Small point - perhaps you have not been following the trustworthy alternate journalism and political 'wrong thinkers' that are top-level and too honest for corp-media. First, Oct7th, lies, no beheaded babies, no preg. mother's baby cut out, no rapes, no babies in ovens, most killed israeli civilians were by israel military 'Hannibal Doctrine' where killing own people so not used as hostages to free some of the over 1000 extra-judicial men, women, children held in prison and torture - sometime to death - or killed for organs with israel being the top illegal organ trafficker, what other lies ..
So, who started the Oct7th well-disciplined military operation? Well, some 75+ years ago Zionists terrorism started, and grew, and grew, until we see the black-hearted Zionist Jewish Supremist State and open genocide - unlike the 10 million Ukraine White Christians starved to death by Jewish Bolshevik pre-soviet leaders with NYT covering up the holocaust.
You know how we can gage the answer to who started the Oct7th occupied resistance? We have the UN General Assembly go through Zionists and israeli's 75+ years of terrorism and mass murder and whatever positive - if any - and have them re-vote for or against israel nationalism, and if yes, then vote on where it should be, broken-up into little States on Martha's Vineyard, some of the European tiny countries where super-rich and powerful have castles, maybe in Mexico in the Drug and illegal immigrant Organ harvest trafficking locations?
.. if so, then the Best solution for Palestine, 1-State, owning every USA tax-paid building, utilities, housing, .. that the zionist left - and that undersea Gazain Gas resource to boot-start all those old israeli manufacturing and other businesses.
--
Thank you for the old testament Wisdom review. So well introduced, and sensible.
The Vietnam fear angle is new but feels right. The Zionist directed men and culture genocide was never so clearly a Class and virtue public killing, the poor and the virtuous national protectors get killed, and testicleless commie well-off adult children of ruling elite Class lived to have fatherless devouring mother insane baby-killing acceptance force raised children, Darkened intellect worse the willing sin as St. Thomas Aquinas outline and damage expanding - to forced raised accepting and even praising mothers murdering our bothers sisters and maybe us - insanity - child sexual mutilation of mind-body-soul is normal, wive and mothers killing fatherhood, families, manhood, .. again, insanity as accepted, .., what next - 16 months of open televised genocide, normal?
Remember the legal Birth-control factor. Women and men changing view of self and others, from paternally glorious shining souls loving God in Beauty made in the image of God, to disposable soulless meat-machine one step nearer corruption and of hopeless nothingness in meaningless life to grave. To be use and abuse .. and throw away.
So, Sickened womanhood that once was a blessing to all near - the merciful heart of society - sees homeless broken dying Vietnam vets filling the streets and thinks 'too bad they did die back there in war because I can't profit from them, don't want them for sex, perhaps my crippled-soul can find pleasure in laughing and tormenting them till they suicide. ..
.. of course, once a generation of women are that Sick, then hiring witches to torture our babies to death become a Lust-Torture-Pleasure for then demonic-possessed machine wrapped in a human female skin. Been going more insane every fatherless generation of Feminist commie Satanic 5th column poisonous destroyers in our own families.
It's worth noting that the Bible makes it clear that there is also "esoteric wisdom" that *did not get written down.* Modern-day "sola scriptura" Protestants ignore this simple fact at their own peril.
Look at Matthew 13:11, (and the parallel passages in Mark 4 and Luke 8,) where Jesus tells his disciples that his oblique manner of teaching is "Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given." Likewise, 1 Corinthians 4: 1 calls the Church "the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God."
That word "mysteries" is an interesting one. We live in a time when, like the people of Babel, our language has been confounded. To modern ears, that sounds like "thing that is difficult to understand," or perhaps "fiction about a detective solving a case." But that is not what it meant to Jesus and his followers!
The Greek word μυστήριον (mustérion) used here has a very specific meaning: the secret inner-circle teachings of a religion that were not shared with the public, but only with believers who had undergone some rite of initiation. Writings from cultures that had mystery religions tend to contain oblique references to the secret teachings and talk around them in interesting ways, and we see this in the New Testament, with Jesus speaking in parables and cloaking deeper meanings in what appear to be straightforward teaching.
(For example, no matter how many times we see Old Testament prophets speak of mountains and temples as symbolically equivalent to one another, and despite knowing that the guy who built the original temple was famous for being The Wisest Man Ever, most people imagine the Sermon on the Mount — which concludes with Jesus telling people that those who follow these teachings will be likened unto a wise man who built a house upon a rock — as taking place outdoors on some random hillside somewhere.)
There are also some very abrupt and deliberate breaks in Luke's narrative. In Luke chapter 24, after spending a whole book recording Jesus' teachings in great detail, we find the curious case of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, where Christ meets them and "beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself." We get their reaction to his teaching, but not a word of what he actually said. And shortly afterwards in the Book of Acts, which identifies itself as a sequel to the Gospel of Luke, Luke opens with a brief introduction, and then glosses over what came next: Jesus spends forty days "speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God." He says *nothing whatsoever* about what was taught in the next forty days.
Why? The answer is almost certainly "because Luke was an initiate of the Mysteries, and the stuff Jesus was talking about in these cases was the Mysteries, and Luke understood that they were not to be written down and shared with the public, only alluded to in oblique ways, so that other initiates would notice there's Mysteries stuff going on here while people who don't 'have eyes to see and ears to hear' would never even realize there's anything worth seeing."
That's a really nice compilation of references to esoteric Christianity. I will copy them down somewhere for future contemplation.
But before I concede the idea that the Vatican has hidden mysteries and that all Christians should treat the Pope as infallible despite multiple New Testament warnings against certain Catholic doctrines and practices, I would note that some of the mysteries above are screamingly obvious in hindsight. The Parable of the Sower in Matthew needs no explanation today; it describes how Christianity grew.
The idea that Jesus was launching a worldwide religion vs. merely reforming Judaism was a super difficult lesson for Jesus' followers. It's a rather easy lesson for those of us who are part of that worldwide religion. Notice how Peter needed further instruction after Jesus had ascended in the form of his vision of unclean animals to get it through his head that he wasn't to limit spreading the gospel to Hebrews. (Jews plus Lost Tribes. There are a couple of NT references which indicate that the Lost Tribes weren't completely lost at the time. Notice the large number of people attending Pentecost who spoke foreign languages. Likely Hebrews who lived in other countries.)
What little fragments of Jesus' post resurrection teachings that we do have support my thesis. See Matthew 28:19.
> But before I concede the idea that the Vatican has hidden mysteries and that all Christians should treat the Pope as infallible despite multiple New Testament warnings against certain Catholic doctrines and practices,
I don't expect you to. I don't believe that any more than you do.
Heck, when you start to look into ancient documents purporting to contain the Mysteries teachings of the 40 days, an interesting pattern emerges. This should be seen with all the usual caveats — these things are Not Canonical for a reason, they're speaking of things that can't be verified because initiates of the Mysteries were told not to speak of them openly, people sharing alleged secrets have every incentive to selectively edit the truth for personal advantage, etc. — but there are enough commonalities, themes that show up again and again, to be worth taking seriously. And one of the most common themes is a surprisingly pessimistic one: Jesus tells them that the Church will not remain pure for long, but will be corrupted and fall away not long after they die.
And of course, by the time of Constantine establishing Christianity as the state religion by Imperial fiat, you can imagine how inconvenient such teachings were. These things are Not Canonical for a reason, and unfortunately a big part of that reason was that we don't want to give people such a strong excuse to point out the glaring incompatibility between "state religion" and "my kingdom is not of this world."
> I would note that some of the mysteries above are screamingly obvious in hindsight. The Parable of the Sower in Matthew needs no explanation today
Beware that line of thinking. Assuming that something is obvious and needs no deeper examination ensures that you will never examine it to see if there's anything deeper there.
(To be perfectly clear, I'm not saying your interpretation is wrong. I'm saying that even if you have a correct interpretation, that is almost certainly not all there is to it.)
I see the corruption of the church as something of a feature. It gives every generation of Christian something to fix. And we should do so humbly, as every generation -- including our own -- has its blind spots.
Jesus described his movement as getting through a narrow gate. This appears very pessimistic under the binary heaven/hell model of the afterlife. It's considerably more optimistic if one thinks in terms of a heavenly government brought down to Earth. Those who get through the narrow gate are to be part of that government. Kings and priests are terms used. (In a world of city states, king can be ruler of a city. The Holy Roman Empire with Jesus as emperor is a closer model than king in the sense of British monarch.
A government needs subjects -- one generally has more governed than governors. There will be people who didn't know Jesus who will pass Final Judgment according to one of Jesus' parables.
Also note the passage about "Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven." When actual Believers do their job, others tag along. Being in a high trust community complete with welfare system is rather handy. And many barbarian chiefs converted to Christianity because a religion which encourages subjects to behave which doesn't require human sacrifice is rather handy.
So only at the very beginning were the churches filled with just Believers. And that's part of the plan. Leading non believers to be gooder without recourse to the might of the state is really good training for being kings in the next life.
And this is why I'm a bit of a hyper Protestant. Putting too much responsibility in the hands of the pros defeats this purpose. St. Paul wrote that different people have different spiritual gifts. The best manager is not necessarily the best teacher or the best person to comfort the dying. Different people constitute different parts of the Jesus Corps -- aka the Body of Christ.
(With that written, I will credit the Roman Catholic Church for actively defending Christendom, a project the Orthodox struggled at and the Nestorians failed at bigly. The Roman Catholic Church did a better job than the Protestants at spreading Christianity to the New World as well -- their flexing to allow more native cultural traditions has its upsides. And maybe Japan would have gone Christian if Protestants hadn't interfered.)
Thanks for the link!
Very sporting of you.
Mr. Fabius, very good article.
Small point - perhaps you have not been following the trustworthy alternate journalism and political 'wrong thinkers' that are top-level and too honest for corp-media. First, Oct7th, lies, no beheaded babies, no preg. mother's baby cut out, no rapes, no babies in ovens, most killed israeli civilians were by israel military 'Hannibal Doctrine' where killing own people so not used as hostages to free some of the over 1000 extra-judicial men, women, children held in prison and torture - sometime to death - or killed for organs with israel being the top illegal organ trafficker, what other lies ..
So, who started the Oct7th well-disciplined military operation? Well, some 75+ years ago Zionists terrorism started, and grew, and grew, until we see the black-hearted Zionist Jewish Supremist State and open genocide - unlike the 10 million Ukraine White Christians starved to death by Jewish Bolshevik pre-soviet leaders with NYT covering up the holocaust.
You know how we can gage the answer to who started the Oct7th occupied resistance? We have the UN General Assembly go through Zionists and israeli's 75+ years of terrorism and mass murder and whatever positive - if any - and have them re-vote for or against israel nationalism, and if yes, then vote on where it should be, broken-up into little States on Martha's Vineyard, some of the European tiny countries where super-rich and powerful have castles, maybe in Mexico in the Drug and illegal immigrant Organ harvest trafficking locations?
.. if so, then the Best solution for Palestine, 1-State, owning every USA tax-paid building, utilities, housing, .. that the zionist left - and that undersea Gazain Gas resource to boot-start all those old israeli manufacturing and other businesses.
--
Thank you for the old testament Wisdom review. So well introduced, and sensible.
The Vietnam fear angle is new but feels right. The Zionist directed men and culture genocide was never so clearly a Class and virtue public killing, the poor and the virtuous national protectors get killed, and testicleless commie well-off adult children of ruling elite Class lived to have fatherless devouring mother insane baby-killing acceptance force raised children, Darkened intellect worse the willing sin as St. Thomas Aquinas outline and damage expanding - to forced raised accepting and even praising mothers murdering our bothers sisters and maybe us - insanity - child sexual mutilation of mind-body-soul is normal, wive and mothers killing fatherhood, families, manhood, .. again, insanity as accepted, .., what next - 16 months of open televised genocide, normal?
Remember the legal Birth-control factor. Women and men changing view of self and others, from paternally glorious shining souls loving God in Beauty made in the image of God, to disposable soulless meat-machine one step nearer corruption and of hopeless nothingness in meaningless life to grave. To be use and abuse .. and throw away.
So, Sickened womanhood that once was a blessing to all near - the merciful heart of society - sees homeless broken dying Vietnam vets filling the streets and thinks 'too bad they did die back there in war because I can't profit from them, don't want them for sex, perhaps my crippled-soul can find pleasure in laughing and tormenting them till they suicide. ..
.. of course, once a generation of women are that Sick, then hiring witches to torture our babies to death become a Lust-Torture-Pleasure for then demonic-possessed machine wrapped in a human female skin. Been going more insane every fatherless generation of Feminist commie Satanic 5th column poisonous destroyers in our own families.
--
What else? Let's call it a night.
God Bless., Steve
It's worth noting that the Bible makes it clear that there is also "esoteric wisdom" that *did not get written down.* Modern-day "sola scriptura" Protestants ignore this simple fact at their own peril.
Look at Matthew 13:11, (and the parallel passages in Mark 4 and Luke 8,) where Jesus tells his disciples that his oblique manner of teaching is "Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given." Likewise, 1 Corinthians 4: 1 calls the Church "the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God."
That word "mysteries" is an interesting one. We live in a time when, like the people of Babel, our language has been confounded. To modern ears, that sounds like "thing that is difficult to understand," or perhaps "fiction about a detective solving a case." But that is not what it meant to Jesus and his followers!
The Greek word μυστήριον (mustérion) used here has a very specific meaning: the secret inner-circle teachings of a religion that were not shared with the public, but only with believers who had undergone some rite of initiation. Writings from cultures that had mystery religions tend to contain oblique references to the secret teachings and talk around them in interesting ways, and we see this in the New Testament, with Jesus speaking in parables and cloaking deeper meanings in what appear to be straightforward teaching.
(For example, no matter how many times we see Old Testament prophets speak of mountains and temples as symbolically equivalent to one another, and despite knowing that the guy who built the original temple was famous for being The Wisest Man Ever, most people imagine the Sermon on the Mount — which concludes with Jesus telling people that those who follow these teachings will be likened unto a wise man who built a house upon a rock — as taking place outdoors on some random hillside somewhere.)
There are also some very abrupt and deliberate breaks in Luke's narrative. In Luke chapter 24, after spending a whole book recording Jesus' teachings in great detail, we find the curious case of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, where Christ meets them and "beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself." We get their reaction to his teaching, but not a word of what he actually said. And shortly afterwards in the Book of Acts, which identifies itself as a sequel to the Gospel of Luke, Luke opens with a brief introduction, and then glosses over what came next: Jesus spends forty days "speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God." He says *nothing whatsoever* about what was taught in the next forty days.
Why? The answer is almost certainly "because Luke was an initiate of the Mysteries, and the stuff Jesus was talking about in these cases was the Mysteries, and Luke understood that they were not to be written down and shared with the public, only alluded to in oblique ways, so that other initiates would notice there's Mysteries stuff going on here while people who don't 'have eyes to see and ears to hear' would never even realize there's anything worth seeing."
That's a really nice compilation of references to esoteric Christianity. I will copy them down somewhere for future contemplation.
But before I concede the idea that the Vatican has hidden mysteries and that all Christians should treat the Pope as infallible despite multiple New Testament warnings against certain Catholic doctrines and practices, I would note that some of the mysteries above are screamingly obvious in hindsight. The Parable of the Sower in Matthew needs no explanation today; it describes how Christianity grew.
The idea that Jesus was launching a worldwide religion vs. merely reforming Judaism was a super difficult lesson for Jesus' followers. It's a rather easy lesson for those of us who are part of that worldwide religion. Notice how Peter needed further instruction after Jesus had ascended in the form of his vision of unclean animals to get it through his head that he wasn't to limit spreading the gospel to Hebrews. (Jews plus Lost Tribes. There are a couple of NT references which indicate that the Lost Tribes weren't completely lost at the time. Notice the large number of people attending Pentecost who spoke foreign languages. Likely Hebrews who lived in other countries.)
What little fragments of Jesus' post resurrection teachings that we do have support my thesis. See Matthew 28:19.
> But before I concede the idea that the Vatican has hidden mysteries and that all Christians should treat the Pope as infallible despite multiple New Testament warnings against certain Catholic doctrines and practices,
I don't expect you to. I don't believe that any more than you do.
Heck, when you start to look into ancient documents purporting to contain the Mysteries teachings of the 40 days, an interesting pattern emerges. This should be seen with all the usual caveats — these things are Not Canonical for a reason, they're speaking of things that can't be verified because initiates of the Mysteries were told not to speak of them openly, people sharing alleged secrets have every incentive to selectively edit the truth for personal advantage, etc. — but there are enough commonalities, themes that show up again and again, to be worth taking seriously. And one of the most common themes is a surprisingly pessimistic one: Jesus tells them that the Church will not remain pure for long, but will be corrupted and fall away not long after they die.
And of course, by the time of Constantine establishing Christianity as the state religion by Imperial fiat, you can imagine how inconvenient such teachings were. These things are Not Canonical for a reason, and unfortunately a big part of that reason was that we don't want to give people such a strong excuse to point out the glaring incompatibility between "state religion" and "my kingdom is not of this world."
> I would note that some of the mysteries above are screamingly obvious in hindsight. The Parable of the Sower in Matthew needs no explanation today
Beware that line of thinking. Assuming that something is obvious and needs no deeper examination ensures that you will never examine it to see if there's anything deeper there.
(To be perfectly clear, I'm not saying your interpretation is wrong. I'm saying that even if you have a correct interpretation, that is almost certainly not all there is to it.)
OK, we are on very similar pages.
I see the corruption of the church as something of a feature. It gives every generation of Christian something to fix. And we should do so humbly, as every generation -- including our own -- has its blind spots.
Jesus described his movement as getting through a narrow gate. This appears very pessimistic under the binary heaven/hell model of the afterlife. It's considerably more optimistic if one thinks in terms of a heavenly government brought down to Earth. Those who get through the narrow gate are to be part of that government. Kings and priests are terms used. (In a world of city states, king can be ruler of a city. The Holy Roman Empire with Jesus as emperor is a closer model than king in the sense of British monarch.
A government needs subjects -- one generally has more governed than governors. There will be people who didn't know Jesus who will pass Final Judgment according to one of Jesus' parables.
Also note the passage about "Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven." When actual Believers do their job, others tag along. Being in a high trust community complete with welfare system is rather handy. And many barbarian chiefs converted to Christianity because a religion which encourages subjects to behave which doesn't require human sacrifice is rather handy.
So only at the very beginning were the churches filled with just Believers. And that's part of the plan. Leading non believers to be gooder without recourse to the might of the state is really good training for being kings in the next life.
And this is why I'm a bit of a hyper Protestant. Putting too much responsibility in the hands of the pros defeats this purpose. St. Paul wrote that different people have different spiritual gifts. The best manager is not necessarily the best teacher or the best person to comfort the dying. Different people constitute different parts of the Jesus Corps -- aka the Body of Christ.
(With that written, I will credit the Roman Catholic Church for actively defending Christendom, a project the Orthodox struggled at and the Nestorians failed at bigly. The Roman Catholic Church did a better job than the Protestants at spreading Christianity to the New World as well -- their flexing to allow more native cultural traditions has its upsides. And maybe Japan would have gone Christian if Protestants hadn't interfered.)