home | previous page | next page | page down

Features

 

May 2002

authors in bad taste
a recent archaeological discovery
Buddhism
cogite intrare
pieces of the puzzle
the Devil's triangle
if E.T. is out there why doesn't he visit us?
What is Gnosticism?
the Horatian
George Bernard Shaw's toast to Einstin
Gary Sloan: The Jesus Question
translating Greek by Benjamin Jowett

Celine, Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot, Mayakovsky, Benn, Marinetti and, and, and ...

Let me start with a question: "What could make me join the gun-lobby or the KKK, become an anti-Semite or a marxist, and why am I not going there?" My heritage (mother holocaust survivor, grandfather murdered in a death camp) does not prevent me from being critical of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Stalin knew exactly what he was doing when he hustled to be the first to acknowledge the new state's diplomatic status. He knew, this was going to be a troubled spot forever.

I also see in the story of the biblical Hebrews nothing but the occupation story of a people and a country that didn't belong to the invaders. From that perspective I could easily develop - as shrinks would hasten to assert - a "typical Jewish" self-hate complex. (Now there is a cliche for you). Or the atheism, God has endowed on me, could make me a hater for different reasons. As it is, it doesn't. I manage to keep my little pet hates under the lid.

I strive to curb my temperament and exercise tolerance even on the fringe to the paradoxical. (How is one to tolerate the enemies of tolerance?) It's becoming harder; I grow older - but not mellower. And of course, I know, there is a price for my integrity and somebody out there has the cash handy. As for anti-Semitism - I don't share this day and age's addiction to conspiracy theories. A small nation has developed necessary strategies to survive frequent prosecutions and to preserve her identity. That's all.

I do detest the Jewish religion, but I am impressed and embrace the literary heritage of the Jewish people, as I embrace the heritage of classic Antiquity and of Western Europe. It all has contributed to make me the person I am. I am not very good at political correctness and on certain topics I can be a downright chauvinist. It keeps people who don't like my position on their toes. So what makes me different to those who overstep the line?

If raised in a different country, in a different time, in different circumstances, would I be a different person? Probably. Would I be a better person? I can only hope so. Or, if raised under Stalin or Hitler, could I have become worse than I am? I am afraid so. Though, given my actual travelling habits, there is a strong possibility that in such situation I might have attempted exile - if! - I would have escaped the ideological lure. I don't consider myself impervious to be taken in by some or other idea or ideal.

It takes learning and discipline to immunize oneself and keep out of the system ideas of one's own superiority. Even merely to be right about something fundamental, can be an enormous ego-boost. The idea to know better, combined with the itch to make other people see this, if necessary by censoring and passing discriminatory laws, and ultimately by turning thumbscrews and dousing Cyclon B on the infidel, has probably been the most dangerous narcotic in the history of mankind.

Historically it had been introduced the moment when a religious cult required from the faithful his or her exclusive and unconditional commitment, not only to believe, but to disbelieve and antagonize everyone who begs to differ; when truth was not regarded as a an object for fair enquiry, but staked out and claimed as the exclusive and unquestioned franchise of the cult. Once the fatal step was done, mankind discovered that to every cult there is an anti-cult with similar obligations for its partisans.

The battles of minds this situation has created, are always fought in the name of principle and truth, but by institutions whose very rationale and methodology excludes even the mere possibility of possessing the truth. Even if they should happen to get it right now and then: their own bias would prevent them from knowing why. A bias is something acquired and transmitted. A tentative bias can be very useful for survival and everyday decision making, as long as we don't lose sight of its provisional character.

We wouldn't be able to cross a street without acts of tentative faith: for instance, that the driver in the upcoming car is not going to speed up and run us over. But this is not the kind of bias that makes life miserable (your own, or your opponent's). It is still subjected to learning, choices, and changes of mind. But the so called truths of religion and ideologies are something else. A truth that comes wrapped in faith is the dead give away for a lie. However I would be the last to deny that there are incontrovertible truths which transcend the envelope of my existence.

I do know that there are truths which are independent from the way we see matters or think about things. And they don't require faith. The oldest book of indisputable truths, which will continue to stand tried and tested, is Euclid's "Elements." Yes, you guessed it, relativistic and oracular philosophies hold no sway over me. We know what we know. But of course, Euclid's truths are of the piece meal kind. It takes effort and work to acquire them, and in the end one is still left with a fragmented bunch of answers, but not the answer.

So an inherited bias in combination with the all too human impatience for a final word that explains it all, and, I may add, a good deal of intellectual laziness, can easily motivate a susceptible person to jump at every ideology, every religion, every cult, that promises to liberate us from our most important asset: fearless awareness of our ignorance and self-assertive possession of what we actually know. What is required is not humility, but the grit to get up from our bum and do the work.

So when we find a person of talent and learning who sold his soul to the promise of a final answer, we should recognize it for what it is: a lazy cop-out. At some point it was the escape from the drudgery and exertion required to preserve the integrity before a truth without romance. It is the only truth available to us. And this can be disappointingly sober and lacking in lustre. It seems, even some of our greatest spirits can find it hard to come to terms with it.

© - 5/4/2002 - by Michael Sympson - all rights reserved

The Horatian

I.
Not so very long ago, if you were born into a mansion of the upper crust, Latin would have been the first language in which you learned how to spell, even before you learned the letters for your own mother tongue. And your valet ­ probably the gamekeeper's son ­ who uses to be the young master's bedfellow, would pick up on a spot of Latin too; and quite naturally. However on the social rungs in between Manor house and serfdom it could be considerably harder.

Shakespeare, son to a man, who, for all we know, couldn't even write his own name, had to learn his "little Latin" the hard way, by rote, in a dank classroom, under the schoolmaster's cane, the little feet dangling from a narrow school desk. Sir Issac Newton had not only ideas on apples falling from a tree, he published them in Latin. So did every other scientist of the period. And who really cared for Latin poetry, used to read it in the original.

Shakespeare did, ("if we do meet again, why, we shall smile,") so did Byron, so did Rimbaud, so did James Joyce. But there are differences: Byron still received the common education of his class, Rimbaud excelled in the curriculum of a French Lycée, while Joyce was already an exception, even among the educated. Bulver-Lytton had translated Horace; his friend Dickens, on the other hand, did neither know Latin, nor did he seem to care. These days, Horace is left to the mercy of his translators.

II.
from Suetonus (69-c.122):

"Quintus Horatius Flaccus had a freedman father, as Horace himself records, who was an auctioneer's agent, and was believed to have been a seller of salt fish - someone once said to Horace in an argument, "How often have I seen your father wiping his nose on his." In the war which ended with the battle of Philippi, he was recruited by the general Marcus Brutus and served as a military tribune. After his side was defeated, he was pardoned and purchased the office of quaestor's clerk. He then won for himself the favour first of Maecenas, and then of Augustus, and held a high place in the affections of both men. Maecenas makes it clear enough how much he loved him in this well-known epigram:

If I do not love you now, Horace,
more than I love my own belly,
I'd be thinner to look at than a hinny,

but he is more eloquent in his final judgement in a codicil to his will addressed to Augustus, "Be mindful of Horatius Flaccus as though he were myself."

Augustus offered him the post of secretary, as is indicated by this note to Maecenas: "Until now I have managed to write letters to my friends in my own hand, but now that I am so extremely busy and not in good health, I wish to take our Horace away from you. So then he will come from that parasite's table of yours to my royal one, and help me write my letters." Even when Horace refused, Augustus was not at all offended and continued to cultivate his friendship. There are surviving letters from which I add some extracts to prove the point: "Take upon yourself some rights in my house, as though you were living with me. This would be proper, since this is the relationship, I have wanted you if your health allowed it." And again, "How I remember you, you can find out from our friend Septimius. Even if you are so proud as to spurn our friendship, we are not for that reason going to be counter-fastidious. Augustus also made jokes, calling him, for example, a very perfect penis and a very charming little man, and he made him rich by one act of generosity after another. Indeed, he so admired his writings and was so convinced that they would endure for all time, that he commissioned him not only to write the Secular Hymn but also to celebrate the victory of his stepsons Drusus and Tiberius over the Vindelici and add for this purpose a fourth book of odes a long time after the first three. Further, after he had read some of Horace's Epistles, he complained in these words that they made no mention of himself: "I'd have you understand that I'm angry with you. In all your writings of this sort you speak with others but never with me. Are you afraid it will damage you with posterity if you are known to be a friend of ours?" This is how he extracted from Horace the piece beginning:

Since you bear along the burden of so many responsibilities,
protecting Italy with arms, improving its morals,
and amending its laws, it would be contrary to the public interest, Caesar, if I wasted your time in lengthy chatter.

In appearance he was short and fat, as described in his own Satires and by Augustus in this letter: "Onysius has brought me your little, which, small as it is, I accept in good part as your apology. You seem to me to be afraid that your books will be bigger than you are yourself, but it's height you lack; there's no shortage of bulk. You could write on a pint-pot and the circumference of your volume would have the embonpoint of your own paunch."

He is said to have been exceptionally intemperate in his love affairs, and there is a story that he so disposed his lovers in a mirrored room that whichever way he looked, there was a reflection of sexual intercourse. He lived mostly in his country retreats, either on the Sabine estate or in Tibur, where his house is pointed out near the little grove of Tiburnus. There have come into my hands elegies under his name and a prose epistle in which he commends himself to Maecenas, but I think them both spurious. The elegies are trite and the letter is obscure, and obscurity is not one of his faults.

He was born in the sixth day before the Ides of December (8 December 65 BC) in the consulate of Lucius Cotta and Lucius Torquatus, and died on the fifth day before the Calends of that same month in the consulship of Gaius Marcius Censorinus and Gaius Asinius Gallus (27 November 8 BC), in his fifty-seventh year, and fifty-nine days after the death of Maecenas. He named Augustus as his heir by word of mouth, because the onset of his illness made him incapable of signing a will. He was buried in a grave near the tomb of Maecenas on the far side of the Esquiline Hill."

III.
Horace (65-8 BC) used to play it safe and kept all his bases covered. He had learned his lesson on the pursuit of "good causes," a lesson he was never to forget again. From then on he curbed his own ambitions strictly to the limits of being a good neighbor ­ and what could possibly be wrong with that? Surely, if everybody tries just to be everybody's good neighbor, this world could only be a good place to live. Even if we should have the misfortune, as Horace did, to live under a totalitarian regime.

Little did he conceive, how much more totalitarian and oppressive a regime could become, if it had unlimited resources of surveillance and marshalled sufficient fanaticism as to turn every good neighbor into a vigilante spy on his own neighborhood, and make children report on their parents. Horace championed immigration into privacy; he certainly had no inkling of the horrors laying in wait in distant millennia, ­ the reality of death-camps was simply unthinkable for a civilized gentleman of his period, despite the realities of a slave driving economy.

But Horace too had to maintain a certain genuflect elasticity towards one of the most ruthless characters in the history of statecraft. Still, it took three more centuries before the state had learned to emulate the practices of a fanatic but disciplined minority of religious sectarians and their program of persecuting the dissenting mind. But once the floodgates had opened the regime was all too willing to carry out to the letter the instructions of a man, who, according to his own testimony, came to set the son at variance against his father, and came to send fire on earth and who demanded, that his enemies which would not that he should reign over them, to be slain before him.

For the likes of Horace, nothing can be more alien than such an absolutistic turn of thoughts. Hence Horace fell into the category of the people "that find their life and shall lose it" ­ with a look of regret, certainly, ­ but in the end not willing to pay the price of discourteous incivility and intolerance, it would have cost him, to agree "to lose his life" for the sake of a totalitarian demand "to find" it. But Horace was fortunate enough never to be confronted with such a choice. The poet's voice rung out far into the future and through periods much darker than his own.

He became a voice of consolation to the ever more isolated minds, that had to bury their dissenting views deep within for fear of prosecution and torture. To my mind, this is one reason for the sway he held on readers in all ages. He offers a position of acceptable compromise, an escapist position, to be sure, but a position one can live by, and with an appearance of dignity. A dignity, easy to be rejected when you are young and confrontational and live in a democracy, but for the sensible mind almost the only to go by, if you have the chance to outlive your teens. Horace has always been a poet of the adults.

VI.
Translations do not fare well when it comes to Horace. At least not with the less well known Horace, Horace the poet, not Horace the writer of ironically clever and mildly satirical conversation pieces, who had never ceased to be popular with the classicists of all ages. Of all his poems, none had been translated more often than Ode I:05. The present count is 144 and still rising. But the most faithful and best of the whole lot is Milton's only stab he ever attempted at Horace. And what a stab it is:

The Fifth Ode of Horace. Lib. I

("Quis multa gracilis te puer in Rosa." Rendered almost word for word without Rhyme according to the Latin Measure, as near as the Language will permit ­ Milton)

What slender Youth bedew'd with liquid odours
Courts thee on Roses in some pleasant Cave,
'Pyrrha' for whom bind'st thou
In wreaths thy golden Hair,

Plain in thy neatness; O how oft shall he
On Faith and changed Gods complain: and Seas
Rough with black winds and storms
Unwonted shall admire:

Who now enjoys thee credulous, all Gold,
Who always vacant, always amiable
Hopes thee; of flattering gales
Unmindfull. Hapless they

To whom thou untry'd seem'st fair. Me in my vow'd
Picture the sacred wall declares t' have hung
My dank and dropping weeds
To the stern God of Sea.

(Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa
perfusus liquidis urget odoribus
grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?
cui flavam religas comam,

simplex munditiis? heu quotiens fidem
mutatosque deos flebit et aspera
nigris aequora ventis
emirabitur insolens

qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea,
qui semper vacuam, semper amabilem
sperat, nescius aurae
fallacis. Miseri, quibus

intemptata nites. Me tabula sacer
votiva paries indicat uvida
suspendisse potenti
vestimenta maris deo.)

A wonderful fusion of metaphors and visuals into one metaphor of a mood, and a prime example for that notoriously famous Horatian "density." The poem plays on the ancient practice whereby on retirement the huntsman would dedicate his nets to Diana and the prostitute her mirror to Venus. "The miracles of the poem," the pundits tell us, "include its music, the many details of interplay between storms at sea and the storms of love, and the typical Horatian twist that the first love poem of the collection bids a farewell to this kind of love."

This is nice to know and pretty obvious, but Milton's "weeds" ­ a mourning widow's attire ­ shows that Milton had already realized what took me a considerable time to figure out: that is Horace's supreme use of a personae to voice his poetry. Of course he didn't invent the ploy, in antique poetry the poet doesn't "confess" his love, he puts a confessing persona on stage, like a modern rock singer.

In Horace's poem the personae is an elderly woman with a juicy past who seemed to have lost her beloved to the God(s) of the unfaithful sea. Perhaps it is even her own memory we find acted out in the first three stanzas. But the main motif, as in every great art is the calculus of destiny: how helpless the main protagonists wriggle in fate's spider-web; the passage of time and the loss of beauty and youth.

V.
Friedrich Nietzsche somewhere noted that in Horace's poetry every single word is to be found to radiate power in every direction across the entire stanza. But not everybody would agree with this: Jorge Luis Borges in his essay on Virgil, seemed to be unimpressed with Horatian murk and puts his doubts in the Horatian craft. I think both critics have a point: The question here is not one of craft, but how much one is willing to tolerate obscurity. Borges himself is an extremely lucid and clear performer, and feels a strong affinity to Virgil's style and polish.

In a poem ambiguities can create carefully set sign-posts for hidden and overt complexities and so help to re-create in the reader's mind the mood of a poet who doesn't mind owing up to the fact that he lacks the grasp. Virgil was able to perform with blinding clarity, and yes, that may set him above Horace as a thinker, but Horace just claimed the right to give expression to the confusions of a mind that had not yet found all the answers, and perhaps never will. At least there is no pretension in his position.

Besides, what seems to look as murk to the modern reader, might have been nothing of the kind for the contemporary Roman if he had sprung from the same mold of education, as Horace himself. After two millennia one has to come to terms with the fact that more than ninety percent of the poet's references and allusions are lost for us. Our scholars can turn and sift the soil as hard as they like, there is simply nothing left to be unearthed.

So there is a very real possibility, that this sound-bity spin doctor of the commonplace actually might have been even more commonplace than we give him credit for, which in our eyes is not a compliment at all, yet for the contemporary reader may have provided a similar delight of recognition, as the Jewish reader receives from discovering the biblical leads and references in the word-puzzle of the Song of Songs. What seems to add the extra dimension to Horace's poetry, could very well be our own ignorance.

© - 5/7/2002 - by Michael Sympson - all rights reserved

cogite intrare

The Roman senator and pagan speaker of the house, Symmachus (340-405 AD), appointed a promising young African as professor of rhetorics in Milan. The young man turned on his benefactor, converted to Christianity and was the first to call for coercive conversion - "cogite intrare." As with his doctrine of "original sin," which he'd based on his understanding of Paul's Gnostic stance on sexuality - St. Augustine found his precept in the New Testament, in Mk. 6:11; Mt. 10:5-15, 11:20-24; and Lk. 10:1, 4-9, 10-16 where the "prince of peace" curses down brimstone and hellfire on those who dare to resist him.

"After these things Jesus appointed other seventy also, and sent them two and two before his face into every city and place, whither he himself would come.

"Carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes: and salute no man by the way. And into whatsoever city ye enter, and they receive you, eat such things as are set before you." (Lk. 10:1, 4-9; compare Didache Chapter 11) "But into whatsoever city they receive you not, go your ways and say: 'even the very dust of your city, we do wipe off against you: it shall be more tolerable in that day for Sodom, than for your city.' (Lk.10:10-12)

Then Jesus began to upbraid the cities wherein most of his mighty works were done, because they repented not:

'Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment, than for you. And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mighty works, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee' (Mt. 11:20-24)."

It is not quite a "kill the blighters" but not very far from it, and the Koran just caps it in perfectly logical terms:

"We shall soon cast into Fire all those who deny Our Messages. As often as their skins are burnt up We will replace them with new skins that they may continue to taste the agony of punishment. Surely, Allâh is All - Mighty, All - Wise." (Koran 4:54 - 56) "But those who have disbelieved and cried lies to Our Messages, it is these who are fellows of the blazing Fire." (Koran 5:86) "Make no friends with them until they emigrate in the cause of Allah. Capture them and kill them wherever you find them." (Koran 4:89)

One cannot say that the religious folk didn't know how to follow instructions. Especially when acts of enforced coercion catered to political convenience. The Bible is gloating over the Hebrews alleged invasion of Canaan in the name of their faceless idol. Cities of the native population, daring to resist their summons, saw their males put to the sword without distinction. Even conversion would not shield the rest from the inevitable holocaust. Not a single creature was to be left alive. Of course not. The land had to be cleared of its inhabitants before we can think of colonizing it.

And should a gallant and aristocratic spirit, like King Saul, attempt to break this cycle of violence, there would be a "man of god" to make his life miserable. Written during exile this story has little archaeological evidence to speak for it. It looks more like a wishful fantasy by exiled peoples who dreamed to reclaim their homeland by any means, even terror, and unfortunately this juvenile fantasy created a model for the acts of coercion by the Babylonian repatriates (Nehemia 13:23, Ezra 9:2,3, 10:3,9ff, even Lk.17:12 and Jn. 4:3-5, 39-40) and the Maccabees.

And this in turn inspired Theodosian's decrees (Codex Theodosian XVI, 11:2) and Mohammed's jihad (622). It endorsed Charlemagne's ethnocidal campaign against the Saxons (772), and snowballed into a pretext for Ferdinand & Isabelle to commission Torquemada (1420-1498). The Inquisition religiously "cleansed" the Spanish peninsular and 200,000 unwanted citizens lost their homes. Who refused exile was either baptized or became the main course at a public barbecue over a slow fire. Sons were seen to go after their own mothers in exile and deliver them to the Inquisition.

I repeat: this was not just a big misunderstanding. The perpetrators followed instructions. When during the Dark Ages now and then magistrates and royal courts would find it convenient to clear their debts to Jewish money-lenders in a "spontaneous" pogrom, their action was framed and "justified" by Paul's blood libel (1 Thes. 2:15). Church councils endorsed the practice. In the fourth Lateran council in 1215, Pope Innocent III's encyclical decreed that Jews who refused baptism were to be banned into ghettos.

Intermarriage was to be prohibited, "unrepentant" Jews were to be barred from certain professions. Innocent III even anticipated the Nazis and required Jews to wear a yellow sign on their garb to mark their identity. By the same token, Innocent's predecessors had already recommended to burn and destroy Jewish literature. To get his way with the dissenting Greek Sister-Church, Pope Innocent III, ultimately took recourse to misdirecting the crusade of 1204. The spoils are still on display on the St. Mark square in Venice.

Not satisfied with the spiritual results, Innocent III decided that he needed a dedicated institution to enforce thought prohibitions and harass the dissenting mind: in 1208 he introduced the Holy Inquisition. Immediately the Holy Office launched a campaign against Albigensian "heretics." The genocide in the Languedoc lasted from 1208 to 1244. It became the dress rehearsal for the Spanish auto-da-fés. But it did neither stop Luther's heresy, nor Luther to remember his Augustinian training and pick up on the paradigm:

"... set fire to their synagogues or schools and bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn... I advise that their houses be razed and destroyed... I advise that all their prayer books... in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them... that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb... that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews... that all their treasure of silver and gold be taken from them... and expelled from their country be told to leave and return to ... Jerusalem" (Luther "On the Jews and their Lies," 1543).

Protestantism was meant to bring a change - it didn't. These days the founder of Protestantism is remembered for marrying a run-away nun and translating the Bible. What his aficionados conveniently erase from memory is his betrayal of the German peasantry when they had turned to him for guidance. Instead his inflammatory rhetorics unleashed their wholesale slaughter (the numbers vary between 120,000 and 200,000) and between office hours the man still found the time to personally supervise the drowning of a five year old "devils-child" in the Zwickauer Mulde.

"Yes, their blood is on me, but I put it in the hands of our Lord, who made me do it" (Luther, "Table-Conversations").

Luther's sedition was only the last in a long chain of heresies.

From 315 until the Arab invasion in 647, Donatists created the first unresolved schism in ecclesiastic history; the clashes between the factions laid waste and ruined the richest province of the Roman empire, the bread-basket of the world. Equally long lived was the Arian heresy, though historically it remains a moot question who had actually descended from whom: the split occurred with the announcement of the Nicean Creed in 324, and was only extinguished in 589 AD in the 3rd Council of Toledo. The council also, for the first time in Spanish history, called for forcible conversion of Jews.

A difference of opinion whether Jesus was the adopted human son of an alien Father, or himself an alien in the guise of a human could mean the difference between having a life before death or being slowly stretched over the rack till the joints are giving, burning of the outer epidermis under red-hot sheets of metal, and a good and slow roasting on wet firewood. Incidents are on record from the earliest times: Acts 5:1-11 depicts a chilling scene. A cult-leader, "Peter," helped by a gang of devoted thugs (the "young men,") enforces his rule of terror over the new sect.

Two members hold back on their contributions and get the treatment for backsliding. They "mysteriously" die. Even Luke can't completely obscure the horror the sectarians must have felt after the incident. All this goes far beyond any freedom of speech issue. The first amendment should protect us from being persecuted for our opinions. It does not, or should not protect the intrusion, the unasked buttonholing, roping in, and brainwashing of unsuspecting bystanders. Soapboxes are ok, school prayers are not. But this of course draws a fine line. We do allow our children to be instructed in algebra and reading and writing, if necessary with coercive means.

In other words, like it or not, a thing called "truth" mingles with the crowd of criteria which constitute justifiable coercion in order to get people instructed. But what "truth" is supposed to mean, is even now far from a resolved issue. Only one thing is sure: it doesn't come wrapped in "faith." Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250) coined the notorious phrase of the three con-artists: Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. Indeed, a fugitive murderer (Ex. 2:12), a convicted rebel, and a caravan robber: what credentials. If God was trying to tell us something, he certainly did it in bad taste.

© - 4/27/2002 - by Michael Sympson - all rights reserved

What is Gnosticism?

I. The Hellenistic soil
Before exile, Yahweh's cult held only a fringe position within the polytheistic spectrum of the Hebrew tribes. (The unending whining about the "high places;" at times the substratum of Canaanite culture spilled even into Yahweh's own courtyard: "Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the LORD's house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz." (Ezekiel 8:11) In exile the tables turned; history was rewritten and Judaism absorbed the dualistic concept of Zoroastrianism.

The trend didn't find universal approval. Deutero Isaiah's monistic "I am the maker of good and evil" (Isaiah 45:7) is an open protest against Zoroastrian dualism. It is an historic turning-point. But such monotheistic manifesto can just as easy inspire indifferent atheism. If everything originates from one and the same source, what difference is there between god and no god? The younger Isaiah, not unlike his Greek contemporary Heraclit (c.535-c.475) was a revolutionary and profound thinker, but his readers looked for a god more partial to his own people.

No wonder then that the bureaucrats of theology henceforth busied their little minds to control the damage. "God" had to be the source of only one part of the equation, and the source of evil to be separated. It made a sham of the purity of the monotheistic tenet, but it fitted nicely into the black and white scenarios of the national Persian religion. The deal paid off: in 538 BC Cyrus issued his famous edict and who still wanted to return, could do so in safety. But this, by no means, was a universal sentiment.

As in modern times, antique Zionists represented a determined minority. In their duffel bags they brought home a new theological paradigm which established modern Judaism and Hellenistic Gnosticism in its earliest form. Already before the Babylonian exile a sprawling trade-community had spread Jewish outposts all over the diaspora. Isaiah 11 testifies to the beginnings of proselytizing mission. Over the time every missionary's conduct was to be regulated and subjected to strict rulings.

Such rulings are reflected in Mark 6:7-10 and the "Didache" (chapter 11). The extend of this mission later in the Roman era was considerable and reached not less than 10% and perhaps up to 20% of the total population - ten to twenty million. But for now, Alexander the Great's armies routed the Middle East and dotted the occupied territories with colonies and enclaves of discharged veterans who were thought to spread the benefits of Greek culture and education. Communities of Greek merchants or soldiers would try to maintain an Athenian life-style on Egyptian or Judæan soil.

The natives responded in their own fashion: the Mishnah mentions Homer, but only to forbid reading him. There is no evidence that the rabbis had read Plato or Sophocles. Epicurus became synonymous for atheism. The attitude was to reform Hellenism, not to be reformed. But Talmudic literature uses an extensive Greek vocabulary, and the five "Magillot" - the Book Esther, the Song of Solomon, the Book of Ruth, Ecclesiastes, the Lamentations of Jeremiah - add to the Old Testament the Hellenistic touch. However we are not looking at colonial seggregation.

Over generations, the Greek settlers would become assimilated and intermarry, soaking up features of the local culture. Hellenism became a complex and innovative civilization. The Maccabees grew up in this environment. But, provoked by the innane policies of the Syrian government, a xenophobic movement in Al-Qaeda style arose to "defend" Jewish values and practices against foreign ideas. The Books of the "Maccabees" report only on the extremist's point of view: a minority view as opposed to hellenized Jews who didn't really try to introduce Greek paganaism in Jerusalem, merely a reformed version of Judaism.

II. Gnosticism
No matter how far back we track a religious document, a church or a church-like organization like the synagog is always already present as the custodian and conveyor of its tradition. From this I conclude we would be misguided to look out for the beginnings of a brand new cult. Instead what we are after is the moment when a new sectarian movement splits off from an older mother religion; in other words we look for "heresy." There must have been many dissenters we no longer recognize, like the Qumran people. Josephus gives us the farewell address of Eleazaar, the defender of Massada.

The speech testifies for the assimilation of ideas from Greek philosophy among the learned Jewish elite: God was expected to send his emissary into the fallen world and to open a new chapter in the history of mankind. However the "Lord of this world" would fiercely resist the attempt. This basically is the gist of the Gnostic movement emerging from the century before the birth of Christ. Zoroastrian dualism and Greek Platonism in turn made their contributions to the essentially Jewish concept of a cosmic Christ.

The movement immediately fell apart in countless sectarian heresies, each catering to a particular level of education, ethnic interests or sheer despair with the affairs of the period. The believer educated in Greek philosophy might speculate extensively on the particular relationship between the first unmoved mover (an Aristotelian concept, later adopted by the Neo-Platonists) and the ever wider, ever more distant circles of emanations between him and the material world.The Jewish sectarian beleaguered by a hostile surrounding may have preferred a more hands-on gnosticism. The manuscripts from Qumran and Nag Hammady are surviving examples.

But all parties agreed on a few fundamentals:

· that the material world is the creation of an essentially evil deity
· that the first and hitherto hidden mover is taking pity on the creatures of this fallen world
· and therefore had sent his messenger to the rescue
· that the messenger was to be detected and his mission temporarily thwarted by the Lord of this world
· and therefore the only way to win the fight is to deny procreation and cooperation in the works of this world.

The letters of Paul (Rom. 6:7, 25; 8:7, 8:15; 1 Cor. 2:14,15; 7:1, 27, 28; 15:50; 2 Cor. 5:8, 11:13,14; Gal. 1:12, 15,16; 2:4, 5:24, Philip. 2:6-11); the gospel of John, and especially Cerinthus' "Revelations" testify to the gnosticism at the base of the New Testament. Even the Koran's contention that it was not Jesus "but only a likeness that was shown to them," that had been crucified, is pure Gnosis.

III. Jesus & the New Testament
To gentile proselytes the message of a national Jewish messiah meant very little, but the political environment of the occupied nations in the Roman Empire lent itself to the notion of a world messiah, a "Christ." Jesus did act and express his believes firmly within the gnostic context. Had there been no ecclesiastical history and Christianity petered out after a few centuries, which very well it might have done, the New Testament would be just another collection of Gnostic texts. We would be unable to tell the difference.

In 130 AD, a certain Marcion of Sinope (c. 84-160), had put together the letters of Paul and one unidentified gospel without nativity story and genealogies. However, in 144 AD, Marcion's membership card was revoked and the Church expelled the man for his ascetic views and rejection of the Old Testament. Marcion went next door and opened his own church. But his legacy remained with the Church he left. It became the seed for our "New Testament."

Marcion rejected the Old Testament and catalogued in a book the numerous contradictions between Paul's God of mercy with the wrath of Yahweh. Marcion concluded that the creator in Genesis, was an agent of evil, if not its source, who incarcerated in the fallen flesh our immortal essence, and that Jesus and Paul had proclaimed a higher deity, hitherto unknown to the Hebrew scripture, which had sent Christ to ransome from "the Lord of this world" (2 Cor.4:4) the dissipated sparks of immortal spirit.

Consequently Marcion's church drew up a sharp distinction between the ascetic purity of the "perfect" who lived an abstinent and solitary live to end the cycle of evil with a refusal to procreate, and the lesser congregation which made amends for their worldly lifestyle with contributions to the existence of their ascetic leaders. It would be hasty to criticize Marcion's position as contradicting the teachings of the New Testament. The message in Lk. 20:34; Mt. 10-12; Mk. 12:25 is loud and clear on the point.

It should be kept in mind that the New Testament which Marcion had edited and initiated was meant to be an instrument for Gnostic mission. All later Gnostic churches modelled themselves on Marcion's heresy. His own organization reached its prime in the 5th century AD, by far outnumbering the Christian Churches of the period, and was succeeded by Cathars, Templars, the Waldensians and the Bogumiles. But the massacre at Montsegeur in 1244 effectively put an end to Gnosticism as a competing Church.

Appendix
from Eleazar's speech to the defenders of Masada:
"Our forefathers have corroborated the same doctrine by their actions, and by their bravery of mind, that it is life that is a calamity to men, and not death; for this last affords our souls their liberty, and sends them by a removal into their own place of purity, where they are to be insensible of all sorts of misery; for while souls are tied clown to a mortal body, they are partakers of its miseries; and really, to speak the truth, they are themselves dead; for the union of what is divine to what is mortal is disagreeable. It is true, the power of the soul is great, even when it is imprisoned in a mortal body; for by moving it after a way that is invisible, it makes the body a sensible instrument, and causes it to advance further in its actions than mortal nature could otherwise do. However, when it is freed from that weight which draws it down to the earth and is connected with it, it obtains its own proper place, and does then become a partaker of that blessed power, and those abilities, which are then every way incapable of being hindered in their operations. It continues invisible, indeed, to the eyes of men, as does God himself; for certainly it is not itself seen while it is in the body; for it is there after an invisible manner, and when it is freed from it, it is still not seen. It is this soul which hath one nature, and that an incorruptible one also; but yet it is the cause of the change that is made in the body; for whatsoever it be which the soul touches, that lives and flourishes; and from whatsoever it is removed, that withers away and dies; such a degree is there in it of immortality. Let me produce the state of sleep as a most evident demonstration of the truth of what I say; wherein souls, when the body does not distract them, have the sweetest rest depending on themselves, and conversing with God, by their alliance to him; they then go every where, and foretell many futurities beforehand. And why are we afraid of death, while we are pleased with the rest that we have in sleep? And how absurd a thing is it to pursue after liberty while we are alive, and yet to envy it to ourselves where it will be eternal!" (Josephus, Wars VII, 8:7)

© - 4/6/2002 - Michael Sympson - all rights reserved

the Devil's triangle
"Every tree is known by his own fruit."
Luke 6:44

I. triangles
This, our world, is ruled by triangles. Drug dealers turn to the Golden Triangle for opium supplies, tired husbands disappear in the "Bermuda Triangle," religious fanatics shelter under the Near Eastern Triangle: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. The latter is one big family. It is not a partnership. Though this part of world history is geographically taking place in a corner smaller than a public toilet, the hostility between the three brothers is affecting the Earth globally.

The religious lobby is still permitted to abuse the first amendment and indoctrinate the susceptible and intellectualy immature with a widely held misconception that a pre-condition for good morals is the unconditional belief in some myth from a time when people had their letters written by the public scribe and compiled the homespun precepts of certain self-styled "messiahses" and "prophets" from the late bronze age. Nothing has proven more effective to implement permanent war.

War, of course, according to Heraclit (c.535-c.475) is the great generator of progress. This is an uncomfortable truth; but since we no longer live in the era of the stone axe, we better find ourselves a more effective way of crisis mangement or all this progressing will amount to little more than surrendering the torch to a new species, which, I am sure, is already waiting in the wings of evolution to replace us. What makes war so effective, is motivation and fanaticism - among other things.

II. Palestine before Christ
Linking the crossroads to three continents made Palestine a melting pot for religious and cultural influences from Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and raiders of the seaboard. It was also the natural battleground for the great powers of the region which took turns to establish their influence. But in the 14th century BC the Egyptian protectorate found itself powerless to prevent the invasion of the Philistines, who gave the country its present name.

The Old Testament is gloating over the invasion of Canaan by the Hebrews. Cities of the native population, daring to resist their summons, saw their males put to the sword without distinction. Even conversion would not prevent the inevitable holocaust (Josh. 6:17-21, 7:12-16, 8:2). Not a single creature was to be left alive. And should a gallant and aristocratic spirit, like King Saul, attempt to break this cycle of violence, there would be a "man of god" to make his life miserable. (1. Sam. 15).

With such friends - who needs enemies? Personally I prefer a neighbor who openly covets what is mine to the self-righteous bastard who lays claim on what is not his in the name of some phoney mandate by divine approbation (Deut. 6:3). Greed may be reasoned with, it's the law of economics, but faith walks with plugs in the ears. In the 3rd millennium BC the Canaanites lived in city-states, one of which was Jericho, the oldest city on the planet. They traded, they developed an alphabet.

Actually archaeology has a hard time to confirm the biblical migration of Hebrew settlers, even of Joshua's campaign. Especially for the sojourn in Sinai there is not a single shred of corroborating evidence. Hebrew settlements are found all over the highlands, but they barely differ in style and artifacts from the indigenous population, except for the lack of pig-bones on their garbage dumps: an indicator for specific dietary customs without which we wouldn't be able to tell their identity.

Relevant passages - Ps. 74:120-13, Ps. 89:9-10, Isaiah 51:9-10, Job 1:6, 2:3-6, 8:9, 9:5-11, 26:5-14, 36:27-30, 37:2-13, 38:4-12, 14, 17, 22-25, 28, 30-32, 35, 41:1-10, 18-34, Nahum 1:2, 1:3-5, Habakkuk 3:3-6, 2 Kings 19:24-28, brief references in Jeremiah - indicate a polytheistic religion very much in common with the rest of the Canaanite population. Even post exile Gen. 1:2 uses the term "Tehom" for "deep" which is the Hebraic and Canaanite equivalent to the Babylonian "Tiamat," the dragon of the watery chaos.

These days Passover is called the feast of atonement, but what had a bunch of fugitive slaves to atone for, one wonders? The story gives it away: the blood of the lambs was used to mark the lintels of the homes which should not be touched by the "angel of death." (Ex. 12:13) Angels know their own, they don't need signs. Terrorists do! In return for the golden vessels lent by friendly neighbors to adorn a festival, every Egyptian firstborn was killed in that night (Ex. 12:29; 12:35) - or so we are told.

Despite the biblical bragging, the Kingdoms of the Houses of David and Omri never enjoyed full autonomy and lived a precarious existence on the grindstone between Assyria and Egypt. The Yahweh cult was never more than a fundamentalist fringe movement. In 721 BC the larger and more prosperous of the two states fell to Assyria. In 587 BC the effects of Hezekiah's and Josiah's reforms (621-605 BC) delivered the shrinking remains of Judea to the Babylonians. Judaism was on the brink to extinction.

But the exiles transformed themselves into freewheeling cosmopolitans and educated city-dwellers. The tradition of the roaming shepherd Abraham was restyled; he became an urban emigrant (Gen. 11:28ff). The Hebrew tribes had lost their statehood, but the Jews recovered with a novelty: a Jewish national identity. It was accomplished with two innovations: the synagogue, perhaps the first institution for public education on record, and, to have something to teach, a canon of militant classics.

The Edict of Cyrus in 538 BC created a new situation. The Babylonian occupants had deported the courtiers, land owners, a handful of literati and every scribe and artisan - altogether a crowd that would barely fill a modern school-yard - but the half-pagan rural population was left in the country. Now the religiously righteous repatriates disenfranchised their former brethren and considered themselves as the only legitimate Jewish nation (Nehemia 13:23, Ezra 9:2,3, 10:3,9ff, even Lk.17:12 and Jn. 4:3-5, 39-40).

When in 333 BC Alexander the Great's armies routed the Middle East, they dotted the occupied territories with colonies and enclaves of discharged veterans who spread the benefits of Greek culture and education. Hellenism became a complex and innovative civilization. Communities of Greek merchants or soldiers would try to maintain an Athenian life-style on Egyptian or Judæan soil but over a few generations, the original Greek settlers intermarried and merged into their urban and rural surroundings.

The Maccabees grew up in this Hellenistic environment, overseen by the Ptolemians of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria. In 141-135 BC, not without provocation by the Seleucid government, a fundamentalist and xenophobic movement in Al-Qaeda style arose to "defend" Jewish values and practices against foreign ideas. The Hasmoneans set up an independent state. It lasted until Pompey's campaign subjected the Orient to Roman rule in 63 BC. The Romans put Herod the Great in charge of Palestine (37-4 BC).

Herod had the last of the Hasmoneans killed and lavishly reconstructed the Second Temple. Herod's rule was followed by a period of civil unrest.

"There was also another disturbance at Cesarea, Jews living among the Syrians there, rose in tumult against them. They said that the city was theirs, because a Jew, meaning king Herod, had built it. The Syrians maintained, that the city was a Grecian city; for Herod had set up statues and temples which could not have been designed for Jews. On which account both parties came to blows." (Josephus Wars 2:7)

"Deceivers and robbers got together, and persuaded the Jews to revolt, and exhorted them to assert their liberty, inflicting death on those that continued in obedience to the Roman government, and saying, that such as willingly chose slavery ought to suffer for their treason. And up and down the country, they plundered the houses of the great, slew the men themselves, and set the villages on fire; and this till all Judea was filled with the effects of their madness." (Josephus Wars 2:6)

"At the festivals, Sicarii" - Barabbas (Mk. 15:7) was one of them - "slew men in open daylight, and in the midst of the city; they mingled with the multitude, and concealed daggers under their garments. When a victim fell, the murderers became a part of the crowd; by which means it appeared that they could not be discovered. The first man slain was Jonathan the high priest; many followed every day. Fear became more afflicting than the calamity itself; and everybody expected death by the hour." (Josephus Wars 2:3)

Doesnt it sound familiar? It was the antique equivalent of the suicide bombing in our news. It was the period when Maccabeean Judaism spawned Christianity and later Islam. All three faiths adopted the concept of "Holy war." Moses, Jesus and Mohammed - a fugitive murderer (Ex. 2:12), a crucified convict, and a caravan robber took turns to pronounce their intentions:

"Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour" (Ex. 32:27).

"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came to send a sword" (Mt. 10:33-37).

And Mohammed pronounces:.

"The sword is the key to heaven and hell. A drop of blood shed in the cause of God, is of more avail than fasting and prayer."

As literature, Koran and New Testament are merely homespun huff and uneducated puff; as political manifestos, they are an unmitigated catastrophe. The political aspect to the concept of Parousia was lost neither on Post-Maccabees nor Intifada.

III. Palestine after Christ

"And as the sedition still continued, Felix chose out the most eminent men on both sides as ambassadors to Nero, to argue about their several privileges." (Josephus Wars 2:7)

Hollywood, Christians and the political opposition in the Roman Senate liked to depict Nero as a mad fiddler and arsonist. Fact of the matter was, Nero had been more than fifty miles away from the capital, when after a series of recent arson attacks on Corinth, Ephesus, Marseilles, and Toulouse a fire broke out in Rome as well.

After the news had reached his court, Nero immediately initiated relief measures and opened to the public his own estates for temporary shelter. Subsequently, criminal investigations prosecuted groups of sectarian extremists on arson charges. To stamp out the source once and for all, Nero ordered a campaign against Jewish insurgents in Palestine. It eventually led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple. Christians of the period used to pray for doomsday to arrive soon. (1 Cor. 16:22)

Nero's suicide momentarily stopped the campaign and after some confusion left Vespasian in charge to finish the job. (In our days we look to Afghanistan, and history seems to repeat itself.) Herod's temple was completely dismantled, Jerusalem "cleansed" of its population and became off limit to every Jew. The Romans reconstructed the city, gave it a new name - "Aelia Capitolina" - and consecrated Yahweh's real estate to Jupiter Optimus. Not surprisingly this again led to sedition and riots.

In 115 AD supported and perhaps orchestrated from across the border (Dio, Epitome LXVIII p.421), concerted insurrections in the Jewish Diaspora of Cyrene, Cyprus, and Egypt left Emperor Trajan little choice but to launch a military campaign against the Parthian empire (modern Iraq). His successor, Emperor Hadrian as well, wasn't exactly thrilled by Bar-Kokhba's last stand in Al-Qaeda style and from 132 to 135 AD Hadrian's generals mopped it up in a torched earth campaign. (Dio, Epitome LXIX p.447-449).

Jews had again lost their statehood and until 1948 became an often sorely harassed people without a country. There are no records of any attention for Jesus' actual resting place by early Christians. And the "empty grave" became a shrine only after the Empress Dowager, Helena, in 324 AD pointed her manicured finger at a grave in Giv'at ha-Mivtas in Jerusalem and declared it to be the place. For a brief period this initiated an intensive reconstruction program which brought some prosperity to the region.

This came to an end after the Arabic invasion in 638 which completed the triangle. The Umayyads in Damascus (until 730 AD) were sensible administrators, but the neglect inflicted by Abbasids, Seljuks, Fatimids, European Crusaders, and Mamelukes, gradually wasted the land. Palestine could have grown to a role as the world's forgotten corner, had not Popes and crusaders dragged it again on the stage of big politics. The situation nauseated sensible spirits like Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250).

He coined the notorious phrase of the three con-artists: Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. Needless to say, the papacy took turns to excommunicate the man, despite Frederick's success to obtain a treaty without a drop of blood, which secured free access to the holy land, after previous crusades had wasted immense resources in human lives, political good will, and art treasures to achieve just that. In 1099 Jerusalem experienced another "cleansing" of its population. It was even worse than the first time.

Muslims were trapped and hacked to death in the al-Aksa Mosque, Jews burned alive in their Synagogues. Ironically pogroms on Jews in Mainz had provided the war chest to make all this possible. In 1517 the Ottoman Turks defeated the Mamelukes and ruled Palestine until the winter of 1917-18. I am not aware of any atrocity during their protectorate - understandably: whistle-blowers got themselves hung up by their thumbs and the soles of their bare feet made intimate acquaintance with very thin and very flexible rods.

But it has to be acknowledged, that especially after the reforms of the Egyptian viceroy Muhammad Ali in 1831 and following the modernization of the Ottoman administration in 1876, Palestinian deputies held seats in the Turkish assembly and only then had any resemblance of representation at any point in history ever. Meanwhile the first Zionist Congress of 1897 in Basle, Switzerland, issued a programme for the colonization of Palestine.

IV. another exodus
It was the age of colonialism and almost everybody in Europe made plans for some spot on the planet that was not his. Personally I have no problems with imperialism. Multi-ethnic empires provided a long term umbrella to bring different societies together and distribute more fairly whatever options for education and social rise had been available. When members of the realm broke away they often found themselves abandoned by the only periods of good government their nations had ever seen.

Egypt and the Lebanon under the Romans were certainly in better shape than ever after. Gandhi operated the way he did, because as barrister at His Majesty's bar he knew his options; the response of the British Raj was predictable. It is called rule of law. Once the power who made the law legal had pulled out, things deteriorated within hours: 4,000,000 refugees crossed a brand-new border between "Pakistan" and India, train-loads of uncounted dead went both ways. The Mahatma was assassinated.

It is true, Imperialism often went hand in hand with colonization, but the two are not necessarily identical: colonization of populated land simply means invading and infiltrating and disenfranchising the indigenous. The story of the Old Testament set the example for the American frontier. But whether the biblical Hebrews, like the Philistines, had come as invaders or for some reason gradually segregated themselves from the common Canaanite stock, it merely resulted in a new state but not a new empire.

Moved by anti-Semitism and pogroms in Eastern Europe, Theodor Herzl, founded the Zionist movement, and wrote in 1896:

"The Idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is a very old one: it is the restoration of the Jewish State. Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation, the rest we shall manage for ourselves".

Rejected by the Ottoman authorities, Herzl lobbied with the British, German, Belgian and Italian Governments. The responses were lukewarm and the Zionists changed tactics.

"If distrust of zionism was to be dispelled, there must be no more talk of a Charter or, even worse, of an international guarantee; still less must there be any room for the suspicion that the real purpose of the Zionist movement is to detach Palestine from Turkey and turn it into a Jewish State" (Dr. Weizmann).

But the direction was clear - the goal of zionism from the start was the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine.

To give reality to the political concept of a Jewish State in Palestine it was necessary to fill the land with Jewish people. The religiously motivated solidarity of the Jews in the Diaspora with the Holy Land had survived over the centuries. But despite anti-Semitism and pogroms in Europe, only small groups had emigrated to settle in Palestine out of a purely religious sentiment. They barely numbered 50,000 at the end of the nineteenth century, and personified the Jewish link to Sweet Jerusalem.

The Zionists drew on this religious sentiment to build a political movement. A stirring slogan was spread abroad: "A land without people for a people without land," ignoring the fact that the Palestinians living there at the turn of the century, numbered well over half a million. History repeating itself! The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 opened the door: Dr. Weizmann concluded that Zionism's best hope for a Jewish State in Palestine would lay with Great Britain.

The British, knowing that their mandate by the League of Nations was temporal, made promises from both corners of the mouth. To the Arabs on the base of the secret Sykes-Picot agreement and correspondences between Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt (1915-17), and Sherif Husain, Emir of Mecca, which recognized that sovereignty would rest with the rulers and people of the Arab territories, either under an

"independent Arab State" or a "confederation of Arab States".

At the same time the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Arthur James Balfour, in November 2, 1917 sent this message to Lord Rothschild: "... His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object ... ." In 1920 the Jewish Sir H. Samuel became the British high-commissioner in Palestine and by a strange coincidence increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants infiltrated the country.

Inevitably this could only lead to frictions between the two populations. In 1921 the "Hagganah" - like all terrorist organizations from the Maccabees to Al-Qaeda - was intruduced as a vigilante "self-defence" organization. No doubt it was an act of desperate self-defense, when in 1946 a splinter-group of the Hagganah blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people, among them British, Palestinian and Jewish employees of the mandate.

Eventually a British white paper on terrorism in Palestine couldn't help but acknowledge the part Jewish extremists played in it. Things had developed to a point, which in the journalese of a later period, could only be characterized as "ethnic cleansing." Only three days before the General Zionist Council decided to establish an independent state in Palestine on May 16, the same terrorist group that used to blow up hotels in selfdefence, massacred 250 civillians in Deir Yassin in the Jerusalem district.

This was the beginning for even more sweeping operations, which eventually created some 175,000 Palestinian refugees. In May 14, 1948 at 4 pm in Tel Aviv, after the British forces had pulled out, the Israeli made a declaration of their statehood. President Truman hurried to recognize the new state, yet was beaten to the post by none less than "Uncle Joe." Stalin, the old fox foresaw that the new situation would saddle the Western Powers with troubles that must go on for ever.

V. by their fruit ye shall know them
And so it happened. Whether by means of hijacking airplanes and killing Olympic teams, whether with explosives strapped under the shirt, whether by sending troops into territories which a treaty has already conceded to the other side, whether by provocatively setting up religious settlements on foreign soil, it always comes as doing the work of god. Hate has become a method and it uses exhortations to peace and neighborly compassion as the candy-wrapper.

But after 3000 years of ceaseless grief the rhetorics can no longer conceal something utterly evil underneath this holy madness. The unholy triangle of Judaism, Christianity and Islam poisons the Planet with growing rapidity. If faith could be reasoned with to any degree at all, it should be self-evident that Jews and Arabic Palestinians have no more title to the land between Sinai and Lebanon than white Americans to the territories of the natives between Alaska and Cape Horn. They just live there.

And they will continue to live there by dint of their political determination and military ability to prevent their own replacement. "Rights" and legitimacy in any guise, are not part of the picture. Neither was this fact hidden from the primeval terrorist himself: even King David, dangerous and unpredictable, a man

"after the Lord's own heart"

with a history of methodical betrayal and terrorism (1 Sam. 27:11, 2 Sam. 12:31), even he had his lucid moment:

"These sheep, what have they done" (2 Sam.24:17)?

Palestine as a country is not a particularly desirable spot of land, more of a Mars-scape than anything else. Jerusalem is the place where in 980 BC extensive plumbing was invented, because the city is so difficult to supply with water. Palestine is the transit route from one place to an other - you won't check in into the motels if you don't have to. Most Jews living there for good are themselves refugees from political and racist persecution or descendants of survivors from the death-camps.

This is the worst aspect. It created a mind set which feels to be in its right when actually it should merely appreciate the escape to an hospitable place. Historically Palestine has always been hostage to the policies of international powers. This never changed. The extremists across the camps are the product of their respective up-bringing. An up-bringing in increasingly strong believes and religious zeal. But after three millennia of trying we can be confident, that the message is to blame, not the messenger.

Unfortunately the ethical substance in us which guided us through three million years of evolution does not protect us from lapping up every metaphysical baloney that seems to excuse an atrocity. But we do still recognize the enormity of the atrocities laid before. The victims pray for deliverance, the victorious, for obvious reasons, style their atrocities as more or less divine justice. Both camps are filled with refugees from a long history of atrocities. Neither side qualifies in any sense as "freedom" fighters.

© - 5/2/2002 - by Michael Sympson - all rights reserved

a recent archaeological discovery
Isaiah (c. 745-c.686)

"It was in the 5th year of Ahaz the king. From an iron brazier a white-hot coal fire shed a faint glint into the light-less immensity of a vaulted hall that stretched infinitely into the echoing dark. A young man, attired in a long white robe, held a tong in his hands and waited, almost motionless, for the appointed hour to come. Then he picked a red-glowing coal from the brazier and looked up to a statuesque assemblage of even blacker darkness in front of him. He almost seemed to exchange a tiny nod with his invisible vis-à-vis before he reached out to touch the sealed lips ... ­ I awoke, as if from a dream, and I knew that I had the gift of the word.

But it was a strange gift. Every utterance seemed to be driven by an urge to fill a primordial mold, words dropped like coins into the slots of an outlandish pattern, which quite often caused an impatient outburst by my wife: "Good Lord, this is a fish mart, Isaiah; all you have to do here is ask for the price!" 'Isaiah,' was this my name? At moments I found myself doubting everything."

from what seems to be Isaiah's Diary written in Spring 715, on a collection of strung up potsherds recently unearthed in Jerusalem.

Buddhism

Judged by its fruit, Buddhism, of all religions on this planet, has a track record of the fewest atrocities committed. I do not mean to suggest conversions - cogite intrare is not a Buddhist concept. (Though, if this could end the bloody nonsense in Palestine I would support it.) However, despite the wishful assertions of Western scholars - Hermann Oldenberg, Karl E. Neumann (who translated "The Speeches of Buddha," 3 vol. Leipzig 1896-1902), and Helmuth von Glasenapp - Buddha's teaching never existed in a "pure" form.

Superstition clings to the various Buddhist traditions like cotton wool to velcro. And of course it is easy to criticize it in the image of the Orient, which was created by western Orientalists, not so much as a place, but as a concept, a rhetorical means, expressed in clichés of the passive, mystical, exotic, corrupt Oriental. It certainly opened the way for the ethnic profiling of the others, their mentality, culture, and religion - but also of the West as a categorical contrast to the Orient.

There is a flip side to this coin: - with the exception of Japan - there is no other culture that within its own limitations had been able to create a similarly effective emulation of Western values - while the West manages to exploit and emulate everything, which indeed is a sign of superiority. Buddhists have always studied and practiced what they have understood to be Buddha's way, or dharma. But as an object for systematic and scientific study Buddhism was not born until the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In spite - or because - of western colonial power and intrusion, the East became the missing link to a mental landscape, a projected Other World. The attitudes toward eastern religions reflected different historical periods and thoughts in the West. The French enlightenment had already identified the status of Confucius as a rational gentleman, in opposition to the inferior, magical and ritualized Taoism. The situation appeared to resemble the dichotomy between secular humanism and Christianity.

Buddha had been mythologized as an African or Mongol, as Noah or Adam, as Osiris, Neptun, even as Odin. That he was also to be identified with Jesus and Luther and thus became a "true Victorian gentleman" was due to the first serious reception and invention of Buddhism in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Edwin Arnold, who actually had been to India himself, wrote "The Light of Asia" in 1879, a poetic and romantic story of Buddha (later to be dramatized in play, opera and film).

It caused "an enourmous upsurge in awareness of, and interest in, Buddhism." Already in 1844, the French scholar Eugéne Burnouf (1801-52) wrote "L'Introduction à l'histoire du buddhisme indien," the first detailed study of Indian Buddhist history, doctrines and texts. It was the beginning of Buddhist Studies. And being the era of higher criticism at the theological seminars, this meant the search for the historical Buddha and a quest for the "original" de-mythologized Buddhism.

In the (still existing) Pali Text Society, created in London in 1881 by Th. Rhys Davids, Pali was found to be the authentic language of early and essential Buddhism. Pali-canonic Theravada Buddhism was babtized the "Protestantism of the East," as opposed to the corrupt, "Catholic" Mahayana Buddhism with all its folklore, magic, superstition and idolatry. Actual living Buddhism was looked upon as a false folk-religion, degenerated from pure and only existing "real" textual Buddhism.

Monastic life and meditation was often seen to express ritualized laziness. Buddhism became an invented tradition, and a projection in terms of the mind and culture of the "discoverer." Naturally the clinically clean manuals of the "original teachings" of the Gautama are as much a product of scholarly fantasy as of centuries of oral transmission, which, as modern research has unequivocal proven, is a very unreliable method of preserving and transmitting an original utterance.

Historically only one great political personality ever managed to run his realm on Buddhist principles - and eventually failed. King Ashoka (c.273-c.232 BC) as a young man had fought a decisive war to unite all of India and repented the deed for the rest of his life. He was a product of the period, an educated and enlightened despot, the Indian version of a Hellenist whose empire, not unlike the kingdoms of his western colleagues, began to fall apart and fragmentize before the old man would close his eyes.

And that, with all due respect to the Dalai Lama, is the end of Buddhism as a beneficial force in politics. The ferociously expansive Tibetan empire during the time of its glory (c.550-900) was intellectually and hygienically as dark as the Ages in every other part of the planet. Heraclit's "War is the father of all things etc." is one of the great uncomfortable truths of all times. What its author failed to foresee is the fact that war could develop the means to destroy itself together with the benefits.

However in one aspect Buddhism is truly unique among the faiths: it is barely ever in conflict with the findings of science. For two reasons: 1. the fundamentals of the cosmological picture are very plausible, the psychological insight is based on empirical therapy. 2. The big cosmological picture doesn't matter much in the larger scheme of the four dyanas and three knowledges, and the causal nexus of universal suffering, the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, and Anatman, the doctrine of the illusory self. Bottom line: the Gautama was a bit of a sissy and a whiner, but got the causes right.

© - 4/7/2002 - by Michael Sympson - all rights reserved

(The following article expresses better than I could, the whole problematic issue. However I disagree on the historicity bit: I think there is good circumstantial evidence that Galilee really had been the stomping ground for the fellow in bast sandals. And even if it wasn't, what good would it do, to put such fact to the faithful? The author seems to have ample experince with the effects of the brainwash that comes bottled and labeled as "faith" (always a bad principle to build bridges). In the end it all comes down to a credibility issue. Not of the tradition, but of the person. It is simply not possible to subpoena a purely mythological Christ and frame an (long overdue) indictment. The point was not lost on a certain Arthur Drews in 1912. He proposed that Christianity as a religion would actually be much better off with a mythical Christ than a disappointingly mundane fellow in the flesh with his dubious agenda.
Michael Sympson)

The Jesus Question
by Gary Sloan

The question is twofold: Did a historical Jesus exist, and does it matter? To tackle the first half first, the answer depends on whom you ask. Ask most Americans, and you will get a resounding yes. To get a no, you must turn to a small contingent of renegade scholars, their adherents, or a few crackpots who like to sound outrageous. The question may also be greeted by an occasional indifferent shrug.

According to recent surveys reported in Newsweek and Time Almanac 1999, 85% of Americans call themselves Christians. Of these, 75% believe Jesus was God incarnate, that he was born of a virgin, died on the cross for the sins of our species, and was resurrected on the third day. So three out of four Americans are orthodox Christians. They believe God assumed a human guise for about 33 years, talked, walked, slept, ate, breathed in Palestine some 2000 years ago. They merge the "historical" Jesus with the biblical Jesus-the divine Redeemer, the supernatural Messiah, depicted in the New Testament. Unlike the Gnostics, an early Christian sect that considered Jesus an illusory wraith who only seemed to have been crucified, orthodox believers eschew a Jesus lite, some incorporeal emanation from on high or mythic symbol of the eternal Way. Only a god who deigned to bleed, sweat, and weep can offer the empathetic understanding and tangible satisfactions they seek.

The remaining 10% of Christians are "liberal" Christians. They don't believe Jesus was God. They view him, rather, as a human paragon of moral virtue whom they should emulate. As do many orthodox Christians, liberals are prone to ignore or dismiss as inauthentic those biblical utterances by Jesus that contradict his image of charitableness, forbearance, and compassion. Most non-Christians also believe that the biblical Jesus reflects a historical prototype. By and large, the world entertains a hefty respect for the Prince of Peace. Like the Muslims, some consider him a prophet of the Almighty.

In their perception of Jesus, a large rift exists between the average layperson and biblical scholars. Aside from a comparatively small band of evangelical theologians, most scholars reject the divinity of Jesus. Some, in fact, are agnostics or atheists. (I'll long remember the crestfallen look of a pious student when I told him the faculty of a divinity school he planned to attend included a large number of avowed atheists.) Many scholars envision little similarity between the Jesus of the canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) and the supposed historical model. In the book The Five Gospels (the fifth is the extracanonical Thomas), the Jesus Seminar, an international consortium of 75 scholars, concludes that only 18% of the words attributed to Jesus by the Evangelists, the anonymous authors of the Gospels, actually issued from his mouth. The Gospel of John they throw out altogether, and only a single sentence from Mark makes the cut. The Sermon on the Mount they gut, and everything that smacks of miracle or magic gets the heave-ho: the Annunciation, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, walking on water, the temptation by Satan, the feeding of the multitude, etc. Thomas Jefferson would have applauded this rife expurgation of preternatural elements. He constructed his own version of the Gospels cleansed of the occult and supernatural.

The Jesus Seminar views the biblical Jesus as a patchwork accretion of legend, fantasy, surmise, and creative engineering that evolved from a few slivers of biographical truth. The construction work was already well advanced in various oral traditions before anything was written down. From these traditions and a few rudimentary compilations of sayings and acts of Jesus, the Evangelists culled what suited their purposes and tricked out the material with their own embellishments and innovations. They might import an incident from the life of some mythic or real hero, put into Jesus' mouth some doctrine espoused by their own sect, or impute to Jesus a background, character, and deeds consonant with Old Testament predictions (or what they thought were such) about the Messiah. The Evangelists were not averse to imaginative glosses on Old Testament passages. Matthew, for example, transformed a "young woman" who would bear a child (Isaiah 7:14) into a virgin who would bear Jesus and converted a prophecy about Israel (Hosea 11:1) into a prophecy about Jesus. In light of the dense encrustation of artifice and myth surrounding Jesus, the eminent theologian Rudolph Bultmann groused in 1926: "We can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus." The minimalist Jesus served up by contemporary scholarship validates Bultmann's skepticism.

The line between a minimalist Jesus and no Jesus is razor thin. For a century and a half, some scholars have taken the final step. Those who have denied existence to a historical Jesus include Bruno Bauer, Robert Taylor, Joseph Wheless, John Robertson, Arthur Drews, Peter Jensen, Gordon Rylands, P. L. Couchoud, Guy Fau, Earl Doherty, and George A. Wells. Viewing the biblical Jesus as a pastiche woven from stories of various pagan gods, demigods, and heroes adapted to a first-century Jewish milieu, many scholars have noted striking similarities between Jesus and pagan counterparts. For example, the Persian sun-god Mithra, widely worshiped in the Roman Empire before the inception of the Christian era, had 12 disciples, performed miracles, was buried in a tomb, rose on the third day, was called the Good Shepherd, identified with the lamb, considered "the Way, the Truth and the Light, the Redeemer, the Savior, the Messiah," his principal festival was held on what was to become Easter, and he instituted a Eucharist or Lord's Supper. When in 313 C.E. Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Empire, he was influenced by the pell-mell conversion of Roman soldiers from Mithraism to Christianity. The biblical Jesus gave them a sort of home-grown Mithra and comparatively effortless entrée into salvation and immortality.

Among contemporary scholars who deny a historical Jesus, George A. Wells is perhaps the most credible. In six carefully reasoned, heavily annotated books (The Jesus of the Early Christians, Did Jesus Exist?, The Historical Evidence for Jesus, Who Was Jesus?, The Jesus Legend, The Jesus Myth), Wells, Professor Emeritus of German in the University of London, has propounded the thesis that the Jesus of the Gospels is a late first-century fabrication, devised some forty to eighty years after the time of his supposed death. Wells doesn't accuse the Evangelists of conscious duplicity. By the time they took up their quills, vague reports about a crucified savior named Jesus were widely afloat. In the early phases of the developing myth, details about his life and death were hazy. Later, the Evangelists would naturally suppose he was crucified when Pontius Pilate was the prefect of Judea (26 C.E.-36 C.E.) since Pilate was notorious for his brutal governance of Judea. The Evangelists amplified the sketchy reports they had heard by attributing to Jesus maxims, doctrines, actions, and a history befitting a Jewish Messiah.

Wells shows that St. Paul, who wrote several (perhaps as many as eight) New Testament epistles to various churches between 45 C.E. and 60 C.E., was largely ignorant of the Jesus described in the Gospels because the "facts" about him therein recorded had not yet been devised or gained wide currency. (Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, Wells dates no earlier than 70 C. E., a conservative estimate. In the newly-published The Jesus Puzzle, Earl Doherty dates Mark around 90 C.E.) Paul never mentions Jesus' parents, the place or manner of his birth, his apocalyptic pronouncements, or his statements on various ethical matters even when doing so would have lent authority to Paul's teachings. In his letter to Christians at Rome, for example, Paul tells them to bless those who persecute them, to refrain from judgment, and to pay taxes. Had he known that Jesus, according to the Evangelists, had issued fiats on these very subjects, he could have clinched his behests by citing the Messiah.

Paul's Jesus is a shadowy figure invoked by Christians before the Gospels fleshed him out. He had died for people's sins, was resurrected, and would soon return to judge the living and the dead. Paul associated Jesus with the Wisdom figure of Jewish literature. In that tradition, Wisdom is represented as a supernatural being made by God before he made heaven and earth. According to Wells, Wisdom "is the sustainer and governor of the universe who comes to dwell among men and bestow her gifts on them, but most of them reject her; after being humiliated on earth, Wisdom returned to heaven."

Wells further shows that the only first-century references to Jesus are in Christian sources. Some Christians contend that the following passage in Antiquities of the Jews, written by the Jewish historian Josephus in 93 C.E., confirms the existence of Jesus since it appears to provide independent testimony:

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth of the Messiah. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

Wells demonstrates that the passage wasn't written by Josephus, but was added in the fourth century, probably by the church father Eusebius. No one before him quotes the passage, though second and third-century Christian scholars knew the Josephus book well. Had they known of the passage, they would have quoted it in their theological disputes with the Jews. Wells notes that the passage interrupts the narrative flow of Josephus' text and that it implausibly imputes to Josephus, an orthodox Jew, the sentiments of a devout Christian. Jesus isn't mentioned by numerous Jewish and pagan chroniclers supposedly contemporaneous with him. Early second-century allusions by Pliny, Suetonius, and Tacitus merely reflect what by that time had become common hearsay among Christians.

Having read all Wells' books and a number of responses to them, I, personally, find his thesis thoroughly persuasive. If a historical Jesus did exist, we know nothing about him. Perhaps a first-century Galilean preacher named Jesus really did exist, but he was so obscure that nothing but the name is left. In his latest book, The Jesus Myth, Wells concedes the possibility that an obscure prototype existed.

Now, turning to the second half of the question, does it really matter whether Jesus was a real person?

To liberal Christians, viewing Jesus as but a moral exemplar, not a god, it shouldn't make any difference. Nothing about his teachings is unique or distinctive. All the moral principles the biblical Jesus lays down were commonplace long before he uttered them. According to the historian Joseph McCabe in The Sources of the Morality of the Gospels, "The sentiments attributed to Christ are in the Old Testament. They were familiar in the Jewish schools and to all the Pharisees, long before the time of Christ, as they were familiar in all the civilizations of the earth-Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian, Greek, and Hindu." The famous Golden Rule, which many associate with Jesus, was advocated by Confucius 500 years earlier and then later, long before the Gospels were concocted, by Hillel, a Pharisee. Hillel wrote: "What thou dost not like, do thou not to thy neighbor. That is the whole; all the rest is explanation." One of Jesus' signature commandments-"You shall love your neighbor as yourself"-is cribbed verbatim from Leviticus 19:18 in the Old Testament.

By diminishing the Jesus factor in their moral computations, liberal Christians would derive some gratuitous benefits. They would no longer have to blink at or rationalize the unsavory side of the biblical Jesus: his insistence on eternal damnation, his enmity toward those with beliefs different from his own, his anti-intellectualism, and his dictatorial mode of instruction.

As for the 75% of Americans who think God incarnated himself in a historical Jesus, most would be devastated to discover that Jesus never existed. Their belief in Jesus gives them an indefatigably sympathetic confidant, assuages their fear of death and bereavement, wards off existential angst, assures cosmic purpose, and aligns them with the good guys. So handsome are the psychological pay-offs of belief that many, perhaps most, orthodox Christians are impervious to all countervailing logic and evidence. Their will to believe vanquishes every disquieting fact, every contrary line of reasoning, no matter how compelling to an impartial eye. Psychologists have a frightening arsenal of terms for the mental habits designed to preserve cherished beliefs: dissociation, absolutist thinking, dichotomization, object permanence, nominal realism, phenomenalistic causality (!), and worse.

A few years ago, I got a crash course in the mental ploys believers use to sustain faith in the reality of Jesus. In 1996, in a series of letters to the Shreveport Times and the Monroe News-Star, the largest newspapers in north Louisiana, I presented a detailed exposition of George Wells' thesis that the historical Jesus is purely mythic. The letters elicited over 150 responses, about one-half published and the other half sent to my home. With few exceptions, the respondents skirted the substantive issues Wells raised. Many launched ad hominem attacks against me. Here are some of the evasionary tactics they used:

Accused me of hypocrisy. "It seems the wacky writings of Gary Sloan, belittling and mocking Christians, are endless. In a country where liberals incessantly preach 'tolerance,' it is amusing how truly intolerant he is of Christians."

Reprimanded me. "I fail to understand why Mr. Sloan enjoys and is proud of condemning holy things. Is it just that misery loves company?"

Ridiculed me. "Here's Sloan again, with his copious babble, confirming his brilliance and superiority over all of us dumb Christians, telling the world how we don't know doodly-squat about Jesus. Until now, the world has lived in ignorance. Hail, the bringer of light! Mr. Sloan, read Proverbs 14:2 and may Jesus bless you."

Demonized me. "There are people who enjoy doing evil things. Sloan takes delight in trying to destroy people's belief in Jesus. When I read his letters, I can just see an evil Satan sitting there writing the letter. The master spirit of evil is using Sloan's body."

Described my future. "I shudder to think of the fate that awaits this foolish Enemy of God. It looks like Sloan wants the whole enchilada-death, followed by the White Throne judgment, humiliation, condemnation, then thrown into the bottomless pit by an archangel with an attitude, to swim around in burning fire with his master, the devil, for eternity."

Pitied me. "I don't disdain Mr. Sloan. I see him as someone searching and someone Jesus hasn't given up on. I pray this poor, confused soul will accept his Savior someday."

Thanked me. "Does Sloan realize that with each letter he writes, he draws Christians even closer to Christ? As a believer in Jesus, I want him to know that with each letter, he strengthens my faith."

Invited me to church. "Like a lot of others, I've been reading the letters about Jesus written by Gary Sloan. People keep telling him he's wrong, but I haven't seen one person invite him to church. So I would like to extend him a personal invitation to visit our small Baptist church this Sunday."

Stigmatized the intellect. "Mr. Sloan will never find Jesus with his mind and intellect. 'Professing themselves wise, they become fools.' He will find him with his heart and spirit, or he will never find him."

Reviewed orthodox doctrine. "Jesus was not only real, he was holy when implanted in Mary's womb and was holy when Mary delivered him. Jesus was never just man. He never gave up his holy nature. The fact that Jesus is God is proven by his resurrection from the dead. Nothing Sloan or Wells can say will change the facts."

Affirmed their conviction. "Sloan doesn't understand that there is no argument he (or Wells) can make, no power he can bring to bear that will make us change our mind. We're going to see our loved ones, we're going to see Jesus."

Not all my respondents can be dismissed as Bible-Belt fundamentalists or uneducated rubes. The respondents included lawyers, physicians, bankers, journalists, and university professors.

So, once again, does it matter whether Jesus existed? Obviously, for many Christians, it matters immensely. And, as the above responses indicate, true believers aren't about to be seduced by the facts.

© - 9/22/2000 - by Gary Sloan - all rights reserved

George Bernard Shaw on the Universe and everything

As an Englishman Sir Isaac postulated a rectangular universe because the English always use the word 'square' to denote honesty, truthfulness, in short: rectitude. Newton knew that the universe consisted of bodies in motion, and that none of them moved in straight lines, nor ever could. But an Englishman is not daunted by the facts. To explain why all the lines in his rectilinear universe were bent, he invented a force called gravitation and then erected a complex British universe and established it as a religion which was devoutly believed in for 300 years.

The book of this Newtonian religion was not that oriental magic thing, the Bible. It was that British and matter-of-fact thing, a Bradshaw *. It gives the stations of all the heavenly bodies, their distances, the rates at which they are travelling, and the hour at which they reach eclipsing points or crash into the earth. Every item is precise, ascertained, absolute and English. Three hundred years after its establishment a young professor rises calmly in the middle of Europe and says to our astronomers: 'gentlemen: if you observe the next eclipse of the sun carefully, you will be able to explain what is wrong with the perihelion of Mercury.

The civilized Newtonian world replies, that if the dreadful thing is true, if the eclipse makes good the blasphemy, the next thing the young professor will do is to question the existence of gravity. The young professor smiles and says that gravitation is a very useful hypothesis and gives fairly close results in most cases, but that personally he can do without it. He is asked to explain how, if there is no gravitation, the heavenly bodies do not move in straight lines and run clear out of the universe. He replies that no explanation is necessary because the universe is not rectilinear and exclusively British; it is curvilinear.

The Newtonian universe thereupon drops dead and is supplanted by the Einstein universe. Einstein has not challenged the facts of science but the axioms of science, and science has surrendered to the challenge.

(from George Bernard Shaw's after-dinner toast proposed to Einstein)

* English railway timetable

pieces of the puzzle

I.
When Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev (1834­1907) in 1869 produced his periodic table of the chemical elements, he gave indirect evidence for two more facts. First that the elements of matter manifest themselves in countable ratios and secondly that matter must therefore be based on an underpinning structure of small invariable units. We could say, the world is constructed from digits. This is a bit different from ancient atomists who had no idea what to conclude from their intuitive insight.

Since then research on the building blocks of matter has gone a long way and most of us think of atoms in terms of little solar systems, with electrons revolving around a core of protons and neutrons and a zoo of rapidly decaying subatomic particles within. Recently our instruments have enabled us to actually see atoms, and they don't look at all like little star systems ­ more like a hilly landscape, or tiny mountains. In fact they look uncannily like visual simulations of Schrödinger's wave equation.

II.
If we race after a light-beam, no matter how fast or slow we move ­ light will always be ahead of us by the margin of its own speed. It is not like following a car, when the calculation would be based on the difference between the two velocities. Now let us assume we could build a spaceship powerful enough to bring us very close to light velocity. But if we come real close, the increase in weight is equivalent to an increase in mass of such a magnitude, that it approaches infinity.

This prediction of Einstein had been tested and confirmed in the Stanford particle accelerator. Despite of the charge of millions of G-Volts lavished on a single electron, as predicted, it just came very close to light velocity. The forbidding increase of weight finally set a limit to the energy necessary to push it further. In a manner of speaking, they started cueing a billiard ball with the power of a nuclear bomb, and ended up flashing their pathetic little toothpick of a cue against the mass of Mount Everest.

It is not a speed limit we can overpower like the sound barrier. The energy of the entire Universe, even of an infinite Universe, would not suffice to push a tiny electron over this threshold. In Einstein's equation mass and energy are equivalent, and acceleration to light speed would create infinite weight, which means infinite resistance to being accelerated. It also means that the thinnest cloud of cosmic dust in the way of a spacecraft travelling near the speed of light, becomes an impenetrable barrier.

III.
Since Michelson's and Morley's experiment in 1887 we know that Light travels by the same constant speed, ­ in all directions, and regardless of the observer's own position, trajectory or speed. What does this mean? Think of two spacecrafts travelling into opposite directions at 90% of light velocity each. Their mutual escape velocities apparently add up to a speed far in excess of the speed of light. So in order to keep up communications between the two ships, it seems, we need a relay station in the middle, at their point of departure.

Since each spaceship travels with less than light velocity, its signal will always be fast enough to arrive at our transmitter. From there it is posted to the other space ship and sure to catch up for exactly the same reason. To visualize the situation take two pens, to represent the two space-ships, place them somewhat apart on your desk, and put in between a coin as our transmitter station. Then remove the coin and ask yourself whether this changes anything.

I don't know about you but it jolted me to realize - - that nothing has changed. A transmitter simply adds nothing to a direct transmission of signals between the two spacecrafts. If you think of it, a transmitter in between the escaping spacecrafts would only serve to slow down communication, not to speed it up. But how is this possible if the two escape velocities add up in excess of signal-speed? Remember the Michelson and Morley experiment.

Every signal is always coming in by the full velocity of light. If the signal speed relative to every other object in the Universe is invariably the same, it doesn't make any difference at all, if we post the signal directly to the other space ship, or send it through a transmitter. Counter-intuitive as it may appear, the signal is sure to reach its target, even if the escape-velocities of both spacecrafts add up in excess of light velocity.

IV.
If Einstein (1879-1955) had become a violinist instead of a physicist, or simply married a different woman, we probably would use the slightly less elegant transformations by Hendrik Antoon Lorentz instead of Einstein's equations. Instead of saying that physical time - clocks travelling at high velocities - literally freezes to a standstill at the speed of light, we would express this effect in terms of contracting space. At extreme velocities the increased mass of the spacecraft creates a gravity effect which affects the surrounding space.

This means that at a speed very close to light velocity, we could journey to the Vega star system in just four years travel-time, despite the fact that the star's actual location is as distant as 26 light-years. If we were able to tap into the energy sources of the Universe as a whole in order to accelerate our spaceship towards the critical barrier, we could "shrink" the size of the entire Universe. So not only the ship lunges at Vega ­ it "pulls" the star into it's own gravity well, so to speak.

After only 12 years we would be leaving our Galaxy, after 15 years we would be reaching the Andromeda Galaxy. Here on Earth however time would have moved on for some 1,6 million years. After 18 years the journey would reach the thousands of Galaxies in the Virgo super-cluster, and after 26 years we would reach the end of the observed Universe. Meanwhile the solar-system at home would have passed the end of its duration. We have heard of this as an effect of 'asymmetric aging' - Einstein's twin paradox.

So, is it a freeze of on board time in our spacecraft or does the Universe actually shrink? What "really" happens is everybody's guess (in the background I hear Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) snigger away - "told you so, time and space ain't real") but there is proof for "Lorentz Contractions:" some 20 kilometers above sea-level, cosmic ray "muons" are created when highly energetic particles from deep space collide with atoms in the Earth's upper atmosphere. It's a natural phenomenon.

The muons then travel down through the atmosphere nearly at the speed of light. With a mean lifetime before decay of only 2.2 mili-seconds, the distance travelled by a muon should be about 660 meters. My old physics manual says:

"if only asymmetric ageing ("time dilation") applied, a muon could never reach the ground. As a matter of fact however, about one fifth of all muon particles do hit the ground. So they literally contract the distance of 20 kilometers to a racetrack of 600 meters."

It really happens. But see the file in the archive, according to which Einstein's time dilation and Lorentz's spacial contraction are completely equivalent.

Lorentz Contractions affect not only space but the spacecraft itself. Travel at any speed causes a vehicle to contract. Even an ordinary sports car contracts by a measurable fraction of a split-micron. A tell tale sign for this we see on photographs which show the passing vehicle slightly tilted out of alignment with the race track, despite the fact that the photo-shoot's alignment is perfectly parallel to the vehicle's trajectory. At extreme velocities close to the boundary, this means the spaceship would contract vertically to its trajectory and look like a pancake.

We know it does. If an electrically charged electron or proton is sent through a cloud-chamber it ionizes on its way the surrounding gas-molecules in a kind of globular halo or "coulomb field." If accelerated this field can be observed to contract vertically to its trajectory. But at the same time the charge increases, and with it the power to ionize the surrounding gas-molecules. (This may even explain the odd increase of the cosmic redshift for distant objects in deep space.) Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853-1928) was a brilliant physicist and Nobel laureate (1902), born at the wrong time and overshadowed by Einstein.

V.
In a very real sense Heraclitus (c.535 ­ c.475 BC.) was right: we don't step twice into the same river. And since mass and energy are equivalent, it is evident that mass is the repository of energy for motion and heat. And heat irreversibly approaches maximum entropy. As Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888) has put it:

1. "The total energy in a closed system cannot be changed" 
2. "The total entropy of any closed system can never decrease."
3. "The entropy of the Universe approaches towards a maximum"

For my cup of coffee or the Universe this means the same: physical events have a history, the coffee in my cup is getting cold and staying cold.

© - 5/4/2002 - by Michael Sympson - all rights reserved

if E.T. is out there, why doesn't he visit us?

We cock our radio dishes and listen to the skies, but nobody out there seems to be interested to let us know of his existence. We are the only noisemakers in the Universe. Scientists, considering the question, suggest even a "cosmic censorship," some kind of quarantine imposed on our planet, until the human race is mature enough to learn the truth. Perhaps. But then, most likely, given time and distance, E.T. had already visited our planet, only at the wrong time, when dinosaurs still walked the earth or even more likely a billion years earlier when life had lingered on in the form of microorganisms.

Because life on our planet could have gone extinct some 800 million years ago, that is before higher organisms evolved, and there would still be a long history of life: a history of microbes for three billion years. (Sometimes, when they show submarine volcanoes spew sulphur and clouds of living bacteria, I wonder whether the old rock deposits of these organisms are really the earliest form of life, or whether there is a chance that the chemical compounds of life could have been formed in the thickening clouds of interstellar dust, long before this material condensed to became planets and stars.) Besides, who are we, to expect special treatment?

But the actual reason for our cosmic solitude could stem from an aspect of Einstein's physics: according to that famous equation (energy equals mass by light velocity to the square power), a spacecraft making its way through the Milky Way at say 99.5% of the speed of light would traverse mists of tiny particles (interstellar dust etc.). that not only seem to be bombarding the spacecraft at near light velocity, but also appear to have masses near to infinity. How to defend a spacecraft against such bombardment? It is like traveling at light-speed through solid concrete. Which seems to rule out inter-stellar space travel for just about everybody. (Sorry trackies! Didn't mean to be discouraging.)

I don't know whether this is a consolation, there is anyway nothing that compels us to conclude that advanced intelligence out there is inevitable. Just look at life on Earth: despite of favorable conditions there seem to be only two other groups of species of comparable intelligence who share the planet with us: the great apes and the whales. Both have given evidence for their capacity to communicate and comprehend, none has shown any interest to do so without our coaching and coaxing. Numerous species have survived and do survive over long periods of time without it, even without any brain at all.

And finally what chance is there that intelligent life actually cares to develop science and advanced technology? Apart from the odd discovery, the specific methodology of science, was neither discovered nor approved of by the indigenous cultures of Africa, America, China, and India. In Europe too, science was received in the face of organized hostility. The development of science was by no means a simple and straightforward set of events. And I am not sure, whether the socioeconomical, political, and cultural parameters needed to back up any such development, are fully understood.

We like to think that a capitalist free market economy and uninhibited democracy are the necessary generators of scientific progress. They might. But then they may not. The historical records are ambiguous. Despots and totalitarian states sometimes sponsored and achieved considerable scientific success. However always in an environment of tense and volatile competition. In antiquity the Hellenistic states of Alexander's successors provided such environment until the Roman Empire put an end to all competition and with it, it seems, to scientific progress. Without the Cold War no man would have gone yet to the moon before the end of the century - if at all.

Considering the odds, our own Galaxy may produce a technological civilization once in a million years. Of course this doesn't exclude the possibility of a far greater number of civilizations without advanced technology. I too believe that the universe out there is teeming with life. But for all practical purposes we are alone, because within that statistical limit of one million years, any advanced civilization may exist for just a few centuries, a few millennia at most, and how likely can it be that two of such cultural life-spans not only overlap and open the same window in time, but find themselves located in physical proximity to each other - close enough to make contact?

© - 4/25/2002 - by Michael Sympson - all rights reserved

translating Greek
by Benjamin Jowett

Translating Greek into English is never easy. Greek is partly adversative and alternative, and partly inferential, the members of a sentence are either opposed to one another, or one of them expresses the cause or effect or condition or reason of another. The opposition or inference is often much more one of words than of ideas. Modern languages have fewer links of connection and they are content to place sentences side by side, leaving their relation to one another to be gathered from position and context.

English is lacking in adversative and inferential particles and a nice sense of tautology is a never sleeping watchdog. We cannot have two 'buts' or two 'fors' in the same sentence. The Greek can. There is a similar dearth of particles for gradations of objective and subjective thought, which the Greek so thickly scatters over his page. English is more dependent than Greek upon the apposition of clauses and sentences, yet using this form of construction is difficult for the lack of case endings.

For the same reason there cannot be an equal variety in the order of words or an equal nicety of emphasis in English as in Greek. The greatest difficulty for the translator arises from the restriction in the use of the genders. Men and women in English are masculine and feminine, and there is a similar distinction of sex in the words denoting animals; but all things else, whether outward objects or abstract ideas, are relegated to the class of neuters. The genius of the Greek language is the opposite of this.

Genders are attributed to things as well as persons according to their various degrees of strength and weakness or from resemblances or some analogy. This use of genders in the denotation of objects or ideas not only affects the words to which genders are attributed, but the words with which they are construed or connected, and passes into the general character of the style. Shall we speak of the soul and its qualities, of virtue, power, wisdom, and the like, as feminine or neuter?

The usage of the English language does not admit of the former, and yet the life and beauty of the style is impaired by the latter. Often the translator will have recourse to the repetition of the word, or to the ambiguous 'they,' 'their,' etc.; for fear of spoiling the effect of the sentence by introducing 'it.' Collective nouns in Greek and English create a similar awkwardness. The use of relation is far more extended in Greek than in English. Genders and cases makes the connexion of relative and antecedent less ambiguous.

The greater number of demonstrative and relative pronouns, and the use of the article, make the correlation of ideas simpler and more natural. The Greek ear or intelligence for a long and complicated sentence forces the modern translator to break up such sentence into two or more short ones. Two genitives dependent on one another in the same sentence, unless familiarised by idiom, have an awkward effect in English. Frequently the noun has to take the place of the pronoun.

'This' and 'that' are found repeating themselves to weariness in the rough draft of a translation. As in the previous case, while the feeling of the modern language is more opposed to tautology, there is also a greater difficulty in avoiding it. Rarely and only for the sake of emphasis or clarity can we allow an important word to be used twice over in two successive sentences or even in the same paragraph. The particles and pronouns, as they are of most frequent occurrence, are also the most troublesome.

Strictly speaking, they ought not to occur twice in the same sentence. The tendency of modern languages is to become more perspicuous than ancient. The familiar use of logic and the progress of science have raised the standard. No word, however expressive and exact, should be employed which disturbs the effect of the surrounding language. The style of one author is not appropriate to another; we expect every man to have 'a good coat of his own,' and not to dress himself out in the rags of another.

For instance Shakspere outdid the capabilities of the language, and many of the expressions which he introduced have been laid aside and have dropped out of use. Archaic expressions are to be avoided. Metaphors differ in different languages, and the translator will often be compelled to substitute one for another, or to paraphrase them, not giving word for word, but diffusing over several words the more concentrated thought of the original. The Greek goes beyond the English in its imagery.

A good translator must not allow discordant elements to enter into the work. For example, in translating Plato, it would equally be an anachronism to intrude on him the feeling and spirit of the Jewish or Christian Scriptures or the technical terms of modern philosophy. No two words are precise equivalents (just as no two leaves of the forest are exactly similar). Greek has a free and more frequent use of the Interrogative, and is of a more passionate and emotional character.

by Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893), from his "Prefix to the Collected Works of Plato" (1871)

previous page | page up | next page