(continued from last post)
Before the message could be successfully disseminated from
Palestine to Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Egypt, Rome and western
Europe, the new religion had to be made acceptable to the people
of those regions, and it had to be capable of holding its own against
already established creeds. The new god needed to be comparable in
power, majesty, and in his repertoire of miracles, to those he was
intending to displace. If Jesus were to gain a foothold in the
Romanized world of his time, he had to become a full-fledged god. Not
a Messiah in the old sense of the term, not a liberator, not a
priest-king, but God Incarnate, a god, like Orpheus, Tammuz and
especially Mithras, who passed through the underworld and the
harrowing of Hell, and emerged, rejuvenated, with the spring.
It was at this point that the idea of the Resurrection first
assumed such critical importance, and for a fairly obvious reason, to
place Jesus on a par with all the other dying and resurrected gods who
populated both the world and the consciousness of their time. Most
importantly, the story of Jesus would have to dovetail with the popular
cult of Mithras, the unconquered son of the sun. For precisely this
reason the doctrine of the virgin birth was promulgated, a virgin
birth like that of Mithras. And the Easter festival, the festival of
the death and resurrection of the God-man Jesus Christ, was planned
to coincide with the spring rites of the Mithraeum, and of other
contemporary cults and mystery schools.
Given the need to deify Yehoshua, the political struggles and court
intrigue involved in the attempt to install him on the throne would
have to be soft-pedaled, if not entirely exised from his life's story.
Important connections with the Essenes and the Zealots would have to be
stripped from the account as well. In the transition from the man
Yehoshua to the Deity-figure Jesus Christ, the whole dynastic struggle
would have to fall by the wayside. In its place came the familiar myth
of the God of the Jews leaving Heaven and incarnating in the womb of
the Virgin Mary, a God eventually sacrificed to himself like Odin on
the World-tree, but in this case the sacrifice was for the benefit of
sinful creation, not for some quasi-shamanic quest for knowledge. The
familiar Bible is almost exclusively an expression of the mythic
Christ, with hardly a trace left of the real Yehoshua.
Of special interest, however, is the Book of Revelation. This was
apparently a book written much later than either the Gospels or the
Epistles, and written for the express purpose of discrediting the
burgeoning Gnostic movement and any descendant of Yehoshua that
might come down the pike to try to claim the thrones of Judah and
Israel for himself.
For the anti-Gnostic messages, one need only look as far as the
letters to the Seven Churches. The churches in Pergamon and Thyatira
are both accused of "holding to the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which
thing I hate," and "suffer(ing) that woman Jezebel, which calleth
herself a prophetess, to teach and seduce my servants to commit
fornication." Nicolai, or Nicholas, may have been a Gnostic or a
Manichean, and at the point at which the book may have been written the
fight between the Gnostics and those Christians that followed
Saul-Paulos' teachings might have begun in earnest. And since the
Gnostics had ties to the original Judaic mystery school of Yehoshua,
the added mission of discrediting any heir of the "son of the Widow
Lady" may have been part of the condemnation of Nicolai.
Moving further in, you hear tales of plagues and persecution of the
Pauline Christians. There seems to be resonances within of the
persecutions of Christians under Nero and other Roman emperors...in
fact, after rendering the name Nero Augustus Imperator into Hebrew and
using traditional Jewish numerology, Gematria, the name breaks down
into the infamous number 666, the Number of the Beast. Then the
references to an "anti-Christ" begin.
"And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out
of the sea..." begins the 13th chapter of Revelation. According to
legend, the first Merovee, the first king of the Merovingian line, was
fathered not merely by a human father, but also by a fabulous sea
monster. This may have something to do with the conjecture that Miriam
ha'Migdal was pregnant when she was spirited away from Roman Palestine.
It becomes obvious that this "beast" that the passage warns against is
really any descendant of Yehoshua that might attempt to retake the
throne. And the author of Revelation identifies him with a land over a
sea...perhaps Gaul?
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