Well, I think chistianity is unique in that the founding father of the religion doesn’t have a book to his name. There is no ‘book of Jesus’. Of the 66 books in the bible (39 old, 27 new testament) not one of them is penned by the guy who makes the bible the bible.

The old testament, also called the Torah, has 5 books by the founding father of judaism. He wrote seven, but two are about kaballah, the jewish system of magic and are excluded from public view. The Koran, has 114 ‘books’ (suryah) which include the old and new testaments. The remaining number were revealed to Mohammed over the course of 23 years during his preaching career. Both the Koran and the Torah, which bookend Jesus in teachings were penned by the most famous of their mystics, yet the book of Jesus is nowhere to be seen…

Every other religion has a book from a founding father – sorry girls – as the basis for their belief system. It seems a little strange that Jesus didn’t put pen to paper, and nobody curious academic of the time came to interview him. It all seems very very strange…

Even the most culturally disconnected tradition: Taoism got a book from a founding father. Keep in mind that the key premise of Taoism is spending time in nature away from civilization. These guys were basically called ‘mountain men.’ Most serious Taoists would disappear into the mountains and live as hermits, meditating for very long periods of time. Decades.

A lot of these guys would go years without human contact. It wasn’t an organised religion at all. It had no founding father. Nobody claimed to be the wisest of them all. There wasn’t even a uniformity of belief at all. the idea was to independently spend contact tie with nature and discover the secrets of the universe through long periods of uninterrupted meditation.

So the idea of having a book from one of these hermits is pretty bizarre. Lao Tzu is credited as the founding father of Taosim. But it was really only a fluke that history got a book out of him at all. It is unclear what the guy’s name really was as the translation is ‘old master.’ So he could have been anybody really.

The story of how this guy wrote is his book sheds some light on the Jesus story too. When Lao Tzu was found, he wanted to travel across the great wall of China into Mongolia. The seargent of the gate guard wouldn’t let him through. He insisted that he was too smart to let him leave China until he wrote down everything he knew. So in order to get what he wanted, he wrote the ‘Tao Te Qing.’ Then the gate seargent allowed him through the gate and he wandered into Mongolia and out of the history books.

So if this guy can a seminal religious text to survive the ages, why not Jesus? There is no report of a great number of followers or entourage accompanying Lao Tzu. He was completely unknown to the world, while Jesus became so famous that he became known to the Roman government and they put a price on his head!

It is ludicrous to believe that nobody in Jesus entourage, disciples or otherwise, was interested in writing down what he said? Was he of no interest to any of the academics in the synagogues at the time. Was his famed healing ability of no interest to any learned men? I just can’t believe that is true. When somebody as learned as an army seargent kick-started the formalization of Taoism, it is impossible that nobody literate took an interest in Jesus…. WTF!

So let us assume that he DID, in fact, author a text, because I just can’t believe that it didn’t happen. I can’t believe nobody recorded anything he said directly.

THE TESTAMENT OF JESUS HAS BEEN BURIED

I think we are all familiar with the council of Nicea in 313. Emperor Constantine oversaw the conglomeration of the bible by all the notable bishops in the Roman Empire. The debate about theology, belief and attitudes would go on for a long time between theologians, though Constantine had other ideas. He gave them all a week to come up with an agreed text for the new testament or he would put them all to death. It is very easy to see how that deadline was met. A lot of deeper issues were cast aside in favour of speed of debate. So the hundreds of eligible texts floating around at the time was reduced to an agreed upon 27.

That is a tiny fraction of what was available and useful for this text. Most people focus on the bishops rush to create a bible and blame them for its shortcomings. What people don’t put enough weight behind is the fundamental incompatibility between the teachings of Christ and Empire.

Jesus was a wanted man in the Empire, there was a price on his head. His teachings of pacifism and ‘do unto others as you would have them do to you’ are at odds with a military machine and exploitationist, slaving society. They are opposite ends of the spectrum! This is why early Christians were thrown to the lions as entertainment. This is why Christians refused to serve in the army. Christianity cannot be carried by an Empire…

So after centuries of internal espionage against the Christians, the emperor decides to convert to Christianity!

More WTF!

His conversion had nothing to do with the teachings of Christ. Nothing to do with a discovery of Christian ideals. Nothing to do with the fundamental tennets of Christianity. The opposite: The Christian God wins battles. YEP! That’s what he was all about. A Christian Bishop was travelling in his entourage and in the magic before the battle, Constantine saw a Christian symbol in the sky and won the battle. The Christian God Triumphant!

So he converted and decreed that all the Empire would convert with him. It was just that when he got down to the nitty gritty of it, Jesus’ philosophy would undermine the Empire too much. He was already creating a kind of double speak by converting to Christianity himself.

So when he got to the council of Nicea, it was too much for him. I assume that one or more of the bishops at the council of Nicea actually had a copy of the book of Jesus. Though when Constantine read it, he could not allow it into the bible. The ideas in it were too revolutionary for the Empire. THe direct word of Christ was too much for Empire to bear, so it was excluded. A watered down version of the word of Christ is what we got. I am still stunned that there is no ‘Book of Jesus’ in the bible. I am sure a copy of it exists somewhere and wouldn’t all of Christendom like to see it….