Jesus Family Tomb

The Jesus Family Tomb Reopened – Part 1

On 27 March 1980 the underground tomb of the Jesus family was found.

The Lost Tomb

In 2007, James Cameron, the writer and director of films like Avatar and Titanic made a documentary with Simcha Jacobovici on the Lost Tomb of Jesus – most people have never heard of it and there is a reason why but it’s not the reason you think.

This blog will expose the truth!

For the last forty years Christian pseudo academics have been doing their best to rebury the Jesus of History simply because Christian academics assume that they own the copyright on Jesus but they don’t.

The problem that Simcha and the documentary Archaeologist professor James Tabor had – and still have – is the fact that you can’t say you’ve found the tomb of Jesus unless you first define what you mean by the word ‘Jesus’. Somewhat understandably, when Jacobovici says ‘Jesus’, Christians think he means the man who can walk on water, fly and raise himself and other people from the dead. Of course, all Christians know, in their heart of hearts that nobody could find the tomb of such a person.

To explain why that is important let me give you an analogy:

VladBram Stoker wrote probably one of the most famous books ever written. His book created the literary character ‘Dracula’ and the reason his book was so good is because he based his fictional character on the life of a real man – Vlad III was Voivode of the Kingdom of Wallachia – even today he is the national hero of Romania.

If I tried to find evidence for the life of Bram stoker’s Dracula I would always fail. There can be no evidence for Dracula just as you can’t find evidence for the life of Harry Potter.

What you can find is evidence for is the life of Vlad the III – a real person.

In a recent research paper, the Jesus of History conclusively showed that the Christian myth is fraudulently based on the life of a real person: a Hebrew holy man, Yeshua bar Yosef, who was the brother of James the Just and was a leader of a uniquely Jewish religious movement.

So where does that leave us?

What that tells us is that we can’t read the Bible as history but as a symptom of it.

The names of the Jesus family were filtered through decades and possibly centuries of memory. That Maria was his mother, that Joseph was his father and that James, Simon and Jose were his brothers is fairly certain.

We also know that the Jesus of History had a constant companion – a woman who was with him when he died – who washed his naked dead body and was still a big part of the movement after Jesus died.

Was her name Maria, Mary, Mariam, Mariamene – we don’t know! Was she his wife? I’ll let you decide.

MaryIt’s not an accident that the identity of this woman is confused. The Roman Catholic Church has spent one and a half thousand years telling everyone that this woman was a prostitute. Now everyone admits it was a lie. But that mea culpa is about two thousand years too late!

This fact is important because it shows that when it comes to fraud, Christians have form.

So what’s the truth? We know that in Hebrew culture a woman that close to a religious leader could have only been his mother or his wife.

So we are looking for a Hebrew tomb from the early first century CE, with something very like the names of the Jesus family including possibly a wife.

Contrary to the expectation of some of the Christian pseudo academics we don’t expect his tombstone to read Mr Christ or Jesus Nazareth son of Joseph Nazareth.

So what happened, what did we find in 1980?

Let me tell you the sad tale of possibly the worst excavation in the history of archaeology:

TombDuring construction work for a housing complex at Talpiot, some 5 km south of Jerusalem’s old city, routine blasting exposed the facade of a first century Hebrew burial tomb. Civil engineer Ephraim Shohat notified the Israeli Antiquities Authority.

They sent out archaeologist, Eliot Braun to investigate. It was Thursday the 27th March. He found an exposed rock-cut tomb with a unique facade – not seen before or since. There was no rock covering the 18” x 18” entrance and soil had obviously washed in and half filled the tomb. Mr Braun was just able to make out ten ossuaries within the tomb.

Eventually, district archaeologist, Amos Kloner, took over supervision off the site. He appointed IAA archaeologist Joseph Gath to carry out excavation.

Gath invited a young student, Shimon Gibson, to draw the layout of the tomb.

Around noon on Friday the 28th March, the day after the tomb was first exposed, an eleven year old schoolboy name Ouriel Maoz, whose Orthodox Jewish family lived nearby, passed by the site and saw the distinctive facade. He ran home and told his mother, Rivka Maoz, who called the IAA as the tomb was exposed and it looked like the builders were going to destroy it – there were no archaeologists working and Mrs Maoz could not reach anyone at the IAA.

The next day – the Saturday, was the Shabbat and young Ouriel was on his way home from the synagogue. He saw children playing with the bones and playing football with the skulls from the tomb. The tomb had been left unguarded. Mrs Maoz went out and chased the children away and collected what bones she could save.

On Sunday 30th March she gave that bag of bones to Joseph Gath. Those bones should have been given to Joe Zias, who was the anthropologist for the Rockefeller Museum, who normally receives all the bones from excavations. He has no record of ever receiving them or examining them. He has never filed a report on the Talpiot tomb bones.

Gibson arrived and in his initial testimony he said he recalled seeing the ossuaries had been removed from the tomb and lined up ready for collection. He added that Gath took him inside the tomb and showed him the imprints of where the ossuaries had stood.

Joseph Gath did not publish a full report of the contents of the Garden Tomb and Zias never examined the bones.

In 1996, Amos Kloner quietly published a paper on the tomb.

Kloner insists that all the ossuaries were removed on the Friday afternoon but the Maoz family and their frantic phone calls to the IAA are evidence against his assertion. Kloner reports that he can find no record that would match up the ossuaries and their catalogue numbers with the original locations in the tomb from Gibson’s map.

The tenth ossuary went missing and cannot be found at the Rockefeller Museum. Amos Kloner insists that the tenth ossuary was damaged and was therefore stored somewhere else and as a result cannot be found. For anyone who has not been involved with archaeology in the past, it might be helpful to point out that archaeology often deals with broken objects on a regular basis.

Removing the tombsThe ossuaries found inside the tomb had the names of the Jesus family.

Ossuary Yeshua bar Yosef — Aramaic for (Jesus son of Joseph)

OssuaryMaria—written in Aramaic script, but a Latin form of the Hebrew name ‘Miriam’ (Mary) – this Latin form of the Hebrew name written in Aramaic is unique out of over 2000 ossuaries found.

OssuaryYose—a diminutive of ‘Joseph’ mentioned as the name of one of Jesus’ brothers in the New Testament (Mark 6:3) ‘Joe’

OssuaryYehuda bar Yeshua—Aramaic for ‘Judah son of Jesus’ (Bar Jesus {son of Jesus} – in Acts 13:6)

OssuaryMariamene e Mara— in Greek this reads ‘Mariamene known as Mara’ or ‘The Lady Mariamne’ This form of the name is unique. The word Mar is Lord in Aramaic and is still used today to refer to Jesus.

OssuraryMatya—Hebrew for ‘Matthew’

OssuraryYakov ben Yosef akhui diYeshua – ‘James son of Josef, brother of Jesus’ – was stolen. Proved in court to belong to the original ten.

Let me give you a brief summary of the problems with this excavation:

  1. The names: The official story – Despite the ossuaries having engraving detailing the principal names from the Jesus family Kloner and his team decided that the names were common and the tomb was of no special interest.

The unofficial story is that Joseph Gath was terrified that the tomb belonged to the Jesus of History and would make Christian anti-Semitism even worse. We know this because his widow told us. As we proved in our paper and we will detail in our next video, just because a series of names may be common it doesn’t mean that a specific group of names is common. Even if we assume that the Hebrew people of the first century only had 16 names to choose from, finding a tomb with four members of a specific family would be 65,536 to 1 – in other words you would have to open 65,536 tombs to find another similar group. The truth is that there are almost 2,800 names in the Hebrew Bible and in the first century people also used Greek names.

  1. Recording of the site: was worse than useless. Gibson was only a student at the time so he could perhaps be forgiven but Gath and Kloner should have known better. We can’t even say which ossuary belonged where.
  1. Care of the human remains: Zias, without any embarrassment, tells anyone who asks that no human material from the Talpiot tomb reached him. For all we know Joseph Gath could have thrown the body of the Jesus of History in the trash.

Ossuary of James

  1. Control of the site: there was none. Sometime after Friday the tenth ossuary went missing, shortly after Oded Golan acquired the James son of Joseph brother of Jesus ossuary. After twelve years in court and patina tests as well as a recent soil sample, the ossuary has been proved to come from the Jesus family tomb.

It is obvious, that either Kloner and his team are the worst archaeologists in history or they believed they had a good reason to rebury the Jesus of History forever.

Did they sell the James Ossuary to Oded Golan? I don’t know. Maybe they were glad to dump the ossuary where no one would believe it came from the Jesus family tomb.

Professor Andre Lemaire, who is the greatest Semitic epigraphist in the world and is based at the Sorbonne University in Paris France confessed,

The ossuary (James) is absolutely authentic but there are political and religious forces interested in making the find disappear.”

In light of these facts, I doubt that Amos Kloner and his team were incompetent. It is evident then that they must have been complicit in one of the greatest cover-ups in history.

This blog is taken from the videoThe Jesus Family Tomb Reopened Part 1

Research PaperThe Jesus of History: Did he really exist – The Jesus Family Tomb

Gay attack

Morality is relative until it’s not!

Forbury Gardens in Reading, England, is a park known as a place for ‘gay’ men to meet. Last Saturday several gay men were enjoying the evening sunshine drinking beer and chatting. Khairi Saadallah, a Libyan immigrant to Britain, entered the park but not for sex. He took a knife and killed three men and injured three others. According to Islam, homosexuality is a crime punishable by death.

Crime SceneKhairi Saadallah is a 25 year old Libyan who was known to the British security services but, like all the other Islamic soldiers who later went on to kill, the British Government had decided that Khairi was not a risk!! (Just how that is still supposed to make people feel better is unclear).

Western culture has declared that God is dead and in his absence everything is permissible! Today, morality is relative to the individual. If an Englishman went into London and killed three Muslims and critically wounded three others in the name of Christianity the news would be all over the world in minutes but nobody cares when a Muslim does it to the English.

The British Establishment hold the racist notion that ‘Mass Murder is an Islamic pastime!’ The Pakistani London Mayor explained to the English Infidels, who he is supposed to serve, that Islamic Terrorism is all part of living in a multicultural country. For our ruling elites, ‘indiscriminate murder is in the blood of brown people – they just can’t help it!’ So they try to ignore it – in the hope that it will just go away!

None of this is true!

Should gay men turn a public park into a brothel? Probably not. Should we kill them for doing so? Definitely not! But, if we are going to find a way forward together, at some point, we are all going to have to take responsibility for our actions.

Muslim immigrants find it impossible to integrate into British culture simply because the British have none! Beyond booze, football and the NHS what is Britain. Maybe Islam is not the disease on the body of Britain – just maybe it’s a symptom of its cultural death!

If people are the sum of the stories they believe, Britain died at the end of the Second World War. Abandoned by its German monarchy, its effeminate Church and its incompetent Governments, Britain regressed into barbarity and indolence. Unless the British start believing in themselves, more of them will be killed like cattle while grazing in a field.

The Jesus of History said ‘And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand’. Unless the Europeans reclaim their love of their own countries, those countries will cease to exist!

 

Police Brutality

Police Brutality is American Culture

Police Brutality is rarely a symptom of racism. Not anymore  – It hasn’t been for a long time. Neither do the American police have a monopoly on ‘Brutality’. The truth is there is a problem with the police all over the Western, First World, nations! In fact, in every country that has been exposed to popular American culture there is a problem with pointless police violence.

It’s obvious that Western Civilisation is dying from a cancer but anti-black racism has nothing to do with it! Police brutality is a symptom of a, much deeper and more malignant, form of cultural cancer and it’s a cancer that will kill us all! ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter are just distractions. They offer no real solutions. They have never – and will never- put an end to violence and brutality. Why? Because ANTIFA and BLACK LIVES MATTER love violence! As long as they are the ones doing it. American popular culture isn’t addicted to racism – it’s addicted to brutality.

Culture:

So how did American culture become so depraved? To understand that we need to look at these two examples:

  1. After the First World War, the German people embraced the concept of their inherent racial superiority. Based on Darwinian theory, the Germans believed that the Aryan race was at the pinnacle of evolution. They felt that it was their duty to subjugate the inferior races around the world. That was the story they believed and so they acted as they did – millions of people died.

 

  1. Flash forward sixty years and the German people, both East and West, are finally reunited. They no longer believe that they are ‘racially’ superior. The vast majority of ordinary Germans now believe that they are ‘Morally’ superior. Rather than spend all of their time and resources subjugating inferior races, they now are determined to destroy their own country by ‘Saving’ all of the inferior races. Through the power of their new Empire, now called the EU, they compete with other western nations to be the most moral country in the world.

Ultimately, the new German story will prove to be much more dangerous than the first – both to Germany and to the rest of the world – but no matter what evidence is presented to the German people, they continue to vote for politicians who spend all of their time and resources destroying their own country and, in the process, European civilisation.

We can see from this example that people, both individually and collectively, are the sum of the stories they believe and the prejudice of their beliefs make it almost impossible for them to look at any fact that contradicts their internal narrative.

It is obvious then that in order to understand how Brutality got to be a fundamental part of American culture we need to go back to the beginning of America and look at the stories the early Americans believed.

TULIP:

The original European settlers of the American continent were followers of a Frenchman named Jean Calvin. Some were called ‘Separatist’,  later they were called ‘Puritans’ but all of them were Calvinists. For those of you who are not aware, Calvinists believe in the Five Points of Calvinism:

T: Total Depravity

U: Unconditional Election

L: Limited Atonement

I: Irresistible Grace

P: Preservation of the Saints

Jean CalvinThey believed, among other things, that they alone had been chosen by god to be saved. They believed that Christ had only died for them and not for all human beings. They also believed that no matter what evil they did, they would always go to heaven. Calvinism is a kind of spiritual supremacy that was the background colour over which the American dream was painted. Genocide and slavery were an inevitable product of this corrosive belief.

It is also true that the when the American colonies divorced themselves from the aristocracy of their European homelands, they lost any sense of chivalry. The vast majority of settlers were from working class backgrounds. Finding themselves alone within a hostile country they naturally reinvented themselves. What they lost was the flower of European civilisation – the art of self-restraint – known to Europeans as ‘Chivalry‘.

Over thousands of years, European aristocracy had turned violence into an art and Chivalry was a code, like the Japanese code of Bushido, that existed to restrain and channel that violence into something positive. Chivalry was based on the belief in the idea of self-restraint and self sacrifice. During the 19th and early 20th century Chivalry became enshrined and promulgated through sport.

Winning:

In England, prior to the turn of the 20th century, young men were taught that a gentleman competed for the love of the sport. To a gentleman winning and losing were all the same. Anyone who has actually competed in sport – particularly the martial arts – will confirm that someone else being ‘less’ than you on a particular day doesn’t necessarily imply that you are ‘more’. The code of Chivalry teaches that your abilities are between you and God. To make someone else feel inferior just so you can feel good would be unthinkable.

Crap FencingToday – the only thing that matters is winning. Nobody cares about the ‘loser’ – nobody cares about the art. Young Americans are taught that only ‘winning’ matters. The greatest insult to an American is to be called a ‘loser’ and this obsession with ‘winning’ has destroyed sport and in the process civilisation.

Take as an example sword fencing. Originally this was a deadly art whose beauty was remarkable. Now Olympic fencing, in all disciplines, is just an athletic game of flick, stab and poke. The electric scoring system awards a hit split seconds apart, the faster person becomes an Olympic gold medalist. But, in reality this obsession with winning has turned suicide into a sport.

The great warrior Winston Churchill put it best when he said:

In War: Resolution

In Defeat: defiance

In Victory: Magnanimity

In Peace: Good Will

Bully:

You only have to watch the Olympics on television to see that in competition we cheat. In defeat we are petulant. In victory we are insufferable and in peace we are self aggrandize. Without class or restraint – it was inevitable that America developed into a ‘Bully’ culture. If we make a god out of the ‘self’ there really is no room in the world for anyone else but one’s self.

A bully is defined as

  1. A person who is cruel to others, especially those who are weaker or have less power. [from late 17th c.]
  2. A noisy, blustering fellow, more insolent than courageous; one who is threatening and quarrelsome; an insolent, tyrannical fellow.

Does that sound familiar to anyone? It should! With the advent of mass media – American culture has spread bully culture  around the world like a Virus.

The TV Series 24 with Kiefer Sutherland is a perfect example of Bully culture. If you’ve not watched the series – I would recommend it –  the story revolves around Jack Bauer,  a Counter Terrorist Agent – working in Los Angeles. He is a weak man who sucks up to his superiors but bullies anyone he has power over. His wife and daughter are narcissistic morons but Jack lacks the moral  character to restrain their selfishness. And this is where we see a similarity to ANTIFA and BLM – Jack Bauer justifies his psychopathic violence because of his belief in ‘the president’ (a fantasy not justified in the story as fool is invariably sold out by a list of weak and ineffectual presidents).  In the same way ANTIFA and BLM justify their violence by creating the myth of white supremacy.

Living in a ‘Bully’ culture – Americans mistake pointless aggression for masculinity. Whoever shouts the loudest is the boss. Perhaps because of their hatred of the English, any form of politeness is seen as somehow effeminate and a sign of weakness. Have you noticed that nearly all the ‘Badies’ in American films have an English accent?

When George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin he wasn’t a victim of racism. American cops kill twice as many whites as Blacks – Americans are equal opportunity bullies. They’ll happily bully anyone – they don’t care what colour you are. The Truth is that George Floyd was also a victim of Black Culture because Black Culture is the essence of ‘bully’ culture.

African culture, like American culture, was and obviously is based on the violent subjugation of the weak. We only have to look at the BLM riots today to see how true this is.

The Zulu empire enslaved the Nguni and Khoisan tribes. The Europeans didn’t catch slaves in Africa – they bought them from African kings. Those Kings had already enslaved other Africans.

Why is it that young black men are fed a diet of black role models whose greatest dream in life is to be a pimp with street ‘cred’ and get paid for doing nothing . George Floyd died because Black people have been encouraged to be a part of Bully culture. To believe in the story of violence.

They could have been shown role models like Lieutenant Colonel Alan West or Professor Tomas Sowell. They could have been so much more!

This begs the question – Why is the mass media feeding the world such a corrosive world view that will inevitably result in either genocide or civil war?

The Jesus of History taught us that: ‘For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.’

Calvinism gave America a story that made them treasure the ‘Self’ above all things. Lacking restraint and self-discipline the American obsession with the ‘self’ led to coarsening of Western civilisation.

In other words – you  will become  – the story you believe. So you better make sure the story you believe is based on reality.

We can’t build a sustainable future based on lies. European and White Americans left racism behind a long time ago. They fought wars to end racism and slavery – that is the truth.

Even if all the white people in the world committed suicide tomorrow – that would not stop brutality and violence.

Police Brutality will not go away until we grow out of this ‘Winner’ Culture. We have to Teach our children to play the game for its own sake. To be magnanimous in victory and noble in defeat. We have to teach our children how to compete without becoming a bully. We have to teach young men to be strong and to use that strength to protect the weak.

Unless we give young men heroes to look up to they will spend their lives looking down!

It’s time American Bully Culture grew up!

 

 

Welby

BLM and the Chocalate Jesus

Theological and moral confusion is nothing new to the Archbishops of the English Church. The latest lamb of god, Justin Welby, confessed to the Guardian Newspaper in 2014 that he doubts that god exists. Now that the barbarians of BLM are at the gate and demanding that all statues of Christ be destroyed Welby has broken like a KitKat and is happily offering to sacrifice his Christ a second time.

Personal Jesus:

Chocalate jesusIn a recent interview he enthused, ‘You see a black Jesus, a Chinese Jesus, a Middle Eastern Jesus – which is of course the most accurate – you see a Fijian Jesus’. Apparently, according to the Archbishop of the English Church, everyone should have their own personal Jesus – who looks and sounds exactly like them – everyone except the English that is! For some reason not mentioned the English have to have a Chocolate Jesus. A more cynical writer might speculate that moral and physical cowardice might have more to do with Welby’s enthusiasm for vandalism than any real theological insight.

So was the Jesus of History black? In actual fact, the Canaanites and the Persians were Caucasian. The Prophet Muhammad himself was white skinned with a ginger beard.

In the Hadith Sahih Bukhari 63 we are told that when a man arrived looking for the Prophet he was pointed to the ‘White Man leaning on his arm’. The Middle East did not become homogeneously brown skinned until after the explosion the Berber tribes of Islam out of North Africa.

 

Bath Water:

Not that the English Church has ever been interested in historical reality. Perhaps it’s because Welby knows that Christ is a myth created by Greco-Romans that he feels so ready to throw him under the bus! But if the statues of Christ are the bath water what of the baby? Today the barbarians are destroying statues but Welby will be helping them flush two thousand years of cultural heritage down the toilet – the fruit of our civilisation and then what will be left?

The Church:

It was Western civilisation that forced most of the civilised world to end slavery. And it is that civilisation that gives descendants of Africans a right to speak freely in England.

Maybe it’s time the Church admitted their fraud and re-examined that true sayings of the Jesus of History. In them we might all find a way to heal our fractured society.

“If a kingdom is divided against itself, it cannot stand.” Mark 3:24

Cognitive Dissonance

Does Reality Matter: Cognitive Dissonance in the Religious Mind

A forensic textual analysis of Luke 17:20

 

For the last two thousand years and until very recently, Western civilisation found its version of reality within the Bible. Unfortunately for history, nobody has been able to agree on what that reality is. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, in 2001, there were 33,000 different denominations of Christianity – all of which assume that they have a monopoly on truth. Islam, Judaism and Christianity are all based on Hebrew Scriptures but violently disagree on what those scriptures mean.

For the last fifty years, our intellectual elite have told us that reality and truth are indeed subjective and have no inherent meaning; but today, in 2020, as our civilisation implodes, truth is being effortlessly manipulated by the Government-Controlled-Media, never have we had such a need to learn how to determine what is real from what is false!

As an example of this confusion, consider Luke 17:20 – a two thousand year old conversation recorded in the New Testament. It is one of the most misunderstood logia attributed to Christ, which may have been spoken by the actual Jesus of History. Understanding the reasons for this textual confusion, sheds light on the dangers of cognitive dissonance and the importance of an appreciation of objective reality in our everyday lives.

The human mind finds comfort in conformity. All of us believe some things ‘Religiously’!

We all know someone who believes in something that makes no sense and won’t listen to reason. No matter how much evidence you show them to the contrary they just can’t see the reality that seems so obvious to you and me.

For some it might be a belief in Donald Trump, for others it might be a belief in man-made climate change; it doesn’t really matter what it is. It is a fact that the ‘Religious Mind’ finds comfort in abdicating its responsibility to navigate reality for itself, and – to a certain extent – it is a blindness we all share; which begs the question, ‘Does Reality Matter’? Is there such a thing as objective truth anyway? Most people would say ‘Yes!’

We instinctively know that a connection to reality is a prerequisite of being sane; but what do we actually mean when we say that someone is ‘insane’?

 

Cognitive Dissonance:

Most of us expect the people around us to express a view of the world that reflects our own lived experience. We expect people’s actions to be based on reason and logic.

In 1957, Dr Leon Fastinger demonstrated that the human mind cannot live with two ideas that are self-contradictory – to do so causes us physical discomfort and long-term psychological stress. The level of emotional and physical discomfort we experience, when faced with a paradox in our beliefs, is in direct proportion to the depth of our emotional commitment to that belief. When a sane person is faced with a reality that undermines a deeply held belief they will do almost anything to make the pain go away. Typically they will try to avoid (Avoidance) the information. If that doesn’t work they will try to rationalise (Rationalisation) it away. Their last option will be increasing levels of aggression (Violence).

The theory of Cognitive Dissonance and its associated ‘confirmation bias‘ is now used against us by the media. International media sources are owned by only five multinational companies. They all show the same information all day every day. People naturally self-censor their information sources in order to avoid the discomfort of Cognitive Dissonance.

 

Objective Reality:

Unfortunately, for our long-term mental stability and health, our beliefs are dependant on our ability to comprehend reality. The problem is that if we base our fundamental beliefs on a false reality it is inherently unsustainable. Often human beings are subconsciously aware of the vulnerability of their belief and may not be consciously aware of the fact that they are employing avoidance, rationalisation and violence in order to protect themselves. Only by learning to notice our responses to information and forcing our mind to listen to disagreeable information will we be able to free ourselves from our slavish reactions.

 

Reported Speech:

In order to understand the objective reality of someone’s words, we must first understand the matrix of belief implicit in the exchange. The matrix of belief can be summarised as the sum of your past, how you feel about that past and your expectations for the future. In order to forensically analyse a text you will need to consider the following points:

  1. What did the speaker actually say? The translation closest to the original.
  2. What was the matrix of belief of the speaker?
  3. To whom was the speaker addressing his words and what was their matrix of belief.

 

Reading Comprehension:

To further complicate this intellectual minefield, the next problem we have is that different people have different levels of reading comprehension. Traditionally, reading abilities have been divided into three levels:

  1. Literal comprehension: absorbing information in the text
  2. Interpretive comprehension: seeing relationships between ideas contained within the text
  3. Applied critical comprehension: extrapolate existing ideas and opinions

Over the last fifty years reading comprehension has fallen all over the Western world. In 15th century England, 40% of the population were illiterate. Today, in 2020, 83% of the British population can read but just don’t bother. There is no effective difference between someone who can’t read and someone who chooses not to.

Over the last seventy years, reading has been taught using the ‘Look-Say‘ system, which teaches children to learn words as if they were Egyptian Hieroglyphics. It is for this reason that people can identify words in a sentence but not understand their combined meaning. Poor reading comprehension makes people dependant on authority. Lacking the ability to think for themselves they rely on authority to tell them what to think. Their reality is defined by commonly accepted authority figures.

 

Logic Vs. Inspiration:

Our ability to comprehend reality, as expressed in the written word, is further complicated by the fact that our experience of the world is not limited to just our five senses. Almost all of the major inventions, which created our modern world, did not come from a process of logic but rather through inspiration. Nikola Tesla invented the A.C. Motor, Radio and the X-Ray. Tesla’s mother, Georgina, taught him to find inspiration within the silence of his mind. However, whilst ultimate reality may not be found through logic alone, what truth you find must not, itself, contradict logic.

It is evident then that expressing our non-binary inner life through the medium of binary language is extremely difficult.

It is for this reason that religions like Zen Buddhism use a “direct pointing” form of language rather than descriptive or narrative text in order to express the profundity of their non-binary reality. For example, “What is the sound of one hand clapping.

It follows, therefore, that to understand such a statement we must first have shared the same internal esoteric experience as the speaker or make the leap of logic to directly comprehend his meaning.

 

Exegesis Vs Eisegesis

Logically speaking, when we forensically analyse a text we are trying to find out what the original speaker or writer was trying to say and why. We are trying to get inside the mind of the author. We call this kind of forensic textual analysis ‘exegesis’.

Another common approach to textual analysis, particularly popular within Hebrew culture, is a system called ‘eisegesis’. In this system, the analyst uses a principal text as a way to express their own ideas and narrative. Eisegesis is not really interested in the mind of the original author.

When analysing a text it is vital to be aware of your own objectives and sub-conscious bias. If you are using exegesis to study a text it is also vital to understand the bias of the author.

 

Forensic Textual Analysis based on Philosophical Coherence:

Philosophical coherence is based on an axiom, or series of axioms, that share a common logic, against which other texts can be compared in order to ascertain their validity.

As an example consider the following conversation attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Luke:

“Now, being inquired of by the Pharisees as to when the Kingdom of God is coming, he answered them and said, ‘The Kingdom of God is not coming with scrutiny’. Neither shall they be declaring ‘look here’ or ‘Look there’ for the Kingdom of God inside of you is.”

Luke 17:20, Thomas 70

γαρ η βασιλεια του θεου εντοσ υμων εστιν

FOR-THE-KINGDOM-OF,THE-GOD-INSIDE-OF,YOU-IS

 

 Level 1: Literal comprehension:

Most people will read the text and say, ‘Ok! The Kingdom of God is inside of me‘, and shrug their shoulders – ‘who cares!’ ‘It doesn’t affect my life’!

This is a reading comprehension at a basic level. The person has read the text literally but cannot see the implications of the statement. They know nothing of the history of the southern Levant; they know nothing of Hebrew culture and history. They know nothing of Judeo-Christian doctrine on which their culture was based. This person has been taught their whole life that their life is an accident of evolution and entirely meaningless. They cannot see how this statement might contradict everything that they’ve been taught about themselves and the world around them.

Many Christians will read this text and grasp that the Kingdom of God is within them and that it cannot be seen. They will just shrug their shoulders. They will not be able to see that this single statement entirely undermines everything they have been taught about Christianity.

If a Jewish person reads this statement at a low level of comprehension, they will not realise that this one statement proves that the Jesus of History was not the Christ of myth.

It is very common, particularly for American Evangelical Christians, to obsess about the idea of ‘Kingship’ as they often believe they have no way to interpret the concept. The result is a rather childish view of the ‘Kingdom of God‘ as being an expression of ‘absolute and unlimited’ power, which they extrapolate on to an anthropomorphic vision of God.

History (and the Hebrew Scriptures) demonstrates exactly how limited and fallible the concept of monarchy, in real life, actually is.

At this level, it is almost impossible for the reader to extract anything useful from a written text.

 

Level 2: Interpretive comprehension:

At this level of comprehension the reader will realise the following additional points:

  1. The Pharisees expected a physical Kingdom of God to come in the future.
  2. The Kingdom, to which the Jesus of History is referring, will not be a visible military or cultural polity, nor will it be a utopian future.
  3. The Jesus of History is saying that the Kingdom of God is within the Pharisee to whom he was speaking.

Until very recently, the last line of this saying was translated correctly with the Greek ‘Entos‘ in the text rendered as ‘Within’ or ‘Inside’. Biblical scholars with certificates awarded from Divinity Colleges realised the implication of the three points above and in 1989, with the publication of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, changed the translation from the second person singular to an indefinite second person plural. The new translation accommodates the Christology of the evolving church by adding words to the statement as, “the Kingdom of God is among you” or “the Kingdom of God is among some of you.” This allows their readers to avoid cognitive dissonance and continue to believe that only they have the keys to the Kingdom of God.

As an example of the dangers of a low level of reading comprehension consider the following quote from a noted Biblical Scholar:

“Attempts to read Luke’s ἐντὸς ὑμῶν as a reference to the inward, spiritual dynamic of the kingdom of God (e.g., Caragounis, “Kingdom of God?” 423-24) find ready adherents in this age of psychology and individualism here in the West. But they falter especially on the grounds that (1) nowhere else in Luke-Acts is the dominion of God regarded as an inner, spiritual reality; and (2) the notion that the Pharisees contain within themselves the kingdom of God is inconsistent with the Lukan portrayal of persons from this Jewish group.”

Professor Joel B. Green – NICNT, e-Sword

We will return to Professor Green’s quote in our conclusion but notice how Biblical Scholars justify their forgery. You will also notice a, not very, subtle use of eisegesis. Professor Green assumes that the Kingdom of God, to which the Jesus of History was referring, was something that only certain ‘kinds’ of people could experience, if indeed the Kingdom of God was an inner reality. Professor Green is therefore assuming that Jesus excludes other Jews from the Kingdom of God but would implicitly accept Professor Green and all the Gentiles.

He also, falsely claims that the translation of the text as ‘within’ is a new-age affectation but the truth is that this is the original translation and is included in the 1611 edition of the King James Bible. Obviously, Professor Green’s statement is a perfect example of avoidance of cognitive dissonance using rationalisation.

 

Level 3: I Applied critical comprehension:

If we read Luke 17:20 at this level of comprehension we must consider the following:

  1. The Jesus of History was replying to a direct question from a Pharisee and used the Pharisee’s term, ‘The Kingdom of God’ in his reply in order to illustrate his own point.
  1. The Pharisee was asking about a principally Judean concept that had been growing in popularity since the death of King Josiah in 609 BCE. With the failure of Judean military hopes and after several foreign invasions, the Judean scribes had promoted the idea that their God (Yahweh) would establish a physical, military and cultural utopia on their behalf via a military leader.
  1. The answer given by the Jesus of History neatly sidesteps this question by effectively ignoring it. He explains that the connection to God, justice and peace, which the Pharisee is waiting for (represented by the concept of the ‘Kingdom of God’) already exist within him. The use of this metaphor in this instance is unavoidably unsatisfying, as it doesn’t really answer the Pharisee’s question. The Jesus of History appears to be uncomfortable with it but uses it to subvert the topic.
  1. To illustrate point 3 and in reference to the rest of Luke, the Jesus of History rarely refers to God directly but uses the term ‘Light‘ as his preferred metaphor for God, for instance:

 “Because of the mercy of God who sends the light of day from on high to visit us and to enlighten those sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, to direct our feet on the path of peace.”

Luke 1:78

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“No man when he hath lighted a candle, covered it under a vessel, putteth it under the bed, but setteth it on a candlestick, that they that enter may see the light. For nothing is secret, that shall not be made apparent, nothing concealed that will not be made known.”

Luke 8:16

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“The Light of the Body is the eye. Whenever, then, your eye may be single, your whole body is luminous…”

Luke 11:34

In Luke 17:20 and the three logia above, the Jesus of History is using metaphor as a direct pointing to an inner reality and it is understood within Hebrew culture that insight is required to interpret this style of commentary correctly. This system of insight language the Kabbalah (Hebrew mystical tradition) calls, ‘The language of Root and Branch’.

 

  1. The matrix of belief of the Jesus of History, who was born a Jew, lived as a Jew and died as a Jew, is illustrated by these sayings. These three examples of metaphors for God, all come from Luke are also echoed in the other gospels and in the extra biblical sayings. The metaphor of the ‘Breath’ of God (Ruach) as Light is common within Hebrew spiritual and mystical texts. The concept of the spirit of God as our divine essence (Yetzer ha’Tov) is very old and comes from Genesis 2:7:

 “God formed the human out of the soil of the ground and he blew into his nostrils the breath of life- and the human became a living soul.”

The concept of ‘Bene Elohim‘ – that life comes from, and is connected to, God – is uniquely Hebrew and not present in Greco-Roman cosmology. The Prophet Muhammad used a unique term for God that expresses this concept:

“By Him in Whose Hands my life is, none of you will have faith till he loves me more than his father and his children.”

Sahih al-Bukhari 14

It should be noted that it was the Jesus of History who uniquely applied the term Bene Elohim to anyone with a direct connection to God through Emunah.

In Greek thinking, and thus in Christian thinking, connection with God was extra to the self and often traumatically accompanied by frenzy. In Acts of the Apostles 19:6, the arrival of the spirit of God was accompanied by aspects of insanity like ‘Talking in Tongues‘. This is entirely unknown in Hebrew culture.

  1. Luke 17:20 appears to have been copied ‘word-for-word’ from a common source. Professor Robert W. Funk and the scholars of the Jesus Seminar identified that hypothetical common source as the document called Q-Source. All of the Q-Source sayings appear to be commentaries on existing Hebrew texts, which inculcate a recognisable Hebrew philosophical paradigm. The Q-Source shares the same foundational philosophical and cultural concepts implicit within contemporary Hebrew mystical spirituality.
  2. Those sayings in the Gospel attributed to Christ that do not appear in the Q-Source often do not conform to our Hebrew philosophical paradigm and appear to be extrapolations based on Greco-Roman philosophical paradigms.
  3. We can therefore say, from reading Luke 17:20 correctly that the following Christian doctrines cannot be based on the Jesus of History:
    • The Church: God is within all living things, all of whom have direct access to him through their own essence. The entire edifice of priests, bishops and popes is unnecessary.
    • The Second Coming of Christ (the Rapture): The Jesus of History did not believe in the apocalypse, the last day or the resurrection of the dead.
    • Messiah: The Jesus of History did not believe that he was god or the military leader expected by the Judeans.
    • Original Sin: If all living things have direct access to God within their essence, the doctrines of original sin, vicarious sacrifice must also be unsupportable based on this saying.
    • Animal or Human Sacrifice: If all living things are expressions of the spirit of God the concept of animal sacrifice cannot be justified based on this understanding.

 

Summary:

Cognitive Dissonance:

The quote I mentioned earlier from Professor Joel B. Green is a perfect example of rationalisation to avoid cognitive dissonance.  In his quote, Professor Green maintained that there were no other references in the Gospel of Luke to an internal ‘Kingdom of God’ but if we look at Luke 13:19 we can see that, according to the Jesus of History, the Kingdom of God is often born out of something that a person might discard and grows slowly unnoticed, which provides shelter for all the creatures of heaven and is an obvious reference to an inner reality.

“What is the Kingdom of God like, and to what can I liken it? Like it is to a mustard seed, which a man discards in his garden and grows and becomes a great tree and the flying creatures of heaven roost among its boughs.”

Luke 13:19

Objective Reality:

Often people fear someone else giving voice to their own secret fears. Professor Green insults anyone who would read Luke 17:20 as ‘Within’ by saying “ready adherents in this age of psychology and individualism here in the West”. For an American living in the Bible Belt it would be better to be associated with a known pedophile than a liberal. The use of this subtle insult is a good example of the use of aggression to avoid cognitive dissonance. It is obvious that Professor Green is very uncomfortable with anyone voicing his own doubts based on his subconscious awareness of objective reality.

 

Reported Speech:

In order to understand Luke 17:20 Professor Green would have to understand Hebrew culture, spirituality and history in the first century and today.

Luke 13:19 above is describing the Kingdom of God as the growth of faith (Emunah). Unfortunately for Professor Green this concept is often misunderstood by Christians who translate the Hebrew concept of Emunah as ‘faith’ but this is a fatal mistake. The Church inherited their concept of faith from the Greco-Roman Saint Paul:

“We walk by faith, not by sight.”

2 Corinthians 5:7

The word ‘faith’ in Greek texts is πιστεωσ (Pistis) and it actually means ‘belief‘ and it is by the power of belief that Christians enter the Kingdom of God. Belief is instantaneous so it is evident that it is not belief to which the Jesus of History is referring when he says ‘The Kingdom of God’ as he explains in several passages that its appearance comes slowly without notice.

Wisdom (Sophia), on the other hand, comes through direct experience and work. Through experience we come to know God. The love and trust we have, as expressed by Emunah, supports our world because it is based on reality.

Without examining the matrix of belief for the Jesus of History and his audience it is impossible to grasp the original meaning of Luke 17:20.

 

Reading Comprehension:

A misunderstanding of Luke 17:20 allowed for the Christian Church to justify morally repellent axiomatic doctrines, which has led many people to become atheists. Because of poor literary comprehension most Western people feel that they can only choose between Christianity and Atheism, the Jesus of History would disagree.

 

Logic Vs. Inspiration:

Professor Green perfectly demonstrates how difficult it is to understand non-binary reality expressed in ordinary binary language. Because institutional religions discourage their members to connect to the divine outside of the control of the group, textual scholars often lack the inner frame of reference by which to understand the profundity of logia like Luke 17:20, which is expressed in the language of ‘Root and Branch’.

 

Exegesis Vs. Eisegesis

As a consequence of the restrictions, which a scriptural approach to spirituality places on the mind, it is common for Christians, like Professor Green, to make the Kingdom of God into a mirror image of themselves. In the last hundred years, scholars have turned Christ into everything from a communist to a Jihadi. They have turned the Kingdom of God into a communist utopia, a military empire and an undisclosed astral destination.

All of these scholars are reading into the text aspects of themselves.

 

Conclusion:

Without the Christian Church, it is doubtful that the Jesus of History’s words would have survived the formation of Rabbinical Judaism, in the first half of the first millennium. However, in order to reclaim those original sayings it requires forensic textual analysis based on philosophical coherence. It also demands from us that we overcome our own cognitive dissonance to find the truth.

The failure of the Church, in the previous century, has given birth, now in 2020, to a world so lost that its governments cannot see the evil that they bring on their own people. As entire nations are placed under arrest with violence and the threat of violence. Through the manipulation of information, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is changing, in the words of its mastermind, Klaus Schwab, what it means to be human. If that is not evil, I don’t know what is.

It is therefore your obligation to learn how to find the truth within or behind the words that evil men will use to enslave you.

 

 

Trumps spiritual advisor

Trump’s Spiritual Advisor Versus the Jesus of History

It would be easy to laugh at President Trump’s Spiritual Advisor, Paula White, but it would be a mistake to dismiss her as insane. The truth is that Paula White represents two thousand years of Christian scriptural tradition. It is that tradition that unites Christians in their belief that the closer to God you are the more insane your behaviour becomes. This is where we get the word ‘touched‘ as a euphemism for someone who is obviously insane. It comes from the phrase touched by God‘.

The Jesus of History, on the other hand, taught that the proximity of God brings clarity and light. For him the proximity of God came slowly and in silence. So how could Paula White and the Evangelical Christians be so fatally wrong? How can Christians attribute their own insanity to the Jesus of History?

Greek Spirituality:

Christian snake charmerUnlike Hebrews, the Greco-Romans responsible for the creation of the New Testament lived within a time and a culture that believed that human life was ruled over by many Gods and each of those Gods had his or her own temple and a dedicated Oracle.

The Oracles were individuals who were directly touched by the hand of their God and people would travel thousands of miles to consult the Oracle of their favourite Deity.

In the Greco-Roman tradition, Gods were external to the human experience and therefore any evidence of God must be, by its very nature, supernatural. The proximity of God – to be touched by God – as is implicit in the act of prophecy, was always accompanied by symptoms of psychotic dislocation.

The Oracle of Delphi was one of the most sacred Oracles in all of ancient Greece from about 1400 BCE to 400 CE. Her often manic ravings were highly regarded and her advice affected everything from the outcome of wars to when farmers planted their crops.

The Oracle entered her trance by inhaling sweet-smelling noxious fumes coming from deep fissures underneath the temple, according to the ancient historian Plutarch.

The role of hallucinogenics, of one form or another, in ancient Greek prophecy is well documented.

The fact is that the people of the Greco-Roman world expected their prophets to be stoned out of their minds.

Christian Spirituality:

In the Synoptic Gospels the concept of the proximity of God is an unholy mix of Greco-Roman misunderstanding of Hebrew spirituality seen through the distorted lens of the writer’s Greek expectations.

The term ‘Spirit‘ in the Gospel of Mark was mainly a reference to a concept very similar to the Middle-Eastern idea of the Jinn: a spirit creature who could possess humans.

There was a man in the synagogue with an unclean spirit and he cries out, ‘Ha! What is it to us and you Jesus the Nazarean!…”   Mark 1:23

Mark also mentions that Christ was to be ‘Baptised in the Holy Spirit’ as a kind of magical transfer of God’s power so we can see the concept evolving.

In the Gospel of Luke, we see the word ‘Spirit’ used as a metaphor for ‘God’ and is used in the same way that Saint Paul uses the term ‘Pneuma‘ as something extraneous to the person that has been added like a magical power.

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me” Luke 4:18

With almost the same words, the poet Virgil, in Book VI of the Aeneid describes the Oracle as prophesying in a frenzied state as the power of her god possesses her.

By the time we get to Acts of the Apostles nearly every other verse talks of the Holy Spirit.

“And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” Acts 2:4

“And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams;” Acts 2:17

In the New Testament, we can see the imposition of a uniquely Greek interpretation of the proximity of God. It’s inevitable then that, for Christians of today, manic behaviour is taken as evidence of the power of their God.

Hebrew Spirituality:

Hebrew culture, on the other hand, rejects the Christian vision of the proximity of God.

In Genesis, God breathes into a human made of clay and gives him the breath of life.

God formed the human out of soil from the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life; and the human became a living soul.” Genesis 2:7

The name of God in Exodus 3:14, “Aeie Ashr Aeie” means, “All that was, is and will be.”

For the Hebrew people, God is seen as the soul of all souls and is not extraneous to the person.

According to the Jesus of History the proximity of God can be experienced directly by everyone.

“When the Pharisees demanded of him When will the Kingdom of God come! He replied The Kingdom of God will not come through observation. Neither shall people say: Look! It is here or there! For you will see that the Kingdom of God is within you. ” Luke 17:20-21

The ‘you’ the Jesus of History was referring to was a Pharisee, so he really is saying that God is within all of us – not just Christian believers (as Evangelical Christians would have you believe). When the Jesus of history spoke about the proximity of God he used the word ‘Light’ as a metaphor:

“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”  Matthew 5:16

“But if thine eye be wicked, then all thy body shall be dark. Wherefore if the light that is in thee, be darkness, how great is that darkness?” Matthew 6:23

Matthew 6:23 is a misquote of the Gospel of Thomas 24, which was a first century collection of the sayings.

“There is a light within, the children of light, and that light shines on the whole world. If we don’t become that light there is darkness and we are that darkness.” Gospel of Thomas 24

Summary:

So why does it matter what the ancient Greeks thought about God and what has that got to do with the Jesus of History. I’ll tell you!

Beliefs have consequences and Christian beliefs have shaped history for two thousand years. It was Evangelical Protestant Christians who created the Ku Klux Clan and forced prohibition on the American people.  Christianity made America in its own image.

Paula White like most Christians is stuck in her head. Christianity gives its adherents no way out. The God they hear is just the sound of their own thoughts. The God they see is just a reflection of their own idea of themselves and has nothing to do with the Jesus of History.

As an example just try this experiment. Find a place where you can be quiet and undisturbed and just take a few breaths. Close your eyes and listen to what’s going on in your head. As the novelty wears off, you will begin to notice your thoughts arising and those thoughts are arising from your feelings and all of those feelings are reactions.

Paula is stuck inside her idea of herself. The sum of her past, how she feels about her past and her expectations for the future forms a distorted window through which she sees her world. This is why her God likes all the things she likes and hates all the things she hates. Paula has her very own personal Jesus.

That’s why Christians find it so hard to understand the nature of evil. That’s how Paula could enthusiastically pray for a child to die in its mother’s womb and that’s why Christians send her millions of dollars to do so. Like most Christians, the God that Paula prays to is the Christ of Myth.

The Jesus of History, on the other hand, taught that God must first be found within, within the silence beneath your idea of yourself. From this silence comes clarity and light. That clarity and light is available to everyone – It’s even available to Paula if she could just stop thinking long enough to listen.