Dear Readers,
The only way to avoid duplicate content is to post on one site only, so I will be posting the rest of my series on Yeshua/Jesus where I have posted my articles since 2009:
right here.
Let’s keep in touch but, for now, above all else, keep your Selves safe from the Inside/out 
Kind thoughts from me,
CC
While on the topic of hygiene, it is worth adding that the washing of hands, netilat yadayim, before or after specific activities such as praying, eating and bodily evacuation was another ritualized cleansing. And this ritual washing points to another of the anomalies found in Matthew’s pages.
Yeshua, a Jewish rabbi, at a time of cultural orthodox observance, would NEVER have broken bread with a group of Gentiles – not even with one – if he could have brought himself to befriend one. It would have been an insult to his God to do so. Among Jews, all outsiders known for their lack of personal hygiene were known as the Unwashed. Besides, a man as religiously principled as Yeshua would not have eaten unleavened bread in the days preceding Passover.
In Acts 11:2 Peter was reprimanded for having done so himself 2 So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers* criticized him, 3 saying, ‘Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?’
By the same token anyone familiar with the rigors of the Judaic protocol in vigor circa 34 AD cannot imagine, not for a moment, that Yeshua could have declared, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.”
In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.” Luke 22:10
It is commonly accepted that drinking blood is at the very least freakish, if not totally disgusting. For the Jews, the repulsion of blood is visceral, which is why from antiquity to this day, only Kosher meat, meat that has been drained of its blood while still on the carcass, can be eaten by practising Jews.
Yeshua, who had espoused many aspects of the Iyisim beliefs was against the sacrifice of animals. He might have been a vegetarian, but even if he did eat meat, it could ONLY ever have been meat slaughtered the Kosher way – meat that had been totally drained of its blood, seconds after death.
Adding to that, on the eve of Passover, during the Seder, ritual feast, it is customary to read the Hagadah, a text that contains the story of the exodus from Egypt and the ten plagues God unleashed to convince the Pharaoh that it was in his own people’s best interest to let ‘His children go’.
The first plague is remembered as the Plague of Blood. The Lord, it is said, struck the waters of the Nile and the river became one of blood. The fish died and the people were no longer able to drink its water. Presumably, the water was also no longer suitable for either the beasts to drink or for irrigation – a disaster of true biblical proportion.
The Seder prayer ritual does request that each participant drink, at various key intervals four very small glasses of sweet wine. Each glass symbolizes one of God’s promised deliverance: “I will bring out,” “I will deliver,” “I will redeem,” and “I will take.”
So, there is no doubt that Yeshua drank wine during his last supper, but the iconic lines written by Luke could only have been spoken by one who had once been a pagan and still thought as one – not by a Jew.
In spite of all improbabilities and incongruities, what is certain is that, through the events Matthew mashed-up on his papyrus, Yeshua found himself reinvented as Jesus, teacher of goyim, a term from the Tanach that amalgamated all non-Jewish nationals.
With a modicum of real-time empathy for the real man, it is easy to imagine what a devastating turn of events this would have been for Yeshua whose only spiritual aspiration, based on his interpretations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was to convince kin and peers that he might be a bone fide contender for the role of messiah of their Jewish God and his people. And what would he make of the plethora of Sacred Heart images of himself that adorn Christian churches and homes?
What would he make of the throngs of people who in millions of churches around the world worship his body carved out of wood, marble or painted cement, he whose religion forbade the worship of idols?
Here again, it seems that the pagan beliefs of the early Christians were casting rituals of their old faith on to their newly found divine savior.
In short, it doesn’t require a great leap of imagination to anticipate that Yeshua, the real man, would have been totally incensed and repulsed by the grotesque misrepresentation, both of his cultural heritage and his creed, as well as by the posthumous theft of his identity.
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Dear Reader: the rest of this series will be posted on http://www.articlesbase.com/authors/cc-saint-clair/144167.
See you there
C.C.
All differences set aside, all three sects governing all the important aspects of Jewish religious and secular living had at least one activity in common, that of the Mikveh, the daily ritual of cleansing immersion in a flowing body of water, living water, such as rivers and streams, or any rain catchment area that has garnered such attention the remix of events that is Matthew. Mikveh baths have been found as far out as Masada.
As every Jew in those days, each of the Temple priests followed one of the six hundred and thirteen commandments written in the Torah, the important mitzvah intended to cleanse the body by immersion in Mikveh water. Thus, they had to immerse themselves before serving in the Temple. Archaeological digs of villas, such as the one named the Burnt House that can be experienced behind glass through an underground museum in the Jewish Quarters of Jerusalem have revealed them to contain many rooms for different purposes – even a separate room for the Mikveh.
For the water to retain its spiritual properties of purity, it could not be ‘drawn’, brought in or installed on the sites and the canalisation needed to distribute water to these bath rooms, was made possible by the Hasmonean viaduct, unearthed in 1985. It is estimated that its construction preceded the reign of King Herod.
While the priests purified themselves in private surrounds, the rest of the population made do with communal Mikvehs and, as has already been discussed, in streams and rivers. This is the point where this narrative returns the one the afore-mentioned In Matthew’s gospel, the moment when Yohanan hailed Yeshua enjoining him to come in flowing waters of the Jordan. How ironic that it should be such an innocuous moment of a mundane daily Judaic ritual that has been recast and enshrined in the gospel as the Baptism of Jesus!
In that particular scene, Yohanan is the central character cast as John the Baptist, a man with a penchant for the cilice (the scratchy goat-hair shirt of the penitent worn as undergarment) and a fondness for honey and locusts, the short-horned grasshoppers that are still culinary treats in various modern-day exotic cuisine.
As occurs so many times throughout the pages of the gospels, an ancestral Jewish rite is claimed by the writers of Christianity and passed off as an established Christian rite, notwithstanding the reality that back in the days of Yeshua and Yohana, Christianity did not exist, not even in anyone’s thoughts, least of all in Yeshua’s.
Some fourteen years turbulent years later, after the undeterred priests were still throwing Saul of Tarsus (Paulus/St Paul) out of the Temple for attempting to teach the theories he had borrowed from Jacob’s knesiyat ha-nimolim, he went into exile in Syria and Jordan. There, to non-Jews, he was finally free to teach a new belief system, a much simplified version of the commandments topped by the worship of Yeshua resurrected adding, as he went, the epithet Son of God.
Mark and Matthew wrote their gospels a few years after that, only to have them altered by a number of anonymous brush strokes on parchments. By the 4th century, Christianity had spread far and wide and ushered in the conversion of the first Roman emperor to Christianity, Constantine The great.
All of the events from the birth of Yeshua to his arrest constitute an unfortunate but rather mundane chain of events involving only a cast of Jewish characters – as would have been the case for any other Jew who expressed his religious opinions too freely and too loudly – loudly enough to annoy the Zadokim and the Perushim and flashily enough to make the local Roman soldiers very tetchy as they observed the wild-fire hysteria crystalized on the man who had ridden into town from the eastern gate on a white donkey. They watched as hordes of Jews reached towards this man, pleading, ‘Rabbi, hosha na. Teacher, save us!’
It was on the day of Succoth, a day when pilgrims had arrived from far and wide from all corners of Israel and abroad to perform their religious duties at the Temple – the moment popularized in Christian liturgy as Palm Sunday.
The New Testament makes many references to Jesus arguing with the Temple Priests about points of interpretation of the Torah and the prophecies. Like the Perushim, but unlike the Temple priests, Yeshua believed in the prophetized arrival of a messiah and one can easily imagine the oratory debates between them and Yeshua, with him challenging the manner in which they ran the Temple. He challenged their complacency, that of the ones in cushy jobs known to abuse the power of their position. He challenged them in their beliefs that complicated rituals, praying and imploring God for good fortune and forgiveness, offering the life of an animal as a sign of good-will were all their common God asked of his People.
It is quite imaginable that there would have been political factions and alliances made and unmade within the Perushim, the Zadokim and merchants. They would not have liked much his main argument which was that it was not enough to follow rituals with scrupulous care and do external mitzvah while neglecting to tame cravings and greed; while neglecting to care for one another. When push came to shove, perhaps because Yeshua had a strong temper himself, he became the odd man out.
After all, freedom of expression was allowed then as now, even to mere teachers but, then as now, only up to a point. As Yeshua upturned merchants’ stalls set up in the Temple court by priestly permission, as he quarrelled with the men in charge both of the religion and the politics of the religion, he made himself some enemies.
‘And Jesus entered the temple of God and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. Quoting from the Torah, he shouted, ‘It is written: “My house shall be called a house of prayer” before adding in his own words, ‘but you make it a den of robbers.’(Matthew 21:12).
The third sect of note in the time of Yeshua was that of the Isiyim [Essenes] currently thought to be the originators of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Initially, they lived in high numbers in most towns but took to the desert as protest against the way the Zadokim were tending to the spiritual health of the people. Ideologically, Yeshua would have aligned himself with this group in this respect, He would also have espoused their views on animal sacrifice. They believed that meat, any meat, not just pig meat, was impure, regardless of the rigors of the kosher treatment of the animals before and after death.
These Isiyim enjoyed an ascetic, communal lifestyle which would have appealed to Yeshua’s orthodoxy more than the lifestyle of the rich and powerful Zadokim and Perushim.
Somewhat different in hair and skin coloring from other Jews, the Isyim considered themselves a group apart. In this respect, they allowed anyone to become one of them after a period of probation and they accepted in their midst children from other social groups. Though their community was mixed, many of these men and women were celibate.
These men and women were spiritually enlightened. They knew about telepathy. They knew how to access higher energies and, in secret, they toiled for the triumph of the Spiritual light over the darkness of the human mind. However, though their belief system revolved around an apocalyptic event that would bring about a new Kingdom – it was not necessarily linked to the arrival of a messiah, the topic closest to Yehsua’s heart.
It is believed that around Jesus’ twelfth year, his parents, Yosef and Maryam took him on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. There, it is said, he discussed the Laws of the Torah with a group of Temple priests and that they were duly amazed by the wisdom of one so young. It is thought that, at some stage, Yeshua and his parents may have gone to Egypt.
After a gap of years, Jesus showed up again but in Galilee, preaching about the Kingdom of God. By then, because Yeshua’s spin on the Torah and the Books of the Prophets resembled the doctrine of the Isiyim, it is believed that he might have spent some years in their midst, as a disciple. And it is believed that he kept very close ties with them while in Jerusalem. It is believed that they assisted him, as only they could, in the hours of his crucifixion.
When Matthew is able to distance himself from Jesus-the Saint, he occasionally injects a degree of realism in his gospel. Jesus, he wrote, warned his disciples: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matthew 10:5)
It is essential to understand that Christian Jesus simply did not exist. There was no worship of Yeshua while he was alive. What there was the tenuous resonance in the ragtag band of his Jewish disciples of his enhanced Hebraic teachings. We know there was no worship, as such because these simple men abandoned him in the crucial moment that preceded his arrest. When the disciples sensed danger for Yeshua, they would have known that the same danger faced them.
Between the possibility of being sentenced by stoning by the Jewish tribunal, the Sanhedrin, or being tied to a crossbar by Roman soldiers, their lack of intrinsic faith in the one they had called their Teacher saw them pretend they didn’t know him.
For them, it was all rather simple: a Messiah, a great leader of men – in their kingdom or in the Kingdom of God – would have known how to extricate himself from the humiliation and the pain of a crucifixion. Or, as our current teen culture might see it, Only losers get nailed.
Luke 22:54: Then they seized him and led him away, bringing him into the high priest’s house. Peter followed at a distance; and when they had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard and sat down together, Peter sat among them. Then a maid, seeing him as he sat in the light and gazing at him, said, “This man also was with him”. But he denied it, saying, “Woman, I do not know him”. And a little later someone else saw him and said, “You also are one of them”.
But Peter said, “Man, I am not”. And after an interval of about an hour still another insisted, saying, “Certainly this man also was with him; for he is Galilean”. But Peter said, “Man, I do not know what areyou saying.”
Having said that, Peter, himself a Galilean, would have known that before any Jew could be arrested by Roman soldiers, a minimum of two witnesses had to identify the alleged perpetrator. If Yudah (Judas) acting his part was one, then, perhaps, Peter, in the absence of a supportive mob, preferred to give Yeshua a fighting chance by simply turning his back on him.
The earliest form of Yeshua-spiritual entity began with belief he had resurrected. What would eventually become of the ministry of Saul (Paulus/St Paul) was actually triggered by Yacob (Jacob), one of Yeshua’s brothers, years after the crucifixion.
Indeed, soon after the death of Yeshua, Yacob created a knesiya, a place of gathering where he and, presumably some of the disciples, as well as others who believed news of the ‘resurrection’ could meet. This meeting place, knesiyat ha-nimolim, would later be renamed the Church of the Circumcised, though one must realize that the word church, based on the German word kirche, was not used in the years that immediately followed Jesus’ death.
As the name suggests, Yacob’s new sect did not take in any non-Jew adherents for the same reasons that Yeshua kept himself separate from the pagan Gentiles, following the Mitzvah commandment mentioned above.
Under Yacob’s guidance, this group of Orthodox Jews added the worship of Yeshua, the resurrected Messiah, to the scriptures of their Jewish faith. They became the first Messianic Jews, popularized today under the banner of Jews for Jesus.
All of that makes perfect sense inasmuch as we accept that Yeshua did exist. It makes sense in so far as we believe that this man is the only prototype for a historical Jesus, the one on which Christianity has been founded along with the pagan-inspired trilogy of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which technically holds Christianity one hair’s breath away from true monotheism.
Italy’s debt crisis escalates.
Its unsustainable borrowing rates have sent the global market in a spin-out.
France, the solid one, is now strained to the limit.
The writing is on the wall.
After 2012 years of viral marketing against the odds, Vatican City NOW has the option, the financial option, to do finally do something real and tangible for its flock.
It can sell some of its billion $ worth of high-end investments and properties.
It can open its coffers and humble itself to serve the immediate needs of its European flock in three predominantly Catholic countries, including Spain – three of many worldwide who have been faithful against over-whelming odds, for over 2000 years.
THAT is what redeeming one’s self could begin to be about, be that in the name of Jesus … or in the name of amending karma.
***** Uh … not because of the billions of $ but because of the *emotional* sacrifice that would require of the Vatican Collective because … they actually CARE.
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