Informant38

This isn't about the truth, it's about deception. It isn't about the path it's about being tricked out of the path and toward someone else's goal. For there to be deception there has to be truth, or something more true than the deceit performed, and to be misled it's necessary for it to be possible to be led, somewhere. I'm not talking about that, not representing truth, not pointing the way.
The first trick is in the Jesus narrative, and it's entirely invisible. The story of Jesus is 33 years long but there's a hole in the middle of it that lasts for 18 years. From 12 to 30 Jesus disappears from the books of the Bible's New Testament. There is no explanation for this, not even a mention of it.
12 is the general threshold of puberty, sexuality beginning its changes in the young body and mind. It's a time when children begin to look outside the home for guidance and example. Jesus, in Christian homes and schools, is held up as almost beyond example, but the story of his life is placed before children as central to their own lives.
This seems odd in a culture and a cultural institution that makes sex more important than anything else, including life. Think not? The average television-watching kid will see on TV and at the movies X number of deaths most all of them bloody and violent, before reaching the age of 12. Yet the image of an erect penis placed in a movie or television show, let alone the full act of sex itself, with the even more taboo vagina, and the impossibly taboo entering of that vagina by that erect penis, an act from which these children emerged into their own family's biological reality, would be a criminal act more scandalous and and punishable than the poisoning of hundreds of children in some chemical accident caused by negligence and greed.
It's not debatable that this culture cares more about sex than death, cares in a nasty and hatefully vicious way - people still get nauseated by a woman breast-feeding her baby in a public place, especially a place like a restaurant. They're sickened because they were trained to be, conditioned before they could think clearly to hate and fear their own sexual natures, or accept them as they're shaped by the unseen hands of the deliverers of mediated sexuality. That this makes them easily manipulable, susceptible to the artificial sexuality of advertisements and media imagery, is beyond most victims' comprehension. It's just how things are, that's all.
So in a culture that values sex more than death, the death of its most central figure is celebrated and sex is completely absence from his narrative. Not only is sex absent, but the years of his sexual maturity and peak are missing, along with whatever else happened to and around him during those years.
Why?
There is no explanation given.
It's a trick. A means of manipulation that's wonderfully effective. Some aspects of that effectiveness have been explored here before. What I wanted to do was get this down while there was time.
Who's done this?
Who benefits?
Who benefits from the grafting of the Jesus story onto the history of the Jewish people as children of God, and central to the will of God in the world, in the Old Testament? Christians are made to feel they're the ones being addressed by the covenants and promises of the Old Testament, the speech of God to his people, yet the book is very clear that this is about the Jews and no one else, and it's only through intellectual contortions and lacunae-filled gymnastics that that can be transformed into a message for gentile believers.
Jesus, in the book as we receive it, was executed for defiantly teaching away from the book itself, toward something he continuously points to as higher and simpler truth, more vital than dogma and rule, changing the established codes, driving the corrupt and corrupting out of the temple, etc.
His execution, for blasphemy and rabble-rousing and subversion, is then transformed into an act of redemption, purposeful, inevitable and right, so that it is no longer a loss, a martyrdom, but a gain, the failure becoming a triumph. But the triumph leads right back to the book.
Yet there's nothing in the gospels that has Jesus himself grafting his teaching or what will become his narrative onto the self-worshiping testaments of the Jewish book. More in common with Isaiah, and Jeremiah and Zachariah, with their fiery condemnations than the bizarre legalisms and military celebrations of much of the rest of it, he speaks, in the little we have of his voice, toward something undefined and outside the received, and against the political and cultural reality of his time. And he's killed for it.
The unspoken, or mostly unspoken idea about the New Testament stuck onto the Old until they merge together is God wanted it that way, but it doesn't say so anywhere specifically in the book, and what little history I've stumbled on outside the archives gives a picture of a hunted people, hunted by Jew and Roman alike for the first decades after the death of their leader, with no literacy at all, and the assumption there would be an oral remembering, stories told and heard and told again. The idea of those stories including the begat begat begat begat triumphalism of Deuteronomy is absurd. The idea of Christian love and humility including the stoning of adulteresses side by side with the story of "cast the first stone" is illogical and absurd. Yet the Bible as Christians now carry it is mostly the Old Testament, pound for pound.
So somewhere in the centuries between the death of Christ and the Council of Nicea the narrative was codified and essentially set in stone and became what we have now, after much translation and re-translation and argument over inclusion and exclusion, as the Bible.
The magic version says only the will of God is represented here, that this is how the Supreme Being wanted the story told, but knowledge of other aspects of purported divinely-driven and obviously flawed codifications says it's a human thing. Done for human motive, which is always about biology, about survival and genetics and the long-term pay-off.
Who?
Why?
This isn't an answer or even an attempt to answer those questions, it's about the fact of the trick itself, the tricks themselves, which is so taboo it's blasphemy just to mention. Just as it was once blasphemy to question the right of adults to smoke tobacco everywhere they went. Just as we see now the beginnings of acceptance of what was once the blasphemy against the automobile, that the gases and poisons of its presence in our lives is not a good thing, but a bad thing, benefiting some of us in the short term, but harming most of us in the long run, and changing what we are, as an animal, a species of animal on earth. Something like but more than the sheep and goats and wolves and swine and other creatures we use to map our selves against the bright light of the larger world