Jesus was hung on a tree?
My book, "The Division of the Damned" deals with the imaginary
idea that Himmler sent a squad of SS to
to make a deal with a vampire count, Count Dracyl. The soldiers, already
disillusioned with their part in the war and the treatment of the conquered
nations, then turn on the vampires and fight them using silver swords and
bullets and the power of a tree.
"The power of a tree?" I hear you ask yourself. "What on
earth is he on about, what power does a tree possess?"
Well, I proposed in my book that a tree could be used as a Christian
symbol and therefore a point of belief for the soldiers to rally to. In fact,
why a tree at all? How did I get to a tree being the anchor of their faith to
fight the Dracyl? Why not a fish, a spear, a mummified head, a turnip, a sock?
And, perhaps more importantly, was it right for me to make up a Christian
symbol, or am I going to be cast to the fires as a heretic??
Okaaaaaay....
Ever since I read
Sepulchre by James Herbert as a young soldier, I've been interested in the
interweaving of ancient legend and religion. I devoured that book and was
fascinated when he introduced the fact that a whole rook of Old Testament
legends, stories I'd always accepted as Christian history, were in fact
Sumerian. This shocking revelation opened up a whole new aspect of religion to
me.
I'd never given
the church any thought up to this point. Church to me was a duty I performed
when my name was up on orders to turn up. Sunday morning parade, inspection,
bit of a mumbled sing song, snooze during the sermon then back to barracks, job
done. I simply accepted it as a part of life. Then along came Mr. Herbert and
in one smart passage he managed to rattle me out of my spiritual coma.
The Creation, Adam
and Eve, The Flood, the
of
put down in texts that stretched far back to the dawn of true civilisation. Not
direct copies but stupendously close. Christianity, the creed I'd so blithely
accepted with nigh on bovine indifference, had simply robbed 'em!
Now, at that time
my thinking processes were very much different to now. Yes, I was interested in
the idea that Christianity held ancestry in other religions, just as I was
interested in the Third Reich, learning the drums and Warsaw Pact arms and
equipment. However, those enthusiasms wilted like lettuce in a microwave under
the glaring intensity of my social life at that time I simply couldn't find it
in my self to leave the bar and pursue these interests.
So nothing more
happened in that direction, especially as none of my mates would have been
interested anyway. Imagine the scene:
Kev, (Drinking buddy): Beer Reg?
Me: Yeah, Guinness, did you know that a lot
of the Old Testament stories were based on other even older religious texts?
Kev: Go to bed mate, you've had enough.
Get the picture?
Then, fifteen
years later, I discovered the internet and a whole world of information, both
good and bad suddenly opened up to me. Old interests were sparked, ideas took
flame and I unexpectedly learned that you could type with two fingers just as
well as with one, if you practised.
Whilst bumbling
through Wikipedia I came across the demon Lilith. Lilith is mentioned in so
many cross-religious threads that I had to use her, so I did. She was,
apparently, the first wife of Adam but was banished from
being too assertive as she refused to lie under Adam, (as in, nudge nudge wink
wink). Intriguingly, Lilith was supposed to have been the first Biblical
vampire who drank the blood of Abel after Cane had slain him. In the Sumerian
texts she was a sort of demonic hand-maiden to the Sumerian Goddess of love,
Inanna, and bizarrely she also lived in a tree.
Now I knew I
needed an artefact to focus the fight against the Dracyl and the. "Lilith's
tree" idea attracted me right from the start. Right there, with a tree as
the focal point, I had a link to Lilith and Sumeria. However, the only
Christian bark-wrapped greenery I knew of was a Christmas tree, and that was
hardly the dark, brooding force of all-conquering power I was looking for.
So I started to
dig for something else. There was of course the Tree of Knowledge, the shrub
that Eve took the fruit off for Adam's dinner, (the naughty minx), but that
seemed so... lame, somehow. So I dug some more and I'd almost given up when
that
struck again! I found some passages relating to Christ being hung on a tree.
Acts
"Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree"
Acts
slew and hanged on a tree"
Acts
him down from the tree"
1 Peter
self bare our sins in his
own body on the tree"
Paul: Galatians
curse upon us...
Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree"
The inspiration
was saved, now I just had to sell it.
So, is it alright to do it then or am I
in the doodoo?
It would be wrong
on so many levels for me to claim that Jesus wasn't crucified. Just as it would
be wrong for me to say that he was hung on a tree and cite these tracks from
the Bible as proof. For me, there is no proof to be had from a book that was
written two thousand years ago; a book born out of the strife, egos and schisms
of an upstart cult.
In my humble
opinion, the modern Bible is not the word of God as the fundamentalists would
have us believe.
There, I've said it now
and I can't take it back.
Why do I say that? Well
here are my reasons and believe me, this is an extremely superficial glossing
over of what is an exceedingly deep topic.
The oldest known
Bible to date is the "Sinai Bible" in the
There are, unbelievably, 14,800 differences from the modern Bible in its ancient
bindings. Think about it, 14,800 divergences from what is written in the
contemporary text. Imagine being asked to copy a book and you make that many
changes? You'd be fired, or sued even! So what does that say about the
claim that the Bible is "The word of God"?
Let's dig
deeper.
If we look back,
the basis for the Christian doctrine as we know it today was set down by
Constantine the Great, at the Council of Nicea in AD 325. However, the
decisions on which stories or gospels should actually make it into the New
Testament weren't made until AD 367, forty two years after!
" Uhu." I
hear you asking yourself, "so why was it necessary to edit the Bible?"
Well, before that time,
the Hebrew bible wasn't essentially seen as the word of God, it was more of a
guide as to how to be Christian. In an effort to hone their course, Saint
Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, in his Easter letter of 367, listed the
books that were to be included in the New Testament. His main reason was to
exclude his favourite hate, an offshoot of the faith called Arianism, (named
after its founder Arius and not some discredited, laughable racial theory),
nevertheless, his suggestions stuck.
So even here, not
500 years after Christ's martyrdom, we have discrepancies and arguments as to
what he truly did in life and more importantly, what should actually go into
his biography. So would it really be wrong of me to suggest that Christ was
hung from a tree and not on a cross? Would everyone be up in arms about it,
bearing in mind the slip shod way his life was recorded?
Then we have the saga
of the translation.
The King James
Bible is often toted as the original Bible (or word of God?) and all subsequent
English versions as cheap impostors. So how was this paragon of translating
purity actually reworked into the English language?
In 1607 King James
1st commissioned a gaggle of translators to render the Bible into English. Two
years and nine months later, the work was ready for the printing press but
James was still not happy. Himself a minor scholar of limited ability, it was
clear that he did not have the talent, skill, time nor inclination to read and
prepare it for publication. So he gave the manuscript to the most celebrated
whiz kid of that time; enter Sir Francis Bacon.
Bacon took a year
to pound the differing styles of the translators into some kind of uniformed
pattern, employing the rhythms, syntax and mannerisms that were so popular in
Shakespearian
the time.
Mmmmm.... wait a
minute, so he changed it then?
Well, yes.
Over fifty
translators had slaved over the wording for nigh on three years to perfect the
conversion of its ancient passages into the English language, and Bacon changes
it, using the "Dictionary of Slang" of that time to make it more,
"Popular"?
Yes, but wait, it
gets better.
The Bible used by those
fine English scholars to translate into English, (before it was so horribly
molested by that pervert of the written word, Bacon), was in Greek. The Greek
copy was originally translated from the Aramaic ... which was translated from
the Hebrew; do you see where this is leading? See a pattern here?
So basically, who
knows what the original word of God was?
Nobody,
that's who.
The original
scrolls that held the words that have conquered the world have long been lost
to the annals of time and nobody, this side mortality, will ever know what they
truly said.
However, I
digress. The Tree.
So where did the
Christian connection for the tree come from? Well, the Greek word for the
object used by the Romans to kill Jesus is Staurus, which Mr. Bacon changed to
cross. However, the actual translation is not Cross, it's Pole, or... (ta da!)
TREE!!
Look, it's vague
but if Dan Brown can change places, people and facts for his books, then I'll
gladly use someone else's inaccuracies to help me, because that's how we role
in fiction-land :-)
I have merely
dipped the tip of the toenail of my little toe into the subject and anyone who
knows the field of study will probably point out a rook of mistakes in
"Division, (not 14,800 though, I hasten to add).
"Division of the
Damned" is a story, a work of fiction and I just wanted to highlight the
reasons and the facts (coughs) behind the legend of the book.
Thanks for reading this
and I hope you enjoy the book, (if you buy it).
Richard Rhys Jones
αωαωαωαωαωαωαω
Division of The Damned
By Richard Rhys Jones
It was a brilliant plan to win the war.
What if the Third Reich could own the night?
What if they had a Division of Vampires?
And if those Vampires didn't stop?
If they had plans to conquer the whole world?
Even Heinrich Himmler hadn't thought of that. But in Transylvania someone had. And on the Winter Solstice of 1944, the world would be at their mercy.
αωαωαωαωαωαωαω
Find the Author at:
www.divisionofthedamned.blogspot.com
www.kingsofkindle.blogspot.com
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