Well, it has come, my Fall-On-The Sword moment.
I know there’s not many of you who follow me and are listening, yet what I’m about to share has to be said, for whomever might be. This is my fall-on-my-sword moment, as what I’m about to talk about could be seen as sympathy toward a country about which I previously had classified knowledge. It’s been almost two years since I had access to any such information about the nation of the Iran and its compliance with the JCPOA, and while my understanding could now be outdated, I cannot help but agree with Iran’s ambassador to the UN, that our current president has picked this fight. My fellow Americans, this is exactly why we must elect leaders who are honorable, empathetic, and impeccable with the truth!
There is enough violence in this world without our soldiers undergoing a war, a major war in which another group of people will be victims of our military might when they deserve our mercy. Sure, Iran has a crummy civil rights record and is considerably old-fashioned in its form of government that places the religious leader above the president in a fake democracy. And yet, it was been a peaceful country for centuries and a founding member of the UN, ECO, NAM, OIC, and OPEC. Also, please note that Iran is a strategic ally with China, so what the news is failing to mention to you is that our lying president is provoking a world war, and in a nation that is home to 22 World Heritage Sites.
The Persian people are strictly religious perhaps because they have retained much of the knowledge of the formations of the major religions, while we have fallen pray to the comforts of following false idols. What I am pleading with everyone to understand, jeopardizing my future as a national security advisor to do it, is that our disdain for Iran comes from prejudice that goes back at least to the ancient Greeks almost 3,000 years ago. To see what I mean, please read the following excerpt from my coming book, “Being Truth’s Servant.” I regret that the times have called for release of this chapter before the rest of the book was ready to release.
Please read this, and question, and research, and seriously consider this view of the world before you permit any kind of bloodshed, or all the deaths are going to be on your hands. This is our country, and we are in charge!
[Religious Deception (excerpt from the draft book “Being Truth’s Servant” by Mark DeNome)
By this point in my time here, I had learned I needed to question many major worldviews common in our society. Being committed to truth meant me taking a closer look at the social construct of religion specifically. In my youthful state of twelve when I started to question major religions, I imagined everyone as trying to do their best, every one of us thinking we were doing the right thing, and thinking the right way. It was at 33 years of age, with this Therump candidacy, and then his presidency, that I started to notice more open corruption in government work, and I started to consider that this moral war was far bigger than I imagined, with actual bad intent and bad actors. So I expanded my study of religion beyond holy books and scripture, to include ancient civilizations, including mythology, occult knowledge, and even some conspiracies.
I have worked carefully to try to sort truth from babble and bullshit, using inductive and deductive reasoning repeatedly on different theories about the effect of race and gender over time, like some sort of computer simulation, looking for a formula where puzzle pieces start to create a meaningful mosaic. I hoped my logic would reveal the motives behind these confusing conflicts, shed light on the recent rise of open bigotry, and help resolve some of the troublesome occurrences going on in the world. I prayed this would happen before the complexity and profoundness of it all turned my mind to mush. In this section, I describe some of the great lies I have identified throughout his-story, working to let logic illuminate the intended message of the nature of GOD amid the great deceptions that have occurred. The Gnostic Bible alleges that Jesus said, “Do not offer wisdom to those who are not worthy of it, or you might harm it, and do not withhold it from those who are worthy of it, or you might harm them.” Well, in today’s world, every being is worthy of this kind of knowledge.
In the age of the internet, all the hidden knowledge of ancient times is less and less hidden, which means there is both fact and fiction that we must constantly weigh the truth of that information and the reliability of its sources. We must remember that all mythology and all scripture and all other tales are told from some point of bias or even intentional corruption. There is no doubt in my mind there is a great war that has been going on for thousands of years – a hidden war over the hearts and minds of us common beings, who are mostly blind to the puppet-masters and their motives. With the internet, we can see more clearly at least, that there is such a moral war going on, that there are ideas working to help us free ourselves, and another set of ideas working to promote discord that keeps us blind and confused.
One thing I noticed among the bullshit, is that some statements are curiously the exact opposite of what is likely true. This led me to believe that some writings were revealing not by saying things plainly, but by cryptically saying the exact opposite. For instance, the angel Eleleth allegedly tells us that “Incorruptibility inhabits limitless realms,” which we know must be false because we know our own realm to be corruptible. So the writer of Eleleth wants us think she is a liar which begs the question of what else is she lying about, which plants the seed of light within our minds that the exact opposite of what she said is true, rather that “Corruptibility inhabits limitless realms.” She must be trying to warn us to question the motives of higher powers and the incorruptibility of even kings and gods.
For ages, the earliest kings and pharaohs used monuments, writing, and other art to spread their own greatness, until another pharaoh would come along and replace, or even erase, all records of the prior ruler. Stories are always written by the victors, and even when the oppressed spread their truths, it gets easily stamped out. The ideas that have lasted are those that the rich and powerful wanted to be spread, and for a very long period of time, that richest power was the Catholic Church. The printing press changed the game, by making it more affordable to print material and spread ideas, including those that questioned the church. It’s no coincidence that the rise of Protestantism protesting the church occurred in the same era as the Crusades, when the church employed warriors to travel far and wide to destroy records of competing rulers and competing ideas, allegedly seeking some container of relics, perhaps which could reveal knowledge.
It’s a miracle that some writings have been able to survive the millennia of persecution, but they have. A major miracle for knowledge occurred in 1945 when the Dead Sea Schools were found, leading to formation of the Nag Hammadi Library in 1947. Our religious books and our school textbooks have been teaching old assumptions lacking new realizations from these findings and from advancement in DNA analysis, age-dating science, and other technologies. We have made discoveries about the creators of Stonehenge, explored deeper into the pyramids, and uncovered the Malapa Site in South Africa among other advancements in archeology. These discoveries along with the clues left from writers from history, lend more support for a story of humanity that is in direct conflict with that the church has been telling us.
Some such knowledge was secretly alive and underground, through what I can only assume is by the work of any of the many fraternal organizations, like the freemasons, the Jacobins, the Elks, the Lions, the Odd Fellows, the Rotary, the Shriners, etc. In my reading of these organizations over the years, I never came across one that seems to treat women as equals, and many still seemed unhealthily hierarchical. That combined with the requirement of all of them that I must believe in a supreme being, were two hard stops to me joining. What I have done though, is read, mostly from Wikipedia and also from books published by Forgotten Books that have discussed fraternal organizations. It was in these writings, which was often mysterious and cryptic, that I picked up tricks to how to interpret the occult. For instance, Albert Pike (yeah, the KKK founder and Confederate General Albert Pike), in “Morals & Dogma” wrote, “The method of indirect suggestion, by allegory or symbol, is a more efficacious instrument of instruction than plain didactic language; since we are habitually indifferent to that which is acquired without effort.” Later he added, “No better means could be devised to rouse a dormant intellect, than those impressive exhibitions… which instead of condemning it to a prescribed routine of creed, invited it to seek, compare, and judge.” That’s poetic, but I think I’ll still try to state it plainly for you. Times are too critical not to.
There have been many others though, who believe that one cannot truly learn merely by being told a truth and using inductive and deductive reasoning, and one must be forced to live through it through experiences. George Gurdjieff writes, “The teacher, possessing consciousness, sees the individual requirements of the disciple and sets tasks that he knows will result in a transformation of consciousness in that individual. Instructive historical parallels can be found in the annals of Zen Buddhism, where teachers employed a variety of methods (sometimes highly unorthodox) to bring about the arising of insight in the student.” Gurdjieff and others can keep teaching through trials if they want, but I find this so-called ‘magic’ deceptive and part of the problem, even when well-intentioned. I’ve learned quite a bit through straight study of written works. And it’s been illuminating to put together some of the conclusions those in power refuse to say out loud.
One of those illuminating things is how the concept of trinity has evolved. First, there was the Sumerian triple-male of Anu, Enki, and Enlil. Then the Babylonians adopted a father, mother, and son combination of Baal, Ashtoreth, and Tammuz. The Egyptian pharaohs had three father-mother-son combinations in its long and complicated past, namely the Memphis triad (Ptah, Sekhet, and Nefertim), the Osirian (Osiris, Isis, and Horus) triad, and the Thebian triad (Amun, Mut, and Khonsu). Then the Hindu’s were all like “Hello, we have the triple-male we call the Trimurti of Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu.” And the Romans, at least the early ones, tore down many of the statues and temples devoted to all kinds of deities, but before they became the force behind Jesus, they worshiped a father-mother-daughter Capitoline triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva (yes, two women!) We are fortunate that unlike the other temples that may have existed, because instead of being destroyed like all the others, the Capitoline temple was located in the city of Pompeii, where it was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79CE and then excavated in 1748. Otherwise, temples for women did not far well over his-story, with the notable exception of Temple Of Athena, which likely remained because of its symbolism for the defeat of the Persians in the Peloponnesian War. The Roman Catholic Church however, removed all female recognition when it made its trinity about the father (GOD), the son (Jesus who is half GOD), and the holy ghost (which is somehow also GOD). It really makes no sense to anyone except people fed that Trinitarian juice from birth, yet to this day, this is the trinity that lasted generation after generation because of the constant dominion, or domination rather, of the church.
The thing we must never forget is that those in power seek order, not truth. Past rulers are pleased that the populace is so gullible and beguiled by the glamor, pomp, and stagecraft of preachers of sin and salvation with all their ceremony, music, stained glass, and images of pasty, winged cherubs. We common folk so easily recline into our own submission to it, and fail to unite to overcome our own oppression. To understand what those rebellious people from our past have been unhappy about, we have to go back a bit and look at the transformation of ancient Greece and the changing worldview of race and gender.
Early Greece was for years a land of petty kingdoms, worshiping superhuman gods with anthropomorphic animal forms; however as the lands more and more turned to rule by local oligarchs, the art began more and more to glorify the human form. The obsession with the human form, especially love of the male body, is most pronounced in the province of Sparta, founded in 900 BCE. Greek towns moved toward local governing bodies called Ecclesia, which might be considered citizens’ assemblies except that they were for males only. By 621 BCE, local governance had shifted to Ecclesia in every Greek town except Sparta, where the Greek provinces united to select a panel of elders to maintain oversight of the war-minded Spartan king.
The female body that became ideal during this time, was not one that was physically fit, but voluptuous, from a life of leisure and wealth – meek, mild, and less likely to object to sexual conquest. Through Greek art we can see another cultural change becoming more evident. Instead of black figures on the natural tan of terra cotta pottery, we start to see dark backgrounds exalting lighter faces. We even see a period fo a couple years around 550 BCE when the black figures are painted over with white, literally white-washed pottery. I attribute this change in preference to fear of their enemies of the Greeks, the Persians, were a darker people and making themselves out to be a more inclusive people, or so it seemed by their decision to restore the second temple for the Hebrews.
Through works of art, including literature by Homer and Hesiod, the ideas of the Greeks spread to other lands, including the Romans, who by 509 BCE were interested in this idea of democracy and overthrew King Tarquinius to establish a Roman republic. The Roman people however, proved just as war-like as their past kings, or perhaps just easily misled to hatred by the wealthy Romans who through theatre, writing, and other arts, swayed the people one way or another toward fear of outsiders. By 146 BCE, the Romans completed their conquer of Greece and just about the entire Mediterranean, including combat with the Persians who the Greeks had fought all those years.
While money might convince individuals to join the military, once enlisted, soldiers had to be given purpose to fight, and fight well. So it was that the greatest orators were used to promote war so Rome could conquer all the outsiders on both the eastern and western fronts. My middle name being Anthony, you might think I would have an attachment to Mark Antony, but no. Mark Antony was a puppet of one oligarch over all the rest and helped Octavian become emperor, thus ending the Roman Republic in 27 BCE. From there, he only made it easier for the Romans to expand persecution of other peoples and cultures, like the Hebrews, and eventually the followers of Jesus too. The Jesus we hear about today through the church in Rome; however, may have been different than the messenger who actually existed.
Most generally agree that Jesus was on Hebrew descendent and lived in the town of Nazarene where he was called Yeshua. Nazarenes were Hebrews by nationality, though perhaps not aligned with mainstream Hebrew faith. Nazarenes believed Moses had received the word of GOD, but that the teachings of Moses were not those contained within the Hebrew bible. They kept all the Hebrew observances, including objection to eating meat, and recognized prophets up to Jacob - just not the story of Moses as told in the Bible. Skeptics like the Nazarenes were not appreciated by the Romans, nor the faith leaders within the province of Judea charged with maintaining order in the lands of the Hebrews. We are made to think Jesus was a docile man promoting nonviolence, so peaceful that his executioner, Pontius Pilate allegedly pleaded for Yeshua to be spared, and only acquiesced to his execution when the brutish crowd refused to relent. I hope you can see how unlikely this is, considering the conflict and violence of the times; otherwise you are not going to get much from this book.
The emperor Tiberius Caesar, had in 19CE ordered Hebrews of military age to join the Roman Army, and banished all remaining Hebrews in the city of Rome to the province of Judea, which would not have been well received by the people of Judea. It’s more likely that Yeshua was inciting rebellion and was considered a threat to the stability of the province and also to the rabbis looking to keep their appointed positions. The subsequent years after the reported death of Yeshua continued to be unsteady, with the next three rulers (Caligula, Claudius, and Nero) being assassinated over a period of thirty years. Nero blamed the followers of Yeshua for the fire of 64CE, when a mob turned against the markets. Two years later, the Jewish-Roman Wars were in full force, and lasted seven years during which time the second Hebrew Temple was destroyed, and Peter was replaced as the first pope by an appointee of Rome. The Nazarene’s increased in numbers after alleged persecution by the Hebrews in Jerusalem drew many away from the teaching of the Hebrew Bible; however many Hebrews interpreted the historic horror as punishment for not believing and doubled down on their faith.
Some of what we know about the Nazarenes comes from Hippolytus, an influencer within the church, who was martyred in 235CE for criticizing important tenets of the church, including ascension and modalism, which held that the names Father and Son are simply different names for the same subject. Hippolytus, writing well of them though still calling them Naasenes (perhaps for their healing practices involving serpents), describes the Nazarenes as taught by Mariamne, the second wife of Herod I and mother of two sons allegedly executed in 7 BCE. Another historian on the Nazarenes was Josephus, who is thought to be the younger brother of one of the apostles, Matthias, who like Mariamne, is descended from a wealthy Hasmonean dynasty of Hebrews. The coins of the Hasmoneans suggest they were descendants of the Phoenicians, who millennia before had controlled all the Mediterranean from the banks of Judea and Israel.
Most of what we know of the Nazarenes and the different peoples of Judea and Israel come from Josephus, though there is general agreement among experts that one passage in particular has been subject to interpolation, or addition by another author, likely Pope Eusubius, and therefore possible deletions of parts of the original works of Josephus as well. The writings of Joseph seem to have been kept by the church to do their unique accounts of the events leading up to the Jewish-Roman War. For instance Josephus’s writings describes him traveling to negotiate with Nero for the release of twelve Hebrews priests, the same number as the apostles. It does not describe him negotiating for the body of Yeshua, though, as the gospels record. Josephus also reports living in caves through Jewish-Roman War, and working on his writings including “Antiquities of the Jews,” though it’s questionable whether Hebrews at that time referred to themselves as “Jews.” We are told there is no existing original of any of his works, with the earliest copies being 11th century Greek reproductions; however Origen makes several references to Josephus that suggest his writings were widely known in 248CE. Some of the writings of Josephus curiously refer to Ophites, which like Hippolytus, suggests heresy surrounding Moses and specifically the serpent of genesis. This kind of language was likely a basis for the views of Roman senator Tacitus, who around 100CE exclaimed that these followers of Christ hated the human race, used black magic in pursuit of revolutionary aims, and practiced incest and cannibalism.
Then around 150CE, a man who would later be identified as a church father, Justin Martyr, gave a valiant defense of the morality of Christian life and convinced Antoninus to stop persecution of the church, with his writing “First Apology” addressed to emperors Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, and Lucius Verus (three of the so-called Five Good Emperors). Justin Martyr presided over the gospel harmony, and was responsible for compiling and reconciling all conflicting accounts of the gospels. In doing so, Justin Martyr proposed adoption of the stoic doctrine of the "seminal word," which would involve use of the character of Jesus to serve as promulgator and teacher of new doctrine, identified as the “word of christ.” His aim was to emphasize the absolute significance of Christ, so that “all that ever existed of virtue and truth may be placed upon him,” and therefore he endorsed the concept of the Holy Spirit as a member of the Christian Trinity, as well as the miraculous birth of Jesus to Mary when she was a virgin. Nonetheless, Justin Martyr was particularly antagonistic towards Hebrews and regarded them as a cursed people. His anti-Judaic polemics have been cited as an origin of Christian anti-Semitism, he was the first to argue that the Romans had no responsibility for the death of Yeshua, supporting the idea of Jewish deicide through betrayal by Judas and crucifixion by the people of Judea.
Justin Martyr’s work did influence Marcus Aurelius, who as emperor from 161-180CE, mandated the provincial governors to impose severe punishments on the followers of christ. During this time of unfriendliness to early Christians, Celsus wrote the earliest known comprehensive criticism of Christianity, called “On The True Doctrine,” which survives only by the refutation by Origen in 248CE. Then in 250CE, Emperor Decius called for people to perform a sacrifice of “loyalty to the ancestral gods” and the wellbeing of the emperor, or else be put to death. Church leaders were arrested and executed, including Fabian, Bishop of Rome, and Babylus, Bishop of Antioch. One of those persecuted was Origen, who with a team of secretaries, spearheaded the concept of atonement and salvation, and tried to argue for pre-existence of souls though this was rejected by the church. Origen himself argued that not all of the bible is to be taken literally, writing, “And if God is said to walk in the paradise in the evening, and Adam to hide himself under a tree, I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally.” While it was Philo, a generation after Yeshua, who championed the allegorical writing found in the gospels, it was Origen who made it popular more than two hundred years later.
By far the most severe persecution of the followers of Christ; however, occurred during the Diocletian Persecutions. In 299CE, emperor Diocletian purged Christians from the military. Then in 302CE, he condemned the Manicheans, followers of Mani, to death. He only surrounded himself with public opponents of Christianity too, executing the deacon Romanus for denouncing the sacrifices. Diocletian allegedly visited oracles at Apollo and was told “the just on earth” hindered Apollo’s ability to speak on the matter, for which Diocletian just blamed the Christians. He then set his mind to even greater persecution, ordering churches razed, scriptures burned, and relics seized across the empire. In 303CE, Christians became deprived of public positions, denied rights in the courts, enslaved, and on some occasions even burned alive. In some places, all persons, men, women, and children, were ordered to gather in a public space and offer a collective sacrifice. If they refused, they were to be executed. The persecution of Christians continued the next year when Diocletian ordered the arrest and imprisonment of all bishops and priests. This year, 303CE, was the not-well-known moment in time when the church was purged and its teachings corrupted wholly.
What escapes most people, it that the actual teachings of the early Christians have been replaced by the teachings of the Constantine Christians. Seeing persecution of the millions of Christians was not possible, the Constantine Christians selected their own people to take over the church, starting with Marcellus as pope in 308CE, four years after removal of all church officials. After several years, the emperors realized the new church was going to last quite a while, and it build St Peter’s Basilica constructed from 319-333CE at the current location of the Vatican, which at the time was a cemetery for executed Christians. The church decided to get the bishops together at the Council at Nicaea to direct a new path for the church. Seemingly intentionally, the council made this proclamation from the city known to be the birthplace of Hipparchus, whose mastery of mathematics and models of the motion of the sun, moon, and equinoxes was impressive to both pagan worshippers and Roman rulers who wanted advanced notice of his astronomical predictions. This new church claimed association with only a few of the church leaders of the previous order, namely Clement of Rome, known for calling on early Christians to maintain harmony and order. Also acknowledged by this new order was Ignatius of Antioch, who helped define the sacraments and roles of bishops, as well as a few well-liked bishops from conflict areas of modern day Turkey.
Not only did the emperors replace the pope, but they also used their power to not just sequester, but actually made additions and deletions to the Christian scripture. They collected and ‘harmonized’ the gospels, and compiled them into a bible of their own to compete with the Hebrew Bible and with the prevailing pagan writer at the time, a humble hermit named Hermes. Hermes had discovered and revealed many mysteries to his followers, such as in the work “Hermetica,” which discusses the divine, the cosmos, the mind, and nature, while touching upon more magical concepts like alchemy and astrology. Because the church and its wealthy influencers found its ideas struggling against the humble science of Hermeticism, they claimed their gospels were written by not one, but two hermits. Jerome tells us of Paul of Thebes, 227CE who fled Decian persecution to practice his faith in Christ in the Thebian desert, where after trials and tribulations, he came across another hermit by the name Anthony, who became his disciple. Anthony, who claims to be from several domains, was Christian monk who lived in rural solitude for 20+ years before a spirit directed him to Paul of Thebes.
These alleged ‘desert fathers’ actually had little impact on the New Testament, while much of the inspiration might be owed to Justin Martyr for all those idea he put forth all those years ago, and to Tertullian, who around 200CE wrote of the trinity and expressed that human beings are like little fish, which is the origin of referring to Jesus and disciples as fishers of men. Origen, through his extensive travel and first hand verification of documents and relics, is largely responsible for collecting the information on the various texts that became a compiled New Testament. And some credit must go to Roman senator Sossianus Hierocles, who around 303CE claimed that the doctrines of Apollonius of Tyana were far more meritorious than those of Jesus, his contemporary. Thusly were the teachings of this new ideal messiah made to follow on the life of Apollonius of Tyana, and for the purposes of promoting order, made to emphasize more peaceful and soothing language suggesting freedom from torture and sorrow that comes from poverty, famine, and war, and behaviors they wanted citizens to emulate.
Replacement gospels were written by a group known as the four original ‘doctors’ of the church. Though we now associated the mission of a doctor being to cure, the Latin word doctor just means teacher. The four were:
Augustine of Hippo, likely owner of the Gospel of Mark and the Apostolic Histories;
Jerome of Stridonium, likely owner of the Gospel of Matthew and the Catholic Epistles;
Ambrose of Milan, the likely admirer of Philo who wrote the Gospel of Luke for Theophilus and also the Pauline Epistles; and
Gregory of Nazianus, likely the rhetorical stylist behind the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation.
Interestingly, the Eastern church preferred to acknowledge their own four ‘doctors of the church’, that excluded Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome, so the Western church reciprocated by joking the fourth original doctor of the church was Pope Gregory instead of Gregory of Nazianus, and it stuck. This quartet invented the four evangelists, aligning them close as possible with what was known of the apostles, knowing the apostles of Jesus had been arrested and executed shortly after Jesus. Many people think the evangelists as these missionary types out knocking door to door, but at the time of Jesus, evangelists would have been considered heretics and punished severely, so any evangelists that existed in those days were doing so with permission, and funding, from the emperor at the time.
To remain as consistent as possible to what was previously known and verifiable, the creators of the gospels tried to piece together knowledge of the life of Yeshua and his suggested key disciples, though they had very little. In order to customize each of the gospels to meet the cultural conditions of each province, the creators sprinkled in historical traditions and other details unique to these provinces. This new codex, called the New Testament, was translated into Latin by Jerome and also into Syriac by Aphrahat. The Council of Rome in 382CE suggested the 27-book canon that exists today, which was approved by all the provinces by 405CE. The church doctors were either short-sighted to have tolerated such conflicting testimonies, or perhaps they eventually wanted people to see the discrepancies and “look for life of a world to come,” as the Nicene Creed states. This allusion to a new apocalypse, which in Latin translates as “lifting of the veil,” would mark the end to the world of the church. I imagine they expected the lie could go on for maybe two hundred years, not two thousand.
The evidence was all out there; but that didn’t stop the church from delaying the inevitable unveiling. The church was clever when it came to accusing others of what it was guilty of, like when it created a prophecy about one who will oppose christ and substitute himself in Christ's place, as described in Galatians 1:7 that some people want to “pervert the gospel of christ,” and pressuring devotion with literary devices like “one who believes in him is not judged, but one who does not believe is judged already.” Elements like these were inserted to combat the arguments made by skeptics.
One of those skeptics with large reach was Porphyry of Tyre, one of the founders of Neo-Platonism. In his retirement around 300CE, he wrote “Against The Christians,” consisting of fifteen books. Because the work was banned by Constantine, and ordered burned by Theodosius II in 435CE and again in 448CE, everything we know about these books comes from the Christian apologists like Methodius, Eusebius, Augustine, and Jerome, who challenged Porphyry’s ideas. One of these accusations held that Christians were blasphemers for worshiping a human being rather than the supreme god. The church seems to have answered this argument by establishing the trinity as explanation for how Yeshua was like god and therefore should be worshipped. This and other lies to cover up lies were made at the second council of bishops at Constantinople where several revisions were made to the Nicene Creed. Those revisions, many of which were influenced my Augustine, the bishop of the Roman province of north Africa who faced a lot of skepticism from other Abrahamic religions, were:
Addition of “Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary” to suggest Mary was not tainted by the act of sex, and also seemingly to clarify that she was not in fact the holy ghost, for those who might’ve assumed she was that third part of the trinity;
Addition of “whose kingdom shall have no end” seemingly portending conflict between church and emperor;
Mentions the prophets (though some were later labeled by the church as either secondary or false authorities not preach the true gospel according to the church);
Introduces baptism, but only one, for the remission of sins;
Addition of “…before all worlds…” suggesting incarnation;
Asserts the role of the church to “look for resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come,” which arguably reflects their belief that the current age is flawed and will be replaced by a better one.
Ruling at the time was Theodosius, who outlawed paganism and made Christianity the empire's official religion. Even before Theodosius and Augustine though, the Council of Nicaea was solidified in the eyes of the people by the emperor Constantine, the first emperor to convert to Christianity, a religion that promoted social order by making the people believe in resurrection and in ascension to heaven, if they acted right.
My grandma, who we all call MeMe, tells story of time a family friend brought his favorite painting to the house to show her, and it was Jesus on the cross. When MeMe’s sons, who must have been quite young, saw the painting, they couldn’t stop giggling in front of the artist, which embarrassed MeMe so. After the painter left, MeMe made them explain themselves. Here, they thought it was just a painting of a naked man. I guess in all the Sundays they had gone to church, their Methodist leaning had not emphasized the crucifixion enough for them to have ever seen that image of Jesus before. Best believe though, their laughs turned to horror and sobs when they found out it was Jesus, fearing they were going to go to hell!
I share this personal account of my family and how the terror surrounding resurrection influenced my skepticism and concerns about resurrection growing up, and maybe even my concerns about Christianity and religion in general. For all of my years as an atheist, I used to perceive the conflicting testimonies of the resurrection of Yeshua as a sign of some secret fake death staged by the apostles with the help of Pontius Pilatus who took part in the ruse. I saw the whole empty tomb shenanigan as a distraction, while recognizing there was likely crucial evidence in existence in the church relics or elsewhere somewhere that might either support or squash the theory, like a body, body parts, bloody robes, or other DNA. And yet, there seems to be none.
The Romans want us to believe Jesus was declaring himself king of the Hebrews, free of Roman rule, and I imagine that at least is true, though I find it highly doubtful that the Roman centurions were peaceful, nor believe that Yeshua was preaching peace. When the Romans could not stop the idea of rebellion from continuing to live in the hearts of the Hebrews, they tried to corrupt that message and use the real social movement he represented. When they found that to not be working, they tried to use it and emulate it. They realized the idea of resurrection implied salvation, which implied atonement, which implied nonviolence, which brought order.
Knowing this, it’s curious whether or not this was the intent of the emperors, and the story of the crucifixion was all some con. If it were not, I would hate to be that guy who minimizes the sacrifice of a martyr, especially a martyred messiah, but we do have to ask the question. The gospels tell us the execution of Jesus of Nazareth, and before him, John the Baptist, was ordered by Judean king Herod Antipas at the request of his wife, Herodias. The tellers of this story try to make Herodias out to be the evildoer and Herod the merciful. The effort that the tellers of this story put into labeling Herodias an evildoer and the Judean king as merciful, suggests to me that the opposite is true, that Herodias pleaded for the life of John the Baptist. To understand this woman and her motivations, we have to look at the global dynamics at play leading up to this time.
Alexander III of Macedon, by conquering Babylon and subduing Thebes by 323BCE, had paved the way for Rome’s conquest of the entire Mediterranean. Alexander left four dynasties: Attalid (Greek), Antigonid (Macedonian), Seleucid (Hebrew), and Ptolemaic (Egyptian), all of which were male-centric and averse to black races. After Alexander, blacks and females found favor in former Persian lands where the Scythians, made up of women warriors, now possessed much of the area conquered by Cyrus II. Women who fled the persecution of the new Greece founded Pontus, north of Macedonia, and joined with the Parthians to form the Sasanians, who through a series of military leaders known as Mithridates, fought to advocate for the freedom of the matrilinear Hebrews and their lands, yet were subdued. In 311BCE, Seleucus ruled over the Hebrews, starting the Seleucid Anno Graecorum (Greek Year) calendar, and likely began compiling the Hebrew Bible, and revising it to create a patrilineal approach and make other claims about Moses that were against the oral tradition of the Hebrews.
The Seleucid Bible was Alexander’s Gordian knot, a new his-story aimed at competing with matrilineal Egypt and its associations, by confounding the narrative. He appealed to the Israelites, located in Canaan, the “meeting place of civilizations,” and eleven Israelite tribes became his chosen people, who were promised they would thrive if they adopted new ways, ditched the old, and encouraged others to do the same. They became the Samaritans, who created a written tradition of descendants of son after son, while the matrilineal oral tradition specifically emphasized the importance of the bloodlines of the four matriarchs of Israel: Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah. And when the Judeans added vowels, called matres lectionis, or “mothers of reading” to the modern Hebrew alphabet, the Samaritans refused, and retained the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet adapted from Phoenician. Much of the his-story explained in the Seleucid Bible relies on the prior narratives from ancient Egypt, explained by fabricating the tale of an Israelite exodus from Egypt that never happened, and a made up enslavement that made Israelites more sympathetic to male-centered Romans than to the more gender-balanced Egyptians. The knotted mess that the Seleucid Bible created actually re-wrote his-story to blame the 587BCE Babylonian destruction of the Hebrew temple and enslavement of the Israelites, and subsequent invasions by Philistines, as being the fault of Greek enemies, when it was actually Greek allies.
A number of years after this deceit, when Greece fell victim to Roman invasion, a Hebrew group called the Maccabees led a revolt and took control of a part of the land called Judea. A Maccabee by the name of Hyrcanus I expanded the boundaries of Judea, partially through forced conversion to the oral traditions, including the controversial practice of circumcision. Hyrcanus 1 (134-104BCE) was the Maccabee who founded what is today known as the Hasmonean dynasty, which supported the matrilineal tradition, and traced its lineage back to the Phoenicians. After three successions, a woman, Alexandra Salome, was identified to rule the land of Judea, and did so for nearly ten years. Shortly after Salome’s eldest son succeeded her, a coup occurred and her second son proclaimed himself patron of a new Hebrew group, the Sadduccees, who would assimilate to Roman culture and laws.
The Sadducees were predominantly priests prospecting for future Roman appointments, while the people of Judea who practiced the traditional religion became known as Pharisees. The Sadduccees solicited support in this Hasmonean civil war rom the Arabic Nabataens, and for his war-mongering, Roman general Pompey squashed the battle and had the Sadduceean leader imprisoned. For the sake of order, Pompey restored the Pharisee leader to the high priesthood, but after this, he took greater interest in Judean affairs, and in 63BCE initiated a new, Pompeian calendar, counting forward with year one representing the year Rome assumed rule over Judea. In governing, Pompey relied heavily on an advisor who would become known later as Antipater, meaning “against the father,” possibly due to his support of a series of ruling women in Egypt, even if those female leaders were known by the name Cleopatra, meaning “glory to the father.”
Antipater was probably not his name during those days, but a name acquired later by the writers of his-story, foreshadowing that he would betray the father-loving ideology, and maybe even Rome. There is a lot of ideas and conflicting testimonies about the identities and motivations of leaders during this time, which signals a lot of deception happening by people in high positions at that time and over time. To whatever degree the confusion comes from people with real intent to deceive or from plain old confirmation bias toward supporting their own religion, the misleading his-story has been perpetuated by archeologists guided by the bible in their hand. What we can still reason; however might lead us to the true story of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth.
During the Hasmonean civil war, Antipater’s sons Phasael and Herod came to rule Jerusalem and Galilee, respectively, from 47-40BCE, even after Antipater was murdered in 43BCE. During these years, the battle of Jerusalem was being waged by the Pharisee leader, Antigonus ben Aristobulus, named posthumously after the Greek play involving civil unrest, a betrayal, and a female hero. Roman general Pompey intervened again in 37BCE because Antigonus and the Pharisees were aided by the Parthians, people of Persian descent who were sympathetic to women warriors and leadership. Plutarch tells us that Mark Antony had Antigonus beheaded, while Cassius Dio tells us Herod I had Antigonus bound to a cross and scoured to death, an insulting method of execution reserved for worst offenders at the time. This report is suspicious since the son of Antipater (“against the father”) was likely sympathetic to Antigonus, yet it does clue us into possible inspiration for the story of Jesus. Someone must have died via this method to produce the account. This brings us to who Herodias was and why it mattered for Christianity and our human story.
The Hasmonean bloodline continued through Berenice, daughter of Salome, who with Aristobulus IV, and produced Mariamne III, who produced an heir to rival the sitting king, Archelaus. Word got out that a king would come who was wed to the Hasmonean heir and would otherwise save the Hebrew way of life, a prophecy that became the inspiration for the story of John the Baptist. As a result, Archelaus tried to contest the marriage of Mariamne III to Herod Antipas, citing all kinds of false grounds. He also issued a census to register the people of Judea, according to the Gospel of Luke, possibly even a massacre of the Hasmoneans, or even children close in age who might be the son of Mariamne III. There were protests, and Herod Antipas tried to appeal to the people of Judea to cease riots until he could be confirmed king of Judea after killing his elder brother, Archelaus.
Rome had to intervene. Realizing the Hebrew rebellions kept occurring because of consternation of matrilineal rule against patrilineal rule, emperor Augustus cut a deal with Mariamne III, in which her family and lineage to peacefully live out their matrilineal ways in the province of Gaul, modern day France, in exchange for her aide in promoting peace within Judea. Judea became a tetrarch, broken up, with Archelaus and Antipas both receiving positions of rule over new, smaller territories while the family established itself in Gaul. The most interesting possibility of such a theoretical deal, was Mariamne III agreed to put forth the image of an ideal Judean that was peaceful. She wrote of his-storical accounts of apostles not as leaders of the uprising, but as conveyers of peace, disciples of their esteemed leader. Her son, Philip II, born in 4BCE, became one inheritor over the tetrarch of Judea and died in 34CE, which corresponds to the lifetime of the great made-up messenger. Her husband, Herod Antipas, instead of going to Gaul with Mariamne III, married her younger sister, Herodias. He may be the inspiration for Philip the Apostle, who, according to the tales, received the insulting manner of death of crucifixion. Seemingly, rumors spread of Herodias being a supernatural leader of a supposed cult of witches and worshippers of the Greek goddess Diana.
Protests against the patriarchy continued via a people of Nazareth called the Mandeans, and in 70CE, the matrilineal marriage practices of the Hebrew community were re-stated. One of these Nazarenes, Josephus, would call Mariamne III the “Cleopatra of Jerusalem” for it would seem to him that she was father-loving, and went against the matrilineal tradition of her people. He however, would come to aid the church in solidifying and proselytizing the story of the ideal Judean, a “New Moses” known as Jesus. Several generations later, the church would fall at the hand of Constantine and his oligarchs, followed a few generations later by the fall of the Roman Empire. The Roman empire did not get defeated by any warrior army, but by becoming a subservient puppet to the church, which no longer needed the face of emperors or senators to remain relevant. One Roman strategist is noted for making a statement that sounds a lot like a description of now a second Gordian knot that is coupled with Alexander’s knot, saying, “several knots all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened.”
Some people still had gnosis, or knowledge, of the real occurrences, so the criticism of the church was constant and growing. The subsequent wars executed by the church were religious wars, against possessors of knowledge or even proof able to topple the lie. These powerful few int he church have attempted to keep the many from such knowledge, for instance by tying it to far-fetched mysticism, but it is very real without anything mystical about it. To misrepresent the accounts of these skeptics, Diocletian implemented a misleading calendar that shifted our his-storical timeline by roughly 100 years. The Anno Domini dating system the western world uses today is based on the crucifixion of Jesus was not devised until year 525. Before that we had the Diocletian calendar, which started in 284CE, and before that we had the calendar based on the year of the founding of Rome, which was given by Roman Emperor Augustus, who happened to also be the emperor at the time of Jesus. I’m not sure exactly how these different calendars affect age-dating, and how some methods count backward from today while others count forward from known (sic) dates, but I suspect someone who specializes in these calendars might be able to explain. What I find to be clear though, is that a group of people lied. Then a second group of people made up a second line to counter the first, then a third group of people caught the second lie but not the first, and a fourth group is just hanging our heads as these peoples, the Hebrews, the Christians, and the Muslims, have been killing each other over it ever since.
While his-story has idolized the ‘great’ military conquerors and authoritarians Cyrus II of Persia, Alexander III of Macedon, Ptolemy I Soter (Sotor meaning savior), Herod, and Constantine, there have been great cleo-matras fighting the good fight during these times. Prolific women rulers of ancient times include Ianna, Ma’at, Isis, Hapshetsut, Semiramis, Teuta, Salome, and Cleopatra I – Cleopatra VII. In fact there were many temples honoring powerful females, including the Greek goddess Artemis. The Temple of Artemis, considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, was built during the bronze age but destroyed allegedly by a flood in 700BCE. It was rebuilt in 550BCE, then destroyed by an arsonist in 356BCE. Reconstruction was started by Alexander III of Macedon to symbolize the triumph of civilization over barbarism; however the temple was destroyed a third time, in 268CE, allegedly by the Goths in an oddly targeted and improbably raid.
The Temple of Artemis may have originally been built by the Villanovans, known for metallurgy and considered the first Iron Age culture. The Villanovans were predecessors of the Etruscans. Contemporaries to the Spartans and the Athenians, the Etruscans were tradespeople, well traveled and well-educated. Unlike their Athenian counterparts, who favored male features to the point that they condoned homosexual love between student and teacher, the Etruscans were clean-shaven, held women as equals, and honored both gods and goddesses, including Diana, Greek goddess of the hunt and the woodlands and moon. Diana also may have led a real life army of women warriors, and may have inspired the legend of Amazons, a group of fierce female warriors led by female leaders like Hippolyte, Menalyppe, Penthesilee, Lampetho, Marpesia, Orithyia, and Antiope. Other argue the Amazons are based off the Scythians, a nomadic people who occupied most of Central Asia as early as 900BCE. One ruler from a Scythian confederation, Tomyris, led her armies against an attacking Cyrus II, defeating and killing him in 530BCE. It was in this region around the same time that we get perhaps the most profound example of gender corruption, in the tale of a divine being known for her strength. Her name was Heracles, named after the Roman goddess Hera, but when the Greeks later describes her twelve labors, the Greeks redefined her as the masculine Hercules.
Greeks at this time held ardently to the iconic feminine image of Venus and Aphrodite - a sensuous, often nude, female, looking just like a male would want her. We see the change in the ideal of women very specifically in the changing image of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, handicraft, and warfare who is today emblematic of freedom and democracy. The Greek Athena who was once black, through time had her temple re-built in the Roman style with her image more and more Caucasian. As gender conflicts worsen, we start hearing of a new identity of Athena, as Medusa. Legend tells of Athena being made ugly, with snakes as hair, as punishment for her enraged reaction to her rape from her own temple. Medusa, now represented the irritation of the male leaders with women in power, has become the face of female rage seemingly for all of time, immortalized by Italian Renaissance artist Cellini, who depicts a warlike Perseus holding the decapitated head of a Medusa with serpent for locks of hair, which whether intended or not is an unmistakable allusion to modern day dreadlocks.
One of the few women exalted by the Greeks and Romans, was Cybele of Phrygia, known as magna mater of “Great Mother” who for the Greeks and Romans, symbolized subservience to the Earth, and a natural order, Fate if you will. Associated with lions, which were often subservient at her feet, her image invoked offspring's duty of obedience to the parent, she was at times consulted by even the most powerful as an oracle and tool used to conveying public perception too. Such an icon of a mother goddess goes back so far it clearly reveals a tendency of human nature, with the Woman of Willendorf dated to 28,000BCE and other icons, like the Woman of Catalhoyuk, dated to 6,000BCE. Cybele of Phrygia however represented more than a corpulent fertility fetish, because she was notably a ruler, with a consort who is said to have castrated himself, perhaps not literally, but figuratively by being in her service, instead of the expected gender roles of the subservient female.
After Cybele, all oracles seem to become known as Sibyll after her, though there is evidence of “frenzied women from whose lips the god speaks" noted as far back as the Mari culture, a Sumerian city in modern day Syria in the second millennia BCE. The first known Sibylline Book supposedly passed from the Phrygian Sibyll to an Erythraean Sibyll around 550BCE, and soon after that ended up allegedly in the hands of Tarquinius, the last king of Rome, via a Cumaean Sibyll two decades before Roman became a Republic. Interestingly, several centuries later, Rome, facing a failed harvest, famine, and ominous meteor shower warning of coming defeat in the second punic war, famously called in a sibylline oracle and was eventually victorious against Carthage. A few more centuries after that, the Romans provide accounts of a Hebrew Sibyll, possibly representing Mariamne III, and a Tiburtine Sibyll that supposedly prophesied an emperor named Constans who would bring peace by ending paganism and converting Jews.
In addition to all these prominent female roles in his-story, the Hebrew Bible identified several femme fatales who make major contributions to history, including Esther, Judith, Delilah, Jael, and Bathsheba. I feel it is important to state such names and honor the women who managed to get their name etched into his-story, and also important to realize that the Diocletian Persecution didn’t just result in the persecution of Christians. It also represented a tremendous persecution of women, like Agnes of Rome who in 304CE, at age twelve, was the child of wealthy family sought after but refused to sacrifice as ordered by Diocletian. Also that same year were killings of Margaret of Antioch, at age 15, and Lucia of Syracuse at age 21, and Dorothea of Alexandria fifteen years later. These sacrifices may have been inspired by legends of the virgin martyr Barbara of Heliopolis and that of Valerie of Limoges in the previous century.
Of all the virgin martyrs, none were as prolific as Catherine of Alexandria, who died in 305CE at age 18 by emperor Maximian. We are told Catherine was a devout Christian, who debated more than 50 pagan philosophers and orators, and won, but she lived in a time when Christians were persecuted and put to death. We are told she was scourged badly and survived, starved in prison and survived, put on the breaking wheel which broke, before she volunteered for beheading in which milk, not blood flowed from her neck. While all these instances are suspicious, we cannot deny that such a horrid killing of an innocent young girl would be told in a way that gives some dignity to the victim. And that’s what happens, because we are told that the emperor, a salesman by background, later relinquished the emperorship to a younger Constantine to champion Christianity. It is all peculiar because Constantine then deified him. These were the Constantine Christians who imprisoned all the church officials, executing many of them, and replacing them with their own puppets. Critics of resenting being made to worship only a male, and not exaly both a male and a female deity, referred to these church officials as matrum caesares, or mother-killers. In this battle where males decided the role of females as fair maidens for life, one woman stood out, Helen, mother of Constantine. Helen left us Saint Helen’s Chapel, a pilgrimage site for devotees of Saint Catherine, of not just Christianity but Jewish and Muslim faiths. As a result, she is regarded by many as a patron of the feminine concept of wisdom, associated with Holhmah in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek, Ma’at in Egypt, and Ishtar in Mesopotamia.
The church by the time seems to have formed such disdain for women that it was prohibiting clerics from the full experience of love with a woman. Given how above-the-law the church did and does still seem to operate, it seems less likely that celibacy was actually meant to free clerics from earthly impulses, than it might be out of concern that loving a woman compromises the ability of clerics to enforce church ideas that subdue women’s role in society, so “ministers can more easily remain close to Christ with an undivided heart.” The apostle Paul was celibate and recommended it, saying “He who is married cares about the things of the world – how he may please his wife” instead of how he may please God, which seems to suggest he believes those two things to be in conflict.
In stark opposition to this worldview, Hindu, Islamic, and other Eastern views of sex have always been more sex-positive, with those cultures seeing sex as an act of worship rather than something to be feared. The Greeks saw sex this way once, back when the Samothraceans and Eleusinians were exploring pharmaceutical mysteries. So the distinction seems to come not from Abrahamic religions, but from Augustine, an influential bishop who helped formulate the doctrine of original sin and championed just war theory, among other concepts. In his “Confessions” Augustine shared about his own sexual escapades using dark language, saying “I muddied the stream of friendship with the filth of lewdness and clouded its clear waters with hell’s black river of lust.” Women then, were a treacherous temptation for him, and that sentiment, possibly influenced by a likely large number of women working magic against him at that time, carried on throughout his edicts and interpretations of Christianity.
Back to the Diocletian Persecution though, which ensured that opponents of Christianity fled and the teachings went underground. In addition to messing with the calendar again, Diocletian instituted Christmas to outshine the Mithraist celebration of Sol Invictus “unconquered sun,” on the same day. This was Diocletian’s attempt to minimize the significance of this celebration of the church’s inability to stop people from worshipping a sun god Baetylus, meaning “House of God” and a black stone sacred in several pre-historic civilizations, that may have been carved with inscriptions and mounted atop sacred pyramids in ancient Egypt. A couple years later, Diocletian started his attack on the Serapeum, a remaining pagan stronghold that was a temple to the god of silence and secrets, and also the location of the Library of Alexandria, which was a research institute dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts. Serapeum was sacked fully in 391CE, and just a few years later, in 415CE, monks were ordered to stone to death a famed female mathematician, philosopher, and pagan named Hypatia, an account which shows that rivals to the church were being slaughtered even before the dark ages brought the death and destruction of the crusades in search of relics that could be used against the church.
In the twelfth century, Pope Innocent III greatly expanded the scope of these crusades in Israel, Spain, and southern France, where an anti-clerical group called the Cathars of Manichaen influence were based. The Cathars were purists who professed that god had a female equivalent, Sophia, representing wisdom. With women among their ranks, the Cathars lived without possessions and performed manual labor to get by, and this appealed to many at the time who were disillusioned with the opulence of the church. To counter the influence of the Cathars, Pope Innocent III in 1209 also established the Franciscan Order, a clan of simple-living purists led by Francis of Assisi, who professed the purity of the ‘savior’ Jesus. A few decades later in 1233, Pope Gregory IX, cousin to Pope Innocent III, instituted the Papal Inquisition, whereby the Franciscan Order and other friends of the church were utilized to conduct trials over heresy against the church, which occasional involved torture and had penalties being confiscation of property, imprisonment, or sometimes if non-repentant, death by burning at the stake. A group known as the Knights Templar, skilled crusade fighters that had a network of Templar Houses across Europe and the Near East, started to take bribes and become cooperative with local officials. They were thusly dissolved by Pope Clement in 1305, though in 1307 some were suddenly charged with heresy, arrested, tortured, and burned at the stake by King Philip IV of France. It is from the Knights Templar network that freemasonry began to emerge, attracting candidates who professed faith in the supreme being.
In 1517, an ordained priest by the name of Martin Luther disputed the church’s stance on indulgences and instead created pamphlets and ultimately his own version of the bible in German language, which argued salvation is not earned by good deeds but by the grace bestowed for faith in the redeemer, Jesus. This however went against the original intent of the religion, to employ fear to maintain social order. After studying the works of Martin Luther, an English scholar by the name Tyndale created an English translation of the New Testament in 1535 against the wishes of the church. When the church met in 1545 at the Council of Trent, one topic of the Council of Trent was development of a List of Prohibited Books. Books thought to go against the church included Tyndale’s Protestant Bible, along with astronomy works such as Kepler’s Epitome Astronomiae and philosphy works like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
It was decided the recognized Protestant Bible in English would be prepared by King James of England, and it was available by 1611. Among the changes made in this King James version, was the addition of a second commandment against idolatry, while merging the last two commandments about covetousness in order to keep the total number at ten. This English translation also gives us the phrase “fire and brimstone” as an expression of judgment, God’s wrath, and eternal damnation, which seems to be opposite the momentum of protestantism. This new version incited discussion and even accusations that the other group denies the one true god, all groups easily overlooking the giant leap to worshiping just a single male god. This is what’s going on by the time the Age of Enlightenment dawns, when the works of scientists and philosophers become more widely circulated through academies, masonic lodges, literary salons, and coffee houses. This is not far from where we are at today, with common folks choosing to chew on the plethora of information available, or perhaps choosing not to chew at all.
One notable difference over time, is in the attitudes toward Hebrews and other deniers of christ. The Hebrews were placed under perpetual servitude starting in the Papal Inquisition 800 years ago, and not even 100 years ago, the United States turned away Hebrews fleeing persecution by Nazi Germany. Today they are arguable less persecuted and more understood. The Hebrews were, and still are, begrudged for their attitude toward money and gaining their come-up as a people, as if they are preparing for some moral war that the rest of us do not see coming. It is known that a man by the name of Adolf Hitler who preferred a so-called ‘white’ race over all others, referred to Hebrews and Negroes almost as if interchangeable. We know other peoples through time have had negative attitudes toward blacks and Hebrews and women. We know the Hebrews were granted back a nation of Israel on the lands of their ancestors in 1952, though it’s hard to tell if it’s the true Promised Land of the Hebrew prophecy, or whether the lands were once inhabited by a people who looked different that the Hebrews we see today. We have Schlomo’s “Invention of the Jewish People,” which explains that ‘white’ Jews were Kazarians of Scythian ancestry who rejected both Christianity and Islam during the dark ages. We see that while the Christians and Muslims are surely and profoundly wrong in their beliefs, the Jewish narrative does not quite align with science and reason either. Misogyny, for instance, while evident in the New Testament in 1 Corinthians 11:3 and in Ephesians 5:23, is also found in the Hebrew Bible, right up front in Genesis 3:16. The authors of the Hebrew Bible, not the Christians, sealed the fate of a narrative of Eve as inferior, and by the time of Augustine and his notion of original sin came about, most of civilization were already persecuting womanly ways, and the woman-bashing ways of Augustine and the church found receptive ears then, and still today.
In all the deceptions that we can chart through time, the original deception and the seed of all these wars and troubles still going on today, is still the Seleucid ‘Hebrew’ Bible. This is Alexander’s Gordian knot. Before the Hasmoneans, it’s tough to see where the matrilineal line comes from, though there has been glimmers of it through time, with Hatshepsut, Isis, Ma’at, and even the Sumarian Ianna. And at some point this narrative meets up with the Levites and whatever land they were assigned to, whether it was Egypt, Persia, Pontica, or another city. Egyptians especially seemed to honor the divinity of women, at least more than did most later so-called civilized civilizations. The Greeks and Romans on the other hand, seemed to have a strong adversity to gender equality as being just too difficult to bear - males just plainly unable to overcome urges to take what they want and who they want, sexually. His-story gives us several reminders that even some women have worked against the betterment of their entire gender, like Olympias, mother of Alexander III of Macedon, named after the games devoted to honoring masculinity, who was critical of Antipater even as he used his influence for the betterment of a matrilineal people. Many, whether male, female, or in between, are just content to live in their comfortable inclination toward human dimorphism, no matter the damaging and deadly effects this has on us, and has had on us for thousands of years. Things could have been better for all of us all along, if instead instead of seeing error as feminine, we recognized the desire for knowledge and understanding as the feminine ideal, and instead of worshiping domination and obedience to masculine authority, we recognized all the error males are capable of too.]
Peace, Salaam, Shalom! -Mark