Rome

[bbyrd009]

...
Thanks to Constantine and his councils, creeds and exclusive canon (which blatantly opposed Paul's inclusive assertion that all writing is θεοπνευστος, theopneustos; 2 Timothy 3:16), the detrimental atheism of the liberation movement became the wholly dependable monotheistic religion of imperial Christianity. And although the deception worked like a miracle, it needed some nifty folklore to get really going.

The search for the "historical Jesus" pretty much started with Constantine's mother Helena, who lived two and a half centuries after Mary and Jesus of Nazareth but still managed to unearth the one and only true cross of Christ. This is remarkable since hundreds of thousands of people had been crucified in the century of Jesus and crosses were recycled until they fell apart. Even more remarkable, the one and only true cross of Christ still had the Titulus Crucis — the plaque that declared Jesus' regality in Hebrew, Greek and Latin — attached to it, which Helena duly purloined and carried home in lucrative triumph.

Though Helena is still widely venerated for her efforts, the story is really rather absurd and shows very little sensitivity to both the nature of the original Jesus movement and the wholesale destruction of the Jewish world in the years following 70 AD. But then, neither Constantine nor Helena cared much about the actual gospel and were mostly interested in extending the emperor cult some badly needed divine swagger. Both Jesus and Constantine came from humble origins, and both Mary and Helena had been abandoned by their husbands (which conveniently explained why there's no Joseph at Golgotha). The whole Jesus-son-of-Mary thing matched the Constantine-son-of-Helena thing like a glove and demonstrated beyond the need for further investigation that Constantine was destined to be the vestige of whichever god on earth.

Much of our intuitive and folkloristic understanding of the Bible comes from the traditional church, which is a post-Constantinian Roman institution and has nothing to do with the gospel of Jesus Christ and everything with Roman Imperialism. Subsequently, the traditional church has had very little reason to preserve or even reflect the concerns of the Bible authors, and has always been nearly wholly invested in forwarding the pagan models that keeps flocks conveniently fearful and compliant. In political Rome family ties were hugely important and the early formal church built its mythology on the assumption that the mother and (half-) brothers of Jesus must have been at least half as holy as he, and certainly automatically part of Jesus' missionary apparatus, since he, just like any Roman Caesar, would surely surround himself with siblings and cousins.

In the Bible, of course, things work quite the opposite and nobody gets any glory on account of a famous brother (or else we would have heard more from the brothers of David). Jesus even literally explained that whoever did the will of his Father was his brother and sister and mother (Matthew 12:50), and the Biblical Marian character reflects precisely that."

 

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Is anyone in this world of men, planet Earth, concerned with population control? It would seem that some are, but seemingly not many in the fastest growing places [ 10 Effective Ways to Control Population ]

Wow, some good points in there A, I kind of expected a pop reduction rant

 

[bbyrd009]

The Titulus Crucis

When Jesus was crucified, Pilate had a sign fixed to the cross that said: JESUS OF NAZARETH, KING OF THE JEWS. All gospels mention this sign (Matthew 27:37, Mark 15:26, Luke 23:38) but only John mentions that this sign came in three languages, namely Hebrew, Latin and Greek (John 19:19-20). Some minor Greek manuscripts of Luke also contain the reference to the three languages, but most modern scholars are certain this is a gloss copied from John, and most modern English translations of Luke omit it.

Tradition explains that Pilate put this sign up to mock Jesus, but that's really quite dubious. Pilate may actually have been a good guy (read our article on that name) and the Titulus Crucis may actually reflect Pilate's understanding of Jesus' core essence (John 19:22).

The first people to acknowledge the existence of this "King of the Jews" were the Magi from the east (Matthew 2:1-2). Instead of Magi, Luke tells of shepherds abiding in the field while keeping watch over their flocks (Luke 2:8), and despite tradition and folklore, these shepherds and the Magi are of course the same people: those Rabbis who ran the Jewish wisdom schools in Persian Babylon. After the averted holocaust described in the Book of Esther, many stayed and created the hugely important Jewish tradition that has sustained Judaism until the present age.

Suffering far less opposition than the Jews in Palestine, the Babylonian Jews were the first to figure out what the deal was. These Babylonian Rabbis where the first true evangelists, who traveled to Palestine to explain their intellectually impoverished brethren how humanity could survive the Roman imperial onslaught. That event was broadcast across the region in the poetry of the nativity story.

Those with Hebrew eyes saw honorable wise men from an intimately related eastern tradition. Those with Latin eyes saw some local leaders from a barbaric land just over the far eastern border of the civilized Empire. And folks with Greek eyes got a nicely tailored Greek tragedy, no talk of kings but a people's ritual (in Mark, Jesus simply came from Nazareth, meaning the Diaspora; Mark 1:9).

The youngest of the gospels, that of John, placed itself on the shoulders of the synoptic giants. John wrote in a world in which the Pauline mission had led to a by now well established gospel tradition, which was told in the union of the world's three great perspectives. And there it is: John's respectful salute to the three cultural languages in which Jesus was first proclaimed King of the Jews — the Titulus Crucis formed by the Synoptic Gospels standing over the Word, and the Marian societies standing beneath the Word..."

 

[bbyrd009]

Fish for fish and eggs for eggs

As should be clear by now, the gospels are not amateur biographies of a local hero but highly sophisticated commentaries on the age, with an emphasis on the evolution of the wisdom tradition in an imperial world — a journey that will go on until every man is anointed and the empire is no more; or in the words of Paul: "then comes the end, when He hands over the kingdom to the God and Father, when He has abolished all rule and all authority and power" (1 Corinthians 15:24).

The synoptic evangelists were writing during the first decades of the Jewish Wars and had to word their disapproval of Rome very carefully, if possible even more careful than Paul had in the decades prior (read our article on the name Onesimus).

The hope on deliverance by natural, God-ordained means, which fueled the social movement after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD by Titus (whose father Vespasian was nicknamed mulio or Muleteer), became the triumphant entree of Jesus on the foal of a mule (Matthew 21:5). The Idumean king Herod'sscandalous termination of the rightful Hasmonean royal bloodline by executing his own Hasmonean wife and their sons, was told of as the massacre of the innocents of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16). When Jesus spoke of moving mountains (Matthew 17:20), nobody in his audience would have failed to recall the colossal manmade mountain that housed Herod's palace called the Herodion. When he told of throwing mountains into the sea (Matthew 21:21), his audience doubtlessly remembered how Herod had built the harbor complex of Caesarea Maritima from imported cement made from volcanic ash. And when the foolish man built on shifting sand (Matthew 7:26), few would not have snickered at that very complex sinking rapidly beneath the waves.

When in 9 AD Emperor Tiberius asked chief Bato of the Illyrian insurrectionists the reason for the revolt, he answered: "You Romans are to blame for this, for you send as guardians of your flocks neither dogs nor shepherds but wolves." When Jesus said: "I am sending you out like sheep among wolves" (Matthew 10:16) nobody in first century Palestine would not have understood these words to relate to the great revolt that had nearly stopped Rome...

 

[bbyrd009]

...In Luke's account of the risen Christ who met Cleopas on the road to Emmaus (24:13-18), the author supplied sensitive commentaries on the battles of Emmaus and Actium (hence Nicopolis). Luke's story of Lazarus (16:20) offered in no uncertain terms a commentary on the templar enterprise installed by Rome, built by Herod and ran by Annasand his cartel. John's version of Lazarus (11:1) incorporated the story of the sisters Mary and Martha, and very few from John's original audience would have not realized that the names Martha and Mary are essentially identical and that this story too visited the tried archetype of the Two Sisters.

There was, of course, only one Mary. But she existed in many locations and only one produced the actual Son: the non-violent resistance movement that originated in the Diaspora, was first recognized in Persian Babylon and ultimately materialized in Roman Judea. She was somehow imagined to comprise sub-movements dubbed Jameso, Joses, Judas and Simon and an untold number of informal ones (his sisters), but how that translates to historical social movements is not clear at this remove (or even to someone as informed as Paul, see 1 Corinthians 1:12). Within first century Judaism there were many highly unique schools — we know of Sadducees (= sons of Zadok), Pharisees (= sons of Persia?), Sons Of Light, Sons of Zebedee, the Essenes, Therapeutae, Zealots, the Fourth Sect, pre-Jesus Christians (those rooting for a Jewish king after the collapse of the Hasmonean dynasty in 63 BC; see John 6:15), Hodosites, Nazarenes (Acts 24:5) and Baptists (John was probably not the only one and had disciples who were thus Baptists), but there were doubtlessly many more schools of advanced though operative in the Empire.

Mark uniquely dubs one of the Mary's he places under the cross Mary "of-James-Mikron-and-of-Joses-the-mother," and while tradition often calls this James the Less in a vain attempt to forge a distinction from the other Jameses, this epithet seems to correspond mostly with the nickname of Saul of Tarsus, better known as Paul, which means Little.

(For more of these correspondences, see our article on the name Dalmanutha.)

 

[bbyrd009]

from Tarsus, famous for silphium, which (probably) went extinct from over-harvesting a couple hundred years prior, and Maria--the Latinate/Greek version of Miriam--means something like "obstinacy, stubbornness." Which we'll put together later unfortunately w/o the author's help but some connections should already be apparent I guess. If only they made some logical sense huh?

 

[bbyrd009]

there is one more installment to get to a central point that I hoped to make, but maybe this is not the place?