The circumstancial case is it’s genre, for one thing (sayings gospels disappeared after the first century) as well as the fact that it has not yet developed any crucifixion soteriolgy. It has no resurrection and does not refer to Jesus as divine. It appeals to apostolic authority for the sayings rather than a written one (which suggests a lck of knowledge of any of the Canonica Gospels as well as a still active oral tradition).
The form of the sayings resemble the Jewish genre of “Wisdom sayings,” and emphasize insights into humanity and the world rather than to convey anything uniquely “Christian” in the sense of recognizing Jesus as a divine, savior figure. It treats him more as a prophet or a wisdom teacher than a God, and there is no hint of Messianism in thomas.
All this suggests a very early compilation of sayings before Jesus had been deified and before Christian salvation theology had really taken off. The sayings may have been written down anytime between 60-100 CE but at least some of them probably circulated in oral form from extremely early on which is why speculation about legitimate apostollic origin is not out of the question.
Thomas is not part of Q. They’re two different sayings gospels, but Thomas does help the case for the existence of Q by showing that early sayings gospels did exist.
Don’t forget that this is all in the realm of conspiracy theory. I’m surprised that nobody has figured out a way to work the Magna Carta into all of it, yet.
But if this the Gnostic Gospels cannot be disputed… if there is evidence that Jesus and Mary were married and living in France… why don’t people just come out and show all the evidence?
If the Priory of Sion is true, and they are the supposed line of Jesus… why don’t they expose themselves?
Is there a document that shows the genealogy of Jesus and Mary?
If so, why isn’t it shown to everybody?..
It seems like most of the documents written about Jesus like Gospel of Mary, etc were written much later than the Gospels.
Why was Gospel of Thomas (the disciple?) so different from the rest? We still have to take into account his written words even if they are different. It sheds light on that time.
Were the gospels in the bible altered in any way?
If the gospels were fake, why didn’t anyone speak up in the 100AD 200 AD?.. Why didn’t the numerous people who saw Jesus say anything to downplay the Gospels? Is there another religion that embraces that Jesus and Mary were married?.. It seems like only much later that this idea takes hold.
These ideas are really intriguing but more like conspiracy theories than fact to me. People trying to find hidden meaning in things that might just not have meaning. Like those people who say that Bush knew and perhaps caused the 9/11 attacks and blew up the WTC with demolitions… It makes sense when you look at it a certain way…
Okay, I found a copy of Robert Graves’ novel King Jesus (London: Cassell & Company, 1946). In his version of the story, there are three women in Jesus’ life named Mary, and he does (sort of) marry one of them, but fathers no children.
Jesus is really the son of Prince Antipater, son of King Herod the Great. In Chapter 5, Antipater is troubled that the people of Judaea despise the house of Herod the Idumaean (Edomite) as upstarts, who took the throne by force of arms with Roman backing. Simon the High Priest, a religious and historical scholar with a lot of esoteric knowledge, makes a case that Herod and his family are true heirs to the throne, because like David they are Calebites – that is, descended from Caleb a Kenite of Hebron, who was the great-grandson of Judah. Then Simon tells Antipater something even stranger, which he has not confided even to Herod:
By Simon’s reckoning, the current heiress of Michal is an orphaned Temple ward, Miriam (Mary), daughter of Hannah and Joachim the Levite. He persuades Antipater to secure his title to the throne by marrying Miriam, but to keep the marriage secret for political reasons. Shortly after they are married, Antipater is iimprisoned and executed by his insane father. For the sake of appearances, Mary, already pregnant, publicly marries Joseph of Emmaus.
Mary gives birth to Jesus and, when he reaches adulthood (having grown into a scholar of astonishing genius and erudition), she tells him of his royal heritage. By this time the Jewish monarchy is vacant; after Herod’s death, the Emperor Augustus (wisely) decided no surviving member of Herod’s family was worthy of the throne, and placed Judaea under direct rule by a Roman governor. But Mary assures Jesus he is the heir even under Roman law, and will rule as king some day. Jesus goes off to spends some time among the Essenes. He travels to Egypt and settles for a time in On-Heliopolis, a destination of religious pilgrims from all over the known world. In Chapter 16, Jesus sets forth his own conception of his goals:
Back in Judaea, Jesus is baptized by John (his first cousin). He is tempted by visions of several beasts symbolizing vices – Anger, Lust, Pride, Greed, etc. – and tames all of them; but he can make no sence of his vision of a bull.
Shortly thereafter, at Hebron, he makes the acquaintance of Mary the Hairdresser (Mary Magdalene), a Kenite madam and retired prostitute who is rumored to be a witch, and turns out to be a priestess of the old Triple Goddess. She is, in fact, keeping in a cave the original Ark of the Covenant, containing a red and gold tablet carved with pictures. Chapter 19:
Jesus then exorcizes seven demons from Mary; she admits defeat for now, but warns him this is not the end.
By this time Jesus has a following of persons who know that he is the son of Antipater. They stage a ceremony in which John the Baptist anoints Jesus King of Israel; Jesus’ left thigh is forced permanently out of joint, like Jacob/Israel when he wrestled the angel; and Jesus is married to the new “heiress of Michal,” a kinswoman of his mother’s, Mary of Bethany, daughter of Jose styled Cleopas.
In Chapter 29, Jesus is crucified. As he hangs on the cross:
After the crucifixion and burial, Jesus does appear alive to his followers, and tells them, “On Passover Eve I learned this: that the Kingdom is not to be taken by violence.” Then he leads them all up a hill where three women stand: Mary his mother, Mary his queen, “and a very tall woman whose face was veiled.” The four of them vanish in a mist.
It’s not the Holy Blood, Holy Grail version of the story – it’s even more interesting. I haven’t checked the scholarship on which Graves based his assumptions, but it’s obvious he gave the scholarship a lot of effort.
I’m with you, as a child of an ex-Mormon and ex-Christian Scientist, myself a former born-again Christian, now dead-again Agnostic.
Considering that no one knows who really wrote the Gospels now accepted as canon (Did Matthew the Apostle write the Gospel of Matthew? Or was it some other Matthew? Or was it followers of the Apostle Matthew?), why would I accept the judgements of 5th century scholarship as a true account of what happened back then?
Assuming the apostolic names on the gospels are who Christians say they are, then who the hell are Mark and Luke, and why should I accept their story of events over Mary, Phillip and Thomas?
I actually read a brief article on Asherah. I can’t say I learned much about her, seeing as it was just a synopsis of what archeologists had uncovered, but I am curious as to whether you have any links from which I could learn more. Incidentally, another point of interest (at least to me) was that YWHW had a last name, supposedly (Shomron).
I should’ve posted… the descendants of the Jesus and Mary supposed marriage…does anyone have the records of that?
Apparently that is what the Holy Grail is. But why in 1900 years or so hasn’t that record ever been shown?..
If I was Jesus’ descendant I’d be proclaiming it… the church wasn’t that big in 200AD and I’m sure if you had a paper saying that you were the son of Jesus and Mary… people would listen…
But why didn’t this happen?..
And if it did, where is the evidence? All the evidence couldn’t have been destroyed…
On a tangentially related topic, while the Ethiopian royal family never claimed descent from Jesus, it did (and does) claim direct lineal descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba; the story is that when she came for a state visit, he seduced her and knocked her up. Which, if true, would make the Ethiopian emperors distant cousins of Jesus, if Jesus really was a “Son of David.” (The website of the Crown Council of Ethiopia (royalty-in-exile), at http://www.ethiopiancrown.org/, includes a “Further reading about Ethiopia” page which lists Holy Blood, Holy Grail as a source.) That might explain why the Rastafarians see Haile Selassie as the Messiah. (Well, that and a whole lotta ganja.)
Come to think of it – since Solomon had 600 wives and 400 concubines (and the horny bastard still had to have a little action on the side!), and the Jewish gene-pool must have gone through a lot of sloshing and churning in the millennia since – what Jew isn’t a Son or Daughter of David? You know, it’s like the theory that any modern European or European-derived person is statistically certain to be a direct descendant of Charlemagne.
What’s more: Since we so-called white gentiles are derived from Europe, where Jews were settled in almost every country at one time or another since the fall of Rome, and where in every country they came under very strong pressure to convert to Christianity – and it is a matter of clear historical record that in every generation, some Jews did give in and convert, and within one or two generations the converts were assimilated into the larger gentile population – then any of us could be, and probably is, partially descended from Jews (would’ve made Hitler shudder!) and, therefore, from King David. So what’s the big distinction about having him for an ancestor?
(The people we now call “Jews” are, of course, descended from those who resisted the pressure and refused to convert. Which explains a lot about their history: They’ve been selectively bred for stubbornness!)
Well according to the Da Vinci Code, and the conspiracy theorists, the Holy Grail is made up of a record Jesus’ children and descendants.
Also, wouldn’t Jesus and his jewish family in France have kept a record around 30-100AD?.. What kept them from making a record like this?
Why wasn’t that shown to everybody?
Also in Acts 9:22
22Yet Saul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Christ.
I’m not sure the original language there… but Paul didn’t even know Jesus and persecuted those that followed him. If Paul was against Jesus… wouldn’t he have been diligent in proving Jesus wrong or right?
I find the theory of that Jesus didn’t die and married Mary and moved to France intriguing… but can’t find any reason to believe it…
Then there’s the question of how “pure” the Jewish race itself could possibly be. I remember reading in H.G. Wells’ Outline of History that after the final destruction of the Carthaginian Empire in the Third Punic War, a lot its surviving people turned to Judaism as being the only Semitic game left in town. And here’s another quote from Graves’ King Jesus, Chapter 10:
And through all the centuries of their post-Roman Diaspora, the Jews were forced to accept a lot of cuckoos in their nests, by way of gentile overlords who forced themselves on Jewish women, which is why the Jews developed a rule that anyone is a native “Jew” whose mother is Jewish.
We’re all cousins, one way or another. No so-called race or nation of humanity is “pure.” (Well, maybe the Japanese.)
I’m not much of one to quote the Bible for anything other than literary references, but even the Bible tells us he was married.
Remember the wedding at Cana? JC shows up, his mother chews his ass for forgetting the wine, he snaps his fingers and presto - booze by the barrel. All well and good, until you look at wedding customs of the time.
It was the responsibility of the GROOM to provide the wine at weddings.
When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.”
I sometimes wonder how the Mormons (and other Christian Temperance types) explain that story . . . perhaps by arguing that the Aramaic word usually translated as “wine” actually means “non-alcoholic grape juice”?
Just as Catholics, committed to the doctrine that the Virgin Mary remained a virgin all her life, explain the references to James and Joses “the brothers of Jesus” by insisting that the word “brothers” actually means “cousins”. Or else they were Joseph’s sons from his first marriage . . . or else . . . let’s not discuss this any more, Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum . . .
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