A Brief History of The Hebrews: Conflicting Stories & Christ the Conservative Liberal

CONFLICTING STORIES 

There are a number of conflicting stories in the Bible, which conveniently allow charlatan Christian preachers to pick whichever one they need to support whatever story they wish to weave to seduce their audiences with promises of salvation for money. 

   

Israels national history begins when they enter and settle in the land of Canaan. The Hebrew bible is composed of traditions collected and presented by different authors at different times, which is why there's conflicting points of view. 

Sometimes their trek in the wilderness is punishment, for example, and others times it's a honeymoon. In some sources the Israelite monarchies are celebrated as intended by God (as in the Saul Source), but then other versions (the Samuel Source) see the monarchies as a betrayal, as the Lord alone is to be seen as the King over Israel, and there should be no earthly kings. 

This polemic has parallels in the mythologies in Enuma Elish, which is significant because it shows a presentation of an interplay with theological perspectives. This interplay was indicative of not only the true nature of religious traditions practiced by the early Tribes, but which would later be emulated by Jesus in both in the lesson he taught, which often ran counter to the dogmas imposed by the Sanhedrin, and the way in which he taught those lessons, which were just as often in public rather than cloistered within a temple. 

CHRIST: THE HERESY OF A CONSERVATIVE LIBERAL

In contrast to this, virtually everything Christ did and said ran counter to not only those dogmas that the Sanhedrin sought to enforce, like not healing the sick on the sabbath,  but also the imposed orthodoxy that would come later with the rise of the Catholic Church.  In fact, anytime someone did to the Catholic Church what Jesus did to the Sanhedrin, they were essentially dealt with the same way Christ was. This, perhaps more than almost anything else, speaks clearly to whether Christ would ever have considered himself a Catholic, or even a Christian.  No wonder Gandhi said that Christians was so unlike Christ. 

The fluidity of Israels early religious faith, that the Sanhedrin and then the Catholic Church would come to punish anyone for daring to emulate as Christ did, could be seen in practice after the Tribes had settled in Canaan. Like all migrations, the acclamation of the Tribes to their new home would  inevitability lead  Israel's religious culture to change. In response to this change, as has always been the case, Conservative reactionaries sought only to tighten adherence to dogmas, and more for fear of loosing their power than for ruffling the eternal feathers of their father in heaven.   

Over time, those changes would lead to the syncretism that associated the Lord of Israel with the wilderness as described in the Epic of Gilgamesh. In that Epic, the wilderness was where Humbaba had met with Gilgamesh. And as Israel moved into urban areas and become farmers, leaving the unrestricted nomadic life of shepherds behind, the more dogmatic life became. Those dogmatism's rose with urbanization, and people living closer together and engaging in more frequent interactions. And the more they did that,  the more people were willing to rely on human law makers to oversee and enforce those laws, in order to produce greater conformity. 

This is significant in part, because Christ was a shepherd, not a farmer, who had spent his time "in the wilderness," like Humbaba, rather than in the cities and the temples, like the law makers and the Sanhedrin.  From this perspective, Christ is essentially a conservative, hearkening back to the original traditions of the Tribes, even though he was eventually crucified as a liberal and a heretic, who was convicted for breaking the laws of God (at least as the Sanhedrin saw it anyway).

The Judges derives from the verb "to rule," and were leaders who ruled over some part of Israel.  The author of Judges notes several times that "in those days ... all people did what was right in their own eyes." The last Judge is Samuel, who over saw the transition from territorial rule to a centralized military monarchy. Samuel was also a prophet, a seer, a priest, and a magistrate.   In a sense, then, Samuel is like Christ, while Saul is like Barabbas, who follows only his instinct to draw his sword, like Peter in the garden of Gethsemane.

In this sense, Christ is a "conservative," in that he is practicing the traditions of the Tribes, but is seen as a "liberal" by the Pharisees because he is both defending the poor, and doing so by creatively applying the sacred scriptures, not in ways that simply adhere to the interpretations of previous scholars, but in ways that apply specifically to the problems of his time and place, which was how the early Tribes had always applied and interpreted those traditions.