Regarding Vic Alexander's "Story of Jesus From His Own Words"

I do whatever I can to support Victor Alexander's translating of the ancient Aramaic Bible. This is self-serving: I want to know as closely as I can what the ancients actually said, and I know that the Hebrew text has been extensively edited and that the Western versions of the Bible are hardly worth squat doctrinally. Only their page numbers are true. I use Bullinger's Companion Bible as a reference to where things are. That, and Bullinger wrote his own Bible in the companion margin (read the right text, not the left text). I want Alexander to get on with it!

I am neither blind nor untrained in biblical translation and interpretation. I know that Alexander's translations have some problems: they are idiomatic and not literal, and Alexander himself has a conservative, historical-literalist perspective. Nevertheless, his are a step up from deceptive translations (yes, they intentionally aim to deceive you) of corrupted texts. Deceptive how? They intimate a dualistic reality and inculcate a false worldview: that God is separate from us, distant and far. Were there a hell, they would burn in it.

So I got a copy of Story of Jesus From His Own Words. It isn't like I don't know the story of Jesus, but hey, support Vic. For myself, I am glad I did. What I learned was worth the bucks. I have always had a problem with 'Allaha.' Why not just go with 'God' and know that it means more to us that its original 'Good'? No, explains Alexander, Allaha represents the Allahoota, the whole Godhead -- Godhood itself: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God doesn't parcel himself out like we do to him: Allaha is the whole entity, and we are in it. I just got my money's worth. The rest is gravy.

The rest is not as I supposed it would be, a more scholarly discussion on the words Jesus (Eashoa) used to describe himself. It is more a compilation of passages from the Gospels, the Epistles, and the Old Testament which present the picture of who Jesus was and is. I was not disappointed, but I had to be understanding. Vic is neither a theologian nor an esotericist. He is a translator, and a damn fine one at that. He knows the ancient Aramaic and cuneiform languages. What he reads is the impression he gets, and the Story of Jesus From His Own Words reflects his reading -- literal human characters, Satan, and all. If you read as I, parsing the symbols embedded in the stories, you will have to do that here, too. Alexander does not interpret; he reports: this is what the Bible says about Jesus. You will get a much better understanding of what the Bible actually says about Jesus here than you might get just reading your Bible.

One thing the Bible does not say about Jesus in the Old Testament is that his name is Jesus, or in the Aramaic, Eashoa. Alexander understands 'Eashoa' to mean 'the Life-Giving, Living Branch' (see his comments on Mark 1: 1 in his New Testament). This is not really different from my understanding of 'Jesus' meaning 'Yah, Saving' (my take from Bullinger, comments on Israel in Genesis 32: 28, in which God is the doer (!) of the verb portion of the name). You just got your money's worth out of reading this post.

Here are two things that are really, really fine gravy to me:

'Moshiach' means 'anointed,' and is an adjective. It is an act of consecration. The idea comes up (for me) in the Book of Jeremiah in the announcement of the seventy years of captivity in Babylon (chapters 23-25 and 29), and in the Book of Daniel in the explanation of the seventy sevens (chapter 9). The anointed was the whole period of the seventy sevens -- an epoch of Israel's history, not a man. The anointed is not a person other than you. THAT was the whole point of it: He anoints YOU for a season, and then the extra bennies are cut off and you have to stand on your own faithfulness, your own integrity. Per Rehnborg, the exemplary person known as 'Jesus' did, and died, and was seen again risen by 'Peter' and 'Paul.' Excuse me while I cry.

The second new information I got from the book was that the person Marqus, who wrote the Book of Mark, took on the name John (perhaps out of respect for another John, or to associate the meaning of the word with himself and his ministry) and is the source, if not the author, of the Book of John. Yes, take it with a grain of salt. This, as I understand it, is what Alexander understands to have happened. I love it, because I believe Marqus (and ALEXANDER DOES NOT AGREE WITH ME) to have been an Indian Therapeut (a Buddhist missionary healer of those sent out by Ashoka) who came to understand the thought and intention of Moses in the Torah, and subsequently attempted in the last days of the anointing upon the nation to inform the Jews of what their scriptures were really about. Marqus invented the Jesus of scripture from the inspiration of either or both Gautama and the exemplary character who may have been his teacher of BIBLICAL Judaism. (See the Christian Lindtner Theory: Lindtner detects underlying Sanskrit works in Mark; http://www.jesusisbuddha.com/.)

Marqus, by the way, would have meandered over a period of many years from India to Judea and perhaps to Alexandria in Egypt. Much of that time may have been spent in Persia, where he might have been much influenced by Zoroastrianism with its Azure Mazda God of Good and Evil -- the source of Satan and hell in his philosophy and understanding of Jeremiah's good figs and bad fig -- thus placing them (Satan and hell) in our Bible. As I read Genesis, the serpent was our "ignorancing," and we did it to ourselves.

It is kind of weird: I have read all the New Testament and Bible, of course, and none of the material should be new to me, but Alexander's arrangement and comments have tweaked and illumined my understanding of what I thought I knew was the story of 'Jesus.' No regrets.