Jesus, Some People Say….
……dinn’t even exist. Personally, I find this to be quite peculiar. Oh, they say there are an absence of historical documents. Weelll, that’s’ new to me, as I read the Nag Hammadi documents some time ago ( they were unearthed in the early 1900’s in, guess where,,,,,Nag Hammmadi.
A poor Egyptian farmer, plowing his field, busted some ceramic jars, and made himself a millionair. Carl Jung ended up buying them, and Elain Pagels made a big thing of analyzing them…..lots of Christians objected to their content ( the gospel of Judas, and of Mary Magdelen, for example), but no-one objected to their authenticity, to the time period they were born in, etc….
The same is said for the New Testament, as far a historicity is concerned,,,it came from then, it spoke of events….then there are many other works, and if we accord the same selection process to them as to all historical documents, we soon can see that they are authentic.
The Romans record the death of the man in Jerusalem. One of the members of the Sanihedron ( the Jewish ruling body, read Government) wrote a book with him in it. A reader of it told me that it is interesting to see mention of the guy, through the eyes of someone who hates him. OK, so the Government wanted to take him out because he was a threat to their money, and their power. They must have been deathly afraid of the crowds who followed him, and wanted to put him on the throne of David, his ancestor.
Even in the absence of the above said, we must look at some other historical figures, in order to get a clue….Paul of Tarsus is a good example.
The World Book Encyclopedia has some information on him, or at least it used to. It tells about his life in the temple, and cannot explain his conversion to the heretic Jewish offshoot religion.
Now, you might want to ask yourself, along with Paul, there were many other individuals who were killed, tortured, and tortured and killed, for following Jesus of Nasareth. Why did they do that?
If they were mentally unbalanced, how did they write such great words of psychological guidance, so admired by so many down through the ages. Perhaps it is a fluke, and psychotic, masochistic people back then had deep insights into human nature, and were able to pull the will of the masses with them. To the point of annilation, since so many found their un-just reward in the Roman Collesium….
More than likely, all of these people , many of whom, no doubt, go recorded in the volumes of ancient historical writings which survive today, were more or less sane. So, you really do have to ask yourself, why did they do that? Doesn’t make too much sense now, does it?
If you want to ignore the bible and other documents written by the early Christians (though that may be a bit duplicitous, as other documents are looked at with a different yardstick) that is up to you; but it must be hard to also ignore the followers of Jesus, and all that they went through.
I can well understand the modern folks who tend to ignore all psychic and supernatural events, for whom all “ Miracles” are active hallucinations of the masses (though the exact mechanisms of the hallucinations are rarely alluded to, and never proved). This last bit ticks me off, naturally, since I have had numerous psychic incidents myself, and have known lots of other people who did, too.
The real bottom line on all of this is reading. When time after time, in book after book, we see philosophical people with a deep link to God becoming involved in astonishing works, it becomes very hard to ignore.
Please do read up on Joan of Arc. A seventeen year old farm girl has been talking to spirit people for years. They have been telling her to free her country. She doesn’t know how that could be….
Her home village is plundered, amidst the smoking debris, in a country devastated by a long war (eighty years, I think), she finally finds a way to get to the nearest castle (no easy feat in itself). Somehow convincing a noble lady of the truth of her cause (it may have helped that there was a prophecy of a maid saving France); a small group of soldiers takes her over to see the king.
The king, he is not the king yet, actually, dresses in his assistants clothes, to try to fool her. There are no portraits of him, so she has no way to know what he looks like. She walks right up to him, and pays him honor. In a chamber, she recounts a story of his life that only he knows. He sends her off to relieve the siege of Orleans, with only Seven hundred men, and a herd of cattle, which were much more appreciated by the populous than so few extra soldiers.
The English were deeply entrenched. All felt that they had the city.
Somehow, within a few weeks, the English leave, and the French had the city. It sits at a strategic intersection. With its’ fall, the country -side would have been open to English rule…and the rest of France, only a matter of time…….
…as far as I know, no historian has ever been able to explain why the English left…
….now she took the king to be to Rheims, for his coronation. Pro-English cities turned over to the king of France the Keys to their cities. Oh, there was some fighting, and Joan proved an outstanding warrior.
How did a farm girl just take up the reins of an army, direct artillery, and have grown men follow her into battle? I imagine she had total charisma, and much more than that. She was illiterate. It does seem hardly believable that anyone would risk their life on a silly enterprise, if there were not some strong basis in it that they could feel.
After the coronation, France followed, joining the army in droves, but the King was weak, he did not follow up, indeed, he effectively broke up their army.
There is a lot more to it than that, and her death was political. A Pro-English churchman led the way, with faulty arguments, to have her burned at the stake.
Try reading “ Joan of Arc”, by Regine Pernoud. He takes letters from both side of any particular battle, court documents of the follow up trial where Joans’ followers clear her name, and, in all, there are 10,000 pages of documents in France, says the author.
For an even more astounding read, look into the Miracle at Fatima. In 1917, in Portugal, several children see, and talk to spirit people, who tell them many things, predicting the end of WW1, and the upcoming WW11, if people did not heed the message. As word got around, it raised a stir in this communist country.
Many went to the apparition site on the appointed day, to laugh, and/or debunk. Even catholic priests went to debunk, to relieve pressure from the Government.
The coldly calculating journalists, and the skeptics of all kinds, had to agree on several things…..they were all thoroughly drenched in the morning, the sun came out during the apparition, and they were all unexplainably bone dry afterwards.
This is only to start…..they all saw the sun come down out of the sky, it really looked like it was going to hit. Even men miles away, who had just recently been heaping scorn on the crowds passing through, fell to their knees in the mud, praying that their lives not end this way….
….for those who took their eyes away from the spectacle, and looked around, they saw wonderful colors everywhere, covering everything, color that one does not see, heavenly colors…….that reminds me of the near death experiences, perfect hues, and rainbow colors….
Of course, the documents claiming miracles of all sorts, and for all religions, are many, and many the people who are there to uncover an old tomb, and get to see a person dead for a few hundred years, looking like they went in yesterday, and smelling like roses.
Look it up yourself, there is a whole world out there, don’t just ignore it as most people do. It will, perhaps, lead you down a good road. This is where the creator wishes us all to go, and why he gives us miracles, as a show of his presence, and of his love for us.
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