JESUS NAZARENUS REX IUDEORUM : INRI
Mark 9:30-37 : 9:30 They went on from there and passed through Galilee. He did not want anyone to know it, 9:31 for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, "The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again."
As professing Christians we have to face some major issues in Christian faith and in the Christian doctrines, that during the last two millennia some significant changes were made mostly by the Roman Empire in order to make the first century Christianity obsolete and in many instances even extinct.
You can be almost certain that as we are closer to Jesus time so we can be closer to the real teachings of Jesus.
Some people think that there is absolutely no need to recover what Jesus eventually and originally taught to his disciples how they lived how they tried to make the divine requests of Jesus a reality on the ground, because we have the church here and now, and the church is able or should be able to tell us what think, what the do, what to believe.
However there jas been an identifiable permanent attempt from the Roman Empire since the 4th century to make the original teachings of Jesus obscure. Some say that Roman Empire does not exist anymore, actually that is not quite accurate.
When the Roman Church took the place of the Empire in the medieval era, the Roman Church maintained the imperial practice of veiling Jesus behind man-made doctrines.
Among these practises they even banned the very reading of the Bible for the general population, and especially they banned any Bible translation to the vernacular. When someone read the Bible in those times, he or she did so on their own peril, risking torture and execution, ordered by the Roman Church, sentenced by the state to be quartered or burnt at the stake.
The authorities, of course, they didn't stop at the banning of the reading of the Bible, but they even tempered, extrapolated and altered the scriptures in many instances as they saw fit, and as they are caught in the red by the researchers. One of the obvious examples is the ending of the Gospel of Mark where anything after verse 9 in chapter 16 is a proven later addition.
We do not have real, contemporary gospel versions, which means from the late first century, or the early second century, only the copies from half a millennium later.
We can be almost absolutely certain that the existing canonized gospels in the New Testament, became heavily edited by unscrupulous imperial agents, sometimes they even twisted the meaning of the texts during the centuries in favor of Rome.
Many major aspects in the Gospel stories were doomed to faint, as they were deemed not expedient.
One of these aspect is the membership of Jesus in the socalled Nazarene movement, which was a real Jewish sect in the first century. The Baptizing movement of John was an other sect. When John was murdered by Herod Antipas, many from the baptizing movement joined the Nazarenes led by Jesus. Originally, the fishermen group, Peter and his brother Andrew, John and his brother James were the disciples of John.
The Nazarenes had a couple of nick names, like the Way and the Poor.
The Nazarenes were the essential group among the early Jesus followers and they were all Jews. Even the Apostle Paul was accused by the Roman Governor that he was a ring leader of the Nazarenes.
In the Greek texts the Scriptures mostly refer to Jesus as Jesus Nazarenus, which means the Nazarene sect leader Jesus, and very much less as Jesus of Nazareth.
However the Latin, thus Roman translation always say Jesus of Nazareth, so many vernacular translations like the King James sticks to the term.
However, the very town of Nazareth, according to archeological findings, did not exist in Jesus time, in the first century.
While the towns on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, Capernaum, Bethshaida, Korazin are mentioned many times in the New Testament, but the very and most significant town in the vicinity and at that time is/was never mentioned in the New Scriptures.
While historians says that Nazareth is nowhere in the first century BCE and even CE documents, not in tax papers, not in any military accounts, private correspondence, then the very capitol, and most important city in contemporary Galilee, called Sepphoris, is not mentioned, not even once in the New Testament.
Not even that the distance between Sepphoris and Nazareth was SIX kilometers.
They have archaeological findings and evidence of the existence of Town of Nazareth in the second century, but not before. However., Sepphoris was the main city in Galilee, freshly rebuild and reembellished by Herod Antipas.
The non-existing Nazareth, at that time should have been a Nazarene camp or hamlet in the outskirt of Sepphoris, a mostly Greek speaking, multicultural city, with a sizable group of Torah scholars and other Jewish intellectual groups.
In Jerusalem the Great Council asked Nicodemus, that Can anything good come from Galilee? Go and check the scriptures. But even the Scriptures says, written by Isaiah that in the Land of Galilee (Zebulon and Naphtali) “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Those who lived in the land of the shadow of death, on them light has shined.” As it is quoted by the Gospel of Matthew, and interpreted it for the Jesus movement.
Indeed, the Roman Empire, and the Roman editors wanted the memory of the Nazarenes to fade from history and from the Gospel, because the Nazarenes, as Jews, refused to worship the Emperor, as the Emperors were not only declared divine, but they even have their own temples and altars.
The Nazarenes practiced the common property of all, meanwhile Rome was a slaveholder, imperalist entity, conquering other countries without a pause. The Nazarenes held, that according to the Jewish Law, slavery is unacceptable and according to the Book of Ezekiel, there must be no interest rate on any loans. The Roman creditors or editors wanted these values to disappear from Christianity, which gradually became very Greek and then later it evolved into the state religion of the Roman Empire, which never abolished slavery.
The Nazarene sectarian camp first evolved into a hamlet in the outskirt of Sepphoris, then in the second century it became a small town, and from the Nazarenes it inherited its name Nazareth. It became very handy to erase the memory of the Nazarenes, the early followers of Jesus, whose renewed title, Jesus of Nazareth pointed toward only a small town, but not anymore to an extinct group, described in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. May the LORD keep us among his friends, as we reject the empires and their institutions, AMEN.
