Good Friday with Five Broken Cameras and Broken Commandments

The Jewish festival of Passover may celebrate a myth, or more likely the Passover story is part mythology, with a germ of truth. The basic tale is in the second book of the Bible, Exodus, Chapters 11 and 12. The key point is that when the Jews were getting ready to leave Egypt, all the first born Egyptian children and cattle died on an appointed night.

If the whole story is not a myth, and if you don't believe in supernatural crimes against humanity, then there is only one conclusion. Gangs organized by Moses went around and killed a bunch of innocent children, and cattle, in the night.

And so the Jews celebrate passover. They make it a celebration of freedom from slavery in Egypt, and I am all for freedom, and for celebrating freedom.

But given at least 3000 years have passed, would it not be a good idea to stop reminding the world every year that instead of killing the Pharaoh that night, which would have been justifiable tyranicide, they killed an untold number of Egyptian children?

Imagine if Germans annually celebrated the Holocaust like it was a good thing, or if Americans celebrated Wounded Knee or some other massacre of native American Indians.

Good Friday is pretty weird too. If there is anything that whips up Christians to kill Jews, besides high interest rates, it is Good Friday. The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the Son of God or at least the Messiah or a Prophet or some sort of rabble rouser who was against the quaint Jewish custom of stoning people to death for sex outside of one man to one woman marriages.

Good Friday follows Holy Thursday, at which Jesus had his last meal with the Apostles. This was on or near the Passover, according to Mark Chapter 14. Mark is the Gospel with the best pedigree. There is reasonably good evidence that it was dictated by the Apostle Peter in Jerusalem, and in it Peter confesses to having denied Jesus three times. It contains no childhood account of Jesus, the account of the resurrection is short and sounds appended, and Peter is not marked out as the head of the church. According to most Bible academics, the other three Gospels make up stuff to add to Mark's version.

I doubt the crucifixion is merely symbolic. Taking everything into account, it was probably a historic event. Psychologists have documented how it is common for bereaved people to imagine a visit (while asleep or even while awake) from someone who recently died. If even one Apostle (or Mary Magdalene, the first person to see him in Mark) had such a vision, it is easy to understand that a decade later every survivor in the inner circle would at least refrain from contradicting the story that Jesus rose from the dead. It is notable that in Mark there is no "doubting Thomas" story to counteract the cynicism of the less gullible.

In time the false Apostle Paul made the Jesus cult into a story about Jesus's triumph over death. This was not a new story: Osiris, Hercules, and Cybele all had cults promising some sort of life after death. Passover became part of the tradition of non-Jewish Christians. Paul also began wrangling for control against Peter and James, Jesus's brother, who led the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. This led to the hatred of Jews that became such a strong component of Christianity and led directly to the Holocaust of the 20th century, not to mention 19 centuries of Jew killing in between.

But perhaps the best (as in most uplifting) interpretation of Good Friday is that, since Jesus was the first born Son of God, that God is an Egyptian. The Jews murdered Jesus like they murdered the Son of the Pharaoh back in Egypt. Tie that into the story of the Good Samaritan and a few choice other sayings from the Gospels, and you can argue that it is bad to kill people just because they don't belong to your religious or ethnic group.

What a concept.

Many of the parables of Jesus clearly speak to peasants, who were in the majority for most of the world's post-hunter-gatherer history but are now becoming a rare breed.

5 Broken Cameras was nominated for an Academy Award this year as Best Documentary Feature. In it we see arrogant expatriate European Ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlers stealing land from and beating up lovable Palestinian peasants just east of Jerusalem. Some (but not all) Zionists believe that God hands out title deeds, that they are not subject to the commandments in Exodus: "Thou Shall Not Steal," and "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house ... nor anything that is thy neighbors."

Think of how many people get recruited into Islamic Jihadist groups after watching such obvious injustice. They won't think "Just a few bad Jews are doing this." They won't even think "All Jews are doing this." They will think "Jews are doing this with American help."

We (Americans) should not be helping anyone steal anyone's land. In fact, American's might want to consider all the land (and other stuff, including labor) we've stolen (including by fraud) over the past 300 or so years. In the name of Justice, or Jesus, or Osiris, or Nature, we should make restitution. Or at least stop killing and stealing.

Saint Peter Died in Beijing

Chinese scholars announced that Saint Peter, the leader of the 12 Disciples of Jesus Christ, ended his life in Beijing. A tomb containing his bones and a manuscript with the story of his life was unearthed during an excavation for a new skyscraper near the old royal palace. "It dated to approximately 85 A.D., when Beijing would have been the stronghold of a local warlord."

Christian scholars have always suspected that the idea that Saint Peter died in Rome was a 3rd century fabrication by the bishops of Rome. There is no record in the New Testament of the apostle Peter ever visiting Rome. The only letters in the Bible purported to be written by Peter were written from Babylon, which is a few days journey from Jerusalem. Acts of the Apostles has Peter living in Jerusalem long after the Christian religion had spread to other cities in the Roman Empire.

The Life of Peter, now being prepared for publication, appears to have been partly written in his own hand and partly written by an assistant who joined him in his trip. It records his three years with Jesus, then several decades of living in or near Jerusalem. Finally Peter decided to take the word of Jesus East. He stayed for two years in Babylon, then traveled through India, stopping and founding Christian communities which later disappeared. Finally he sailed to southern China, then worked his way up the coast to Beijing, where he died of natural causes. His assistant arranged with the local rulers for his tomb.

The Vatican immediately called the Chinese scientists and scholars, "A bunch of liars. The timing of this hoax, when the Church is trying to exert control over Chinese Catholic bishops, is particularly suspicious."

The Catholic Bishop of Beijing said it is too early to declare himself Pope. "We will need further confirmation by a wider team of archeologists and specialists in ancient languages. However, if God puts this responsibility on my shoulders, I will accept His burden."

Hillary Clinton reacted strongly to the news. "It's as if someone claimed Jesus, after he rose from the dead and departed Jerusalem, came to the Americas and preached among the Indians. If is just a fabrication to assert Chinese Communist power in the religious sphere."

Professor Moriarty, speaking for the Southern Baptist Convention, said "of course our scholars would be interested in anything that sheds light on the early Church. However, it has always been the position of Protestants that the Church should be governed by its members, not whichever anti-Christ happens to be Bishop of Rome at any given moment."