) as a fool to those who are foolish. But I will not cast my pearls before swine.

According to the Rabbis, even the pearls of God are tarnished in an imperfect world, something you cannot get, and when you speak of my not understanding, be frank, you mean not accepting your entirely subjective and therefore unverifiable interpretations. The bible, even if it had been sent directly from heaven by angelic messenger, would be imperfect once it was opened on this earth. In fact, the inspiration of God is supposed to be via the Holy Ghost acting upon men, and men themselves are imperfect beings, so the Word is not going to be as so remarkably accurate as you think by the time they have pondered and written, then translated. The evidence offered by people not prone to subjectivity, but skilled in history and science, is that biblical history is very flawed indeed. You will stick by your subjective views but history and science have to aim for objectivity to be valuable. That might mean opposing absolutely some false idea. That is what I try to do, and you, if you are a historian, ought to.

Mr Albright had run out of ideas, so refused to reply to the troll!

The Autumn Festival—Halloween or Guy Fawkes Night?

How long has this commercial and kiddy festival of Hallowe’en been celebrated in the USA? It is celebrated, now, in the UK, but here it is an import from there! When I was a child 60 years ago, we had no Hallowe’en festival or tradition, although it was known historically as a night for ghosts and witches.

In the post War years, the big autumn festival we celebrated was, and still is, Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night on 5 November, associated with an attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament by alleged Catholic dissidents in the seventeenth century. “Guys”, effigies of Guy Fawkes are made and displayed on street corners or door to door to get gifts, usually small change, the days before Bonfire Night itself. Then they top off the bonfire with the effigies and all of it goes up in smoke accompanied by fireworks and traditional food like potatoes baked in the fire (originally), pork pie and peas, brandy snap, and parkin (a ginger oat cake).

So the period for displaying the Guy and begging for coin was about All Saints Day to Bonfire Night. However, the eve before 5 November was called Mischief Night, allegedly the night when Fawkes and his plotters were preparing their mischief, and on that night, children would arrange cruel tricks like tying dustbin lids to old and unpopular people’s doorknobs, knocking, then running off.

All of this is not ancient, hearking back only about 400 years, but it seems plain enough that the bonfire (bone fire) tradition is much older, and that is associated with the pagan autumn festival of Samhain. The Protestant Church was glad to direct the tradition from Pagan rites to an anti Catholic occasion, and so it has remained over here, until US films like “Halloween” brought the Halloween tradition from the US back into Britain, where it gradually gains strength, for kids, but has certainly not been a continuous festival. Guy Fawkes Night, with its bonfires and fireworks to scare off the spirits, is more that.

Water to Wine Miracle: A Matter of Plumbing

Philip Jenkins writes (The Jesus Wars):

The Church organized public exhibitions to show how the Pagan priests had contrived some of the miraculous tricks by which they overawed the simple.

This sentence should give pause to the faithful but gullible readers of the bible, for some of the Old Testament miracles might have been priestly magic on just the lines the Christians here were debunking. The ancient Greeks arranged for water to turn to wine on a grand scale by clever plumbing. They could do “Open Sesame” types of miracles by having immense stone doors that would open at a touch. The ancient Persians had batteries of iron and copper rods dipped into wine or citrus juices, with which they must have been able to make sparks, and might have been able to use to light barrels of oil instantly. Perhaps the Greeks used the same trick for instant illumination at Eleusis.

So the rumblings and pyrotechnics on Mount Zion described in the bible could have been a show put on for the faithful believers, especially as we read they could only be observed by the people from a distance, so they had no idea what was really going on.