No doubt the authors of The Lost Gospel, a new book making the claims asserted in the headline above, expected it to incite sales-generating outrage.
Unfortunately, the daily swill of viral tweets, videos, and pictures has so desensitized the entire world that these seemingly outrageous claims about Jesus Christ have not even made it into the enviable stream of trending topics. Topics, incidentally, which range from sublime images of a spacecraft landing on a comet, to photoshopped images of a champagne glass teetering on the surgically enhanced butt of Kim Kardashian.
Not to mention that, for growing multitudes, religion is becoming irrelevant and alienating in equal measure – with Islam being hijacked by head-chopping jihadists, Judaism by land-grabbing Zionists, and Christianity by child-molesting priests.
All we need now is for a prominent religious historian, like Karen Armstrong, to produce research showing that Jesus had more wives than the 40 who the Mormon Church finally admitted this week honored, served, and obeyed its founder, Joseph Smith. Or, better still, that those twelve disciples were in fact Christ’s lovers; which is not so far-fetched given Pope Francis’s recent confession that a cabal of homosexuals wield organic influence within the Vatican.
All institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
(Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and of Fabulous Theology, 1794)
Nevertheless, as the son of a preacher man, I feel a special obligation to comment on scholarship that challenges the Christian beliefs so many of my loved ones adhere to with the conviction, even if not the bloodlust, of a Muslim Jihadist.
Mind you, I do not do so as a defender of the faith; after all, I’m inspired more by the polemical writings of Paine than by the canonical writings of Mark, Mathew, Luke, or John. And don’t get me started on those of the brazen fabulists who wrote the “Old Testament.” Indeed, I digress….
A new book based on an ancient manuscript claims Jesus Christ was not crucified…
The book is based off a translation of an Aramaic manuscript found inside the British Library.
Professor Barrie Wilson and writer Simcha Jacobovici claim the text reveals secrets to Jesus’ family life, including his marriage to Mary Magdalene, the names of their two children, assassination attempts on both their lives and Jesus’ connection to powerful political figures in the Roman Empire.
(International Business Insider, November 12, 2014)
Frankly, it’s bad enough that promotion for this book is drowning in the viral sea of trending topics. But the cardinal sin is that it reveals no secrets.
Which makes Wilson and Jacobovici, who should know better, even more mercenary than FOX News commentator Bill O’Reilly, who claimed that his Killing Jesus (2013) presented all kinds of new facts about this Biblical event. Whereas, in fact, his book simply added to the cottage industry of “direct-to-the-the-public pseudoscholarship” on the greatest story ever sold. An industry, incidentally, which dates back to, well, the writing of the “Four Gospels of the New Testament.”
More to the point, though, bona-fide scholars have been debunking Christian orthodoxy about Jesus Christ for centuries – as the cover story for the December 22, 2003, edition of TIME magazine, titled “The Lost Gospels,” duly attests.
Some scholars, like French historian Constantin Francois Chasseboeuf de Volney, have posited, quite persuasively, that Jesus is a completely mythical character – no different from other mythical characters like Hercules and Agamemnon.
Interestingly enough, the aforementioned Paine asserts in “The Age of Reason…” that the miraculous birth, crucifixion, and ascension of Christ “sprung out of the tail of … heathen mythology.” Alas, given the way this heathen mythology, masquerading as divine theology, still governs so much of our daily lives, Paine heralding the 1790’s as the age of reason was clearly premature….
Other scholars, like Iranian-American professor of religion Reza Aslan, have posited that the historical Jesus was far more compelling than the mythical Jesus portrayed in the Bible.
In point of fact, the Jesus Aslan portrays, in Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013), strikes one as having more common cause throughout the ages with the likes of Patrick Henry than Martin Luther.
For my part, I began my Doubting Thomas questioning about Jesus’ family life many years ago after reading Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which is arguably a prequel to (if not a blueprint for) more popular books like The Da Vinci Code.
I read Holy Blood, Holy Grail in the mid-1980s, and remember vividly proselytizing its fascinating claims amongst friends because I thought it gave credence to my ingenuous apostasy.
I especially relished challenging Christian fundamentalists in my family with ‘proof’ that, although Jesus might have been a saint, celibacy was not one of his virtues (and, what better justification can there be for one’s own promiscuity, eh…). Because Holy Blood, Holy Grail asserts that Jesus not only ‘had carnal knowledge’ of Mary Magdalene, but also fathered children with this woman who Catholic dogma insists was nothing more than a ‘harlot’ (whore).
(“Holy Blood, Holy Grail v. The Da Vinci Code,” The iPINIONS Journal, February 28, 2006)
I not only wrote this almost 10 years ago, but cited the affirmation I found decades earlier in Holy Blood, Holy Grail for my abiding doubts about the generally accepted account(s) of Jesus’ family life.
This is why, far from acclaim for their scholarship, the authors of The Lost Gospel barely qualify for entry into the academy of those who question whether the Bible contains the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the life of Jesus Christ.
Finally, to be fair, leaders of the Catholic and Protestant Church maintain that Jesus was (as the Bible says) the celibate son of God. What’s more, they denounce any claim to the contrary as just the work of mischief-making heretics.
Except that these are the same Catholic leaders who not only denounced claims about the epidemic of child-sex abuse among priests, but are still engaged in a conspiracy to cover up that abuse; and the same Protestant leaders who continue to propagate, as objective truth, the fairytale about God creating man and woman in some Garden of Eden.
So who ya gonna believe…?
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