Essenes, the Jewish sect located in Palestine, later Roman Judea, from the 2nd Century B.C. to the 2nd Century A.D., comprised two groups, the practical and the contemplative, or the physicians, called so because they doctored troubled souls.
They lived by Lake Asphaltites (the Dead Sea). Pliny the Elder, who wrote about the Essenes first, remarked that "bulls and camels can float in it [the Lake]."
They had possession of the Dead Sea Scrolls but probably didn't write them. Copies of Torah from the 3rd Century B.C. Source documents. Older than the first Catholic Bible, the Vulgate, by seven centuries.
Essenes avoided sex with women. Probably thought about it. Dreams in an Essene mind at the time of Jesus. A curvaceous city woman, a merchant's wife, a prostitute. My own dirty mind in a time of savage war of eleven days in Gaza and Israel, mainly Israel pummeling their own Holy Land like it's a sand castle at the end of a day at the beach.
Pliny, writing in the 1st Century A.D., writes a paragraph about the Essenes, who are "without any women, casting off the whole of Venus: without Money: keeping company only with date palms."
Casting off means also unmooring a boat, a new freedom.
The Essenes practiced daily water immersion. I wonder if John the Baptist learned from them? Who is John the Baptist? He's the man who announced the coming of Christ, the messenger who condemned Queen Herodias to her face for being an adulteress, condemned King Herod Antipas, both of them Roman puppet rulers. The people, treated unjustly, overtaxed, brutalized, putting up with Jewish cooperation with Palestine's occupiers, Sadducees and Pharisees in a mode of go along to get along, cried out for someone to come along and solve all of their problems.
John lost his head after sexy Salome, daughter of Herodias, stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, turned on by Salome's dance, granted her request:
"Bring me the head of John the Baptizer on a platter."
Presenting his neck to the ax, John smiled inwardly, convinced he'd passed the torch to the right person.
Was he the right person? There were many "messiahs" during those centuries. Jesus, take a number, it's probably a double digit. The numbers of men advertising themselves as messiahs must have felt strange to the pagan Romans, yet, they grabbed ahold of one philosophy of one man. Jewish Christians wrote the early Christian writings. The New Testament was written by converts, some would say "heretics."
Paul was Saul, looking at Christians as those in the wrong. He held robes of men stoning Stephen to death. watched the rocks breaking skin, cracking bones, back shots aplenty at resumption of the fetal position, and this was the birth of Christianity, shepherded by a man who watched another human being get pummeled by missiles thrown and flicked by right-thinking religionists. Pharisee and Sadducee inducement to kill Stephen might have happened. I wasn't there, don't quote me on that speculation.
Christianity, early on during its first four centuries (until its full legalization in 381), needed martyrs, just like most Earth-shaking events require influences propelling the fact, real or not, of their having happened so that learners of these past conditions can acquire inspiration as they face their own eras and difficulties. Thus do acts of injustice inspire movements.
Peter, later sainted and given the job of Heaven's doorman, asked to be crucified upside down; he felt unworthy to be crucified as was his Lord. Gary Gilmore asked to be executed by a firing squad. In both men's cases, Peter and Gary were killed by state representatives. Jesus, too, suffered and died on the cross, an execution method Romans reserved for political criminals, meaning they thought he was a threat to the state. How this could be the case is open to questioning and speculation, and requires historical research I'm not going to spend five years doing. Suffice it to say, Jesus wouldn't have been executed by way of the cross if he hadn't been judged as a political criminal, though it's interesting that the two crucified men on either side of Jesus were thieves. He told them he'd take them to Heaven.
"Sure, whatever you say. You do see the situation we're in, right?"
Humility characterized Jesus in some instances, grandiloquence in others. And doubt, don't forget. He doubted, knowing he was a sitting duck for Roman authorities led by Judas, agent of Jesus' ascent to Heaven where he's been sitting for a long fucking time at the right hand of God, his Dad.
Can times get worse? What is Jesus waiting for? Has to summon a Heavenly Army to do Armageddon with? Or does he show up as a regular human, unknown, underpaid, undervalued, kicked in the shins by capitalism every day, becomes a union organizer and a bit of a kook with a faraway look in his eyes, spends a lot of time praying. Asks for guidance before withdrawing support for a presidential candidate. Challenges power, gets assassinated, because that's how the story is supposed to play out. When an organizer for good and humane treatment of the downtrodden becomes prominent and influential, the powers that be eliminate him or her. The viciousness and brutality of the ruling class, no matter what the era, should never be forgotten or underestimated.
So, I propose that Jesus came back already and got himself killed. He might've been a Black man, or a Malaysian. He wasn't J. Edgar Hoover and he isn't Robert Mueller, or Rachel Maddow, or David Hasselhoff, or me, nor was he Gore Vidal, or Timothy McVeigh, or Saddam Hussein, or Ronald Reagan. Jesus had no place in his practice for a cretin like Reagan.
I think Jesus was more like the Essenes: peaceful, abstemious, cautious in speech, challenged by life's experiences, a man of faith, a man of doubts, finally, a brave man committed to telling the truth as it came to his eloquent tongue.
Here's to you, Jesus. I never have been a Christian, but that's not necessary to get something useful for life out of the story of Jesus, as well as Judas, Mary Magdalene, and Joseph of Arimethea's cup held aloft to receive Christ's blood from near his heart where the legionary thrust his lance to put an end to him so they could take shelter while the wrath of God the Father blasted Jerusalem and environs with a black-clouded storm, all the way out to Gaza maybe.
NEW RELIGION BORN.
One cobbled together from Judaic tradition (itself influenced by the Egyptian and Babylonian religions as well as Mesopotamian cults and Phoenician polytheism) and Mithraism. Mithra, a god of light, worshipped by Roman soldiers, predating Christianity. Mithra, born on December 25th, a day around the Winter Solstice, the birth of light. Jesus was put to that birth date to make him appealing to Mithra devotees, got Army support that way. Christmas and Santa Claus are really about acquiring a militarist point of view: "Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war!" Those lyrics either mean what they say, or they don't. "As to" is like saying "as if to war." The lyrics don't mention the casualties following the march to war, whether the march be literal marching, or marching by news people pushing the company line on invading Venezuela or North Korea.
To you, Jesus. You stuck your neck out, you surrendered and that's your message. Stop trying to control, let things be, peace, at least for a while, for the world needs peace. Peace of camels floating in the Dead Sea, a thing for a Roman writer to marvel at. Pliny, who died of curiosity while studying the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79.
Essenes would have been around to see the ash cloud coming west, making pretty sunsets, deep purple at times, magenta. Floating past the bulls and camels in Lake Asphaltites, unaware that Romans to the west in Italia had suffocated and been singed thoroughly, en masse. The Essene, I imagine, would not pass judgment on the singed and suffocated victims of the belching volcano just because they had led sex-filled sybaritic lives.
Those who keep "company with date palms," as Pliny wrote, are the quintessence of harmlessness as they die out the like the Shakers, rejecting sexual reproduction, intimate contact with women, preserving ancient sacred books in the dry desert air, the best element in making natural time machines.
Vic Neptune
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