The Gospels and Sarah Palin

Lame Stream Media grifter Sarah Palin got caught the other day by a reporter who asked her what she thought of her tour of Paul Revere’s House in Boston.  She then went on in casual campaign chit chat to describe how Paul Revere had warned the British with shots and bells or something to that effect.  Her fans then went into Wikipedia to hack the story of Paul Revere to match Saint Sarah’s view of what I believe is sacred American History. 

Well anyway her boss, Roger Ailes, inventor of Lame Stream Media Fox News, in his bulletproof, bombproof office, in fear of gays and or blacks, has sent her on a Vacation to Nowhere on a bus leaving a huge carbon footprint in perhaps the hope that one of her insane stalkers gets off a few rounds of sacred second amendment sacramentals, that she of course survives, wonder woman, saint, and he can have Cheney’s old office during Sarah’s first term as Prez.

This is not the America I grew up in.  The nuts are running the insane asylum. 

I have to think, wonder, how the gospels possibly got distorted in similar fashion after they were verbally transmitted and then in writing transcribed to suit the decade and or the ego of the current saint in charge of the Jesus cult. 

“and on this nitwit (Sarah Palin) I will build my whats-sha-ma-call-it”.(Roger Ailes)

HMOG!?

Have a nice day.

Benedict XVI and the Self Hating Gospels

 In an attempt to soften his own roots and contributions to recent European history, Joe the Pope aka Joe the Scholar has let the Jews off the hook for the execution of Jesus in his forthcoming book, Jesus of Nazareth – Part II.

Pope Benedict: Jewish people not guilty for Jesus death

The Jews as a collective body are not directly responsible for the politics of the Jewish “Aristocracy” and or Temple hierarchy that plotted with the Romans to get rid of one minor Jewish Sect/Cult leader in first century Palestine.

Surely Josef Ratzinger was dragged screaming and kicking out of his youthful house and forced to join the Hitler Youth. In a very loose sense, he might be referred to be a self hating German. But the Germans do not really take responsibilty for the Holocaust in their hearts. They have paid some reparations to survivors and built a few monuments and passed a few laws outlawing anti-Semitic discourse in public view. This false sense of mea culpa, of wished for self hating Germans, by the German people for the collective acts of WWII was imposed on them by their conquerors in 1945.

True contrition by individuals can only be experienced by individuals who directly took part in their own little sliver of war crimes during the Nazi regime. Group guilt and group punishment is quite a different matter.

Anti-Semitism is I am told a nineteenth century term. If you go back to the first century the proper term is perhaps anti-Judaism. We again go back to the mysterious dividing line between Jewish Jews following the teachings of Jesus and the half Jews and full Gentiles that morphed a Jewish sect/cult into mainstream Roman pagan culture and Jesus into a god status.

As I have stated before the four Gospels were probably written after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.. In deed the language of blaming the Jews for Jesus' death in those gospels reeks perhaps of self-hating Jews as authors. So, if it comes down to logic, you can see that the gospels were not written by eyewitnesses or in some cases by real Jews, Jews that Jesus knew in his lifetime.

How many generations from the believed death of Jesus around 30 C.E., to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., to the Kitos diaspora wars 115-117 C.E., and the final destruction of Jewish resistance by Hadrian in 135 C.E.? Somewhere along that time line, Jesus and his very Jewish mission got turned into Mac and Cheese with Beef Gravy (not kosher).

Benedict XVI scholarship I believe will limit itself to the four anit-Judaic gospels. It is very limited flawed post WWII German scholarship at best for a possible “self hating” German to discount the writings not of first century self hating Jews but rather mid second century Jew hating Gentiles outside of Palestine.

The true message of the Jewish prophet Jesus was, is Love. Anything less, like many passages in the New Testament, just does not cut the mustard.

Third rate hack Roman scholarship seems to have changed little in nineteen hundred years.

And so it goes.

Meal Ticket to Heaven

There was a famous BBC documentary series with James Burke called “Connections”. It seemed to ramble all about and show how different historic events, inventions, ideas sometimes came together to form other historic events, inventions, ideas.

I have a similar idea and flow here and it all has to do with food and religion.

Holy Thursday was also in stellar or is it lunar alignment with Passover this year.

As such or by coincidence, the Jewish Seder, or feast meal remembering Passover was held in the White House this year with Jewish staff officiating and the First Family in attendance in the private family quarters. This is no doubt a good political or is it a PC move for a chief executive who last week or in the last few days has mentioned his family links to Islam and in a predominately Muslim country of Turkey. Astute!

Let me go free flow on this. In my article about Saint Paul, I had mentioned my encounter with a Hindu salesman in an Arizona parking lot over a decade ago and his mentioning family and meals as the basis of response for questions I had about his religious background. Perhaps he was secular and did not know or did not want to go into detail with me within the context of a western, predominately in the past, Christian country.

And then there is Mel Gibson, sad soul, a RC traditionalist, that blames the Jews for Jesus’ Jewish mission in life. One of his seeming passions in life is anti-Semitism. That and transubstantiation of the conversion of Bread during the mass into the body of Christ – no satisfactory religious chefs after Vatican II for him. Does he resent the Jewish tradition of Passover or would he rather have had Jesus being secular and eating at Burger King?

Mr. Gibson’s profound anti-Semitism is I think rooted in his Irish Catholic American background not unlike my own. Irish American you say? A side trip to Australia as a young child and into adulthood didn’t much improve his cosmopolitan or lack of it view of the planet. Is it anti-Semitism or a profound lack of the knowledge of Jewish culture?

Moving along, I think of all the nuns who taught me as a child. Was their involvement in the faith profound, spiritual or was it all a meal ticket thing.

Standing behind three nuns in a polling place in the 1976 presidential election, I was surprised to hear that the nuns had legal names and they had to announce them to people running the election polling station. One by one they announced their legal names and one by one I heard the first real name of Mary for each and I don’t remember the other two’s last names but the third one of Mary Clancy – that sure hit a note of recognition of an good sounding Irish Catholic name. Then I thought to myself. All these nuns attached to a religious order that used the name Mary in the title of the order, they were all named Mary as well. Did they choose their vocations or were they steered toward vocations by parents who named them and groomed them for such.

This brings me in thought to Vatican II. I think the lay people did not panic so much then as it was the priests and nuns that jumped ship in droves that began a downward spire in the whole full life RC thing. Perhaps these deserters wanted a whole full secular life thing with sex and all that. Fewer nuns. Lay teachers cost more. Tuition for a RC education and a few decades later no more free Catholic grade schools for the average Catholic.

The priests, after Vatican II, saw the medieval church melt in front of their eyes and standing there Sunday after Sunday preaching the same lame boiler plate religion message just got so unspeakable.

The nuns and the priests for better or worse I classify under the meal ticket thing. That when Catholic families had five, six or eight kids, the parents had to do some futuristic planning about what to do with so many kids. One son for the priesthood and one daughter for the convent took care of two children. The others would marry and reproduce and take care of the parents in old age etc. It seemed like a good plan.

There has always been a percentage of priests and nuns who leave religious orders after their parents die. My aunt who had been a nun for twenty five years gave up the career after her parents, my grandparents died etc. Meal ticket or not, sometimes breathing your own free secular air is what life is really all about.

This brings me to the four gospels and how perception is everything. The Gospel of John seems to have been written by a non-Jew or a profoundly ignorant about his own culture Jew or anti-Semitic Roman Empire type. Only three of the gospels bothers to mentions the traditional Last Supper scene, the Jewish Seder, in the context of the Bread and Wine sacramental thing that has held a great deal of Christianity together for close to two millennia.

If one steps back and looks at these other three synoptic gospels, you realize that the menu is quite sparse there too.

Which makes me think? Did either secularized Jews or Hellenistic Jews write the gospels as “eyewitness” accounts? Or maybe non-Jews wrote them. That or they date further down a timeline well into the second century of the Common Era or got rewritten all the way up until the time of Saint Constantine the Great in the fourth century.

The oldest known existing fragment of the gospels is one page from John and that is in a museum in England and is dated to around 130-140 AD. Those dates triggers off a possible connection to the second Jewish rebellion during which The Third Temple got temporarily dedicated to Yahweh out of the recycled temple stones from Herod's time or the unfinished Temple of Jupiter on temple mount.

Not a lot of recorded history there. Josephus Flavius was dead and Jewish historian types were scarce at the second most total and most long lasting decimation of the Jewish nation in 135 AD. No doubt Hadrian wanted the facts covered up and did not even try the PR thing altogether. The emperor Hadrian has a favored status among most western historians. His collecting antiques and boy toys gets more mention in history books and you have to dig a lot to find his ranking in holocaust standings.

(If Jews want archeology opened up on the noble sanctuary, mention that you are looking for the Hadrian’s whatnot or the Temple of Jupiter, the west will approve.)

The gospels got written most likely by some Hellenistic Jews in Asia Minor (Turkey), a refugee staging area after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD and the final blow to the nation in 135 AD. That perhaps the anti-rebellion forces within Judaism in 70 and 135 is what laid the basis of anti-Semitism all the way to the present day. The present day anti-Semitism may have its beginnings on a change of internal attitudes and divisions in Judaism and the turning away from the old Judaism, more political than religious, recently passed away in 135 AD.

That said, I do not understand why they tack the Hebrew Testament onto the Greek Testament and have so little, basic knowledge among the common ranks of that long standing world religion and culture of Judaism.

The strength, salvation and possible rebirth of the dying Christian Church lies in the foundation stones of Judaism and Jesus’ (sorry Mel) Jewish mission. Two menus in one restaurant like the Old and New Testament speaks not of good eating but more like competing food court entities at a shopping mall.

Where is the horseradish? Bon appetite.

A Journey Begun with 1000 Masses

-
The mind wanders.

I am looking at a photo of my old catholic grade school in Philly, now defunct. The photo is from when it was brand new in 1923. There is a blacksmith shop and row houses where the convent would be built thirty years into the future. There is a woman in front of one of the houses no doubt calling her children to dinner and there are two boys in old fashioned knicker pants, perhaps hers, in the street roughhousing. There are trolley tracks for a trolley car line that no longer runs there.

While I think I can predict what will become of the RC church in America, I see a middle view. That new factory worker’s parish of my youth would celebrate mass in that school, designed by the world famous gothic architect George A. Audsley. The school hall would serve as temporary church for another twenty three years. The church, Romanesque, was the complete obsolete in style from the school. That structure would be built in record time and for cash when rationing of building materials would be lifted after the war.

You can take away the buildings. Christianity and its celebration, in the beginning of time and perhaps in the end of time, will be conducted in people’s houses, pavilions in parks, K of C meeting halls.

Without property, the Church belongs to the Holy Spirit and to the People. Without property, it will no longer belong to the pencil pushing all boys accounting club in Rome.

Rome may be building its future in the emerging world. Good for them. The people there will likely get a school, clean water and a medical clinic faster if they join the RC church than if they wait for some native corrupt dictator to send help.

Cycles and energies go round and round.

I have perhaps attended over 1,000 masses in my life, in my youth. Weekly and every school day in October, Lent, May , First Fridays, First Saturdays and the numbers add up. No doubt you get a smattering of words from the Epistles or the Gospels hanging out there in the stone house so often. Before all this talk of a Latin mass into English or English back again into Latin, the Epistles and the Gospels, the most important part of the service, were read to us in the native tongue.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to find some of those words that I remembered being read from the pulpit in my youth. Through research I found out that basically the same readings from sacred text were read at the same time every year, year in and year out. There was a one year lectionary in most of the Catholic churches in the world. I believe also that some of the Lutherans followed the same one year lectionary thing for centuries until Vatican II.

After Vatican II there was a suggested three year lectionary whereby more of the Epistles and Gospels would be read over a three year period. As I say it is suggested more for solidarity of all Christian churches, RC and Protestant, to be on the same page every Sunday so to speak. That is about the biggest accomplishment of Vatican II as I can see down here on the ground. That and talk -Talk - about interfaith dialogue but no real long term dialogue intended.

I started looking for a one year lectionary maybe ten years ago. I also wanted to find a 1957 Saint Joseph’s Missal. The missal was a book containing the mass in Latin and weekly one year lectionary readings. This was a personal book, held in one hand, that you took to service with you. I do not remember if it contained any hymns.

The Internet and its content has improved vastly in a decade and most of my research got done there without touching any hard copy.

Fast forward, I never got the Missal even though they are available on Amazon.Com or similar vending places. I never did get to a Latin Mass. Until recently the Latin mass thing was, and still is to some extent, a secret and clandestine thing to find. You need word of mouth to spread and find these rare Latin mass occurrences.

Because of all that I have read or researched I no longer have any nostalgia to see the Mass again in Latin. Latin is a dead language, meaning that no new words for it has been created for close to fifteen hundred years, not since the death of the Western Roman Empire.

Getting back to something I wrote earlier, I remember highlights of about a dozen Gospels from those annual readings.

One I wrote about earlier, the other two I will mention here.

One is the Transfiguration whereby Jesus and Peter and James, son of Zebedee, go to the top of a mountain. Jesus is transformed almost into light and is in the presence of Moses and Elijah. Peter wants to build a shrine to these three prophets after witnessing the event. Jesus says no.

I have often wondered why Jesus supposedly gave the reins of his mission over to a hardhead like Peter. After he just witnessed the divine or near divine powers of Jesus, he denies Jesus in the early morning hours of Good Friday when Jesus is judged and condemned to death.

On one level, Jesus saw that the weakest among us such as Peter should be the strongest link in the chain of the Christian faith. From what I have seen lately of the Vatican Three Stooges style bureaucracy, Jesus was indeed wise both as a human and or as divine being in putting this man eventually in charge, after the death of James, Jesus‘ half-brother, and as one of the first leaders of the early church.

The other reading I remember from my youth had to do with Jesus and his being asked what is the greatest law in the book. To which he replies in Matt 22:37 a quote from Deuteronomy 6:5 about loving God with your whole heart, soul and mind. He finishes with a second but no less sacred idea with Matt 22:39 “…Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself.” -- Matt 20:40 “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

I remember this passage whether it be from a movie, or from a one year reading cycle or in a religion class in high school. This thought always impressed me.

I put all this casual and earnest research into bible studies or daily reading or the reaction of the world to every day events away in my brain. This last most important commandment to love your neighbor as yourself is I think the keystone in the Christian faith.

Of course other world religions and beliefs also have similar ideas, text and dogma. I feel that a similar idea similar to the Golden Rule of “doing unto others what you would have them do unto you” is perhaps a starting point in restoring civility into this growing and in many places hostile global world culture.

I mention some of the words of Dr. Karen Armstrong from her interview on Bill Moyers Journal the other night. She mentioned that we in the west had three hundred years to accommodate ourselves in the changing of some institutions from the sacred to the secular.

No doubt the hanging of Quakers in Massachusetts led to the need for the founding of a place for Quaker political and religious asylum in the British colonies of North America. This led to William Penn, a Quaker, getting a land grant from Charles II to start such a place of tolerance that in many ways led to the formation of ideas of self worth, religious freedom, and even political independence.

Cycles and energy go round and round.

Massachusetts, shortly after the founding of Pennsylvania as a haven for all faiths or even non-believers, burned itself out on ignorance, hate, or whatever with their Salem witch trials around 1692. Turning against your neighbor is easy but sometimes the collateral damage is a bitch to swallow or live with.

I was disheartened to hear that they, Islamic fanatics, had bombed and killed people in a hotel in Islamabad because this hotel was a refuge for the tourists or native Islamists not observing the annual month long fast of Ramadan. It is this group mind think, this only one religious belief allowed in a country or the inequality of women etc. - that scares the crap out of me.

We in the west had our transition from the sacred to the secular over a longer period than these Muslim countries who have had to deal with it in decades. Diversity is a concept we understand. How it is adapted elsewhere, only time, and cultural context to digest it, will tell.

This love your neighbor as yourself is a good thing, a good concept, but I think the core to looking at it in terms of a long term or compressed timeline is that in order to love your neighbor in the truest sense you have to first love yourself.

The west in its recent past reached its pinnacle of individual freedom, potential and global scale selfishness. That the opportunity to spread individual freedom or its concept to the world means that it should be coupled with responsibility and selflessness.

Freedom with responsibility may be a oxymoron of sorts but marshalling and maintaining a positive energy flow connected with individual freedoms demands some rules to be followed. The chaotic present secular world without rules or regulations is not good for either the west or the east.

We have to look at Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. He did not love his neighbors as himself. He may have thought he loved his God with his whole heart, soul and mind but without the balance of love for neighbor, you only have an abstract obsession. Living with and dealing with your neighbor on an everyday basis is one basic building stone of civilization.

But by loving yourself and the cup overflows to your neighbor is an energy no doubt understood by Jesus when he zapped the fanatic Paul on the road to Damascus. Paul was truly empowered by Jesus to start building another path along the new faith’s road of life. On that day Paul started to love his enemies and started to truly love himself as well.

“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love” - I, You, We, are nothing in God’s ultimate scheme of things.

As the world grows smaller, we had better practice love for our self more and reach out in love to other neighboring cultures.

The mind wanders.

...and the journey continues.