The following Scripture passages are offered to aid beginning fellowships. The readings and commentary for this week are more in line with what has become usual; for the following will most likely be familiar observations. The concept behind this Sabbath’s selection is revisionist history.
Weekly Readings
For the Sabbath of October 12, 2013
Rewriting History
The person conducting the Sabbath service should open services with two or three hymns, or psalms, followed by an opening prayer acknowledging that two or three (or more) are gathered together in Christ Jesus’ name, and inviting the Lord to be with them.
___________________
When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. And they were saying to one another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?" And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back--it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, "Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you." And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mark 16:1–8)
*
Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And behold, there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. See, I have told you." So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. And behold, Jesus met them and said, "Greetings!" And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me." (Matt 28:1–10)
*
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, "Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise." And they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles, but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter rose and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; and he went home marveling at what had happened. (Luke 24:12)
___________________
The grandchildren of America’s Baby Boomers do not in public schools learn the same history of the United States of America as the Boomers learned; nor did the Boomers learn the same history as their grandparents learned … every few generations, history is rewritten, reinterpreted, retold as a differing story from the previous version[s] of history that the inhabitants of a nation learned. Today, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Arkhipelag GULAG [The Gulag Archipelago]—Solzhenitsyn’s critique of the Soviet forced labor camps—is read in public schools and is part of Russian education, producing a radical rewriting of Russian history from that taught to young Russians prior to 1989. Likewise, America’s 1960s as recorded by Liberal [Marxist-leaning] academics isn’t the 1960s of rural America.
Beginning about 1815 CE, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, British historians effectively wrote women out of history. Whereas women appear regularly in neo-Classical texts [the Age of Enlightenment], they disappeared into the flotsam of history during Victoria’s reign as queen, something that would seem to run counter to having a woman as a dominant world leader for a half-century.
While political Conservatives in the United States are beginning to voice alarm over the reworking of history that they now see occurring, especially in “Common Core” curriculum, they express no alarm over the reworked history of the “Jesus Movement” that occurred in the 1st-Century CE; for almost without exception, America’s Conservative reformers are self-identified “Christians,” allegedly good Sunday-worshiping Believers that want to return the Federal Government of United States of America to its constitutional limits, which would require foremost abolishing the Department of Education as well as Obamacare.
One of the principle differences between the timelessness of heaven and decay of one moment into the following moment that is a defining characteristic of the creation is the awareness of a “past” in which the living entity did not participate (i.e., had no life). In timelessness, there is no history of what has occurred before for the moment doesn’t change, and activity in the moment erases previous activity that no longer exists … for humanity, unlike beasts of the field, an earlier time exists when parents and grandparents were small children and grew to be adults, with parents and grandparents reminding children of how tough life used to be before the cloud, Internet, school lunches, ready-to-wear clothes, flush toilets. The rural legend of having to walk to school through deep snow might have been true for children in the 19th-Century CE, but probably not: if the snow were deep and unplowed, there would have been chores to do on the farm that would have precluded going to school that day.
Having a past that is not erased by activity in the present is a unique characteristic of the creation; therefore, it would be reasonable for the present prince of this world—that old serpent, Satan the devil—to desire to erase human history as activity in heaven erases what previously occurred. It would certainly be to the Adversary’s benefit to erase evidence that the man Jesus of Nazareth lived as a Judean, an observant Jew, and that this man alone was the Son of the God of Abraham, from the collective conscience of humanity. It would also benefit the Adversary to keep knowledge of God the Father from resurfacing in Christendom once the Adversary successfully suppressed awareness that the God to whom Jesus prayed was not the God of Abraham, the God of living ones, but the previously unknown God of dead ones.
The question now is how does one go about rewriting history—
How many women went to the Garden Tomb on the morning of April 29th [Julian], of the year 31 CE? And does the number matter? … If only ten-thousand people show up for a million man march on Washington, and the press reports the gathering of hundreds of thousands on the Square, do numbers matter? Is ten thousand a million? Is ten thousand hundreds of thousands? Should politicians respond differently to a gathering of ten thousand in Washington, D.C., than to a gathering of, say, eight hundred thousand? Yet, what if the media failed to report a gathering of eight hundred thousand while covering for days the gathering of ten thousand? Which gathering becomes more important politically? And has history been reworked for future generations that will rely upon primary sources (reports in the current media) to provide an accurate and unbiased account of this present generation?
If every tree in Oregon’s Lincoln County were logged, but nobody said anything about the massive clear-cutting of many river drainages, would Oregonians two hundred years in the future “invent” explanations for why there then is no old-growth timber in Lincoln County … perhaps early 21st-Century global warning caused all the trees to die? Perhaps it was the combination of global cooling in the 1970s followed by global warming in the 1990s that caused massive deforestation of the Salmon, Siletz, Yaquina, Yachats, Alsea River drainages. Scientists warned America in the 1970s that within ten years, global cooling would cause severe climate change. Scientists then warned America in the 1990s that within ten years, global warming would end life as Americans knew life. And certainly, a treeless Lincoln County would not be the land that Californian immigrants to coastal Oregon found in the 1960s. But then, these immigrants ignored murals made from old photographs—photos taken in the 1870s—of treeless ridges above the Yaquina and Alsea Rivers, with the most easily seen murals being on the walls of National Security Bank’s Newport and Toledo branches in the 1960s. To improve game habitat, Native inhabitants kept Coastal ridges burned to create open areas, never allowing trees to become established in these hunting zones. But nothing in the 1950s and 1960s was taught to Oregon’s school children about pre-contact Native Americans using fire as a forest management tool. Rather, fire prevention was stressed through the promotion of Smokey the Bear declaring, Only you can prevent forest fires.
History is continually being rewritten, rethought, reworked, with the history of Christianity being no exception to the generational reconstruction and reorganization of the past. Volume Four of A Philadelphia Apologetic (2012 for the e-book publication) introduces a discussion of the missing generations in Matthew’s Gospel genealogy of Christ Jesus, which has been for earlier scholars the basis for placing Israel’s exodus from Egypt in the mid 13th-Century BCE instead of where it more properly belongs, mid 15th-Century BCE. For in oral narratives, an “unimportant” ancestor is omitted from the person’s genealogy, a universal custom. Only significant ancestors are worthy of remembering. Thus, when the genealogy of King David was inscribed, sometime after the youthful David was chosen by the God of Abraham to replace Saul as king of Judah and eventually of all Israel, all generations were not included. Some were omitted as can be seen through attempting to reconcile the Judges and the length of their appointments with David’s ancestry. It is quickly discovered that two-centuries-worth of generations are missing, as are about the same number of generations of Israel in Egypt.
The history of Israel was rewritten, condensed, and made more memorable than it was in reality, which doesn’t take anything away from the God of Abraham—He did not write a single word of Israel’s history. All of Israel’s history was written by intelligent men who, apparently wanting to tell the truth, followed the conventions of oral discourse; thus, they inscribed incomplete genealogies that established lineage through ancestral importance. Moses was told what to write, the Judges were not. The kings were not. The prophets were told what to speak, but the scribes chronicling Israel’s history were not. They were political historians striving to give an honest account of who did what when … who was the scribe that wrote down King Saul’s speech when Saul ordered that priests of the Lord be slain:
And Saul said to his servants who stood about him, "Hear now, people of Benjamin; will the son of Jesse give every one of you fields and vineyards, will he make you all commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds, that all of you have conspired against me? No one discloses to me when my son makes a covenant with the son of Jesse. None of you is sorry for me or discloses to me that my son has stirred up my servant against me, to lie in wait, as at this day." Then answered Doeg the Edomite, who stood by the servants of Saul, "I saw the son of Jesse coming to Nob, to Ahimelech the son of Ahitub, and he inquired of [YHWH] for him and gave him provisions and gave him the sword of Goliath the Philistine." Then the king sent to summon Ahimelech the priest, the son of Ahitub, and all his father's house, the priests who were at Nob, and all of them came to the king. And Saul said, "Hear now, son of Ahitub." And he answered, "Here I am, my lord." And Saul said to him, "Why have you conspired against me, you and the son of Jesse, in that you have given him bread and a sword and have inquired of God for him, so that he has risen against me, to lie in wait, as at this day?" Then Ahimelech answered the king, "And who among all your servants is so faithful as David, who is the king's son-in-law, and captain over your bodyguard, and honored in your house? Is today the first time that I have inquired of God for him? No! Let not the king impute anything to his servant or to all the house of my father, for your servant has known nothing of all this, much or little." And the king said, "You shall surely die, Ahimelech, you and all your father's house." And the king said to the guard who stood about him, "Turn and kill the priests of [YHWH], because their hand also is with David, and they knew that he fled and did not disclose it to me." But the servants of the king would not put out their hand to strike the priests of [YHWH].
Then the king said to Doeg, "You turn and strike the priests." And Doeg the Edomite turned and struck down the priests, and he killed on that day eighty-five persons who wore the linen ephod. And Nob, the city of the priests, he put to the sword; both man and woman, child and infant, ox, donkey and sheep, he put to the sword. But one of the sons of Ahimelech the son of Ahitub, named Abiathar, escaped and fled after David. And Abiathar told David that Saul had killed the priests of [YHWH]. And David said to Abiathar, "I knew on that day, when Doeg the Edomite was there, that he would surely tell Saul. I have occasioned the death of all the persons of your father's house. Stay with me; do not be afraid, for he who seeks my life seeks your life. With me you shall be in safekeeping." (1 Sam 22:7–23)
What Doeg said would not have been known to the priests of the Lord, slain because they had given aid and comfort to David. While the men of Saul’s household would have heard what Saul said to Doeg, out of fear of Saul, they would not then have written down either the words of Saul or of Doeg: there was no honor in Saul killing the people of Nob. There was no glory to be gained by striking down priests, women, infants and children, oxen or sheep. Rather, what Saul did would have been recalled and recorded as a record against Saul—and then only after Saul was dead and the exact wording of utterances was no longer remembered.
For the purposes of narrative accuracy, exact working need not be remembered: the essence of what was said is enough. But substituting the essence of what was said for what was actually said is always a reworking of history, with “history” being filtered through the biases of the person supplying the essence of what was said. Hence, victors write history. Losers attempt to spin defeat into partial victories.
Did David actually say to Abiathar, son of Ahimelech, “‘He who seeks my life seeks your life. With me you shall be safe’”? The words of David seem reasonable, something that David could have said. But who wrote David’s words down, certainly not the same person that recorded Doeg’s words. Thus, sometime after the event a scribe chronicling the incident created the dialogues that supply humanity to the otherwise dry inscription of historical fact. The words of this chronicler are assumed to be factual for they record the essence of truth as David would have perceived what happened—and now three millennia later, the words of this chronicler are all endtime humanity has as an explanation for why Saul slew the inhabitants of ancient Nob, the city of priests.
We have an invented account, one based on actual history. We have, in reality, a non-fiction novel analogous to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a 1966 account of the brutal 1959 murder of Herbert Clutter, his wife, and two of their four children … parts of Capote’s book differ from what actually happened. Yet the book become the greatest crime seller of its era and is usually recognized as one of the best books of its type ever written.
The thoughts of a person are outside of information that historians can use to tell what happened in any given situation. Likewise, recreated dialogue is necessarily fictionalized dialogue. So the scribe who gave words to King Saul’s complaint against the priests of Nob is analogous to author Truman Capote, who expressed the thoughts and words of killers Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, the two parolees who murdered the Holcomb, Kansas, farmer and his wife and children …
Scripture is figuratively handicapped by the assumption that it is the infallible word of God, that its every word has been uttered by God, that God gave to the scribe who inscribed Doeg’s words perfect recall of the scene …
If God gave to this ancient scribe perfect recall, why didn’t God give to the author of Matthew’s Gospel, to the author of Mark’s Gospel, and to the author of Luke’s Gospel perfect recall. Why are there two women at the tomb in Matthew’s Gospel, three women in Mark’s Gospel and a host of women present in Luke’s Gospel … there was only one woman present in John’s Gospel. So a person can believe that there was one, two, three, or many women who went to anoint Jesus’ body in the predawn darkness of the first day of the week, the day after the Sabbath, during the Feast of Unleavened Bread in the year 31 CE. But a person cannot believe that all of these accounts are the infallible word of God, correctly representing the faithful history of the moment. At best, only one can be correct. Three have to be false, but not necessarily untrue. Three could have been written for purposes other than presenting a historical account of what actually happened after Jesus was raised from the dead by the Father.
Now, realizing that Scripture functions for endtime disciples as a non-fiction novel, presenting the “truth” without factually recording the exact details of what happened, when … again, what color was the robe or cape that Roman soldiers put on Jesus when mocking Him? The author of Matthew’s Gospel wrote,
Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor's headquarters, and they gathered the whole battalion before him. And they stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on his head and put a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him, they mocked him, saying, "Hail, King of the Jews!" And they spit on him and took the reed and struck him on the head. (Matt 27:27–30)
The author of Mark’s Gospel wrote,
And the soldiers led him away inside the palace (that is, the governor's headquarters), and they called together the whole battalion. And they clothed him in a purple cloak, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on him. And they began to salute him, "Hail, King of the Jews!" And they were striking his head with a reed and spitting on him and kneeling down in homage to him. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him. And they led him out to crucify him. (Mark 15:16–20)
If God gave to the author of Mark’s Gospel and to the author of Matthew’s Gospel perfect recall, both gospel authors should have agreed as to the color of the robe Roman soldiers place on Jesus when the mocked Him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews. These are not accounts of two separate occasions on which Jesus was mocked, but of one mocking, meaning that the Father and Son trusted human persons with the recording of what happened. And more than that, trusted human readers to be able to distinguish between fact and fiction, and between fact and fact as well as between fiction and fiction.
Luke’s Gospel is a fictionalized accounts that lacks spiritual insight or significant spiritual importance: Luke’s Gospel features a talkative, lightweight Jesus that converses with men other than His first disciples before meeting with the men whom the Father gave to Him.
Matthew’s Jesus speaks with the women before meeting with the men whom the Father gave to Him.
John’s Jesus speaks to Mary Magdalene before ascending to the Father as the reality of the Wave Sheaf Offering, then returning to meet in Jerusalem with ten of the men the Father gave Him on the same day that life was returned to Him.
And in Mark’s Gospel, the women tell no one that Jesus has risen.
In Luke’s Gospel, disciples receive the spirit on Pentecost, actually the Feast of Weeks, the high Sabbath that commemorates Christ Jesus’ return as the Messiah and the resurrection of the Firstfruits, of which Christ Jesus was first.
In John’s Gospel, disciples receive the spirit on the day of the Wave Sheaf Offering as Sadducees reckoned when the Wave Sheaf Offering was to be observed.
Therefore, the focus of John’s Gospel is disciples being born of spirit at the beginning of the Christian era, the reality of the First Unleavened (see Matt 26:17 in Greek and without the extra words that translators add), whereas the seemingly unintentional focus of Luke’s Gospel is the absence of spiritual birth until Christ Jesus returns as the Messiah.
In the three previous Sabbath Readings, exactly who the “they/them” are, those who know God’s decrees, who knew God but did not honor Him as God (Rom 1:21) was never fully addressed; for these individuals are not time-linked or time-marked. These individuals encompass anyone who worships the creation rather than the Creator throughout time, but when did humanity truly know the Lord and worship the Creator as God? And this “when” requires speculation that backs up to the beginning of Paul’s treatise to the Romans, where even there, no solid identifier (referent) for whom Paul references with the third-person pronoun exists.
Apparently, the entirety of the world at one time knew God as “God” and knew what His decrees were, but this scenario cannot exist post expulsion from Eden except for one period in the course of human affairs: when Noah and the seven left the Ark, with Noah being a preacher of righteousness and with his sons being “sons of righteousness,” meaning that all eight humans on the Ark had knowledge of God, knew God, and had knowledge of His decrees. And Noah was a preacher of righteousness—a righteous man—prior to when the Lord spoke with him, telling him to (and how-to) construct the Ark. Therefore, knowledge of God had to exist in the world prior to Noah’s becoming a preacher of righteousness. And human history had to be reworked post-Flood in order for the Lord to be grieved because of His creation of humanity … He was grieved before, but no person would have known He was other than for, possibly, Enoch.
If knowledge of God existed prior to Noah, this knowledge had to come from Adam through Seth and his descendants, then on through Enoch and Noah, and the pattern they represented. All of the world would have known God and known the plan of God through Enoch being taken before his time followed by, three generations later, Noah crossing from one age into the following age.
Not all of humanity was actually aware of what humanity collectively knew, just as not all of Israel is today aware of the significance of the Passover and the annual high Sabbaths—and the two generations between Enoch and Noah have to do with Daniel’s seventy weeks prophesy … it is the third attempt by the last Elijah to breathe life into the dead Corpse that is the Christian Church that takes, with this reality expressed in the seventy weeks prophesy and seen in 1 Kings 17:21–22.
The after-the-fact awareness of God’s involvement in the course of human affairs, involvement revealed by prophets but not believed until after prophecies come to pass, requires that the history of human affairs, the history of greater Israel, the history of the Christian Church be reworked at periodic intervals. However, the Adversary seems to cause Christianity to rewrite its orthodoxy often, with a rewriting currently underway … for political Conservatives in the United States, America’s founding was based on sermons delivered by Christian pastors in the 18th-Century CE. If only that were true. What is true is that the politicos in black robes that railed from Colonial pulpits neither knew God nor the plan of God. They did not believe either the Father or the Son, and they certainly didn’t walk in this world as Jesus walked. They were spiritual bastards, the offspring of the Adversary who comes posing as an angel of light (2 Cor 11:14). And these black robed bastards shall receive their just rewards when their judgments are revealed.
William Penn attempted to live out his pacifist beliefs, but his followers found that in this world, regardless of conscience, the Province of Pennsylvania had to raise a militia during the French & Indian War, thereby violating everything Penn represented. It was either raise a militia or lose Penn’s charter—and the world became acquainted with fighting Quakers, a reworking of history.
The examples of reinvented history are numerous, even generational. And so it will be even through the seven endtime years of tribulation. And when future generations will be taught that today many Christians believe in the Second Passover liberation of Israel, many more than actually do, many more Christians will seem to have embraced that which they really know nothing about than actually have. But that’s okay.
*
The person conducting the Sabbath service should close services with two hymns, or psalms, followed by a prayer asking God’s dismissal.
* * * * *
"Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved."