THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Jerry Falwell is not going to like you.

Yeah! Somebody said in a respected website what I have been thinking (and posting in a less respect forum)! So, could you also say that early Christianity a not-so-secret weapon against Judaism?

On Jehovism: right on. These, too are my thoughts exactly. This corroborates new findings that the West's Masoretic text is much newer than the East's Septuagint, from which there are many significant changes. It also corroborates finds from the digs at Ugarit and from Gnostic texts that JHWH was the lord of Chaos, destruction, and the untamed sea the Devil to everyone else of the region but Jews.

I keep pointing out that there were six million Jews in the Roman Empire.

That simple fact has helped me a lot, Bob.

What do you think of this one?: one hundred million have invaded the United States since 1965.

Feel free to combine all these comments into one.

Could you say that, because of this mass conversion of Greek Jews into Christians, were it not for the Khazars, we wouldn't be speaking of the Jews today?

There's a very interesting recent book (SECRETS OF THE BIBLE)in which the author really picks apart the Bible. Most interesting(and probably the basic reason you haven't heard of this book) is the author's statement that the Jews regularly utilized human sacrifice until they got civilized after the "Babylonian captivity" -- from which they were liberated by Cyrus the Great (of Persia).

The Book of Esther is one of those that Martin Luther decided to eliminate from his version of the Bible, allegedly because it wasn't originally written in Hebrew. (Luther apparently believed that "authentic" Old Testament books were all originally written in Hebrew.) The Book of Esther is about a Jewish girl living in an apparently very large Jewish community in Persia well before 69 A.D. Even if it was intentionally written as fiction, it would have had to have been <i>believable</i> to its intended audience.

There were no Jews in the Roman Empire. The word Jew didn't exist until the letter "j" began common usage in the English language. Prior to that, they were referred to as Iewes, or other similar spellings. Even this doesn't really address the issue. This word evolved from Greek and Latin words that simply meant "an inhabitant of Judea". So, an Edomite or Samaritan living in Judea could be a Jew. Today's "Jew" is a racial and religious entity that can trace its lineage back to ancient Pharisism, which evolved into Rabbinism, which evolve into today's Judaism. By using phrases like "Greek Jews" you imply an unbroken lineage between Israelites that had migrated to Greece, or Rome, or Spain, or England, etc., before the time of Christ with the mixed racial body that constitutes modern Jewry. If you can see that there were Hebrews that followed the Law and other Hebrews that adopted ritualistic BS and joined the franchise of Pharisism, it gives you an entirely different outlook on what we see as Jews today. Then when you add the Khazarian element...well, don't get me started!

I agree that Christianity probably began as a Jewish sect that abandoned circumcision. It is also questionable whether Ashkenazic Jews descend from Biblical Jews, and hence whether Ashkenazic Jews have a legitimate right by virtue of ancestry to reside anywhere in the Middle East. I have been attracted to Koestler's Kazar thesis ever since he wrote about it.

A great deal of what we now know as Judaism (Talmud, etc.) emerged between 200 and 1000 AD, in good part as a reaction to the triumphal rise of Christianity.

I had never heard of Jehovism until I chanced on this blog, but I suspect the word describes well an important (and deplorable) strain of American thought and religion. And conscious and unconscious Jehovism may have played an important in the American adoption of universal infant circumcision in the first half of the 20th century.

Only about 55% (and about 35% west of Denver) of American baby boys are now circumcised shortly after birth. Using Novocain was unknown before the late 1990s, and is still not standard practice. No competent doctor "pushes" circumcision any more; it is

done only because the parents want it. Why? Because they fear that Junior will be mocked in the locker room for having a foreskin. Because fathers want to take baths with their sons without having to answer Junior's questions about why their peckers differ. Because mothers shudder with disgust at the prospect of intimate relations with a man who has all the bits Mother Nature gave him. In the American South, having a foreskin brands you as a redneck, as born at home with a midwife rather than in an urban hospital, to white trash parents to poor afford the cut and too functionally illiterate to appreciate that the foreskin is uncool. And more than a few ardent Christians prefer to go with the Old Testament rather than Acts. I can read French, and French web sites re circumcision state baldly that Americans adopted infant circumcision in good part because of the strong Old Testament flavor of American Christianity. But I still think the most important reasons why infant circumcision became very popular in the decades before WWI are a growing obsession with being clean and odor-free, a morbid disgust with masturbation, and Victorian/Edwardian mothers who wanted their boys clean and odor-free without having to think or talk about their private parts.