Historicity of Jesus - 2

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/ift/ift32.htm

EXCERPT:

Remarks.--I have selected The Wolf and the Crane as my typical example in my "History of the Aesopic Fable," and can only give here a rough summary of the results I there arrived at concerning the fable, merely premising that these results are at present no more than hypotheses. The similarity of the Jataka form with that familiar to us, and derived by us in the last resort from Phaedrus, is so striking that few will deny some historical relation between them. <b>I conjecture that the Fable originated in India, and came West, by two different routes. </b>First, it came by oral tradition to Egypt, as one of the Libyan Fables which the ancients themselves distinguished from the Aesopic Fables. <b>It was, however, included by Demetrius Phalereus, tyrant of Athens, and founder of the Alexandrian library c. 300 B.C., in his Assemblies of Aesopic Fables, </b>which I have shown to be the source of Phaedrus' Fables c. 30 A.D. Besides this, it came from Ceylon in the Fables of Kybises--i.e., Kasyapa the Buddha--c. 50 A.D., <b>was adapted into Hebrew, and used for political purposes, by Rabbi Joshua ben Chananyah in a harangue to the Jews, c. 120 A.D., begging them to be patient while within the jaws of Rome. </b>The Hebrew form uses the lion, not the wolf, as the ingrate, which enables us to decide on the Indian provenance of the Midrashic version. It may be remarked that the use of the lion in this and other Jatakas is indirectly a testimony to their great age, as the lion has become rarer and rarer in India during historic times, and is now confined to the Gir forest of Kathiáwar, where only a dozen specimens exist, and are strictly preserved.

The verses at the end are the earliest parts of the Jataka, being in more archaic Pali than the rest: the story is told by the commentator (c. 400 AD) to illustrate them. It is probable that they were brought over on the first introduction of Buddhism into Ceylon, c. 241 B.C. This would give them an age of aver two thousand years, nearly three hundred years earlier than Phaedrus, from whom comes our Wolf and Crane.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[acharya]

YAHOO



Who is Jesus? He's three people, says Deepak Chopra

By Michelle Nichols 2 hours, 37 minutes ago

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Who is Jesus? According to spiritual guru Deepak Chopra, there are three interpretations.
ADVERTISEMENT

In his book "The Third Jesus," published this week, Chopra says there is a "sketchy historical figure," a second "abstract theological creation" and a third Jesus with the highest level of enlightenment -- what Chopra calls God-consciousness.

"I want to offer the possibility that Jesus was truly, as he proclaimed, a savior," Chopra wrote. "Not the savior, not the one and only Son of God. Rather Jesus embodied the highest level of enlightenment.

"He spent his brief adult life describing it, teaching it, and passing it on to future generations," he said. "Jesus intended to save the world by showing others the path to God-consciousness."

Chopra, author of more than 50 books and head of the spiritual group Alliance for a New Humanity, describes God-consciousness as "a metaphor for a shift in consciousness that makes Jesus's teachings totally real and vital."

He said he began searching for the third Jesus as a child attending a Catholic Irish missionary school in India after being fascinated by what he described at the "most interesting, romantic, passionate, spiritual story of all time."

"Yet I was struck by the fact that my friends, who were part of the Church, had been indoctrinated into a belief system where guilt was actually a virtue and I couldn't quite come to terms with that," Chopra told Reuters in an interview.

"I said to myself there must be a third Jesus, a state of consciousness that I can actually relate to, and I started to really study the New Testament and the Bible," he said.

EAST MEETS WEST

Chopra paints this third Jesus as one of both Eastern and Western spirituality.

"Leave aside the differences in the language of it -- they are all talking about the same thing," he said. "So I hope in the very least it will contribute to some healing of the rift in our collective soul, which is the cause of all the wars and all the problems we're having today."

Chopra said the Jesus created by the Catholic Church was confusing because although the religion had done a lot of good in the world, it had also taken part "in the Crusades, in witch hunts, in burning people on the stake, homophobia, depriving women of their rights, all kinds of things."

"The present day crisis in Christianity is it's bogged down in issues like -- what would Jesus do? They make pronouncements on things like abortion, women's rights, homophobia, stem cell research -- nothing to do with Christ," he said.

"It influences our politics, it influences our national policy, it influences whether we go to war or not in the name of God," he said. "It's inanity of the utmost extreme."

Chopra said he hoped readers would take away a practical way to understand the New Testament and understand that engaging in contemplative meditation can lead to positive change.

"Everything changes for the good," he said. "The way we think, the way we behave, the way we feel, the way we have our personal relationships, our social interactions, our environment all changes in an evolutionary direction because we have shifted in our own consciousness."

And that, he said "is precisely what is meant by the kingdom of heaven is within you."

(Editing by Bill Trott)

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/faq/index.html

The notion that dramas should aim to suspend our disbelief goes right back to Aristotle's "Poetics," where it was first articulated. However a similar jarring "mistakes" were deliberately employed as effects by the playwright and drama theorist Bertolt Brecht (3) in the 1930s. He even had a name for them: 'alienation effects,' (Verfremdungseffekten) and they crops up in many of his plays. Brecht used alienation effects because he wanted shatter audiences suspension of disbelief, so that they would think about the issues raised by his plays dispassionately, instead of merely being swept away by the drama.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/spengle.htm

Spengler rejected traditional unilinear accounts of historical development and also causal explanations. Instead he examined history within the framework of cyclic patterns. "Each culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return." <b>Augustine saw in the City of God a divine plan behind history, and for Marx the driving force behind historical development was the class struggle.</b> In Spengler's garden of cultures there is no gardener, a visible purpose or unifying meaning, except fate, which cannot be explained. Cultures spring mysteriously into being, they have morphological similarities but nothing else.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Since "the foundations of Judaism and Christianity" were not built on truth, but on "voluntary and involuntary errors," it is no wonder that "numberless fables have been invented [by ecclesiastical historians] to raise, to embellish, and to support" faith. Instead of providing historical truths, the Christian interpretation of history has led to the "abuse of history": "Deliberate, systematical lying has been practised and encouraged from age to age" by church historians, "and among all the pious frauds that have been employed to maintain a reverence and zeal for their religion in the minds of men, this abuse of history has been the principal and most successful."<b> Sadly, noted Bolingbroke, this "lying spirit has gone from ecclesiastical to other historians."</b><!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Chapter 2 examines inscriptional dedications by various Asian cities to the imperial temple of Ephesus (89-91 CE). <b>These inscriptions show the temple to have been dedicated not to a single emperor, as some scholars suggested, but to the Sebastoi, the Flavian family (pp. 35-36), sometime in 89 or 90 CE during the reign of Domitian (pp. 45-49). </b>They also demonstrate the interplay of cult and politics in regard to a city’s relations with both Rome and other cities in the province of Asia (pp. 37-41; cf. pp. 158-60).<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Berossus And Genesis, Manetho And Exodus: Hellenistic Histories And the Date of the Pentateuch
</b>Russell E. Gmirkin (Gmyrkin)

<b>Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus proposes a provocative new theory regarding the date and circumstances of the composition of the Pentateuch. Gmirkin argues that the Hebrew Pentateuch was composed in its entirety about 273-272 BCE by Jewish scholars at Alexandria that later traditions credited with the Septuagint translation of the Pentateuch into Greek. </b>The primary evidence is literary dependence of Gen. 1-11 on Berossus' Babyloniaca (278 BCE) and of the Exodus story on Manetho's Aegyptiaca (c. 285-280 BCE), and the geo-political data contained in the Table of Nations. A number of indications point to a provenance of Alexandria, Egypt for at least some portions of the Pentateuch. That the Pentateuch, drawing on literary sources found at the Great Library of Alexandria, was composed at almost the same date as the Septuagint translation, provides compelling evidence for some level of communication and collaboration between the authors of the Pentateuch and the Septuagint scholars at Alexandria's Museum. The late date of the Pentateuch, as demonstrated by literary dependence on Berossus and Manetho, has two important consequences: the definitive overthrow of the chronological framework of the Documentary Hypothesis, and a late, 3rd century BCE date for major portions of the Hebrew Bible which show literary dependence on the Pentateuch.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

In a normative learning environment, the teaching of the Empty Throne became transformed into a psy-ops weapon against the Deity Set. Manetho was the Precursor of Josephus. Just as the Indic influence in Freud could not be digested by Europe resulting in Nazism, etc....

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->People should know that Buddha had forbidden the creation of any image of himself. So out of respect Buddists didn't create his image for many centuries. At that period Buddha used to be depicted using symbols such as dharma wheel, an empty throne, a pair of footprints or the Bodhi tree.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Egyptian [Ptolemaic] Beginning of Anti-Semitism's Long History</b>
Interview with Pieter W. van der Horst<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

The Audacity of these greco-romans is mind-boggling. The propagandist scoundrel Josephus writes a tract admonishing Apion!!!

[Shambhu]

Not directly related, but shows you the extent to which the "establishment" will go to to force-fit reality to their own worldview:

Yesterday they were talking about slave rebellions. The whites, it seems, had invented a disease that would explain why some slaves would not want to work for their masters: they were just suffering from "dithesia ethiopicus" (spelling).. <!--emo&:furious--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/furious.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='furious.gif' /><!--endemo-->

----

Today's "establishment" is the academics, the church etc..

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Double bind theory was formulated in the 1950s by, amongst others, Gregory Bateson, to create a theory about schizophrenia. It is about relationships and what happens when important basic relationships are chronically invalidated via paradoxical messages. The "double bind" theory of schizophrenia (Bateson et al 1956), maintained that the mother sent a mixed message to her child and that this message put the child in a "double bind," e.g., she was alternatingly warm and cold, meaning that he was damned if he responded to one part of the message and damned if he responded to the other (contradictory) part of the message.

This is not unlike the Jewish Mother syndrome. She buys her son two shirts. When he comes downstairs wearing one of the shirts, she says "Oh, you didn't like the other one."<b> The only way out of a double bind message was a "meta-communication," that is, a comment about the communication, etc.</b> That is, it must be more than: "No Mom, actually I liked the other one better, but I am saving it for Sunday." Meta-communication response would be, "Mom, are you trying to make me feel guilty as I go out to have a good time with my new girl friend, tonight?"
..<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

I would place these double bind techniques under the category of "crowd control algorithms" referred previously on another thread by Shambhuji.  The "ought" is another category of double bind which Balu specifically deemed absent from Asian ethics.  A psy-ops context is needed to explain the origin and operation of these ethical control techniques. When westerners interpret Dharmik culture they (wrongly) assume the operation of this same type of dynamics.

from a christist tract:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Christian Induce Neurosis

Many Christians believe that the God they want to please tells them to do things
that are impossible to do. Much of scripture or at least what we think of
scripture is paradoxical. I believe that most of the commands that folks
PERCEIVE as paradoxical are actually not but common folk have learned
otherwise. Thus, it is common for Christians to be caught in a chronic Pragmatic
DB struggle.
..
• All Christians should experience joy. (Without joy I must be__________.)
• I should love everyone, even my enemies.
• I should never get angry.
• I should forgive everyone who hurts me and never be angry with him.
• I ought to be better, nicer, loving, easier to live with, a better parent, etc.
• I should want to pray, study, worship, attend church, serve, be holy
Each <i>should</i> and <i>ought</i> is supposed to arise spontaneously and remain
permanently in my heart.
..

-On the One Hand
-On the Other Hand
--------
-God is sovereign
-Humans are responsible for personal
decisions
-------
-God is in charge of all the universe
-Humans have a free will
... ..<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

just checked atwill's forum after a few weeks. to my surprise...

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>THE DARK LADY: THE WOMAN WHO WROTE SHAKESPEARE</b>

The Dark Lady Players, a New York Shakespeare company are about to demonstrate that the author of the Shakespearean plays was a black, Jewish woman, Amelia Bassano Lanier (1569-1645). This is the most recent authorship theory to have been accepted by the Shakespearean Authorship Trust chaired by Mark Rylance.

Lanier was the first woman in England to publish a book of original poetry, Salve Deus (1611), and for a decade was mistress to Lord Hunsdon, the man in charge of the English theater. A Marrano Jew of Venetian-Moroccan origin, she was identified in 1973 as the 'dark lady' of the Sonnets. Her literary signatures have now been found on seven of the plays.

...

The discovery of these Jewish allegories in the plays, known as the Atwill-Hudson Discovery, definitively shows that their author was Jewish.  It also confirms the cutting edge New Testament scholarship described in Joseph Atwill's  book Caesar's Messiah (Ulysses Press, 2005), which is beginning to attract increasing attention.

For more information
www.darkladyplayers.com
www.caesarsmessiah.com
www.theatresource.org/
www.shakespeareanauthorshiptrust.org.uk/

See news story 28 February 2008
http://www.njjewishnews.com/njjn.com/02280...KosherBard.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Imperialist Propaganda: Second Thoughts on Charlie Wilson's War
Chalmers Johnson

..
An Imperialist Comedy

Which brings us back to the movie and its reception here. (It has been banned in Afghanistan.) One of the severe side effects of imperialism in its advanced stages seems to be that it rots the brains of the imperialists. They start believing that they are the bearers of civilization, the bringers of light to "primitives" and "savages" (largely so identified because of their resistance to being "liberated" by us), the carriers of science and modernity to backward peoples, beacons and guides for citizens of the "underdeveloped world."

Such attitudes are normally accompanied by a racist ideology that proclaims the intrinsic superiority and right to rule of "white" Caucasians. Innumerable European colonialists saw the hand of God in Darwin's discovery of evolution, so long as it was understood that He had programmed the outcome of evolution in favor of late Victorian Englishmen. (For an excellent short book on this subject, check out Sven Lindquist's "Exterminate All the Brutes.")

<b>When imperialist activities produce unmentionable outcomes, such as those well known to anyone paying attention to Afghanistan since about 1990, then ideological thinking kicks in. The horror story is suppressed, or reinterpreted as something benign or ridiculous (a "comedy"), or simply curtailed before the denouement becomes obvious.</b> Thus, for example, <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[ramana]

dhu< Oh my God! Its what has happened before! Seems Judeo Christain ethics of the West is all about that!

[dhu]

The last four paragraphs of Chalmers' essay are also significant. He makes it clear that these narratives are a convoluted and part-calculated effort to "induce amnesia". Kubrick goes into the other side of this comedic-horror diptych in <i>The Shining</i> where he emphasizes the horror part rather than the comedic part. Jack induces self-amensia as he exited the room of horror where he had encountered his "true self," represented by the diseased european woman. EWS is another one that deals with amnesia and horror theme.

This dynamic also explains why these fellows tend to see genocide and conspiracy in Indian "Caste System" and elsewhere (eg the "Religion" of Ramayana) as they dutifully perform their gutter inspections.

[dhu]

As Easter week approaches, we should get a handle of some finer points of jeebus corpse's mahaan theology.  It's really amazing what these clowns grapple with as a matter of routine:

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Penal Substitution</b>
..
Recent controversies

Most recently, controversy has arisen over the strict doctrine of penal substitution in which Socinus's argument about the justice of God has been raised: in modern dress the question is put has been whether it constitutes <b>"cosmic child abuse."</b><!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Shambhu]

On CNN they showed a clip of palm sunday celebrations in vatican or somewhere and said "..when christians commemorate ..xyz"

Not "what they think is xyz".

So jeebus is a done thing, as real as the sun and the moon. Never mind that no evidence can be found for anything jeebus. "That cave over there is the grotto of the nativity" the Xtian priest says. And that is enough for all heaven-hunters to throng to the "grotto". Just like the colonialist blanks out any suffering by his slaves, just as the butcher and all meat-eaters blank out suffering by "livestock" animals but will get bent out of shape if a puppy is hit with a stick..just like that teh heaven-hunter morons blank out any need for open-minded inquiry into jeebus. Even when someone else does all the work for them (like Atwill has), they do not want to even read the book or even a summary..

[Guest]

The God Who Wasn't There
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73_IjNPmIEI

[ramana]

dhu, was Arianism a midway point to Muhammed's Islam? In other words did Muhammed use the theories of Arianism while crafting his version of Islam for the Arabs? i was struck by the fact that many of Islam's practises are similar to pre-Reformation Christianity or hard line Old Testament.

[dhu]

there were stages to the monotheist transformation. The oldest stage is the normative ethics found in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics title. There is a connection to an imposed Alexander world conqueror narrative. I believe that this was when the old testament narratives were linearized and a psyops framework was imposed on the original disparate phoenician/egyptian/babylonian/canaanite narratives - this is the manetho/apion stage to which josephus appended his own confession in Against Apion and during which the various components of the documentary hypothesis were joined together by the septuagint 70 scholars committee in ptolemaic alexandria.

The next one comes with the psyops of Flavians at the time of roman greek transfer. Atwill will fill in a parallel stage consisting of the Flavian construction of Rabbinic Judaism - the first inking of the 'religion of the book' paradigm - (as opposed to and an explicit replacement of the preceding <i>temple</i> judaism - which had its mirrors in the Mt Gerizim Jews, babylonian jews, etc - and which had continued despite the septuagint/OT attempts). Dura Europos synagogue (2nd c) had a mural of the infant Moses in the arms the Shekinah (Patai's The Hebrew Goddess) which obviously was not opposed to "jewish" sensibilities at the time. This is the era of revisionist monotheism - (think british mediated construction of a "monotheistic" sikhism/brahmos, etc). The important thing to realize is that the monotheist narrative was imposed on the "texts" in a psy-ops framework (eg Waheguru battling the hindu "pantheon" in SGGS is simply a point re-interpretation, not reality).

Next stage is the augustinian stage of 'divine will'. This was attributed to manicheans, that is, to persians (ie Augustine was purportedly a manichean who converted) and was designed to combat persians, against whom all previous versions had been unsuccessful. (This is the specific thread that continues into Islam).

As for Islam, acc to scholars, the language of the koran is most similar to syrian form of arabic and it is v likely that it was a conversion attempt by Christians of interior arabs. I'm not sure how Ariansim fits into everything. What is amazing is that enetire greco-roman civilzation bit the dust while the arab first cousins continued blissfully with their paganism.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->4. Consider too, for example, one of the notions fundamental to Modern Jurisprudence: `will'. There have been umpteen discussions about this notion in Philosophy, Law, Psychology, etc. Clearly, or so we think, human beings have a will and exercise it as well. What is the origin of this picture of human beings? Till 300 B.C.E. this notion was `absent' in what we call the western culture today. Neither the Greek thinkers (like Plato or Aristotle), nor the Roman jurists (who wrote their law digests) had such a notion or such a picture of human beings. <b>The first person to struggle with this notion and write tracts about it</b><b> was Saint Augustine, one of the most influential Fathers of the Christian Church. Why did the Christians find this notion important? </b>Because, they think, the universe exemplifies the Will of God and human beings should subordinate themselves to this Will. That is to say, the human will must subordinate itself to the divine will. What is human `will' then? What does this subordination consist of? These and many similar questions arose *within* the ambit of Christian theology, presupposing a Christian picture of Man. (A picture that was neither Greek nor Roman, and is definitely not Indian.) Yet, how many of us do not practice Law, read and write about human will and even assume *as an empirical fact* that it is in the nature of being human that we have will? (This is no *fact*, but a Christian theological picture of man.)<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->