Date: July 24, 2006 11:31:29 PM PDT
Subject: Biblical Prophecy Turned on Its Head -- P.S.
Despite the claim that Jesus was of "the seed of David," i.e., of royal Judean blood --a claim made primarily by Jesus' followers in their attempts to persuade Jews that Jesus met all the prerequisites for the Messiah predicted by prophecy, including the Davidic pedigree-- according to the earliest Gospels, whenever Jesus journeyed to Jerusalem, he was recognized immediately, from his accent, as a GALILEAN -- a "mongrel Jew" from the "gentilized" northern territories, the land of heretics, rebels, and Greeks and Romans.
Likewise his band of disciples, who, as smelly fishermen and laborers, were all uncouth peasants from the "outback," in the eyes of the more cosmopolitan Jews of Jerusalem.
So Jesus Christ --scorned and despised by his "fellow Jews" (who are "the Jews" upon whom the Jesus of the Gospels heaps calumny, repeatedly cursing them all as "hypocrites")-- was, with good cause, ridiculed for his quaint, anachronistic Judaism, because he was in fact, a "foreigner," out of place among the Jewish nobles of Judea.
Galileans were kinsmen of the Samaritans, inhabitants of the old Northern Kingdom which seceded from "Israel" during the time of Solomon, following a revolt of the prophets against the too-worldly ways of the Son of David's palace and his false God's Temple.
The aristocratic Temple high priests who had sided with Solomon in that dispute --thus becoming the King's "official" holy men, rewarded with control over his State Religion-- in pits of pique retaliated against their rivals, accusing Northern Jews of heresy, idolatry, and the ancient equivalent of "devil worship" in their writings, afterwards conveniently (since they were also put in charge of the "official" canon of scripture!) incorporated into "Holy Writ."
Nevertheless, for centuries after their rejection of the Northern Jews, the Jews of the Southern Kingdom (Judea, around Jerusalem) could find no genuine prophet born in their own kingdom, within sight of the Temple of "their" God, the "true" God. Every holy man whose words are today enshrined in the Books of the Prophets came from the NORTH -- a fact so embarassing to the self-righteous Jews of Jerusalem that any careful reader of the Bible can easily recognize the Southern scribes' attempts to conceal or minimize it by clumsily "obfuscating" any reference to a prophet's true heritage and place of origin, while overlooking clues remaining elsewhere in the text, allowing one to infer the facts anyway!
So, the fact of the matter is, only the Levitical (ritual) priesthood of the Temple was a pure product of Judea and Jerusalem. The prophets of "Israel" were a phenomenon of the "heretical" Northern Kingdom, of which, later in history, Samaria and Galilee --Jesus' own homeland-- were a part. In modern geographical terms likewise, Jesus would be described not as a "Jew," born in "the State of Israel," but as a PALESTINIAN.
