Bill Wagner's
Gnostic Columns
Page 2
India-Palestine Connections in Antiquity
"Art thou
greater than our father Jacob ?" asks the Woman at the Well in amazement.
In Samaria.
Abra(ha)m sired
a number of children - two of whom, Ishmael ("God Hears Man" -
as illustrated in his life lest it be missed. Scripture
"explains itself" when allowed to) and Isaac figure in the
account as the Hebrew scriptures present it. Ishmael, as it
were, "leaves our story
here."
Hagar (his
mother's name) derives from the root which gives us "Hejireh" in
Arabic. Its nearest equivalent in English would be "Exodus."
An Exodus (a
scriptural archetype) is:
-a flight
-in
secrecy
-into the wilderness
-undertaken in haste
-to escape affliction
-culminating in an Encounter with "life changing" consequences
The Bible
is full of them.
They tend to
happen in pairs. Jacob thus flees the first time from Esau, the second
time from Laban; David from Saul, then from Absalom; Moses from the Egyptian
police, then from the Egyptian army (making him, as it were, the patron saint
of "militant populists" and "separatists").
Illustrating (as would be expected) the significance of her name (or one of
its aspects), Hagar thus flees the first time alone; the second time with
Ishmael. Who, in turn, is the "rejected stone" of the Parable
("stone" and "son" being puns of the sort with which the
Hebrew scriptures abound, by design).
This leaves
Isaac, who fathers Esau and Jacob. Esau "despises his
birthright" by siring offspring with his harem of Canaanite trash (the
phrase usually disguised as "mess of pottage" can also be
legitimately rendered "a [tasty] bite of red [meat]" - a name,
perhaps curiously, adopted by the Italian porn star la Cicciolina - "the
little tasty morsel"). This is "a grief of mind" to
his mother Rebecca, who laments that if Jacob should follow suit her entire
life would have been for nought. (His father Isaac was, so to speak,
"blind to its significance").
Jacob is thus
obliged to flee (exodus) in order to continue the bloodline of the promise
uncorrupted. In his second Encounter, his name is changed by the angel
(ambassador, messenger, deputy, agent) to Israel ("God Sees Man"),
his twelve sons becoming the patriarchs of Israel's Twelve Tribes. All
of which came to be "in captivity" in Egypt, while the Edomites and
other descendants of Esau remained where they were.
This is
"how," if you like, Christ's adversaries in John 8:33 could be
offspring of Abraham who had never been in captivity - John Hyrcanus I, in or
around 100 BC, attempting to resist Roman expansion with a kingdom badly
fragmented along racial-religious lines, had offered them the choice of
"conversion" to whatever "Judaism" may have been or
involved at that time, or expropriation of their property and exile (Flavius
Josephus, The Antiquities of the Judaeans, 13.9.1). They chose
"conversion."
This has been a
cursory outline-overview of the situation indeed, but it suffices to put the
significance of the question by the Woman at the Well (and any time there is
an encounter with a woman at a well by a man of prophetic heritage in
scripture, there is a marriage and offspring in view) with which we began into
the context in which it becomes comprehensible.
In light of the
new name given him by the angel, "Our Father Jacob" =
"Our Father Israel." qed.
If only as an
antidote to the myopic selectivity with which the Messianic prophecies are
arbitrarily juxtaposed (plastic model assembly absent the instruction booklet
again), consider Isaiah 53:10 b -
Having made his life an offering for sin, he shall see his seed; he shall
prolong his days,
and the pleasure of YHVH shall prosper in his hand.
from which vantage point not
only the current fascination with the Holy Bloodline and Mary Magdalene, but
their rooting in a form of "christianity" indigenous to Syria
("of Saint John") begins to become apprehensible as other than a
free-floating abstract generality (an idea divorced from the organic context
proper and necessary to its comprehension). Such as, for an
example, the matter of the Lost Sheep of the House of Israel - who had
long been awaiting their promised Shepherd, whose acknowledged mission
was to seek them out and reunite them into one flock again with himself as its
head. (One who was given, as in John 4, to staging practical
demonstrations of what he was talking about).
To make a very
long story very short, the Assyrian conquest of Israel (the northern kingdom,
by stages) triggered a flood of refugees, by ship, to safe havens as far
removed from Palestine as Ireland (the relevant histories dovetail precisely).
But, unlike the Babylonian scouring of Judaea, the Assyrians did not exile the
entire population of Israel "across Euphrates" (where Josephus
records them as still living in his own day); Second Chronicles 34:9 (and 21,
and 33) proves this. And further; whereas the Babylonian
"scorched earth" policy had destroyed Judaea and left it that way,
by design, the archaeological record shows that Assyria was
rebuilding Israel within a generation's time (prosperity generates taxes.
Not to mention that the "urban renewal" racket was as profitable to
the usury-financeers then as it is today. As Lincoln's Secretary of War
admitted in an unguarded moment, "Wars are fought to create
conditions").
In fine, there
were a number of Israelites - particularly of the Joseph Clans - resident in
their ancestral homeland in the first century AD. Their own tradition
had diverged from that of the south back in the days of the Judges, and
subsequent developments had only exacerbated the antipathy between them and
the Judaeans. Such were relations between them at the time of
Christ
that, per the Talmud,
pilgrims to Jerusalem from Galilee normally took the long way round Samaria
(and the same route back) rather than risk being beaten up.
The Judaeans
cordially returned the favor, twisting (as they did everything they found
distasteful, and investing this with the mantle of piety) Shamerim
("Observers"/"Doers" [of Torah - compare James and
"the Sectarian Scrolls"], their self-designation) into
Shomeronim, "Samaritans" (Inhabitants of Samaria), with these
generically defined in practice as "Cuthian half-breed trash" (the
victors, as usual, write the "history") whose very touch was
contaminating.
Even in this we
encounter the abstraction racket. In context, "Observing
Torah" (since roughly eighty percent of the Law is in the context of the
community - not of the individual) can mean nothing if not Law Enforcement
(however distasteful the connotation it has recently acquired). Laws
which are not enforced are dead letters - requiring the spirit of holiness to
put them back into living, actual practice. Law (Torah) which is enforced
is Law which is Observed/Done. The alternative to this is to relegate
the entire affair to abstract, self-centered, ritual piety. Qui bono ?
And might there have been a connection, however tenuous, between "Be ye
Doers of the Law" (Jacob - misnamed "James") and the
"gangs of ruffian fundamentalists" who went around forceably
circumcising men in first century Palestine and driving collaborators
with the enemy from their homes (ditto the American Revolution) ?
Stranger connections than this have been the case. As,
for example, when the German peasantry, newly enabled to actually read the
Bible, began to demand that their erstwhile "christian" princes
follow the Laws of God concerning ownership of land - and the translators of
the Geneva Bible adorned theirs with tightly reasoned exegetical
marginalia bearing on the scriptural limitations placed on earthly governments
and the limitations to allegiance due them. When possession of a
Bible translation other than the Authorized Version is made a capital crime
(as it was in England, as it was earlier likewise in Rome when Jerome's
Vulgate similarly replaced the Old Latin at sword-point),
"something's up" worthy of note. Something real, for a
change.
The Protestant
Reformation categorically denied any relevance at all to science where
"Truth" was concerned - in effect (if not intention), making
empiricism and atheism synonyms. With any linkage between
"faith" and "reality" ruled out in advance, the result
was, and remains, schizophrenia: "Truth" an intangible
abstraction; reality, the dog-eat-dog that Love thy neighbor as thyself
cuts to the quick. It is not so much that we cannot have it both ways as
that there are no two ways about it. Life is not really all that
complicated - it just only works the way it works. ( And for heaven's
sake - if you don't like what it says, or the sense it makes, argue with the
one who wrote it. Yours is an argument to which I am a third party.
I just work here).
Judge the tree by its fruit.
Simple, right ?
Yes - but not
simplistic.
Figs come
from fig trees. So far, so good. Good figs come from
good trees; inferior ones from inferior trees. At this point people veer
off into the positing of an abstraction as the supposed terminus of a
line of development we discussed earlier (such as, on one of its lower
levels, "moralism"). But is there really a
moral dimension in the lives of trees ?
Hmmmm . . .
We have
(presumably) learned from the Parable of the Sewer that any number of
environmental factors can exercise modifying or overriding force. I.e.,
through no "fault" of its own, a seed may be eaten before it can
germinate, be stunted in its growth, choked out by other plants around it,
fail to reach its potential through lack necessary nutrients, and so on.
(It was not without reason that the earlier medieval philosophers of the
Aristotelian tradition called the earth "the realm of
accidents"). Even if it does survive and grow to maturity, its
ability to produce good fruit (and that in abundance) may be severely
curtailed. Does this make it a "morally objectionable"
tree ?
Any number of
dimensions are latent within this. One such is the reminder
that "the point of the exercise" for a fruit tree is producing fruit
- not growing luxurious foliage in all directions. This is why the
Husbandman of the garden (Gen.2:15, John 20:15 - the fact that we keep
these in separate conceptual boxes does not mean that they might not be
related) prunes the trees entrusted to him, in due season. Considering
such things that one has noticed at some length goes by the term
"meditation" (as in "Prayer and"). We might just as
well call it (and in fact, did) "kneading." This need not be a
grim affair: it is well to laugh at the idea of trees having morals - at the
same time, though, we should realize that we are laughing at our own
(induced) "belief."
There is far
more, however, "to" this.
Can a thorn
tree bear figs ?
Even if it were
somehow possible - against every impulse of its nature - to induce a
thorn tree to want to produce even one fig (an absurdity in itself), it is
genetically incapable of doing so. It doesn't refuse to. It is
unable to.
Just about as
unable, in fact, as a religionist hierophant is of transforming a
goat into a (wet) sheep via "baptism."
(As the Russians
say, "When the shrimps learn to whistle !!!")
Time for a pop
quiz. What are the first "Ten Commandments" in the Bible, and
where are they found ?
You could call
it a "trick question," because they're really the same Commandment
ten times (as if repeating something important were going to make an
impression on people as stupid as we are).
The Commandment,
in essence, is "Kind Reproducing (its own) Kind." Goats
produce more goats; sheep produce more sheep. Fig trees produce figs
(with fig seeds in them). Thorn trees do not produce figs. Genesis
One, Chapter One.
This is a Law
woven into the very fabric of (re-)Creation itself. (Go back and read.
All the "stuff" was already there. But it was all jumbled
together - concatenated. Before it could be put back right again,
it had to first be separated into components. By stages.
From here to "alchemy" is a very short step indeed).
Genetic
Determinism is one of the conceptual axioms intrinsic to Scripture (if
not to those who alter and "interpret" it).
This is simple,
but not simplistic. It does not follow from this that every fruit
tree will automatically produce good fruit in abundance (as we have seen).
But it does follow that only olive trees have the genetic capacity to
produce olives at all, and a great deal of considerable significance follows,
in turn, from this. One of its consequences is that "Gnostics are
born; not made."
As a
strategy to get around a lot of useless assumptions, regard peoples as
metals. Iron is not "superior to" other metals outside of a
narrowly defined set of referents not apparent to metals which do
not share its nature.
Magnetism, to
iron, is a possibility. It is not something guaranteed to it, but it is
something potentially available to it - either spontaneously (magnetite occurs
naturally) or by induction from already magnetized iron
("teaching"). Either way, iron has the capacity to sense, and
to respond to, something "other." To have a role in the
greater scheme of things. To participate, in a sense, in the
"occult," as it were. To iron, the "other,"
invisible realm is a reality, verified by experience. ("My sheep
hear my voice").
Truth without
can only be known by means of truth within - as true north is sensed by a
magnetized needle under proper conditions, spontaneously. To those who
have, more (and by this means) shall be added, given appropriate effort:
note (in passing) that it is the Truth which is to set us free. Nobody
(Rabbi Saul notwithstanding) did (or ever will do) it "for us," any
more than someone else can eat, drink, sleep or perform other functions for
us.
To zinc, copper
and the rest, this is all stuff and nonsense - occultism easily "disproven"
by materialist "science." Since experience of magnetism is an
obvious impossibility, magnetism is a superstitious relic of
pre-"enlightenment" wisdom.
This is one
reason why the creation of alloys (interbreeding) with alien metals is
prohibited. Not because other metals are "bad" (metals, like
trees, do not have "morals"), but because the results are useless,
and a waste of good iron (whether magnetized or not) and of otherwise
serviceable non-ferrous metal. "The wicked go astray from the
womb, spouting lies." (These would include the "random
mutations" so beloved by the Darwinian analogue of the man who
believes that he can make a living by winning at the casino).
Herein lies one
nexus of the much-misconstrued "doctrine" of Predestination - and of
"inherited sin" as well. Whether it accords with our attempted
insistence that everything be "fair" (and there is nothing
"fair" at all about Love) or not, the fact is (announced in advance)
that when the Husbandman (Gardener, Owner of the Vineyard) returns, the thorn
trees will be cut down for firewood - so that they will at least be good for
Something, in spite of themselves. And while the grading of fruit trees
will be "on the curve," the unproductive fruit trees will join them
(as will the useless hybrids - capable, through absolutely no fault of their
own, of nothing worthwhile in the context of the master plan) (aka the Design
of Creation).
"As I
have been sent" (i.e., only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, to
seek and to save), so I send you." To this specific group (sheep)
is extended the (much twisted and misconstrued) general invitation,
"whosoever will." "Theology" notwithstanding, it is
extended specifically to Sheep - not to pigs, goats, dogs, turkeys, rats,
jackasses or other "fellow-creatures" of the great
collective barnyard.
This, in turn,
is why no better (or more dangerous) start could be made into the
"rubber-on-the-road" reality of the Gospels than the matter of the
underlying Samarian identity of Christ and of (whatever) Christianity (may
once have been and involved. Having a name for something is not the
same as knowing what it is, by any means - to say nothing of how it works).
This is the way
of an adulterous woman :
she
"eats,"
then wipes her "mouth" and says,
'I have done nothing remiss.'
Proverbs 30:20
Protestant
Christians (to the extent that this is not a contradiction in terms) love to
claim that Scripture Explains Itself. This would be well and good, if
they ever allowed it to do so. Unfortunately, this would unravel not
only their own "special positions," but those of their
ecumenical colleagues as well, so the proposition remains a hypothetical
one for them, and for those who remain in their conceptual orbit by sharing
the assumptions on which they proceed (whether unwittingly or not, the result
is the same).
When we do give
it the opportunity to speak for itself (and, make no mistake; it does), there
is no end to the mysteries which not only come into view, but begin to make
sense. In this particular case, what is called the "Seedline"
doctrine.
In Genesis,
after the Woman had "eaten" in the garden, she made an apron of
leaves to cover the part of her she had just wiped - which was not her mouth,
or she would have made a bandanna.
According to the
earlier Sumerian records which Zecharia Sitchin has made sense of and
"popularized," the female deity Nin Ti, in addition to being the
genetic technician responsible for humanoid life as we know it (well, kind of)
here, was herself the actual mother of an individual of superior capacities.
Which would be to say (as Genesis does), that she was the mother of all
(subsequent) Living ones. Which might even be "why" the
bloodline of the promise, although reckoned patriarchally in the subsequent
bookkeeping, runs along the female line.
These same
Sumerian records indicate that she was also more or less compelled to produce
quite another strain of humanoids by a rival deity - which were, essentially,
a race of two-legged drones in whose nature animality (by design)
predominated. Reduced to their scriptural compressions, Abel and
Cain.
In Genesis One,
the earth is (re-)populated by Elohim with humanoids created via some sort of
mold or die suitable for mass-production ("the image of God," or
"imager - that which imparts an image) - males and females together.
Their only discernable function in the design of things is an ecological one -
to "be here," as the deer and the birds are. After history's
first recorded orgy (the Commandment that they be fruitful and reproduce,
teemingly) (delivered to the assembled production run), they leave the story,
except as background figures (the Cast of Billions).
By contrast, the
much-maligned (from well-intentioned ignorance) YHVH (a new actor) forms (a
new verb) a new character in the drama, Ha ADaM (The Man. Or, HuMan) -
singular in number. He forms him because none of the Adam previously
created (in Genesis One) was able to till the garden.
The Biblical
clock begins to tick with Ha Adam's formation. Everything previous to
him, in the account, is literally in the "timeless past" -
before time even began to be reckoned. Actually, if people would only
learn a modicum of Hebrew and read with attention, any number of
"issues" which currently occupy their speculative imaginations would
be quickly and easily settled. One such would be the silly and pointless
arguments over the age of the earth. We know from Isaiah that Elohim did
not create the earth Tohu (a ruin); he made it to be inhabited. But we
similarly know from Genesis that when the (algebraically compressed) story
opens, the earth was Tohu - Tohu v' Bohu ("a wreck and a ruin").
We also know (or should) that the Hebrew (past) tense here is the imperfect.
This does not translate into "good sense" in English, but this
cannot be helped. In Hebrew, the earth had at some point become, and
when the story picks it up, still was, a wreck - the wreck of a previous
world - evidences of which geologists and paleontologists have been finding
ever since they started looking for it. Everything (to make a long story
short) is cyclical: seedtime and harvest (as opposed to the Cartesian
lineality we attempt to impose upon it. Actually it is linear, but it
perns in a gyre, after the fashion of a screw, combining both notions.
But we are far off topic already).
The entire rest
of the Bible is a protracted account of the subsequent (and future) history of two
seedlines - that of Cain (with whom the Woman was already pregnant when she
left the garden; his name is an expression of the same root which gives English
the word "gain ; especially by bargaining." Loosely,
"profit") and Seth, the replacement son of Ha Adam ( Abel
having been murdered by Cain).
As may have been
noticed by now, all authentic survivals of lore, from whatever tradition,
align and explain themselves once a framework is found. Islam provided
one such, ca. 700 AD; the result was the spectacular flowering of
Gnosis/science which marks this era on the other side of the Mediterranean.
The Bible - would people only read it - provides one as well.
What, then,
of the serpent ? It depends on which one you mean. The beneficent
one (cf. Moses' and Aaron's rods in Egypt, the one Moses fashioned of
aurichalcum in the desert which Hezekiah destroyed, to which Christ pointedly
analogised himself) or the poisonous ones (vipers remembered even by
Australian Aborigines) (concerning which Christ also had a few things to say)
?
The Greek
demigod Aesculapius carried a rod, around which coiled a serpent (habitually
confused with the two-serpent version). He was the great healer of Greek
antiquity - analogous, that is, to Moses with his rod/serpent. Less well
known is that his name is (like all such) a compound of early Semitic roots -
Ish Shkul (from which, "school") Ape : "Man-instructing
Serpent."
The Vedantist will chime in
with his Kundalini serpent's progress up the spine (concerning which,
incidentally, Coleridge wrote "Kublai Kahn"), and the Susquehannock
Indian with the rattlesnake on the rock - everything authentic converges.
Magnetism is
like that - it not only attracts iron, but aligns it with the greater design.
What is enosh that you even think about him ?
or the offspring of adam, that you should care about him ?
Yet you have made ish but little lower than gods
and you crown him with glory and majesty !
Psalm 8:45
It is passages
such as this which underlie Christ's otherwise inexplicable
pronouncements on the status of his people in the grand Design.
Of course, it helps not one whit that these have been systematically
"translated away" either, leaving what he said as seemingly
off-the-wall oddities in a conceptual vacuum.
As usual when
simple, ancient verities are encountered by people who must (by default)
initially regard them as modern novelties, there are several aspects to this -
each of which requires revision of previous assumptions.
Being
essentially idiots by tendency (and encouraged to extend ourselves along
idiot lines on nearly every hand as "normalcy"), it amuses
and entertains us to systematically ignore the clear-cut Blacks and Whites
upon which scripture is predicated for the sake of freer play with
shades-of-grey relativities. But anything denied its proper place
must (and inevitably will) appear elsewhere, in the wrong place. And
so here, as well, in our seemingly insatiable passion for elevating
out-of-context relativities to the status of categorical absolutes
(otherwise known as "Theology"). Amateur Philosophy: the
leitmotif of "Western Civilization."
Even on the
dimmest level of comprehension in Hebrew (i.e., about where mine is) scripture
distinguishes between the several categories of two-legged beings which
inhabit the earth. This stands in sharp contrast to the Babylonian propaganda
(relentlessly trumpeted from every quarter) according to which
all people, everywhere, are all one species (i.e., a consumer is a
consumer). The state religion (collectivism) maintains (as usual, in
outright defiance of scripture) that we are all offspring of Adam and
Eve; "science" (the usual bogus "alternative"
construal) that we are all descended from an amoeba. Six of one
and half a dozen of the other. Take your "choice."
Now the men (enoshim - plural of enosh) of Sodom were wicked
and sinners against YHVH exceedingly. (Gen.13:13)
And they (the enoshim of Sodom) pressed sore upon the man (ish) - Lot -
and drew near to break the door. (Gen.19:9c)
It does not
follow from this that Ish is superman, nor that adam and enosh are
untermenschen. Recall the analogy of the metals; Ish is a term of
quality - intrinsic, yet only potential. To iron, magnetism is a
possibility - a capacity capable of realization. Or, in
another common (NT) analogy, of being brought to ripeness; completion :
Full-fill-ment. But whether entrusted with five talents, with three or
with one, it is one's works upon which judgement is based. Race
and Grace are not antithetical, but complimentary - viewed as
"things" (abstractions) no useful aspect of them is apparent.
Only in context (the dynamic or kinetic) does their working make sense.
Anyone doubting this (life is really not all that complicated; it just only
works the way it works) is invited to try balancing astride a stationary
bicycle. Absent motion forwards, absent everything; some
potentials only appear in the context of others (which are
"preconditions" to them, if you like) - comprehension only
appearing in accordance with genuine effort, for a parallel example.
After Elohim
has instructed Noah that '"of every living creature - of all flesh -
two of every (kind) you shall surely bring into the ark to keep (them) alive
with you; male and female (zakar v'neqebah) . . ." (Gen.6:19), YHVH
instructs him to take of every clean behemah
seven - man and his wife (ish v'ishatu) (Gen.7:2a)
If this is, as
alleged, with reference to animals (cattle and sheep, e.g.), then
we have some real problems. Simply put, for Noah to have sons
respectively (in no particular order) Negro, Asiatic and Caucasian (and via
one wife, no less) presents us with the same genetic impossibility as the
"alternative" allegation that the races of mankind must have
"evolved" in the interim between the deluge and "historical"
recordkeeping. Or that the deluge in question must have been a local
one, leaving everyone else unaffected everywhere else.
All of these
difficulties hinge upon the insistence that behemah subsumes
four-legged animals but not two-legged ones. Acknowledge for once that
all races were preserved on the ark (which is "why" all races and
cultures preserved ancestral memories of the flood, if not of the ark
itself) - and further, that (Gen.7:2b) some of these are clean, and others
unclean, and this particular augean stable is well on the way toward
sanitation.
Add to this
that the people of Israel are forbidden to copulate with
these creatures (Lev.18:23) because it is (genetic) confusion
(a term used here, as in
Lev.20:12 where this result is in view - the mixture of crops in a field,
which cannot cross-pollinate, is a different term), and we have a place to
stand, and explore further from.
Contrary to a
widely repeated falsehood, recognizably distinct species can and do
interbreed, producing fertile offspring. This a real problem in the
western USA as the ranges of the whitetail and mule deer have come, in
modern times, to overlap; the more aggressive whitetail bucks cover the
muley does, producing offspring which, when mature, lack the defined
instincts of either parent stock and fall easy prey to predators.
Perhaps curiously, after tree-planting extended their respective ranges and
initiated an era of such widespread hybridization that it was proposed to
eliminate categorizing them as separate species, the eastern
("Baltimore") and western (Bullock's) orioles are, through
(needless to say, spontaneous) selective breeding, returning themselves to
distinct types again (this according to the most recent Audubon
Society field guide, p. 742). Reality is not only stranger than we
imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine (not that we make this any
easier for ourselves by the "ideas" we adopt).
Break
the arm of the evildoer - Yea, as for enosh,
search
out (and extirpate) his wickedness . . .
incline
your ear to vindicate the orphan and the downtrodden,
so
that enosh, who is of the earth, may cause terror no more.
(Psalm
10:15, 18).
Teacher, Who did sin - this man or his parents -
that he was born blind ?
Disciples to Christ (John 9:2)
Go back and read it again - you are up against the cumulative inertia of 1,500 years here. That he was BORN blind. That the sins of the parents are visited (genetically and otherwise) upon their offspring is commonplace knowledge in both the scriptures and in experience. The disowned literature of the era 300 BC - 300 AD (including the "sectarian documents among the Dead Sea Scrolls) abounds with it (despite the late revision of Ezekiel - most probably in the Persian era - to provide the continuing influx of proselytes with "equal opportunity.") (Hyrcanus I took care of the separatist hold-outs). We mentioned a few installments ago that "the" answer" depend on the question. This is certainly the case here. That a man could have been born blind because of the sins of his parents strikes us as not implausible (if politically incorrect). But that he could have been born blind because of his OWN sin goes completely over our heads. How could he have sinned before he was even born ? No matter which way you turn this, pre-existence is presupposed by Christ's disciples, as an axiomatic "given." Or, if you like, "Reincarnation." The mentality of Palestine during this era was steeped in it. Without even touching on the widespread expectation that Elijah and "That Prophet" were returning immanently (the tip of an iceberg), you will find that this is the predication of Hebrews 11:35f. (those who refused rescue from torture for the sake of a better "Resurrection") (For that matter, the whole "Standing One" conceptuality subsumes both resurrection from the dead and the periodic reincarnation [Son] of HaAdam. If our familiarity with "religion" did not stop at the border of what had been the Roman empire, such things would not need to be pointed out and explained). It can be valuable to notice what scripture does NOT say. Christ, here, does not say "Wherever did you get such a lunatic idea as reincarnation ?" in reply to their question. What he does say is that, in this particular case, it is neither. (It may be well to note again here that the automatic "either/or" assumption, with which we cripple ourselves, is rarely in accordance with reality). Indeed, the "tabla rasa" idea - the notion that everyone begins, at birth, with a similar (if not identical) blank slate, is a piece of nonsense from those whose business it is to falsify reality. Newborn infants - to our own certain knowledge - have distinct personalities. If, as alleged, these are assigned by an evenhandedly disinterested creator (favoring none over any), why are there so many little con artists, and so few little angels ? And by the same token: if (or, since) these traits or predispositions of character are authentic expressions of who people "are," where were they developed ? What partly confuses us is that we have an equation in two variables here - not one. In its genetic aspect,
They decided to teach the wolf to read, so they sent him to school. The teacher said, "Repeat after me: A . . . B . . ." The wolf said, "Lamb and goat in my belly !!!" The Book of Akihar
But within the framework of mental and character traits, there is evidence of what can easily be envisioned as the effect of previous decisions (for better or for worse) in each individual personality. Since everyone is born with a personality, we must have come here from somewhere - somewhere else or somewhere "other." From this it follows fairly spontaneously that this earth, in turn, must be a sort of way station in the journey to still a third place (or perhaps back to square one). Either way, that "the afterlife" should be in doubt looks sillier and sillier the more we really examine it (and by using the same method of inquiry that initially made it appear dubious. The idea of "the afterlife" is not absurd - it is our assumptions which make it, as everything we take up, seem so. Life is not absurd; our thinking is. We recognize the absurdity of it, but attribute it to life rather than to our own grapundless assumptions). An agrapha of Christ, preserved for nearly 2000 years in the middle east: "This world is a bridge. Pass over it, but build not your habitation thereon." And what's really silly is that people can argue over whether there is a Purgatory or not. Where do they think they live now ? Disneyland ? Had it been the intention of the Creator for earth to be a paradise (perhaps a cosmic Rest and Relaxation vacation resort as a respite from the struggle upwards) he could have made it so. One thing for certain is that YHVH put HaAdam to work the same day he was formed - guarding, irrigating, pruning and so forth. This sounds a lot less like paradise than like "the protestant work ethic."
India-Palestine Connections in Antiquity
I am writing in response to an account of your splendid work posted at www.GNOSTICLIBERATIONFRONT.com. This deals with the equivalence of the Gospels and certain Buddhist texts.
I should like to point out that, if you will enquire further into the economic and religious connection of Palestine with India in antiquity, you will find that it is a very ancient one indeed.
One obvious example of this is a Hebrew term, found in the Book of Genesis and thereafter : na'ar (plural na'arim). This is often translated "young man," "youth," or something similar. It is clear from the contexts in which this appears, however, that these na'arim are a para-military warrior caste.
For one example, in the War of the Kings, Abram decides the outcome with his force of 318 na'arim. Later in time, na'arim were David's personal bodyguard and elite soldiers ("mighty men"). The same term also exists in the feminine gender : na'arah. Ruth, according to the Hebrew text, was a na'arah; Dinah (Jacob's daughter) was another. The role of a na'arah in scripture is of a sexual nature.
It is apparent, in context, that both were under vows of absolute obedience to a superior; one rather suspects that they may have been accolytes in (for lack of a better term) an "order" of some sort. When Moses fails to return from the mountain and leadership of Israel falls to Joshua, for an example, he demurrs that he is "only a na'ar" although he cannot, at that point in time, have been less than 57 years of age.
It is also (once alerted to the existence and nature of the pattern) fairly apparent that this continued into the first century A.D. from Mary's "Behold the na'arah of the Lord - do with me as you please," spoken to the "angel" (ambassador pleniponitary) at the Annunciation. Similarly, recall Christ's "Suffer the na'arim to come unto me and forbid them not."
All of this is the appearence, much further west, of the Nairs or Nayars (as generally rendered into English) - a people of India widespread throughout the ancient (and modern) world. The Nairs are, it is reported, a millitarily-organized caste operating without regard to national borders; their women undergo a ritual marriage ceremony as children, thereafter functioning as the interests of the caste dictate. Both sexes, according to a late-ninteenth century edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, are "curiously submissive" to members of a particular Brahmin caste.
India's "penetration" of, and control over, the religious-economic mentality of the west is a matter of boasting by Asoka (the Indian King who forced the conversion of his subjects to "Buddhism") (a.k.a., "dharma"), on his well-known (but seldon translated) steele.
The key to this (and probably a great deal more) was control of the spice route, which was already ancient in David's time. The northern branch of this had Jerusalem as its terminus-cum-chokepoint (ergo the alliance of David with Hiram of Tyre); the southern terminus was in Edom (hence David's wars and conquests). David himself, for that matter, acknowledges himself a na'ar - a fact which may not be unrelated to his having been relegated to shepherding by his father (unlike his paternal brothers), his youthful military prowess in the war with Philistia (the caravan road again), his descent from Ruth (who, although born in Moab, could not have "returned" to Beth Lehem unless this had been her ancestral seat - the Bloodline of the Promise, you will recall, runs along the female line, albeit husbands are later utilized as bookkeeping entities, reflecting subsequent changes in societal structure), and a great deal more.
Hoping this has been of some assistance to you in your studies, I am
Your Well-wisher and Appreciator,
Bill Wagner
The real holocaust
is yet in the future, from our (temporal) perspective. But from the
perspective of scripture (one which transcends space and time) it is
simply a fact - a no less fixed certainty than that the sun should rise in the
morning. As such, the Holocaust is not a matter of "acceptance"
or disputation, any more so than is resurrection - only of
acknowledgement as a foregone conclusion, intrinsic to the script
of the creation drama itself. The only "alternative" to
acknowledgement of it is to deny the validity of both the scriptures and
the source from which they come. Each to that which corresponds to
his own nature.
The Holocaust is one
of the plainest matters set forth by the Hebrew prophets - those of both
Israel and Judah speak with one voice concerning it. Notwithstanding
this, it is one of the most deeply hidden teachings in the scriptures
- one most carefully and systematically excluded from notice by those whose
business it is to promulgate "religion" for public consumption and
to merchandise materials purporting to elucidate it. But the more
one simply reads the scriptures, allowing them to say what they say, the
more it comes to call attention to itself.
In one sense, it is an
easy matter to present - one has only to cite a number of verses
which, considered together (since they refer to the same event), align
themselves spontaneously into a composite picture. The problem with this
approach, however, is that not only are the characters in the drama, and
the forces which impel them are largely unknown (even if not
completely unsuspected), but due to the effect of
calculated disinformation (parodied earlier as "the serpent is a sort of
vegetable, of which we must beware"), there is a real need to learn
what we know.
A continuum begins with
matter and extends upward into the etherial much further than we can
comprehend. One might say that these "higher levels" are
increasingly refined forms, if not of matter, then of the "stuff" of
which the universe is comprised. Where people go astray with this basic
idea is in their assumption that, because these worlds are
"higher" ones, the beings that inhabit them must be more noble than
we are - more actuated by altruistic love, wiser, more compassionate, and so
on. This is by no means necessarily the case however, as any number of
ancient accounts (beginning with the Akkadian sorcery texts) make plain.
One way in which
neighboring worlds differ from ours is in Time. Recall here the many
tales from medieval Britannia in which the protagonist returns from a day
spent in fairie to find that a hundred or so years had elapsed on earth in his
absence. What this ultimately boils down to is the ancient world's working
definition of a "god" : a being who is "immortal."
And a life span, to us, of many thousands of our years would
be, for all practical purposes, immortality - "from age to age the
same," as Martin Luther put it. The two Witnesses (Prophets) of
Revelation illustrate this (Enoch and Elijah, perhaps) - returning to this
realm in which time is accelerated in order to complete their
rounds.
And just as time is
relative to "level," so similarly is status, and this needs to be
understood if sense is to be made of the whole confused jumble of
"religious" ideas inherited from antiquity. To a military
recruit at boot camp, a Sergeant is a figure of awesome power and authority,
and a Major might as well be the president himself. He is not, of
course, but the view from within the experience-world of the recruit is a much
different one than from outside. World, like time, is relative.
Another relativity is
Physics. To us, a cigarette lighter is a commonplace; to a savage
watching a visiting explorer light a fire without rubbing two sticks together
for several minutes, this is, at a minimum, metaphysics (and with a capital
"M"). Still another relativity is space : anyone maintaining,
a hundred years ago, that people would make the journey from Paris to New York
in four hours' time or converse with people on the other side of the globe
would have been accounted mad. The nearer ranges of this come into view
with great clarity in the Cargo Cults of the South Pacific which sprung up on
the departure of servicemen from "another world" in 1945.
"Some day the Gods will return to us !" (Had they known that
these same gods had called fire down from heaven upon other people,
"incomprehension" would have aquired a new depth of meaning to
them). Look around you - cargo cults are everywhere.
Let us tie this together
now : "deity" is relative. Status (godlike-ness) is relative.
Time and space are relative. Physics are relative. And all of
these are relative to the observer. The observer is an intrinsic
aspect of the observation.
What we tend to end up
with, then, is the concept of God - El Elion, Ein soph, or whatever - in records
marbled through with accounts of interactions with godike beings. An
example ready to hand is in Genesis 6.
And it came to pass . . . that the Sons of the Gods saw the daughters of
the Man, that they were beautiful;
and they took them as women - every one they chose.
Genesis
6:1-2
About the closest our
familiar world comes to an analogue of this is the behavior of Captain
Cook's sailors when they "discovered" Hawaii. (The translation
of beni h'Elohim as "sons of the gods" is literal).
This was the first
outbreak of widespread miscegenation in the scriptural record. The
response of YHVH was the deluge. One which, incidentally, did not
eliminate the offspring of those who descended from the sky from the earth : David
slew one such giant as a young man; when he was getting on in years, as King,
he was nearly killed by another one he was fighting. His men made
him promise after that to leave eliminating giants to them.
Here we should bring in a
mis-comprehended teaching of Christ :
And as it was in the days of Noah, so also shall it be in the days of the Son
of the Man.
They did eat, they drank, they took women, they were given in marriage, until
the day
that Noah entered into the ark, and the deluge came, and destroyed them all.
Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot ; they did eat, they drank,
they bought,
they sold, they planted, they builded ;
But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from
heaven,
and destroyed them all.
Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of the Man is revealed.
Luke 17:26-30
The Son of Man here is Ben
h'Adam - the unsullied descendant (or reincarnation) of the individual we call
"Adam," formed by YHVH to be a gardener in Genesis 2, in
contradistinction to the Genesis 1 Mankind (an uncannily precise analogue of
the Greek anthropos). "Eating" is what the woman did in
the garden; we have touched upon this already. Drinking is what Noah did
in Her Tent (the aholah of Ezekiel 23:4) after planting the
vineyard. Buying and selling are matters of profit - of Gain (in Hebrew,
Cain), and so on. The entire passage is a fugue on the wages of
unrestrained copulation. Particularly in the case of Lot. Recall
that Ha Adam, who was of angelic stature, was originally a hermaphrodite -
both male and female, until he was divided. What did the men of
Sodom attempt to do by mob-force ? To know (a word with distinct
connotations) the angels who visited Lot. To copulate with them in their
feminine aspect. The response of YHVH on this occasion was to
"nuke" Sodom, since another deluge was "out of the
question."
And what are they doing as
you read this ? Tampering with genetics - the one thing YHVH "goes
ballistic" over. Here we go again.
All ancient accounts are,
in essence, congruous. There is a gradation of worlds ;
hierarchies, assemblies and bureaucracies exist within each. A
Roman aphorism is well to recall here : Senatori boni viri; senatus
bestia est. As individuals, Senators are decent, honorable men; the
senate, however, is an irrational animal. Organizations of any sort
become semi-independent subsystems unto themselves, complete with
"organizational cultures," politics, hidden motivations, power
plays, rule-worship and the rest of it. Nor does it follow that because
(Job 1) the gods meet in periodic assembly, they do not pursue individual
ambitions both within and when absent from it.
From simple consideration
of the Biblical and Sumerian accounts as Zecharia Sitchin has presented them,
it is apparent that more than one god was involved in the creation of mankind
and in the administration of earthly affairs. When Israel warred with
neighboring peoples, the prophetically gifted account writers presented these
for what they were at root: the warfare of god against god, both using armies
of surrogates - of YHVH against Dagon and Chemosh, for obvious examples.
It would not be unreasonable to attribute gross differences in racial
morphology amongst various peoples, in context, to design by various regional
gods, for the ease of their identification as chattel property, much as cattle
are branded (more than obvious, in light of the Sumerian Levavtine/African
creation-gods). Nor, from this perspective, would circumcision (which
was not unique to Israel) differ greatly from ear-tagging.
This, in turn, brings
hierarchy back into the picture : although clearly guilty of not only murder,
but fratricide (Abel and Cain having had the same mother - compare the
Sumerian parallel), although YHVH is preeminently the God of
Justice and Judgement, his hands appear to be tied when meting
out retribution to Cain. Recall, if only from reading Gilgamesh,
that there are gradations of godhood.
By the time we come down
to the period 300 BC - 200 AD, the plurality of gods has become a plurality of
angels (and demons), sometimes with little practical difference.
Both categories are beings with superhuman abilities, which appear and
disappear at will. In one sense, angels have always been in the
scriptural picture. Yet in another, many of the recorded
"religious" observances and ordainances in scripture have very
little to do with the transcendental but great bearing on interaction with
beings from neighboring dimensions. Anyone doubting this should
carefully compare the accounts in Valee's "Passport to Magonia" with
with those in Genesis through Judges. So mixed are the accounts that one
could conclude (as have some) that all gods are simply extra-dimensionals/UFO
pilots, YHVH included. To do so, however, is to fail in the
comprehension of hierarchy, and what it necessarily involves in practical
terms. Sergeant, Captain, Colonel and General have different
appearances and functions, but acknowledge, and serve, one head. Others
have gone to the other extreme, imagining themselves gods in a world (and universe)
which would otherwise lack these. Their reward is the pit.
Taking the canonic
scriptures, the para-scriptures such as Enoch and Esdras (which were
rabbinically consigned to destruction as a religious obligation, but
managed to survive in Christian hands. Some among these are more
deserving of inclusion than much of what was included), the Dead Sea
Scrolls (a number of which reside, unread, in safe deposit boxes) and,
for that matter, the Koran, we have as much of the universe as we can
conceptualize (even as the generalization of an abstraction), governed
by God.
Below which come a number
of angels - immortal beings : all of whom advance the same cause, even though
polarized and at war amongst themselves.
Like everything else in
our experience, this is schizophrenic. Transcendentally,
"God's in his heaven, and all's right with the world." All
will be seen, in the end, to have been a display, educational (revelatory) in
purpose, of divine omnipotence. But, in the mean time, all is wrong in
the world (with the exception of the secretive activities behind the scenes of
the friends of God, and the efforts by the awakening to facilitate the coming
of the kingdom). It is from this second perspective that it is possible
to speak meaningfully.
However rationalized-away,
the genealogy of the Son of The Man (Ben h'Adam, of Genesis, Ecclesiastes and
the Evan Bohan Matthew) is from Seth, which was (the son) of (h')Adam, which was (the son) of God (YHVH).
Luke 3:38
Seth (and his posterity)
is differentiated - absolutely - from Cain,
who was of that wicked one.
1
John 3:12
And his comprehension that there are, now as then, the offspring of two seperate, different and irreconcilable creators on earth (in addition to a cast of millions upon millions) is essential to comprehending the teachings and Parables of Christ in the Gospels. The Logos (Hebrew, Dabar) is the articulation of an intention. And because the articulation of the Creation Idea or Design, its articulator as well. Its comprehensible (to the extent that it can be) expression, and its executor.
Notwithstanding that
In the beginning the word was the Logos
and the Logos was with God
and the Logos was a god
(John 1:1)
(and here we have
hierarchy, in spades), unlike Satan, it was not his ambition to take the place
of his superior, or to deviate from his program. In the simplest
possible explanation, the sower of the good seed was Ben h'Adam - the Son of
The Man. Who, according to the Baptistic community of John, Jacob
("James") the Righteous ("just") and Qumran, periodically
reincarnated on earth. The entire Bible is an account of his
descendants, and his re-appearances, stretching into what is yet future.
While men slept, the
adversary came and sowed tares. Both have grown, by design, together.
But, at harvest time (and there were fields already white for it in Christ's
day), the angels will gather the tares into bundles (since we are speaking
here of people, communities/enclaves/ghettos) and burn them. Now, just
as El is a stepladder term (going on one hand from simple "power" up
the hierarchy to God) (El Elyon, e.g. - the Highest God), "angel"
likewise has considerable flexibility. An angel, in scriptural usage, is
an executive agent, without reference to world - an ambassador
pleniponitary with the power to make what he says stick and what he says
happen. An entity is sometimes called both an angel and a man in
the same passage, pointing to this. In its broader sense, in nineteenth
century America, the County Sheriff was the angel of justice, as a nurse is an
angel of mercy.
Bluntly put, the present
age is moving inexorably toward a cataclysmic race war.
And I will lay my vengeance upon Edom by the hand of my people Israel:
and they shall do in Edom according to mine anger and according to my fury;
and they shall know my vengeance, saith YHVH Elohim.
Ezekiel 25:14
And the house of Jacob shall be a fire,
and
the house of Joseph a flame,
and the house of Esau for stubble,
and they shall kindle in them and devour them;
and there shall not be (any) remaining of the house of Esau;
Thus
YHVH hath spoken.
Obadiah, 18
And the Light of
Israel shall be a fire
and his Holy One a flame
and it shall burn and devour the thorns and the briars in one day.
Isaiah
10:17
This last opens a door.
In Hebrew, h'Adamah is (by design - this is one of the many ways in which
scripture communicates information) ambiguous, meaning both "the
Woman" and "the Ground" ("the Man" being h'Adam).
cursed be h'adamah for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it
all the days of thy life;
thorns and also thistles shall she bring forth unto thee
Genesis
3:17-18
With this in mind,
consider the Parable of Isaiah to which Christ referred
the vineyard of YHVH Sabbaoth is the house of Israel
and the people of Judah his pleasent plants
Isaiah 5:7
Because thou hast forgotten the God of
thy salvation (scripturally, independence and self-determination)
and hast not been mindful of the Rock of thy strength,
therefore thou shalt plant pleasant plants
and shalt set (graft) it with strange (alien) slips (graftings)
:
In the day shalt thou make thy plant to grow,
yea, in the morning shalt thou make thy seed to flourish
But the harvest shall be a heap of ruins in a day of grief
and of desperate sorrow.
Isaiah 17:10-11
My well beloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill:
And he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof,
and planted it with the choicest vine,
and built a tower in the midst of it,
and also made a winepress therein . . .
What could have been done more to my vineyard
that
I have not done in it ?
Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes,
brought
it forth wild grapes ?
And now, go to.
I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard:
I will take away the hedge thereof,
and it shall be eaten-up,
break down the wall (defence) thereof,
and it shall be trodden down:
Yea, I will lay it waste :
it shall neither be pruned nor digged;
And there shall come up briars and thorns.
Isaiah 5:1-2, 4-6
To sum up, because it
allowed robbery and oppression to go on - the exploitation of its own people
who were to be loved as neighbors, Israel turned her back on her husband YHVH.
Who, in reciprocity, turned his back on her. The land of Israel, YHVH's
vineyard, was given over to thorns. And not without repeated warnings:
And it shall come to pass in that day:
every place shall be, where there were a thousand vines,
(valued) at a thousand pieces of silver (each),
(that place) shall be for briars and thorns.
Isaiah 7:23
They shall lament . . .
for the pleasant fields (that once were theirs)
for the fruitful vines (that were once there)
Upon the land of my people shall come up thorns.
Isaiah 32:12-13
Israel was overrun by Assyria and those
who had not fled abroad largely went into
Assyrian captivity. The grapevines were replaced by thorns. So,
bearing in mind that plants in the parable are peoples, who were the thorns ?
Caananites : descendants of Canaan (upon whom Noah laid a curse) :
And YHVH spake unto Moses in the plains of Moab by Jordan, near Jericho,
saying:
Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them,
When ye are passed over Jordan into the land of Canaan;
then shall ye drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you
and
destroy all their pictures,
and destroy all their molten images,
and thoroughly pull down all their high places.
And ye shall empty the land and dwell therein,
for I have given you the land , to posess it.
And ye shall divide the land by lot for an inheritance, among your families
to the more numerous ye shall give the greater portion,
and to the fewer ye shall give the smaller inheritance:
Every man's portion shall be in that place to which his lot falls;
according
to the Clans (usually rendered "tribes") of your fathers you
shall inherit.
But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you;
then it shall come to pass that those which you allowed to remain of them
shall be pricks in your eyes and thorns in your sides,
and they shall vex you in the land in which you dwell.
Moreover : it shall come to pass that
I shall do unto you as I proposed to do unto them.
Numbers 33:50-56
Geographically, both the
land of Israel (in the north) and Judah (in the south) were depopulated in
their respective captivities (that of Judaea, in Babylon, was total.
That of Israel was of the majority, with "gleanings" like the Woman
at the Well remaining behind). Into their places came thorns - and
Judaea much the more so.
Edom (the posterity of
Esau, which had never been in captivity) had (and have) an eternal,
inextinguishable hatred of the descendants of Jacob, to whom the
Birthright passed from their father Isaac. Because of this, Esau was
scheming to murder Jacob even while Isaac still lived. They freely
interbred with the peoples around them (an ancestral characteristic), and the
wealthier among the Judaeans interbred with them, despite the railings of the
prophets against this. Jeremiah, who was sent unto Judah (the capital of
which was Jerusalem, with which Israel had little or nothing to do after
Solomon's Kingdom ruptured) pled with them -
Thus saith YHVH to the men of Judah and Jerusalem:
Break up your own fallow ground -
sow not among thorns !
Jeremiah 4:3
(Recall here that
"ground" - adamah - is the femine gender of adam,
"man"). This is, in the previous parable, grafting alien slips
into the good vine.
The last prophet in Judah
to raise the people up against such miscegenation was Ezra, in the return of a
tiny remnant of Judaeans from Babylon
to build up the Temple
which
the Edomites burnt
when Judaea was made desolate by the Chaldaeans.
1 Esdras 4:45
but it was too little, too
late, and went across the grain of ancestral inertia. Historically,
"The investigation of the actual history of these southern immigrants and
that of the passages which directly or indirectly concern them here converge.
From the Judaean genealogies in I Chronicles ii and iv, it has long been seen
that the tribe of Judah, after suffering heavy losses, ostensibly before the
monarchy, was built up again through Calebite and other clans of south
Palestinian and Edomite affinity. These became . . .
"Israelite" and finally (presumably during the exile) moved
northward into the neighborhood of Jerusalem; indeed as late as the days of
Nehemiah, traces of Calebites can be found among the leading men who helped to
rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. The evidence, on the face of it .
. . a Judah of semi-Edomite origin . . . It is quite in agreement with this
perspective of history that the Chronicler, after describing the singularly
mixed constituents of the new Judah (Benjamin can also be included) procedes
to represent a temple service inaugurated by David, where the names of
prominant Levites are appreciably of semi-Edomite, south Palestinian and
non-Israelite origin. Hence, it is also possible to trace a close
connection between (a) the southern clans who became Judaean, (b) the temple
personnel and (c) the families of the scribes."
The Cambridge Ancient History
One of the reasons why
Esdras (the Greek form of Ezra, incidentally, and books which contain
important visions of Daniel) was excluded from the cannon:
The nation of Israel - the Princes, the Priests and the Levites
have not put away from them the alien people of the land,
nor the pollutions of the peoples (around them) :
of the Canaanites, Hittites, Pherezites, Jubusites and the Moabites;
Egyptians and the Edomites. For both they and their sons have married
with their daughters,
and the Holy Seed is mixed with the alien peoples of the earth:
And from the beginning of this matter the rulers
and great men (among them) have been partakers in this iniquity.
1 Esdras 8:68-70
Another:
The manners of them which are created in this world that is made
are corrupted by an ineradicable seed
2 Esdras 9:19
One of the principal
reasons why the Qumran scrolls were suppressed for so long as they were (and
with plans for their further suppression) is that they are full of this matter
- as anathemetical to latter day Pharisaism as to the ersatz catholicism
constrained by the Augustinian dictum that any creature that goes on two legs
is, perforce, not only human but potentially elect:
Why should it
be a mixture, like a mule ?
and you
should be like one dress(ed in a mingled garment)
in wool
and in linen ? And you should labor with an ox
and an ass
(yoked) together ? Your offspring also would be
like that of
sows mixed seeds. (Rather,)
Let the seed
and the produce of the (vineyard) be holy.
4Q418; Fragment 103, ii.
I will give
them (over into the power of the an)gels of Mastemoth, who will rule them
and they
shall neither know nor understand that I am angry with them because of
their
rebellion (against my commandments. For they aban)doned me
and did what
was evil in my eyes, and because they chose what displeases me ,
overpowering
others for the sake of riches and profiteering . . .
They will rob
their neighbors and oppress one another
and defile my
temple (their own bodies) . . . and my festivals . . .
Through their
children they will defile their seed.
4Q390, Fragment i.
The
sons of Israel must guard against all illicit mating
and
(thus) properly revere the temple
4Q394,
lvi
As for the fornication that is
taking place among the people,
they are (supposed to be) a Holy people, as it is written :
"Israel is Holy" - (therefore, such mixing is forbidden) . . .
(Nevertheless, as y)ou know, some of the priests and
the (people are miscegenating. They) are inter-marrying
and (thereby) polluting the (hol)y seed (as well as)
their own (see)d with fornication
4Q398, lvvviii-lvvvix
The inhabitants of
Qumran were, in modern parlance, racial seperatists:
(W)e
have separated (ourselves) from the mass of the people (of Judaea)
and from mingling with them in these matters
and from being in contact with them in these (things).
4Q397
Wherefore (the Prophecy) has come
to pass: They will turn aside from righteousness
and
draw nigh to iniquity, and will defile the house of their worship . . .
will pollute the altar with the very gifts they offer to YHVH -
(they) who are not priests, but the offspring of slaves.
The
Assumptions of Moses
As for the authentic but
disowned scriptures of Christianity,
First
fornication came into being; afterwards, murder.
And
(Cain) was begotten in fornication, for he was the offspring of the serpent.
So
he became a murderer just like his father, and killed his brother.
Indeed
: Every act of copulation which has occurred between those of dissimilar
natures
is
Fornication.
The Gospel of Philip
And
again, he speaketh after this manner :
Behold - they that destroy this temple,
even they shall (re)build it up.
And so it came to pass.
Epistle of Barnabas 13:14
This last dates from 119
AD and - apparently - quotes what Isaiah 49:17 once said.
Disowned by the new (and
fraudulent) orthodoxy, comprehension of reality persisted in the
Gnostic fringes:
The Cainites say that, in the beginning, two men first originated,
and, from these two, were derived Cain and Abel.
And over these two the angels fell out,
and made war on each other, and so caused Abel to be slain by Cain.
For
the quarrel among who contended concerned the races of men
and involved these two : the one who had begotten Cain
and the one who had begotten Abel.
Epiphianus, Panarion 39
Those born of truth spring from a
fountain of light
But those born from injustice spring from a source of darkness . . .
According to his portion of truth, so does a man hate injustice,
And according to his inheritance in the realm of injustice
so is he wicked and hates truth.
1QS
JUDGE
THE TREE BY ITS FRUIT
Chris
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