The Egyptians did not want to lose Osiris, a man whose mother conceived through God’s word that was pronounced by a light from heaven—an angel if you like—for ever. Like Jesus was later to be characterised, Osiris had risen from the dead and then died the second time. The difference between his story and that of Jesus here is that during his second life he impregnated his wife, Isis, who had in the first place helped resurrect him, resulting in the child—his first incarnation— well-known as Horus. So, not wanting to contemplate his permanent absence, the ancient Egyptians kept incarnating him in the form of the bull born in the manner outlined. As you can see, the practice must have gone on for perhaps 18,000 years before the time of the Jesus story.
If the bull is Osiris, who is Jesus, then the cow mother must be Mary and she too, like the bull’s mother, must revert to virginity after giving birth to Jesus. That logically expels all later brothers and sisters of Jesus because that would mean Mary had, far from reverting to virginity, continued her cycles of pregnancy and giving birth. That would disqualify her as mother of God and Jesus as an only child bona fide for sacrifice.
Jesus is given the sacrificial lamb treatment retrospectively and all his brothers and sisters are either played down or erased from the records, especially from orthodox church records such as those of the Coptic Church. But as for the
With the case now before a world court, where an Italian is suing for being taken for a ride as far as the Jesus story is concerned, coming up, these are some of the surprising truths that may come to light. The Italian complainant learned lately of the Egyptian Gnostics’ re-creation and refashioning of Osiris in the form of Jesus, got disgusted, and is now suing for “injury.”
Verse 99:1-2:
”Said to him his disciples, as follows: your brothers and your mother are standing outside.” Then he replies to them that his brothers and mother are those that will do the will of his father, such as they, the disciples. Then the disciples pose the question on coins and taxes and Jesus tells them to give Ceaser what belongs to Ceaser. Echoes Luke 20:22-25.
More about this may be read from:
S. Morenz, Die Geschichte von Joseph dem Zimmermann aus dem Bohairischen und Sahidischen übersetzt, erläutert und untersucht (Berlin und Leipzig, 1951).
This roughly translates to: The story of Joseph the Carpenter, translated from the Bohairic and the Sahidic ancient Coptic Texts (thought to date back to 320, 328 AD), by Sigfried Morenz, who examines and describes them (Berlin and Leipzig, 1951).
Here Jesus tells the story himself, of his father’s life and death to his disciples at the Mt of Olivet. Jesus lists Joseph’s children by his deceased first wife as: Judas, Justus, James and Simeon. His daughters by the same wife were Assia and Lydia. Joseph, although a carpenter by profession, was also a priest at the temple. After he was widowed he applied to the priesthood for a bride and a 12-year old virgin girl, who had grown up in the temple as a destitute, dependent for sustenance on alms, was given to him by the priesthood after casting lots to determine whom, among the aspiring suitors, she could be given out to. This was Mary and Joseph intended not to defile her virginity ever: this was a marriage that was intended to be celibate.
From my acquaintance with Coptic Church history, perhaps this was necessary if Joseph had to retain his priesthood. The original texts are Coptic and may reflect Coptic thought and practice even though Joseph was supposed to be Jewish. Up until now a Coptic Christian man may take up priesthood even after marrying but may not marry again should he lose his wife. But if he does remarry he loses his status as a priest. A convenient, celibate, arrangement, though, may be made and, according to claims, honoured. Likewise, a man who is sworn into priesthood while a bachelor may not marry at all thereafter. One may also hear of a married Coptic Pope or two in history who, on ascendancy to the throne, ceased all sexual relations with their wives till death. These are policies that the faithful are told until, of course, someone gets pregnant within a celibate marriage: who better to “blame” for it than the Holy Spirit?
Jesus himself says that he was conceived of the Holy Spirit two years after Joseph had thus married his mother, so, married off at 12, she was pregnant at 14. On noticing that she was heavy, while in a marriage that was not only supposed to be celibate but also virginal, Joseph was embarrassed, upset, wondering when and with whom she had committed adultery, but sought to hide the fact. He planned to put her away quietly, but the angel, Gabriel, approached him and informed him that the conception was through the Holy Spirit. This was a version that he reported himself, so all we have is his word for it. The rest of the ancient Coptic literature story conforms much to what is related in the canonized gospels although there are unique and spectacular details here and there.
It is instructive that Jesus refers to Joseph as his father “after the flesh” which would suggest that he recognized Joseph as his biological father although spiritually he had God as his father through the Holy Spirit. The Gnostic authors of these texts would be at home with such symbolic settings. This was the practice at the time, kings often attributing their conception to higher powers, sidelining their biological fathers. This would be the basis on which they would justify their ascendancy to the throne as no ordinary being was supposed to attain such a status but God’s own. A well-known example among them was Alexander “The Great” himself, whose circumstances of conception and birth, although it came over 300 years before that of Jesus, bear great resemblance to the latter’s better-known circumstances. Alexander was worshiped for centuries before Christ as the son of God through the Holy Spirit, King Philip, his father, being posthumously relegated to a foster father a la Joseph.
From Kalenjiin and Egyptian practice, we could perhaps explain why certain lovers were called “Mary”. The name probably comes from Egyptian (retained in Kalenjiin too), mrrt, or,
According to the Gospel of Philip, a Nag Hamadi compilation of statements pertaining primarily to the meaning and value of sacraments within the context of a Valentinian conception of the human predicament of life after death, which is outside the Cannonised 4 gospels, Jesus had 3 female companions: His mother Mary, his/her? Stister, a Mary too, and Mary Magdalene, his closest female companion. Most importantly this Mary Magdalene who, according to the Gnostics, was the closest person to Jesus, “the most spiritual of the disciples” described as “the woman who knew the All” and, sometimes, the spiritual, or even “the legal wife of Jesus” (Cf. Walker, 1983:93).[2] His disciples often complained of Jesus’ partiality to Mary Magdalene, often kissing her in public. Other Marys: Mary Salome, Mary of
But the da Vinci Code film at some stage poses a difficult question to this effect: If the Lord so loved Mary Magdalene, who is the Church to declare otherwise?
As a spiritual leader, the Kalenjiin people in their true setting would still have appreciated a Jesus who was married and even had children, provided he led a righteous life. The priest of Asiis, Poiyoop Tuum, is required to be successfully married, have children devoid of juvenile mortality. No one can arrive at priesthood before attaining these, not least because of the lengthy strenuous training that is required. Bachelorhood is despised and death in this state is a disaster: it is said kiime kooninda, or kiime maat: he died forever or his spirit/lineage died. It is the duty of every man and woman to rekindle this maat. That the news of a married Jesus should shake a Kalenjiin faithful is, therefore, surprising.
(Latin, 'work of God'), a Roman Catholic organization founded in 1928 by the Spanish priest Josemaria Escriva (1902-75) de Balaguer. Their name is most abused in the da Vinci Code movie, but they have scarcely complained. Instead, they have, quite oddly, applauded the incident. The film depicts a monk from their movement murdering people wantonly and dashing to them over their death throes to pray for their souls to go to heaven. He allegedly kills for what he imagines to be a good cause, so it is machiavellianly OK, it would appear.
Opus Dei members, of whom there are 76,000 world-wide, may be either priests or lay people, in which case they are encouraged to retain their social position and pursue their profession. Particularly active in General Franco's
Active recruitment has resulted in a growing membership world-wide. The movement has attracted considerable criticism for its secrecy and authoritarianism, but Pope John Paul II is a supporter--he beatified de Balaguer in 1992.[1]
According to the Opus Dei website, http://www.opusdei.us/art.php?p=7017, The Da Vinci Code has raised public interest in the origins of the Bible and of central Christian doctrines such as the divinity of Jesus Christ. These topics are important and valuable to study, and they hope that interested readers will be motivated to study some of the abundant scholarship on them that is available in libraries. Does this prove that there actually is a Machiavellian strain in Opus Dei’s DNA?
This was the hero of the Nicene Council as I came to learn when I was studying the Coptic language and church history. The Nicene Council’s proceedings are an important plank in the da Vinci Code story.
Athanas was bishop of
who believed Jesus Christ not to be divine but only an exceptional human being. He was excommunicated by the Nicene Council in 325 AD. The condemnation was confirmed by Constantinople Council in 381 AD. At this time the power of the Christian Church was shifting base from Alexandria, Egypt, Africa, to Rome in Italy, the Roman Empire’s eternal capital—irrespective of the occasional claim (of Constantinople, Turkey) otherwise. The Catholic Church’s powerbase, has remained there, in the
Arius’ was the brand of faith adopted by the Germanic invaders of parts of the
If
Nicene Creed: International Consultation on English Texts translation
as printed in:
The Lutheran Book of Worship
The Book of Common Prayer (Episcopal) English Language Liturgical Commission translation
We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
[1]The
[2] For the latter controversial statement,
If, in Kalenjin cosmology, the expanse of land that centres on the Mau forest was the "Promised Land," then the Ogiek were their Canaanites.
As we read in Wanguhu Ng'ang'a's newly published book Communities of Kenya, the Ogiek were the natives of that land.
The Kalenjin were later conquerors. Like the Israelites, who travelled northwards, the Kalenjin came southwards from Egypt.
No wonder the Ogiek remnants of the Ndorobo-Sirikwa cluster are beginning to pose what looks like a "Palestinian problem".
The Kalenjin story is nearly identical in many other ways to that of ancient Israel. Why is it that certain central details of Kalenjin settlement in Kenya's Rift Valley have mythical counterparts in Israel's reported colonisation of Canaan at the end of the 13th century BC?
Why does the Kalenjin epic claim a sudden exodus from Egypt, a wandering for long decades in the wilderness, the crossing of a river called "Jordan," a mass circumcision at Pisgah, capped with the conquest of Jericho, Bethel, Ai, Hazor and other cities of the Levantine natives?
Even more astonishing, how is it that, for these events, Kalenjin tradition uses terminology almost identical to that of Judah's King Josiah, his chief priest Hilkiah, their redactor Ezra and other masterminds of what Bible students call the Deuteronomistic History?
Today's Kalenjin equivalents of the Soferim — those who wrote and edited the Jewish Bible in the seventh and sixth centuries BC (just before, during and just after the Babylonian exile) — assert that the Kalenjin arrived in abrupt escape from Egypt.
They began to settle only after some 40 years of wandering in the "wildernesses" of Southern Sudan and northwestern Kenya and "the Mountain God" (Elgon). Divested of the Bible's thick ethnic self-aggrandising gloss, it is true that a certain Semitic tribe left Egypt abruptly after a period of imperialistic rule.
Known to historians as Hyksos and including the immediate family of a certain Y-aa-gub ("Jacob") — known in Kalenjin mythology as Yak-hober — this Semitic tribe renamed itself Ysro-el ("Israel") after their leader had dreamed of an encounter with the god El at a place thereafter called Beth-el or Bethel ("House of El").
In Out of Egypt, Ahmed Osman explains that the term Israel was derived from the Coptic god Asar-el, (a name that means "Osiris is God" or simply "El empowers") the chief god of the Nilo-Hamitic Copts, Edomites and Canaanites.
Known in the Pentateuch as "Moses," Amenhotep IV was the pharaoh who triggered so much religious unrest by revolutionarily imposing a monotheon called Aten — for which reason he changed his named to Akhenaten — and banned all other gods and goddesses.
Kalenjin youth at a traditional ceremony.
Egypt was electrified. But what archaeo-history now knows is in conflict with what we read in the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History.
Moses abdicated and fled not because he had killed an Egyptian and hidden him in the sand but only because the priests conspired to kill him on account of the Aten.
First, he went south to Nubia — his mother Tiye's maiden country. There, he married Tharbis, the black beauty whom Exodus calls Zipporah.
After assuming the pseudonym "Moses," he sneaked back into Egypt via Midian, and gave his Aten religion to his former Israelites slaves.
In return for a promise to liberate them, they agreed to be recruited into an army which he then used to wage war on official Egypt to try to reclaim his crown.
But he was routed and forced to flee once again, this time into Sinai's Shara Mountains — "the Mountain of God" — in Edomite country, to give rise to the legend called Exodus.
The problem we have is that it is the Jewish descendants of those Israelites who are writing that story and they are doing so after many centuries of oral tradition and with a great deal of ethnic self-glory.
The Pentateuch tells only the story of the small group that fled with Moses northwards. Historians now agree that the religious upheaval caused by Akhenaten-Moses occasioned "exoduses" in all other directions.
Some fled to West Africa (perhaps including the remarkable Dogon of Mali, Akan of Ghana and Wolof of Senegal). Some fled to Crete, Peloponnesus, Thessaly and Colchis (creating the legend of Jason's Quest for the Golden Fleece).
Some fled towards the Red Sea (later to emerge in Ethiopia as the "Falasha Jews").
If we zero in on the Kalenjin, Luo, Maasai, Teso and Turkana, the question is: Are they the descendants of the Copts who fled southwards?
The Kalenjin thesis seems to be that the Myoot — their maternal ancestors — moved out of Egypt southwards at about the same time as the Israelites were scurrying out of Egypt northwards.
The linguistic evidence adduced by the Kalenjin counterparts of the Jewish Soferim is telltale. Compare the Pentateuch with, for instance, Kipkoeech araap Sambu's book The Kalenjin People's Egypt Origin Legend Revisited.
But, before we do so, let us summarise the Bible story on Israel's flight. After wandering for 40 years around a peak in Edom (known variously as Hor or Horeb or Sinai or "Mountain of God"), they gave their new god Aten the name Yahoo, taken from the local Shasu-Edomites.
Finally, they arrived at the foot of Nebo or Pisgah, a Moabite hill on Jordan's East Bank.
Atop Pisgah, "the Lord" showed Moses the extent, beauty and economic prospects of "the Promised Land" of Canaan but told him that he himself would never see that land.
Then, following a mass circumcision ritual at Gilgal, the "children of Israel" crossed the River Jordan to capture Jericho.
As we turn to the Kalenjin version of the story, please keep in mind the biblical terms "Pisgah", "circumcision", "Gilgal", "Jordan" and "Jericho" which I have just used.
It was from a mountain called Psigiis that the leader of this southern "Exodus" viewed the Kalenjin "Canaan".
On top of Psigiis (Pisgah?) — the term which gave this vanguard Kalenjin group its name Kipsigiis — the leader viewed the whole range of what would become modern Kalenjinland from Koibatek and Nakuru to Lake Victoria.
Because, during the wandering, the Kalenjin people had had no time to circumcise their boys, the whole Kalenjin community was forced to camp somewhere called Tulwaap Monyiis for a mass circumcision ritual.
But "mass circumcision"? Of course! Among Egypt's most important religious impositions on Israel was the Nilotic practice of chopping off the foreskin of the male organ.
Among the Copts, it had been a bequest from the god Ra. Long after the Exodus, the Jewish writers of the Pentateuch would replace Ra with their own newfangled Yahweh as the god who had demanded the "cut."
But, with the Soferim, there is no attempt to explain the significance of circumcision — which is among the proofs that their Nilotic masters had imposed it on the Israelite slaves without explaining its religious significance to them.
Indeed, the Book of Joshua reports that all the male Hebrews who came out of Egypt were circumcised, but that those born during the wanderings were not and that a mass circumcision was thus performed on all the males at Gilgal in the plains of Jericho.
Moses' Levites performed a mass ritual at Gilgal just before crossing the Jordan. Sambu writes: "[The Kalenjin] did not name the [corresponding] hill Gilgal.
But... it is interesting to note that one of the places the [Kalenjin] occupied twice while wandering in the plains [of the Rift Valley] was Gilgil."
Which Kenyan has never heard of Gilgil, the thriving trade centre between the lakes Naivasha and Elmentaita?
The Israelites then crossed a river called Jordan to take Jericho, just as the Kipsigiis crossed a river called Chooryan to take Kericho.
What can it mean? We now pronounce the "ch" in "Jericho" like the "k" in "Kenya". But the native Jebusites — a clan of the Canaanite natives — pronounced it like the "ch" in "church".
Jericho, therefore, rhymed with Kericho. Moreover, in the Kalenjin language, "k" is usually pronounced like a hard "g".
Kericho, therefore, may originally have been Gericho (which is not at all far from Jericho.) What a small world ours is!
The only question is: Who borrowed from whom?
The near-identity between Pisgah and Psigiis, Gilgal and Gilgil, Yordan and Chooryan, Jericho and Kericho, etc., and the circumstances in which those terms occur affirm at least a historical confluence.
Neo-Hamites: A shared history of flight and fight
Kalenjin, Dholuo, ancient Coptic, ancient Canaanite (or Ugarito-Phoenician) and ancient Edomite belong to the same ethno-linguistic family known as Nilo-Hamites.
The Nilo-Hamites had a profound influence on Hebrew, both when the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt and for centuries in post-Exodus Canaan.
The Pentateuch is chockfull of religious imagery and vocabulary borrowed from Coptic. If the Kalenjin left Egypt at the same time as the Israelites, then that is a historical confluencer.
In mind-bogglingly salacious, the Deuteronomistic Historian tells us exactly what terrible things the Israelites, under "Joshua", did to the Canaanites, savage deeds which reverberate up to now as a "Palestinian problem".
The question is: What happened to the Kalenjin's "Canaanites", the autochthonous Ogiek- Sirikwa-Ndorobo cluster?
From the way the Kalenjin react whenever faced with that question, we can infer that the Ogiek's fate was in every way as horrendous as the Canaanites' — numerous fights, flights, deaths, assimilations and adaptations.
Those were exactly what happened also to the Philistines, Moabites, Ammonites and Amorites after the Israelites had grabbed their lands.
The difference is only that, by their "euphemisms," the Kalenjin show at least a sense of remorse. The Khazari usurpers of Judah who now lord it over Palestine do not.
Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard/Article/Kalenjin--Another-lost-tribe-of-Israel-/211006
About The Author: Philip Ochieng -- is a Kenyan Editor with the Nation Media Group. Like Obama Senior, he too went to the US on the famous Tom Mboya Airlift of 1959 [ when hundreds of Kenyan students were given scholarships to American universities ]. |
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Whatever you do, don’t kill the Kenyan dream