Magi Mike’s Blog

Christianity would certainly have been stillborn if the gentile Christians of the Roman empire had told the truth that Jesus was a rebel. The synoptic gospels depend upon Mark which was the earliest one, written around the time of the Jewish War and the fall of Jerusalem, when Jewish rebels were particularly disliked by Romans. The bishops could hardly write gospels admitting the truth about their God being an earlier Jewish rebel, and yet they could hardly ignore the truth either because plenty of the Jews who left Judea after the Jews’ defeat spread into the wider empire telling the truth about the Christian “Lord”. Some bishop commissioned Mark to refute the true stories being spread by Jews. The essence of their narrative had to be accepted but the explanations were distorted.

Do Christians know what the name Barabbas means? It means the Son of the Father. Who is that other than Jesus himself? Jesus always spoke of his Father in heaven, and is supposed to have outraged Pharisees by so doing, an unlikely allegation. Barabbas is Jesus and the story of the exchange of prisoners was one of the facts invented by the Christians who commissioned Mark to negate the truth that the Jews actually were supporting Jesus! All scholars agree that the supposed exchange is without precedent, makes no sense, and would have left Pilate open to the charge of treachery, if true. Pilate is known from independent sources to have been a monster, but the gospels so nearly make him a Christian because of his sensitive treatment of Jesus that the Coptic Church made him a saint.

The gospels stories, and indeed all the bible, has to be put into their historical context to be properly understood. More…

Having abrogated the law of Moses as an hindrance to conversion of gentiles to the new universal Judaism of Christianity, the bishops quickly had to impose a plethora of new rules to keep their burgeoning congregations in order. The converts had to remain “in communion” with the church, and so partaking of the Eucharist was obligatory.

From very early in gentile Christianity, the new Christians had to bring their children into the church for the holy communion of the Eucharist—even infants! The administration of the Eucharist to children continued in France, according to Bingham’s Antiquities of the Christian Church, until the twelfth century. Adults were required to receive it every day, though it declined to four times a week in some churches and then declined continually until the Middle Ages, when so many churches were empty that Christians were ordered to take communion at least once a year.

The early pressure to take the Eucharist was compelling because clergy taught that it was essential to eternal life. It was held in great reverence, and the bishops had complete power over who would receive it, giving them immense control over the Christian slaves of God. Worshippers were not allowed to approach the Eucharistic table unless suitably physically and morally pure and expiated of sin by penance.

Again, the bishops had absolute authority over the magnitude of the sin and its punishment. Examples were prolonged absence from church, unchastity, prostitution, adultery, becoming a gladiator or actor, betrayal of Christians to the authorities, pederasty, homosexuality. Note how many sins were sexual in nature, and had little to do with Christ’s moral concerns. Abstention from sexual activity, a personal choice for Essenes, except for those of the highest orders, was made obligatory for gentile Christians. Because of the presumed imminence of the End, Jesus, John and their successors, had had to initiate many who came to them hoping to join God’s coming Kingdom without any detailed teaching of Essene practices. The later bishops, especially the gentiles ones misled by Paul, imagined the celibacy of the senior Essenes had to be followed by everyone.

The punishment varied according to the seriousness of the sin, as judged by the bishop. A short period of withdrawal from the Eucharist was the minimum. As the bishop judged the sin as more and more serious, the period of denial of the Eucharist increased to years and then up to the sinner’s whole life! There was worse! The sin could merit denial of the communion for the whole of eternity—excommunication. These punishments seem to have derived from the punishments of the Essene sectaries. Moreover, during the period of penance, when the Eucharist was denied to the errant Christian, the penitent was obliged to abstain from all sexual relationships, even with their spouse, and, indeed, any other pleasure. Every spare minute was to be spent doing religious exercises.

At the end of the period of penance, the sinner had to appear before the congregation dressed in sackcloth, with a shaven head, and covered in ashes. They had to fall in submission, like a Moslem, before the bishop, openly confess their sins and publicly beg for absolution.

Excommunication meant denial of all Christian sacraments, and the severance of all communication with any Christian—exactly what the errant Essene had to suffer. For them it meant death, for they had to eat grass, as they could not accept any unsanctified food such as that offered by anyone not in the order.

The control exercised by the bishops over their flocks amounted to religious terrorism and despotism. Bishops could permit or deny what Christians were led to believe were rites essential to their salvation. It certainly impressed upon Christian converts the enormity of the consequences of being immoral—the conviction that eternal retribution would follow—but few of the sins had anything to do with what Christ taught as reasons for damnation, like failing to love others, or hoarding wealth. And it granted to certain men, the clergy, who were in general no less sinners than other human beings, a fascistic authority that led the Church itself into gross sins and unforgiveable crimes.

Our morals at core are instinctive, evolved because we are social animals and so living in groups must offer advantages over living separately as solitary animals. The benefits of living socially are that we can defend each other, care for each other, feed each other, and comfort each other, some of the characteristics Jews call hesed or “lovingkindness”, and Christ called “love”.

Journalists and sentimentalists are fond of referring to “our loved ones” meaning people special to us, but proving that Christianity has not penetrated into our souls. “Our loved ones”, Christ taught are all of our neighbors wherever they might be, for any one of them could literally move in next door tomorrow—even some of our enemies!

One of the great advantages of Christianity over most Pagan religions and philosophies is that it has a clear role model for ordinary people in that it relates not only some of Christ’s teaching, but also described how he lived and thought. In the days when people were illiterate or were excluded from reading the life of Christ in the New Testament for themselves, stories of the life of Christ as a role model for them to copy in their own lives was particularly important. Believers were expected to be Christs, to behave like Christ. Only the Cathars kept it up, and the Catholic Church ordered a crusade against them, and scattered them far and wide. There was no need of any particular understanding of theology or philosophy in everyday living so long as simple folk had a model of excellence before them.

It was easier than it was for, say, the Stoic who was expected always to act sensibly—which is to say with reason—explaining why Stoicism remained the preserve of literate and wealthy people in classical times. It was easier than it was for the Platonist who had to look to God Himself. One of the failings of Christianity was that a majority of Christians wanted to raise up Christ to the Godhead, removing him as a realistic human role model for many. Paul exacerbated this deification by making Christ the object of Christian worship as a risen god on the eastern mystery model, though he was more useful as a human role model, with God left sitting aloft on his unattainable seat of power and judgement.

Stoics missed a human role model to such an extent that they inclined to idealize philosophers in that role. Epictetus, the Stoic ex-slave who was a near contemporary of Christ, urged his disciples to choose a role model and to imagine he was always beside them to instruct and guide them in the ways of excellence. Christians, in Jesus Christ, had this model of excellence ready made inasmuch as he was a man of exceptional morality.

Not only that, he was, as the propounder of love of others as the key to proper morality and sociality, the object of deep affection. Christians were to love God and to love other human beings, just as they loved Christ first as a symbol of human excellence, and then as an aspect of God Himself. To love others as if each of them were God Himself was Christ’s central tenet, though later Christian leaders decided it was something they would rather not know. It was much easier to get gentile recruits who were simply required to have faith! Most therefore came to prefer just to love God while continuing to hate other humans except for the narrow circle of “loved ones” that most of us love without any effort at all. It seemed to meet Christ’s requirement sufficiently well, they mutually agreed.

Having the loving Christ notionally at ones shoulder, like the eminent person of the Stoics, is still the belief of many a Christian. Christ is their buddy, but few of them know him at all well. The image of him they carry with them is not the Christ of the gospels. The role model of the modern US Christian is a Rambo Christ or a type of Dirty Harry. Yet no reading of the New Testament gospels can yield anything like any such image. Christ as a brutal avenger is an atavistic decline from an advanced to a primitive morality, from mutual concern and universal service to reactive tribal vengeance for some dishonor, imagined or otherwise. It has been seen with pelucid clarity in the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, a wicked man, certainly, but no more so than many of our own tribal heroes, no more so than Bush, Blair, Clinton or even Obama. We have lost the ability, essential for compassion, of being able to imagine ourselves in someone else’s shoes.

Christians, to follow the lead and tenets of the gospel Christ, ought not to gloat over human death, or to glorify it, yet that is what they do, even the most pious—they claim—of them. Society, which is the origin of the concept of God, has the right to protect itself from those who work to destroy it, but it should do it reluctantly and with sorrow not joy. Joy is for the lost sheep found, for the returning wanderer, not for finding and killing the wayward sheep or wanderer for causing those at home too much worry.

Society justly protects itself by due process of law, not by taking arbitrary revenge, and, when all that is left for society to do is to take a life in defense of itself, any human being and especially anyone who professes to be guided by Christ must make every effort to demonstrate the value and efficacy of human morality, which, when universally practised, would abolish the need for punishment.

Christians have been ready to castigate Islam as lacking tenderness, despite its pure monotheism and high general morality, because it lacked a suitable role model. For all the Moslem talk about their brotherhood, that was not their central principle—that was their universal submission to God. Curiously, modern Christianity has grown in the same direction. What was meant to be universal, and once was so regarded, is now so narrow that it applies only to “our loved ones”, with no love extended to enemies, nowadays innocent people thousands of miles away being bombed, shelled and machine gunned by our heroes, professional terminators armed to the teeth, and drone killing machines remotely piloted from some distant aircraft carrier.

Arabs were not averse to spreading their new imperial religion, Islam, by conquest, by coercion and by taxation (exempting Moslems and converts from it), rather than by love and example. Even so, the Christian world had been in turmoil for centuries, and Persia was decadent, so by keeping order in their conquered territories the Caliphs were preferred by their subjects to their predecessors.

Today’s nominally Christian western powers, led by the USA, have no compunction in murdering foreigners on an industrial scale by indiscriminate use of WMD, scarcely even for revenge, but often simply as a warning and an example to the survivors and onlookers. They now know just what to expect when they fail to submit to the will of the all powerful financial and military class of the US. There is no justice in it.

The attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan were nominally in revenge for the deaths of 3000 innocent office workers in the Twin Towers, yet the US and its ally, Israel, had conspired to rob a whole nation of its homeland of several thousand years, the very people of whom Christ was a member 2000 years ago, the Palestinians. The UK and US had spent much of the Clinton administration bombing Iraq under the pretence of a “no fy zone” and a stiff regime of sanctions, even before Bush engineered the invasion of 2003. An unknown number, but at least a million, innocents died in the two operations combined. These mega murders were to avenge nothing. They were directed at one man, a man protected for decades by the not at all worthy Christian leaders of a supposedly Christian nation.

The mass murder was to demonstrate western, primarily US, power, the US allies in these “coalitions” being simply to dilute the responsibility for unspeakable crimes against humanity by the USA alone. And already in earlier times the US had killed an estimated 2 million Vietnamese by the most horrifying carpet bombing and the use of chemical weapons that are killing and deforming Vietnamese babies still. Just what is Christian in this, only partial, litany of mass murder of innocent human beings? Millions have been killed to show that the US was not to be meddled with, or to avenge much lesser crimes albeit serious ones themselves.

Isn’t the point of Christ’s passion and death the lesson that taking human life must always be wrong? Christians consider that Christ was God, and pious Jews approved of his murder. If Christ were to return, he would have a good chance of being klilled at the instigation of some US Christian leader. God is everyman, according to the one Christians recognize as having the authority of His Son, one of the Trinity. When a slight to anyone is a slight to God Himself, as Christ taught, the leaders of the USA are carrying a burden of sin that far exceeds that of its well publicised enemies, those so wicked that they constitute an “evil empire”.

If the wickedness of a nation is to be measured by the number of innocent people it has killed then the USA is up with Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Polpot’s Cambodia—millions! The failure of successive Christian leaders of the USA to recognize the enormity of their own crimes, and their responsibility for them, and the grotesqueness of their boasted claims to moral propriety is an insult to the intelligence of anyone normal, but not, it seems many Christians. The fact that they nearly all remain mute in the face of these horrors shows that Christianity is dead in the modern world.

Desperately Christian!

Professor Sir Colin Humphreys, the Goldsmiths’ Professor of Materials Science at the University of Cambridge, is a metallurgist and materials scientist who claims in a book, The Mystery of the Last Supper, to have solved what F F Bruce once hyped as “the thorniest problem in the New Testament”. The gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke say that the Last Supper coincided with Jewish Passover, a Thursday, while John claims it was the day before, a Wednesday. Astronomical data, textual research and the emergence of a miraculously ancient Jewish calendar handed down by none other than Moses have convinced this Cambridge academic that Christ was actually crucified on 1 April, 33 AD—the greatest April Fool’s day of all time.

Humphreys says we can use “science and the gospels hand in hand” to prove that there is no contradiction in the two Last Supper days. His answer is a different calendar, but that is far from a new idea. Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls various scholars have realized that the Essenes of Qumran, assuming that the scrolls are theirs, used a solar calendar different from the lunar-solar one used by the Jewish temple authorities. Since there is a mass of evidence that suggests that Christ was an Essene by culture, it seems quite likely that the apparent difference in the day when the Last Supper was held in the Synoptic Gospels and John offered a likely solution to F F Bruce’s thorny problem. Arguments were put forward in The Hidden Jesus, and on the AW! website, addressing questions like these, and the date of the crucifixion—which was actually in 21 AD! Even the pope in 2007, was ready to believe Jesus may have followed the solar calendar of the Qumran community. Humphreys says:

The problem with this is that under that system Passover would have fallen a week later, after both the Last Supper and Christ’s death

It seems that Humphreys knows details of the Essene solar calendar unknown to mortals. But then he is a Christian, and Christians have the gift of sudden certainty! Whatever suits their interpretation of their Christian belief system suddenly becomes certain! The Essene calendar turns out to be no use, so can certainly be discarded, the great scientist has decided. Instead, he suggests for the first time that another calendar was also in use, making three in use simultaneously!

The official Jewish calendar at the time of Jesus’ death seems to have been the one still used by Jews today, a lunar system in which days run from sunset to sunset. This was the calendar brought in by the Persians who colonized Yehud from Babylon in the fifth century BC. Working out quite how the Essenes and the Temple worshipping Jews managed to co-ordinate their lives when they had a calendar each is hard enough, but now a third one has emerged, it is getting rather silly.

Sillier still, Humphreys thinks it was “adapted from Egyptian usage at the time of Moses”. The Book of Exodus in the Old Testament says God instructed Moses and Aaron to start their year at the time of the Exodus from Egypt. Humphreys argues that this system would have been an adaptation of a lunar calendar used by the Egyptians, in which the start of the year was changed to be in the spring, and conveniently it dates Passover in 33 AD to the Wednesday of Holy Week, already decided upon by Humphreys and his chum, Oxford astrophysicist, Graeme Waddington, in 1983. This then identified the date of Jesus’s crucifixion as the morning of Friday, 3 April 33 AD, which has since been widely accepted by Christians. If Jesus died on 3 April, the standard Jewish calendar of 33 AD would have placed his crucifixion on the 14th day of the Jewish month of Nisan. The Passover meal, however, falls on the 15th, supporting John’s account, but not those of the other gospels.

Plainly, this is God at work. It is a miracle. A calendar was handed down in a mythical story by a mythical being around 1300 BC, and suddenly pops up being used by the reincarnated God and his chums in the very week of his death just as he was about to cross into the promised land of God’s kingdom. Who could fail to be a Christian now?

It seems that by choosing the Wednesday of the Passover, Jesus was identifying himself with Moses. He then died on Nisan 14th, just as the Passover lambs were being slain according to the official Jewish calendar as well. Humphreys says with Christian assurance:

These are deep, powerful symbolisms and through the use of this calendar they can be based on objective, historical evidence.

So this is objective historical evidence of a mythical man, the preservation of a calendar over the astonishingly long time of a thousand years by illiterate slaves, who gave rise to a mythical empire, mythical kings, and then disappeared with scarcely a trace for hundreds of years before turning up in Persia! Professor Humphreys is a scientist and ought indeed to be capable of objective work, but he is first and foremost a Christian, a man brought up as a young earth creationist who confessed he was shocked to learn, only at university, that the earth was not young! He was chairman of Christians in Science from 1994-2001, and is associated with the Templeton Foundation.

Of course, all his best chums and coreligionists support him in his skulduggery. Alan Millard of Liverpool University gurgles:

By linking scientific knowledge with biblical study, Colin Humphreys gives a welcome demonstration of a way apparent contradictions in the gospel texts may be reconciled.

That is obviously so, were it true. Another chum and coreligionist, Hugh G M Williamson of Oxford University says these…

…suggestions are likely to have a significant impact both on scholarly appraisal and on the regular Christian appreciation of these climactic events of the faith.

Ah! This is more like it. Nothing here to do with scientific knowledge, objective or historical evidence, just an appreciation of these climactic events of faith.

No doubt professor Humphreys will get a Templeton prize for this, but many things remain puzzling, not least how a mythical being, Moses, was able to devise a calendar that was still in use 1500 years after his nominal lifetime—a double miracle to begin with. What is it about religions that saps people’s brains and sucks away any principles they ought to have had? Didn’t Humphreys think any lessons were worth taking from his discovery that the earth was not 6000 years young, and the author of Genesis was wrong. Christians think it is God, don’t they? Suddenly, they have to help the poor old chap out. He is a bit old, after all!

Science, as yet, has no way of turning myth into objective truth and history, so Humphreys’ theory can only be bunkum. The book, in short, cannot be worth reading. Even so, to help you make up your own mind, here are the chapter headings:

1. Three mysteries of the last week of Jesus
2. Dating the crucifixion – the first clues
3. The problem of the last supper
4. Can we reconstruct the Jewish calendar at the time of Christ?
5. The date of the crucifixion
6. The moon will be turned to blood
7. The Passover puzzle and the calendar of Moses
8. Did Jesus use the solar Passover calendar of Qumran?
9. The date of the last supper: the hidden clue in the synoptic gospels
10. Was the Moses calendar used in Israel at the time of Jesus?
11. The Galilean Passover and the date of the last supper
12. From the last supper to the crucifixion
13. The last days of Jesus: an overview

Dr Lindsay Wilson, Academic Dean and Lecturer in Old Testament, Ridley, Melbourne, has briefly reviewed for The Melbourne Anglican The Separation of Early Christianity from Judaism, by Marianne J Dacy (Amberst, New York: $119.99). Dacy is a Catholic.

He says her analysis is largely an historical one. That has to be good, for many Christians think fundamental theological differences between the Jewish and Christian religions were the reason for the separation. It is not so. The Jews, many Christians say, rejected God and murdered His son, so they were the people of the Devil, abandoning God, even though He had declared they were His Chosen Ones. Dacy does not think such theological factors had much, if anything, to do with it, and she puts little emphasis on them. Her thesis is that Christianity became Gentile not because of carefully argued theology, but largely because of the increasing number of Gentile converts, the marginalising of practising Jewish Christians, and the change in the balance of power in the Roman Empire.

Surely she is right. Christ was a Jew, and despite the supposed perfidy of the Jews, all the first Christians were Jews, though many were Hellenized Jews. It was through the increasing preponderance of Hellenized Diaspora Jews in Christianity outside of Palestine that gentile godfearers, mainly women at first, were drawn in, then men once the Pauline faction had abrogated the need for circumcision. Jewish Christians seem to have fought with the Romans in the war of 66-70 AD, and sympathized with the ambitions of Bar Kochba, while refusing to recognize him as messiah—how could they—and being unwilling to actually fight.

Even so it was in the period between the two Jewish wars that the Christians outside Judaea began to separate themselves from Jews generally. When Christianity was accepted by Constantine, things began to get harder for the Jews, as Christian prejudice against them was able to be expressed, and eventually the privileges given to Jews by Julius Caesar were lifted by Theodosius, and Jews began to be maligned like all the other non-Christian religions, and their synagogues smashed just as temples to the classical gods of Rome had been. Dr Wilson truly writes:

One of the striking features of this story was to see Christians, when they rose to political and social prominence (fourth to fifth centuries) using the law to impose Christianity and discriminate against other religions. This is the very practice used by Islam today, and widely condemned by Christians. There is value in reading church history!

Wilson is pointing out Christian hypocrisy, with the appropriate degree of coyness Christians feel is necessary when they ever so politely criticize others of their co-religionists, however objectionable their behavior might have been, or still be!

He continues that the rift between Christianity and Judaism was accelerated by the rise of Christianity to a position of political and social privilege. Once Christians had power, they no longer bleated about persecution like that they had received at the hands of a few emperors anxious that the decline of the empire curiously paralleled the growth of Christianity within it. Now they could mercilessly attack pagans, then Jews, then even each other—over metaphysical, nay mythical, doctrinal matters concerning the nature, substance and body of Christ.

Christianity had already declined beyond a savagery that had not been seen in civilized society for a very long time, but which was to persist for over a thousand more years of Christian darkness, before the glimmers of the Enlightenment were seen.

In recent years, archaeologists have turned up evidence of a wave of human settlements along the shores of the Persian Gulf dating to about 7,500 years ago. Jeffrey Rose, an archaeologist and researcher with the University of Birmingham in the UK, said:

Where before there had been but a handful of scattered hunting camps, suddenly, over 60 new archaeological sites appear virtually overnight. These settlements boast well built, permanent stone houses, long distance trade networks, elaborately decorated pottery, domesticated animals, and even evidence for one of the oldest boats in the world.

But how could such highly developed settlements appear so quickly, with no precursor populations to be found in the archaeological record? Rose believes that evidence of those preceding populations is missing because it’s under the Gulf. Rose thinks it is no coincidence that the founding of such advanced communities along the shoreline corresponds with the flooding of the Persian Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago.

Surrounded by deserts, there is no obvious source for the civilized settlers. But they could have come from the heart of the Gulf, the part that is now submerged. Displaced by rising sea levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean, they had to move to higher, more marginal land, where their remains are now being found.

Historical sea level data show that the Gulf basin was above water from about 75,000 years ago, when sea levels fell. The newly exposed land was an ideal refuge from the harsh deserts surrounding it, with fresh water supplied by four substantial rivers, the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun, and Wadi Baton Rivers, as well as by underground springs. When conditions were at their driest in the surrounding hinterlands, the Gulf Oasis would have been at its largest in terms of exposed land area. At its peak, the exposed basin would have been about the size of Great Britain, Rose tells us.

Modern humans could have been in the region even before the oasis was above water. The area in and around the “Persian Gulf Oasis” may have been host to humans for over 100,000 years before it was swallowed up by the Indian Ocean around 8,000 years ago. Rose’s hypothesis suggests that humans may have established permanent settlements in the region thousands of years before current migration models suppose.

Recently discovered archaeological sites in Yemen and Oman have yielded a stone tool style that is distinct from the East African tradition. So humans were on the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula beginning as far back as 100,000 years ago, far earlier than the estimates of several recent migration models, which place the first successful migration into Arabia between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago.

A once fertile landmass now submerged beneath the Persian Gulf may have been home to some of the earliest human populations outside Africa. The receding of the waters from 75000 years ago left the Gulf Oasis accessible to these early human migrants out of Africa, and would have provided “a sanctuary throughout the Ice Ages when much of the region was rendered uninhabitable due to hyperaridity”, according to Rose.

The presence of human groups in the oasis fundamentally alters our understanding of human emergence and cultural evolution in the ancient Near East.

Vital pieces of the human evolutionary puzzle may be hidden in the depths of the Persian Gulf, but if the rise of the sea around 7,500 years ago was quite quick, the land being low lying rather like Bangladesh, and subject to storm surges, the story of a flood could have arisen. The people who escaped will have fled upstream to the present day Iraq, ancient Mesopotamia, where the Sumerian civilization developed a few thousand years later, and the numerical literacy which had already emerged for recording trade began to transfer to recording narrative. So the elements of the Flood and the Garden of Eden story with its four rivers, and its springs could have existed at the dawn of recorded history in Mesopotamia.

A news item somewhere informs us that John Dominic Crossan, once a Catholic priest, and now a long time member of the Jesus Seminar, has written an explanation of the Pater Noster or the Lord’s Prayer—“Our Father…” Apparently it is a prayer about the father of a household and the need to distribute the household’s food fairly. He may be a bit right!

Christians have always tried to maintain that Jesus was a member of an ordinary family, one of the motivations, no doubt, for the invention of the Birth Narratives, stories that no one in the main gospels ever refers to or seemingly knows anything about. And for the very good reason that few scholars doubt that they were later inventions tacked on to two of the gospels when they were compiled.

I cannot imagine why the prayer should not refer to God, as most Christians believe, but in the context not of people who lived in family groups, but of people who lived in religious communities, namely, the Essenes. They had a special meal, like the Eucharist, and most likely its source—the scenes where Jesus broke bread, and fed the four and five thousand—called the Messianic Meal, and it seems that the head of the table would recite the prayer on that occasion.

Jesus was an Essene beyond reasonable doubt. That Christians persistently deny it shows they are unreasonable. The Essenes were a Jewish church and, like Jews, and many others, called God their Father. To them, God was the Father of the human race, so all men were sons of God, but they were sons in a hierarchy of sons, the head of each level in the hierarchy being a father to his own sons.

Familiar? The later gentile church retained the system. Bishops, monks and priests are called father by others, monks are led by a father, an abbot, a Patriarch is a Head Father, an archbishop, and a Pope is a Father (Latin Papa, Greek, Pappas). In Aramaean, “abba” means father, and “ab” or “av” does in Hebrew. So, Barabbas means Son of the Father in Aramaean, and Barabbas was Jesus, indeed modern gospels admit that Barabbas was called Jesus!

The Essene hierarchies were not based on material status, on wealth, but on service to others. “The last is first and the first last” being an expression of rewarding service as opposed to status. God’s sons, the human race, were to be valued for their service to others, not on the basis of wealth, so the Essenes, like the apostles in Acts, held all their goods in common. They were communists. That is one big reason why American Christians cannot face up to the truth about Christ.

Paul made the Jewish leader, Jesus, who expected God’s visitation to save the Jews from foreign oppression, into the saviour of an Hellenistic mystery cult. Paul was the cult leader. He transferred the divine title of God to the messiah, and substituted effort of will by faith. Faith is a cop out. It is empty without works, as James wrote, even in the New Testament. Modern Christians prefer faith because works means doing something—doing God’s will, actually measuring up to the law, or measuring up to the criterion of loving your enemy. Paul’s rejection of will undercut Jesus, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, because it is the effort involved in trying to do God’s will that is salvific. Trying to fulfil the law, and trying to love others is what takes people closer to God, not any self-indulgent faith. Paul distorted the value of the law, and he taught in opposition to Jesus. Jews stepped away and ignored him. The Christianity of Christ himself was destroyed. More at:

http://www.askwhy.co.uk/christianity/0582PaulChristianity.php

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