I've Decided On My Career Path in Academia

I am a notorious procrastinator. You know the old saying 'analysis paralysis'? That's me.

I often try and dress up my caution by saying something like, 'I am still deciding.' 'I need more time to think.' However I am quite certain that these intellectualizing exercises always go back to something more basic.

I remember being five years old and being 'stuck' on a high fence. All my other friends had already jumped over to the other side without thinking. I was thinking too much. I was considering 'the best way to get down from the fence' and as a result I was stuck on the fence while they were running to the apple orchard to eat delicious fruit (sounds like I lived in the Sound of Music or something).

In any event, it took my twenty years to right my first book. I'd like to think that I needed to 'get it right' but the truth is that a little more recklessness wouldn't have hurt the book's progress.

Now that I am working on my next popular work I am starting to see that I need to become a 'real academic.' There's only so far I can go writing for 'real people.' If I am going to take the idea that Marcus Julius Agrippa, the last king of Israel was the real messiah of Christianity as a stake into the heart of the West I am going to have make a convincing scholarly argument based on at least one ancient witness.

But which witness?

The idea that the rabbinic literature and early Alexandrian Christianity identified Agrippa as the messiah of Daniel 9:26 and this went back to an ancient first century tradition common to both religions can only go so far. It is still highly theoretical and doesn't quite 'work' with traditional approaches to Judaic and Patristic Studies.

So it is that I have been sitting around spinning my wheels. My present employment can only last so long (maybe another ten years tops). So I have to start considering get paid for speculating about the past. Who knows how long people will continuing buying my books or if they will ever see me on TV promoting these strange ideas.

This is what I have been thinking about for a long while and then I received an email last night from my friend, mentor and father figure Dr Rory Boid of Melbourne University who scolded me for my fence sitting:

The time will come (AND SUDDENLY AND MOVING EVER FASTER TOWARDS YOU: Deut. XXXII) when you will be in a REAL spot if you can’t handle B.H.’s translations of the Mårqe and Ṭîṭe and Ninnå collections and Kippenberg’s translations of the Durran collection and can’t read simple prose in Biblical Hebrew. What are you going to do if you have to quote a phrase in Samaritan Hebrew (or Aramaic) in public or on camera and make it sound acceptable?

So then I got my 'big idea.' I will refine my knowledge of Hebrew to the point that I can write a thesis arguing that the great Samaritan first century reformer Marcus the son of Titus (Marqe the son of Tite) lived in the late first century. This will be the first step towards establishing that he was really Marcus Julius Agrippa, the last king of Israel friend of the Emperor Titus (and thus 'father' of everyone in the Empire), lover of Agrippa's sister Berenice.

I know this might sound crazy but this line of approach has great promise. I have read the bad translation of Marqe's writings by MacDonald and got a clear sense that Pauline ideas are present throughout the text. But this would not be a part of my argument

I have already initiated the start of an argument that Marqe was St. Mark in a couple of chapters in my book, the Real Messiah. This would not be used in my thesis either.

All I need to do is argue for a first century date based on a number of observation that Rory and Benyamim Tsadaka have pointed out to me over the years. A convincing case can be made AND THEN the identification of Marqe as Marcus Julius Agrippa could follow in a paper.

With THIS DATING and THIS IDENTIFICATION in place everything is in place for formally recognizing that:

(a) Agrippa was recognized as a messianic figure by a great number people in Palestine and Egypt
(b) that the great number of Pauline allusions in the writings of Marqe are attributable to the fact that Agrippa was also the historical person behind Marcion (I have demonstrated this already from the rabbinic references to Agrippa but here is another supporting line of reasoning)

I know for many people out there this doesn't seem like a big deal. But for someone who is used to sitting on fences for long periods of time, it's nothing short of a revelation.