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.

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.

Temple Mount / Noble Santuary Compromise

With all the current bloodshed in Israel/Palestine these days, I am thinking of the future. Where do two cultures, political states, religions go from here?

I do not wish to document past hopes or failures. I wish to consider how hard it will be for both sides to sit down and negotiate in good faith for the future of the immediate nation state and the greater region. Examples about the end of the cold war between the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R. or the falling down of apartheid in South Africa are not good examples to use or learn from. Those scenarios fit other times and places in other parts of the planet.

I have pondered this situation and think that some symbolic gesture(s) by both sides could pave eons of highways to the future. I use one example here. I am certain that those directly responsible will have better and more practical ideas than my own. That is okay. The important process is the beginning of visualization of a peaceful, prosperous Israel/Palestine in the future by all parties concerned.

I do not wish to intrude on the two cultures and religions but I have some observations. I do not think that a bi-cultural country is immediately possibly. In a global village sense, maybe a hundred years from now nobody will care who your neighbor is across the street in terms of culture or religious background. In an immediate sense I see a divided geography perhaps with walls but a reduction of violence and an escalation of trust between all parties of the region. A successful peace in Israel/Palestine will deflate political agendas in the region and hiding behind religious masks at the present time.

Picture Israel/Palestine or Palestine/Israel whichever way you want to look at the coin. Picture joint economic ventures, common public utilities, high standards of living.

The thing that sticks in a lot of Israeli throats is the division of Jerusalem with a joint political state sharing a joint capital. This is something nobody from the outside can impose. This is something the two parties have to agree upon and work together on to make it work. It is not impossible but it will be extremely difficult to maintain if the current levels of friction and mistrust continue.

I say take the Temple Mount or Haram-esh-Sharif (noble sanctuary) and borrow a page from the wisdom of Solomon. If there is to be a divided capital of Jerusalem then I think that this elevated property gets cut down the middle. The price for peace for the Palestinians should exact a price or such. They at the moment do not have the upper hand in the military equation of the situation. The Israelis are looking at their enemies, though in facts their neighbors, getting up front and personal in a very ancient symbolic piece of Israeli identity in the form of the city of Jerusalem.

This is not easy. But what if the Palestinians say okay, cut Harem-esh-Sharif down the middle if that is what it takes to make a permanent, stable, universally recognized state and capital for Palestine. I think that the Palestinians will opt to keep the half of Temple Mount that has the most symbolism in a structure for them, the Qubbat al-Sakhra or Dome of the Rock. If that happens, then the plain structure or Al-Aqsa Mosque is now on Isreali territory. I do not think that the Israelis will stop the function of this mosque but what if in the terms of binding eternal peace treaty Israel can turn the mosque into a synagogue or even tear it down to build a Third Temple.

A lot of hot points here. Al-Aqsa mosque is the big work horse mosque of the Noble Sanctuary area on Temple Mount.

Israel, if you look close enough, is more a secular state than a theocracy that it had ideally been in the ancient past. A Third Temple is only a dream for a handful of the extreme religious community. If we cannot do these things mentioned above, what can both sides do to show good faith, both literally and symbolically.

I believe that the two mosques could stay in place. A joint police force in the city of Jerusalem could administer control the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary and - and somewhere in the middle of this joint historic site, archeology and research could start on a small scale, a few square meters a year, and could go on for decades and fill a yet to be built museum for artifacts found that touch the history of two nations, two cultures, and two religions on common ground - the Earth.

It is just a thought for a possible win-win compromise for peace to accidentally break out and spread throughout the region and on to the planet as well.