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Trajan Conquers the East 'Wars & Rumours of Wars' (Mark 13.7)
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Trajan Conquers the East'Wars & Rumours of Wars' (Mark 13.7) In 114 Trajan swept south with his army from Armenia. The rapid Roman conquest of Mesopotamia brought nearly all Jews under Roman dominion for the first time. But at the very moment Trajan sailed in triumph on the Persian Gulf, the Je...
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Temples on the Mount Herod's Temple – Facts and Fantasies
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Temples on the MountHerod's Temple – Facts and FantasiesFor Jews and Christians alike, "The Temple in the time of Jesus" has long held a special value. For Jews it is central to their cherished notions of an ancient and powerful kingdom and a tangible link to the splendours of Solomon and even to God h...
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Greeks & Romans in the Levant World Culture Confounds the Jews
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Greeks & Romans in the LevantWorld Culture Confounds the JewsGreek and Jew ‘Nothing so far has disproved the contention that the classical Greeks did not even know the name of the Jews.’–A. Momigliano (Alien Wisdom - The Limits of Hellenization, p78. In the late 4th century (332 BC) Alexand...
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Yahweh – Jehovah Brutal Jewish God of War
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Yahweh – Jehovah Brutal Jewish God of WarAll cultures have anthropomorphized their gods into humanoid (if sometimes grotesque) form. Were the Jews the exception? Hardly. We know precisely what the Hebrew god looked like. We are, after all, fashioned in his own likeness! "Yahweh", in fact, is a...
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Babylon Nurtures the Jewish Priesthood What really happened to the Jews?
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Babylon Nurtures the Jewish Priesthood What really happened to the Jews? The major players of the ancient Middle East, century after century, arose in the fertile river valleys and flood plains, primarily of Egypt and Mesopotamia. First one region, then another, produced a dominant city-based...
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Israelites and the Assyrians – On the Margins of Empire
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Israelites and the Assyrians – On the Margins of EmpireBeginning in the Early Bronze Age (circa 3500 BC) pastoral nomads – indigenous to the region – periodically settled the Canaanite highlands. Settlement was a response to grain shortage induced by disruption of lowland agriculture. But the...
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Genesis: First invent your Jew, then invent your Christ...
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Genesis:First invent your Jew, then invent your Christ... Race is a sensitive subject. To use the word almost invites the charge of racism. Yet to understand the rise of Christianity one must come to terms the people who were its original authors – the Jews. The Myth of the Jewish ‘Race’ "Thus saith...
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Egypt and the Jewish Patriarchs – palpable nonsense!
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Egypt and the Jewish Patriarchs – palpable nonsense! The two primary books of the Old Testament – Genesis and Exodus – refer to 'Pharaoh' 155 times. Curiously, not once in either book is Pharaoh identified by name – and yet, in fact, the references are to many different pharaohs, across many...
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King David – The Boy Wonder
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King David –The Boy Wonder The ancient Jewish hero David, "son of Jesse the Bethlehemite," is a "curiously elusive figure" (Oxford Companion to the Bible). In turns shepherd, giant killer, court musician, poet, warlord and king, nothing and no one outside the Bible notes his existence.If a h...
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Solomon? – The Emperor With No Clothes
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Solomon? – The Emperor With No ClothesSupposedly, an Israelite empire flourished in the 10th century BC, during a time of temporary weakness of both Assyria and Egypt. Yet the fabled empire of David and Solomon remains just that: a fable, unsupported by any evidence – and empires normally lea...
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God's love – for the Jews! Ignorance, misogyny and intolerance
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God's love – for the Jews!Ignorance, misogyny and intolerance In the creed of the Jews, the natural impulse to love another human, expressed through sex, became a prisoner of the counterfeit impulse to fixate upon, adore and worship an illusory tribal deity. With emotional attachment, and its...
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Temples on the Mount – Beginnings Jerusalem's holy theme park
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Temples on the Mount – BeginningsJerusalem's holy theme parkThe "Temple of Solomon", centrepiece of an ancient imperial capital and Yahweh's very own residence on earth, has ever cast its chimeric shadow over the Jewish people. The fabulous sanctuary has engaged the interest and excited the ima...
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A History of 'Jesus Denial' The End is Nigh (for the godman!)
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A History of 'Jesus Denial'The End is Nigh (for the godman!)In a culture based upon Christianity the denial of Jesus' existence may appear at first glance absurd or even stupid. After all, goes the argument, "mainstream scholarship" accepts that there was a historical Jesus, even if there is no ag...
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The "12 Apostles" – Fabricated followers of a fabricated Saviour
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The "12 Apostles" –Fabricated followers of a fabricated SaviourThe apostles should be twelve of the most famous people in history. We're told they were hand picked by Jesus to witness his wondrous deeds, learn his sublime teachings, and take the good news of his kingdom to the ends of the earth.W...
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Nazareth – The Town that Theology Built
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Nazareth – The Town that Theology Built The Lost City The Gospels tell us that Jesus's home town was the 'City of Nazareth' ('polis Natzoree'): And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a CITY of Galilee, named Nazareth, To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of t...
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The Genealogy of Jesus – Matthew's edit How the godman was given a bogus pedigree
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The Genealogy of Jesus – Matthew's edit How the godman was given a bogus pedigreeThe genealogies found in Genesis provide a necessary link between the six days of divine creation, the descendents of Noah after the Flood, and the foundation narratives of Abraham and the Patriarchs. The sacred t...
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Enforcing the Faith – Missionaries or Murderers?
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Enforcing the Faith– Missionaries or Murderers? Christians get a lot of mileage out of the aphorism of 'turning the other cheek', a sentiment originating at least as early as Pythagoras in the fifth century BC. Yet both in theory and in practice, Christians have honoured the principle of murderi...
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The Buddhist Influence in Christian Origins
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The Buddhist Influence in Christian OriginsSpeculation of a link between Christianity and Buddhism first arose as a result of the translation of Buddhist texts into European languages during the British colonisation of India. Similarity in the stories of the births and lives of Jesus and Buddha...
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St Paul the Apostle – Could it all be a fabrication?
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St Paul the Apostle– Could it all be a fabrication?A Jew called Saul? An apostle called Paul? Or just plain invention? From religious policeman to grandee of the church, from beast fighter in Ephesus to beheading in Rome, Paul's story has more holes than a swiss cheese.Curiously, the trail-blazin...
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Persecution – Holy Mother Church Invents Heroic Origins
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Persecution – Holy Mother Church Invents Heroic Origins"God protects us" says Church Father."God interposed His providence on behalf of believers, dispersing by an act of His will alone all the conspiracies formed against them; so that neither kings, nor rulers, nor the populace, might be able t...
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The Emmaus Encounter – A fiction inspired by faith
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The Emmaus Encounter – A fiction inspired by faith Of the dozen or so post-death appearances claimed for Jesus Christ, the "most detailed" (a whole 20 verses) is the one reported solely by Luke, "on the road to Emmaus." Alarmingly, from the perspective of historical proof, the two primary witness...
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Resurrection of the Lord? Not in this universe!
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Resurrection of the Lord?Not in this universe!It is not the peripatetic "ministry" of Jesus, with all its supposed healings, wise teachings and astounding miracles, that is the bedrock of the Christian religion. Rather, it is the extraordinary melodrama of his death and resurrection, sometim...
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Waking the Dead – Did Jesus really "raise" anyone?
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Waking the Dead– Did Jesus really "raise" anyone?Of the 35 miracles supposedly performed by Jesus three were nothing less than restoring life to the recently dead. The lucky three were, implicitly, returned to normal life and would die another day, though we are told nothing of their post death adv...
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An Empty tomb of Jesus? – or vacuous nonsense!
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An Empty tomb of Jesus?– or vacuous nonsense!A state religion needs the paraphernalia of public sanctuaries, "holy places" where the serried ranks of the faithful can prostrate before the gods and abase themselves before the earthly legates of the divine. No more is this true than in the delirium o...
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The Sepulchres of Deceit Exploring Jerusalem's tomb town
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The Sepulchres of DeceitExploring Jerusalem's tomb townJerusalem is encompassed by graves. The ancient cemeteries date back millennia, to the Iron Age and beyond. In this vast, circumnavigating necropolis, a number of tombs are particularly impressive, combining elements from both Greek an...
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Fabrication of a Christian Holy Land The maritime stage of a perambulating messiah is palpable nonsense
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Fabrication of a Christian Holy LandThe maritime stage of a perambulating messiah is palpable nonsenseThe events of the ministry of Jesus pivot around a shallow Levantine lake. In the 1st century AD the lake was smaller and shallower (by several metres) than it is today. Two thriving Romano-Hel...
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The God who never was becomes a rebel who never rebelled
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JC – Hero of the PeopleThe God who never was becomes a rebel who never rebelledA 'life' conjured up from mystical fantasy, a mass of borrowed quotations, copied story elements and a corpus of self-serving speculation, does not constitute an historical reality. It constitutes a myth, a hero-myt...
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Paul in Cyprus and Galatia
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Paul in Cyprus and GalatiaReal or Imagined? Did Saint Paul, native of Tarsus and Roman citizen as he claimed, really make the journeys ascribed to him – or are they just a frame upon which to hang his seminal epistles? Did this erstwhile Rabbi Saul, student of Gamaliel and Pharisaic Jew, really sa...
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Witness to Jesus? – 2 Seneca and the Stoics
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Witness to Jesus? – 2 Seneca and the StoicsIn antiquity it was not the formalistic Roman religion, with its capricious gods and part-time priests, that offered answers to the perennial questions of existence – How shall I live? How shall I face death? etc. – but the schools of philosophy.Adepts w...
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Witness to Jesus? – 1 Philo of Alexandria
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Witness to Jesus? – 1 Philo of AlexandriaFrom a distance of 2000 years Jesus Christ appears in glorious technicolor, a veritable rainbow of the power and the glory. Every child "knows" his story, every individual "recognizes" his slender frame, his flowing chestnut hair, his kindly blue eyes. B...
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