Historical Setting: The Great Skellig in an unknown time
Brother Lugh and I are waiting now, for calmer waters so that a supply boat can deliver the winter supplies here, and the plan is made that I will be sent away then, with the boat to the mainland, which is the homeland of Lugh. Brother Lugh plans to go along also, believing his calling is to feed the hungry. His real yearning is for family.
He asks, “Did you have brothers and sisters?”
“I had a sister. My mother died when we were very young. So, like you, the only parent raising me was a father. He was a Pharisee. We were Jewish and our family meticulously observed God’s law and what we knew then, as the Law of Moses.”
He already knows I am that Lazarus.
He says, “I know Jesus was Jewish, also. But thankfully, he converted.”
“No. He never ‘converted.’ He was always a Jew.”
“What about his baptism?”
“Even John the Baptist was a Jew. The repentance John was calling for was for a turning back to God, the God of Abraham and Moses. God who answered from heaven, “this is my own Son.”
“Surely, as the cross is Christian, he was crucified and rose again, as a Christian.”
“The cross was Roman. There were no Christians at that time. He was crucified by the Romans who were purging Jews, claiming that Jews were all criminals because we were traitors simply because we wouldn’t bow to Rome. Maybe we were traitors to Rome. The Romans were imperialists, and stole their power by creating enemies of any nation that didn’t just meld into Roman. Observant Jews would not bow to Ceasar.”
“I thought the crime was that Jesus went around teaching love for all people.”
“Yes, that really riled the Romans. Jesus went around teaching love even for enemies, completely contrary to the rules of political power mongering. So Romans put a disparaging banner over Jesus, ‘King of the Jews’ and they gave him a mocking and painful crown. It was political.” [blogger’s footnote]
And I just continue my rant, “We held onto the observance of the Jewish traditions, which seemed a fly in the ointment of Roman imperialism on their march to rule the world. But God sees over the walls of division people build.”
“What about the Jesus teachings, to love God above all else, and to love your neighbor? Don’t the love laws separate Christians from Jews?”
“Those love laws are first in the Torah.”
[Blogger’s note] This theory about the relationship between Romans and Jews is not well supported in the gospel texts, and, in fact, the Christian bible, in no uncertain terms says “The Jews killed Jesus” [I Thessalonians 2:15]. Historical research, however, and particularly writings by early Christians outside of the cannon, and some modern bible scholars are finding a powerful Roman root to modern anti-Semitism through the early Christian repetition of Roman political lies. Authoritarianism uses the repetition of lies as a tool, and it is only now becoming obvious to some Christian scholars that some of the Roman political lies crept into Christian scriptures. May this continue to be a subject for unfettered research of the Christian History. It is well known that Romans alone, and not Jews, used the torture of crucifixion.
(Continues Tuesday, Sept. 29)
