This week's theme: Easter The first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The annual celebration of the death and resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I mentioned before that at one time I seriously considered Biblical Studies as a career path but life was unpredictable and I didn't go that way. Anyway, I did pickup a few things that I think most people have never heard of but might find interesting. Professor John M. Allegro was one of the top Oxford scholars of ancient Middle Eastern languages and had been the head of the British team of scholars sent to aid in the translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1950s and 1960s. His credentials were impeccable. Anyway, in 1970 he wrote a book called "The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross". His basic premise was that by studying the origins of certain ancient religious words he could gain insight into the meanings behind many Bible verses. Sounds reasonable so far. Anyway, he concluded that the New Testament was really just a cover story to hide the fact that Christianity was a fertility (sex) cult centered around partaking of a hallucinogenic mushroom, the Amanita muscaria, common in the Middle East. Here is an excerpt: *********************************************************************************** THE SACRED MUSHROOM AND THE CROSS A study of the nature and origins of Christianity within the fertility cults of the ancient Near East by John M. Allegro "At the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabach — thani!” which means, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” ... The words, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani”, but dubiously mean “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” as every Semiticist knows. The “translation” is another of the New Testament “false renderings” of special cultic names or invocations, culled this time from the well-known passage in Psalm 22. The Hebrew here is nowhere rendered by the words “Fbi, Fbi, lama sabachthani” which, on any count, are strange Aramaic. The allusion in the text to the Psalm is but a “cover”: lama sabachthani is a clever approximation to the important Sumerian name of the sacred mushroom *LI_4PSh_BA(LA)3...ANTA, source by word-play of so much of the New Testament myth." (Page 89-90.) https://www.ivantic.info/Ostale_knjiige/John_Marco_Allegro_The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cross.pdf *********************************************************************************** In 1974 the book came out in paperback in the United States, which was when I bought my copy. Needless to say, it went over like a lead balloon tied to an atom bomb. The critics savaged it. The publisher was forced to withdraw the book from publication and apologize for ever printing it and Allegro was hounded out of his professorship at Oxford. I don't speak any ancient languages and am hardly qualified to comment one way or another on his work, but there seems to me to be at least one major flaw in his logic. He assumes the meanings of the words remained constant over hundreds, even thousands of years and that just doesn't seem likely to me. For example, "Wednesday", "Thursday" and "Friday" originally meant "Woden's Day", "Thor's Day" and "Frige's day", but nobody would argue based on that that we practice the Old Norse religion today. The names are just meaningless leftover names today. Whatever the origins of ancient words may have been there's no guarantee they still meant that centuries later. *********************************************************************************** (Note: none of the rest of this below has anything to do with Allegro's book.) Still it did get me thinking about names in the Bible. After all there is the ancient Latin proverb "nomen est omen" ("The name is a sign, the name speaks for itself.") A lot of names in the oldest parts of the Old Testament are the same as names in the Canaanite religion which predated it. We know a lot about the Canaanite religion because of the discovery of thousands of clay tablets starting in 1929 in the ruins of the ancient city of Ugarit in northern Syria which flourished from about 1450 BC until its destruction in c. 1200 BC. To give you some related dates: Moses is thought to have lived around 1300 BC and King David around 1000 BC. The earliest books of the Bible were thought to date from the 6th century BC but might be earlier, probably not much before 1000 BC though. (Theses dates are pretty uncertain but may give some context.) Anyway, Canaanite names do show up enough in the early Old Testament that I suspect the Hebrews' religion was originally just an offshoot of that religion and that the Jews didn't become pure monotheists until the Persian period c. 550 BC - after their encounter with Zoroastrianism. (Zoroastrianism believes there are two gods, a good god and his angels in constant struggle with a bad god and his demons and that ultimately the good god will win out.) The father god in the Canaanite religion was named "El" and was like Zeus in the Greek religion. His name came to mean just "god" in general and occurs 238 times in the Old Testament and in many Hebrew names ending in "-el" such as Israel "May El prevail", Michael "who is like El?", Gabriel "El is my strong man", Ezekiel "El strengthens", Emmanuel "El is with us" Raphael "El is Healer" or "El has Healed" and so forth. As a side note, names ending in "-iah" ("-yah") are derived from "Yahweh", God's name given by Him to the Hebrews and appears in names like Isaiah "Yahweh is salvation", Jeremiah "May Yahweh exalt", Josiah "Fire of Yahweh", Elijiah "My God is Yahweh", Gedaliah "Yahweh is great", Hezekiah "Yahweh has strengthened", Jebediah "beloved of Yahweh", Nehemiah "comforted by Yahweh", Obadiah "Servant of Yahweh" and so forth. One aspect of ancient Middle Eastern religions is that each city-state typically had it's own local guardian god that looked after it, much like Athens, Greece had the goddess Athena, the goddess of wisdom and military victory. The Canaanite god over Jerusalem was named Shalem "the stable one", "Jerusalem" was thus the "the foundation of Shalem" and his name survives as "Solomon" (as in King Solomon) and as the modern word "shalom" “peace”. I suspect the Song of Songs may originally have been a love poem between Shalem and his consort and was only included into the Bible later on the mistaken idea that it was about King Solomon. By the way, it is one of two books in the Bible that never mentions God (the other being Ester). The last thing I'll mention here is the word "Elohim" which literally means "the gods" and is a common word used for God in the Old Testament. The problem is that it's plural. For example Genesis 1:26-27 which is translated as: "God said, 'Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, ... God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them." But probably should be translated as: "Then the gods said 'Let us make mankind in our image after our likeness ...'... the gods created mankind in their image; in the divine image they created them: male and female they created them." This "Elohim" plural problem has been known for a long time. Early Christian apologists argued that it referred to the Trinity, even though the Trinity is never mentioned in the Old Testament. Others refer to the "majestic plural" the royal "we" like kings and queens use - that God is so powerful he overflows the singular even though He's only one. I have a lot more about all this on my website at: http://www.winternet.com/~swezeyt/bible/oedipus/swezoed0.htm So what can we conclude? I think the understanding of Biblical names does give some insight into understanding the Bible, especially the early parts of the Old Testament, but alas no sex/drug cult here. Still it appears the early Hebrews' religion emerged from the Canaanite religion, with an emphasis on Yahweh which developed into pure monotheism after the Persian period. Somewhat like Christianity emerged from Judaism later on. As I've mentioned before we are hampered by the severe limitation of information we have about the Bible. We would certainly like a lot more before we can make definitive statements about things, we can only say things are apparently this or that, or that things hint at particular meanings. No certainty here - either way. I'm sure it's apparent by now that I'm not a literalist when it comes to the Bible. I personally believe that as modern Christians we should draw from everything at our disposal to better understand our faith but I would never tell anyone one what they should or shouldn't believe. The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cross THE SACRED MUSHROOM AND THE CROSS (online book) https://www.ivantic.info/Ostale_knjiige/John_Marco_Allegro_The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cross.pdf In any event, don't eat too many chocolate bunnies! That's my job :-) Happy Easter! ...