Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?

G. R. S. Mead

• Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9783849640514
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

A study that thoroughly questions the date of the birth of Jesus Christ. George Robert Stowe Mead was an author, editor, translator, and an influential member of the Theosophical Society as well as the founder of the Quest Society.Contents:I. Foreword.II.— The Canonical Date Of Jesus.III.—Earliest External Evidence To The Received Date.IV.—The Genesis Of The TalmudV.—The Talmud In HistoryVI.—In The Talmud's Outer Court.VII -The Earliest External Evidence To The Talmud Jesus Stories.VIII—The Talmud 100 Years B.C. Story Of Jesus.IX.—The Talmud Mary Stories.X.—The Talmud Ben Stada Jesus Stories.XI—The Talmud Balaam Jesus Stories.XII. The Disciples And Followers Of Jesus In The Talmud.XIII.—The Toldoth Jeschu.XIV—A Jewish Life Of Jesus.XV.—Traces Of Early Toldoth Forms.XVI.—The 100 Years B.C. Date In The Toldoth.XVII.—On The Tracks Of The Earliest Christians.XVIII.—Concerning The Book Of Elxai.XIX.- The 100 Years B.C. Date Epiphanius.XX.-Afterword.

Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?

G.R.S. Mead

Contents:

Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?

I. Foreword.

II.— The Canonical Date Of Jesus.

III.—Earliest External Evidence To The Received Date.

IV.—The Genesis Of The Talmud

V.—The Talmud In History

VI.—In The Talmud's Outer Court.

VII -The Earliest External Evidence To The Talmud Jesus Stories.

VIII—The Talmud 100 Years B.C. Story Of Jesus.

IX.—The Talmud Mary Stories.

X.—The Talmud Ben Stada Jesus Stories.

XI—The Talmud Balaam Jesus Stories.

XII. The Disciples And Followers Of Jesus In The Talmud.

XIII.—The Toldoth Jeschu.

XIV—A Jewish Life Of Jesus.

XV.—Traces Of Early Toldoth Forms.

XVI.—The 100 Years B.C. Date In The Toldoth.

XVII.—On The Tracks Of The Earliest Christians.

XVIII.—Concerning The Book Of Elxai.

XIX.- The 100 Years B.C. Date Epiphanius.

XX.-Afterword.

Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?, G. R. S. Mead

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Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?

I. FOREWORD.

WHEN some five and a half centuries before the Christian era the Buddha arose in ancient Aryavarta to substitute actuality for tradition, to break down the barriers of convention, and throw open the Way of Righteousness to all, irrespective of race or birth, we are told that He set aside the ancestral scriptures of His race and times, and preached a Gospel of self-reliance and a freedom from bibliolatry that will ever keep His memory green among the independent thinkers of the world.

When the Christ arose in Judaea, once more to break down the barriers of exclusiveness, and preach the Way to the 'Amme ha-aretz, the rejected of the ceremonialists and legal purists, we are told that He extended the aegis of His great authority over the ancient writings of His fellow-countrymen, and cited the Torah as the very Law of God Himself.

We are assured by Traditionalists that the Incarnation of Deity Itself, the very Giver of that Law, explicitly attested the genuineness of the Five Books; He, with His inerrant wisdom, asserted that Moses wrote them, just as it was believed by the people of His day.

Whereas, if there be anything certain in the whole field of Biblical research, it is that this cannot be the whole truth of the matter.

It has been said in excuse that the Christ did not come on earth to teach His disciples the "higher criticism." This may well be so, and yet it is a fact of profound significance that, as we shall see in the course of the present enquiry, even in His day this very Torah, and much more the Prophets and Sacred Writings, were called into serious question by many.

If, however, the Christ actually used the words ascribed to Him in this matter, it is difficult to understand why a plan so different in thus respect was adopted in the West from the apparently far more drastic attempt that was made so many years before in the East. It may, however, have been found that the effect of a so abrupt departure from tradition had not proved so successful as had been anticipated, for the Brahman, instead of giving of his best, and allowing himself to become the channel of a great spiritual outpouring for the benefit of the world, quickly resumed his ancient position of exclusiveness and spiritual isolation.

So in the case of the Jew, who was, as it were, a like channel ready to hand for the West, whereby the new spiritual forces could most efficaciously be liberated, it may have been thought that if the traditional prejudices of that "chosen" and "peculiar" people were more gently treated perhaps greater results would follow. But even so the separative forces in human nature were too strong, and the Jew, like the Brahman, fell back; into a more rigid exclusiveness than ever. But thee Wisdom behind Her Servants doubtless knew that this would be, and reserved both Brahman and Jew for some future opportunity of greater promise, while She temporarily utilized them, in spite of themselves, and in spite of the mistakes of their Buddhist and Christian brethren; for all of us, Brahmans and Buddhists, Hebrews and Christians, are of like passions, and struggling in the bonds of our self-limitations and ignorance; we are all children of one Mother, our common human nature, and of one Father, the divine source of our being.

It may have been that in the first place the great Teacher of the West made His appeal to the "Brahmans" of Jewry, and only when He found that no impression could be made upon their rigid adherence to rules and customs, did he go to the people. There are many Sayings strongly opposed to Legalism, as understood by subsequent Rabbinical orthodoxy, and, as we shall see, there were many mystic circles in the early days, even on what was considered "the ground of Judaism," which not only rejected the authority of the Prophets and Sacred Writings, but even called into question the Torah proper in much of its contents. Moreover, we find that Jesus was, among other things, called by the adherents of orthodox Rabbinism a "Samaritan," a name which connoted "heresy" in general for the strict Jew, but which, as we shall see, seems to the student of history sometimes to stand merely for one who held less exclusive views.

However all this may be, and whatever was attempted or hoped for at the beginning, the outcome was that until about the end of the first century the Christians regarded the documents of the Palestinian canon as their only Holy Scripture, and when they began to add to this their own sacred writings, they still clung to the "Books" of Jewry, and regarded them with the same enthusiastic reverence as the Rabbis themselves. The good of it was that a strong link of East with West was thus forged; the evil, that the authority of this library of heterogeneous legends and myths, histories and ordinances, the literature of a peculiar people, and the record of their special evolution, was taken indiscriminately as being of equal weight with the more liberal and, so to speak, universalizing views of the new movement. Moreover, every moment of the evolution of the idea of God in Jewry was taken as a full revelation, and the crude and revengeful Yahweh of a semi-barbarous stage equated with the evolved Yahweh of the mystic and humanitarian.

For good or ill Christianity has to this day been bound up with this record of ancient Judaism. The Ancestors of the Jew have become for the Christian the glorified Patriarchs of humanity, who beyond all other men walked with God. The Biblical history of the Jew is regarded as the making straight in the desert of human immorality and paganism of a highway for the Lord of the Christians. Jesus, who is worshipped by the Christians as God, so much so that the cult of the Father has from the second century been relegated to an entirely subordinate position—Jeschu ha-Notzri was a Jew.

On the other hand we have to-day before us in the Jews the strange and profoundly interesting phenomenon of a nation without a country, scattered throughout the world, planted in the midst of every Christian nation, and yet strenuously rejecting the faith which Christendom holds to be the saving grace of humanity. Even as the Brahmanists were the means of sending forth Buddhism into the world, and then, by building up round themselves a stronger wall of separation than ever, cut themselves off from the new endeavour, so were the Jews the means of launching Christianity into the world, and then, by hedging themselves round with an impermeable legal fence, shut themselves entirely from the new movement. In both cases the ancient blood-tie and the idea of a religion for a nation triumphed over time and every other modifying force.

What, then, can be of profounder interest than to learn what the Jews have said concerning Jesus and Christianity? And yet how few Christians today know anything of this subject; how few have the remotest conception of the traditions of Jewry concerning the founder of their faith! For so many centuries have they regarded Jesus as God, and everything concerning Him, as set apart in the history of the world, as unique and miraculous, that to find Him treated of as a simple man, and that too as one who misled the children of His people, appears to the believer as the rankest blasphemy. Least of all can such a mind realize even faintly that the claims of the Church on behalf of Jesus have ever been thought, and are still thought, by the followers of the Torah to be equally the extreme of blasphemy, most solemnly condemned by the first and foremost of the commandments which the pious Jew must perforce believe came straight from God Himself.

Astonishing, therefore, as it appears, though Jew and Christian use the same Scripture in common, with regard to their fundamental beliefs they stand over against each other in widest opposition; and the man who sincerely loves his fellows, who feels his kinship with man as man, irrespective of creed, caste, or race, stands aghast at the contradictions revealed by the warring elements in our common human nature, and is dismayed at the infinite opposition of the powers he sees displayed in his brethren and feels potential in himself.

But, thank God, to-day we are in the early years of the twentieth century, when a deeper sense of human kinship is dawning on the world, when the general idea of God is so evolved that we dare no longer clothe Him in the tawdry rags of human passions, or create Him in the image of our ignorance, as has been mostly the case for so many sorrowful centuries. We are at last beginning to learn that God is at least as highly developed as a wise and just mortal; we refuse to ascribe to Deity a fanaticism and jealousy, an inhumanity and mercilessness, of which we should be heartily ashamed in ourselves. There are many to-day who would think themselves traitors to their humanity, much more to the divinity latent within them, were they to make distinctions between Jew or Christian, Brahman or Buddhist, or between all or any of these and the Confucian, or Mohammedan, or Zoroastrian. They are all our brethren, children of a common parent, these say. Let the dead past bury its dead, and let us follow the true humanity hidden in the hearts of all.

But how to do this so long as records exist? How to do this while we each glory in the heredity of our bodies, and imagine that it is the spiritual ancestry of our souls? What is it that makes a man cling to the story of his "fathers," fight for it, and identify himself with all its natural imperfections and limitations? Are not these rather, at any rate on the ground of religion, in some fashion the "parents" we are to think little of, to "hate," as one of the "dark sayings" ascribed to the Christ has it?

Why should a Jew of to-day, why should a Christian of the early years of the twentieth century, identify himself with the hates of years gone by? What have we to do with the bitter controversies of Church Fathers and Talmudic Rabbis; what have we to do with the fierce inhumanity of mediaeval inquisitors, or the retorts of the hate of persecuted Jewry? Why can we not at last forgive and forget in the light of the new humanism which education and mutual intercourse is shedding on the world?

Wise indeed are the words: "He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" And yet in theology all the trouble is about this God whom we have not seen. Theology, which ought to be a help and a comfort, becomes the greatest scourge of humanity, for in theology we do not say this or that is true because the present facts of nature and human consciousness testify to its truth, but this is true because many years ago God declared it was so—a thing we can never know on the plane of our present humanity, and a declaration which, as history proves, has led to the bitterest strife and discord in the past, and which is still to-day a serious obstacle to all progress in religion.

When, then, we take pen in hand to review part of the history of this great strife between Christian and Jew in days gone by, we d...

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• Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?