JESUS WAS A REVOLUTIONARY WHO BETRAYED HIS CAUSE

So here’s the story on Jesus, according to Michael Baigent in The Jesus Papers. He also co-wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The Jesus Paper’s is an addition to the latter book and further explains Jesus’s mission (which changed in mid stream according to Baigent) his marriage to Mary Magdalene and their disappearance into France with the help of Roman authorities after a faked crucifixion.

Let me admit, however, that Michael Baigent writes in a very circuitous manner, in such a way that one wonders why his narrative does not travel in a straight line. It leaps back and forth in time. Is this a fault in his method? Is this the only way he can work his thesis in a satisfactory manner, or is it that a more straightforward methodology would make his case appear weaker? Frankly, I think the case for Jesus being a revolutionary rather than the son of God, as the Catholic Church claimed and passed on to the Protestants, is very strong. After that, I don’t know, but if those two letters (read on) are true, wow, what a smack to the senses of anyone raised in our modern world so much dominated by the “People of the Book” (Muslims, Christians and Jews). Another point, after reading this book and several others, I and no objective person can believe in the facts as presented in the Bible, the Koran or anywhere else. Baigent and others have clearly revealed just how much empty supposition goes into every line of the Bible and its interpretations. When you finish reading The Jesus Papers, you should realize that everything is a chimera, created by people who had a political motive to interpret everything just as they did rather than a spiritual one.

According to Baigent, Jesus (because he descended from the house of David) was chosen at an early age by Zealots to fulfill the Old Testament mission of a promised Messiah who would lead them on a political war against the Roman authorities. Thus Jesus consciously fulfilled the many prophecies of the Old Testament, but he had spent part of his undiscovered youth in Egypt where he came across the sort of mysticism which informed early Greek and Egyptian religions. He became an initiate of those mysteries by which people learn to have visionary experiences in caves and dark underground places in Egypt. The Greeks called this inward journey visiting the Netherworld, the Egyptians called the underground journey going to the “Far-world”, and Christians called it, and still do, the “Kingdom of Heaven within”. As Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Not out there >>>. We modern people, of course, understand that people from everywhere have always sought these transcendent moments through the use of drugs or sensory deprivation in deep caves or in modern chambers that are much like wombs or in groups full of music and shouting. We recognize them as self-induced psychological experiences rather than spiritual experiences. Baigent points out the many passages in the New Testament and in the scrolls from Nag Hammadi and in the Dead Sea scrolls where it is clear that the mystics of those days, one of which Jesus became, believed they could journey to these places of death and return by initiations that only the initiate knew how perform.

Baigent further claims that there is a written message that Paul took for his own purposes that split the Jewish tradition between the political Zealots and James, Jesus’s brother, and the messianic Jews who eventually became the Christianity of the Roman Church which is based on the unsubstantiated claim that Jesus arose from the dead and is, essentially, God. The Vatican to this day is trying to suppress and hide the fact that there is much evidence that shows that Jesus never claimed to be God and, of course, never was God, that all he spoke of were these mystical moments when an initiate could think he had personally experienced the realms of the gods. Baigent claims that Jesus revealed his changed course when he was asked if the Jews of Jerusalem ought to pay their taxes to the Roman Emperor. The Zealots felt double-crossed when Jesus said that they should pay those taxes. That’s why Judas Iscariot (sicarii = knife bearer and, thus, Zealot) betrayed him to the Roman authorities. Jesus was no longer useful to the Zealots.

Of course you must read this book for yourself because Baigent must work long and hard to tie all the loose ends together. The kicker to the book, coming at the very end, is that Baigent saw with his own eyes two letters (circa 32CE that he could not translate to read) which were in the hands of a wealthy private Jewish collector of antiquities. He believed they were authentic and written by a “bani meshiha—the Messiah of the Children of Israel”. The letter writer is defending himself to the Sanhedrin against charges that he had called himself the “son of God”. He explains that he did not mean that he was physically the son of God but only that he is spiritually adopted as a son of God, and that anyone who is filled with a similar spirit can also, in that sense, call himself a son of God. Thus, Jesus is not God and never was. As you can see, if these letters are authentic, they can change the course of history, but, as of yet, in the murky world of antiquities, they have not yet been surfaced by this collector or by anyone he sold them to, if he did sell them, if they are, indeed, letters written by Jesus in his own defense. Interesting, eh? Much more interesting than that hanger in dry dusty Southwestern America.

SIGNS FROM ANCIENT/MODERN DAYS

Today, passing by a church on Minnehaha Street in Vancouver which likes to load down its curbside reader board with pithy (well, maybe pissy) conundrums for the passing parade, I read the sign, WHEN YOU'RE DOWN TO NOTHING, GOD'S UP TO SOMETHING. Actually, from personal experience and a lifetime of reading and study, and as revealed in that old movie with Joanne Woodward, "Rachel, Rachel", I think the sign, if it were honest, should read, WHEN YOU'RE DOWN TO NOTHING, WE'RE OUT TO GET YOU, for that's when the Christian brotherhood comes for you—when you're weak and vulnerable.

Of course, the upshot of pouncing on the vulnerable and lost is Christian or Moslem or Jewish houses of worship full of the mentally ill or, at best, the neurotic many who are trying to get well but not always achieving that goal. Which further means, it's in those sanctuaries where you'll find weak-minded authoritarian figures who like to dominate others (as part of that, they are manipulators, prevaricators, passive-aggressives, child molesters and rapists too) all mixed in with the weak and vulnerable who are open to that sort of molestation of body and psyche, quite often children and women. Witness that Texas mess! Would anyone but a wimpy sort of male want a women chosen from that brainwashed bunch? Of course, to be honest, sex is an interesting sort of animal, and women (men too) can be a lot more interesting in bed when that evolutionary adaptation sets the synapses to firing than you or I may imagine them to be. Sex has a lot to do with imagination and less to do with pure chemistry.

DID YOU HEAR THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS AND HUMANISM?

In reading The Jesus Papers, by Michael Baigent, I came across an interesting quote by the disciple Thomas as revealed in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thomas said (no, that's not me, but it could be) "When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father."

When I was more of a believer than I am now, I used to understand that Jesus was calling me brother and telling me that we shared the same father and, therefore, I was as much a god as Jesus was. How the Catholic Church corrupted the historical Jesus into a triune clusterfuck, I'll never know.

Self knowledge. Ah, yes! Later in the morning after reading that passage, as I was strolling through the Vancouver Mall for exercise and window shopping, I pictured a teeshirt conundrum that read: HUMANISM—THE ETHICAL LIFE.

Then I imagined the dedicated dogmatist challenging me, saying, "Yeah, but who anchors your ethics? What unimpeachable source underlies your philosophical musings?"

My only answer could be "Me and what can still be called my human nature. And yours too!"

I went on rambling in my head while my body rambled too, meandering between the aisles of the goods and services in Sears, Macy's, Penny's, etcetera. Each of us carries the basis of moral behavior in our own bodies, I thought. We all know what it is to "feel" we've been treated unjustly. It hurts. By extension we can surmise that each of us, sharing the same biological feeling structure or moral mechanism in our own bodies, can recognize and share this feeling mechanism. In fact, humans are so certain of this moral mechanism in the human animal that we recognize those who don't have this universal mechanism are a real danger to us. We call them sociopaths and the criminally insane. From that simple fact of shared biology (some have called it the golden rule)(some have announced it in the saying "all men are created equal"), we can build a humanwide ethical structure when, and if, we mature as a species a little more than we are now matured.

The flaw in religious people is that they want to cheat on this biological mechanism. Instead of referring to their own feelings as a source of ethics, they try to buttress their personal feelings by calling in a higher authority. They want to trick us into giving their feelings a little more concern than we give our own feelings. Specially guilty of this hedging of bets are the preachers and other church leaders like mullahs and rabbis who use their power positions to wheedle money and even more power out of the weaker and less skeptical among us. Specially nasty and irrational of these religious folk, leaders and followers alike, is the belief, which the gullible among them accept unquestioningly, that this higher authority who justifies their human feelings about life can also reward and punish humans with eternal punishments and rewards. Now there's a real stretch of the imagination and also of the unbounded ego of religious people and their leaders in their attempt to get the rest of us to give more importance to their "ethical feeling mechanism" than we give to our own ethical mechanisms.