Paul's Agon

Below is an excerpt from the Introduction to my booklet “The Seven Letters of Revelation – A Radical Interpretation”. It represents the first part of the introduction to the booklet. When Paul began the process of finalizing his gospels sometime in the early AD 90s, he had read (or had with him) the following materials: The Torah which included Isaiah and its prophesies; which also generated the Moses and Joshua typologies that he would use to describe Jesus. From Philo of Alexandria, he had the conceptual and doctrinal framework upon which he would build the story of the life of Jesus as well as the document “Flaccus” about the punishment and death of a Roman official named Flaccus.  He also had the works of Josephus about the Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities from which he pulled the historical background for the early life of Jesus. From these documents, he took events in Herod’s life, John the Baptist and Pilate among others. He might also have had a document called “The Te...

This blog post is based upon a chapter of my new book entitled “Coded Messages in the Pastorals”. This chapter is one of the key chapters that describes a specific mnemonic devise that was apparently used in Rome starting from the first century AD, most likely, into the second century. This blog post is a shortened version of the chapter of this book which can be found on Amazon at   https://amzn.to/2vdLyOF There is a famous palindrome called the Sator Square that points to how the Romans used mnemonic devices to solidify certain concepts in the minds of Roman soldiers, plebeians and slaves. These devices could also be used to guide the writing process of propagandistic materials intended to accomplish a particular (social) goal. A person trained in using these devices could be counted upon to stay “on script” and, in a sense, they are the precursors of what we call today “talking points”.  The Sator square is thought by some to have merely been a mind game, but I think i...

This blog post showcases one section from my book Behind the Ritual Mask. These and other materials have also been recently published in the shorter book Contra Religion - Excerpts from the book Behind the Ritual Mask.  The Suffering Savior Sources The Suffering Savior and its related concepts in mythology represent a broad spectrum of ancient cultural institutions and messages. The penis, the pillar (or the two pillars), the mountain of god, the magic mountain, the bull, etc., are only a few of the more primitive concepts that relate to the Suffering Savior paradigm. The early forms of this paradigm generally refer to male power, rising up in life, touching god (as with Prometheus), and later vanity, Prometheus fallen, punished and crucified for arrogance. Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, Atlas, Hercules, Samson, Christ and a host of other suffering gods are related to this concept. Indeed, this is one of the most powerful paradigms because of its early (now forgotten) associat...