“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” – Seneca the Younger
This short, brutal essay could have been called jealousy. Or envy. It is about the inter-generational violence of ideas. It is the distilling of what had been simple and straightforward but rendered complicated through centuries of the Christian culture’s pretense of charity; back to the simple and straightforward. In short, it is an essay about a culture that is not compatible with its’ pretensions.
The messiah nobody prophesied
“Jesus rarely makes pronouncements or speaks about himself in the first person. Jesus makes no claim to be the Anointed, the messiah”
Well, it’d be difficult for most Christians in this day and age to accept the idea Jesus never claimed to be the messiah. But hey, guess what? All of the ‘mainstream’ scholars of early Christianity accept the idea Christianity was ultimately created by a group having little to do with the historical Jesus, going so far as to state the movement that co-opted Jesus as its’ cultic hero put words on Jesus lips. Example prima facie is, Jesus did not speak words John put in Jesus mouth:
“All New Testament scholars agree that Jesus did not say what John puts into his mouth, but that it is the position of the Gospel’s author”
Now, suppose you’ve named a messiah and you’ve been kicked out of the synagogue, not for that, but for radical departure from the norms governing Jewish society’s cohesion; with incoherent demand Greeks, Romans, and their ilk, be allowed in without regard to the rules. Well, that’s essentially what had happened to the followers of the Pharisee turned apostate Saul, also known as Paul. So, the evictees had to take their messiah with them and claim he was the authentic one. Otherwise, not only do you have a messiah who never claimed the title, you also have a messiah nobody prophesied and you’d have to invent something. Granted, this second instance would be little less ludicrous than an angel named Moron appeared to pastor Smith, as he laughed all the way to the bank, so to speak, at his flock’s naiveté, but that’s human nature:
“You can’t convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana with the promise it will get 20 more bananas in chimpanzee heaven. It won’t do it. But humans will” -Behaviorist Yuval Noah Harari
Quite naturally, human nature being what it is, the eviction caused a lot of injured feeling and consequent name-calling, as the exiled group essentially had not only become Romanized, but now had to come up with a mythology to self-sustain (a foundation of human social structure.) This name calling made it into the new Christian cult’s scriptures, along with a rather childish ‘we’re the real Jews with the real messiah’ assertion, never mind the cultural Jewishness had been squished out of the new group, by the now predominate Greco-Roman elements, a little bit like juice spurts out of a stepped on bug. But that didn’t prevent the new Greco-Roman-Christian theology claiming to be the ‘real Jews’ and the originals to be ‘devil deviant murdered Jesus’ Jews.
Consequently, when projecting subsequent ethnocentric bias (cultural narcissism), you wouldn’t necessarily have to be a Christian to suffer what Christian rooted culture shapes people to experience, a sort of butt-hurt jealousy over Jewish people never surrendered legal title to, or their sovereignty over, the noun Jew, necessary to legitimize what amounts to stolen prophecies of a messiah. It’s a kind of deeply rooted insecurity but nothing unusual within the culture. As mundane as, and possibly why, a lot of people masturbate. Or go on rampage with pogroms.
In related irony, with Christian theology demanding Christians are the real Jews, and hyper-Christian types, or better said in Christian terminology, when radical ‘New’ Jews, like Condoleezza Rice, see opportunity to make a bit of money (with her Chevron stocks), the stereotype is perfect!
Not a very charitable history now, were it? For that matter, the example given is neither a Rastafarian one.
Meanwhile, having been stepped on for well over a millennia by these ‘New Jews’, it should come as no surprise to any more or less socially astute observer; there will manifest paranoid-insane-psychopath Jews of the original tribe with names like Krystal, Krum, Dershowitz and Netanyahu, whose antipathy to the Christian goy is protective of their own to point of collective, self-destructive madness – in case of Israel taking advantage of USA to fight Israel’s real and/or imagined enemies, inclusive of very real enemies created from acts of pure paranoia.
This ‘better their boys die than ours’ motivation, taken in a rather sardonic light, seems superior to what amounts to attitude of Ann Coulter or ‘shoot them all and let god sort them out’ or, in the case of the related sending fellow Americans to die, a Nikki Haley ‘let those who will be shot, be shot and god will ‘gracefully’ sort them out’ reflection of the Christian psychopath. Such a perfect ‘peace’ is conferred by her ‘jesus.’
By way of balanced perception, it’s a pity these ‘new jews’ had never discovered their own version of Tikkun Olam, or repairing the world we live in; as opposed to an apocalyptic-messianic tradition more resembling a northern pagan or Teutonic Jüngster Tag:
Related: Jews in the News
Ronald Thomas West 