Fake Mustard Seed Parable -- Greco-Roman Urban Legend?

I happen to like mustard as a condiment.  Researching it, I see its history as both a condiment and a medicinal herb going back to ancient Rome and Egypt.

Problem with that is that it had always been a rich man’s condiment in ancient days and all the way up until Columbus.  Indeed the whole Columbus thing of going out of the superstitious Christian European box was a marketing strategy to obtain greater market share and greater market profits out of the spice trade that had been disrupted by the collapse of the Center of the Christian World in Constantinople in 1453. Center of the European distribution network too regarding the spice trade from the far east.

Greed was the motivating factor in Columbus’ zeal to find a shorter trade route to India.

When I read the parable of the Mustard Seed in the synoptic Gospels I wonder why a simple man of the people, a day laborer, a migrant homeless man in the form of Jesus, why he would preach to the simple masses, mostly farmers and goatherds etc. about the very complex and exotic spice trade item from India such as mustard and or the mustard seed.

I understand the power of metaphor, the power to illustrate a small lurching into the big, to illustrate some other point.

Indeed, I feel certain that the Jesus-y feel of the mustard seed parable has an overlaying stink of an urban scholar that knows all the aspects of primitive botany from books and also commodity profits of an earthy sounding farm product that Jesus must have had knowledge of, but probably did not.

In fact, in one of the synoptic passages, the mustard seed parable is preceded by a parable of weeds among wheat.  While an urban dweller who wrote this mustard seed parable might stick his nose up at weeds, many weeds are indeed edible and the poor, the starving unentitled poor, Jesus’ poor, would have gathered up many of those weeds separated eventually from the wheat and ate them.  Survival makes more sense than urban vested scholarship in the early church’s reconstruction of a holy man who few if any recorded any details about.

Not only eat the weeds, but dry the ones that were not edible and use them as fuel, not burn them up foolishly like waste in an urban middle class garden.

Mustard, where it can grow, not the Holy Land, is also considered a weed.

A middle class Greco-Roman urban garden view of the natural world?

Confused mixed message from early paid for Jesus scholars? Greco-Roman urban myths? Faulty creationist type middle class science? If it sounds good in an abstract middle class context, it must be true.


Problem with scholars, urban middle class scholars, like the ones involved with the Jesus  Seminar, who have signed off on makes sense, sounds like middle class, myths like the Mustard Seed parable, is that they are middle class and see the whole world with their born to, ingrained way of looking at the world. 

This middle class urban way of looking at Jesus, invention then and still now, is an interesting illustration of the human condition but it is not the true Jesus. 

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Shroud of Turin Faked – Satan’s Magic Cloth – Fraud dictated, letter perfect details, fitted to Synoptic Gospels – Jesus Seminar

Perfect Fit to the Synoptic Gospels - Too Perfect

Just as Bishop Lahey of Nova Scotia is apologizing in a courtroom, sorry he got caught trying to distribute kiddie porn, just as the most recent Dutch Church sex abuse scandal is breaking loose, Italian Experts (tourist experts?) authenticate the medieval faked relic, The Shroud of Turin, the so-called burial cloth of Christ, just in time for feel good about the church Midnight Mass services on Christmas Eve.  The lie continues one more season in the eight thousand season history of the church of Rome.

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2010/04/satans-magic-cloth-shroud-of-turin.html

It is the twenty first century and people are still clinging to an art fraud from the fourteenth century to stimulate faith. Fraud does not stimulate faith. Fraud stimulates more fraud. 

The cloth, “the Shroud of Turin”, which has a unique image imprinted on it, put there by some lost process, is just one lone survivor of the thriving phony relic business of the middle ages. Enough pieces of the true cross were sold by the church, enough to build apartment buildings along with hundreds of gallons of Christ’s blood, were hallmarks of a corrupt age that preceded the selling of indulgences and the Reformation. 

The Roman church clings to its pagan roots and pagan fascination with superstitions that equal relics with good luck and magic. 

So now after many tests including modern carbon dating and putting the Shroud firmly in the fourteenth century, the RC church is selling the same old shit to inspire faith at a current exhibit in Turin. Shit that inspires faith is superstition or shit faith. 

People, fanatics keep coming up with more bizarre ways that could prove this Bogus Turin cloth to be the actual burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth. Can I sell you some shares in the Brooklyn Bridge?

The Shroud is a fraud because it conforms to the exact details of the synoptic gospels, written fifty to hundred years after Jesus. Oral history changes over times. The gospels, their alleged facts are there in writing. Logic to me dictates that the oral history of the gospels finally written down would miss details or add them. This cloth does not challenge the established story recreated and finalized decades after the ministry of Jesus. 

Because the Shroud conforms to an image of Jesus with a crown of thorns and a spear wound in his side and other markings on the cloth, that cloth was made to order. Made to order to conform to gospels which if you believe the Jesus Seminar only accurately quote Jesus eighteen percent of the time in those accounts written much later than Jesus’ lifetime. 

If the most important part of the gospels, the words and ideas of Jesus are on shaky grounds, how can anybody believe the stage sets drawn around the words to illustrate the story. 

So if you get an object that conforms to faulty gospels one hundred percent – it is hardly proof but a customized sure hit bogus relic. 

There is some fascinating literature about the Shroud. Most of that has been written in the last forty odd years and concerns the use of analysis and science to disprove this magic cloth possibly originating from the king of all fraud – Satan.

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Jesus, a man of true heart and spirit

I have written before about the Jesus Seminar which has made a scholarly attempt to decipher the New Testament. Long story made short, this decades long project has produced a body of scholarly opinion about the origins of the gospels and the writings in them. Bottom line. The gospels are not eyewitness accounts, play by play, blow by blow, of the holy man aka Jesus of Nazareth.

The Jesus Seminar among most things states that less than twenty percent of the sayings attributed to Jesus were actually said by him directly or indirectly.

The first time I heard something like this in I believe a New York Times article more than a decade or so ago I was completed dumbfounded. The New York Times had a stellar reputation then of printing all the news worth printing.

The Jesus Seminar has more than its share of critics regarding methodology, qualifications of scholarship etc.

Jesus Seminar

The bottom line however is that this niche of historic research, scholarship and educated opinion puts the story of Jesus being resurrected into an allegorical mode and style consistent with Jewish studies and teachings of the time.

A recent online article about J.D. Crossan, co-founder of the Jesus Seminar appeared in CNN. The article was insightful into the background of the man who helped start a pathway to truth about the real Jesus and perhaps too the real message of Jesus.

John Dominic Crossan's 'blasphemous' portrait of Jesus

Crossan believes the public should be exposed to even the most divisive debates that scholars have had about Jesus and the Bible. He co-founded the Jesus Seminar, a controversial group of scholars who hold public forums that cast doubt on the authenticity of many sayings and deeds attributed to Jesus...

Crossan's overarching message is that you don't have to accept the Jesus of dogma. There's another Jesus hidden in Scripture and history who has been ignored...

My own search for the real Jesus started many years ago in reading the New Testament several times. As time progressed I noticed the flaws and differences between the gospels. No big deal to a Roman Catholic as I had been raised and never read the bible as a one piece of literature. The gospels doled out in the Roman mass ritual were more like what they describe as soundbites in the media. Short readings and short homilies too as I remember from my youth. In the RC church it is all in the traditions and rituals and not in the writing styles or intent of the original “four evangelists”.

The modern world discounts the ancient world. Jesus and religion and or “Christ”ianity compete with mankind's attention along with media commercials for hamburgers and car insurance.

All this stuff on the side of scholarship by a Jesus Seminar also competes for the tradtional fundamentalist Christianity that in recent decades here in America has seemed to graft itself onto one of the major political parties.

So it is not surprising that people were not aware of all this scholarship and research stuff going on not in secret but off the main media stage. Perhaps too another generation is only getting first wind of this ongoing religious research. The CNN article has something in excess of eleven thousand comments as I am writing this several days after the article first appeared.

In any case I use the Jesus Seminar to reinforce my own historic and religious research. Alas I nevered studied Latin or Greek and cannot do what someone like Crossan and others can do with reading the oldest documents available to scholars regarding the New Testament.

Never the less I find that my own Irish Catholic American upbringing parallels Crossans when he comments on the usage of accepting Jesus to a evangelical Protestant.

Some critics say he's trying to debunk Christianity. Some question his personal faith. At a college lecture, Crossan says an audience member stood up and asked him if he had "received the Lord Jesus" as his savior.

Crossan said he had, but refused to repeat his questioner's evangelical language to describe his conversion.

"I wasn't going to give him the language; it's not my language," Crossan says. "I wasn't trying to denigrate him, but don't think you have the monopoly on the language of Christianity."

When asked if he is a Christian, Crossan doesn't hesitate.

"Absolutely."...

I know where Brother John is coming from. Once the Roman religion is engrained in you, phrases like receiving “the Lord Jesus” as your savior is language you never heard as a child or in the style of Roman Christianity as I experienced it. Five centuries after the Reformation there is still a linguistic and cultural devide perpetuated by both sides of the “Kristos” aisle that only helps to splinter understanding regarding concepts of Christian faith, salvation, purpose and ideals. And then again it might be the non-verbal cultural thing of the Irish.

After spending much of his life in the Roman Catholic Church, Crossan is now an outsider.

He hasn't joined a church because he says a priest might deny him the sacraments because of his run-ins with church leaders.

"If I attend a local Roman Catholic Church, I would get sucked back into all the debates," he says. "I don't want to spend my life fighting Roman Catholicism."

This is the quote that hit home for me. Any of you who are regular followers of this blog know that that is what I have been doing – fighting Roman Catholicism. I have not been fighting it to attack it but rather to deprogram myself in the many pagan aspects of a Christian belief system merged with Roman paganism in its prime. Whatever.

As a cultural Christian I still consider myself a Christian. I believe in the basic message of love of Jesus to us and all our neighbors. I believe in God and the Holy Spirit and believe that Jesus was in some of those few words recognized by the Jesus Seminar as authentic, a true man of heart and inspired by that holy spirit of the creator.

Jezus van Nazaret - the Movie - Verhoeven

Here some meat and potatoes and looking for an interesting movie about the life of Jesus and his teachings. Dutch director and author Paul Verhoeven intends to make a movie out of his book Jezuz van Nazaret.

Basic Instinct director plans film about Jesus

In an interview with MTV, the Dutch film-maker reveals that his newly-translated book Jesus of Nazareth, is intended as a staging post on the path to a movie version. Verhoeven wants to tell a story free from suggestions of miracles, and bereft of the crucifixion and resurrection scenes often seen in previous films depicting Jesus's life. The director prefers a humanist, scholarly approach, and will focus on his subject's ethical teachings….

Verhoeven says Jesus was a man who was consistently persecuted throughout his life, surrounded by enemies and forced to flee at every turn. Brushing off concerns over the negative attention his proposed film might receive from religiously-minded critics, he said: "Is it controversial? It's the truth."

The Dutchman is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not a fan of the most famous recent retelling of Jesus's final days, Mel Gibson's blockbusting The Passion of the Christ. Furthermore, he suggests that the crucifixion probably wasn't nearly such an appalling experience for its victim as the movie suggests…

"[Gibson] reduced it to two hours of suffering," complained Verhoeven. "The suffering of Jesus is not the important thing. It's terrible, but many people have terrible endings. Even with sicknesses that are so horrifying that crucifixion that took six hours is perhaps not even that important in comparison to what people have to go through, especially if they are wounded, lose limbs, whatever. Terrible things happen in the world. I think that's not the essence. The world is full of violence and terrible things. The whole universe is filled with disaster."

A modern view of Jesus for a modern global reality. Not a blood filled Mel Gibson medievalist fantasy tale.

I was especially surprised to see that this Dutch man is also a member of the Jesus Seminar. He obviously has the passion for a secular Christianity of the 21st century of our common global era.

Paul Verhoeven is a member of the Jesus Seminar. He is the only member who does not have a degree in biblical studies, although he graduated in mathematics and physics at the University of Leiden. Since he is not a professional biblical exegete, his membership in the Jesus Seminar has occasionally been cited by opponents of the Seminar as a sign that this group is less scholarly than it claims. On the other hand, some Jesus Seminar members were unhappy with Verhoeven's portrayal of Jesus as an eschatological prophet.

In 2007 Verhoeven authored the book Jesus of Nazareth (Dutch: Jezus van Nazaret) about the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The book reviews the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth and the alleged corruption of these same ideas over the last 2,000 years. The book may be a preparation for Jesus: The Man, a controversial film project about the life of Jesus. Verhoeven's book tells about the Jewish uprising against Roman rule and characterizes Jesus as terrorist. He rejects all supernatural happenings and miracles as unproved or unprovable. Marianna Sterk of the publishing house J.M. Meulenhoff said "Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait," has been released in September 2008 in Dutch and will be published in English in April 2010 by Seven Stories Press. Wikipedia

Good luck in his modern refreshing telling of the Jesus story.

A New Christian and the Core “C” Document

There is that last scene in the 1960 Movie “Time Machine” where it is determined that the Time Traveler has gone back to the future to rebuild a dying Earth civilization. It is also discovered that he has taken three books from his library to aid him in his efforts. The interesting question is what three books did he take? What three books would you take to represent the best of Human History and Cultures?

Interesting questions. I have written before about the Quelle Document that scholars have searched for in trying to balance the quotes of Jesus in the first three gospels that seem to be very exact or the same in translation. The “Q” – (Quelle – or “source” in German) - document is something of a holy grail for New Testament scholars.

I step back and have to wonder if the quest for “Q” is a macro or a micro attempt to get closer to the teachings of Jesus. Since it covers the base of three documents, the synoptic gospels, it is a macro item.

I want something a little more that a cheat sheet that the gospels writers, the dozens of them, copied from to define the true essence of Jesus and his teachings.

The search for the basic Jesus is perhaps in a “C” or Core Document (Core same in English as German?) - that is the base seed from which all other gospels grow and build upon. If there is such a Core or “C” document, then it might be a small and hidden document and right in front of the scholars’ noses all along.

If the new belief in non-belief represents the New Atheism, perhaps the minimalist beliefs of a Cultural Christian can represent that of a New Christian.

Where am I going with this? Well looking through the top fifteen “red ball” quotes by the Jesus Seminar of religious scholars, I see that seven out of the top fifteen quotes are from one chapter of one gospel. This particular group of scholars agree on what was truly said by Jesus with a high percentage of agreement on certan quotes in the NT. Those seven quotes I refer to are from Luke chapter six.

Reading Luke 6, I have to consider that here is close to eighty percent of the Jesus drama and Jesus message spelled out in plain language.

You have the blasphemy of King David in the House of G-D and the taking of the Sabbath from the sacred to the secular in the one phrase “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” – meaning “the people” make the rules for Sabbath and not high priests. Miracles are allowed on the Sabbath.

You have the naming of the twelve Apostles.

You have the Sermon on the Mount.

You have love for enemies and the judging of others.

You have a tree and its fruit.

And you have the houses built on rock and sand.

Luke 6 (New International Version)

That if one wanted to print Luke 6 in small print, it could be printed on two sides of one piece of paper. Luke 6 could be put into your wallet or purse.

You could read it everyday to be reminded of the message of the teacher, the master, the Prophet, the social agitator, the community organizer, the Son of Man, and the people – the people of God – who live the Jesus message everyday as – New Christians in a new global age.

A New Christian can believe and try to live by the basic core message of Jesus' teachings.

Like the Time Traveler who needed three books to bear witness to the whole of human history and culture, the New Christian perhaps only needs two to three pages – Luke 6 – on which to build a future for mankind, the whole of the human race, for generations to come.

A Real Jesus and Simon Bar Kochba

I have mentioned The Jesus Seminar in several of my articles. At first I was reluctant to accept that this long term scholarly deconstruction of the faith was necessary. In many ways, the future Christian church and it will exist in the centuries to come, will be based on a new foundation. The old foundation gave way not unlike the old St Peter’s in Rome that had stood there a thousand years and was torn down around 1500 C.E. to make way for the present structure.

Besides the crumbling foundation being examined and the engineers of The Jesus Seminar trying to determine how to best assess the damage, there is also separate from scholarly review the cancer setting into the Christian Faith from a worldwide RC hierarchy covering up priest abuse and the whole question of celibacy as a major factor in that abuse issue.

Another part of the cancer on the faith is the rigid thoughtless absolute bible hugging notion that the Bible is the unerring word of God as in the unerring opinion (tin god punditry) of fundamentalists. Yeah right.

The Jesus Seminar has moved on from the five gospels (Thomas for the sake of argument was included) and is now dissecting The Acts of the Apostles.

Seminar on the Acts of the Apostles

I invite you to read some of their reports and their blackballing of Acts as more of a second century document than a reflection of first century Christianity as we think of it and or have come to know it.

I eagerly await their seminar on Paul.

In my own amateur studies of esoterics and religion I feel confident to move on with my own brand of Cultural Christianity.

When looking at the Gospel of Mark recently and in a new format, line by line -

Bible, King James Version (KJV)

It struck me that Jesus if he ever existed did not live on the timeline they claim that he did. In my opinion, Jesus and or his ministry happened after the destruction of Herod’s temple in 70 AD.

I say this because I already believe that the Gospel of John is at least two small gospels welded together in the middle to suit a political agenda and claiming legitimacy of the Peter Clique of Christians as the one and only authorized Jesus name brand.

That looking at Mark I see road directions, markers that want the reader to believe in these events occurring in a certain time period. That the beginning of each synoptic gospel has different timeline markers designed for different intended audiences. Mark has John the Baptist. Matthew has Herod the Great and the Persian Magi. Luke has a census ordered by Augustus, with a timeframe not easily found or reconciled anywhere else in writings from antiquity.

And looking at Mark the whole Pilate marker is an amateur writer in the early second century wanting to use a recognizable figure such as Pilate in that he on a verbal or oral scale was somebody the Jews were still talking about decades after his transfer out of Palestine.

The trial with the high priest in the gospels is so phony. An orthodox Jew says he is the messiah and the high priest tears his clothes. In real life the high priest would have most likely said something like “Of course you are the messiah, and so is my nephew and half the people I meet everyday”.

The amateur nature of Jew on Jew and noble Roman letting Jew kill Jew is not early first century drama but early second century drama. Simon Bar Kochba and his Revolt and recycling of Hadrian’s Temple of Jupiter as the new Third Temple was a very short lived but real drama. There are coins of this two, three year era when the Jews almost broke the back of the whole Roman army and deserved a Josephus Flavious to write ripe propaganda about it.

Alas there are no records, very few about Hadrian bankrupting the Roman Empire in his desire to subjugate a foreign people and destroy a unique belief system. Who would want to keep records of the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Jews?

Jesus and or his sayings as in the Gospel of Thomas got written into a post apocalyptic script and backdated to be in the old antebellum Temple before 70 C.E. and to fulfill a hundred real or imagined prophetic conditions of a messiah. A simpler setting in a simpler time was needed to explain the teachings of Jesus and not with the backdrop of the chaos and thunder of the collapsed Jewish Dream in 135 C.E..

A simpler setting but the anger and rancor and political Jewish State infighting appear not to be disguised. The Pharisees as a class were a far more important factor in every day Jewish life after the destruction of Herod’s temple in the year 70 that before its demise.

After Bar Kochba and the total destruction of the Jewish State, some had to backtrack and decide or fabricate who the real messiah had really been if not Bar Kochba. Jesus of Nazereth?

We live in a wonderful age. The words of Jesus, the real words of Jesus and their love, humanity and quest for justice will echo through the centuries to come and not be filled with the hate and anti-Semitism of the hack spec writer scripts of the synoptic gospels.

Saint Quelle Pray For Us

Saint Quelle, who was he? He was from Somewhere. Presumably he lived in the end part of the first century into the early years of the second century. Where did he live? Somewhere is in present day Turkey.

After doing a lot of amateur sleuthing about the last century of academic dissection of the four Gospels, one sees a lot of impressive deconstruction and primarily from the Jesus Seminar. I say deconstruction because it is easy to pull something apart but what is left of the whole of the Christian Myth.

A name that gets tossed around a lot is the retired Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Sprong. He is quite eloquent and I do not take away from any of his or his fellow Jesus Seminar types but – but – they all salaried, vested and pensioned academics and use only documentation to talk their talk and walk their walk.

Besides, deconstruction of the Christian Myth leaves a great big hole, a void, a chasm that has not yet been filled in. When it is filled in, it will be paper mache and made only from the original few documents in Christianity that are there.

This academic dissection got started over a century ago with an analysis that stated of the first three similar synoptic gospels – Matthew and Luke did not copy everything from Mark. Some other document, a “quelle” (“source” in German) document must have once existed to be a source for the slight differences in quotes between the original Mark and the two follow up gospels of Matthew and Luke.

Rather than be a document, I have sometimes wondered if “Q” was not the same oral source. This does not much differ from oral history being written down and then used at a later time. But think of it. Let’s put a human being there in the seventh and eighth decade of the first century and still being a possible oral source – an original eyewitness. Interesting concept. I call him Saint Quelle. He was real. Just like Christianity itself.

What about the documents that are not there? Too many documents seemed to have disappeared in the early centuries of the Church or maybe they never existed to begin with – “Q” document included.

I am not saying that Jesus is not real. His message is clear to me. It is a simple message and stated amid the embellishments added to the New Testament over the decades and centuries after his ministry. While the academicians may have done a lovely job on the Gospels, they have yet to scrutinize the rest of the New Testament and namely Saint Paul.

I believe that there is a Paul Seminar going on at present. And it is brought to you by the same people who deconstructed Jesus in the Jesus Seminar - claiming by one estimate that only 18% of the sayings in the Gospels were actually uttered by Jesus.

I hope that the scholars they use this time are not merely Christian scholars who have studied Hebrew and Judaism. How many Rabbis have been invited to dissect Paul, the original yeshiva overachiever?

Having stated earlier that I thought that the Acts of the Apostles was an honest work, I look at it of late and see some basic flaws. I do not see specific flaws. The main thing I see is an all too convenient nature of the Acts as a bridge document to feed into and explain the players.

In Acts, Peter runs a Jim Jones type commune. Anybody who does not sell all their property because the world is going to end next week – and give all your money to the commune – well they get blown away like Ananias and Sapphira who cheated God and hedged their bet about the end of the world and the eternity things. Does this all happen in mere days or months after Jesus leaves town following his resurrection?

And, with Peter, is a major shadow player in the form of James, the “brother of Jesus”. Peter is or is not the second banana here depending on who tells you the story or who is in charge of the lecture.

Then you have Paul, the guy that always seems to be a dollar short and a day late in missing all the good stuff that just happened right under his very nose – lived in Jerusalem and never heard of Jesus etc. There is I think a problem with timelines here. Paul is an Apostle with an asterisk footnote.

Paul hears Jesus on the road to Damascus after Jesus is dead, resurrected and ascended into heaven until the second coming. Jesus makes one exception to his timeline to grab Paul’s attention when Paul and his posse got stopped short by a blinding light and Paul does a 180 degree turn and then embraces Christianity instead of trying to destroy it.

Then Paul and Peter and James kiss and make up and agree that circumcision is okay for gentile believers of Jesus as the Messiah – but only outside Jerusalem, James and Peter’s turf. Whatever.

The rest of Acts has Paul being beaten and arrested and surviving one shipwreck after another. You can almost hear the 007 electric guitar music playing as he rides out the super hero role into a question mark. Acts does not really say what happens to either Peter or Paul. You are supposed to guess your happy ending to that spec script.

Acts in real terms to me is like a bridge document or a Star Wars 1, 2, 3 to make sense of the original starting films 4,5,6 which got produced first like the Epistles or the Gospels. Acts if it is a bridge document, it was written to pull all the rest of accepted scripture into a makes sense timeline.

Just waiting for the shoe to drop from the Paul Seminar is so nerve racking. What will the academics accept and who or what in the script will get black balled?

Looking ahead with my own deconstruction and reconstruction, I see a few things that will cushion me against the Paul Seminar throwing the baby out with the bath water again.

A sort of partial deconstruction and reconstruction happened in the Reformation. The protestants threw out the Pagan Roman traditions of the RC church. The Prots based Christianity on the written word. That was a primitive reconstruction of sorts. It perhaps sets the stage for the future of Christianity after another future wave of literal deconstruction and reconstruction of scripture.

And then there is always the possibility that a set of Christian style bunch of Dead Sea Scrolls or Nag Hammadi type documents will get discovered in the future.

As such I am following my own previous stated positions. I break the whole Jesus Christ myth into historic timeline myths labeled The Jesus Myth and The Christ Myth. Do not be afraid of the word myth. I use it in place of the word story as in traditional and or legendary story.

The first is The Jesus Myth which is the basic Jesus product that grew up out of oral and written things – a model T Ford automobile - that includes the gospels if in fact they were finalized before the second stage or The Christ Myth.

The Christ Myth is the merger into Greek and Latin and with heavy weight pagan beliefs and the basic son of Zeus thing – a 1959 Cadillac with fins.

Any way you slice Christianity, it as a core of words or beliefs, has a lot going for it and namely its ability to morph from millennium to millennium and suit new secular needs. Right now the faith is a little bit in the doldrums and waiting for the winds of some more change to take it to the future – on wings as of an eagle.

Saint Quelle pray for us – and especially the Paul Seminar!

In Search of Jesus

In one of those rare moments of coincidence, I ran into an old copy of U.S. News and World Report April 1996 in the laundry room of my apartment complex about a month ago. The title of the magazine was In search of Jesus.

A great deal of the article had to do with the Jesus Seminar, a group of christian scholars who with their various historic research and linguistics decided by committee vote what parts of the New Testament seem more valid than others.

If you in fact get some new bible and words in red denote the words of Jesus you probably have this professional elitist meal ticket christian enterprise to thank.

It is quite easy to dissect the faith. I have done it here and as a hobby for many years. I want to know the basic Jesus. I try to live the simple Christian message.

What irks me most about finding this magazine is how it got published and how only a few elite made a significant mark on modern cultural society and then blended back into the academic woodwork. That I on my own personal journey was perhaps mirroring some clues spewing out of the Jung’s cosmic unconsciousness related to the same subject.

What irks me is that as an elder in a Lutheran church, over a decade ago, I mentioned to the Pastor how I had read something in the past about this red balling and black balling of the so called words of Jesus. He did not throw any crumbs back to this dog in any part of the dialogue as if he was ignorant of the Jesus Seminar. He was not. I did not have a collar and was not part of the comfy smug club member’s only section of elites in the Christian church.

Well so much for elitism. I believe there is a job application out there on the Internet if you want to join the Jesus Seminar to add prestige to your scholarship and resume. First question is how many PhDs you have and in what areas are they in. That leaves me out in the cold for that job. Of course it may not pay anything to speak of. It is the prestige.

Why if you can chop the Lord’s prayer into three or four iffy segments of who was likely to have said this or said that – isn’t the Jesus Seminar more an autopsy of the Constantine Christian church and if so – why are some of you elitist ministers attached to this project – why haven’t you taken your collars off if all that is left of Christianity is you and your sterile academic input? Salaries and pensions would seem more valuable than the simple words, message and heart of Jesus’ ministry of so long ago.

Where is your faith?
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