The Messiah - A Political Project. A critical view of the origin and evolution of Christianity
About the Book
"I wanted to compose a text that would summarize and process the essential information that the modern Christian needs, in the light of all the new studies, discoveries and archaeological finds". The author, 2009.
The Lord’s Prayer is found in an Egyptian text dating from the year 1000 BC! It is known as the "Blind man’s Prayer" And in this very text also figure what will later be the Beatitudes of Jesus. All of the theology of Ancient Egypt will later appear in Jesus. The Old Testament (600 BC) had already been impregnated with the monotheism of Pharaoh Akhenaton (1360 BC).
Case by case, it is rare to find a passage of the New Testament that does not have sometimes disturbing precedents in Egyptian religion, and it is evident that the history of these two ancient peoples, Hebrew and Egyptian, should have enjoyed multiple contact and exchanges over the course of the centuries. Mutual two-way influences, making it difficult to work out who influenced whom. In the final analysis, these are neighboring territories, remember that the Suez breach is very recent historically speaking.
Philip Davies and others suggest that in the time of Hezekiah, Jerusalem established its own school of scribes, uniting the sources of oral tradition known as the Jahwist tradition.
Hezekiah’s ambition grew inordinately and he formed and directed a coalition with the Philistines trying to unify Judah and Israel. At the back of his mind, perhaps Hezekiah feared that the Assyrians would also come for his kingdom.
"The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him [shall] the gathering of the people [be]."(Genesis 49:10) This is the basis of Messianic belief, and is known as the Prophetic Blessing of Jacob. With regard to Genesis, it is known that many paragraphs were added to the original, especially when the Jews came back from their exile in Babylonia, during the 5th century BC.
The archaeologist Israel Finkelstein stated in 2003 that the exodus never took place. His research revolutionized the new Biblical archaeology by stating that the saga narrated in the five books that make up the Christian Biblical Pentateuch, and the Jewish Torah is not a case of Divine revelation. He said that, on the contrary, this epic is a brilliant product of human imagination.
Judaism had a problem in the Roman Empire: if a Roman wanted to be a Jew, should he fight against Rome or not? What is Judaism's problem? that it combines nationality with religion. When someone converts to Judaism they adopt Jewish nationality as well as religion, so a Roman converting to Judaism. converts to what? a people or a religion?. Christianity solved this problem, the Nazarene movement accepted diverse nationalities within the same religion and allowed the Romans and Greeks to continue being Roman and Greek, so Christianity removed the link between religion and nationality. This is the first idea we must understand.
The prophetic block text offers us a portrayal of God as Man’s friend. God has made an alliance with his people; he is committed to them and hopes that they in turn will live coherently with that friendship. The Prophets, who love God thanks to their faith, in turn call upon their countrymen to be loyal to the demands that God’s friendship makes on them. They offer their message in the guise of oracles of salvation or of punishment, they reproach or urge, perform prophetic gestures, or present fantastic visions. All of the foregoing to make an impact on their listeners and attract them to their message
I sometimes feel that the Jesus of the canonical Gospels is too Roman, too "friendly" to the Roman power of the time. Could this just be another version of Jesus, like Spiderman 3, who had a dark side?
Let us take a look at those Gospels:
- They are diplomatic about the Roman power in Judea: they "wash Pontius Pilate’s hands", those responsible for that death are the traitor Judas and the people clamoring for Jesus’ crucifixion
- Jesus says in the gospels "Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and give unto God what is God’s"
- A Centurion (an important Roman soldier) shows his faith, is well treated by Jesus and even considered worthy of belonging to the brotherhood.
- Jesus never speaks out against the Roman domination of his people, instead he merely makes prophecies. in this sense he was totally unlike Gandhi (1869 – 1948)...
When we painstakingly analyze the letters of "Paul", we realize that the Jesus shown therein has very little to do with the character who supposedly lived in Galilee and died in Judea; they tell us instead about a divine Jesus who does not have an earthly existence, very much in the Hellenic style. The Gospel of Mark, on the other hand, originally ended with Chapter 15, that is to say with the burial of Jesus, the chapter about the resurrection being a later addition. The merging of the literary character with the vision of "Paul of Tarsus" leaves us with a historical Divine Jesus, who is that proclaimed by the Council of Nicaea, with some modifications by the first relevant Christian groups.
Mithra, Persia (1200 BC) born of a virgin on December 25, he had 12 disciples and performed miracles. After dying, he was buried and came back to life 3 days later. He was also called "The Truth" and "The Light". It is "worth noting" that the holy day for worshipping Mithra was Sunday.
The mythical sun gods are a constant in the ancient world and Jesus is a recycled copy of several of them. The topic of transferring the features of one character to a new one is even found in the Bible itself. In the Old Testament, there is the story of Joseph. Joseph was a prototype of Jesus.
In Westerns, we know that at some point somebody is going to take a swig of whiskey to have a slug dug out of him, somebody will eat beans at a campfire and sleep under the stars, somebody will stick up a stagecoach or a bank and get a haul of gold, or somebody will say "I don't think they're gonna attack till sunup".
When speaking of someone wondrous in the ancient world, one automatically thought of them as born of a heavenly virgin, reviving the dead, attracting disciples and performing miracles. Jesus obeys these genre rules and the stereotypes of that time also apply to him. He follows the same genre stereotype as the "movie stars" of his time: Homer’s Ulysses, Philostratus’ Apollonius of Tyana, or Petronius’ Encolpium.
It is interesting how some key aspects of the history of Israel between the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD are hidden and not taught in the seminaries or from the Christian pulpits even today: for example, everything regarding the life and work of the legitimate heirs to the usurped throne and their struggles to reassume power as well as their names, which are identical to those of several apostles.
Quantum physics states that every observer alters what he/she is observing, because he/she is an active component of a unified field, of a single infinite space of wave-particles. Sartre (1905 – 1980) expressed this by saying that a look from "another" objectifies one and endangers one’s subjectivity.
The sociological concept of the self-fulfilled or self-realized prophecy, basically asserts that if a situation is defined as being real, that situation has real effects. If "another" looks at us and classifies us from a framework of beliefs or a value scale which we have not taken part in creating, this puts us in the situation of "potential slavery". If we are "caught napping" we may expose ourselves to the danger of becoming a "being-for-another". All of this is synergized when the other claims to wield Divine authority and wants to make us their puppet, their lackey, their "sheep"... Much harm can be caused by "sacred narratives" and unquestionable institutionalized dogmas.