In my third online discussion with Ralph Ellis, we focus in on the name of “Jesus” — where did it come from? What was it exactly, prior to all the translations?
Leading up to this chat, I had directed Mr. Ellis to the YouTube channel Religion for Breakfast, where host Andrew Henry discusses the current academic consensus on the name of Jesus, in twovideos.
Andrew Henry, host of Religion for Breakfast on YouTube.
Mr. Elllis, who has written three books with “Jesus” in the title, offers his rather different take.
Also prior to our chat, I had asked Mr. Ellis about what he thought of the name of “Joseph” — the Gospel Jesus’ father. Or “worldly father,” as we might have called him in church, when I was a kid. Since Ellis believes that the historical Jesus’ natural and quite real father was King Abgarus Monobazus of Edessa, where did the name “Joseph” come from? I had suggested it was just impishly inserted into the gospel story. But Ellis thinks it may very well have been Abgarus’s adoptive, “Jewish” name. Why? It turns out he has an interesting theory about this, and it is completely plausible. Indeed, it is congruent with the rest of the story as he’s explored it in his many books:
As always with Mr. Ellis, our conversation runs wide, and deep into the history. In the video version of the podcast I have tried to make it easier to follow, with a few visual aids:
My dog only interrupted once.
As always, I now have more questions. Perhaps I will invite Mr. Ellis back onto the program — I am very curious about Judas, for instance, and it was Judas of Gamala who really started the movement that became the Jewish Revolt. The more I read Josephus — and his four works (The Jewish War, The Antiquities of the Jews, The Life and Against Apion) provide quite the kick — the more impressive Mr. Ellis’s interpretation seems to me.
“That a republic may vanish is an elementary schoolbook fact.”
Since reading Garet Garrett’s The People’s Pottage 42 years ago, I have not really “believed” in the American federal republic. The three essays that make up the 1953 volume are “The Revolution Was” (1938), “Ex America” (1951), and “The Rise of Empire” (1952). While Garrett focused on the the revolution that was the New Deal in the first of these essays, the enormity of the revolution in the state became clearer to him over time, and I, since reading the book, have become aware of how right Garrett was. Though we are distracted from the anti-republican elements in American political governance by our quadrennial presidential election cycle and by the propagandistic efforts of major news purveyors, the reality is nevertheless revealed, though hardly fully revealed, to those who pay attention. The chiefest of these realities is the “Deep State,” which far from being a fictional entity or imposed category on experience, is the array of the bureaucracies and corporations that hide behind classifications of secrecy.
The dominance of these institutions preclude the terms “republic” or “democracy” as apt designators of These Benighted States.
My working model for American national government is that of a conservatorship, with the bureaus protecting the People from their own senile whims. The democratic elements are not at the root of our system any longer, the Administrative State is, the permanent government, especially the parts covered in protective secrecy. The Deep State, I hazard, is the firmware and the o.s.; the democratic parts are the GUI.
This conservatorship would be more comforting were it more competent, but the model requires that the real rulers come from the ranks of the benighted, and, with the recent fiascos of Russiagate, the Ukraine debacle, and the pandemic, it is quite clear that at least the public spokespeople for the real government are not merely deceptive, but foolish, their plans makeshift. We are not dealing with Evil Masterminds, here, though undoubtedly there are a few, who have been inducted into the deepest part of the Deep State
I am not saying that the U.S. ceased being a republic with the creation of the CIA. Garrett’s first essay is older. (Indeed, the Civil War, the Spanish-American war, and the Great War all subverted the republic profoundly.) Furthermore, there were multiple factors in the growth of the military-industrial complex that led to the current sub rosa conservatorship model. But as numerous major liberal figures in the 18th and 19th century repeatedly warned, a large permanent military presence and the practice of secrecy are utterly at odds with liberty, democracy, and citizen governance.
After the New Deal and World War II, Operation Paperclip, the multiplication of “intelligence” agencies, the continual parade of unwinnable wars, the cushy deals with armament corporations, the use of military bases as “pork,” and many other factors led ineluctably to our current ultra-fake republic, spurred by the witless partisans in the two major political parties.
And the only true “statesmen” are men and women in the deep recesses of power whose names you do not know. Our elected leaders, on the other hand, are a brummagem lot.
The comedy of democracy in the context of its actual diminished capacity is so great that it is often hard to keep a straight face. Most people manage by forgetting the context. It is great fun reading journalists who cover the Pentagon and Surveillance State beats knowingly narrate the budgets and bearing of the protected bureaus, and then pretend that “democracy is worth fighting for” by siding with one faction or another. But part of the comedy is forgetting. And to be an American intellectual is to be something of an amnesiac.
And as for the common folk? I have a great deal of trouble taking seriously a people who have voted into power, as putative maximum leaders,
a sadsack peanut farmer
an actor
a former head of the CIA!
a super-corrupt governor of a backwater state
the witless buffoon son of a former president
an identitarian poseur ‘community organizer’
a ‘reality TV’ star
a former bumbling senator of advanced age with obvious dementia problems and a family shakedown corruption scam, ongoing
But these are just the turds who floated to the top. Down below, it’s far more disturbing.
Until a recent video by Rebel Wisdom, I had never heard of Samo Burja. I just do not follow international affairs well enough, I guess. But Mr. Burja’s discussion of Putin and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine struck me as not only interesting, but very much along familiar lines:
This analyst makes three predictions:
1. China develops more financial alternatives to First World financial systems and offers them to rogue states around the world. (I’ve talked about this before, on Paul Jacob’s podcast a few weeks ago. This could help collapse the dollar, by the way.)
2. Russia successfully occupies large chunks of Ukraine that it did not control before. (Seems likely. Surely Putin’s keeping the eastern sectors, but, this man says, more than just the Donbas region.)
3. Putin remains in power for the next year.
He also says Russia will become something of a vassal state to China, which is something neither we nor the Russians should want. But it is something the Chinese quasi-commies want (why don’t we just call the CCP elite caste the warlords or oligarchs? Please advise). And it is something that the embargoes will ensure. This is also a point I’ve made before.
The Romney position that Russia is America’s most dangerous enemy — the position that Obama once mocked but now Democrats push with spittle flying — is something China needs us to believe, for I suspect (and, again, have said as much to friends) that China pushed Russia to do this as part of its plan to weaken America which would allow it to conquer Taiwan. That’s not the only end game, but it’s a huge one, and Burja identifies it as Xi Jinping’s life goal. Seems likely.
Given that China has invested so much in the Democratic Party (Biden being a paid stooge and almost certainly a traitor in technical terms, and worthy of the firing squad), that all of the media has rallied propaganda to this diversion is hardly surprising at all.
Above all I do not want WWIII, which I think is likely if Biden loses control of what remains of his senses. What I think the corrupt insider Democrats yearn for is a protracted set of brushfire wars with a weakened Russia. But pushing Russia is really, really dangerous. Past Ukrainian policy by the Dems has been as insane as their desire to regime change Assad and their “successful” regime change of Qaddafi. These people seem like fools, but I don’t know precisely what they want. But if they want a One World Government with the power center in Beijing, they appear to be doing great.
Secondarily I don’t want the U.S. to become any more like China. Or Russia. This element — an unintended effect of international conflict known to classical liberals for centuries — is also something that Mr. Burja makes clear.
In recent podcasts with Paul Jacob, I tried also to make this point:
First (6:50), I suggest that the COVID over-reaction police states of New Zealand and Australia maybe disqualify them from “free nation” status, and therefore as American allies. Then (9:46) I explain my concern over how disastrous American interventions have been generally — in one country after another — and most recently in Ukraine. And when I got to the subject of biolabs in Ukraine, Paul Jacob not only agreed with me but expressed a bigger worry: that these may have been established there the better to escape American law prohibiting bioweapons research (just as the American military did with torture under Bush/Cheney). And I went on (22:39) to suggest that the current war started in 2020 with the release and psy-op packaging of SARS-CoV-2 into global society, courtesy of the Wuhan biolab, and that the point of China egging on Russia was to demoralize Americans from war to allow China an easier walk-in over the Taiwan Strait. And Democrats, because they are basically crazed enviro-nuts who think that energy is bad and are willing to make Americans poor the better to virtue-signal their commitment to “the planet,” are helping China along.
This is not the first time American foreign policy has been shanghaied to subvert our own freedom. Without any pressure from Spain, the United States succumbed to liberticidal imperialism during the McKinley administration, as William Graham Sumner made so clear in “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.”
The extent to which the Democrats at large are bought off by the Chinese is probably limited. Actual, direct “Manchurian Candidate” subversion of an American political figure is probably limited to Joe Biden himself (though a subverted president is nothing to sneeze at). The rest just go along with subversion for the very reason subversion works, according to Yuri Bezmenov: you cannot subvert someone who does not want to be subverted, and Democrats have been pinko for my whole lifetime. They love big government transfer programs and all the rest, and since they themselves get involved in the government racket, they can add class-interest to their lust for subversion of the American system . . . which once upon a time was based on private property and distributed responsibility.
Which is why Democrats became such true believers in Trump’s vaccine program as well as enthusiastic pushers of lockdowns and mask mandates. They do not care about medical results, not really: they care about regimenting society, abridging the freedom of all for the sake of all (the basic idea of republican governance, but also of socialism) and, especially, of targeted victim groups. This is, after all, the basic game progressives play in psycho-politics: sacrifice by all for the benefit of a few. But the utility of the pandemic to the Chinazis and the globalists has been waning. People around the world now chafe under the lockdowns and idiotic (and obviously ineffective) mask mandates.
So: invasion to “the rescue” — the rescue of globalists’ subversion plans. The Great Reset and all.
Just how limp a noodle the COVID flail has become can be seen in how kid-gloved YouTube has been to Dr. John Campbell. In a series of videos, recently, he has explored the data that shows how destructive pandemic policy has been. And he has been allowed to continue. A half year ago he would have been de-platformed by the Deep State’s Internet service wing, Google/Alphabet.
And it is worth noting how amazing Campbell’s turn has been on the subject. Steve Kirsch, writing on Substack, explains the situation pretty well: “a former advocate of the vaccine, trusted by millions of people, has now realized he’s been deceived and he’s not happy about it at all.”
Paul Jacob wrote about Dr. Campbell’s discussion of recent Ivermectin study results, in “This Is Just Huge.” Kirsch fixes upon the doctor’s consideration of recent revelations from Pfizer about adverse effects of the mRNA treatment.
I share this not because the news seems all that new to me, but because many folks are just now realizing how wrong “the experts” were. In the wake of proof that the government has lied to us about the safety of mRNA coronavirus “vaccines,” we now get a lot of “how could people reject this information” and “how could they have suppressed information about adverse effects” sputterings.
Oh, the naivety. It is so very easy. Those on the inside had a lot of money and prestige on the line, while the masses of people are generally serviles, demanding to be saved by higher-ups. What I’ve seen over and over on this latter is incredulity that great groups of people could commit fraud and great harm, knowingly coupled with this: the belief that some must be sacrificed for the greater good — if some people must die that the majority be saved, all the better!
This sacrifice ideology, absolutely central to life in a wealth-transfer state, has been endemic for a century now. It is a sign that people have tacitly embraced what they would otherwise, in moments of clarity, describe as “fascist” or “Nazi” or “communist” principles. Because of this, along with propaganda-induced fear and tribal allegiances, the masses and the elites have pushed dangerous and deadly-to-some pseudo-vaccines while suppressing less expensive yet more efficient treatment and prophylactic regimens.
I think this is a sign of a decadent civilization.
To me, a decent, life-affirming political philosophy begins with the realization that majorities and even consensus opinion can be wrong. The low-level democratic idea insists that only a few “bad people” can commit great evils. This is obviously way off, and is the wedge notion that allows for a massacre society. Which we now live in.
And is that why we can actually encounter leftist Democrats talk about nuclear first strikes?
How low our society has sunk. But it can go lower, and, I fear, will. Under pressure to fulfill the entelechies they have already nurtured — let their adopted memes take over their lives and infect others — and as subverted by Chinese psy-ops and their own fears of imperialist Russia, American Democrats and neocons could actually destroy civilization. All it takes is a few nuclear bombs. Or a real plague. Or globalist totalitarianism.
As my friends know, one of my favorite conspiracy conjectures — which I lovingly bring up at awkward social moments, to fondle intellectually and perhaps too publicly — is that [some of] the elites in the Deep State and the Davos crowd know that a huge natural holocaust is coming, that it would likely destroy the bulk of civilization, and that it would be a mercy to kill off vast swaths of humanity more slowly, prior to that chaotic event.
How? Say through a planned rollout of pseudo-vaccines that make us weaker and prone to spread-out deaths via bloodclots, autoimmune disease, and the like.
And what would this natural holocaust be? A surge of solar energy is the most likely candidate. Knowledge of a cyclical recurrence of comet hits might suggest the same strategy.
This is not just outrageous speculation. Terrestrial hits of solar bursts are unpredictable but not uncommon on a long time-line. Evidence for them is accumulating — they are not just limited to the infamous Carrington Event of 1859. A recent article at Astronomy.com relates evidence of a massive solar storm many thousands of years ago, as the pre-pottery neolithic (PPN) was reaching a tipping point in accumulating capital — something perhaps necessary for civilization to take off. The article’s blurb: “An analysis of radioactive chemicals in ice cores indicates one of the most powerful solar storms ever hit Earth around 7176 B.C.” The article links to a scholarly paper published in January, “Cosmogenic radionuclides reveal an extreme solar particle storm near a solar minimum 9125 years BP.” It is fascinating.
Other extraterrestrial events are being studied and categorized as well — I’ve mentioned the Holocene Impact Working Group before. In the paper “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea,” the truth about Sodom and Gomorrah came out last year: a bolide event destroyed a city near the Dead Sea c. 1650 BC. This fits the Biblical timeline. More important is evidence of massive destruction at the Abu Hureyra site in Syria: this event c. 10,800 BC. This fits the Younger Dryas timeline, and is a few thousand years earlier than the PPN.
And note: isn’t it interesting that the eruption of Thera/Santorini happened within a century of the destruction of Sodom/Gomorrah? Ralph Ellis’s contention that the Santorini event corresponds to the first Exodus, arguing that the “parting of the Red Sea” describes classic tsunami behavior, and that the historical record of the event can be found on a well-known stela in Egypt, hidden in plain sight.
But back to my conjecture about our elites: Arguably, it’s not “mercy” alone that would have the elites kill off the “superfluous” populations. The chaos of mass death on a multi-billion population planet might preclude the elites from reaching their bunkers in time to wear out the maelstrom. But had the population already been radically reduced in number and spirit over years of death and anguish and sorrow — from, say, iatrogenic effects of the recent pandemic — then maybe the elites could make their getaways.
What I am suggesting is that the celestial coup de grâce (solar surge; comet hit; what-have-you) might make for less civilizational destruction — fewer riots, mostly — allowing for the rich folks (Hollywood moguls, tech company heads, politicians, billionaires, scientists, a few athletes — insert Dr. Strangelove arguments here) to make their escape into the underground bunkers.
The elites are contemplating a new Ark. What with the military’s vast empires of underground installations already in place, the Ark, I hazard, has already been made, and the plan is in place. And folks like Fauci and Schwab and Gates and others are likely in on it.
I of course merely speculate; I know nothing. But for us science fiction readers, well: some of us assume that when we imagine possibilities, well-funded people make plans.
twv
Looking westwards towards the Sun, on the Pacific.
Next, try to understand the idea of sacrifice. The religious fixation on the rite of sacrifice is fascinating. For years I’ve pushed the notion of the practice as important in establishing a moral universe with an integral cost concept. Without a sense of cost, morality is impossible. Sacrifice is crude but perhaps effective in this task.
I think I have heard Jordan Peterson pushing something like that.
Anyway, the ancient Egyptians sacrificed bulls. But that was in the Age of Taurus. Upper Egypt kept the Apis Bull Worship going even after the Age of Aries began. In Lower Egypt, the folks living next to the Giza pyramids knew better, that the Ram had replaced the Bull. This became a central concept in the development of Mediterranean (“Middle Earth!”) and Mesopotamian religion. Genesis and Exodus both encode that transition. And the BC/AD divide marks the beginning of the Age of Pisces, of the Fisher Kings — the sign of the fish and all that.
Could the Carthaginians have engaged in holdover rites from the Age of Gemini, when twins were the religious fixation? I know not. Seems a stretch.
We are still a ways away from the Age of Aquarius. Or already in it. Depends on who you ask. I am unsure of why this would be of prime importance for philosophy — but the ancients were obsessed with the Great Year. Still reeling from the catastrophes of the Ice Age, they were understandably obsessed. And putting the idea of cyclical regularity into the major religions was, for them, a natural notion. And interweaving it into our collective unconscious with sacrifice? I guess that seemed vitally important.
The first (and fledgling) republican federation rebooted under the Constitution of 1787.
The second republic rebooted to a nation-state with the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1860-65.
The nationalist republic rebooted to neo-empire in a series of ratcheting acts (Spanish-American War; Progressive advancement of the administrative state; World War I; Great Depression and the New Deal; World War II) finalizing with the formation of the national security state.
So now we are due for another such restarting, grand revision, and we are about on schedule. You can smell it in the air. And see its necessity on a variety of spreadsheets, not all of them financial — but the debt hangeth like a Damoclean blade strung up on the slenderest of threads, over our heads. Some reset, great or evil or heroic or messy, is coming, perhaps soon.
What’ll it be?
Democrats say Republicans are fascists, Republicans say Democrats are commies: so the safe bet is technocratic totalitarianism, with commie and fascist elements.
Could be something else though. But anything else will take bloodshed, which I doubt Americans really have much stomach for. They’d rather stay home and be stamped by the Mark of the Beast — for COVID.
The video, directly below, is the finale to a series of lectures on the history of unbelief from medieval to modern times. It strikes me as quite good — good enough that I just ordered the lecturer’s book on the subject. (I also cued up the audio version in Scribd.)
Alec Ryrie’s novel argument in this lecture is that the modern humanist consensus is not based on any of the major arguments or strains of intellectual atheism, but, instead, on the replacement of Jesus Christ as the center of our civilization’s moral universe WITH HITLER . . . as the Devil. What unifies most parties and certainly most citizens today is actually the Argumentum ad Hitlerium. The humanistic consensus, in Christian, non-Christian, and anti-Christian forms, is derived by inverting Hitlerism Popularly Understood. Hence our obsessive focus on one type of vice — racism, sexism, and other x-isms that intellectually congeal around the in-group/out-group antagonism — to the exclusion of other vices or any coherent set of virtues.
And this allows me to understand why I am so at variance with our general culture.
For I definitely did not derive and hone my normative thought via inverting Adolf Diabolos!
I find this devil-inversion method witless, and today’s cultic focus on this new Devil as sub-intellectual.
The reason for the former is that the method allows people to be manipulated by ideological propagandists and Deep State psy-op masters. The reason for the latter is that Hitler Popularly Understood is a hothouse flower, carefully cutivated and not enough of the real thing.
Hitler is in many ways far worse than his image, because the bulk of his ideas are now so mainstream. The welfare state itself was one of his crowning achievements, and it was an outrage, and quite integral to his designs. Yet many of the nutters who today think they oppose Adolf Diabolos in every possible way actually promote many of his key programs, and their commitment to these programs corrupts their politics generally. Sure, sure; I know, I know: They pick and choose — just as did the American military when it rescued thousands of Nazi scientists and engineers under Operation Paperclip and organized the post-war Deep State as this strange and quite dangerous echo of the Third Reich’s hidden core.
So now we have Boris Johnson and Joe Biden openly planning to regulate speech in a totalitarian fashion, and most people do not see this as the culmination of Hitlerism. I do.
And don’t, for it is also the culmination of the love of leftist socialism.
I am just not into setting up binaries and normative inversions. For I think we Hyperboreans must be mindful of the Law of Nemesis.
Which is in truth the real, animating spirit that is bringing an end to this age of the humanist consensus.
And Ryrie is surely right to prophesy that the current consensus will not last. And yes, I think it is in the process of collapsing right now, in a spectacular way.
I may, some day, write a full review of this book, and of Ralph Ellis’s major contentions. This is not that review, not that day.
A hint to the reader, though: Ellis’s books are inquiries.
Sure, Ellis offers radical revisions of historical understanding, but he does not write histories using the standard narrative technique, or historical treatises plying what has been called the “rhetoric of conclusions.” Ellis’s approach often runs in an unfamiliar manner to many readers’ expectations, demonstrating a “rhetoric of inquiry.” We follow the author, in his many pages, from one problem to the next, with many offered solutions. He offers numerous conjectures, and ably backs them up. But his techniques are often unorthodox, usually resting on unraveling many layers of wordplay.
Now, this is dangerous stuff, in that one might easily abuse language in the course of unraveling past abuses — too easily mistake a homonym or mere phonetic echo for a pun for a past fact — but Ellis’s method may be characterized, at least in part, as an archeology of nomenclature. And his archeological sense is not dominated by fantasies of creation, at least not in the books of his I’ve read.
But there is no avoiding an archeology of names. In written records, especially of a religious nature, that is mostly what we have to work with.
Ellis is trying to make sense of the history of Judaism and Christianity and related religions. All religions engage in word magic, marshaling artful puns and the like. This is especially involved in Jewish writings, where we see some astounding evasions using such methods, such as the pesher technique in the Talmud. Many of the words used in scriptures and in ancient times have multiple — even obscure and even opaque — meanings, sporting etymologies that are open to contest. A word that once meant one thing comes to mean something else, and when these usages change mark important points in history. Accepting some ready-at-hand or traditional meaning may be accepting a long-embedded error, or even a lie.
The Hebrew Bible depicts the Jews’ history as developing in the context of two great civilizations, Egyptian and Mesopotamian. But one of the peculiarities of Judeo-Christian history is that most of its major figures, though dominant in their scriptures, are not recorded outside those scriptural documents. Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Jesus — these people do not appear in Egyptian and Mesopotamian records, or in surviving monuments or actual archeological sites. Not a few scholars regard all pre-Babylonian stories as all or mostly myth, and authors like Richard Carrier speculate that there never was a historical Jesus — he was made up; a religious fiction. Ellis, in his books, looks at these issues anew, consulting Manetho and Josephus and the Talmud and to-us-obscure Syrian historians, expecting to find historical figures, if dislocated in place and time. And boy, does he find them!
In previous books he identified the Hebrew patriarchs with the Hyksos “Shepherd Kings” — as frankly stated by Manetho and Josephus; he found David and Solomon among the later, post-Ramesside pharaohs of the Nile Delta; and he discovered an ancestry for Jesus in, of all people, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, and Parthian royalty!
More astonishingly, Ellis daringly became the first to lay claim to unearthing an ancient conspiracy of the Flavian emperors, in which historian Josephus serves as a master propagandist, appearing as both the Apostle Paul, the founder of what Ellis calls “Simple Judaism” (or Christianity) and as Rabbi ben Zakkai, the inventor of post-conquest rabbinical Judaism. This grew from Ellis’s attempts to make sense of what Josephus was up to — a very complicated man, and even on the face of it not dissimilar to Saint “All Things to All People” Paul. Noting the Josephan histories’ many evasions, animadversions, odd nomenclatures, inconsistencies, and weird parallels with the gospels and the Book of Acts, Ellis identified the historical Jesus, too . . . as “Jesus of Gamala.”
In this book, Jesus, King of Edessa, he goes further, investigating the kingdom of Edessa and its monarchs, drilling down behind Josephus’s slippery characters Jesus of Gamala and “bar Kamza” et al., finding a man with a place in history and even surviving pictorial images: King Manu VI, a cousin or some other relative of Josephus, all bound up with the Jewish revolt put down by Vespasian and Titus, whom Josephus wound up serving.
Whereas the big evasion and lie at the heart of the “Old Testament” is the hiding of the truth about the Egyptian origin of Judaism, the whopper in the “New Testament” account is the moving the story of Jesus back in time from the Jewish Wars to the comparatively peaceful period of Pontius Pilate. The dislocation is chiefly in time, though the dislocation in geography is the existence of a Syrian kingdom “beyond the Euphrates” in Harran and Palmyra, and its dominance by an Egypto-Jewish dynasty that started out as a tax-free buffer state between Rome and Parthia and, under the direction of Jesus (Izas/Izates/King Manu) instigated a revolt against Rome. And was put down.
The story is complex. As is the book itself. The unraveling of the layers of myth-making, evasions and even outright lies was an astounding labor. Ellis is quite convincing, though I can imagine many reasons why a person might start out incredulous and remain, even after reading, more than a tad dubious. As for my part? I am more than half-convinced. But the work of untangling the thorns from these old stories is far from over.
For the record, I suspect Ellis misses a major wrinkle in the story he tells by not confronting Josephus’s discussion of Pontius Pilate’s career-ending routing of a religious pilgrimage in Samaria, a region close to Jerusalem he never mentions. I hazard it could be key to unraveling the full story of the stones from the Ark of the Covenant that became so important to Edessan religious tradition. And which Heliogabalus later brought to Rome when he became emperor, a short “meteoric” rise that seems to have weirdly accomplished what Jesus “of Gamala” aimed at.
Ellis sure has written some long books. He pores over seeming minutia. Not every single one of his conclusions can possibly have the same value. And, perhaps, it would have been helpful had he taken the rhetoric of inquiry a tad more seriously and in a more overtly Popperian manner, offering his arguments even more rigorously as conjectural rather than, as he occasionally writes, “proofs.”
There are a few stylistic oddities in the book. Example? Ellis spells verb and noun forms of “prophesy” the same, while I try always to remember to make my noun form with a “c,” “prophecy.” I cannot tell you how much this bugged me! (Is this an English thing? I will look it up later.)
Ralph Ellis ends Jesus, King of Edessa with a discussion of the fate of Edessa at the hands of Islamic civilization. This will be off-putting to those who believe Islam “is a religion of peace.” Since I regard this statement, repeatedly made by American drone bombing gamesmen Bush and Obama, as a ‘noble lie’ at best, I was not at all disturbed by Ellis’s concluding thoughts on the possible destruction of western civilization by Islamic memes and corrupt, craven politicians of a decadent post-liberal culture. I say, instead, Bravo!
I live-blogged my reading of this book on Gab.com (@wirkman), where Ralph Ellis also micro-blogs. I have interviewed Mr. Ellis twice for my podcast, locofoco.net: they were long and profitable conversations, I think.
Anthony Comegna returns to my podcast for his third outing. The video will go up soon, but the podcast is ready on multiple podcatchers and at SoundCloud (LocoFoco.net):
To connect with Dr. Comegna, try Twitter, where he is known as Dr LocoFoco.
The latest episode of the LocoFoco Netcast, my podcast, is online in both video and audio forms. Like the previous episode, we wander into an extra-controversial topic for controversial reasons. I interview Ralph Ellis, the author of a number of books including King Jesus (which I finished reading only after I chatted with Mr. Ellis for this episode) and Jesus, King of Edessa.
LocoFoco Netcast, Season Two, Episode Four: February 21, 2021.
This is a tricky subject, of course, in no small part because many people, around the world, are believers in one of the three major religions herein discussed: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Like Ralph Ellis, I’m not a believer in any of these religions. But, also like Ralph Ellis, I do not think disbelief in a religion gives the disbeliever license to kill and otherwise abuse members of the religion in question. Religious warfare and genocide are despicable things. They are not acceptable when done in the name of one religion against another, or by disbelievers in all of the major religions. We are living in strange times, when the lid that has been placed, culturally and politically, against mass religious warfare could blow off at any moment, leaving us with a bloodbath — and perhaps no civilization to speak of.
But it is also the case that many people orient themselves politically and morally using religion. This has always been the case. Indeed, this is one of the things religion provides: a mechanism (or, if you prefer, organism) for ego-transcendent morality. Now, I believe that the evidence suggests that just about any metaphysical system could provide that service, but undoubtedly some work better than others. Along with Ralph Ellis, I judge Islam deficient in this regard. Though I did not inquire deeply into Mr. Ellis’s “Islamophobia” (a detestable name for opposition to some specific bad memes), or explicate my own, I can with some confidence state that there are crucial components to the Islamic memeplex that enable it to grow and thrive — while not really allowing freedom to grow and thrive. Muslims have been backwards for a thousand years, and for obvious reasons, not excluding the hegemonic beliefs that squelch liberal developments, especially including notions like Dhimmitude, taqiyya, capital punishment for apostasy, and the simple gambit that Mohammad was to be “the last Prophet.” These are all pernicious notions, integral to Islam.
But every political idea set has some truly dangerous notions. Christianity led to our civilization, which has raised world health, wealth and freedom, but embedded in the core Christian notions are a number of incompatible memes, and warring notions can do much damage.
For this reason, I have long treated investigation into the origins of Christianity as more than a matter of mere curiosity.
I have read up and down and around the subject for years. Of particular interest has been what Albert Schweitzer called “The Quest for the Historical Jesus.” This is perhaps most famously instantiated in the modern Jesus Seminar scholarship, though, after decades of reading in this vein, and about Gnosticism as well (Hans Jonas and Elaine Pagels being the two main historians), a certain deep skepticism set in: the main scholars seemed not to get far, leaving the origins of Christianity in a deep shadow.
Ralph Ellis figured out why. He saw something kind of obvious — but one of those “too obvious” problems that, because of their obviousness could not even be admitted by most people as a problem. There was a historical mystery at the heart of the Gospels: why was an apparently insignificant figure like Jesus (a “peaceful” “carpenter”) so significant in Pontius Pilate’s day, and how did he relate to the epoch-making events of the Jewish Rebellion and its suppression by Roman generals (and future emperors) Vespasian and Titus? Something historically huge and “majorly” evident happened in the seventh and eighth decades of this epoch designated A.D., yet the purported most important man of the period, Jesus, is said to have barely made a world-shaking blip a few decades earlier?
Ellis saw that there had been some strategic fibbing. The historical Jesus had indeed been a revolutionary, as repeatedly suggested and alluded to in the gospels . . . and in the seventh decade in particular. But somebody (whom Ellis identifies in a daring and mind-blowing way) had insulated this revolutionary’s true identity by placing him back in time, in history and out of History.
And Ellis has made some astute observations about the accumulating evidence: at the heart of the matter was the astrological changing of the World’s zodiacal odometer, from the Age of Aries (the Ram) to the Age of Pisces (the Fishes), which began c. 10 A.D. And which gave both the Flavian emperors and the Christians their telltale symbols, the Fish:
The sign of the cross took on increasing importance, of course, as the message of personal salvation became central to Christianity. But to Jesus of Gamala — the historical rather than gospel Jesus — the fish was vitally important, for the gnosis at the heart of his variant of Judaism (he was a Nazarene) was ancient knowledge of the precession of the Earth. This was information that the Jews took out of Egypt shortly after the end of the Taurian Age (of the Bull).
Ralph Ellis is the author of a number of well-thought-out, fascinating explorations that upend what we think about the religions grounding our western civilization. His works can be found at his own publishing house, Edfu Books. His “Illumination Lecture” series on YouTube is also worth consulting. I was extremely happy to have interviewed him, now for a second time. The interview, as published now, lingered “in the can” for a few weeks of difficulties, including technical difficulties (I need a decent mixer) and regional (an ice storm hit and I was without power for too long). Now it is up. I hope people can give it an open-minded review, as an introduction to a new way of looking at the beginning of our age.
For, we are all Pisceans, fishers of men. To those who accept the gospel accounts, they will of course not enjoy this exploration, for it is deeply, deeply heretical. Even apostate. But then, I’m merely another heretical apostate, seeking the truth.
I can assure you, I realize that these matters of history and religion are not irrelevant for our age. For one thing, if Ralph Ellis is right, they show that much of our lives has been deeply influenced, if not to say determined, by myth-makers long ago, men consciously engaged in psychological warfare. A grand psy-ops. These propagandists sought to bring peace to an empire by manipulating our species’ religious sense.
And many, many folks do likewise to this very day.
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Wirkman Comment 