Words Mean What We Want Them to Mean, for More Or Less. They Are Representations of Ideas

The Nazarene 1

Chapter One

The Nazarene

Words mean what we want them to mean, for more or less. They are representations of ideas and are the sight-sound signs with which one self relates to an other. All language continues to evolve. New words are coined to stamp new experiences and new meanings are associated with old words and their combinations.

The Bible in its Old Testament, and extensively in the Gospels of the New Testament, makes reference to the Son of Man. This phrase admits a multiplicity of meanings. In the past, it meant what writers wanted it to mean. Today, it means what we want it to mean. Son of Man has special relevance in the patriarchal male deity mindset of Judaism which, from the point of view of religious origins and culture, was a Motherless Child.

Excusing and lying are commonplace in all cultures. Today’s media, the press and television, excel in presenting contrived fictions as facts. Educational organizations impress on their teachers and students the need to tell the truth, but they do not define what truth is nor where it is to be found and how it is to be assessed.

At the same time, those in authority in many institutions are often guilty of deliberate distortion of events to suit their personal advantage. The cult of dissimulation has been elevated to an art form by churchmen, business executives, politicians and military leaders. Governments set up Departments for propaganda and disinformation to keep the general public either in ignorance or misinformed about events going on in their own country and elsewhere.

During the second half of last century, the male intellectual tyranny that for so long governed decisions in matters of human behaviour, politics and religion has been openly challenged and its deceit exposed. Its myths are now outknown and its creeds and cults outgrown.

Cultural evolution, under a male hegemony, is witnessing what finally happens to the sons of men in a motherless child civilization. We know that the stockpiles of nuclear weapons are enough to wipe out most life on Earth many times over. We do know that some fundamentalist religious and secular leaders, blindly committed to worshipping their own brand of divine lord and master, are hell-bent on carrying out what they believe are the latter’s designs in regards to mankind.

The cultural and scientific revolutions which have characterized the last few Centuries have left Philosophy and Theology in a state of having to rethink and remodel their basic postulates and rational procedures if they are to have any relevance and credibility for the generations to come. Scientific knowledge which sheds new light and dispels the prejudices and a priori misconceptions of past theological teaching is generally suspect. Although they endow their copyrighted deity with the attribute of being the Father of all things, few theologians in their own self-projectioning conceive such a deity as having a scientific mind. He is said to have taught his created motherless mankind what they needed to know about Theology and Sociology, not Science and Mathematics. Fewer ecclesiastics still would concede the possibility of understanding and interpreting the so-called divine in the sign language of algebraic abstraction.

Christianity is at a crossroads in cultural evolution. It is being forced to choose between either a retrogressive childish fundamen- talist worship of the Bible and Tradition, or by cutting its umbilical link with the past, be reborn into the becomingness of adult age in a Scientific Reformation.

As an institution, it is undergoing the greatest credibility crisis in its history. The sources of its revelation, the Bible and Tradition, are both called into question. Most scholars today accord the biblical concept of a primeval parental Original Sin with only a mythological reality and the dying god Christology of mankind's subsequently necessary Redemption becomes no more than an emotive religious intellectual abstraction.

The historical Nazarene Yeshua, an Aramaic word name, and the later conceptualized Iesus Christos of Paul’s Greek-written Theology are controversial subjects of academic speculation. Contrary to traditional accepted meanings, it must be understood that Nazarene has no reference to the village of Nazareth, but denotes a member of a religious sect known as the Nazarenes. We know much more about them from archaeological research and recent discovered written material like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In the History of Religion, the three great male expressions of monotheistic thought, Judaism, Christianity and Islamism are relatively modern. They all link themselves with an accepted first patriarch, Abraham, who is generally dated now by current biblical scholarship as living probably sometime around 1000 BCE. In contrast, for thousands and thousands of years prior to this in the Near, Middle and Far East, there flourished matriarchal societies in which was worshipped The One Great Mother Goddess, The Divine Ancestress, The Queen of Heaven, Mistress of the Universe. The Great Goddess was known under a variety of names, but they all were facets of the one Divine Maternity.

In the matriarchal cultures of the distant past, the mystery of new life, of birth and growth focused attention on maternal aspects of this many titled Great Mother Goddess whose very first representations were artistically exaggerated female figurines. In seeming rhythm with the lunar cycle, woman's body bled. This would stop mysteri- ously for long periods pending the miracle of birth when from her body issued both men and women and also nourishing milk.

Throughout many millennia, gender distinction and sexual inter- course were ritually associated with procreation in spite of the very long period of gestation. Only later did servant man superficially reason the male role in animal propagation. He reversed woman's superior position and made himself the lord and master of she who formerly was his queen and mistress. In human history, the most primitive and the most meaningful and enduring unity of persons is the mother pregnant with child, not the husband and wife, nor the father and son. The most comprehensive revelation of the fecundity and being of the divine Self is Woman, the self-other-functioning placental mammal. The most meaningful expression of her spaced time human otherself's filial becoming is her son of man's kind.

In prepatriarchal myths, a goddess was understood to reproduce parthenogenetically, i.e. by the act-art of self-fertilization. This perception of the source of life remained long after paternity was divined by men. It persisted on in both folk and ecclesiastical culture well into the Christian Era where overtones of it were adopted or adapted by writers and teachers to complete the gaps in popular religious traditions and to make more acceptable their newly developed formal theological systems. Both daughters and sons were the fruit of her womb. Divine sons were meaningful but subordinate and dispensable consorts in cycles of death and rebirth.

Patrilinearity was an essential feature of patriarchal culture. In tribal societies, the chief’s firstborn son was the logical successor inheriting both power and possessions. Brother often conspired against brother and murder or banishment were frequently real outcomes. In ordinary family situations, similar ideas of a mythical Cain-Abel conflict still prevail and fratricide is not infrequent. There were aberrations in the way various priesthoods interpreted their relations with their tribal deities who were often made out to demand in sacrifice the first fruits of harvests and herds. These offerings served legitimately to feed the priests and their families. The ritual human sacrifice of firstborn males was a feature of much patrilineal religion. Although Abraham was ultimately exempted from such demanded slaying of his son Isaac, the modern mind finds it hard to accept, indeed rejects a tribal male deity who puts its believers to such bizarre tests.

The development of religious ideas has followed an evolutionary course.Revelations can only be made into cultures which are disposed to or adapted to receive them. Jewish scriptural traditions and its Mosaic Law were the products of prevailing dominant one-sided patriarchal mindsets.

There was a past time on this earth when the activities of human beings, particularly in Mother Goddess worship, were integrated into Nature's grand network and were a true functional part of it. This was always meant to be so. Mankind, as the protagonist on stage now (in what may well be the final act of the current drama of an era of errors) is destined to rule the earth in the capacity of Nature's appointed obedient servant and husbandman, not in the usurped evil role of rapacious tyrant. His generally greater physical strength is meant to be employed in protective service of mother and child, not in violent and abusive dominance.

With their various priesthoods' connivance, men have prostituted their caretaker-career for a get-rich-quick exploitation of natural resources and have blinded themselves to all possible consequences. For the ecology and economy of our Earth, the Judaeo-Christian religious traditions have proved to be more often curses than blessings. The greatest mistake that humans can make is to imagine that evolution is as blind as they are. Our most childish stupidity is to think that the broodinghen bird's spirit in Mother Nature is only a pious myth; to think that the real living world around us in its quasi-infinite complexity, is purely passive and insensitive, neutral and defenceless, meek and virginal, just waiting to be abusively deflowered

It is important, indeed essential, for any understanding of the evolution and history of modern religion, to be mindful that in the Hebrew language, there was, and still is, no word for divine mother or goddess. Theologically speaking, in the patriarchal mindset, Judaism and its offspring were, and still are, motherless children. Female divinities were officially anathema to it and to its later derivatives, Christianity and Islamism. Their common folk were continually reprimanded for whoring after the “unspeakable” abominations of their godless neighbours.

In their one-sided superficial and prejudiced cultural assessments, patriarchal authorities generally considered the female as merely the passive receptacle of the active male semen from which all new life had its assumed beginnings. Women had considerable economic value. Good attractive specimens could fetch their father or brothers or guardian a high price on the matrimonial market. Nevertheless, they were inferior servant beings, useful like animals for breeding and mere labour activity.

Perhaps most important of all, they served as desirable objects for male pleasure in sexual gratification. This activity however was not without its dangers. Women could be deceivers and artful seducers. Men were not exempt from such vices but as the Genesis story of Adam and Eve pointed out, it was all Eve’s fault in the first place. This attitude towards women’s role in society still prevails in many cultures. Regrettably it is not just confined to Middle Eastern, Asian and indigenous African and Australian societies.

The patriarchal mentality, inherent in priestly Judaistic external- ism, still dominates most Western Religions as it has for the past two thousand years. As the heirs of the Jewish tradition of religion, Christianity has only parted company from it in name, but by no means in nature. The visible authoritarian Christian Church, with its male clergy, canonical legislation and liturgical rites is no different in essential form from that of the Judaism which gave it birth. After two thousand years of attempting to superficially sanctify individual souls, Christianity's experience of inner space is still generally that of a void or empty tomb. It has yet to come to grips with the dual lobed focal core of volumed human consciousness.

Century after century has seen the male rationalizing of biblical teaching and its expression in formal theological systems and creeds which men were prepared to defend, to either their own death or to the death of any others holding different or contrary views. Quite soon after the departure of Jesus the Nazarene from the Palestinian scene, the glad tidings of universal sharing in the heavenly kingdom which he is said to have proclaimed turned sour and sad as overzealous and often misguided churchmen conceptualized religious faith and its ritual expression into absolute dogmas and legislated decrees.

In the Gospel attributed to John 18/36, the Nazarene Jesus is said to have protested to Pilate that his kingdom was not of this world. Eventually however, it became the most powerful earthly political Empire the world has ever known. The poor still had a Pauline sort of gospel preached to them, but it was that of the bad news of anathemas, excommunication and eternal damnation for unshriven gravely sinning baptized Christians and for all the unbaptized pagans as well. Their teachers did not learn from a Master who was reputedly poor in spirit, meek and humble of heart but generally from hypocritical and stubborn ecclesiastical authorities determined to maintain their developing conceptual systems intact and to increase their own power and authority.

All this was part of the divine blueprint in which the male role is as a fertilizing factor, for better or worse, in a moment of spaced time. It is not meant to last. Eventually the male of any species learns his place is at the service of the female and her offspring.

Judaeo-Christian traditions have moulded the patriarchal cultures of the West. Exclusively male priesthoods have masterminded their own ecclesiastical development in their external worship of an invisible, ineffable and transcendent heavenly father god and creator up in the sky somewhere. He was out there, inhabiting inaccessible heights. He was all-powerful, all-knowing and as lawmaker and judge he both condemned and pardoned, was merciful and also vengeful. In the past such a deity mirrored, and still continues to mirror, the experience of its male worshipping selves. They have continued to bask in the reflected glory of an exclusive tribal lord and manly god. For the Jews of old, The fear of the Lord was the beginning of Wisdom, and out of a holy reverence and mortal fear of desecration, the name of their Yahweh became an unpronounceable Tetragrammaton, YHWH.

Very similar issues prevail today as once existed in the earliest times of the Christian Church. Then the self-styled orthodox leaders of a hierarchically structured institutional authority accused as heretics their freethinking Gnostic democratic lay adversaries. In AD 70, the Roman Emperor Titus finally routed and scattered the Jews. The Essene community in Palestine hid their collections of parchment manuscripts and papyrus scrolls in large clay vases in caves in the mountains overlooking the Dead Sea. They remained hidden there until they were discovered in 1947. Their importance was suppressed and their publication delayed, hoping for added financial gain and academic prestige. When eventually they were published, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi Coptic texts put entirely new perspectives on early Christianity. Today's doctrinal doubts and difficulties were voiced far more vehemently in the very first centuries as is evident from the numerous Apocrypha now available for firsthand reading.

Over seven hundred pages of valuable source material are to be found now in THE OTHER BIBLE, edited by Willis Barnstone and published by Harper and Row. Hitherto, much of such writings had only been known in the biased condemnations of them by so-called orthodox, and at times paranoiac, patristic writers. Religious authority, feminism, the conception and resurrection of Jesus, the informal content of what would become Creeds of Faith, all these and many others were hot topics of debate and execration in the first decades of the Christian Era.

Gnostic religion was professedly based on personal knowledge and experience. It was individualistic and had no political or social orientations. If Gnostic interpretations of the teachings of Jesus the Nazarene had prevailed, the course of Christianity would have been far different from what it has been.

In the evolutionary and often revolutionary designs of the divine Self’s planned Christian offshoot from Judaism, a visible author- itarian male-ruled institutional church was necessary to achieve certain cultural effects, sometimes for better but often for worse.

An alliance between Church and State would see the emergence of a blend of politics and religion formulated by ecclesiastical statesmen. Christianity, as we have known it, was to be only a transitory patriarchal phase to fertilize and expedite new aspects of civilization, but in a limited time its manly usefulness would be expended and it would become impotent for further seeding of humanity's destined cultural harvest.