Christmas is about a man who sided with the poor and the downtrodden, or, in the words of the WEF, the useless eaters. From Edward Curtin at lewrockwell.com:
Jesus was a Palestinian Jew born in Bethlehem. He grew up in Nazareth and was executed as a criminal in Jerusalem. It is because of him that we celebrate Christmas. But it is in spite of him that what we celebrate is the opposite of what he stood for.
The different stories of his birth, told by Mathew and Luke in the New Testament, which are the bases for Christmas, are not filled with sugar plum fairies and sleighs filled with useless, unnecessary consumer goods. There’s nothing about a Jolly Old St. Nicholas or baked ham or candy canes. No gifts to return in a frenzied rush that replicates their purchase. No credit card bills that come due in the new year. No “Jingle Bell Rock” with Brenda Lee or “White Christmas” with Bing Crosby.
Just a poor child’s birth to fulfill a prophecy that out of life would come death and out of death would come life. That hope was improbable but possible with faith.
These birth narratives, which tell of a nativity that concludes with the grown child’s suffering, public crucifixion, death, and Resurrection – a story that lives on with the suffering of so many innocents – are, as Gary Wills puts it in What the Gospels Meant, “. . . far from feel-good stories. They tell of a family outcast and exiled, hunted and rejected. They tell of children killed, of a sword to pierce the mother’s heart, of a judgment on the nations.” They are stories of rejection, massacre, and a desperate flight from death at an early age. They are not what most people now consider to be the essence of Christmas since a radical Palestinian Jew’s story has been almost totally erased by the glitz and greed of getting and spending to fuel an economy geared for war and killing.
Stupid people shouldn’t breed, I hope Edwin Curtin understands what I mean.
His hometown was Nazareth, nowhere near this misnamed Palestine. Edward Curtin is a liar.
“a radical Palestinian Jew’s story has been almost totally erased by the glitz and greed..”
“the Gospel stories are different in that they were written after the fact and were not based on eyewitness testimony but are narratives of deep symbolic faith significance, historically wrong in places, but told to signify religious truths of the early Christian faith community.”
Curtain could not be more wrong – yet again..
Jesus is not the radical. John the Baptist dies with his head literally displayed on a platter, mocked for the enjoyment of the corrupt, rich and powerful, who he refused to bow to.
Jesus dies being tortured, jeered on the cross with centurions gambling for possession of his few worldy articles of property. The ‘radicals’ are the murderers who justify and profit from their own crimes, not those who refused to back down from opposing the criminal elite.
Its also a very good reminder that if you are looking for the truth, its not going to arrive from those with a vested economic interest in betraying you for a profit, since neither John or Jesus had a widows mite to their names at the end..
What is most notable to me on Curtain’s later count, is that the early Christians (who are primarily ethnically Jewish) who dissent from the Pharisee’s and support Jesus do it based on a factor that means little to most Christians today, and is not a welcome topic to much of Judaism, for obvious reasons..
They make the point that Jesus is a dual-descendant both maternally and through birth into the house of Joseph from the line of the House of King David. If this was a common or well dispersed heritage within Judaism in its day it is likely that the Sanhedrin would be touting their own links to this heritage, but they do not. This is likely because anyone who actually had descent claims, and was known to still live, was hunted down and killed to prevent them from exercising a claim to such status. It would only be humble carpenters or fisherman that escaped such scrutiny, and the attempt by Herod to hunt down Jesus and his parents – both descendants of King David – are best explained by the diffusion of this news outside of their own immediate family, kicking off the manhunt.
This is because if you strictly assess the Habiru bible, the pact is not with a Hebrew/Habiru race, not with Isra-El, nor with a Priesthood, it is specifically a compact with the House of David –
1 Kings –
“So when all [the ten northern tribes of] Israel saw that the king did not listen to them, the people replied to the king, saying, “What portion do we have in David? We have no inheritance in the son of Jesse; To your tents, O Israel! Look now after your own house, David!”
The Israelites who spurn the House of David never return from captivity – anyone known to exist today within Judaism today would be a descendant (possibly in some part) from Judah at best, and not a single person today has any known descent from the House of David, making it basically impossible to re-found an actual ‘Israel’.
What has to be understood before you can comprehend anything else is that the late bronze age collapse wipes out any widespread ability to read or consult any writings that existed from the earliest civilizations. Eventually ALL middle eastern peoples completely lose the ability, even among scribes, to read early writing systems either in Sumerian or in Semitic languages adapted to use cuneiform.
Jesus during the onset of his ministry – notably – lives as the ‘Habiru’ that we find ample mention of in extra-biblican cuneiform that no one could read until modern times. He travels on foot, with no provisions, camps out, and relies on the charity of strangers like the original Habiru that had long since been lost except for non-decipherable cuneiform writings that do not become available until European efforts to reconstruct these writing systems.
In Sumerian cuneiform, we find the Godess Nanshe who is praised for her service to the poor, the widow and the fatherless in need of care. Nanshe is (very notably) the daughter of the God Enki, known to the Semitic peoples and Ea (very notably pronounced E-YA phonetically), and his consort Ninhursag.
As an aside.. Ninhursag (again quite notably) is found in the original tale of the Garden of Eden, written in Sumerian cuneiform..
The Habiru at this time are a subset of poor transients, who are most often ‘Amorites’ originating from the area of what is today the Kurdistan region, who would definately fall under Nanshe’s protection, and thus her father – Ea (E-ya).
When the Habiru increase in number in migrations into the levant, the sack major Phoenician populations centers and eventually the entire Levant (see the Amarna letters), where they adopt the Phoencian script and encounter an entirely different pantheon headed by ‘El’. On the migration route from Harran (see Abraham) toward the levant e find Yawi-El as minor ruler of a wine producing center in Carcamesh.
Like many Akkadians and Levantine peoples, his name is a theophoric honoring Canaanite El who ‘is’ or who lives.
The Habiru bible stories of most familiarity can all be traced back to the Sumerian god ‘Ea’ (flood/ark, tower of babel, garden of eden), which they absorbed in their homelands, and it became crossed with the identical sounding Yahwi/Yawi, which is confirmed by the OT profession by God that his name is “I am”.
In effect, the ‘chosen people’ are the poor and those in need, and this goes back to the first literate modern human civilization. Even the most brutal and murderous Assyrian or Babylonian rulers style themselves in cuneiform as protectors of the needy, orphans and widows.
This is all hijacked by a ruling elite who want to dominate and it leads to constant civilizational collapse of the most powerful empires and states, because the failure to comply with the edict of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” will always have the same end result.
In the Sumerian pantheon, the God ‘An’ is the father of Enki (Ea) and Enlil, who enact his will on earth and the heavens, but An himself has little direct involvment in human affairs.
Jesus arrives as the son of God, and dual-descendant of King David no less, but he conspicuously does NOT appear as an all powerful ruler himself who could simply force everyone to accept his edicts and follow his orders. He arrives as a transient Habiru who possess’s nothing, but as a dual-descendant of King David, he counsel’s man in the name of his father..