On Tue, Apr 01, 2003 at 08:43:34PM +0100, Ken Brown wrote:
> Steve Schear wrote:
>
> > At 06:34 PM 3/30/2003 -0500, stuart wrote:
> > >On Sunday, March 30, 2003, Harmon Seaver came up with this...
> > >
> > >You give too much credit to the Romans. Catholicism worked so well
> > >because it is a virus, and conversion was often forced upon heathens by
> > >their fellow countrymen.
> >
> > Interestingly though, Christianity started in the Holy Land but never got
> > much traction there.
>
> Not true. Palestine became majority Christian quite early, as did parts
> of Syria, Armenia and Arabia. All those places, and also Egypt, were
> largely converted long before the Christians had any political power.
No, they weren't "christian" -- they were followers of Rabbi Yeshua ben
Yoseph ha Natzri, later called Mesheach ha Israel. No Jewish moma ever named her
little boy Jesus, which is a Greek name, and the Jews had just spent 200 years
of ethnic cleansing anything that looked, smelled, or spoke Greek. Jesus and
Christ and christianity were something invented by the europeans -- a take-off
of the Jewish messiah and with some of the early writings, heavily edited, of
Rabbi Yeshua's apostles, but rather a different thing. When the Romans started
trying to alter things, the groups in Palestine, Syria, etc. essentially told
them to fuck off.
The "epistles of Paul", for example, were written in Greek, while the earlier
stuff was originally written in Hebrew, then very badly translated into Greek,
essentially by the word for word substitution method, which really resulted in
some strange passages in the new testament. Some scholars have been reverse
translating them by the same method with good results, but of course there's a
lot of official opposition to this (just as there is to translating the Dead Sea
scrolls) and zero funding.
Interestingly enough, Paul's letters would have been totally lost except for
one man, Marcion, who collected them all. Unfortunately, he was a Gnostic, not a
christian, and a rabid anti-semite, so he took a scissors and cut out anything
that was at all favorable to the jews and burned it, leaving some very strange
and heavily altered texts.
The new testament wasn't canonized until around 400-500ad, can't remember
exactly, but anyway long after the council at nicea where they excommunicated
all the Palistinian, etc. followers of the Rabbi, and also after christianity
had been made the official state religion of the empire, so any hope of the
real authentic older teachings being included was long gone. And, of course, we
know that pretty much as soon as they were made the official church, they went
about destroying the old religion's temples, sacred texts, etc and persecuting
the followers.
Talk about "broken chains of tradition". 8-)
--
Harmon Seaver
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com
