-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
That was the answer from a Hobby Lobby employee when asked where the Hanukkah goods were. The response was explained with a call to the Marlboro, New Jersey store: “Because Mr. Green is the owner of the company, he’s a Christian, and those are his values.” Hobby Lobby is an Oklahoma-based private company founded by David Green, who is known for applying “Christian values” in the running of his company. Christian hatred of Judaism and Jews has many origins, one of which can be found in the New Testament. While the Romans actually crucified Jesus, it is the Jews who have gotten the blame. The Gospels turned out to be good news for the Romans.
The tales of the final days in Jesus’ life are found in the three synoptic gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, the latter two copied extensively from Mark, generally considered to have been written first.
We pick up the trail with Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin, the 71-member supreme court of the Jewish nation, which took place in the home of Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest. This scenario has several problems pointed out by eminent Jewish scholars:
1) The Sanhedrin only met the Chamber of the Hewn Stone in the Temple.
2) The Sanhedrin never met at night, contrary to the 9 PM-10 PM arrest of Jesus after the Passover supper and the prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane.
3) It is simply inconceivable that the Sanhedrin met on Passover. The Sanhedrin had a strict rule of no council meetings on the Sabbath and on religious feast days, such as Passover.
4) The Sanhedrin pronounced the death sentence immediately, instead of waiting the prescribed twenty four hours.
5) Caiaphas accused Jesus of blasphemy for Jesus’ claim to be the “Son of the Blessed One.” However, use of this phrase was no capital crime.
These errors show that the author of Mark knew nothing about the rules regarding the Sanhedrin and it practices, or the crime of blasphemy. The trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin is pure fiction setting up the whitewash of the Roman participation in Jesus’ death.
The whitewash continues with Pilate’s attempt to make use of a custom in which one prisoner, of a crowd’s choice, is released during Passover. There is no historical evidence that such a custom ever existed, it is fiction intended to shift blame onto the Jewish crowd, who chose Barrabas. Barrabas is Aramaic for “Son of the Father,” and is also named Jesus in early manuscripts of Matthew. The freeing of “Son of the Father” and the sacrifice of the real Son of the Father is a literary device about atonement that parallels the Yom Kippur ceremony of Leviticus 16, the Jewish ritual of the scapegoat and atonement.
We next visit the Joseph of Arimathea narrative. Joseph was a member of the Sanhedrin, who offered his tomb for Jesus’ burial, from the town of Arimathea whose location is unknown and is nowhere else recorded. As pointed out by historian Dr. Richard Carrier, “Matheia means ‘disciple town’ in Greek; Ari- is a common prefix for superiority.” Arimathea can be read as “best disciple town,” an obvious pun by the writer of Mark. Joseph of Arimathea is a fictional character.
The Gospel of Mark is a work of fiction by an author who wanted to shift the blame of Jesus’ death away from the Romans. The only other players in this drama who could be blamed were the Jews. After two thousand years, the Jews are still getting the blame. Any claim that the Jews were a contributing factor in the death of Jesus is not historic. If Christians hate Jews, they’ll have to find another reason.
Click on the Watch on YouTube button to see an amazing video series about the parallels of Mark and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey:
H/T: Ken Berwitz, Paul Tobin, Peter Kirby, Richard Carrier, PZ Myers.
Bron
1, October 6, 2013 at 1:22 pm
a corporation is not an individual but it is owned by individuals or a specific individual.
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…..and since the Federal government never gives subsidies or extraneous financial consideration to ‘prvately’ owned (and stock market supported) entities we should all breath a sigh of relief about THAT reality… 😉
(…cause I don’t wanna pay for those corporate fiscal abortions anymore…..)
a corporation is not an individual but it is owned by individuals or a specific individual. these individuals have the right to determine the standards by which their business is operated [obviously within the law]. you as an individual have the right to not work for them and to not patronize their establishment.
I don’t get it, G*d is not an uber-gangster and I don’t understand those who think that behaving like warring faction gangs would be anything but anathema…..it is not even comprehensible.
…and Lottakatz is right, ideally what Tony C. said but the reality is far from that and our so called separation of church and state is being used to force individual rights out of the picture….Corporations are not people and I doubt there is a Corporation anywhere that employs only those of a single religion…and if there is…. it is a discriminatory practice and a cauldron of discrimination waiting to boil over at that……
Ross S. Heckmann –
“I would concede that the employee’s alleged choice of words was pretty bad.”
Bad is an understatement. It was vieled anti-semitism.
http://youtu.be/8unqrdurxyg
As for who said it, the employee’s mouth may have been moving, but it’s the owner who does the hiring and the training. The employee said that crap because the owner says it and encourages it, and it’s likely he deliberately hires only those who agree with it. If the owner actually does discourage and oppose anti-semitism and other bigotry, then the owner did a lousy job of hiring and training.
limey says: Proving the existence of the spirit, however, is relatively easy.
Obviously it isn’t, and in fact disproving the existence is pretty easy. The entire collection of all the things that have been attributed to the “spirit” have, at one time or another, been taken away from oner person or another by killing parts of their physical brain; sometimes by physical injury, but, more tellingly, by tumors (which because they grow from small to large tend to cause very localized damages before being treated, removed, or causing death).
I am not opposed to using the term “spirit” as a metaphorical label for the characteristics of a person that seem persistent in their life, but those characteristics are, at bottom, an intricate arrangement of neurons and synaptic gaps. Although they may be robust in the sense of lasting many decades, they can be destroyed by injury or disease or being starved of oxygen or nutrients. They are not supernatural, millions of brain tumors popping up in every imaginable locale within the brain prove that. As do millions of Alzheimer’s patients, as their relatives, watching a loved one slowly lose their essence to a disease, will attest with tears.
The “being” is not infinitely greater than a biological process, it is a biological process. I see no reason for that to cause distress, and no reason to be so dismissive of a “biological process” to the point of denigrating it.
I don’t care if people are 90% bacteria or filled with various forms of rather repellent fluids and puddings. That does not matter to me, and should not matter to you. They do not have to be made of some light emitting perfect substance, nor do they have to be permanent or flawless, to be valued and loved, to contribute positively to the well-being of others. I think what we are made of is unimportant, it is what we do with our finite time on the stage that counts.
Jesus was a Jew… Born a Jew and died a Jew…. It was not until the third century that the so called Catholics …. Which means universal….. Denounced the Jewish heritage…. All of the. Gospels are written 40 to 220 years after death….
The day that Jesus was arrested… Was a Jewish high holy day….. As well as the next day….
I’ve said before… history is His Story… The last man standing…..
I’m appalled that the owner would take this attitude since it’s sales….. I had heard someplace that he was going to close all of his stores because of obomacare…..
The word “cater” when used in that sentence means that We don’t jump through hoops for y’all. Not that we don’t serve you at the lunch counter. There is a big difference. Catering to the Muslim Brotherhood would mean the store would sell turbans or tenthead hats. Catering to Baptists would mean they would go out of their way to find crosses with little chains on them. Catering to catolics would mean selling rosaries or not selling condoms.
Know what I mean jelly bean?
There has never been & probably never will be the slightest proof for the existence of of an in-charge capital G god. Proving the existance of the spirit, however, is relatively easy. It amazes me how feeble & low tone the three ‘God religions’ make their God. Even the frequently cited Christian idea that life begins at conception is demeaning of the spirit of man, equating the being to a biological process; the being is infinitely greater than that,
On the topic of the historical accuracy of the Gospels, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach has a great book called Kosher Jesus. He describes Jesus as a patriotic rebel against the Romans; Boteach also takes to task various inaccuracies and misrepresentations of Jewish law that are found in the Gospels. On a positive note he connects New Testament teachings by Jesus to the Old Testament–Jesus was a scholar and knew the Torah and Talmud thoroughly. Boteach argues that anything Jesus said that could be construed as separating him from Judaism is a rewriting by the New Testament writers to keep the Romans from aiming their ire at them (as one reason).
One thing I think he leaves out is the first century AD/CE evidence of Jewish evangelism. There is some debate about that, but I don’t think it is too far-fetched.
Prairie Rose,
I’ve met and had serious discussion with Rabbi Shmuly on two occasions he is a smart man and a warm human being.
Neither the employee or the owner of Hobby Lobby sound very Christian to me.
Mr. Drumm, thank you for your clarification. I of course concede as I must that there has been Christian hatred of Jewish persons. However, I don’t think it can be founded upon a reasonable interpretation of the Bible in general or the Gospels in particular. The Gospel accounts merely describe a group of people who abused their power. It is true that they happened to be Jewish but there is nothing in the Gospels to indicate that their abuse of power arose out of something peculiar to Judaism or Jewishness. The Gospel account shows that the Romans also abused their power. The Gospel of Luke alludes to a massacre committed by the Romans through Pontius Pilate. (Luke 13:1.) The Gospel of Luke records John the Baptist’s demands that Roman soldiers and tax collectors not engage in extortion or theft. (Luke 3:12-14.)
I don’t think Christian hatred of Jewish persons arose out of something peculiar to Christianity (though of course those guilty of such hatred have tried to use it as an excuse). Sadly, groups of people have hated other groups of people from time out of mind; the only difference is the peculiar ways people try to rationalize their hatred.
Additionally, I don’t really think that the inaccuracy of the Gospels has been demonstrated. There are things that you and some of the other commentators think are implausible, but I still don’t see why things couldn’t have happened the way there were said to.
“I of course concede as I must that there has been Christian hatred of Jewish persons. However, I don’t think it can be founded upon a reasonable interpretation of the Bible in general or the Gospels in particular.”
Ross S. Heckmann,
I think you are being coy because there was a reason I used to get called “Christ Killer” in high school and it had to do with the story presented in the gospels. Something about the Jews agreeing that Jesus death would be on their hands and their children’s hands. What happened to all the Jews who had so recently welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem with cheers. Were the Jews back then a fickle lot…..or what?
I did not know that Hobby Lobby was in the catering business.
I am here on Earth from Remulak to study the humanoid specie and the ant specie. My guide back on Remulak is deciding on what to populate another planet with, man or ant. Or both. We know that we can insert a humanoid specie on that planet sans the religion on day one. But we do not think that man will not develop religion in short order, even if we instill some science knowledge from day one. Ants, on the other hand do not fall for such mouse turd stuff such as religion.
Of course most of you think that I am just jiving you. We are from France is our motto when pressed on our place of origin. Ou sous trouve une toilet suil vous plaite. Or however ya spull it. One thing I do notice is that the major religions all put differing head coverings on the guide dogs. The catolics wear beanies, the muslims where turbans or tents, the jews have funny hats hard to describe. Not sure about Bhuddists or Hindu. That area of the world is my next stop. After I stop by France for some food.
rafflaw, I would concede that the employee’s alleged choice of words was pretty bad. The wording proposed by brindlethorpe would have been much better manners. It is possible that Mr. Green doesn’t carry these goods because he thinks it would mean that he would in some way be helping to advance a religion with which he himself has material disagreements. I personally wouldn’t draw the line where he does, but I think we can all at least hypothesize a case in which we would not want to sell certain goods because of a perception that the goods would end up advancing something with which we disagree. While I think the message should have been conveyed in a more mannerly way, I don’t think there is enough evidence there to prove that Mr. Green is guilty of hatred.
David Green is the guy that threatened to close down all of his stores rather than comply with the ACA due to his christian principles regarding contraception. He’s a real sweetheart. While the insensitive clerk dusting customers off with “We don’t cater to you people” wasn’t exactly a horse’s mouth statement, not best testimonial evidence in a court, I’d not consider it a statement reflecting an attitude unknown to Mr. Green. It’s just a feeling I get:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=689137
and
Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius is ongoing along with many (60) other suits:
“In June, an all-male majority of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the Greens and ruled that corporations have religious rights equal to living, breathing humans. The panel of judges said that asking Hobby Lobby to provide contraception coverage would violate the corporation’s religious freedom under federal law.”
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/civil-liberties/report/2013/10/01/76033/hobby-lobby-v-sebelius-crafting-a-dangerous-precedent/
*
I used to think ‘Religion? Angels and demons, creation myths, high priests and low hucksters ruling peoples lives in the name of such hoodoo in the 20th century? That’s why we (as a species) can’t have nice things.’ The only thing that’s changed is the century. Religion is a millstone holding progress and enlightenment back. Bah, humbug.
My interpretation is that Pilate was a weak & easily manipulated man guilty of judicial murder in order to take care of his own political problems.
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is it just me or does that describe the last couple of texas governors?
“an amazing video series about the parallels of Mark and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey”
Among the things I am indebted to Mike S. is a recommendation to read “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell.
The takeaway: religions should be mythconstrued.
So where is tootie and his/her pathetic attempts to claim the store owners “aren’t christians”?
Gene: I thought we used the same Pagan calender. The sex holidays are clearly marked! Or, have you abandoned all lack of faith?!?
Tony C: Points c) and d) of your post are the salient point here. As much as I abhor Hobby Lobby in general (their Christian proclivities are nothing new; I was in one in Texas once and the music being played through the sound system were all Baptist hymns), when push comes to shove this is a private business and the owner of that business has the right to stock whatever items he thinks will sell best. Hobby Lobby doesn’t ban Jews. There are no signs saying ‘Jews go home’. Now. If this were a franchise store on, say a Naval base, then there would be a problem. But as long as it is a private business, they are free to carry whatever sells. They might be missing a segment of the population by so doing, but that’s their choice as well as their right. I would bet there are no Ramadan ornaments or statues of Krishna, or Kwanza candles either.