When HIV first hit the
scene, one of the most common mantras going around was that when you have sex
with someone you’re also fucking everyone else he or she has had sex with. The same principle operates with the Bible
and its numerous authors, editors, copyists, redactors, forgers, fabricators, so-called
“translators”, etc.; when your read it, you’re engaging in a huge orgy having
intercourse with each and every one of them, and all at the same time.
The following account of
historical errors in the Bible is by no means meant to be all-inclusive.
Early Old Testament/Tanakh
Contrary to what
fundamentalists and other Biblical literalists, which include Orthodox Jews, believe,
the various scriptures are riddled with contradictions and errors. The idea that the universe and the earth were
created in their entirety in a mere six days and have been around for just 6000
years (versus the actual 13,800,000,000 for the universe and 4,500,000,000 for
earth) heads the list. Speaking of
which, the Bible doesn’t know whether humanity was created before everything
else or as the finale of it all.
We can start with Genesis
where we have Abram (Abraham) hanging out with a king of the Philistines. The mythical figure Abraham supposedly lived
around 1800 or 1700 BCE; there were no Philistines until around 1175 BCE. Meaning that they also came well after the
time of Moses whom literalists believe wrote the first five books of the Bible.
Speaking of Abram again, he
supposedly came from Ur “of the Chaldees”; much like the former example, this
is an anachronism. Although their
ancestors were certainly around, no Chaldees as such existed at this time, not
until the 900’s BCE, in fact.
Later in Exodus, the supposed Israelites built
“treasure cities” which never existed, living in a slavery which never
happened, abiding in a land (Goshen) which is a myth, from which they fled
behind a prophet named Moses whose name is in fact the Greek form of the
Aramaic name Mazas, which is that languages version of the name Mazda, who is
the deity of the Iranian prophet Zarathustra, walking over a sea bed which has
never been dry, wandering for a forty years in a tiny peninsula which does not
exist in this space-time continuum.
All of the alleged history
which follows is by the explicit admission of the Jewish scholars who collated
the canon of their scriptures not history, but “prophecy”. In other words, those scholars are honest
enough to admit their bias even though priests, preachers, and rabbis are not.
The book Joshua was almost certainly written by
whomever collated the Torah. One of the
better known stories, about the alleged battle of Jericho could not have
happened since that city had been uninhabited for centuries.
Of all the various and
sundry individual writings in this collection, the one called Daniel is the most controversial and
disputed. The Septuagint version, the
earliest canon of Hebrew scriptures, placed Daniel
with the Nevi’im, or Prophets, while the Karaite Masoretes, of over a
millennium later, placed it with the Ketuvim, or Writings.
Despite what fundamentalist
Christians and Orthodox Jews would have us believe about its own claims for
being written in the time of the Chaldean Empire based in Babylon, it was, in
truth, composed in its entirety no earlier than the 2nd century
BCE. A sure way to make prophecies that
come true is to make them after the fact, as we can see from the “predictions”
in Daniel that “came true” during the
2nd century, like the “abomination of desolation” and the so-called
four empires. It is likely that the same
author composed both Daniel and 1 Maccabees, in which the “prophecies”
of Daniel were shown to become true.
The figure of Daniel as
portrayed in the pseudepigraphal story written in his name is not merely
anachronistic but entirely mythical. In
fact, the name Daniel in the writings allegedly under that name is but a
corruption of the name of the legendary Canaanite figure Danel.
In real time, Danel first
appears in the writings allegedly of the prophet Ezekial, at least in the
Septuagint version. The Masoretes
realized the contradiction and, embarrassed that such evidence remained of
lingering polytheism, edited it to read “Danie”l in their heavily redacted
version of the Tanakh. In two of the
passages in which he is mentioned, Danel appears with two other heroic figures
of Canaanite legend, while in the third he is mentioned alone. The myths about Danel were stories of his
wisdom and it is not too far-fetched to believe that the stories attributed to
the mythic Solomon originated as stories of Danel.
Ezekial 14:14 & 20: Though these three men, Noah, Danel, and Job, were in it, they should
deliver but their own souls by their righteousness, saith the Lord God….Though Noah, Danel, and Job were in it, as I
live, saith the Lord God, they shall deliver neither son nor daughter;
they shall but deliver their own souls by their righteousness
Ezekial 28:3: Behold, thou art wiser than Danel; there is no secret that they can
hide from thee.
The current form of the
book of Daniel in Jewish Scriptures
(and most non-Catholic Western Christians) combines the work of at least two
different writers/editors, with chapters 1 and 7-12 being written in Hebrew and
2-6 in Aramaic. The Septuagint and
versions which follow it contain even more interpolations.
A few examples of mistakes
here will suffice.
First, Belshazzar was never
actually king, but this mistake is somewhat forgivable because he governed as
regent for much of the reign of his father, who reigned until the conquest by
the Iranians. His father was not
Nebuchadnezzar II, who died in 562 BCE, as given in Daniel, however, but Nabonidus, who assumed the throne in 556 BCE
and was not only completely unrelated to Nebuchadnezzar (regent 553) but wasn’t
even Chaldean. He, and therefore his
son, were of no royal or even noble descent and were from Assyria, ruling from
Babylon.
Side note: Nabonidus, and
his son Belshazzar, promoted the worship of Sin, god of the moon in Mesopotamia
both north and south. In the north,
Assyria, the center of Sin worship was the city of Harran, which might give a
clue to the true origins of father and son.
In the south, Babylonia, the center of Sin worship was at the city of
Ur.
Wait a minute…where have we
heard the name of that city before? Oh
yeah, the place where Abram was supposedly from. And in this case, Ur actually was “of the Chaldees”.
Now, to the fall of
Babylon. “Darius the Mede”, to whom Daniel assigns the role of conquerer of
the city and empire, never existed. He’s
completely fictional. The Medes never
conquered Babylonia, though they did conquer Assyria in northern
Mesopotamia. It was Cyrus the Great who led
the Iranian army which conquered Babylonia, and with it Syria, Kanaan
(Phoenicia), Samerina, Yehud, and Philistia.
Knowing how the city’s
priesthood of Marduk despised the worship of Sin, which had been getting all
the tribute money previously flowing into their coffers, Cyrus abolished the
official cult of Sin worship and restored Marduk and his priests to their
former place and income, but also prescribed freedom of religion so as not to
suppress anyone’s worship. He had done
the same previously after conquering the Median Empire two decades earlier when
he gutted the power of the Zorastrian priesthood who worshipped
Mazda/Mazas/Moses.
Cyrus the Great, “Koroush
Kabir” in transliterated Farsi, never worshipped Yahweh, the national god of
the Jews and Samaritans, as claimed in the latter chapters of Daniel and elsewhere in the Tanakh, nor
did he make any decrees in the latter’s name.
We know this because we have his decree on hand (currently touring the
United States), in the form of the Cyrus Cylinder, and from this we know he
never specifically mentioned the Jews or Jerusalem or rebuilding anyone’s
temples as claimed in Daniel and
elsewhere.
Birth and early life of Jesus bar Joses
From lies of the mid-2nd
century BCE, let’s travel forward in time four centuries or so to look at lies
from the late 2nd century CE.
That’s when the canonically-approved gospels as we know them reached
their current form.
My first question: was
Jesus bar Joses descended from Solomon the king in 28 generations or from
Nathan the prophet in 42 generations?
I’m a little confused, because the geneaology in the Gospel according to Matthew shows the
first, while that in the Gospel according
to Luke shows the latter.
I know both were intended
to “prove” Jesus bar Joses’ Davidic descent, but there are two problems
here. First, the geneaologies trace to
Joses, who is purported in both cases not to be Jesus’ biological father, so
they are irrelevant to Jesus’ ancestry.
Second, Davidic descent is irrelevant according to Jesus himself, or at
least according to the words the writers of the gospels put into his mouth, him
questioning whether the Messiah was David’s son.
Third, since Mary and the
Holy Spirit were presumably not married, doesn’t that make the offspring of
said union (Jesus) illegitimate, i.e., a bastard? Not to mention the fact that the Holy Spirit,
or Ruach ha-Kodesh, in Judaism was (and still is) feminine and was in
Christianity before the Gentile-friendly of the religion (Paul) gave her a
penis. In essence, what this union of
Mary and Holy Spirit does is put the Almighty’s seal of approval on same-sex
marriages.
Now, from whence did this
only-known spawn of two female personages in history come? One gospel (Matthew) shows the family living already in Bethlehem where Jesus
was allegedly born before fleeing to Egypt then moving back to Palestine only
changing residence to Nazareth. The
other (Luke) shows the family having
to drag their arses out of Nazareth in compliance with an empire-wide census
that never actually took place with Mary extremely pregnant and riding on a
donkey to Bethlehem where she gives birth in a stable in a cave then returning
to Nazareth when the census was complete.
All this was written with
the intention of showing, as before, the Davidic connection of Jesus bar Joses
by having him born in the “city of David”.
Which would actually be more likely than Nazareth, since the latter did
not exist until the 3rd century CE, or at the very least was so
insignificant as to not be noticed before that.
Not bloody likely since the later location of Nazareth is within the
suburban area of the Galilean capital of Sepphoris. That would be like not mentioning Georgetown,
suburb or Washington.
In the earliest copies of
the gospels the exist, the protagonist is referred to as Jesus the Nazarene, or
Nazorean. Nazorean was, at this time, a
title or the clergy of the Mandaean sect of Judaism, which today hold John the
Baptist as their chief saint and may have even then. The gospels said there was a Nazareth, so a
Nazareth came into being.
Likewise, when Helena
Augusta, mother of Constantine the Great and ardent Christian, made a
pilgrimage to what she considered the “Holy Land” (always a Christian rather
than Jewish affectation) and wanted to visit the place of Jesus’ birth in
Bethlehem, the cave in which Mithras was said to have been born wasn’t being
used anymore, so why not? That’s also
how the Grotto of Venus outside Aelia Capitolina, now renamed Jerusalem, came
to be the “Holy Sepulchre” and the temple of Mercury in the upper city became
the “Upper Room”, and how the acropolis that housed the temple of Jupiter and
temple of Juno and Minerva became the Temple Mount holding the remains of the
Temple of Herod and the Royal Stoa, and how the temple of Asclepius became the
pool of Bethesda.
Herod the Great, mentioned
in Luke as the current ruler at the
time of the birth of Jesus bar Joses, had been procurator of Galilaea from
47-37 BCE, and, after adding Iudaea to his territory once the unlamented
Hasmoneans were at last exterminated, was recognized as King of the Jews from
37 BCE to 4 BCE.
Galilaea, along with Syria,
had been under direct Roman rule since 63 BCE when Pompey conquered the whole
region for the glory of Rome. His
Hasmonean allies were already Roman clients and continued as such until they
became too much trouble.
And
it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar
Augustus that all the world should be taxed.
Caesar Augustus, aka Octavius
Caesar, died in 14 BCE. Never at any
time in the entire history of the Imperium Romanum/Basilea Rhomain/Roman Empire
was “the whole world” taxed.
(And
this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)
Cyrenius, Publius Sulpicius
Quirinius, was legatus of Syria 6-12 CE.
He became legatus the same year that Archaleus was desposed as tetrarch
of Iudaea-Samaraea-Idumaea and replaced with a Roman praefectus named Coponius
as Iudaea had become an imperial province.
As that was so, the population needed to be taxed, because empires need
money just as much as deities.
As Galilaea (then under
Antipas, son of Herod) was an entirely separate sub-province altogether, the
non-existent city of Nazareth would not have been subject to the census. I hear Freddie Mercury singing “Another One
Bites the Dust”. While Herod was
perfectly horrid to his in-laws, the less than zero evidence that such an
atrocity as the alleged Slaughter of the Innocents leads an objective reader to
the conclusion this Gothic tale is a bit of a fabrication. That’s polite for “total bullshit”.
Herod, by the way, was by
all accounts a good ruler, at least toward the populace. His building programs alone were the largest
undertakings in the Southern Levant since the days of Omri and Ahab, the
founder of the northern kingdom and his son.
For the general populace, his was much better than the Hasmoneans, most
of whom were monsters.
Herod’s relations with his
in-laws were formed in the light of their stunning duplicity and treachery,
which rivaled that of the Bolshevik exiles who returned to Russia after the
February Revolution and whose conniving machinations turned Stalin the mediator
willing to work with the rival Mensheviks for the common good into Stalin the
Terrible.
The Magi story is a nice
one, but far-fetched. Since the Magi and
the rest of Zoroastrians were not looking for a Jewish messiah to make the Jews
triumphant over all the world and their Torah the law of all the earth but for
an Iranian figure called Saoshyant to bring about the Frashokereti, or final
reordering of the universe, they wouldn’t have noticed. Not even if a giant disembodied hand appeared
out of thin air and wrote it on a wall.
Years of Jesus’ alleged ministry
The next pathetic attempt
to place this story in history comes in Luke 3:1, which reads: Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of
Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being
tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the
region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas
and Caiaphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John the son of
Zacharias in the wilderness.
Okay, a few points
here.
Tiberius Iulius Caesar
Augustus ruled the Imperium Romanum 14 BCE-37 CE, which would make the
fifteenth year of his rule 1 CE. That is
the year the author of Luke is saying
that John the Baptist began preaching.
It is clearly way outside the time of the rest of the governors
mentioned, though his reign does include their years of service.
Pontius Pilatus was praefectus
of Iudaea 26-36 CE. Antipas, son of
Herod, ruled Galilaea and Peraea 4 BCE-39 CE.
His brother Philip ruled Batanea, Ituraea, Gaulinitis, and Trachonitis 4
BCE-34 CE. Their sister Salome, by the
way, ruled Philistia 4 BCE-10 CE, lasting four years longer than Archelaus did
in Iudaea-Samaraea-Idumaea; she was succeeded by Livia Drusilla, mother of
Tiberius, who ruled Philistia until 29 CE.
Lysanias bar Talmai,
successor of his father and half-Hasmonean, actually ruled Abila, Chalcis, and
Ituraea 40-36 BCE, ending his reign in execution by Marcus Antonius.
Annas, actually Ananus ben
Seth, served as high priest 6-15 CE, when he was deposed for executing too many
people, which he wasn’t even supposed to be doing. No one named Caiaphas was ever high priest,
but there was one named Joseph ben Caiaphas 18-36 CE, who was deposed by Lucius
Vitellius, legatus of Syria.
At Luke 13:1-2, we have: There
were present at that season some that told him of the Galilaeans, whose blood
Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.
And Jesus answering said unto them, Suppose ye that these Galilaeans
were sinners above all the Galilaeans, because they suffered such things?
The problem with this is
that as brutal as Pilatus often was, he never did any such thing. In fact, the only case in which the blood of
Galileans was mixed with sacrifices in the temple took place the lead-up to the
Siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. It happened
as part of the infighting which doomed the stand of the rebels from the outset,
thirty-four years after Pilate had left the country and presumably thirty-seven
years after the death of Jesus bar Joses.
Galilean Zealots under John
ben Levi of Giscala took over the temple compound and began performing the
daily sacrifices. The high priest at the
time, Ananus ben Ananus, rather objected to his deposition and summoned his own
adherents to attack, including a sizable force of Idumaean forced proselytes. Several Galilean priests were killed in the
act of sacrifice, their blood then mixing with that of the animals.
I once thought that the
reference in the Gospel according to John
5:2 (“Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in
the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches.”) to a five-sided pool was an
anachronism because I thought surely a pagan temple would not have been built
in Jerusalem and didn’t exist until Aelia Capitolina replaced the destroyed
city starting in 132 CE.
However, I recently learned
that not only did the Asclepion, the five-sided pool sacred to Asclepius, god
of healing, exist, but also a pool sacred to Fortuna, the goddess of luck, both
of which were immediately adjacent to the Serapeum, or temple to the syncretic
mystery god Serapis. These were built to
service the garrison at the Fortress Antonia.
In the Mount Olivet
discourse in Matthew 24:3-51, Luke 21:3-38, and in the Gospel according to Mark 13:3-37, which
they place toward the end of the week after the triumphal entry on (Palm)
Sunday, Jesus describes for the disciples signs of the end.
The key passages for the
purposes of this essay are the following:
Matthew 24:15 When ye therefore shall see the abomination
of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso
readeth, let him understand:)
Mark 13:14 But when ye shall see the abomination of
desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing where it ought not, (let
him that readeth understand,) then let them that be in Judaea flee to the
mountains.
Luke 21:20 And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed
with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. Then let them which are in Judaea flee to the
mountains.
Though the location of this
discourse takes place on the Mount of Olives in the first two and in the temple
courtyard in the third, the discourse is virtually identical in all three
except for those verses just cited.
The problem with the first
two is the alleged incident of the “abomination of desolation”. This alleged incident, the setting up of an
idol of Zeus in the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem temple, took place in 167
BCE. So, the 33 CE almost two centuries
later was a little late to be warning people about this happening. The Luke
reference is much more plausible, a reference, no doubt in hindsight, since the
Siege of Jerusalem occurred in 70 CE.
The Passion Play
The accounts of the Passion
follow a script written for the ceremonies of other dying-and-resurrecting gods
such as Serapis or Adonis or Mithras, all of whom were worshipped in 1st
century CE Palestine. Indeed, a temple
to Serapis and Isis stood in Samaria-Sebaste from the 3rd century
BCE and the just mentioned temple to Serapis (who had by this time also
absorbed Asclepius) stood just outside Jerusalem.
There are numerous problems
with any one of these accounts, several with them altogether.
First, Ananus would not
have presided at any trial, for reason given below, and a trial at night would
have violated Jewish and Roman law.
Pontius Pilatus truly did
not give a damn what the local population thought. He was brutal and merciless. Indeed, he was recalled in 36 CE for the
brutality with which he put down a mild protest by the Samaritans to be a
separate Roman province from Iudea. He
certainly would not have been begging the Jews to accept Jesus bar Joses
instead of Jesus bar Abbas; he instead would have crucified them side-by-side.
Speaking of which, there
was no custom to release a condemned prisoner at the season of Passover. Even if there had been, those eligible would
not have included political rebels.
When Pilatus washed his hands, that was something done at the pronunciation of every death sentence in Roman jurisprudence.
Only Matthew and Mark mention
scourging before the crucifixion, and this was indeed frequently a feature of
crucifixion. Jesus bar Joses was not
being singled out. The purpose behind it
was to hasten death, the same reason that legs of the crucified were sometimes
broken to prevent the condemned from lingering.
If Jesus bar Joses did, in
fact, die a mere six hours after being crucified, it really was a miracle. Two to three days was more usual, sometimes
even up to a week. The men would hang on
the cross, thirsting, sunburned, blinded by the sun, bitten by insects, their
eyes plucked out by birds, worms and other creepy crawling creatures eating
parts of their bodies, all that time.
Unlike the usual portrayals,
the feet of the crucified were usually no more than a foot or two off the
ground. They were completely naked, no
loincloths allowed. They hung until they
died and frequently until they rotted, sabbaths and other festivals or solemn
occasions notwithstanding.
Crucifixion was hardly
unique, even in Palestine. According to
Josephus, 2000 were crucified after the post-Herod the Great revolt in 4 BCE. Like the 6000 who were crucified after the
Spartacus revolt of 73-71 BCE.
The supposed charge that
Jesus bar Joses had allegedly claimed to be King of the Jews was in itself not
enough to get him condemned. He might
have been laughed at. Herod the Great
was King of the Jews 38 BCE-4 BCE and Agrippa I King of the Jews 41-44 CE. What the Christian gospels ignore is the fact
that the Messiah ben David was foretold to defeat the last ruler of the “fourth
empire” (Rome, from Daniel, preceded
by the Chaldeans, Iranians, and Macedonians), and after enumerating his sins
from his throne in Jerusalem, kill him with a sword.
THAT would have certainly
caused a man to be sentenced to death as a rebel. However, Jesus bar Joses not only repeatedly
denied being such a messiah but according to all four gospels foretold his own
death time and time again. Such was
supposed to be the role not of the Messiah ben David but of the Messiah ben
Joseph.
Acts of the Apostles
Just a couple of notes
about the earlier chapters of this work.
Ananus ben Seth (Annas) wouldn’t
have presided over the Great Sanhedrin in The
Acts of the Apostles) for Peter’s and John’s trial. The head of the Great Sanhedrin after 191
BCE, when the body lost confidence in high priest Simon II bar Onias, was the
Nasi. The Nasi didn’t preside over
trials when the Sanhedrin met as a criminal court, but given his history and
the reasons for his deposition, the Romans would never have allowed Ananus to
be Av Beit Din.
Nor was Ananus high priest,
that role belonging to Joseph ben Caiaphas.
Gamaliel’s speech to the
Sanhedrin calling for restraint says that the revolt of Judas the Galilean in 6
CE over the tax and census issue followed that of Theudas, which Josephus
places in 47 CE.
