Someone just asked me where my ideas come from.

Another person told me something that I think gets to the truth about where my ideas come from:

“Bob, things that other people don’t even notice leap out at you.”

An example of this is Jesus’s words, “I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.” Alpha and omega are NOT Hebrew letters. They are not Aramaic letters. They are Greek letters, and everyone who was listening knew exactly what Jesus was talking about.

When Jesus spoke privately with Pontius Pilate, what language do think they were speaking IN? The question never occurred to me until I started thinking about “the alpha and the omega.” Greek was the language of the Eastern Roman Empire. Greek was also the language in which the Roman nobility spoke to each other in Rome.

They spoke Greek, of course.

Jesus kept quoting the Septuagint, the Jewish scriptures in Greek. When Saint John wrote Revelations, and pronounced a curse on anyone who added or subtracted from them, he wrote in GREEK.

Luther and Calvin assumed that only Hebrew scriptures before Christ were Biblical. So they chopped out a huge part of the Catholic Bible that was in Greek. In fact, they cut out all of the Bible from the centuries before Jesus. Jesus Himself would not recognize the Bible I was raised with.

Catholics still keep these Greek books, as the Apocrypha, but they do not study it much. They almost never quote it.

But when Revelations was written in the first century, the New Testament had not yet been compiled. Each of the Gospels, including the many that were thrown out when the New Testament was officially complied, was THE New Testament for a large number of Christians. All they had as scripture was the Bible St. John spoke of in Revelations, and all of the last part of it was the Greek writings we no longer pay attention to.

So the last words of our Bible are a curse on anyone who would remove any part of the Bible, and it was written in Greek.

I am not a Bible literalist, so this makes little difference to me. For Bible literalists, this makes no difference at all.

So where exactly did Greek culture fit into the whole mosaic of Christian history? There were seven million Jews in the Roman Empire when Jesus was born, over ten percent of the total population. As Christianity advanced, these Hellenist Jews, like the historian Josephus, disappear from history quietly and entirely.

They became the basis of the Christian Church.

So most Roman Jews DID accept Christ, but they are the very Jews Christian theologians today reject. Both today’s Jews and today’s Christians do not see them as real Jews because their language was Greek, not Hebrew.

Looking deeply into this would not so much change theology, which is not my field. But it would change history, which IS my field. I want to know what political influence those millions of Jews had in the time of Christ that allowed them to be the only people exempted from the rite of emperor-worship.

I would like to know what how five million people, as they became Christian, began to make their alliances and throw their weight behind the increasingly vicious struggles for imperial power. In the third century, Roman emperors ruled for months at a time before being killed. There was something desperate going on.

And when Constantine accepted Christianity, was it a religious decision or a political one?

All from thinking about “the alpha and the omega,” I realize that there is a giant void in Roman political history without which the history we have is pure myth.

In the Middle Ages, when a man with money got tired of life, he committed suicide with the blessings of the Church.

We all know that not only was suicide a mortal sin in the eyes of the Medieval Church, but a person who committed suicide could not be given a Christian burial. In fact, one of the ways a person became a vampire was to commit suicide and rise from the dead.

But the Church approved of suicide if it was done right. When a Benedictine monk took his final vows, he was accorded burial rites. He became “dead to this world.”

If a wealthy man got tired of living, he was given church rites and buried alive. A priest accompanied him to his burial place. He was put in a hole and food and water were provided through a hole in the grave.

I said “a man with money” because he had to get the tomb dug, pay for the rites, and pay for the supply of food and water.

For the man buried alive death was not long in coming, but it was a Holy Death. He was assured of salvation.

Poor Origen! Origen lived in the fourth century and he was one of the greatest religious writers and teachers and theologians in history. But he was never allowed to become a priest and he has been damned by the Church.

The Church kept insisting that the highest virtue was sterility. St. Paul said, “It is better to marry than to burn,” but the best of all was chastity. Then poor Origen read these words from Jesus, which he quoted but I cannot find:

“Blessed are those who make eunuchs of themselves in my name.”

So Origen, following the teachings of Paul and what he took to be the teachings of Christ, got a knife and made a eunuch of himself. He spent the rest of his life being persecuted by the Church. He was denied ordination as a priest, he was excommunicated by his bishop.

But Origen kept founding new schools of theology and was too valuable to be ignored. Other bishops allowed him to serve, but none would ordain him.

Like suicide, being a eunuch was the holiest thing possible, but it had to be done right.

Jimmy Carter almost lost the presidency in 1976 because of a similar error. Jesus said that when a married man looked on another woman he had committed adultery in his heart. Carter quoted that to a Playboy reporter during the 1976 campaign and said he had committed adultery in his heart many times. His poll ratings collapsed.

CS Lewis, the great Christian writer, as an old man, said that God could let him live a lot longer, but he wished God would call him soon. That is committing suicide in your heart, but it is no sin.

I discussed the movie “The Believer,” where a young Jew was so outraged by the Judeo-Christian admiration of Job that he became a Nazi. In case you haven’t heard the story, God and Satan were talking about this guy Job who loved the Lord with all his heart.

Satan told God that Job only loved God because he was rich and healthy and had a nice family. So God killed Job’s family, took away all his possessions, and made Job sick and hated. And Job loved Jehovah anyway!

Jehovah showed old Satan what was what!

There is nothing wrong with killing a man’s family if Jehovah does it to win a bet.

And this, to my mind, is what is meant by Judeo-Christianity. It has no Jesus reducing all those commandments to two. It has LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of theology, but no RELIGION.

When the Spanish Conquistadores took over Mexico City, the Aztecs desperately sacrificed four
thousand prisoners to their god in a matter of a few hours to get them to drive the Spaniards out. They cut their victims’ hearts out and rolled their bodies down those great stairs this Great Civilization had built.

Only a few decades ago, the official line was the Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice at all. But this line was abandoned when thousands of skeletons appeared at the base of those Greatly Civilized steps, so historians declared that the Aztec priests could not have cut out THAT MANY hearts as fast as the Spaniards said they did.

So some doctors tested the theory.

Some doctors made realistic dolls and tried cutting out the hearts with the speed the Aztec priests would have had to have. They used the old stone knives of the Great Civilization of the Aztecs. At first they thought the historians were right for a change. It couldn’t be done that fast.

Then the doctors thought about it, used another technique and found out it was easy.

They were not the pros the Wise Men of the Great Civilization were, so they had to rediscover this ancient, sophisticated and lost technique.

The doctors may have been lost in the required Politically Correct admiration of the genius of this Lost Civilization. Everybody is always lost in admiration of the sophistication of all non-white civilizations.

The Spaniards, on the other hand, were appalled by this Aztec slaughter.

The Spaniards worshiped human sacrifice, too, but this was the wrong kind. There were tens of thousands of boys and girls who had been committed to monasteries and convents in Spain at birth and dedicated to a life of self-torture and sterility, but that was the right kind of human sacrifice. Those children were aging and dying and suffering and stinking in silence and behind walls.

The Aztecs were rolling their sacrifices down the stairs, on the Aztec equivalent of national television.

We have the same morality today. You can’t execute man, and you certainly can’t perform a public execution, but you can lock him quietly in a steel cage for the rest of his life.

Or you can let him out to go kill some more human sacrifices on the streets. As long as nobody is executed on television, and the bloody corpses of the killer’s victims are not shown on television, the whole thing is just fine.

Judeo-Christianity is alive and well!