Wednesday 23 March 2011

NINE SENTENCES, OR TEN COMMANDMENTS?

Recently I watched, for the first time, the entire 1956 blockbuster movie THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, starring Charlton Heston (I had started to watch it on local TV in April, 1995, but got diverted to Moses Znaimer on another channel), and that gave rise to a number of thoughts, which I herewith share.  My first impression was that the Biblical Moses was much too Jewish for Hollywood, so they tried to make him into a Christian.  Many of the thoughts expressed by the movie-version Moses differ sharply from those expressed by the Biblical Moses.  Most of these are in the category of ecumenist thought, i.e., that the God of Israel was a God for all people, not just the chosen.  This thought did not arise in Judaism until seven centuries later, when it was expressed only by a minority of thinkers who followed the Hosea-Jeremiah-Habakkuk school.  Main-stream Judaism to this day remains exclusivist.  Hollywood put words into the mouth of Moses which are directly contrary to the thrust of his mission – to define a racist, exclusivist and patriarchal religion which differs substantially from all other religions.  The main event of the movie, the Exodus from Egypt, is commemorated in the Jewish Passover to this day, and it is an exclusivist feast.  [For more on that point, read the review of Jesus Against the Rapture at http://nebirucrossing.blogspot.com/2011/03/jesus-against-rapture-jewett-unexpected.html  ].  
In addition to presenting a Moses who differs substantially from the Biblical Moses, the movie contrasts to what we now know about the historical Moses.  That difference can be excused, because most of the pertinent historical research was done after this movie had been made – the movie dates to just a few years after the discovery of the Dead Sea and related scrolls (and before English translations of them had been released) which became the impetus to intensive research from the 1960s to date. [For detail, see http://nebirucrossing.blogspot.com/2011/03/scrolls-and-tablets-part-one.html .]
The historical Moses was actually two people living about a century apart, both named Tutmosis.  [Tutmosis is a variant of Thoth-Moses which means ‘son of’ or ‘follower of’ Thoth.]  The first Tutmosis was the Shepherd King Pharaoh who brought monotheism to Egypt; the second Tutmosis was disqualified by his marriage from becoming the Pharaoh he was destined to be, and instead, led the escape from his half-brother, i.e., the Pharaoh who took the throne in Moses’ place.  Each Tutmosis served for two decades or more as the high priest of the Temple at Heliopolis, and both were thus accustomed to dealing with violent religious dissent.  The actual staff used by the historical Moses has been found.  [For details and a good current summary of the historical Moses, read the review of The Moses Legacy at  http://nebirucrossing.blogspot.com/2011/03/review-moses-legacy-phillips.html ].
Thirdly, the movie makes no reference to the ultimate destination of Moses’ soul.  He [literally!] struck out -- he went to hell -- he failed the perfection test.  The sin of pride got in his way:  God had told him to speak to the rock to bring forth water; instead, Moses struck the rock with his staff – that had worked previously, and it did work this time, too.  But the Mosaic God is jealous and particular and a stipulator of detail.  Because Moses disobeyed God, he could never enter into God’s rest.  For this reason, the devil had a legitimate claim to Moses’ body (since he also had the soul); and thus:  the dispute between God and Satan over the body of Moses, recorded in the Book of Jude.
And, finally, the very title of the movie is historically misleading.  What the early Christians, and Jews to this day, call the Nine Sentences, was first called the Ten Commandments by Mohammed circa 640 ad.  There is only ONE commandment, first stated by Jeremiah in First Jeremiah [also called Deuteronomy, see http://nebirucrossing.blogspot.com/2011/03/scrolls-and-tablets-part-two.html ], from whence it was quoted by Jesus.  The ONE commandment has three parts [all truth is Trinitarian in nature]:  love God; love neighbour; love self.   Jesus quoted [Matt. 22:36-40] the preamble of the Ieremaic re-statement [second giving] of the Mosaic law as THE WHOLE OF THE LAW.  Followed by nine corollaries towards achievement of obedience to the ONE commandment.  The number had to be nine because that is the number of completion, fulfillment, perfection and divinity in both Christian and Jewish numerology.  In Islam, the divine number is ten; hence Mohammed was the first to re-name the Nine Sentences as the Ten Commandments.  Since the time-frame of this movie was about two millennia before Mohammed, it ought to have been titled The Nine Sentences.

Monday 21 March 2011

REVIEW: RELIGION & THE SCIENTIFIC FUTURE Langdon Gilkey

ABOUT THE BOOK:
The role of myth in a scientific culture, and the reasons why our modern technological society requires both myth and theology in order to understand itself and guide its destiny, are explored by Gilkey.  Science has changed our attitudes toward religious statements and the traditional sources of Christian belief.  There has been a shift from the belief that religious truths are made up of statements of fact, to the understanding of religious truth as a system of symbols.  Such reinterpretation of religious language has moved theology even further out of the mainstreams of science and  history, fostering increasingly a belief in the meaninglessness of theology, leading to the God-is-dead movement.  Gilkey proposes that myth has great importance for science, and advocates a renewed interpendence of science and theology.  Dr. Gilkey was Professor of Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and this book consists of four long chapters which were previously given as lectures.  Gilkey has written other books on related subjects, as well as a personal account of his two and a half years in a Japanese concentration camp in China during WW2. 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Langdon Brown Gilkey (February 9, 1919November 19, 2004) was an American Protestant Ecumenical theologian.  The grandson of Clarence Talmadge Brown, the first non-Mormon minister to gather a congregation in Salt Lake City, Gilkey grew up in Hyde Park, Chicago, where his father Charles Whitney Gilkey was the first Dean of the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel, and his mother Geraldine Gunsaulus (Brown) Gilkey was a prominent feminist, and niece of Frank Wakely Gunsaulus, the first President of the Illinois Institute of Technology. [1]. He attended the Laboratory School (part of the University of Chicago), and in 1936 he graduated from the Asheville School for Boys, in North Carolina [2]. In 1939 he received a magna cum laude in philosophy from Harvard, he moved to China in 1940 to teach English at Yenching University and was imprisoned by the Japanese in 1943. [1]  After the War, Gilkey obtained his Doctorate in Philosophy from Columbia University in New York, and became Reinhold Niebuhr's teaching assistant. He went on to become a professor at Vassar from 1951 to 1954, and at Vanderbilt Divinity School from 1954 to 1963. In 1960 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Munich. In late 1963 he began teaching at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he eventually became the Shailar Mathews Professor of Theology until March 1989, when he retired. While on sabbatical in 1970, he taught at University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, and in 1975 he taught at Kyoto University in Japan, where his lecture series focused on the environmental perils of industrialization. He continued to teach at both the University of Virginia, and Georgetown University till 2001. During this last period of his teaching career, he had also been a visiting professor at the Theology Division (now Divinity School) of Chung Chi College, the Chinese University of Hong Kong for one year.  He died of meningitis on November 19, 2004 at the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville. [2] He was 85.  Gilkey was a prolific author, with 15 books and over 100 articles to his credit. Perhaps his most widely read book was the story of his own religious-theological journey. In Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure (1968), Gilkey narrates his departure from the liberal Protestant belief system during World War II when he was made a prisoner of war in the "Civilian Internment Center" near Weihsien for two-and-a-half years (1943-1945).  It was this experience that led to his subsequent rethinking of Christianity in the modern “time of trouble.” Acutely responsive to the need to reconsider such traditional symbols as sin and grace in the turbulent and so often “barbarous 20th century,” Gilkey renewed and revivified the classical Reformation insights—largely ignored by optimistic liberal theologians—into individual, societal and historical estrangement, self-delusion and sin.  Gilkey once responded to fellow theologian Edgar Brightman, who believed in God because man's history (to him) represented steady moral progress, saying "I believe in God, because to me, history precisely does not represent such a progress." [2]  Gilkey was celebrated in academic circles for his work on Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, prominent 20th-century Protestant theologians. Yet Gilkey was more popularly known for his writings on science and religion. He published at length on the topic, fighting on two fronts: against Christian fundamentalist attacks on science, and against secularist attacks on religious meaning and truth. In Creationism on Trial: Evolution and God at Little Rock (1985), he recounted his experience as an expert witness for the American Civil Liberties Union as it challenged the constitutionality of an article passed by the Arkansas State Legislature mandating that creationist views be taught alongside evolutionary theory in high schools. There, in what was called a “modern day version of the Scopes Monkey Trial,” he argued against Christian fundamentalist claims that “creation-science” was a science, as being distinct from religion cloaked as science.  His early books and articles demonstrated the existential power of his experiences, from his early pacifist professions as a student at Harvard University, where his classmates included, among others, former President John F. Kennedy and Cardinal Avery Dulles, to his teaching in China and his experiences as a POW.  His teachers, especially Niebuhr and Tillich, at Union Theological Seminary, helped him with methods and categories to formulate a powerful and creative theological vision of his own. In the 1970's and '80s, Gilkey's theological vision was colored by the growth of Buddhism, and Sikhism as both religions began to influence religious life in America. He held the view most world religions enjoyed "rough parity".
Gilkey’s new theology of history, based on a rethinking of the questions of free will and grace, providence and fate, and eschatology and secular history, is one of his most important strictly theological contributions.
  1. Timothy R. Phillips, entry "Gilkey, Langdon Brown" in "Evangelical Dictionary of Theology", Baker Reference Library, p.482.
  2. Adam Bernstein, "Langdon Gilkey Dies; Theologian, Author, Educator", Washington Post.

ITEM XX06 in the NEBIRU CROSSING bookstore
CONDITION:  READER  [book is intact, but both boards warped, minor markings, dust jacket has extensive wear; FIRST EDITION]

REVIEW: SIKH GOLDEN TEMPLE [HARIMANDIR] ABODE OF GOD

THE GLIMPSES OF THE HARIMANDIR THE ABODE OF GOD by Sarup Singh Alag
Hardcover; 224 pages; this is one of only 1,000 copies printed of the “Fourth Revised Deluxe Edition”, July, 2000.  This book is an English translation of the Panjabi original, and the translation is atrocious, with at least five grammatical errors or spelling mistakes on each and every page of the book.  Even the title of the book has an punctuation error.  The book also requires an editor --- about 70% of the book is excess verbiage – unnecessary flowery language which displays the author’s vanity and detracts from the substantive content of the book.  This chest-thumping includes many passages repeating the inane remarks of insignificant tourists, giving the impression that the author is using the book to re-pay social obligations by naming all of these people, rather than carrying on with his stated intent:  explaining, in a logical and coherent manner, the religious and theological meaning of the building.  In this respect, the book becomes an unconscious sociological and economic exposition of the reasons that the underlying culture of the religion’s proponents has always failed to provide economic prosperity.  If the reader can surmount these most irritating hurdles, he will find the hidden gems [not more than 40 pages of the book] which do provide a most useful exposition of the meaning of the Golden Temple to the adherents of the Sikh religion.  The book could also use more illustrations – it has only one photograph of the Temple’s interior, showing about two dozen sleepy gadabouts lounging amongst dusty carpets in an extremely cluttered and disorderly bed chamber [probably bored by the author].  Two electric fans are visible, demonstrating that modern conveniences are necessary to replace a faith which isn’t working, and that the architecture cannot meet the cooling abilities of true sacred geometry.
ITEM YG73 in the Nebiru Crossing bookstore
reviewed by Natt Morris

Saturday 19 March 2011

REVIEW: MIAMI HERALD SUNDAY MAGAZINE March 13, 1966

March 13, 1966 issue of
The Herald Sunday Magazine.

Condition: moderate tanning due to age; scrambled letters puzzle on page 15 has been (correctly) completed in pencil;
otherwise good; 20 pages.


CONTENTS:

MAJOR FEATURES:
Cover and pages 10 & 11: PEYOTE: SEED OF DISCORD --
AN FIGHTS TO KEEP
ITS ‘SACRED MUSHROOM’
The is a Christian church which uses peyote in its sacraments, based on its unique interpretation of a single phrase in Romans 14.  The church is retaining ‘pagan’ aboriginal practices which can be traced back to Aztec usages.  This is very similar to the modern Christian church having adopted ‘pagan’ practices for reasons of political correctness circa 325 AD after it became the official religion of the .  The difference is that the NAC is not in a position of power where it can protect itself from persecution by itself becoming a persecutor.  Aboriginal peyote users have been persecuted in ever since the Spanish began burning them at the stake five centuries ago.  Although peyote has always been referred to by aboriginals as ‘sacred mushroom’, it is not a mushroom at all; it is a cactus derivative.  Aboriginals in the American South use the water turkey as a symbol of the rising through the chakras facilitated by the peyote; aboriginals further north use the sacred thunderbird in the same manner.  This article provides information on the legal battles of the NAC in particular, and aboriginals in general, not to be deterred from peyote use; some details on the scientific investigation of the substance; and the history of the subject.

Pages 4 & 5: THE BUSINESS OF REALITY [2 photos]
An account of an evening playing pool against Fats


Page 8: HOUNDS IN A HURRY [1 photo]
This article outlines the over 6,000 year history of greyhound racing, with emphasis on since the 1920s.  Greyhound racing is depicted on Egyptian tombs, is mentioned in Proverbs 30, and is referred to in the same sentence in Shakespeare’s Henry V from whence Sherlock Holmes derives his cry:
the games afoot!

REGULAR FEATURES:
Page 2: Q & A [5 questions]
Page 6: Photo-spread: Chess players [4 photos]
Page 7: Column: Goren on bridge
Page 12: Column: Life with Larry Thompson
Page 13: Fashion: Tips On Lips [Gidget’s advice on lipstick]
Page 14: Sunday Crossword
Page 15: Reviews: Records [10 records receive one-paragraph reviews,
including Man of La Mancha soundtrack]
Page 16: Cooking: two St. Patrick’s Day recipes [Shamrock Cake / Boiled Frosting]
Page 17: Essay: Teaching Responsibility is the Parents’ Task
Page 18: Home Décor: budget re-decorating hints for children’s bedrooms


MAJOR ADS:
Page 2: pool and patio, complete, installed $1,988!
Page 3: Kraft Chocolates
Page 5: Kraft Mayonnaise
Page 7: records by RCA Victor [Eddy Arnold featured]
Page 9: Rubberoid corrugated bulkheading
Page 17: May-Bud Cheese
Back cover: Richards All-Steel Cabinets


KANGAROO POET COMMENTS ON THIS ITEM:
The item up for auction here was examined by each of the 13 Poets who operate this eBay store, and they were each asked to make ONE comment on the item.  This illustrates the many ways in which the same item can be perceived, and the diversity of responses to the same item.  What the poets said:
ROBBIN, one of two gay Poets [the orientation is 2 gay, 3 bi, 8 straight] was intrigued by the similarity in the struggle for recognition by mainstream Christianity of the Native American Church [which uses peyote in its communion liturgy] with his own experiences in the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches [the so-called gay church] as it seeks acceptance by the mainstream.
NATT, the architect, looked at the technical description in an ad promoting bulkheading for Miami-area waterfront residents, and concluded that the solution would be subject to the original problem [under-base erosion] fifty years down the line, but that might not matter because most of the buyers would be dead by then.
JAYMES, the professional gambler, wondered how the biorhythm of greyhounds compared with humans, for use as a betting tool.
JDC, who is the same size and shape as Minnesota Fats at his best, rejoiced to find what he held to be moral support for snacking during the play of billiards.
RABIN, the English teacher, wants to get permission to reproduce the Weisberger article on discipline in his local high school’s e-zine.
HANS, retired cop, wondered whose move was next in one picture of the chess photo spread, because both white and black had a good move available.  Who is going first?
ANDREA, one of 3 Poets who are a shaman [the others: K’lakokum and Hans] was intrigued by the statistic that in scientific trials in France only 3 of  60 subjects who took peyote experienced hallucinations, and that in the news article 22 men took the peyote but only the shaman had visions.  She referred to K’lakokum’s essay On Hardness of Hearing, and the scripture which states that only the spiritual can see the spiritual, to support her argument that the peyote will only take into The House of Invention those who are spiritually qualified.
NORM, one of 3 Poets with a Jewish background [the others: Hans and Syd], connected the idea of the mushroom which isn’t a mushroom to The Moses Legacy’s assertions that the pre-Judaic religion began with an hallucinogenic experience in the Sinai mountains, distorted in the re-telling to a burning bush when the original was a burning sensation in the esophagus.
JHM, the only left-wing one of 7 Poets who have run for public office [the others: Syd, K’lakokum, Robbin – Libertarian; Norm, Hans – Conservative; Jaymes – Republican()]  was very interested in the legal history of the [to 1966] aboriginal victories against the establishment. 
BERNHARDT, one of 3 Poets convicted of murder [the others: Paul and Rabin], was interested in the reference to strychnine as an ingredient of peyote, and pointed to its poisonous similarity to arsenic, to which the real Jack the Ripper was addicted, as the down-side of the peyote experience, since every force contains its opposite; good contains evil; light contains darkness; and this containing-the-opposite in the material world has been documented by James Churchward and others.
SYD, the photographer who is also ordained as a rabbi [4 of the Poets are ordained; the others: JHM, Unitarian; K’lakokum: Baptist; Bernhardt: Roman Catholic], thought of Habbakkuk’s diatribe against the crutches; that peyote is one of those crutches; that the crutches are an artificial means to rise through the chakras to reach the Field of One; because the crutches are artificial, they require artifice; they are an attempt to short-cut the path of salvation.
PAUL, the cross-dressing gourmand, wondered about using parsley as the colour agent to create a St. Patrick’s Day recipe for the sacred mushroom.
K’LAKOKUM, [Karl] editor of the Kangaroos’ periodical South of Tuk, couldn’t keep it to just one comment, and pointed out that in South of Tuk #12, Norm wrote an article about the sacred mushroom in the art of Norval Morrisseau.  In Issue #59, JHM wrote an article about the experience of colour under hallucination, such hallucination made possible by LSD, peyote, and the sacred mushroom.  In Issue #135, K’lakokum discussed the magic mushroom in Morrisseau’s Warrior Finds Soma [24x 34n, 1979, catalogue raisonne number muaa].  The amanita muscaria which is believed to be the sacred or magic mushroom was used by the shaman to enter The House of Invention.  From the 9th to 13th century in , it was widely believed that what Eve ate was not an apple, but the sacred mushroom.  This may have started as a Catholic device to keep people away from a consciousness-raising substance.  The Aztecs [who used it in their spiritual rituals] called it nanacatyl. 


NEBIRU CROSSING bookstore inventory # RP01
TO COME:  a logic puzzle based on this review

REVIEW: THE MOSES LEGACY Phillips

THE MOSES LEGACY Graham Phillips MOSES STAFF FOUND
If Moses existed, he was one of history’s most influential figures - but many historians doubt the reality of the Exodus story and even question the existence of Moses himself.  In The Moses Legacy, Graham Phillips takes the reader on an exciting journey into biblical times, using archaeological evidence and a new reading of the Old Testament to recreate early Hebrew history.  He finds that much of the Exodus story can be corroborated including the flight from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan, and concludes that Moses had indeed existed.  But Graham proposes that Moses had in fact been two separate historical figures who later became confused as one.  The first Moses, a dissident court official named Tuthmosis, originally converted the Israelites to monotheism.  He was banished from Egypt around 1460 BCE.   The second Moses, an exiled Prince, had the same name, Tuthmosis, and was the man who confronted the pharaoh and led the Israelites out of captivity.  He lived around a century later. The word Moses, meaning the son, Graham suggests, was a later shortening of this original name.
Having identified the two historical figures behind the Moses story, Graham then seeks to discover the very place where the Hebrew religion originated.  According to the Bible, Moses first discovered God on Mount Sinai when he spoke to him at a burning bush.  Also called the Mountain of God, it was here that God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, revealed the holy laws and instructed him to make the Ark of the Covenant.  It was here too that God infused Moses’ staff with power to bring down plagues of hail and fire, to turn day to night, to change the Nile to blood and to part the Red Sea.  Legend identifies Mount Sinai as Jebel Musa in eastern Egypt, but the Bible itself never directly says where it is.  Biblical scholars have fiercely debated the location.
According to Exodus, at the Mountain of God Moses uses his sacred staff to create a miraculous spring.  Numbers describes the same event but calls the location Kadesh, now identified as a mountainous pass on the borders of Edom in southern Jordan.  It is presently surrounded by the later ruins of the Nabatean city of  Petra, and a Bedouin shrine commemorates the Moses event at its original location.  Above it, rises Jebel Madhbah, a mountain precisely matching the descriptions of Mount Sinai given in the Bible.  Here, a team of British and Jordanian archaeologists recently excavated the remains of an ancient Hebrew sanctuary dating from the very time Moses is thought to have lived.  Remarkably, in the nineteenth century, a tomb was discovered there that may actually have been the final resting place of one of the historical Moses figures. Inside, along with other artifacts, was a 3500-year-old staff inscribed with hieroglyphics identifying its owner as the court official Tuthmosis, the very man Graham identified as the first Moses.  He believes that it was the second Moses who was buried in the tomb, the staff having been inherited by him when he became the leader of the Israelites.  The staff is now in the Egyptian gallery of the Birmingham Museum in England and, after careful research, Graham is certain that it is the actual staff that the Bible asserts Moses used to perform the miracles of the Exodus.
ITEM YB82 in the Nebiru Crossing bookstore; ISBN 0283073500, 2002 softcover, condition: very good; 327 pages; illustrated

Thursday 10 March 2011

NOTES TO SCROLLS PART TWO

At the school for prophets which Jeremiah attended, ten of the twelve faculty members were Sons of Belial, and only the two oldest, originally educated by first-generation followers of Hosea, were Sons of Light.  Now the school for prophets was not only for prophets – it served as a school for everybody who was to become a senior member of the civil service in that day and age.  The divine ratio for a civil service is: one in thirteen.  The tribe of Levi had been selected to be the civil service (that tribe’s role was not confined to the priestly function).  Nowadays, we are very out of whack with the divine order:  consider that police officers, teachers, most of the medical profession, a portion of the legal profession, etc., etc., are all paid out of the public purse and the number of these welfare recipients far exceeds one in thirteen.  The libertarian-objectivist and social credit movements have solutions which would bring about considerably less governing in a healthier and wealthier society (but that’s not our subject today).  Thus Josiah, the crown prince and ultimate civil servant began his schooling here at the age of six, and when he became king at the age of eight, continued his studies while his mother actually ran the kingdom.  The curriculum for those who were to be prophets followed a course of studies originally refined from Atlantis, in Egypt, by Thoth, and this consisted of two Eyes [light-receivers/givers] of about ten to fifteen years each.  A prophet would commence his mission after ‘ordination’ when he was in his early or mid-thirties.  Jeremiah had received his call at the age of ten, and was in his second Eye at the age of  23 when Habukkuk, aged 8, and Josiah, aged 6, were placed in his charge.  This would be similar to a post-graduate student  nowadays becoming a Teaching Assistant to a professor lecturing undergraduates.  Habukkuk, as a future prophet, undertook a full course load, but Josiah’s studies were confined primarily to the secular subjects which would be necessary for the administrative duties of a king.  Jeremiah was a professional scribe [poet, statistician, architect, librarian] in the civil service, not an active priest, and his instruction of Josiah was in the scribal subjects.  Habukkuk’s education was much different.  Jeremiah had immediately recognized him from a prior incarnation when both had been priests in the temple in Atla, capital of Atlantis.  As quickly as possible, Jeremiah took Habukkuk through past-life regression until he, too, remembered the former incarnation.  There was then a group of five former priests of Atla:  the two Hosea professors, Jeremiah, Habukkuk, and one priest actually on the job in Solomon’s temple.  Their task was immense:  to restore the original religion of ONE.  It was decided to steal the ark of the covenant as a symbolic gesture that the PLACE of the divine was in the HEART of every individual, not in the temple.  Some political action was necessary to facilitate the restoration of the original religion – it was necessary to get the king on-side.  Deuteronomy was written, hidden in the temple, “found” and – more importantly -- authenticated by the priest of Atla to the king, who immediately started a reformation.  In order for Deuteronomy to be accepted, its antiquity had to be established; hence, Moses was claimed to be the author.  Modern scholarship agrees that Moses was not the author.  In order for Deuteronomy to be accepted by the people, it needed to take the style and form of important documents familiar to the general populace – and its format is identical to the form of peace treaty current in Jeremiah’s day (not in Moses’ day).  More on that later.  Another task of Deuteronomy was to validate kingship retroactively to give Josiah the authority to take action.  God had been opposed to kingship; it was with reluctance that he had permitted Saul to become the first king.  In Deut.17, the words which Jeremiah placed in the mouth of Moses were specifically directed for use by Josiah.  “Moses” says that if the people insist, they will be allowed to have a king, but that king must with his own hand write out his own personal copy of the law and study it daily during his reign.  Josiah did so.
     The Book of Deuteronomy was never intended, as written originally, for wide-spread distribution.  It was specifically directed at those in political power at the time it was written.  In retrospect, was it a major tactical error by Jeremiah?  In the short term, it did achieve its objectives:  the Bible reports that Josiah obeyed God like no king before (including David!) or after him.  But towards the end of his life, Josiah left the faith.  Deuteronomy had legitimized kingship in Israel; after Josiah sinned, the lightbringers needed to somehow void that legitimization, so as a symbolic gesture, they later stole the coronation stone as well as the ark of the covenant.  And God turned it all around positively by causing Deuteronomy to be edited and admitted to the canon, becoming the book most-quoted by Jesus!
     In Jeremiah’s day, all foreigners were referred to generically as ‘Assyrians’, although only a fraction of them were actually Assyrians.  Of the six principal characters in Jeremiah’s day, five have re-incarnated in the present age to continue working out the karma from their previous lives, and to learn the lessons still unlearned in previous lives.  And about 100,000 of those ‘Assyrians’ have reincarnated at the same time, to continue as immigrants in the City of Brampton all the inter-action of centuries ago.
      Jeremiah was the only one of the recorded biblical prophets who received some form of public recognition during his life-time.  He served a four-year term as Josiah’s prime minister; but he achieved that only because Josiah had become his son-in-law.  During the bulk of his career, he was vilified and despised just as much as all of the other biblical prophets.  Eventually the political situation became unbearable and he went into exile to the Great Pyramid in Egypt, followed by a trip to Britain and Europe, where he died.  What remains of his skeletal remains are buried far below the windmill in Varel, Germany.  He left the ark of the covenant with the White Elephant of Egypt, and the coronation stone with the Black Eagle of  Frisia.  His archives remained at the school for prophets, where his biographer selected those items which were of interest to him, and this edited concoction became our book of Jeremiah.  Omitted were all of Jeremiah’s hymns; and deleted was the ‘musicality’ of his writing.

SCROLLS AND TABLETS (PART TWO)

INTRODUCTION:
THE EARLY BOOKS OF THE ENTITY COMMONLY KNOWN AS THE PROPHET JEREMIAH

0.1...The First Book of Jeremiah was published in 622 BCE [2 Kings 22:8] and survives in large part within the Biblical book of Deuteronomy.  It was published as a political act for spiritual purposes.  Authorship was deliberately attributed to the second Moses to give the document authority, and authenticity was falsely provided by Hilkiah the high priest who shared Jeremiah’s history and two political objectives: to retroactively validate the role of kingship as one of both spiritual and temporal power (to authorize Josiah to act); and to restore a then-fringe minority religious viewpoint to a position akin to that of official state religion (to legitimize ancient cultic practice).  The book deliberately quotes extensively from Exodus and Leviticus to give it its Mosaic flavour, and, being authored by a faculty member of the School of Prophets who is familiar with traditions then about seven centuries old – indeed, he is intent and adamant in restoring those traditions – the book carefully follows the ancient treaty stylistic patterns.  This is the same over-all presentation technique a modern novelist uses when he surrounds his fictions with factual material derived from history in order to give credibility to that fiction.  Other acts of Jeremiah during this time period, in obedience to God’s command to be a terrorist to break down the old to make way for a new planting of seeds [2 Jer.1:10], were the theft of both the Ark of the Covenant and Solomon’s [Jacob’s] Coronation Stone.  The thrust of the 1st Book is that God has made a covenant to provide Israel with entry into God’s rest, i.e., a marital relationship.  Israel must actively seek to possess that rest (go in and possess is cited 35 times in the book), choosing it daily by a daily adherence, or obedience, to the covenant.  Hence, in our marriage vows to this day, the bride promises to obey, while the groom promises to love as God loves Israel.  The effect of obedience to the covenant will be abundance and fecundity; the effect of disobedience will be scarcity and sterility.  Unlike in the four Mosaic books, Jeremiah’s presentation here is of cause and effect, rather than rewards and punishment.  To ensure a continued return to the ancient practices which derived from Atlantis through Thoth to the School of Prophets in Giza, then exiled for a time with the second Moses, Jeremiah provides in the 1st Book that the book becomes a part of the religious liturgy [1 Jer.31:9-13].  The book is to be housed with the Ark of the Covenant [1 Jer.31:24-27], which Jeremiah has already determined to remove.  Jeremiah never intended the 1st Book to become a part of the word of God, but, as it is written:
command ye me,
God obeys the prophet and honours the words, so that two generations later [Neh.8:1] we already have evidence of it as part of the liturgical practice.  The 1st Book also first records references to the previously unwritten constitution of Atlantis and its jurisprudence (such as the law of witness cited in 1 Jer.17:6) which were later reflected in Frisian Democracy and British Common Law.
The First Book also differs substantially from the four Mosaic books in another respect.  Moses dealt with the conditional love we receive from our fathers, based on our obedience.  Jeremiah first introduces us to the concept that we should love God, rather than obey God; this is the unconditional love we receive from our mothers.  In modern psychiatry, we learn that we mature as individuals when we have merged the conditional love of our fathers with the unconditional love of our mothers.  Jeremiah sought to return to the Goddess traditions (attending to the feminine characteristics of God) which pre-dated the Exodus.  Thus, Jeremiah’s re-statement of The Ten Commandments changes the preamble and amounts to a second giving of the Law.  It is exclusively from this second version that Jesus quotes in the gospels.
0.2...The Second Book of Jeremiah was a miscellany in the same sense in which that word was used in the 16th century CE – a hand-written work of disconnected items (poems, stories, recipes, anecdotes) whose only selection criterion was those items’ subjective value to the author or editor.  The 2nd Book was published in 585 BCE by Simon Baruch [2 Jer.36:32], (the same entity later famously known as Mark the Evangelist and then as poet laureate Robert Bridges), and represented his selection from the archives of Jeremiah after the scribe, the prophet, and the princesses Tarah and Cheneva had fled into exile [2 Jer.43:6] to Giza in 586 BCE (and later to Britain [first in 583 BCE, when Tarah remained in Ireland, then again in 571 BCE, when Cheneva remained in Wales] and Frisia [569 BCE] where Jeremiah was murdered and buried in 567 BCE).  Bridges’ choices were not those which Jeremiah would have chosen, but the book does reflect the three great themes of Jeremiah’s mission:  that violation of the Edom (Sinai) covenant will bring punishment (as cause and effect) but will not terminate the grace of the irrevocable promises of God; that the place of worship is not to be centralized in any physical place but rather in the heart of every individual; and that sacrifice is repugnant to God unless it is a true index of the heart.  The 2nd Book has been largely preserved as the Biblical book of Jeremiah.
0.3...The Third Book of Jeremiah was published in exile at Giza in 572 BCE as Jeremiah’s ‘doctoral’ thesis for graduation, after many interruptions in his studies, from the School of Prophets (now back at the original Giza campus), and the book represented about 14 years of effort, primarily for the extensive mathematical calculations which it required.  The original work has been lost – although nothing is ever really lost, since everything is physically recorded in the Akashic Record.  The original was a poem in elaborate and artificial style constructed in the shape of a star tetrahedron using the rules of sacred geometry and numerology which were later foundations of kabbalah.  In fact, the original book was the first written statement of that kabbalah.  Each line in each of the 22 odes began with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet, in alphabetical order, and each ode began with a different letter, in alphabetical order, such that the poem could be read in 484 different ways, each revealing a different characteristic of the same theme, literally and mathematically.  Most of the references to what later became known as kaballah were deliberately removed – at God’s command! – by subsequent editors, and the fragment which survives is now found in the Biblical books of Lamentations and that portion of Isaiah which scholars call Deutero-Isaiah.  The theme of this poem is that the desolation of Jerusalem is a victory for the righteousness of God, and that the suffering of Messiah/Christ is only a prelude to the mercy of resurrection; thus, a fulfillment of the terrorist mandate given in the 2nd Book.
0.4...The Fourth Book of Jeremiah was written in 48 CE by Jeremiah, now incarnated as the Apostle Andrew, in response to a request by James, head of the Christian church, to the then-57 surviving members of the 70 disciples, to record their recollections of the teaching of Jesus in as much detail as possible.  All of these gospels did receive a wide circulation.  [Justin Martyr, circa 118 CE, refers to them in First Apology 67.3 as eye-witness memoirs of the disciples which were then already widely-accepted as Holy Scripture fully equivalent to the Old Testament, and Aristides of Athens in 141 CE in An Address to Emporer Antoninus Pius refers to them as Holy Gospel.  In 177 CE in Against All Heresies, Irenaeus quotes verbatim from 21 of the books later accepted as canon.  By 192 CE, these books were already collectively known as The New Testament, but there was no consensus on which particular ones should be deemed Holy.  There were false gospels and forgeries as early as 40 CE; Paul refers to such in 2 Thess.2:2, and this was the reason for the curse of Rev.22:18].  The 4th Book was widely-circulated for almost three centuries as the Gospel of Andrew, but was one of 62 gospels rejected in the aftermath of the Council of Nicea in 325 CE.  Nicea’s task was to generate a creed which would be enforced by law at the edge of a sword throughout the Roman Empire, and needed to be sufficiently palatable for acceptance by the priests of the Church of Jupiter, the Official State Religion which Christianity was now to both supplant and merge with.  The four disciples – James, Andrew, Peter, John – of Jesus’ executive committee who had been the only ones to receive the complete teaching of Jesus, were all treated as villains by Nicea.  The Council was bent on the radical alterations necessary to make Christianity politically-correct.  Contradictions to the Council’s activities, as expressed in the writings of the Four, could not be accepted.  The Council therefore gave the Bishops of Alexandria, Jerusalem and Rome equivalent status in all matters of doctrine (i.e., greater authority than scripture), but the Bishop of Rome, being located in the capital city, was to become the exclusive public spokesperson and therefore could henceforth use the title Pope which had until then been in use by the High Priest of Jupiter.  The Council appointed the Bishop of Alexandria as the permanent official Keeper of the Mysteries (formerly the domain of the Head Master of the School of Prophets), and designated that Bishop, in perpetuity, to calculate the official church calendar by the politically-correct Roman solar calendar, rather than the Jewish lunar calendar.  The Bishop of Alexandria was designated to send to every church, as soon as practical after every winter solstice, the official church calendar for the coming year, to begin with Easter.  In the ensuing four decades, the Bishop of Alexandria frequently over-stepped the parameters assigned to him, and his annual letter of instructions strayed far a-field.  Thus the original Christian worship day of Saturday was changed to Sunday to conform to the official Jovian state religion’s worship day, and the celebration of Jesus’ birthday was moved from September 11th to December 25th to co-incide with Jupiter’s birthday.  In his mandated annual Festal Epistle in 367 CE, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria announced which books would be officially in the New Testament, and first used the word canon.  He did include Hebrews(the Sixth Book of Jeremiah), James, 2 Peter, 2 John, 3 John and Revelation, all of which had been frowned upon at Nicea, but the Gospel of Andrew, the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of James were suppressed and those four gospels which were admitted to the canon were first severely edited.  The official Gospel accounts, for example, of the Transfiguration scene have removed Andrew from the list of those present.  The Gospel of Mark was abridged to less than half its original length, with all mystery teachings removed.  [Although Mark did meet Jesus in person, he was not an eye-witness to most of what he reported.  He was the executive secretary to the extremely wealthy Andrew and Peter, and the one who actually operated their huge fishing fleet on their behalf for the three years they spent with Jesus.  Mark later accompanied Andrew to Giza for three years, then joined Peter on his missionary journeys; thus received the mystery teachings directly from two of the Four.] In spite of their suppression, all of the rejected gospels and epistles have been preserved to the present day by the Priory of Sion, a secret society formed in 327CE by the dissidents to Nicea who remained loyal to the School of Prophets.  Priory members were successful in 692 CE at the Trullan Synod in getting ten books added to the New Testament [Jeremiah’s 4th Book and 5th Book, and the Gospels of The Hebrews, Peter, Barnabas, and James, the unabridged version of Mark, and the Epistle of Hermas and two Epistles of Clement] – but with the strange provision that no-one was to read them except with the written permission of the Bishop of Alexandria.
0.5...The Fifth Book of Jeremiah was written in 59CE by Andrew from Giza where he had become Head Master of the School of Prophets, in response to questions he had received from readers of his Gospel.  It circulated in northern Europe for over seven centuries as The Epistle of Andrew to the Frisian Islands, but was suppressed by Alcuin circa 800 CE.
0.6...The Sixth Book of Jeremiah was written by Andrew from Giza in 62 CE, in response to a formal request from James addressed to the Head Master requesting a hand-book for distribution to Hellenic Jews who had converted to Christianity.  The book survives virtually intact in our Bibles as The Epistle to the Hebrews.  It has some minor editorial accretions made in the aftermath of Nicea to imply a different authorship, as part of that Council’s attempt to write the Four out of the Bible.  [These attempts to exclude Andrew balanced the karmic debt for the falsification of the 1st Book.]  The 6th Book returns to the God’s rest theme of the 1st Book and expounds on the Incarnation of Jesus as the first begotten into that rest.

SCROLLS AND TABLETS [PART ONE]

EARLY ALTERNATIVE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES
For over sixteen centuries, most Christians have only been familiar with Greek translations of the New Testament and have believed that these versions are all that exist or should be read. But in the last seven decades new information dating to the time of Christ has been interpreted by scholars from such places as Harvard, Princeton, Chapel Hill, Stanford, Oxford, and Chapman to profoundly re-tell the story of Jesus Christ and His teachings. These have radically clarified who Jesus' first disciples were, what they believed, and what Jesus actually taught. Previously unknown books that were read and studied by the original Aramaic speaking Jewish-Christians (pre-Paul) living in Israel and Egypt have become available in English. This includes:
1]The Peshetta (The Aramaic Bible)
Most non-scholars think that the Greek New Testament was the first Bible and is the only Bible.  Even many clergy choose to look only at the information they’ve been told to use (that which has been handed down from elders in their community or church). However, the early Ethiopian Church and the Egyptian (Coptic) Church used different versions of the Bible.  There were many versions after the first Bible was issued by Church Father Marcion (85-160 CE). His version excluded the entire Old Testament and the currently accepted four gospels; it used only the Pauline epistles and an edited version of Mark.  Marcion severely condemned congregants who studied the Gospel of Matthew. But those Christians who had actually walked with Christ and established the first churches,
spoke the same Aramaic (a sister language to Hebrew) which Jesus spoke.  They recorded his words in Aramaic, and their version of the New Testament pre-dates the
modern New Testament and is very different.  The oldest known physical copy of The Peshetta states that it was transcribed from an early second century copy. This is one of the most important discoveries of our age and yet very few non-scholars know about it.
[References:
2] The Essene Papers (The Dead Sea Scrolls)
In the late 1940's and into the 1950's a series of archaeological digs in Israel near the Dead Sea revealed Biblical writings dating to before the first century. These are the oldest Biblical writings discovered to date, and in addition to finding ancient versions of all of the Old Testament (except Esther), archaeologists have found manuscripts which were used by a mystical sect of Judaism called the Essene. We had heard of them second-hand from first century historians such as Philo, Pliny and Josephus, but had never before been able to study original documents. Essenes were the only Jews who had an initiation by Baptism, and who used a ritual purification in water before breaking bread. The
Jordan River, where John the Baptizer performed his baptisms, is within walking distance of Qumran, where Essenes lived communally, sharing their wealth, refusing to hold slaves, and expecting the Messiah. The Essenes looked for God within -- which is also what Jesus taught. The Essene Papers let us understand the background, culture, anticipation and experiences of the original Aramaic speaking Jewish-Christians.
[References:
3] The Kabbalah
Jewish theology involves more than the Torah (Old Testament).  It includes the Talmud (oral tradition), the Mishna, the Targums and a vast corpus of philosophy called the Kabbalah, probably used by the Essene community. [Josephus tells us one of the Essene leaders was Rabbi Menachem, whom we know to be a Kabbalist.] The Kabbalah is the more esoteric teachings of the Jews, but this information has only been fully translated into English and published for public purview within the last two decades. The
Kabbalah includes such scriptures as the Sefirot, the Bahir and the Zohar, which explain such things as the meaning of "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil", heaven, hell, the Kingdom of God, and the Messiah. The Kabbalah teaches us, like Jesus, to look within to find the Kingdom of Heaven, which is God's living presence. The Kabbalist learns to self reflect, to quieten the mind through meditation and to expect the
Messiah. The Kingdom of Heaven is already upon earth and man has only to
realize (make real) this living presence of God within to enter Eden on Earth. Moreover, the Messiah is not a man but a collective awakening of consciousness within humanity. This explains the meaning of Christ's metaphors and parables.
[References:
4]The Nag Hammadi Library
The Nag Hammadi Library is an entire library which was kept by early Christians. Some of these books date to the first century, others to the second or third century but all are still before the formalization of the official New Testament Canon by the Bishop of Alexandria in 369 CE.   Hundreds of papyri and codices include over 40 gospels in addition to those found in the official Canon.  Christians in those areas where Paul evangelized (Turkey, Greece and Rome), used the scriptures with which modern Christians are already familiar, but Christians living elsewhere (Israel, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt) used the more extensive Aramaic alternatives. When the Church in the Greek speaking world became the Official Religion, it began to suppress all non-Greek scriptures.  The various lists of prohibited scriptures published by the Official Church confirm the ancient existence of virtually all of the books now rediscovered in the Nag Hammadi collection.  These include:
We have copies, or pieces of The Gospel of Thomas that date to the first and second centuries. It is not a narrative like the synoptic gospels, but rather a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, half of which do also appear in the New Testament. The sayings in Thomas are shorter and pithier than in the Synoptics, which suggests that they are the true
original forms.  Jesus says: "Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death" and explains to his disciples that they will realize God on Earth by coming to know their true inner nature.  They will see the Kingdom of God "spread out before you". When the disciples ask Jesus "When will the new world come?" he replies "What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it."  In The Gospel of Thomas, Jesus makes it perfectly clear that the path to God is within.
The Book of Thomas  [For complete text in English, see http://lachie.antissa.com/library/bookthom.pdf ]
The Book of Thomas dates to 52 CE and has been in continuous use in India, where Thomas established a Christian church.  There are today over five million adherents to that church.  In The Book of Thomas, Jesus tells Thomas "learn who you are" and "in what way you exist." He says "he who has not known himself has known nothing."
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene  [For complete text in English, with commentary, see http://www.gnosis.org/library/marygosp.htm ]
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene describes the Apostleship of Mary.   The church fathers confirm that there were numerous churches in the first century which had women bishops who gave baptism and other sacraments and used this gospel.  However, by the third century, Rome had decided that female ministries were sinful and put an end to them. In Mary, Jesus explains the nature of our existence and the way to attain God Realization. This book has been carbon dated to 60 CE, making it the oldest physical Christian
scripture in existence.  
The Gospel of James  [For complete text in English, see http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/infancyjames-mrjames.html ]
The Gospel of James is a little older, but not later than the mid second century, almost two centuries before the New Testament was written by the Greeks, but it was deemed too Jewish to include in the Canon. The Jewish Christian followers of James never accepted the authority of Rome and Rome never accepted any of the Jewish or Israeli Christian scriptures.  The Gospel of James was rejected even though James had been made head of the Church by Jesus himself.  James supports the other Jewish
Gospels with its theme: "that you may know yourselves."  In James, Jesus tells us "they will be enlightened through me."
The Gospel of Philip  [for complete text in English, see http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gop.html ]
The oral tradition of The Gospel of Philip goes back to the Apostles themselves but the first physical copy dates to somewhere in the second or third century. Philip was married and had children including a daughter who was married (we learn this from the Church Fathers too). In Philip, Jesus delves into the nature of existence and the purpose of life. He says "ignorance is the mother of all evil".  In Philip, Jesus instructs his disciples to look within and to know themselves. These earliest teachings all centre on enlightenment.
The Dialogue of the Saviour [for complete text in English, see http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/dialog.html ]  After the Nag Hammadi discovery of this first century text, another smaller papyrus at Yale University was identified to be from the same book. Here Jesus explains the importance of understanding how we come into existence and the nature of our true being.  When the disciples beg Jesus to reveal the light to them, he tells them: "Everyone who has known himself has seen it in everything..."  Hell is the illusion that we are separate from God. 
The Thunder Perfect Mind [for complete text in English, visit http://deoxy.org/thunder.htm ]
A Thunder Perfect Mind is an enlightened mind. The disciples were seeking enlightenment, but instead of going outside of ourselves for answers we are directed by Jesus to look within. There is a state of consciousness where we become conscious of what our own consciousness is, and that awakens our consciousness.  These ideas originate in Kabbalah, which the Essenes were already familiar with, and which Christ taught. God's name in Hebrew is spelled YHWH, the meaning of which is:  I am or I am that which I am, or I am that which is conscious of itself.  Ergo: I am the consciousness itself.  By coming to this realization, we enter the Kingdom of Heaven and see spirit in everything, everywhere, all the time.
by H.S. Paul Franklin