A Spiritual Revolutionary

The standard narrative is that the Soviet Union sought to turn religions into manifestations of national cultural heritage. In this instance, however, the reverse happened. In order to replace religious holidays, the Soviet state encouraged people to celebrate pagan Russian holidays as forms of “cultural heritage”, thereby unwittingly transforming what had been considered merely “cultural heritage” into a neo-pagan religious movement. This neo-paganism, originally formed as government-sponsored anti-religious activism, in some cases transformed into virulently nationalist ideologies that challenge the state in the name of the ethnic nation. ⟨...⟩ Most of all, Neo-paganism was a product of the Soviet ethno-nationalist project aimed at the worship of the ethnic nation.

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From: Atheist Secularism and
its Discontents (A Comparative Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia) by Tam Ngo and Justine B. Quijada

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The Fallacious Krishna Connection

The hokum from writers like D. Murdock and the producers of Zeitgeist is often the subject of secular discussions of Jesus, especially concerning the inspiration of the gospels. A popular narrative spewed by skeptics of the New Testament is typically around the lines of the Christ figure simply being an Israelite adaptation of the Hindu deity Krishna — Avatar of Vishnu. Upon closer inspection, nearly every parallel that these skeptics purport to point out between the Hindu god and Jesus are completely non-existent. Atheist historians such as Richard Carrier have adopted many of these outright fictitious claims, rendering their scholarship questionable.
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Contrary to the disinformation on the subject, the Babylonian Talmud refers to Jesus [of Nazareth] on multiple occasions. Variously, in the Gemara of Tractate Gittin and also in the earlier portion of the Mishnah known as Tractate Sanhedrin. In Folio A of the 57th Daf of Gittin the name ‘Jesus The Nazarene’ is mentioned, in a negative context. In this portion of Gemara, this elucidates on the crime(s) that Jesus committed, namely, violating the words of the Sages or the doctrine of the Pharisees. The punishment mentioned by Rabbi Onkelos was "boiling hot excrement" and "eternal damnation in Hell". Aside from the Rabbinic exaggeration, this story corroborates the Sanhedrin's account listed in the Gospels of John, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

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The 2000 Year-Old Relic

In 1988, the Shroud of Turin was previously examined through radio-carbon dating and was visibly deemed a Medieval forgery. However since these results, there have countless challenges and critiques for the methods used by the researchers themselves. Published results of a recent Wide-Angle X-Ray scattering of the ancient relic reveal not only the flaws of the 1988 radio-carbon evaluation but they date the relic to approximately 55-74 AD, the purported era of Jesus of Nazareth.

We obtained one-dimensional integrated WAXS data profiles for the TS sample, which were fully compatible with the analogous measurements obtained on a linen sample whose dating, according to historical records, is 55-74 AD, Siege of Masada (Israel). The degree of natural aging of the cellulose that constitutes the linen of the investigated sample, obtained by X-ray analysis, showed that the TS fabric is much older than the seven centuries proposed by the 1988 radiocarbon dating. The experimental results are compatible with the hypothesis that the TS is a 2000-year-old relic, by tradition, as supposed by Christian under the condition that it was kept at suitable levels of average secular temperature- 20.0-22.5 C--and correlated relative humidity- 75-55%—for 13 centuries of unknown history, in addition to the seven centuries of known history in Europe.

— Dr. Liberato De Caro, X-Ray Dating of a Turin Shroud’s Linen Sample

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The Galilean Messiah

Calling Jesus a ‘Jew’ obscures the fact that he was a Galilean rather than a Judaean, specifically a Galilean Israelite rather than a Judaean Israelite. It has hindered appreciation and further analysis of the economic, political and socio-cultural differences between Galileans and Judaeans in Palestine of the first century. Consequently it has contributed toward misinterpretation of several features of the Gospel stories, including the significance of the Galilee-Judaea contrasts. It denies, or at least obscures, the fact that he and his followers were regarded in their own day by their own people as Galileans and not as a party of ‘Jews’ or ‘Judaeans’. Like the term ‘Christian’, it is also an anachronistic identifier that blurs the reality of Jesus as a representative of first-century rather than fourth-century Israel, even though there are numerous aspects of continuity between the Israel of the Mishnaic and post-Mishnaic periods and the Second Temple period of Jesus’ day. After having taught a course at University of San Francisco for over twenty years on ‘Jesus the Jew’ with my colleague Rabbi David Davis in which we stressed the thorough-going ‘Jewishness’ of Jesus, I would now rename that course ‘Jesus the Israelite’ and gladly sacrifice alliteration for historical accuracy.

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From: Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus by Dr. John Elliot

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The Archko Volume

*William Mahan proved at trial in 1885 that he had been to libraries in Rome and Constantinople; and, that he had found there the ancient manuscripts contained in his book. He included affidavits and letters. In his book ‘The Archko Volume’ Rev. Mahan deals with seven different manuscripts which claim to contain the recorded statements of Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, Herod the Great, as well as his son and other contemporaries of Jesus. ⟨...⟩

Rev. Mahan had published a rough preliminary edition in 1884, of which only 2,000 copies were printed.  He gave it the title: ‘Archaeological Writings of the Sanhedrin and Talmuds’.  The church trial was in 1885. He then decided to revise that 1st edition by adding more background material, and in 1887 he published ‘The Archko Volume’ which was his final edition. The public controversy being created and driven by a Rev. Quarles against Rev. William Mahan in the newspapers of 1884 and 1885, both being Presbyterians but of different synods, was of such a nature as to seriously reflect upon the Presbyterian church as a whole. Therefore, the presbytery decided upon resolving it with a hearing – 

Rev. Mahan appeared five months later, at the regular session of the Lebanon Presbytery of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, in Slater, Missouri, on Monday evening September 26, 1885. When the charges were read to him, Rev. Mahan pleaded, “Not guilty”. The hearing was then taken up on Tuesday morning; and consumed all of the day – “Speeches by the counsel followed, and the Presbytery found Mr. Mahan, not guilty, by a vote of ten to seven” – The Boonville Advertiser, October 02, 1885, page 1, column 5. This same ‘not guilty’ verdict on the charge of “Falsehood” was also confirmed in The Boonville Topic of October 02, 1885, page 3, column 4.

Thus…The majority of jurors were of a firm conviction, that Rev. Mahan had been overseas; did visit, the libraries he claimed to have been in; and there, found the manuscripts of which he had Dr’s. McIntosh and Twyman translate. That…was a huge confirmation.*
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From: The Archko Volume - Revealed: A Further Search for the Historical Jesus by Edward Elkins

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A Lack Of Continuity

*This is not an uncommon impression and one finds it sometimes around Jews as well as Christians—that Judaism is the religion of the Hebrew Bible. It is of course a fallacious impression.

Much of the Bible does indeed live on in Judaism, but whoever would seek to compare the classic Jewish tradition with the biblical world of faith and life would find some startling contrasts. The Bible conceives of all Jewish worship as centered in one sanctuary in Jerusalem, where the service is to consist of animal sacrifices presided over by an order of hereditary functionaries, priests, and Levites.

The Bible knows nothing of the synagogue, of prayer service, of the office of the rabbi, of a festival like Hanukkah. Much of what exists in Judaism is absent in the Bible, and much of what is in the Bible cannot be found in Judaism. ⟨...⟩ The supplementation of the Bible, its rich flowering in the literature of the Talmud, was a daring process.

It was conceived as a means of fulfilling the law, but it often proceeded in bold new channels, It was in a sense a confession that God's "word" is in some respect not final, and that man must step in to adapt it to the world. Adaptation is akin to change.*

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From: Judaism and the Christian predicament by Ben Zion Bokser.

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“Do not suppose for a moment that these statements are empty words: think carefully of the successes we arranged for Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzsche-ism. To us Jews, at any rate, it should be plain to see what a disintegrating importance these directives have had upon the minds of the Goyim.”

— Protocol #2 of the Learned Elders of Zion (Source)

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