You have to look at it in the context of when it was written. There was Nero, the emperor who was a complete and utter nutjob, and who was murdered because of his insane behaviour like killing Agrippina (me, his mother) and his sister, and making his horse a consul. Then there was Domitian who thought that reinstituting the cult of emperor worship would fix the political problems. Because Jews (not only Christians) refused to worship dead emperors, or pay taxes to allow them not to, he sent them, and Jews to the arena to be killed by lions. That's what the writer was seeing, a monster, the emperor, doing terrible things, being against Jesus (the antichrist), and he had visions of how Jesus would come to destroy the emperor and his empire.

It's also the mindset, people were a lot more superstitious then than they are now, so they interpreted everything from the point of view of what the gods wanted, and how the gods were punishing them. It is also an attempt, like in Daniel, to foretell the future without emperors, as Daniel foretold the future without the Greeks.

That's my interpretation of it, that I'll be working on today.

Edited for clarity.
I've finished the first edit of the New Testament book. Now to read through it. Again.

Opinion? Do you think it's being pushy if I started a Facebook page for my books? I'm not getting any input from the people I ask, they all skirt around the question, probably worried I might give them a ticking off or something, as if I'm that sensitive.

I want to get a bit of publicity, so if I ask people to "like" my facebook page, they might get a bit pissy about weekly updates about the books of the Bible. Which is why I'm hesitant. I suppose they can decline updates if it bothers them. I'm really in a bit of a quandary about it.

Agrippina wrote:Opinion? Do you think it's being pushy if I started a Facebook page for my books?

Not at all. Loads of people market themselves with Facebook, it's not unusual at all.

I want to get a bit of publicity, so if I ask people to "like" my facebook page, they might get a bit pissy about weekly updates about the books of the Bible. Which is why I'm hesitant. I suppose they can decline updates if it bothers them. I'm really in a bit of a quandary about it.

I don't really know much about Facebook etiquette. People sometimes ask me to like their pages; if I like them I do, if I don't then I don't. If I'm neutral but I still want to support them then I usually still do.

Post the link, I'll like it if I like the books (which I'm sure I will) - they're arriving today apparently

Wow. I'm so pleased to hear that. Again, thank you for buying them. Let me know if there's anything I need to change in the next edition, please. I just showed them to one of our friends, he was impressed. Probably doesn't want to discuss the subject matter much (not many old people do) but he was impressed at how much work I've put into it.

Agrippina wrote:Wow. I'm so pleased to hear that. Again, thank you for buying them. Let me know if there's anything I need to change in the next edition, please. I just showed them to one of our friends, he was impressed. Probably doesn't want to discuss the subject matter much (not many old people do) but he was impressed at how much work I've put into it.

Well this is the thing - people may well be perfectly happy to like your new publicity page, simply on the grounds that you've put a lot of work into it.

Apart from your Born Again Christian friends, possibly

I have to be careful now about what I discuss on a public forum. I don't want potential readers to google the name, then find my comments about people who know me personally. So I'll reserve comment on those people.

Last night at a party, I got into a discussion of my work with someone who asked me about "what caused the big bang". I'm not really qualified to give a technical response to that, but I did counter it with a question "what do you think caused it?" to which she responded with "Goddidit". I asked her who created God. If God created the universe just for humans, so they could die and come to live with him in heaven, why did he make the entire universe, and who created him. She went away, then came back later to ask if I'd be prepared to meet her son, who's a theologian to discuss my books, and then said it was a good answer, and that she'd not ever thought about that: "who created God?"

Also, someone else overheard the conversation, then approached me to ask if I'd be prepared to deliver a talk about the Pentateuch to a group of people who meet on a regular basis to hear speakers on all sorts of subjects. She said she was the organiser and convenor of the meetings, and that she would like to fit me into a slot early next year. It's forty minutes with slides and in a semi-formal setting, so I was quite chuffed about that. I'll learn more when she contacts me again, but even if it doesn't happen, for whatever reason, it was flattering to be asked to do it.

That's a good thing, the more people know about your books, the better.'

Yes, that's what I'm thinking. It might generate a little interest locally.

So, how are the sales going ? How much do you get for each book sold ? Is volume 3 out ?

aban57 To reply.
Sales are going very slowly, but they are happening. There's not much money to be made out of selling books. I don't think any of us do it to make money. For me it's a way to get what I have to say out there for people to read. A friend of mine has bought them to donate to her local library, in Pennsylvania, so I'm quite chuffed that it will be on their shelves.

I'm battling a little with the New Testament. You read what I wrote earlier so you know it was just commentary on verses I picked through the epistles. I didn't like that approach, I thought it was better to put them relative to the rise of Christianity, which is interesting, especially since people argue with me that while the Catholic Church was running the show throughout the "Dark Ages", their churches (Baptist for example) were worshipping without the rules of the mother church. Also there are other claims, that the "Dark Ages" was all about the church stopping people from learning, that everyone was a virtual slave to the church and that no learning was happening, and then the mythology about vast numbers of Christians being persecuted.

I'm looking at those issues instead, so it's going slowly. Every time I read what I wrote before, I make more changes, so the book is a little different from what you read. It will be a couple more weeks before I'm ready to publish it.

Finished the final edit of Book 3. I like it better this way. Now to do a quick read-through of all of it, check the formatting, check the appendices, then it's done.

I'm guessing this is old news to you Aggie, but I watched a very interesting lecture yesterday about the euhumerisation of Jesus. With the gospels as all after the fact fairytales about the human Jesus as opposed to the original celestial form, designed to cement which "revelations" of the original celestial entity should be treated as....err....gospel. I was wondering if that was something you'd already covered or were intending to cover?

Yes.

My opinion is that in the wake of the Greek invasion, and the influence of Greek culture on the Near East, we already know that various factions split from the "old" religion. This started happening centuries before the Romans invaded. The Roman invasion may have had a small influence, but it's not as obvious as the Greek one. (Greek philosophy - not so much Roman)

We know that the Greek invasion led to the creation of synagogues and the rabbi class. Rabbis weren't necessarily Levites, anyone with a knowledge of the law could disseminate the learning of it, in a meeting house.

Into this culture, came teachers who didn't use meeting houses, one of these, or possibly more of them had great followings, and it's even possible that one or two of them were executed for sedition when they spoke out against the Romans (Jesus and John the Baptist being given some sort of special treatment).

I'm even a little of the opinion that "Saul" was a made up person who was supposed unite the religion under him, in the manner of the first king of the Israelites uniting the Children of Israel under him and their religion.

He and his followers, spread throughout the empire telling stories of a man, and his cousin, who were killed, some of them wrote down the stories, and some of them wrote letters to each other to tell of how they were putting the religion together.

The Church, three hundred years later, cobbled the story together, picking and choosing which stories, and which letters supported their mythology, and they made their holy book, which wasn't allowed to be dissected but was expected to be followed by their congregations, under priests, in the style of the rabbis, in meeting houses, in the style of synagogues. Anything that showed that their religion wasn't "inspired" by God, was discarded.

Add to this the mythology of mass persecutions by Jews, and pagans, and sympathy for the "martyrs" and you have the religion we know today.

Of course this is all pure conjecture on my part. I know a little about the book, the history, the archeology, the history of the religion, and I know how obsessive Christians are in their belief.

You'll never get die-hard fans of the religion to even admit I might be right, or that some of what I say might be true, but I'm "entitled to my opinion" and I'm entitled to express it. I even get into arguments with non-believers when I put forward this opinion. It takes careful reading to find the links.

I can say a lot more but I really want to sell this book. So I don't want to publish too much of what I say online.

Enough of the New Testament now. I've had my computer read it to me while I polished off the final edit. Done, kaput, completed. Off to the publishers with it now.

I hear that one of your upcoming projects is going to be Rationalising the Brothers Grimm.

Already been done. Phil Pullman.


Sent from my iPad Pro using Tapatalk.

Agrippina wrote:aban57 To reply.
Sales are going very slowly, but they are happening. There's not much money to be made out of selling books. I don't think any of us do it to make money. For me it's a way to get what I have to say out there for people to read. A friend of mine has bought them to donate to her local library, in Pennsylvania, so I'm quite chuffed that it will be on their shelves.

I'm battling a little with the New Testament. You read what I wrote earlier so you know it was just commentary on verses I picked through the epistles. I didn't like that approach, I thought it was better to put them relative to the rise of Christianity, which is interesting, especially since people argue with me that while the Catholic Church was running the show throughout the "Dark Ages", their churches (Baptist for example) were worshipping without the rules of the mother church. Also there are other claims, that the "Dark Ages" was all about the church stopping people from learning, that everyone was a virtual slave to the church and that no learning was happening, and then the mythology about vast numbers of Christians being persecuted.

I'm looking at those issues instead, so it's going slowly. Every time I read what I wrote before, I make more changes, so the book is a little different from what you read. It will be a couple more weeks before I'm ready to publish it.

Translate it into Latin, and make it very expensive. Next, persuade authorities to ban it, and make it a capital offense to read it. It will become as best seller!

Volume three has gone up for sale. It's a little more expensive than the other two because it has 400 pages, where the others are smaller.

See the complete set of Rationalising the Bible here.