Oh, I must be doing something right when the evangelicals are attacking me. I noticed this scathing review of my book here. I actually prefer hate mail to love letters. It gives me a chance to do what I was put on the earth to do - draw attention to the end of the western man's hold on the Semitic religious tradition. Robert Turkel who goes by the name 'J P Holding' is saying that he is completing a review of my book. You know it will be 'fair and balanced.' He's in Conservapedia for God's sake!
So it is that this 'reviewer' begins his 'review' with the clearest statement of his objectivity saying that I am "in many ways dishonest and despicable." Really? Wow! Apparently he met some of my ex-girlfriends.
So the stage is set now from these opening lines. He is the 'good guy' in the debate and I, well I am the 'bad guy.' As long as it is all clear in everyone's head. Let's move on to the wonderfully crafted arguments which follow.
He identifies my thesis as being that "Mark was actually Marcus Agrippa, and he was enthroned Messiah as a child in Alexandria, Egypt in 37-8 AD (which is also about when Jesus was actually crucified....in Samaria)." Okay, I am waiting for the proof that I am wrong about this ... And he can't articulate an actual opinion. Let's move on to something else.
Indeed there is nothing I like better than a scathing review but this is pathetic. He doesn't know what to do with all the evidence in my book so he has to recast the work into something it is not - that the claim that Marcus Agrippa, the last king of Israel being the messiah hangs on one thread - my interpretation of the iconography of the throne of St. Mark I rediscovered in the Basilica di San Marco in Venice.
I guess he could only deal with the picture section in the book.
I am developing a children's version of the Real Messiah especially for the evangelical market. The whole story will be developed as a comic strip, maybe then he will be able to understand the one hundred and eighty pages that appear before the treatment of this throne.
In any event because J P can only follow the pictures he claims that the throne is "central proof" to my claim that Agrippa was the messiah. To this end, he manages to articulate that I think "that Agrippa himself sat on it during a coronation ceremony."
Yes, that is true. I do think that the throne is a remembrance of St. Mark as a king. I think it suggests that St. Mark was the messiah. I wonder what this genius makes of Mark and the Popes that followed him being portrayed as sitting on a chair that was made to look like God's throne in heaven.
The alternative would be that the Alexandrian Church somehow were led to believe that a Galilean fisherman named Mark walked all the way from Palestine and somehow (by selling a lot of fish I guess) managed to get an alabaster chair like this made for himself.
Oh yes, then there is the 'other, other' alternative - we could just not bother to contemplate anything that doesn't agree with our own presuppositions. This is J P's approach throughout.
As a conservative he doesn't have any bones about his lack of objectivity. All truth is in the church already or on talk radio or the Fox Network. So it is that he doesn't even a pretend to evaluate the evidence that I bring forward from Philo's Flaccus, Josephus, the rabbinic literature, the Coptic tradition and other sources.
Again all he can do is look at the pictures.
I can't stress enough that he doesn't even bother to reconstruct any of my arguments from the book itself which don't deal with the throne. We are told that:
every credible source I can find, however, dates this artifact to at least 500 years later than Agrippa’s lifetime. How does Huller get rid of those intervening years?
J P admits to going on this blog a number of times. How could any visitor not see that I have made numerous posts that this fall the Journal of Coptic Studies - a real academic journal and not some evangelical masturbatory collective like E-blogs or whatever this place he writes from is called - will publish a forty page paper tracing the history of this object from the second century (the beginning of our first glimmer of historical information from Alexandria) to the transportation of the relic to Venice in 828 CE.
But then again this guy would have to learn to read.
The illiterate tells me that my argument is "all quite circular in the end." Really? Oh but wait. A circle is a picture again. J P can certainly relate to pictures and so it is that my argument is 'circular.'
But what makes it so circular? Oh, I get it - he can't understand all the pages with the letters so he makes up his own version of my original argument which happens to be circular (to attempt to fabricate a claim that my argument was 'triangular' would be too difficult because he would actually have to have three thoughts in his head).
It is against this over-simplistic understanding that he himself made up and then projected back in my name which he argues against this rather than the original case made in my book.
They do it on Rush Limbaugh, so why can't it work in scholarship.
Let me say that there are about one hundred and eighty pages which precede any direct engagement of the throne. I develop a number of discussions from a variety of ancient sources - all of which apparently were over this guy's head. So it is that his new 'evangelical version' of my book is utterly simple:
There is an inscription on the throne that says, “”. According to Huller, this can only be a Jubilee year referred to, and there happened to be one of those in, um, 37 AD when he thinks Agrippa was enthroned, which was also the only Jubilee that happened when Agrippa was actually alive. Therefore we must date this throne to the first century. Unfortunately, he says, we can’t be specific about where the throne was in those intervening 500 years.
This is J P at its most mendacious. Remember that it was he who began the 'review' by calling me 'dishonest and despicable.' Someone who would develop an argument like this and claim that this is his best effort to present the evidence from my book is really dishonest and really despicable. Is that he doesn't want to present the real evidence or can't because he doesn't understand it?
I don't know what to make of his statement here when attacks my use of the inscription without citing the inscription itself. Is it that he feels it doesn't matter? Yet what the inscription say must matter because he is attempting to say that it can't mean what I say it means.
Yet in the end I am left asking myself - why on earth do I have to defend my interpreting the throne of St. Mark as a throne of St. Mark when that's what the inscription says it is? What else is it if not a throne of St. Mark?
Of course if you fail to mention that the transcription says that this throne once seated St. Mark then it helps your argument that I just 'made all this stuff up.' But that's cheating. Cheating is dishonest and despicable even when you do it in the name of God.
It's not just my translator who says that the inscription says this - every version by every other translator retains this same understanding.
So if the object is indeed claiming to be a throne of St. Mark, and the Alexandrian tradition understands that St. Mark was indeed seated in a 'throne of St. Mark' in the first century, why should I treat the throne any differently than I would a manuscript of a first century author which has come down to survive at a later date?
I bet for instance that 'J P' employs Josephus to help him understand what happened in Judea during the revolt. Yet the manuscripts of Josephus - the physical documents themselves - don't date from before the twelfth or thirteenth century AT THE VERY EARLIEST. Most I think come from the fourteenth century.
I happen to think that the object is much older than the dates given by Grabar (sixth century). I happen to think they are older than the date assigned by van Lohuizen-Mulder as the earliest possible date for the throne (early fourth century). But let's stop right there and - for the sake of argument - acknowledge her dating. The value of a manuscript of the gospel from the early fourth century would be utterly amazing, why not a functioning relic which was central to the Alexandrian Church? I don't understand why J P isn't interested in this throne as a man of faith.
And then I remember that he is an uncultured man who claims to care so much about his God and his religion and then an object like this comes along and he discards it because it doesn't fit into his established way of thinking.
Now before he turns around this argument and says something like - I don't hate the object, I hate your interpretation of the object - let me say this. The throne of St. Mark has been rediscovered whether you like it or not. My paper establishes beyond a shadow of doubt not only that this is the same throne as is mentioned in the account of the martyrdom of Peter the seventeenth patriarch of Alexandria (just as van Lohuizen-Mulder and Secchi centuries before her suspected) but that if this is true then the object must in turn be dated to at least the beginning of the third century owing to internal statements in that tradition about this throne being present in the church for generations.
So here we have discovered an object which dates to the very beginning of the Alexandrian church and this character 'J P Holding' who trumpets his 'defense of the faith' all over the internet wants to attack my interpretation of the throne. Okay, that's fine. Let's suppose I am wrong. What are you going to do about the throne?
Here is a testimony older than any complete gospel text that has ever come down to us. It is filled with inscriptions, images and symbols which were established for some purpose by Christians from this very, very early period. Is J P Holding going to take time out from 'smashing the heads of the infidels' in order to understand the very faith he is supposedly defending? No of course not. He is an illiterate, uncultured boor who has nothing in common with the first Christians of Alexandria or anywhere else. The only things he is defending is the sacredness of his own ideas and his own ego.
I happened to have stumbled upon this throne. I don't claim to be a 'defender of the faith.' Yet the relic for whatever reason chose me. Do you know that I get emails from monks in Egypt who literally tell me that they pray for blessings from God for me because of my rediscovery of their throne? If I am on the side of these Christians whose side are you on? Which ancient traditions are you defending?
In any event, I am wasting my time dealing with someone who can never be rehabitilated. He claims to be a Christian but where is his tradition? Maybe the throne bothers him because it testifies to something which predates the silliness of his American evangelical nonsense. In any event, I won't let him get away with claiming that he represents Christianity in any way, shape or form. If he cared about his faith rather than his ego he would go to Venice right now and behold the splendor of this object. If he doesn't like my interpretation, this 'man of faith' owes it to God, Jesus and the countless Popes who sat in this chair as their representatives on earth to come up with an alternative understanding of its testimony.
Back to his drivel.
The inscription on the throne which he didn't bother to report on says that it is a throne on which St. Mark, the evangelist of Alexandria was enthroned. I had one of the world's leading Hebraists translate the inscription. If he has any doubts about Rory Boid, let it be known that I was just talking with Professor Lawrence Schiffman about Rory and I asked what do you think of his work. Schiffman acknowledged that he thought highly of his abilities.
So if J P is going to omit mention of the inscription the whole interpretation sounds fanciful. But that's like having a trial and forgetting to introduce the murder weapon.
This claim that I can't prove that the throne came from the first century or that the Jubilee in question was in 38 CE is sheer nonsense. He doesn't dispute that the imagery witnesses a jubilee. Jubilees occur every forty nine plus one years. The bottom line is that there can only be one jubilee during the time that St. Mark visited Alexandria.
The same Professor Rory Boid of Melbourne University wrote a paper demonstrating 38 CE was indeed a jubilee year according to the Samaritans. It is reproduced here. I guarantee that this nitwit who makes such a big stink that he doesn't see any evidence for 38 CE being a jubilee will not finish this article. The last book he undoubtedly finished from end to end was his likely driver's instruction manual.
Incidentally the book does refer the reader to this site for information (the argument was thought to be too long for the book by the publisher). I wanted more references, more footnotes but unfortunately they didn't want them and what was going to do (notice the URL still identifies its original marker from the book i.e. 'appendix D').
In any event if we fast forward to the end of his 'review,' 'J P' continues his attack not by concentrating on the central claim of the book that Marcus Agrippa was the 'real messiah' of Israel but again only with my treatment of the throne. Apparently I don't know enough about animal husbandry to conclusively identify the animal in the picture as a ram rather than a lamb. He actually cites some sheep species which apparently develop horns as a means of 'proving' that we are actually dealing with a lamb rather than a ram.
I almost pity this imbecile.
The point that fails to sink into his pea brain is that it doesn't matter one bit whether or not you can find lambs with horns or not in some farm somewhere. His intimate familiarity with sheep distracts him from seeing what actually matters here. It's not how sheep look or feel that matters - its how they sheep and rams portrayed in art and specifically in art of the early period.
I can't believe that I am arguing about animal husbandry!
In case this nitwit is reading my site (and it is apparent that he comes over here often - it is also amazing that he didn't find enough supporting evidence here and at the Real Messiah site) here is what comes up when you do a Google image search for - 'lamb of God' Jesus. What's the common denominator?
Oh ... ah, none of the lambs have horns.
Gee I wonder why that is? Maybe it is because art by its very nature has to invoke certain stereotypes in order to differentiate between similar looking things. So it is that 'saints' typically have certain features and 'sinners' other characteristics. The artist isn't creating a 'photograph' but evoking certain stereotypes to distinguish one species - in this case a ram - from a lamb. The way the artist did this was by adding horns.
I guess this is difficult for someone whose sole perspective on the world is Fox News to understand.
So since this imbecile won't actually make a real case against my book, I will, in the interest of fairness actually do his job for him. If J P had developed a nuanced review rather than the grade four book report which he trumpets on his website, he might actually get find some traction bringing down my arguments.
For instance can I really claim that I have PROVEN that Agrippa was St. Mark? If he had actually focused his attention on that part of the book rather than all pictures I could well have been painted into a corner. I would have had to say, in fact that no, I have not proven my case. I have actually acknowledged this in a number of interviews.
Of course I am not a barbarian like this dolt. I don't walk around dealing only with absolutes - i.e. absolute truth, absolute knowledge. The purpose of the book was rather to SUGGEST that one might be the other and if this is granted then a whole new panorama for approaching Christianity with rational thought processes intact.
I know J P is very happy with his faith but it has retarded his ability to formulate rational arguments. There are some of us who feel it is within our rights to simply think about a given subject. We don't have to take sides. It is enough to search through the surviving manuscripts from ALL the different religions who had anything to do with Christianity, put them on a table and try to see how they all fit together without giving one tradition more than its due at that table.
For J P only the American evangelical tradition matters. He might agree with the Catholics when they are against abortion or other 'push button issues.' But when they bring forward the idea of having an enthroned Pope as the necessary center of Christianity (I bet he didn't even know that there was a Pope in Alexandria until he came across me and my book)he begins to shudder.
Yet how again can he claim to be a defender of Christianity when almost every tradition before Martin Luther has this hated Pope-figure within its tradition (i.e. not only the Catholics and the Copts but also the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria is called Papa)? Doesn't he want to think about where this strange concept of an earthly representative who sits in the place of Christ came from?
Of course if you press him he would probably admit that he thinks the Devil inspired men to stray from the true Christ Jesus. Yet if he had the ability to formulate rational arguments one would expect that he would follow through with an alternative theory which does not involve St. Mark (as my theory does) and which does not use the throne of St. Mark in Venice and its remarkable inscriptions as the oldest existing testimony to the origins of this office that is in all 'real' Christian tradition (i.e. other than the heresy he belongs to).
Again, if he really cared about Christianity as he claims he would have to go to Venice, take a look at the relic I have been writings about and come up with alternative suggestions to what I have put forward in the Real Messiah. This is how science works. There is no absolute answer. We instead try to develop better and better explanations to understand a given phenomena.
J P of course can only deal with absolutes. He merely sees my book as one of a number of 'radical new interpretations' of Jesus and the church which come into the heart of 'heretics' like me through the instigation of the Devil. This man is really pitiable. Just look at the chapters which deal with what Jews believe about Agrippa and Samaritans believe about Marcus and you will begin to see something amazing - I am not saying anything original. I am only reporting an under reported fact that the Jews, Samaritans and Christians all thought Marcus Agrippa was the divinely appointed one to come.
If the truth be told, I am one who is honestly and thoughtfully trying to piece together answers about the origins of Christianity while he is the 'dishonest and despicable' one pretending to something he is not - i.e. a sincere Christian.
Yes, its true - after years of studying Judaism, Samaritanism and various forms of Christianity I came up with the idea that that Marcus Agrippa was St. Mark. From this realization I developed a further understanding that the gospel was written to reflect Jesus announcing the evangelist himself as his true messiah (I could cite 'scripture' here but the evangelicals have completely abused that custom; their interpetations are so arbitrary that no one listens any longer to anyone doing it).
Yes, it has to be admitted that when I see that the Alexandrian tradition envisioned St. Mark sitting in a throne like a king I though it confirmed many of my ideas. I developed other pieces of evidence to help identify St. Mark with a known historical figure. Maybe I am wrong. I am not God, I don't have all the answers but I can hold my head up with honesty and sincerity and claim that I did my best to understand the central player in the development of Christianity - i.e. its original gospel writer St. Mark.
The one time that J P references this central idea in the Real Messiah he not surprisingly doesn't know what to make of the material. He simply isn't up to the task. So he writes:
It is claimed that the rabbinic Mishnah “has a story of how the ancient sages actually acknowledged Marcus Agrippa as (Messiah)” with reference to the book’s appendix., where Huller provides a long list of authors who supposedly acknowledged Agrippa as the Messiah, but not one quote or specific line reference is given. It appears that Huller is doing all he can to avoid having his work checked.
Yes to be sure, the footnotes were included in the original manuscript sent to the publisher and they were rejected because it would make the book 'seem to academic.' I have since tried to include the information and the references in Wikipedia and a number of other online forums so more people could have access to them but inevitably some born again jackass like this guy wipe them out.
He accuses me of 'doing all I can to avoid having my work checked, why hasn't he as my review bothered to check ANY authority cited in the appendix. Indeed ANY critical study of Daniel or the Mishnah. Oh, I forgot he has no interest in whether or not I am correct in observing that ALL the earliest Christian and Jewish sources agree that Agrippa was the messiah of Daniel. He only wants to reinforce the implausible faith of his evangelical assembly.
So now it isn't important enough to J P to acknowledge that I might be right about what the rabbinic interpretation is. The facts are that the ancient writings of the Jews DO acknowledge Agrippa as the messiah. Strange but true and no one knows what to make of it. It has a prominent place in my book.
It apparently isn't important to J P either that the Samaritan religion was established by a guy remembered as 'Marcus the son of Titus' and who lived in the first century and who is consistently remembered a second Moses or messiah in the tradition (one reference has this Marcus as 'the unsheather of the Cross.') Why would it be? There isn't a picture of the Samaritans in my book. How can he understand?
It apparently isn't important that Alexandrian Christianity is based on the idea of the enthronement of a guy named Mark who was revered as nothing short of a second Christ in 38 CE (at least according to a number of reconstructions of the event) which just so happens to be the same time that another Mark named Marcus Agrippa came a calling who as a king necessarily also sat on a throne and moreover can be determined to have been enthroned in this particular year.
Whew ...
Indeed now that I think of it. If he doesn't even have the courtesy to read my book and pick apart the arguments one by one why do I even waste my time with his 'review'? What? That's it? There is no more content?
I guess I am going back to work as an acrobat and a DJ.
What a moron.
And while you've dropped by, why not read my book that answers all questions you never thought about asking about the origins of Judaism, Christianity and Islam?
Buy it here
