Update: One should cite the works of Eisenman here: a link to his work and many others: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/jesus/roberteisenman.html
Christianity and the Roman Emperors + The Triadic savior supermeme
Two posts collated, from redfortyeight.com
I zipped through these books at high speed, and found them very compelling, but am unable to assess such a complex mass of similar yet distinct perspectives and datasets. I will have to read them again, along with still more books in the related literature.
Creating Christianity: A Weapon of Ancient Rome: Davis
Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors invented Christianity: Valiant, et a.
Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus: Atwill
The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days: Conner
Paulianity: Identifying Christianity’s False Apostle : Farrell
and this:
Operation Messiah: St. Paul, Roman intelligence and the birth of Christianity: Thijs Voskuilen, Rose Mary Sheldon.
These books provide an acute expose of the emergence of Christianity but they are not mutually consistent, leaving the critique up in the air. Further, they don’t understand the issues of occult action open to such figures as John the Baptist, ‘Jesus’, and Paul. A group og such men could have just as well have exploited the Romans to promote their new religion as the other way around. Note that Paul clearly stated he was somehow in contact with Jesus in some sense. No secular humanist critique can figure this out (although I can’t either, but spirit contact with dead figures is not simply superstition).
Update: I am restoring the original full post here after deleting the passage at the end in bold face See post to follow. I cannot quite delineate the Gurdjieff situation, but I have heard it said in sufi circles that Gurdjieff et al. replicated the triadic operation in the twentieth century, but it is hard to fully document this. The world of Gurdjieff is not a gang of saintly figures, and one might do will to be wary of the original Christological school: it was so full of disinformation, and outright deceptions as to be untrustworthy. But the critics in the books cited are suggesting the Roman Emperors concocted the gospels themselves whole cloth. They go too far, and the firsts book cautions this view….If the early Christological figures to graft their corpus onto Roman thinking and not the other way around they perpetrated their own fraud.
These issues are such a hopeless mess that I would recommend moving away from the whole quagmire.
———–We will insert another post commenting on this:
The triadic savior supermeme….
https://redfortyeight.com/2022/12/19/christianity-and-the-roman-emperors-2/
These critiques of Christianity are essential and important but in my experience it is easy to miss something. Secular humanism needs its critique, but the object is not to turn everyone into Flatlanders. Christians don’t understand their own religion, but secular humanists don’t understand it either….
For example, the work of Gurdjieff in his All and Everything with their Sufistic/gnostic angle discuss the larger phase of emergent Christianity (in Axial Age parallel with much else, e.g Buddhism/Mahayana) rightly pointing to the mysterious triadic coordination of three savior memes: John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul, and their mutual ‘communication’. This ancient legacy (about which I know almost nothing) resurfaces in the Christian generative moment. This larger operation whose exact significance has never been clarified (best of luck with Gurdjieffian mystification) was the larger generator of the strange mystery cult whose unknown inner meaning disgorged its strange cultural exoteric outcome as Pauline Christianity and with an unknown relation to what we suspect is the Roman Emperor cooptation of the ‘what was all that’ that came before, apparently. The source ‘savior’ types probably thought the coopted Christianity a useful disguised outcome for their obscure operations which never reached the public. Ironically the Roman emperors provided a massive propaganda boost for the ‘lost cult’ soon the world of the Popes, and finally Constantine. So it would seem the early Christian group outsmarted Rome, not the other way around.
—————–original post:
I zipped through these books at high speed, and found them very compelling, but am unable to assess such a complex mass of similar yet distinct perspectives and datasets. I will have to read them a…
Source: Christianity and the Roman Emperors – 1848+: The End(s) of History
I zipped through these books at high speed, and found them very compelling, but am unable to assess such a complex mass of similar yet distinct perspectives and datasets. I will have to read them again, along with still more books in the related literature.
Tweet
two more:
The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days: Conner
Paulianity: Identifying Christianity’s False Apostle : Farrell
and this:
Operation Messiah: St. Paul, Roman intelligence and the birth of Christianity: Thijs Voskuilen, Rose Mary Sheldon.
These books provide an acute expose of the emergence of Christianity but they are not mutually consistent, leaving the critique up in the air. Further, they don’t understand the issues of occult action open to such figures as John the Baptist, ‘Jesus’, and Paul. A group og such men could have just as well have exploited the Romans to promote their new religion as the other way around. Note that Paul clearly stated he was somehow in contact with Jesus in some sense. No secular humanist critique can figure this out (although I can’t either, but spirit contact with dead figures is not simply superstition).
Update: I am restoring the original full post here after deleting the passage at the end in bold face See post to follow. I cannot quite delineate the Gurdjieff situation, but I have heard it said in sufi circles that Gurdjieff et al. replicated the triadic operation in the twentieth century, but it is hard to fully document this. The world of Gurdjieff is not a gang of saintly figures, and one might do will to be wary of the original Christological school: it was so full of disinformation, and outright deceptions as to be untrustworthy. But the critics in the books cited are suggesting the Roman Emperors concocted the gospels themselves whole cloth. They go too far, and the firsts book cautions this view….If the early Christological figures to graft their corpus onto Roman thinking and not the other way around they perpetrated their own fraud.
These issues are such a hopeless mess that I would recommend moving away from the whole quagmire.
———–We will insert another post commenting on this:
The triadic savior supermeme….
https://redfortyeight.com/2022/12/19/christianity-and-the-roman-emperors-2/
These critiques of Christianity are essential and important but in my experience it is easy to miss something. Secular humanism needs its critique, but the object is not to turn everyone into Flatlanders. Christians don’t understand their own religion, but secular humanists don’t understand it either….
For example, the work of Gurdjieff in his All and Everything with their Sufistic/gnostic angle discuss the larger phase of emergent Christianity (in Axial Age parallel with much else, e.g Buddhism/Mahayana) rightly pointing to the mysterious triadic coordination of three savior memes: John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul, and their mutual ‘communication’. This ancient legacy (about which I know almost nothing) resurfaces in the Christian generative moment. This larger operation whose exact significance has never been clarified (best of luck with Gurdjieffian mystification) was the larger generator of the strange mystery cult whose unknown inner meaning disgorged its strange cultural exoteric outcome as Pauline Christianity and with an unknown relation to what we suspect is the Roman Emperor cooptation of the ‘what was all that’ that came before, apparently. The source ‘savior’ types probably thought the coopted Christianity a useful disguised outcome for their obscure operations which never reached the public. Ironically the Roman emperors provided a massive propaganda boost for the ‘lost cult’ soon the world of the Popes, and finally Constantine. So it would seem the early Christian group outsmarted Rome, not the other way around.
—————–original post:
I zipped through these books at high speed, and found them very compelling, but am unable to assess such a complex mass of similar yet distinct perspectives and datasets. I will have to read them a…
Source: Christianity and the Roman Emperors – 1848+: The End(s) of History
I zipped through these books at high speed, and found them very compelling, but am unable to assess such a complex mass of similar yet distinct perspectives and datasets. I will have to read them again, along with still more books in the related literature.
Tweet
1848+: The End(s) of History 