The True Origins of the Christian Church

Wednesday October 12^th was the opening day of Ice Hockey season and Thursday the Ducks played their first game.  Thursday night the Dodgers beat the Washington Nationals in game five of their series and now will be facing the Cubs, who beat San Francisco.  Most of the nation is behind the Cubs, who think they have something special this year.  I assume this NL game is being televised.  So is this a game of nation-wide viewership for said Cubs fans?  However the Dodgers and their fans think the same thing and they haven’t won the World Series since 1988 and Dodgers see similarities between this year’s team and the 1988 team.  Meanwhile the Cleveland Indians beat the Torranto Blue Jays in their first LCS game played last night.  It’s only a guess but I’d say whoever wins the World Series it will most likely be a National League team.

The newly renovated Richard Nixon library was reopened yesterday.  Now they have a replica of the Oval Office where you can sit behind the actual desk Nixon used and pretend that you are President.  They have other interactional stuff that’s new.  Meanwhile people are saying that people are suffering from stress in this Presidential campaign and the more time you spend on Facebook and Twitter the more stressed out you are, and it doesn’t make any difference whether you are a Republican or a Democrat.  Meanwhile NFL viewership is down.  The television media is languishing down fifteen percent due to “all the people watching Thursday games on line” even though they’ve been showing them on CBS.  It would seem to me that just having another night of NFL football would dilute the football watching audience.  We learn on “rewind” on KNX radio that on this date, October fifteenth, in 1995 Paul Mc Cartney did a cameo role on the Siompson’s because of the fact that Lisa Simpson is a vegetarian.

Some people want to throw out theology entirely in their “Churchy” activities.  The Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago has Sunday church services where they open by singing a little song and then the children depart for Sunday School and the adults remain for an enspiring lecture on Humanist values.  Some of you may wonder whether I would go to such a Service.  I do believe in a Creator God but I am both a deist in the sense I don’t believe God personally interacts with his creation.  But this would also make me an agnostic because I don’t know this god personally.  I don’t “have a personal relationship with Him”.  Therefore were I to meet him I would logically expect to be as bewildered at the “new experience” as I would meeting Abraham Lincoln or George Washington for the first time.  I’ve only seen actors on TV playing these men and I wouldn’t know the first thing about what they are like as a one on one experience.  So really I don’t honestly know what “God” would think of any of my religious writings over the decades and my defense would be that what I wrote I wrote out of sheer ignorance.

Let's get right to my theory about the identity of this Jesus person.  I'm the guy who believes that originally there was not one messiah but four messiahs who went into the creation of the persona we call Jesus Christ.  But in addition to all this there is what I believe is the Judaizing influence of the "Syrian Church" which was actually begun by out of work Saducees, who believed in animal sacrifice at the temple in Jerusalem before it was destroyed.  There are certain legalist overlays of the Gospel to assume its final form, particularly in Matthew to cover such things as "Peter is the rock and on this rock I will build my church" or "Peter has the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven" or "Whoever marries a divorced woman is guilty of comitting adultry with her" or verses on steps you take to kick an unrepentant sinner out of the Church assembly.  There is another famous textural overlay about "Go ye into all the world and baptize in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit".  I think these verses can be pretty easily identified even by the layman.  The first (and perhaps greatest) persona we'll discuss is the individual referred to in the Bible as "Jesus Barrabus", the man who was freed by Pilate in the Gospels, but whom Tassitus, Roman historian who wrote around 100 AD referrs to as "Crestus" rather than "Kristos".  The difference is that Kristos is the designation of a Messiah where Crestus is a Roman proper name, and is in fact referred to as still being alive even after fifty AD when it says Claudius kicked all the Christians out of Rome.  In the early days when they spoke of Christians they identified with this Crestus and not with Yeshua.   Joseplhus tells us that this individual died under Pontious Pilate in 29 AD.  Further research reveals that it was on November 24th of that year during a partial ecclipse of the sun, which explains the three hours of seeming darkness.  Identifying the crucifixion date with Passover is a later Judaizing influence.  These original Christians had some arnachistic tendencies.  They favored a grand purging, both with the Temple in Jerusalem, and later in Rome some claim they didn't start the fire in Rome (which was an accident in a paper plant) but rather of later spreading of the fire.  Though I'm not averse to saying Nero himself had a hand in this.  This Crestus or Jesus Barrabus- - came out of Egypt.  "Out of Egypt I called my son" thus could be a scripture about this man.  All of the gospels refer to Barrabus but none have anything particularly favorable to say about him, only that he comitted a murder in a riot (on Palm's Sunday?)  What happened was that Judas was one of his desciples that turned against him and turned him in.  But the authorities distrusted his motives and he himself became a suspect and they kept egging him on to give more and more information about Barrabus.  When he and the Romans led the cohort to capture Barrabus- - you now had two suspects.  Who was the ring leader- Judas or Barrabus.  I believe this move toward Vox Populai- -of Pilate letting the people decide was a rare if not unique move for the Roman governor.  They people understandably wanted Barrabus.  He was their revolutionary leader.  Judas was crucified on the cross and Barrabus was let go.  There is nothing else to be said nice or otherwise about Barrabus in the Bible.  He disappears from scripture.   I believe he went first to Egypt and then after some decades he moved to Rome itself.   Tassitus, the Roman historian, says that "Christianity moved to Rome and even now is not extinct".  The phrase "not yet extinct" implies to me it was dying out.  He also says that Christianity has a reputation as the most hated religion.  It's worth noting that later Theologians much preferred the word "Catholic" for Universal, rather than the term "Christian".  

We now come to John the Baptist, who had his ministry between that of Barrabus and Yeshua.  Keep in mind scripture tells us that "Actually Yeshua didn't baptize anyone; only his desciples did".   John was devoted to the memory of Barrabus who had moved back to Egypt with his followers.  John the Baptist saw it as his ministry to purge the country of evil influence to pave the way for the second coming of Barrabus.  Now the parables and sayings in the Gospel- - all that escatology or "last things" stuff or the "Coming of the Kingdom of Heaven" are I believe parables of John the Baptist and not Yeshua.  The emphasis here was on judgement rather than regeneration.  The point here was about a man, a King, a ruler, who went away on an extended trip.  Not dying but just going away- - literally.  John says the we were in charge of "keeping the faith" and being responsible.  And when he comes back some parables pointing to a King killing those "Who did not want him to be King".   There is a lot of talk about winnowing forks and watching and waiting and being good stewards of the property or servants entrusted to you.  John the Baptist of course was executed by King Herod because he pointed out the king's adultry with Salome.  (This is the vamp whom Gloria Swanson had fantasies of playing the role of in the movie Sunset Boulivard)   Yeshua's ministry was in a slightly later time.   Yeshua was a Nazarite, which has nothing to do with any town named Nazereth, which didn't exist in the first century AD on Roman maps.  He came from the area of Mt Carmel by the coast and moved quickly to the Sea of Galilee, and the rest you know about the calling of his desciples and all.  The Gospel of Thomas contains many sayings of Yeshua.  Yeshua was a pescatarian in that he only ate fish and did not believe in killing red meat.  To him, sheep were to be treated like human beings.  Being a Nazarite he also had long hair, did not drink wine, and didn't touch dead people.  There were also areas of sex where Yeshua had some eccentric views.  He viewed male and female as distinctions which would fall by the wayside.  Yeshua met his death because he had a ministry of casting out demons and was picked up as a sorceror.  He was given forty days for anyone to offer evidence that he was NOT a sorceror, and after the forty days, when no one stood in his defense, he was stoned, as is the usual Jewish custom.  This would be around 35 AD, which goes along with the "Favorable year of the Lord" because AD 35 was a Jubilee year, which came every fifty years.  It was a year when many people did not work and gave the land rest and also had all of their debts forgiven.  If there's anything I left out here you can go to previous blog postings (if you can find them) where I dispense more information.