As I reach a certain age I have come to many conclusions about life. In many ways my research into the origins of Christianity has acted as a kind of parallel to the experience of aging and ultimately dying. Indeed everything in my life has revealed itself in relation to something else. I don't think I would have cared less about Christianity if it wasn't for the fact that I married a Catholic. The fact that I am a completely disinterested observer, in my opinion, means I more likely to come to some right answers about the religion as compared with all the believers out there.
One of the 'conclusions' I was talking about just a second ago is the fact that there is nothing better than quiet and peace. When I had my revelation, it was all in my head. It wasn't histrionic or anything. I go about my life. I try to be the best father, the best husband, to perform the best at my job. But in the end I always come back to this problem, the problem of early Christianity. Why? It's a habit, I guess, something like nail biting or the circumstances which lead to insomnia.
To make a long story short, a few different tracks of research have recently converged. I haven't been posting so much at this blog, I think, because I new that something big was coming. There are a lot of reasons why other people haven't come to the same conclusions as I have. We are all different people with different needs and different purposes in life. I don't mean to sound presumptuous but how many hookers have found true love on the job? Maybe a meal ticket, maybe a way out of a dead end. Professional scholarship works much the same way. In order to keep out all the lunatics, they have to also bar the door to the most fertile, creative minds.
In my case, it came down to something much simpler. When I met my wife, I knew I couldn't do any better. Like I said, when I look back at my life I am amazed at my unexpected lucidity. To be so coldly rational about love. I mean this quite sincerely. My wife came upon me like this revelation. I won't say heaven sent, but at the very least with a strange detachment. I simply knew she was the right answer in the way that Albert Einstein knew he had come up with the theory to relativity. It was utterly rational.
I think in a strange way this is another reason I have such a detached empathy for the Christian religion. I have always found it utterly rational. Of course I don't mean the peasant superstition that survived necessarily but the central message that I kept coming up against in the writings of Clement of Alexandria. Lust is the enemy; 'impassibility' the path to salvation. Everything done in weakness fails and the only things that last in this world originate from detachment.
I know I must sound like the most boring person in the world to many of you, but I am the furthest thing from this. I will tell you a little about me. I make people laugh. I feel it is nothing short of an obligation on my part to cause a reaction in other people. I think that comes from have a depressed, overbearing Jewish mother hover over every aspect of my life for twelve plus years. I have great taste. I am somewhat socially withdrawn (but I blame that on my wife).
The point of course here is that in the next few days I am going to tell you the story of how Christianity developed. I will reveal to you it's long ignored essential core. That story starts with Philo moves to Marcion and it ends with the Secret Gospel of Mark. For me at least the claim that 'Christianity is a Jewish sect' seems utterly empty when mouthed by white scholars. What Judaism are you talking about? The answer it would seem is that most of them haven't the faintest clue what they are talking about. 'Judaism' is some abstract monotheistic belief system that they see at the core of their ancestral religion but know little beyond that.
Our story is going to begin with Philo because Clement and the rest of the Alexandrian tradition makes the point implicit - this is Judaism, this is the Jewish religion from which Christianity developed. Yet for some reason professional scholars are unwilling to take the argument much beyond this. They don't want Christianity to develop from Philo because Philo's Judaism is quite heretical. Surely the Jews didn't believe that Yahweh and Elohim were names of separate powers of justice and mercy. Yes they did. Yes they did. And the transition to Christianity took place through Marcionitism, a tradition which I can successfully demonstrate was a development from the pre-existent Jewish doctrine of 'two powers in heaven.'
dating back to conversations with his grandfather, Gaston Frank. "He said we represent one of the last descendants of the Frankist Jewish faith in the world," he muses. "I grew up thinking that our family was something like the Last of the Mohicans."