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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Pope Benedict III – Papal Testicle Testing Chair – Pope Joan the First, a woman

What?  This is history.  Urban Legend – Rome – based on fact?  Over a thousand years old.

There is very little known about the reign of Pope Benedict III except that clerics were generally satisfied with his testicles. Upon his coronation in 855 AD God’s chosen messenger on Earth sat in a special chair resembling an ancient commode while the Holy See checked to make sure that the papacy was indeed infallible… 

Two reliable clerics touched his testicles; witnesses who presented legal evidence of his maleness…At this the priest and the people responded, “Deo gratius” [Thanks be to God]

http://zinjanthropus.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/penis-spines-pearly-papules-and-pope-benedicts-balls/

They keep denying that there ever was a female Pope in the RC Church.  The above device was used for centuries to make certain that all popes had the right stuff, but only after Pope Joan the First’s brief reign in the ninth century C.E..

I finally got to see the flick Pope Joan about the first woman pope circa 850 C.E..

They were showing it on the Reelz cable channel.  I liked the historic sets and costumes especially around the old St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.  Script was a bit disappointing and considering the subject matter, it was a good period piece and not a so-called chick flick.

Joan is the daughter of an abusive priest (yes, they did marry back then) and a loving caring mother who points her daughter in the direction of an education in Latin and such and that leads the heroine all the way to the Chair of Peter in Rome with much grit along the way.  


John Goodman (he stole the show) is her mentor good pope before they poison, John Paul One him, get him out of the picture for fun, power and profit.

Pope Joan film sparks Roman Catholic Church row


Pope Joan I – First Woman Pope



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Diego Rivera – Artist - Birthday

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Rivera

Following Google main page meme - Diego Rivera, 125^th Birthday, Mexican Painter extraordinaire, 1886-1957.

“Man at the Crossroads” - In 1933 the Rockefellers commissioned Rivera to paint a mural for the lobby of the RCA building in Rockefeller Center. “Man at the Crossroads” was to depict the social, political, industrial, and scientific possibilities of the twentieth century. In the painting, Rivera included a scene of a giant May Day demonstration of workers marching with red banners. It was not the subject matter of the panel that made the Rockerfellers angry, but the clear portrait of Vladamir Lenin, the Russian revolutionary leader of the Soviet Union, leading the demonstration. When Rivera refused to remove the portrait, he was ordered to stop and the painting was destroyed. That same year, Rivera used the money from the Rockefellers to create a mural for the Independent Labor Institute that had Vladamir Lenin as its central figure.   http://readingworkbook.blogspot.com/

Myth, meme, urban legend has famous “destroyed” 30 Rock Lobby Rivera mural as hidden behind plaster wall (center left below). If still intact, the original 30 Rock Diego Rivera Mural would be worth an estimated $60-80 million. 

Otherwise, why would the crown jewel of Art Deco Architecture in America, 30 Rockefeller Center, have such a bland boring substitute mural (above)?

Irony is, few these days can even remember the first name of the Rockefeller who rejected his work.  That is why Diego Rivera's name is immortal. 

(John D. Rockefeller Jr. - Who?)

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John Paul II – King Maker – Edward Piszek

An old friend, a Catholic in good standing, recently told me that the “Catholic Church is all politics”. The friend, in the middle of some sort of annulment of a previous marriage thing, is going the distance with the RC bureaucrats because of love. Love is a powerful energy in this world. As for the politics thing, I bit my tongue. A friend is a friend.

Being a cousin of the late Bishop of Allentown Pa, I have heard the family stories not published and the stories of the internal Vatican politics it took to carve five counties in upstate Pennsylvania out of the archdiocese of Philadelphia to become the private fiefdom of my cousin who, when his chances to become a Cardinal of Philadelphia got blown in the 1958 election of John XXIII, the consolation prize from his powerful friends in the Vatican was Allentown.

Getting on with the politics in the RC church, they are Beautifying John Paul II, who is on a fast track to sainthood. Of course JPII changed the rules for sainthood, cut out the long bureaucratic wait thing, in favor of streamlining a thoroughly medieval process. And of course, saints and relics and such went out of fashion with the Reformation for us Protestant types. Whatever.

Here is a story of the man, the Polish American Edward Piszek, who was not so much a king maker as he was pope maker in the case of John Paul the Great.

I don’t know if it is not PC to call Edward Piszek a Polack. There was a time when perhaps Polack had a negative connotation in the immigration pecking order of things here in America. The latest ethnic group to arrive always seemed to be at or near the bottom of the pecking order of society. I heard that word used in my youth for the Polish amidst the still strong ethnic enclaves of Philadelphia. More later on that term.

It is perhaps out of a need to succeed as the son of immigrants that John Piszek succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. I remember an article in the Sunday Magazine of the Philadelphia Inquirer in the mid 70s that specifically was tracing out Edward Piszek’s philanthropy role in the great white (papal) hope of Polish Americans at the time in the person of John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia.

Here you have two Polish Americans, both originally from the midwest and both ambitious and successful in their perspective fields of business and religion in Philly.

The magazine article had its liberal, perhaps cynical, but definitely Wasp-ish, bent openly analyzing the ambitions of two Polacks on the make in a still then Wasp society pecking order of things in Philly.

The article seemed to emphasis how Piszek was upset that the wasp name Mrs. Paul, his business partner wife's name, had the success whereas in the beginning he did not think that a Polish name like Mrs. Piszek’s fish fingers or sticks had much marketing potential. So it goes. Woulda. Coulda. Shoulda.

Anyway, Cardinal Krol was campaigning to be the next pope as the article outlined. He was not buying votes. He was however making frequent trips to East Asia and Africa and making financial donations to the building of schools and hospitals in the five and six figure money category, which was a lot of bread or fish sticks back then. And of course, the philanthropist Piszek had the check book to make Krol a viable candidate for the papacy, even though he was American and not Italian.

From a source, I cannot remember who in Philly told me this story, this Philly urban legend of sorts; it had to do with the papal election in 1978 after the death of Paul VI. I am told the Italians put up a good and or dirty fight to get a fellow Italian, Albino Luciani, elected John Paul I.

The story goes that when the Italians seemed to be getting ahead on votes in the papal election, votes committed to distant runner Cardinal Krol got released by Krol, asking those released voters to consider, closing up fast runner, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla over Luciani. The story goes that Krol, when he released the votes, told, urged his cronies, to “Give it to the Polack”. Or so I remember the story.

John Paul I only reigned as pope for something like thirty three days. The runner up in the first papal election, Wojtyla, had the momentum and or mojo going to push him across the finish line at the next papal election.

The rest is history. Not much about Piszek on Wikipedia. His role in the politics of making Karol Wojtyla pope and now saint is forgotten in history.

Ed Piszek Obits

Piszek, 87, a Fort Washington resident who died of bone cancer March 27, also told his son to "give God the credit. I was under his tutelage. I was his messenger. I was his Johnny Appleseed."

Two cardinals presided and a procession of priests participated in Piszek's Funeral Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, where hundreds came to pay their respects.

Among them were baseball Hall of Famer Stan Musial, who teamed up with Piszek to bring Little League baseball to Poland, Piszek's ancestral home; and former Phillies pitcher Larry Christenson, whom he called "my best buddy."

Pope John Paul II, Piszek's friend for nearly 20 years, said in a note from the Vatican that he was "deeply saddened" by his death. "I am confident that his memory will inspire others to give of themselves freely and charitably," he added.

A self-made man, Piszek turned a mistake into a multimillion-dollar business when he made too many crabcakes during his shift at a Kensington bar in 1946, and decided to freeze some.

He launched Mrs. Paul's Kitchens with partner John Paul. In the 1950s, Piszek bought out his partner and ran the company for about 30 more years before selling it to Campbell Soup Co. in 1982.

I always say you learn a lot more about somebody from his Obituary than you probably already thought you knew. That is not true in this case. In the above Obit articles, I only see Cardinal Krol in one sentence that also mentions Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, a very small understated footnote in history.

Edward Piszek died in 2004 at age 87. He called himself the “Polish Ben Franklin” considering his considerable patronage and philanthropy to the City of Brotherly Love.

If Piszek were still alive, he would be 94, and sitting in the front row as Benedict XVI Beatifies the Polish Pope.

Whether alive or not, I have no doubt that his spirit as pope maker and now saint maker will be in Saint Peter’s square on May 1.

It’s is a hell of lot of story associated with one lonely fish stick or I should say billions of fish sticks.

And so it goes.

Jesus and the Womb of God

This is where I get creative and inspired and perhaps even mystical.

Creative is a dirty word in American business. I learned that the hard way. It shows signs of intelligence which is verboten in our present American fascist state of things left undone, half-assed in the political and religious forums now abandoned to MBAs, PhDs, lawyers and hedge fund managers.

I am inpired by my recent postings on the forgotten female half of our civilisation. I use the British/European spelling. There is no civilization left in the American myth. But that is another story. (sorry for the negative aside)

If you look at anything, you can look at it twice and in a totally different light. I like to use the Earp Brothers and the fight at the O.K. Corral in 1881 in Tombstone Arizona as an example of an urban legend being cast into stone. It, the bottom line, was that the Earp brothers were out to make money and blow town. The truth is that they acquired a lot of deeds for land, property and mines.

They wanted to leave but there were bigger crooks than they running the town. Somebody redrew the town map and every lot in town was in dispute and had to be resurveyed. Of course the surveying fee was outrageous and enough to make most people sell out at a discount and leave town. Or you could sue in court.

So while the Earp brothers got entangled in Republican urban politics they crossed paths with the cowboys and rural democratic politics. The demographics have reversed over a century later. While the Earps didn’t mind eating stolen Mexican beef bought off the Cowboys, the Cowboys wanted a little more respect from the Earps while in town. And so it went.

The rest is history or is it? The Urban legend of the good city dweller against the evil cattle rustlers was set in stone by Hollywood. The good guys were the urban crooks and the bad, bad cowboys just drifted away into history.

In dealing with the concept of women in the church or a religious setting, one has to wonder where and how the urban legend of Jesus got set in Stone. At one point Jesus was real and just like the Earp brothers in Tombstone.

Everybody has a story, a direction and a purpose in life. Getting back to Jesus. As I read and read account after account, opinion after opinion, urban legend after urban legend I have strangely come back to some sort of mystical concept of Jesus.

(Here comes the mystical?)

That if the oldest gospel is dated around 70 C.E., then the oral history is being told and few if any living witnesses to Jesus were still around. In a world with a life expectancy of 35 years for the average human beings then and up until the beginning of the twentieth century, then the first and oldest account of Jesus is a third person account of an urban legend.

Let me throw in a little Islamic perspective which says that Jesus did not die on the cross nor was resurrected. That Jesus was assumed into heaven like the legendary prophet Elijah and you have what I mix with the beginning of the Gospel of John.

The beginning of the gospel of John calls Jesus Logos or the word or the reason God comes down to the perception of man.

The gospel of John is much more fluid and poetic in parts than the first three gospels. John is also the start of the Urban legend of the Jews as bad guys and the Jesus posse as the goodie two shoes of that O.K. Corral scenario.

Anyway, I look at the third party account of Mark and realize that if Mark is not a living eyewitness then he is describing Jesus and the perception and assumption of Mark is that Jesus is a man. No. I am not saying that Jesus is a woman. But if a person is writing history later, it is possible that you do not know 100% about who or what your history subject is about.

So if you take the Gnostic concept or poetic license of the Beginning of John 1:1-5 -

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

- You can look at Jesus from a different angle, like looking at a work of true art in a museum. I see some perfections and flaws of the artist so to speak.

That in real time, with a real Jesus preaching a real gospel, Jesus was neither male nor female. Jesus the logos, the word, the reason was standing right in front of you not unlike a space alien and you see, hear and perceive what you want to see, hear and perceive. Or what you are capable of perceiving in matters possibly divine.

If you are a male, you see a male. If you are female, you see a female. Jesus and his grouping of followers were both male and female. In God there is no male or female. In Jesus there is no male or no female as well?

It was not until after he dies or disappears from the scene that petty human traits arise. Suddenly is it not possible that Mary Magdalene was an apostle. Suddenly the gospels or Paul’s obsessions and petty male hang-ups become the things put into stone, into words on paper, a translation. The true and original urban legend fades into obscurity.

The miracle of God’s presence among us in the form of a future man, a humanist man, a divine male/female presence in our midst gets lost in translation.

I do not want to get into the logistics or the semantics of the Trinity which is really a stone age version, interpretation not suited to today’s modern scientific urban global person to deal with in a credible pattern or sense.

Without going much too deeply into this theory of mine which is already probably a half a dozen heresies rolled into one, I look at something rather symbolic of things, of teachings and urban myths and man and his engineering.

I look at the Hagia Sophia, or Santa Sophia, the primary center of Christianity for a thousand years. While this building, this church and the Eastern Rome flourished for a thousand years, they probably were herding domestic animals into the decrepit old Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome in the winter time for shelter throughout the dark western ages while this magnificent building was the one true Church to the civilized worlds in the east. Here too Islam had one of its grandest buildings for close to five hundred years.

Hagia Sophia is related to the word logos or word or reason or touching the purpose of man in response to God and his prophets to the human race. Hagia Sophia is holy or sacred wisdom. The eastern Roman empire would have seemed to have been more attuned into a feminine sense of wisdom, or understanding, and coming from God. This as opposed to the western male view coming to us to the modern day.

The western church is scared shitless of the feminine and the womb - it is where we all came from - figuratively and literally.

When I look at the image above, (click for a larger image), I see wisdom written in stone, in concrete, in mosaics and the “Allah is Great” Quran plagues. I see mankind reaching out to the universe before science or man had a clue or sense about what the universe truly is.

Click on the image above of the Hagia Sophia. It was the center of Christian faith, the premier center for a thousand years. It was a major center of Islam, its grandest mosque, for close to five hundred years. It is the most sacred spot on planet earth to all faiths of the one God concept.

Sacred wisdom, sacred knowledge, the word, the reason, the logos – no matter how you translate it – here is the spot where heaven touched earth directly for fifteen hundred years.

Look at the enlarged image. What do you see? Is it a museum? Is it a basilica, a church? Is it a mosque?

Look deeper. What humankind has left here for all generations to see is the myth of God, the myth of the Prophets like Jesus among others. I would see a cave if I were a caveman.

I see a womb, perhaps the womb of God. I see great mystery. And then I am transported back to reality and it is just a building.

The perception of man toward - God, Jesus, Science, Art are all in their own way part of a formula, a plan, a logos, a reason, a whisper from above and a meaning for all things.

The purpose of life is a mystery. To an artist, life is poetry.