From previous> Did Jesus Exist?
The one person who might have deliberately done it is Josephus, who was a captured rabbi-rebel leader. At that time, there was an under-current among the Roman military to depose Nero's dynasty. Thereafter his capture, Josephus sincerely wanted his Jewish compatriots to stop rebelling and align themselves with the military.
The military was sick and tired of Nero's personality cult. They were forced to deal with the Jews because Nero wanted the Jews to worship him as their god. Nero was bankrupting the empire.
If Josephus was an American today, he would be a very patriotic American. He effectively became their minister/secretary of propaganda. He helped them invent a new religion that is Jewish-like as a means to re-unify the empire. He believed that the Roman military would be the saviours of Jewish integrity from Nero's hedonism. He believed an arrangement could be made for the military to shield Jews from Nero, if Jewish rebellion would join the military against Nero.
But the Jewish rabbi-rebel leaders would have none of it. So now, the military were forced to fight a war on 2.5 fronts. Would you trust the military who had earlier helped Nero place his figure into the temple? Unfortunately, crushing the Jewish rebellion and destruction of the temple would be the best sign to the whole empire as to who the defacto powers in the empire were.
This disastrous turn of events - the gospels concocted by Josephus was instead used by his masters to turn inspiration by Jewish rebellion to hatred against Jews. His gospels had unfortunately correlated his former rebel compatriots as collaborators with the hated Nero regime. Was he so confident that he could persuade his former rebel-compatriots to join him? Perhaps, Josephus saw himself as a latter day Queen Esther. Perhaps the contentiously disunited rabbis had made a mistake of not unifying behind Josephus.
A couple of decades before Constantine's rise to power, someone decided to revise/reinvent Christianity, by inventing the rabbi Saul/Paul and then backdating the epistles to the time of the mythical Jesus. There was a need to do that because, Christianity had to become a global religion and had to cut off all the Jewish ropes that was tied to it.
That is why, Paul could not successfully ask for agreement from Peter to induct him into the hall of Apostles. Because Paul was invented 250 years later.
So here are the reasonable questions about the irreconcilable concepts ! ! ! .....
- The rabbi-rebels were not in the mood of cooperating with Nero or his representatives, but yet the gospels depict the rabbis not as rebels but collaborators. And today you Christians go bonkers accusing the rabbis of collaborating with the Romans to murder your god. And because of that a huge population of Christians and Muslims despise or even hate Jews.
- The Paul figure needed to be seen as an apostle, but Peter and James wouldn't give it to him ??? Isn't that ridiculous? So what if a replacement had already been appointed.
- If you read all the Jewish scriptures, there is not one verse that describes hell, the pagan fiery hell of the book of Revelation. Then all of a sudden, in the Christian testament is the "hell" found in all the pagan religions around the Jews. Worse, there is not a single commandment in the Torah that has hell.
Josephus had invented a religion that would be Jew-friendly, but would also ensure that would disgust Jews due to its paganistic nature. He invented a religion that was friendly to Jews but wanted to ensure Jews would not believe in it. He wanted to preserve the integrity both of Jews and the Roman empire.
Can you now see why Josephus would have sneaked in a pejorative name for the Christian messiah? http://rameneutics.blogspot.com/2014/04/hebrew-name-of-messiah.html.
Did Josephus miscalculate the response of his former rebel compatriots, whom he had expected would trust the Roman military? Or, did Josephus believe that the disunity of the rebellion needed a jolt?
The mystery of a politically syncretized religion remains unresolved ...
For 2000 years, when Abraham walked out of his father's idol shop, Israel/Jews had been surrounded by pagan religions that had believed in the Hell of Revelation as found with Zoroastrians, Egyptians, etc. Yet there is not a single verse in our scriptures that mentions hell. The eternal burning hell, confessed by pagans.
Not a single verse. Not a single commandment. Actually, there was an implied hell - the burning cauldrons that was prepared for Jews who refused to bow down to an unfamiliar and strange god.
But all of a sudden a hell appeared in an appendix to the Jewish scriptures, in a new religion invented by the Romans to unite the population, that would incorporate all the core elements of the religions in the empire.
For 2000 years, pagans had failed to contaminate Jewish scriptures with concepts of hell and human sacrifice. With the advent of the new Roman religion, they could then sell Jews the cruel practices of their pagan gods - a possibility that had eluded them for 2000 years. The punishment by hell.
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