Exploring the Past to Understand the Present

[araucaria]

I am posting on this thread because I agree that a positive outlook is essential and I just want to stand back and report on a few things I’ve been reading lately. The word crisis means a combination of danger and opportunity, and we are facing a huge crisis in both senses. While by definition we are, to say the least, unsure about what the future holds, we do need to understand just how far back this goes. I find it sometimes helps to use our contemporary jargon when looking at the story so far.

Looking at the distant past is useful because that is how you observe time’s curvature. I don’t want to linger on Ukraine in the 21st or even the 20th century: it is too recent. I have previously explored how the region’s issues date back at least to WWII. Since Germany’s Lebensraum policy came about after being squeezed on both flanks after the Treaty of Versailles, you could go back to WWI. But this is still not the big picture.

However, if you go back to classical Greece, and then fast forward, this might give some indication of our own future. By that time, the gods had long ceased to have any presence as physical entities toying with humans, and had begun to enter human consciousness as abstract qualities, virtues and vices governing autonomous human behaviour. In the 5th c. BC the Greek city states began to merge into a nation following the Persian wars when collectively they managed to see off Darius and Xerxes, mainly thanks to their naval forces, mostly Athenian (for such a tiny country, Greece has an incredible 2,600 miles of coastline). What started out as a confederacy eventually ended up in an Athenian empire, achieved by Athens producing the fleet, with the rest providing funds (paying tribute). If this sounds like NATO, notice that the alliance soon began to break up, with a succession of rebellions leading to the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). Sparta and her allies won the war and the golden age of Athens came to an end. Two things to note here: first, the cultural dominance remembered to this day was doubtless due to some extent at least to the extra income from the tribute being paid to the city. In other words, major intellectual, but also spiritual advances, notably through Aristotle, were partly financed by the ‘military-industrial complex’ of the day. On the other hand, the possession of an effective fleet both served as a deterrent against outside aggression and helped stir internal strife. The other major cause was the simple fact that the Greek city states were too different to cooperate much. What happened next reduced this whole political scene to a local quarrel, while on another level the big picture got much bigger when Alexander the Great spread this culture across his new empire. See this post.

The next major step after Alexander was the life of Christ, by which I mean the the entire experience for humanity, way beyond organized religion. Love and life, you can take that to the bank, but most of all, never forget you have that capital and where it came from! You would need quite a lexicon to translate the shenanigans from back then into modern English, but doing so brings the story a whole new contemporary relevance. The Bible as mainstream news, orthodoxy as the official narrative, heresy as alternative views, martyrs as eyewitnesses or whistle-blowers who were taken out, miracles as paranormal events; and so on, you get my drift.

I have just been rereading a book based on some of all the material that has been resurfacing in recent years from Biblical times: Hidden Politics of the Crucifixion, by Glen Kimball and David Stirland (Ancient Manuscripts Publishing, 1998). Let’s go along with this story for a while, and suppose all the evidence is truly there; a good place to check would be lostbooks.org (a more detailed reference at the end of this post*). It merges seamlessly with what we know from official sources, which are therefore not wrong, just deceptively incomplete. First, a small detail: since Jesus died in 33 AD but was born probably in 7 BC (the year of multiple Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions: the ‘star in the east’), then he died not aged 33 but at 40, a truly symbolic number for the Jews, notably because of the 40-year exile in Egypt. In other words, not only did he live on after his death, but Jesus was born before Christ, maybe indicating twice over that this was much more than one lifetime. As the adopted son of Joseph of Arimathea, a leading ship-owner and trader (after the other Joseph had died), Jesus, we are told, sailed the world, and his passage to India and elsewhere is recorded in documents around the world; a high profile rather than a hermitic lifestyle is understandable from such a charismatic leader teaching the practicalities of his message of love. This would account for the gospel stories being limited to just three years: the rest of the time he was out of the country. One major event was the Roman connection. Emperor Tiberius was ill and, we are told, had sent for the renowned healer Jesus, only to learn that Pontius Pilate had allowed him to be executed: more on this later. This is a major discrepancy for us today: in his own day, Christ was a mainstream figure, and his only enemies were a few members (Anna, Caiaphas) of one branch of the Sanhedrin, the Sadducees; which goes to show the scale of the subsequent effort to stamp out this new philosophy, notably through religion. Try rewriting world history without Martin Luther.

Hence the life of Christ can be quantified to some extent. The official story of three years in the backwater of Galilee against a lifetime of extensive travel covers about a twentieth of the time, and probably much less than a twentieth in terms of geographical outreach. Overall, then, the New Testament story, although still huge, covers roughly five per cent of the actual event as experienced firsthand by many more people than we have been told. Also, given that Jesus’s killers themselves had no doubts about his being the Messiah, that means there was literally no one, all the way up to the Roman emperor himself, who failed to see that this person was extraordinarily special. There is no one, zero eyewitness, debunking a single one of the myriad amazing miracles that we have trouble grasping. This includes the rabble stirred to demand a crucifixion, the same people who just days before were demonstrating as devoted followers; ‘crisis actors’ is the modern term, I believe.
As we know, every time you act dishonestly, you increase your chances of being found out, and once found out the whole edifice comes crashing down: we see none of that here. In fact, it seems there was not one resurrection but a great many coming back from the dead in Palestine, but also in Rome following a major earthquake event. Meanwhile, Jesus was executed not for doing bad things, but for doing good on the sabbath, which was against the law. Clearly the law is an ass when one day a week good becomes bad and when service to God clashes with service to one’s fellow humans.

Jesus was also a member of the royal, wealthy elite, so he would be well known even before actually doing anything. But since what he did was mix bigtime with the wrong sort (ordinary people), and he was also a writer, we are talking about someone who must have been immensely popular. The power of the message, which came at a time when the gods’ influence was at a then all-time low, can be seen from its persistence, two millennia later, no longer as a spiritual lesson but by now assimilated almost as a definition of basic human decency that goes without saying. Given also that for 17 centuries this tradition has been built up solely on the remnants of a 95% information blackout, that gives some idea of the enormity of the cover-up. The accusation of deceit was turned against Jesus, notably on the subject of raising the dead being devilish magic. It may be magic: a magician pretending to cut a woman in half is demonstrating to what extent she is a ‘waste of space’, since she can fit into a space half the size. Resurrection merely takes this to the extreme of showing how a person can survive in no physical space at all. So, magical maybe, but hardly diabolical.

In spite of those unfavourable odds, as I’ve just indicated, I think it can be said that Jesus’s message of love successfuly penetrated human consciousness to a degree that I shan’t try to quantify. But there comes a point where it is no longer enough, when it becomes automatic, instinctive, and so in a sense… unconscious at a higher level. The next step up in consciousness would be to integrate into the message of love, notably an understanding of this blockage that has grown so huge, i.e. the knowledge of both good and evil. This would involve not just hearing the ‘revelation’ or ‘disclosure’ of whatever things have been kept secret, but more fundamentally understanding that open communication is an integral part of this force or energy we call love. My point here is simple. Anyone trying to understand the world today may do better avoiding wading through the truth and lies coming out of Ukraine and Russia. Nor need they try to get their head round the truth and lies to do with the CIA, Islamism, reptilian aliens or whatever other issue is getting in the way. Ultimately, for the vast majority all these issues just lead to the need to hold beliefs, like another religion. On the other hand, regarding Christianity, the recently discovered literature offers probably the clearest demonstration we are going to get that the familiar bible story was not wrong, but such a tiny portion of the truth as to become highly inaccurate. Get your head round this, and the other stuff should sort itself out.

There is something strange going on here. Almost everyone must have been feeling amazingly good, and yet this tiny spanner in the works (a couple of negative priests) leads to the crucifixion. But this was foreseen. Reviving the dead was one thing; it showed that there is life after death. But a newly executed man reviving showed something else: that killing is ultimately futile. (What we may envisage for tomorrow, with everyone today feeling incredibly awful, because that lesson was never learnt, might well be in the nature of a drop of oil that sets everything running smoothly.)
Tiberius in his rage not only had Pilate executed, but he reportedly unleashed a genocide against the Jews for murdering their Messiah, affecting many innocents who were his followers. Notice how his was about the most unchristian thing he could have done, actually repeating Pilate’s mistake on an altogether vaster scale. This major persecution was like a huge bomb exploding, but one unexpected positive outcome was that many promptly scattered all over the world, spreading the good news at incredible speed for the time. Note how this is a replay of Alexander’s belligerent campaign to educate the known world (see above): any evil murderous intent backfires into something positive, putting a whole new slant on Orwell’s ‘war is peace’! Despite this untimely death, Jesus continued to travel the world after the resurrection spreading the word, only now there were thousands of others doing the same thing, including across the Roman empire. That much remains historically true: not to believe in resurrection, however it is supposed to work, amounts to dismissing the contemporary eyewitness explanation with no alternative explanation for how we got to where we are today. Meanwhile the historical fact of persecution remains the spanner in the works that still needs eliminating.

What makes the above history of current relevance, apart from its apparent verifiability, is the reported message of a second coming after 100 (20-year) generations. If Jesus was travelling the globe, then the idea we read about that he was one and the same as Quetzalcoatl, who arrived in Mexico from the east, begins to make sense. He would have taught the Mayan calendar, which is somewhat mysterious because its start date doesn’t seem to mark anything in particular, and in any case predates the Maya civilization. If the calendar was invented halfway through the 5-thousand-year period, then everything would point to the infamous end date of 21/12/2012, which happens to be... 99 generations (katuns) after Christ’s crucifixion, i.e the start of the 100th, due to reach the age of 20 in 2032-33. Remember, these are round figures.

So, now that we are raising this long-awaited 20th generation, with hindsight, what might be the value of the current mindset within the above longterm planning? Well, for one thing, let’s have a look at those miracles, which mostly turn us off, but which back then would be simply be accepted as positive magic. Tiberius: ‘he can heal me, enough said, I want him here!’ Nowadays we might say ‘technologically too advanced’; but we are also at the point where we can say, ‘virgin births no problemo! The other stuff, not just yet, but we’re working on it.’ Science, which bought into 100% materialism, still needs to be reconciled with ‘religion’ (which by the way is not and never was purely up-in-the-air stuff, otherwise why was Jesus spending so much time curing, feeding, reviving physical human beings?). But at least we are reaching a stage where what once seemed impossible is no longer quite so far-fetched. So, ‘resurrection’, for example, is no longer just not natural, it becomes understandable as a change of plane; not necessarily a higher plane, a different plane. So, for example, a film-maker can break an egg and then restore it whole, either by reversing the film or by shooting the last sequence before the previous one. In other words, by moving through time instead of space.

Talking of science, I have been reading an SF story written for BBC TV by the astronomer Fred Hoyle, with John Elliot, called Andromeda Breakthrough (1964). It is the tale of a complex, meaningful message received from the Andromeda galaxy, and containing instructions for building a supercomputer capable of producing the blueprints for whatever is needed to get this planet operating effectively. This includes a lovely young woman, built in no time at all (virgin birth on steroids!) and also planning ahead for the various ways the message might be received. The hero is extremely worried by the whole thing, fearing an alien takeover. With the best of intentions, he destroys the computer, but not before a rogue gulf state has pirated the design and built another one. Eventually he falls in love with the Andromedan (after saving her life), and together they save this backup computer and the program at the very last minute.

So ‘Jesus’ here is a young lady built in a lab on instructions from a machine, and yet fully human. The premise seems to be that alien beings cannot just land on a foreign planet: they need to have a physical vehicle compatible with/made from that planet. Be that as it may, these aliens happen to be huge rocks that are part of the furniture on their rather dead planet, so there is no question of them travelling anywhere. So then, what is happening here? It would seem that this is a disinterested neighbour offering a helping hand, with no interference, to a planet in need of help – an intergalactic expression of love. But to do so, they have to become one of us, which can be interpreted in several different ways. It can mean total racial assimilation: no problem; if you are a spiritually advanced being, you will take this as read. Otherwise, they have to be somehow fake, spies, space invaders, magicians, whatever.

The Fred Hoyle story (again, the writer is a scientist) suggests that if you get to know and love this visitor, together you can change the world. But ultimately, these are visitors on the same level of planetary-based physicality as us. Sure, a distinction is drawn between hardware and software: software can travel, hardware is built on the spot; however, unlike Christlike humanity, software is hardware-dependent: if the computer is destroyed, the apps are lost. The Jesus story is explicitly on a higher plane, and more far-reaching; here again though, the whole project can be hi-jacked by one or two, not necessarily evil monsters, just earth humans with a grudge. Attacked, but not defeated: Jesus is killed, but he just gets up and carries on as before. The grudge in question, as described in the Kimball book, amounts to very little: Anna is unhappy that his own bloodline wasn’t chosen for the Messiah to incarnate, and so seeks revenge, which with foresight is in itself is enough to justify the choice of another family. Clearly, as I said, this was part of the plan to demonstrate the illusion of death; and it is the part of the story that the science misses out or doesn’t get to. All we see is the woman surviving various brushes with death, exactly how we don’t know. But let’s see where science might be catching up at last.

We are talking about chasing shadows. Gombrich (quoted in my 2nd link above) describes how Alexander the Great tamed his horse Bucephalus, afraid of its own shadow, by turning its head towards the sun. Then in the very next paragraph, he describes Alexander’s encounter with the stoic philosopher Diogenes, whose one wise wish is for him to remove his shadow from him and let him sit in the sun. More sun, less shadow, that is the horse’s philosophy too. But then you read that someone finding themselves in Jesus’s shadow is miraculously cured, the inference being that there is more solar energy coming from his shadow than from the sun itself. Or alternatively, that a time would come when protection from the sun’s rays behind a godlike shadow would prove necessary. Interestingly the afternoon of the crucifixion saw darkness and earthquakes in Jerusalem, and also Rome apparently (and the night of the resurrection saw daylight). This moment of physical death was accompanied, we are told, by the dead rising up from the grave. Earthquakes are the sort of manifestations one might expect at the time of a pole shift. Science is now saying that a pole shift, caused by solar activity, is due right now. That would be the reason not only for the timing of the second coming, but also for teaching the Maya, who never saw the start of their outsized calendar and never saw its end, to expect in this distant future what they called... the Fifth Sun.

There is a very practical lesson to all the above. It goes something like this: there is a fork in the road ahead and the signpost may be the wrong way round. The notion of a last judgment with no external judge would be based entirely upon that decision. The Orwellian-sounding paradox ‘death is life’ and its corollary, ‘survival is death’, might turn out to be crucial. Very possibly, elitist self-preservation in underground cities and bunkers after deliberately keeping foreknowledge away from the masses is the wrong way to go. Better stick to altruism, face the danger without fearFocussing on that simple choice should be enough to navigate the chaos resulting from some making a different choice and others maybe not choosing at all, or perhaps changing their minds.
Whatever else is going on, the above strikes me as an excellent design for a truly democratic poll where every vote counts and every elector gets what they voted for.

*Here is Pilate’s letter to Tiberius, ‘entered into the Congressional Record in the year 1887’.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

Posted by araucaria (here)
*Here is Pilate’s letter to Tiberius, ‘entered into the Congressional Record in the year 1887’.

Great post. And the letter from Pilate to Tiberius at the end is fascinating - I'd never seen that before. But I cannot believe it's real; I am not aware of any surviving letters or manuscripts purportedly written by the hand of Pilate, or Tiberius for that matter. It must be a forgery, and probably a relatively recent one (19th or 20th century) considering the contrived nature of the biblical language it attempts to reproduce. It reads like a form a Christian fan-fiction, so I rather suspect it's church propaganda.

The information it contains is just a bit too awesome, including the very Renaissance-esque Euro-centric description of Jesus, his actual words recorded verbatim, an eyewitness testimony of the events surrounding his trial and crucifixion, and even proof of the resurrection. That would literally make this perhaps the most important document ever found in history - if it were genuine. The socio-political climate and details, so faithfully described, would themselves be of enormous interest to historians. That this letter is not widely known (or perhaps even scarcely known), is a strong indicator to me that it's a fake. It simply has to be fake.

But it is a very engaging read!

[amor]

To: Araucaria> I specially wish to thank you for the above work of Pilate to the Roman Emperor. I was crying through most of it which was beautifully vivid and a wonderful piece of writing. You added to my understanding of what the Roman Soldiers witnessed at the Resurection of the Dead and of Jesus. Also the guide to the literature you opened for us at the end, all a lengthy work. I wonder whether we can draw a moral lesson from what mistakes Pilot made which allowed Jesus to fall into the hands of his enemies. It is, STAND YOUR GROUND AND DO NOT TRY TO SAVE YOURSELF BY PASSING THE BUCK SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO FEEL THE HEAT. Pilot was killed in the end anyway eventually. Each of us has to say, THUS FAR AND NO FURTHER NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS TO ME. PILOT'S LETTER, BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN.

[araucaria]

Posted by Mark (Star Mariner) (here)

Posted by araucaria (here)
*Here is Pilate’s letter to Tiberius, ‘entered into the Congressional Record in the year 1887’.

Great post. And the letter from Pilate to Tiberius at the end is fascinating - I'd never seen that before. But I cannot believe it's real; I am not aware of any surviving letters or manuscripts purportedly written by the hand of Pilate, or Tiberius for that matter. It must be a forgery, and probably a relatively recent one (19th or 20th century) considering the contrived nature of the biblical language it attempts to reproduce. It reads like a form a Christian fan-fiction, so I rather suspect it's church propaganda.

The information it contains is just a bit too awesome, including the very Renaissance-esque Euro-centric description of Jesus, his actual words recorded verbatim, an eyewitness testimony of the events surrounding his trial and crucifixion, and even proof of the resurrection. That would literally make this perhaps the most important document ever found in history - if it were genuine. The socio-political climate and details, so faithfully described, would themselves be of enormous interest to historians. That this letter is not widely known (or perhaps even scarcely known), is a strong indicator to me that it's a fake. It simply has to be fake.

But it is a very engaging read!

Thank you Mark, you make a valid point, and Kinball’s version in the book is shorter than the online source without indicating any cuts. It is not an academic work with copious footnotes, and I have not studied all his sources; I said ‘Let’s go along with this story for a while’ precisely because I have no forgone conclusions to foist on people. Having said that, I agree that this letter would make very good church propaganda, good enough to be in Good Friday sermons everywhere and every year – and yet pretty useless if no one has heard about it! Propaganda needs propagating, especially when we are following church usage, meaning the spread of truth, not the spread of lies. This piece rings true because it stays in line with the official gospel narrative while possibly explaining a number of puzzling things about this most puzzling protagonist. It fits in with all the genuine material unearthed over the last century, and to that extent sounds more like something leaked out of the Vatican library than a forgery. But with so much genuine material around, why invent fake stuff, and then not use it?

Pilate’s wife is mentioned in Matthew’s gospel; he didn’t listen to her: par for the course, neither did Julius Caesar his wife. So he judged the man innocent and condemned him anyway. He washed his hands of the affair, which we are told was a Jewish custom he got from his wife. What the hell was he playing at? The letter gives one plausible explanation: he was too undermanned to cope with an uprising. Kinball gives another motive which obviously wouldn’t get into this letter: Pilate was blackmailed for being involved in a secret plot to oust Tiberius in favour of the man actually running his empire, Lucius Aelius Sejanus. This Sejanus is mentioned in Suetonius’s Life of Tiberius, but then Suetonius’s satirical accounts of the Twelve Caesars could well turn out to be the caricatures they certainly appear to be. Any resemblance to our current world leaders being of course entirely accidental. But Suetonius was published and never went out of print, so he must be telling the truth, right? You say, ‘not widely known’ suggests fakery; this is contrary to the definition of a coverup, where what is not widely known is the truth, and on the evidence I present, this was the mother of all coverups.

This is the issue with this material: not only is its own authenticity subject to scrutiny, but it also brings under scrutiny our ‘classical’ texts. Were the Roman emperors really as useless as the buffoons in government today? Maybe not. Clearly some well-known writings are going to contain disinformation. On the other hand, the Pilate letter might be a piece of creative fiction, but it can hardly be a malicious forgery, since it positively adds credibility to the Jesus story. That story in a nutshell: a good man executes a good man despite flagrant deceitfulness from the Sadducees saying a) we can’t execute anyone; b) our penalty for blasphemy is death by stoning; c) we need a crucifixion; any one of these statements contradicts the other two.

The problem is the inherent ambiguity of the Church, which was a medieval controlling ‘world government’ preaching good and practising not so good. So the gospels would represent a ‘limited hangout’, with everything else brushed under the carpet - the less said the better, the conspiracy of silence being to downplay and for some destroy the Jesus narrative. Today, the reverse has happened, with many abandoning the church and the ‘heresies’, the apocrypha, joining the mainstream.

A proper forgery would need to be malicious. To make any sense it would have to turn everything upside down; the Jesus narrative now becomes the conspiracy. So where are the whistleblowers saying things like, ‘I was at the marriage feast of Cana, and it definitely did not happen as reported: the extra booze actually came from my wine cellar!’, or ‘my cousin Lazarus is dead to the world all week, but when his mates call round at the weekend, he comes back to life in no time.’? Obviously skeptics weren’t what they are now.

So what makes the above discussion unsatisfactory? I think it is because it sees things in dualistic terms of black and white. Propagation of valuable material doesn’t work like that. Alexander’s wars and the Roman persecutions were unpleasant machines for much-needed large-scale propagation. The Church was another one. The positive angle would describe the Church as providing what education does today: a grounding in the basics from kindergarten level upwards. The Gnostic gospels are postgraduate research level and would naturally appear esoteric to everyone else, just as top level science is totally mysterious to the layman. We know it is all out there, but as long as we can balance the accounts, calculate how much to buy etc., we really don’t need it... until we do. As we know, keeping things simple for ordinary folk leads to a lot of black-and-white (ultimately false) information. Also, back then, you would not get modern pedagogy, you got a one-size-fits-all orthodoxy. But any education is learning about how things aren’t quite as we were taught in school. Our empty churches are a sign that many have graduated to a higher level of understanding.

The Pilate letter would be a case in point. (Someone’s spellchecker changed the name to Pilot: good idea!) It works, movingly, on a different level, which I might call artistic, the way Bach’s St Matthew Passion works artistically, and still would even with a little artistic licence. Part of the effect is to do with consistency, aka harmony. But the same holds for a scientific theory, which needs consistency, both internal and external, i.e. not contradicting any known ‘facts’, present or to come (science needs to be predictive). The letter could be a piece of creative writing and still positively useful (just like this post).

We might apply the above to the case of Suetonius, who takes a dim view of Roman emperors generally; but one emperor he obviously didn’t see coming was Marcus Aurelius, whose creative writing Meditations (literally ‘To Himself’), although consistent with, is often some way above what became appropriate for the Church (and still for us), and most of all it came from the wrong person (a Roman emperor of all people) at the wrong time (early 2nd century). Try this:

All of us are working together for the same end; some of us knowingly and purposefully, others unconsciously (as Heraclitus, I think, has remarked that ‘even in the sleep men are at work’ and contributing their share to the cosmic process). To one man falls this share of the task, to another that; indeed, no small part is performed by that very malcontent who does all he can to hinder and undo the course of events. The universe has need even of such as he. It remains for you, then, to consider with whom you will range yourself; for in any case he who directs all things will find some good use to make of you, and give you your place among his helpmates and fellow labourers. Only, have a care that yours is not that sorry function which, according to Chrysippus, is performed by the clown’s part on the stage. (VI, 40)

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

I have to remain very sceptical of its authenticity. If, for instance, we could compare this letter with other (routine) missives by Pilate, this would lend it some credibility. But there are none. That this single letters exists, describing arguably the most important person and most important event in recorded human history, makes it automatically suspicious. Don't get me wrong, I would love this to be real, I just don't think it possibly can be.

Not sure why anyone would want to cover it up, it clearly conforms with the biblical account. I wouldn't be surprised if moves were made to re-edit the New Testament to include this Pilate letter - it's that stunning. That hasn't happened, and the letter remains scarcely known. It therefore implies it's below ecclesiastic interest, and of no scholastic value either: because it's bogus.

Posted by araucaria (here)
This Sejanus is mentioned in Suetonius’s Life of Tiberius, but then Suetonius’s satirical accounts of the Twelve Caesars could well turn out to be the caricatures they certainly appear to be. Any resemblance to our current world leaders being of course entirely accidental.

As a side note, I don't believe the pictures Suetonius paints of the Emperors to be caricatures at all. Neither do I believe a precise resemblance to our decadent, bumbling, selfish, pompous and let's just say it - evil - world leaders is accidental. I posted a bit about Tiberius here, and on how the past repeats or at the very least, rhymes, with the present.

Also found this (image below) from the New York Journal, 1897, which may be of interest. A number of scholars and theologians chip in with their opinion of the letter. Though I continue to think it's bogus, the points made in the article are nevertheless worthy of consideration. What we need is a modern review of the document. Let us see the original (faded, fragmented or otherwise). It would probably be written on parchment or vellum, either in Greek or Latin. Perform a forensic analysis; include carbon dating.

I just find it curious that no such parchment has been seen, photographed, or properly described. If there really was a document but it's the handiwork of a churchmen from the 19th century, or some cloistered monk in the 7th century (whose quills never rested and were the source of many spurious texts), then that might be the reason for a real coverup: it's kept hidden because it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

[araucaria]

Posted by Mark (Star Mariner) (here)
I have to remain very sceptical of its authenticity. If, for instance, we could compare this letter with other (routine) missives by Pilate, this would lend it some credibility. But there are none. That this single letters exists, describing arguably the most important person and most important event in recorded human history, makes it automatically suspicious. Don't get me wrong, I would love this to be real, I just don't think it possibly can be.

Not sure why anyone would want to cover it up, it clearly conforms with the biblical account. I wouldn't be surprised if moves were made to re-edit the New Testament to include this Pilate letter - it's that stunning. That hasn't happened, and the letter remains scarcely known. It therefore implies it's below ecclesiastic interest, and of no scholastic value either: because it's bogus.

Posted by araucaria (here)
This Sejanus is mentioned in Suetonius’s Life of Tiberius, but then Suetonius’s satirical accounts of the Twelve Caesars could well turn out to be the caricatures they certainly appear to be. Any resemblance to our current world leaders being of course entirely accidental.

As a side note, I don't believe the pictures Suetonius paints of the Emperors to be caricatures at all. Neither do I believe a precise resemblance to our decadent, bumbling, selfish, pompous and let's just say it - evil - world leaders is accidental. I posted a bit about Tiberius here, and on how the past repeats or at the very least, rhymes, with the present.

Also found this (image below) from the New York Journal, 1897, which may be of interest. A number of scholars and theologians chip in with their opinion of the letter. Though I continue to think it's bogus, the points made in the article are nevertheless worthy of consideration. What we need is a modern review of the document. Let us see the original (faded, fragmented or otherwise). It would probably be written on parchment or vellum, either in Greek or Latin. Perform a forensic analysis; include carbon dating.

I just find it curious that no such parchment has been seen, photographed, or properly described. If there really was a document but it's the handiwork of a churchmen from the 19th century, or some cloistered monk in the 7th century (whose quills never rested and were the source of many spurious texts), then that might be the reason for a real coverup: it's kept hidden because it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

I am in no position to conclude that it’s bogus. Let me grope my way towards a possibly unexpected explanation why it might be neither bogus nor publishable. But first, the Kimball book includes another similar letter to a Caesar, two letters from Pilate to Herod, as well as an excerpt from ‘the writings of Nicodemus’. So, ‘single’ is somewhat inexact. I agree it is important that Tertullian and several others stated that such a document existed early on. It might be worth trying to imagine what it contained if not this.

A general point: the ‘tangled web’ of deceit is said to be a problem for the deceiver, but it also affects everyone else, because the bona fide document comes under suspicion as well. I was going to suggest in my last post that this letter may have been leaked from the Vatican library. That is where your newspaper clipping says it belonged. Maybe some attempt was made to ‘unleak’ it, to stem the tide of publication. I don’t know. The web just grows.

Fact is outnumbered by three flavours of fiction. There are three types of forgery: something X could have done but didn’t; something X couldn’t have done; or something X actually did, but this is not it. The genuine article being something X actually did, and this is it.

They say copying is what the devil does; maybe so, but it is not intrinsically bad. Copies always (often vastly) outnumber originals. They say, don’t believe what you read in the newspapers: why, because they are copies to the nth power. Do we ever ask to see an original document signed by the government? No we don’t, nor would it be materially feasible. We have to rely on William James’s pragmatic principle of verifiability of copies in the official gazette, or lower down, in the press.
Unfortunately the cheats have this base covered too. Eric Hebborn, in The Art Forger’s Handbook (Cassell, 1997), talks of a colleague whose forgery is rejected by an expert. In revenge, he submits a ‘Rembrandt drawing’, which is duly authenticated: he promptly tears it up in the expert’s face.*
*There is a thread somewhere about Bill Ryan’s Picasso which may be relevant here.

Forgers always have a motive, usually money, but here it is revenge. Sure, money comes into it as well: discredit the experts and you’re into the big time. But revenge is a powerful motive.

The motive of Mark Hofmann was rather different, but even more powerful (Simon Worrall, The Poet and the Murderer (Fourth Estate, 2002/3). Born into the reviled mormonism of the paedophile Joseph Smith, ‘he had to stand up at his local ward house and swear to the truth of the Book of Mormon, when he believed it was a work of fiction.’ (p 95). He forged the ‘Salamander Letter’, ‘created a document that, if it were true, could shake the foundations of a major world religion.’ (p.160).
Hofmann wrote in a letter to his mother, ‘you gave it as your opinion that certain materials in the Church archives should not be made public because there exist certain faith-demoting facts that should not be known (…) The truth is the most important thing. Our idea of reality should be consistent with it (…) With love, Mark.’ (p.109-10). Hence the motive of the forger forging a forgery was the truth.

In either case contradiction seems to be the overriding motivation. Exactly the opposite, in other words, of the Pilate letter.
So let me suggest an explanation, an honourable and even a wise motive for what appears to have happened. I reckon a document like this can easily get mislaid in miles of ancient archives. After all, we are not talking about a public lending library. Luckily, this is not the CIA archives either, or it would have been shredded and incinerated long ago. To get published it would need an official Imprimatur (permission to publish, Nihil obstat, no objections). Below is why this authorization might be withheld or maybe withdrawn.

It is a matter of historical record that Roman persecution of the Jews began soon after the crucifixion, whether officially and vaguely to quell a rebellious province, or more specifically for killing the messiah. The whole point of a crucifixion for them was to establish an alibi: even the official gospels make it clear that it is no more than that. Jesus was an enemy of the Sadducees, who, Luke records in passing, ‘did not believe in resurrection’, and were now being repeatedly proven wrong, and about to be proven wrong all over again. But even the official gospels have them forced to accept the blame: the key phrase is ‘his death be upon us and upon our children’. This shows that something they did believe in was original sin. I think the message of Jesus as a ‘second Adam’ was to ditch that notion, because his brand of love is the opposite of perpetuating an ancient mistake or wrongdoing.

This is all in the New Testament, but the Pilate letter only magnifies the idea or fact that the Jews killed Jesus, although between truth and lies we now have this good reason for downplaying it: love. Jesus’s own view was that this thing had to happen, implying that the perpetrators’ identities and even their involvement is irrelevant, and so, spreading any blame is probably a good idea. To be sure, commemorating the crucifixion billions of times over is a counterintuitive way to play down this murder, unless it be to ‘forgive them for they know not what they do’. Nonetheless, if the original Jewish persecutions were a direct consequence of Pilate’s allowing the murder to go ahead and of misperceived Jewish guilt, then for the modern Church, in an age when this original sin took the shape of antisemitism, the appropriate response would be to avoid making matters worse, namely by letting things be.

Antisemitism is one of those words that get bandied about, not always appropriately. Here the Church would be seeking to avoid that trap; but this would not necessarily be obvious to everyone. When, for example, Vatican II removed a prayer for the Jews from the Good Friday prayers, this was possibly less because the material was offensive per se and more because some people found it so. Praying for someone - wishing them well - is by definition not anti-anything, especially when, as here, the prayers extend to every category, the Church itself, the Pope and clergy and all catholics, but also various categories of non-believers, including heretics and Jews. Unfortunately, removing that prayer could appear like an admission of guilt even though, there being no guilt then, there could be none now. It is a matter of sympathetic understanding, and once again, an avoidance of the notion of original sin, the sins of the fathers: twentieth century Jews did not kill Jesus and could not be held responsible.

I have just read the latest John Le Carré spy thriller, A Legacy of Spies (2017). It is a flashback to Leamas, Smiley and Co in the Cold War years, and it ends on precisely the above note; Peter Guillam is in Brittany where his French Dad died as a Resistance hero attacking the German U-boat base. In the final scene, he is having a drink or three with a local man whose own father was ingloriously executed at the end of the war as a first-class collaborator. Reconciliation.

If anyone wishes to take this further, the relevant entry in the Kimball bibliography is probably: ‘Blinzler, J., The Trial of Jesus: Jewish and Roman Proceedings Against Jesus Christ, Translation I. and F. McHugh, 2nd rev. ed. Westminster, Md, 1959’.

[araucaria]

This thread is an offshoot from Anchor’s thread here after he complained, What happened to my thread? (NB I have no complaint with that). By the time it was created it was already too old to be easily findable. So I’m bumping it now. Mods, it may help if the title contained some mention of authenticating/debunking a letter by Pontius Pilate, even though that was not my initial focus. However, it is relevant to know how these posts came into being, on and for that other thread, simply because this ‘point of order’ helps understand what is valid and what is not, which is actually the subtext of the above discussion.


Here is what I responded to Anchor :

What happened to your thread? In bumping it up from page six with a favourable discussion of the peace-maker Jesus, I forgot to factor in some conflictual aspects to his story. Turns out this guy was an agent provocateur who resorted to self-inflicted violence involving as many others as possible, in such a way as to provoke long-term persecutions and multiple wars over millennia. My bad.


Alternatively, speaking one’s mind is always going to be somewhat disruptive, in which no apologies are called for. I will not even plead that my peaceful approach was challenged by a mod. It may be that good and evil are so inextricably mixed together on this planet that there is no safe haven, not even a forum thread.


My apologies all the same.

I shall be making another substantive post later.

[araucaria]

If there is any validity to my last post but one, then it ought to generate further insights. The main implication was that resurrection and original sin are somehow opposites. This in turn suggested that the confrontation was very much between Christ and the Sadducees, with Pilate the impartial judge at once awarding the case to Jesus and overturning that ruling on a technicality. The ones, fighting to the death, obtained satisfaction; the other, non-fighting to the life, also achieved his intended purpose, but only by submitting to undeserved punishment. But what of the substance?

I don’t much understand what is meant by resurrection. I guess in today’s terms we might think of the astral body, an alien encounter, or what happens after an ‘FDE’ (full death experience); however, I have no input on any of that. But I do have some kind of a handle on original sin, so if we look at that, maybe we can work our way back to what it is not. First off, it is intensely reactionary: as before, so now. One man dies, but his children carry on as if he hadn’t. This is countered by the virgin birth issue. Matthew devotes his whole first chapter to establishing Joseph’s royal ancestry, except that Joseph’s bloodline has nothing to do with Mary and Jesus. Bloodlines are a generational example of Sartrian ‘bad faith’. Sartre’s example was a whore: once a whore always a whore, as if the day job (or maybe the night job) totally summed up who that person was. Sartre was not a Christian but evidently, when dealing with whores, Christ was a Sartrian. The overriding history of evil may be summed up briefly: once a Rothschild (e.g.) always a Rothschild. That is how the thing works; however to say so, even from the outside, amounts to perpetuating that error, rather than doing something to change it. The outcome is a permanent clash between conspirators and conspiracy theorists that is never going to change anything; or between the entitled haves and the have nots, all unable to agree on who is doing the stealing. There are all kinds of ways to describe this same phenomenon. Something’s gotta give: literally give, as in sacrifice. The answer to constantly harking back would seem to be some kind of genuine moving, no doubt forward, whatever that means.

Another way of looking at original sin is through the law. The Sanhedrin were the lawmakers, and a set of laws is basically a description of how things have always been done. One aspect of human evolution is to do with how we have come from commandments literally ‘carved in stone’ (hence the expression) to have a legislative branch of government entirely devoted to updating laws, thankfully on the basis mostly of a constitution penned on parchment. Whores and others are no longer stoned to death. This is evidence of christianity at work in what we now consider to be a secular area of life. However, there is a counter-effect also at work in legal practice in the shape of legal precedent. When this notion is invoked, it means basically that your case is to be judged on the basis of one or more previous cases, and the more numerous these are the more persuasive the argument becomes.

A couple of decades ago, I got a close look at how this works. In order to substantiate its interpretation of an article of the French Civil Code (Article 1134), a legal team relied massively on legal precedent. Half a millennium ago, an agreement was made between a service provider and a customer for a given service at a given price in the money of the day. As I recall, the contract was not between two individuals, but included their respective estates, and neither was a (renewable) end date set out. As a result of these clerical oversights or errors, you had a perpetual contract, with ongoing litigation for centuries, because the service provision was unstoppable. Why unstoppable? Because by this time the beneficiary was getting it for next to nothing and had no reason to terminate a juicy deal. And so, into the present century, businesses are still operating (litigating) on the basis of such unredeemable ancient clerical oversights or errors. Not for nothing is the world of finance full of religious terminology such as bonds or debt but also redemption. However, it would be a mistake to conclude that organized religion is as corrupt as the world of finance. To various degrees at different periods, organized religion can be actually… christian.

If resurrection is to be seen as the antidote to original sin, whereby time is stopped in the past (out of fear?), then it has to be something much more general than just what might occur after death. It would be every moment as something different from the last. In other words, it is the passage of time itself and yet the source of eternal youth. Forgiveness is moving on from the negative; growth is moving on from the positive. Carl Jung viewed Catholic confession as a major factor in mental health. In the context of the above, it may be seen as an ongoing rejection of original sin, since a person takes personal responsibility for specific personal mistakes, has them taken off the books and moves on. While rising from the dead is the big picture of what is going on, this day-to-day micro-management of fresh starts is where the rubber hits the road.

The above was written two weeks ago. I shall try to tie it in with current events in another post.