Don't Mistake Me For Someone I Am Not

I have a lot of faults. My wife can attest to that. However accusing me of being an atheist trying to destroy belief in God, Christianity or the messiah certainly are not accurate. I think religious scholarship is pathetically irrational. Yes, guilty as charged. I think that NT scholars typically don't have a clue about Judaism and so will never be able to make sense of the gospel and early Christianity. Yes, guilty as charged.

If the truth be told I don't think that the historical Jesus makes any difference to understanding the gospel. Indeed I don't think that anyone has properly understood the gospel since Constantine and Hosius of Cordoba conspired to corrupt St. Mark's original Papacy (which ran through the 'Origenists' of Alexandria in the third century) and ended with Peter's death in 311 CE (maybe it went a bit longer but that's the last clear sighting of that tradition).

Let the existing Church accuse Origen of having went 'over to the Jews.' Alexandrian Christianity was always rooted in Alexandrian Judaism. The problem now is that the very people who are needed to make sense of the gospel (those of the Middle Eastern cultural milieu) have already have found their religious truths in other teachers. That leaves stupid white people having to overcome their cultural presuppositions about being the beginning, end and middle of 'civilization' and actually take the time to think how Semitic people think, feel and rationalize things.

Of course that will never, ever happen ...

I may be accused of having bigoted beliefs regarding the idiocy of the European Christian tradition but that doesn't make me an atheist bent on destroying Christianity. Indeed do any of you realize how easy it would have been for me to link either this blog or my other one to an atheist blog roll if I wanted to increase hits on either site and boost sales of my book?

The reason I don't and I didn't is because I don't see Biblical criticism as an end in itself. In other words, I don't sit around 'trashing' the Bible in order to prove how irrational 'they' are and how clever I can be.

I am interested in the truth ... period. I believe there is a truth at the heart of Christianity, one which makes rational sense and fits into the traditional Jewish and Samaritan messianic cultural milieu of the age even if I am not smart enough to ultimately figure it out how it all fit together in my lifetime.