THOUGH IT is true that there is much we do not know of the past, the same can be said of the ancients—there is much they did not know of themselves. While the Macedonian king advanced towards ancient Babylon, he couldn’t have possibly comprehended that time as we know...
Noel Joshua Hadley
Alexander & the City of Immortals | #4 Pharaoh, Avatar of Egypt, and His Household of Ascended Masters
THE AGE OF HELLENISM INEVITABLY BROUGHT the cult of Demeter at Eleusis to international fame. The Eleusinian mysteries were so well-financed and world renowned that other religions explicitly rebranded themselves through the efforts of her initiates. This is of course...
Alexander & the City of Immortals | #3 Alexandria, Spiritual Bread and Butter of the World
ROME WAS LITTLE MORE THAN A VILLAGE when Philip II of Macedonia went to war with the Persians. The year was 336 BC. In turn, Darius III had the king of Macedonia assassinated. He would come to regret that decision. At just twenty years of age, his son began the most...
Alexander & the City of Immortals | #2 The Soul Lives On in the Fields of Eleusis
“The living are ruled by the dead” — Elysian Neophyte SHE WAS MINDING HER OWN BUSINESS, PICKING FLOWERS on a spring day, when the young Persephone was brutally raped and abducted by a god. When she didn’t return home, her mother went looking for her. She too...
Alexander & the City of Immortals
Visions of Homer, the Blind Bard of Ionia HIS OWN precious copy of Homer was safely locked in a golden casket, which he furthermore clutched between his fingers, when Alexander the Great stood along the Egyptian shore. Alexander had in mind a grand city which...
“The Contagious Superstition” | #4 Are Christians Stupid? Celsus Thought So (and Even While Defending Them, Origen Agreed)
NOT A SINGLE COPY OF CELSUS’ BOOK SURVIVES. This is due to the astonishing fact that Christian emperor Valentinian III, tag-teaming with Archbishop Theodosius, ordered in 448, and successfully saw to it, that every copy of The True Doctrine was destroyed. Then again,...
“The Contagious Superstition” | #3 When Origen of Alexandria Rocked the Cradle of Christianity
THE DAWN OF YET ANOTHER CENTURY WAS ALREADY AFOOT, and what better way to celebrate it than with a high tide of persecutions against the superstitious faith? The year was 202 when Emperor Severus’ orders found their way to the doorstep of Origen’s childhood home. The...
“The Contagious Superstition” | #2 Celsus, Orator of Rome, and the True Doctrine
MORE BAD NEWS FOR CHRISTIANS EVERYWHERE—the year was 175 or perhaps 180, when along came a man, and his name was Celsus. Christianity’s first noted intellectual tormenter had likely been raised in a Jewish home, possibly even Christian. He had been on the inside. He...
“The Contagious Superstition” | #1 Second Century Christian Atheists and Pliny the Younger’s Cure-All
AMONG THE MANY DECORATIVE ACCUSATIONS heaved upon the infant Christian faith, one particular claim was presented, rather early on, which can be deemed as true. Christians refused to worship the gods. As early as 111 AD, Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia along...
Death, the Afterlife, the Shape of the Earth and Job | #9 The Darkened Council of Job’s Three Friends
IN A WAY, JOB AND HIS THREE FRIENDS were severely handicapped intellectuals. When Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar heard of the evil that had befallen him, they made an appointment together to mourn at his side. We quickly read: “When they lifted up their eyes, afar off,...
Death, the Afterlife, the Shape of the Earth and Job | #8 “Can You Measure the Breadth of the Earth…?”
TO SAY “KANSAS IS AS FLAT AS A PANCAKE” would be to speak an inaccuracy, for Kansas, you see, is flatter than a pancake. Actually, according to the meticulous research and findings of Dr. Dobson and Campbell, it’s only the ninth flattest state in the continental...
Death, the Afterlife, the Shape of the Earth and Job | #7 If Job Were Alive, People Would Listen
IT IS NO SECRET THAT JOB, LIKELY WRITTEN centuries before the Law of Moses, is a flat earth book. Geocentricism abounds. But there’s far more to Job than most contemporary connoisseurs of Scripture are willing to admit. Theologians have long noted that Job ascribed to...
Death, the Afterlife, the Shape of the Earth and Job |#6 “I Know My Redeemer Lives…” The Gospel of Jesus Christ
WE ARE GIVEN NO INDICATION THAT JOB DISAGREED with Bildad and Zophar’s descriptions of the dead man for the very reason that Job wished to heap such an existence, if we can even define it in such terms, upon himself. Whereas Zophar embossed our minds with imagery of...
Death, the Afterlife, the Shape of the Earth and Job | #5 A People of Dung… Devoured by the Unfanned Flame
IT WAS ZOPHAR THE NAAMATHITE’S TURN TO SPEAK. Though the loftiness of the wicked reaches the heavens, he assured his friends, they are at best delusional, for the limits of the Almighty are as high as the heavens, His measure longer than the earth, and His depths...
Death, the Afterlife, the Shape of the Earth and Job | #4 There Are No Names Among the Street Corners of Fire and Brimstone
IT WAS BILDAD THE SHUHITE’S TURN TO SPEAK. Fire and brimstone mark the former habitation of the wicked, he told the suffering Job. To this we may rightly conclude, where there is fire and brimstone, there are no people. Job and his friends held no persuasion to the...
Death, the Afterlife, the Shape of the Earth and Job | #2 “From Womb to Tomb…” Sheol, My Home—and Worms Are Its Inhabitants
AFTER DISASTER FELL UPON THE MAN FROM UZ, we quickly read, “Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth (Job 3:1).” Among his few loyal friends, Job wailed: 9 “Let the stars of its twilight be darkened; Let it wait for light but have none, And let it not see...
Death, the Afterlife, the Shape of the Earth and Job | #1 Poor Job (An Introduction)
“Oh that my words were written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book!” (Job 19:23) FOR THE MEDIEVAL COMMENTATOR, HE WAS A LEPER, while some modern scholars’ finger scurvy as the culprit. And it has been suggested that no less than fourteen diseases are attributed to...
The Complete Death and Total Destruction of Jesus Christ | #5 Who Raised Jesus from the Grave?
UPON HIS OWN DEATH A MILLENNIA EARLIER, King David would, as he himself wrote, “go down into silence.” It is David who once penned: “for there is no mention of you in death. In Sheol who will give you thanks? (Psalm 6:5).” The writer of 1 Kings records: “So David...
The Complete Death and Total Destruction of Jesus Christ | #4 He Received Our Punishment in Full Measure (An Insult to the Sinner and the Saved)
IF THE TRUE SACRIFICIAL DEATH OF JESUS IS UNTHINKABLE, it is only because human religion has made it permissible to find dogmatic detours and attain the alternative. That the only begotten Son of God should become flesh, grow and mature as a man, suffer as a man, and...
The Complete Death and Total Destruction of Jesus Christ | #3 He “Gave Up the Ghost…” (and Returned to God)
CONFUSION OFTEN SURROUNDS THE DISSIMILARITIES between soul and spirit, and yet the Bible gives us a clear distinction. If the theologian has his way, Christ’s conscious ghost immediately left His body at the cross. Whether He ascended or descended to heaven in the...
The Complete Death and Total Destruction of Jesus Christ | #2 He Died Two Times, or “Dying, He Died”
NOW FROM THE SIXTH HOUR UNTIL THE NINTH HOUR, precisely 12 noon until 3 pm in Roman time, Matthew records darkness over the whole land while Jesus hung on the device of His crucifixion. It was about the ninth hour, he wrote, when Jesus cried in a loud voice: “Eli,...
The Complete Death and Total Destruction of Jesus Messiah
PONTIUS PILATE washed his hands of the entire affair. The trial of Jesus had likely been conceived by all parties involved, both His accusers and authorities, as a kangaroo court. Jesus was a non-citizen of Rome, which entitled him to no rights before the law...
Two Mules for Naaman’s Cosmic Turf War
ONE CANNOT help but wonder, in the midst of his desperation, if the honorable captain of the kings host in Syria had already gashed himself with knives, perhaps even commissioning others to perform the sacred rites, only to be told by the high-priest that Baal was...
Truth or Beauty…? | #2 Saint Jerome: Sacred Souls Severed by the Pagan and Profane
THE MAN RESPONSIBLE FOR TRANSLATING the bulk of Hebrew Scripture into the Latin text we know today as the Vulgate never could erase the guilt of his lifelong love affair with Virgil, Plato, Cicero, and Homer. Like the sarcophagus of Heine’s dream some fifteen-hundred...
Truth or Beauty…? | #1 Heinrich Heine’s Eternal Love Affair (and Tug-of-War) with Venus
HEINRICH HEINE WAS NOT WELL. In May of 1848, the German-Jewish writer, known for his lyric poetry set to music by such composers as Schumann and Schubert, suddenly fell paralyzed. Heine would not recover. Further musings were confined to bed, a sickly pulpit for the...
“On the Far Side Banks of Jordan…”
THE LONGER I’VE BEEN IN THE FAITH; THE MORE I MATURE; and the firmer I become on various doctrinal positions—everything from eschatology and cosmology to graceology and doxology—I find myself succumbing to an ever-deepening fear of the Lord on the understanding, and...
Eyewitness Testimony to The SEA-SERPENT | “Mystical Creatures,” Charles Gould (1886)
"On the dark bottom of the great salt lake Imprisoned lay the giant snake, With naught his sullen sleep to break." Poets of the North, Oelenschlaeger. THAT frank writer, Montaigne, says:— “Yet on the other side it is a sottish presumption to disdain and condemn that...
“De Sun Do Move and De Earth Am Flat” — Reverend John J. Jasper (a Sermon)
IT IS CERTAINLY remarkable to consider that preaching was expressly prohibited among blacks during the first 25 years of Reverend Jasper's ministry, and yet the Southern gentleman preached. For more than fifty years of his life, John J. Jasper was a slave. Regardless,...
“Jesus Wept…” Trapped in the Tomb of the Sleeping Death (the Truth of Lazarus & John 11)
“For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks?” (Psalm 6:5) LAZARUS WAS NOT WELL. BUT THAT’S SOMEWHAT of an understatement. Fact is, Lazarus was dying, and everybody knew it. His sisters Mary and Martha sent a currier...
“Go Serve Other Gods…” The Biblical Worldview of King David (1 Samuel 26)
THE KILLING of the Philistine giant Goliath by the shepherd boy David did not go over nearly as well as one might expect. The initial twist to the plot is that the King of Israel wanted the child whom the Prophet Samuel had anointed dead. There were of course other...