The Pokey Finger of God

The other day, I nearly picked up a package of “Last Supper Mints”, which was a 3″x1″x0.5″ metal tin with 50(!) mints within, covered lovingly with a 18th C. reproduction of daVinci’s Last Supper image without. Briefly, I considered putting a photo of the box in my collection of Last Supper images, but the image [...]

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A recent religion post contained something of a broad statement. It was a conclusion I had drawn without the benefit of third-party confirmation. What I had said was that the term “Christian” did not just apply to those who followed the “Jesus Movement”, but also those who followed any of a dozen Hellenized, Asian mystery [...]

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A recent revelation in my religious studies has taken more than the usual amount of time to digest. The resulting effervescent fountain of nested implications has kept me busy for a while. Possibly the biggest question for me has always been based on a need to understand how the whole of Western Europe voluntarily abandoned [...]

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After posting the Folsom Street Fair poster, I started thinking about how versions of the “Last Supper” scene, both serious and satirical, have been made over the centuries. DaVinci’s is simply the most famous. It inspired me to consider writing an epic blog entry, showing the various parodies one can google. In the process, I [...]

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More speculations on history and the development of myth. Gnostic Origins: The word ‘Gnostic’ is being phased out of my working vocabulary, as it fails to provide a consistent, definitive meaning. This word is frequently used as a wide brush to tar all manner of deviations from orthodoxy, yet the more I try to pin [...]

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Although it is still an interesting and entertaining adventure, I feel as if I’ve just completed deconstructing the entire edifice of Christianity and need some time to readjust everything mentally. No doubt, I will continue to learn and adjust my understanding until the day I die, but for now, everything needs to stop moving for [...]

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Does anyone have a comment or specific argument against Alvar Ellegard’s Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ? (Amazon) His argument is that Christianity developed from diasporaic Essene communities that had already developed a standing mythos about a “Teacher of Righteousness”, and that the later stories about a Jesus in Gallilee were much later accretions. This [...]

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In the process of studying Biblical history, I’ve also studied a little bit of Greek, Hebrew, theology, philosophy, anthropology (physical and cultural), archeology, literary analysis, linguistics, economics, politics, military theory, and even (yes) basket weaving. The Bible, itself, is pretty sparse, so all these other techniques are used to illuminate this ancient and hoary document. [...]

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Last night during the “Gnosticism to Christianity” discussion with the CUUPS group, one member asked me if I knew of any of the latests books to have been discovered. I said that there hadn’t been any major announced discoveries, but that we were still translating a lot of the materials we had already found. Case [...]

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The latest series of programs on the cable science channels about Christianity have been generally pretty good lately. The percentage of time I spend railing about how some antiquated dogma was being passed off as fact has gone down to about 20%, as opposed to the 75% I spent last season or two. Last night’s [...]

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