[Salon] NEW SCRIPTURE

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Brenner, Michael <mbren@pitt.edu>
Date: Mon, Jan 6, 2025
Subject: NEW SCRIPTURE

Friends 

This report of stunning new revelations about Scripture was initially distributed to a select list on a confidential basis. Public release waited upon approval by civil authorities who feared the disorder that might be provoked by its appearance. That grant of approval has now been given by the White House. Acting in his capacity as “Leader of the Monotheistic World,” President Biden empaneled an extraordinary board of examiners - all men of impeccable credentials and integrity - charged with determining the authenticity of the documents and assessing the implications of making them generally known. Their recommendation: “Go for It.

Cheers

 Michael Brenner

      NEW OLD TESTAMENT

 

A remarkable find in the Sinai desert of ancient Biblical writings is dramatically revising established thinking about the origins of the great monotheistic religions. These parchment fragments dating from between the 9th and 7th centuries B.C. offer a radically new perspective on the Creation story as transcribed in received versions of Genesis.  Its most singular revelation is an account of the Divine inspiration that led to God’s epochal decisions regarding the forming of Man and Woman.

The discovery resulted from a misguided Hellfire missile fired by United States Special Forces operating in support of an Egyptian government operation that targeted militants of the Jaysh al-Islam, an al-Qaeda franchise.  The blast penetrated deep into a cave complex in the hillside on the north slope of the Mitla Pass. A search team send to recover the missile debris, so as to deny the terrorists the opportunity to retro-engineer its state-of-the-art precision guidance systems, stumbled upon a small clay amphora secreted in a rock crevice. Prying open the tightly sealed cap, they found bits of parchment with closely spaced writing in an indecipherable script.

 The fragments have been examined by a team of experts assembled at Fort Meade by the Pentagon’s Office of Collateral Damage. After months of meticulous labor, the reassembled short manuscript was studied by an elite group of Biblical scholars and philologists.  They determined that the script was an archaic version of Aramaic with an infusion of Phoenician vocabulary - modified and adapted by what apparently was a sect whose members called themselves The Truthers. Nothing more is known about them. From the date and location, it is believed that they had no connection to either the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Qumran sect or the Gnostic community of Nag Hammadi which emerged centuries later. Breaking the code was made possible by the application of an ultra-Top Secret Algorithm perfected by the NSA to generate a computer language impenetrable to China, Russia, Edward Snowden or the FBI.

The translation is attached. So, too, is a trove of other unique Biblical documents: an interview with Archangel Michael, a copy of the Testament of Jesus, a the long lost official wedding photo of Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden – and an historic interview with Jesus, his first since Calvary.

 

IN THE BEGINNING

In the beginning there was darkness. No matter. God said: let there be light. So, He formed a task force composed of the Archangels and instructed them to make a recommendation to Him by the first of the next eon. Their initial step was to assign each of them a cloud and to hire interns to provide support in depth. Their second step was to identify the alternatives: incandescent, fluorescent, halogen, LED. And God saw the light – that approach was not good. He instructed the task force to contract with a Consultant. The Consultant was installed on Cloud Nine. That was very good.

Three eons later, the Consultant’s report was delivered to the Heavenly Father who flipped the switch. There would be LED in the Upper Heavens, incandescent in Purgatory, and pulsating strobes in Hades. The Halogen option was rejected due to its heavy carbon footprint. That consensus conformed to the Diversity principle.  And God called the Heavens Day and Hades he called Night. Purgatory was named the Twilight Zone.

Then God moved on to the organization plan. He observed the Mixed-Use principle. He let the waters be gathered together unto one place; He called it Seas. He let the Dry Land appear; He called it Earth. Next came the landscaping. He brought forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree. He thought to bring forth weed as well – but the Archangels dissuaded Him from doing so for fear of antagonizing the Evangelical base. That was an omen.

God then created a great firmament of light and spangled the banner of Heaven with stars and a crescent. That was good. Then came the break-out: God created every living creature that moveth with life. He blessed them, saying be fruitful and multiply – develop commercial parks and shopping malls. He called that Progress.

On the sixth day God said: Let us make man in My image, after our likeness. Let man have dominion over every living creature that moveth on the land, in the seas and in Heaven. He called that Sub-Contracting.

He formed Man of the dust of the ground enriched by organic ingredients. He named him Adam, and set him amidst the bountiful Garden of Eden custom designed for the capstone of God’s creation. God admired the realm that He had created but there came unto Him an uneasiness. For He had instructed Adam to go forth into the Garden of Eden and be fruitful. As was for all other creatures, Adam could not multiply in solo. Nor could Adam be cloned. He needed a Female partner.

Belatedly God created Woman and named her Eve.  Now Adam had his significant other. The begetting began.

 And God observed everything He had made, and was greatly pleased. So far so good.

 But….

(Here the fragment ends in a jagged torn edge)

 ======================================================================================================================================

So tightly held has the epochal discovery been that the MSM were in the Dark until a few months ago.  A trickle of leaks from academic circles reached The New York Times via the Upper West Side cocktail party circuit. The editors contemplated a big follow-up to the story of the millennium that might include briefings by reliable Celestial sources. However, they were stymied by a call from the White House dissuading them from making public revelations that potentially could do serious harm to America’s national security. President Obama refrained from specifying those threats since they were classified Ultra Top Secret but did indicate that they concerned relations with prized allies in the Middle East. In response to queries from then Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief Dean Baquet claimed that the decision was based on the Board’s judgment that the national interest dictated the story be held until after the next election – the Papal election. So, it was an investigative team from the Onion that took the lead. Their enterprising reporters set out to fill in the blanks.

They were fortunate in catching up with Archangel Michael at the Milky Way transfer station between galaxies. He gave them an exclusive interview on a non-attribution basis – a qualification they characteristically have ignored. Here is what Michael confided:

“Mind you, the Heavenly Father lives with a lot of angst.  I overheard Him once  wistfully explaining to a bunch of us Archangels, ‘I Didn’t Have My Best Stuff On The 6th Day; In Retrospect, I Could Have Used An Extra Day’s Rest; All That Monkey Business on Friday Took More Out Of Me Than I Realized.’ That was when He decided to launch his big Outreach strategy via Prophets.

“HIS idea, when HE set the plan in motion, was to help retrieve his imperiled project. See, HE thought of humans as the living apex of the whole Creation scene.  HF was so immensely proud of His work through the first five days He wanted some intelligent beings who could appreciate it all, beings in situ as it were.  The thing HE didn’t expect was that these self-conscious beings would get so obsessed with their own identity, existence, mortality, etc.  For HIM, the answer of course was to merge themselves with the exquisite universe HE’d crafted.  They never got the hang of it. 

 ‘So, in the 6th century BME, HE went pro-active.  HF decided that humans needed some guides, and created a raft of them: Mahavira, Lao Tzu, Siddhartha, Zoroaster, Plato, Confucius.  A kind of surge for the soul.

 'They turned out to be a mixed bunch; even HE can’t keep Adam’s progeny from going off on crazy tangents.  Confucius set about composing recipes for a prosaic, earthly harmony advertised as the ‘be all and end all.’  Zoroaster picked up this trendy Manichean idea that was circulating around Persia and then really lost it with that fire-worship sorcery.  Plato’s fatal flaw was being too Greek – became compulsive about explaining everything in cerebral terms.  The guy was out of touch with the experiential. Then he takes himself off to Sicily where he aims to make himself Philosopher Capo. HF thought the Greeks were awesome in almost everything, but woefully wanting in religious imagination.  Only Lao Tzu and Siddhartha fulfilled HIS mission.  It wasn’t good enough, though.  They, too, ran into some heavy weather; besides, their territory was limited – after all, this was before the IT revolution.’

 “In a way, JC was HIS chosen guide for the Greater Middle East and the Mediterranean.  Sure, there had been Moses way back.  But talk about a headstrong Prophet!  He even railed against some of the Boss’s instructions.  One time, HF heard Moses muttering something about ‘backseat drivers.’   No surprise then that Moses cast HF as the heavy and used the fear factor to make his own career move.  For HF, the Israelites are something special – but not that special as to let them hijack the spiritual Superpower.’

The Book of Jesus

 The Onion’s other highly placed, anonymous source has given us an authoritative account of what came next: The Book of Jesus – where it is recorded:

“My mission was to inveigle HF’s roadmap for getting out of the human predicament into the religious sentiments of the spiritually hide-bound who dominated my assigned territory.  The key, as HE saw it, was a soft sell.  No doctrine, no fear-mongering, no name-calling, no come-ons - no GPS for the soul.  I was to embody the spiritual truth and hint at its mysteries.  The strategy wasn’t fool-proof; HF knew that.  It did look the best of bad choices.  I guess that I was given the lead role because I’d always been a laid-back sort of guy, did a lot of musing as a kid, had no liking for metaphysics and wasn’t big on ritual either. 

It was all rather sudden.  One moment I was taking a dip in the River Jordan with John the Baptist and when I came sputtering up to the surface, I felt a hand on my shoulder. Thought it was John handing me a towel. Next thing I know I’m the Son of God and Saviour of mankind. No orientation, no mentoring.

‘Well, you know the whole unhappy story.  HE doesn’t exactly blame me.  Just has a lot of regrets.  In my debriefing, HF pointed out – more with sorrow than anger – the mistakes I’d made.  My critical error, as he saw it, was surrounding myself with a bunch of spiritually impaired followers.  The ‘so-called Apostles’, as HE refers to them.  They never had a clue as to what I was about deep down.  Here we were, following a subtle strategy, when my salesmen were better suited for writing soap opera scripts. Perfect material for exploitation by the desiccated lot who merchandised them.’ 

 “The only two who HF thought amounted to anything were Thomas and Judas.  Thomas was by far the most spiritually attuned.  His writings were half-way there.  Pity that he was so conflict averse that he exiled himself from where the action was.    India of all places!  Buddhism already was well-established thanks to the big breakthrough with Ashoka.  Thomas winds up converting Malabar Hindus; the only thing they held onto was caste.’

 “Judas was another story.  I tried to force feed him HF’s message when I realized what a jam I was in.  It was a ‘Hail Mary’ try (if you’ll excuse the _expression_) that almost worked.  Judas, though, was too spiritually dense to plumb those depths.  His ‘Gospel’ is maddeningly confused and inconsistent.  Also, the poor guy got such a swollen head about my making him my own prophet that he lost track of how to sell the message.  The others ran roughshod over him.’

 “Then there was Mary Magdalene.  A sore point for HF – and for me.  HE takes me to task for not seeing what an asset she could be.  The pieces were all there.  A working class woman who achieves spiritual eminence; a human love affair that gets transmuted into an elevation of two souls; a living rebuke to the ‘desert flagellants’ who had made something sinful of humans’ God-given sexuality; a demonstration of how the mix of love, sensuality, beauty and insight into the nature of the universe could lift the spirits to where HIS design could be perceived.  I blew it.   I was too scared at being head over heels in love with a woman while on such a delicate mission.  A Tantrist I wasn’t.’

“The mission was pretty much a lost cause by the time they crucified me.  That wasn’t in HF’s script.  He planned to have me plant the seeds of spiritual insight as long as Lao Tzu and Siddhartha had.  How it ended, by then, would have been unimportant, I’d just peter-out.  Provoking the priests and Pilate was not a brilliant idea.  It wasn’t intentional, but I should have been more prudent.  I guess that, as a rube from the sticks, I just let the Jerusalem scene go to my head.’ 

“Sometimes, we prophets get together and reminisce.  Kind of like veterans who swap war stories.  Funny how we’ve kept figments of our earthly character.   Moses, Mohammed and me (the ‘people of the scalpel’ as Mohammed calls us) still have sand in our espadrilles. Maybe that’s why HF prefers to hang out with the Oriental guys and a couple of their Sufi pals when HE’s in the mood for company.  Those two, to this day, pass around the ganja even as HF joshes them that they’re already HERE.”

AMEN

FINDING JESUS

This recounting has been confirmed by Jesus himself. That encounter occurred under bizarre circumstances. I found Jesus by sheer chance.  I stumbled across him in the deep recesses of my psyche.  Literally.  He was stretched out, recumbent in the shadows cast by my astral self.  I had been rummaging amidst the detritus of my subconscious searching for the ‘inner me.’  What a let-down; the ‘inner me’ bore an uncanny resemblance to the ‘outer me’.   At that dispiriting moment I tripped over Jesus.  Not at all like the dramatic encounter of George W. Bush who found Jesus at cold dawn in Karl Rove’s office.

 He was instantly recognizable from his many publicity photos.  But his brown eyes were sadder, his beard scraggily even by prophetic standards and his countenance betrayed a certain wariness.  Jesus kept glancing furtively over his shoulder as if a man pursued. He returned my casual greeting with a fulsome apology for taking up residence in my psyche.   It seems that the Savior can’t stand loud rock music or the noisy intrusions of sweaty egos on the hunt for self-justification.  That narrowed the range of choices, especially when on the lam and harried.

Without any prodding, Jesus told me what was up.  As he recounted things:

“Bergoglio is on my tail.  The Holy Father is obsessed by the Evangelicals’ threat to the Church’s dominant market share in Latin America.  Seems the Curia has come up with the nutty idea that for its fortunes to reverse. I should make a Second Coming – at a time and place of their choosing.  Their preference is Mardi Gras in Rio.  I’m supposed to descend from the Heavens and samba my way into their wayward souls.  I sent a pro-forma response that I was a lousy dancer who surely would lose for the Catholics that part of their faithful who hadn’t left them yet.  They were awestruck to learn that the son of God has no sense of rhythm.  These guys are under the impression that I spent my formative years in Galilee at disco bars.’

 “Their back-up plan was arriving as a bolt of lightning during the hotly disputed Super Classico between Boca Juniors and River Platte in Madrid.  They imagined the match tied after overtime with me popping up at midfield just as the goal shoot-out begins.  Jesus the peacemaker and conciliator bringing the two sides to embrace each other in an _expression_ of Love for the Heavenly Father. Boy, would that stick it to the Pentecostals – or so he thought.  Imagine!  A stunt like that would leave me sporting ecumenical cleat marks from here to Eternity.  Stigmata, as I’m sure the boys would pronounce them.   The whole scheme was cooked up by the Vatican’s trendy new-age public relations outfit on Piazza Santa Spirito in Milano; styled themselves on Bremer/Brown in D.C., I’m told.’

 “WE owe the papal crowd nothing.  The Heavenly Father cut all ties after that outrageous power grab at Nicaea.  For HIM it was the last straw. They had the chutzpah to declare a selection of stories a so-called ‘canon.’  As if the WORD was theirs to play around with, not HIS.  They were using HIM as the foundation stone for a new Roman Imperium.  ‘Rending God to serve Caesar,’ HE fumed.”

The words tumbled from Jesus’ lips.  His distress obviously went back much further than the game of roadrunner and coyote he was playing with Bergoglio.  His eyes turned inward and, with a sigh, Jesus confessed that “It hasn’t been a garden of roses since Calvary.  Sure, I have a choice condo on Cloud 9 with a glorious view over the Elysian Fields.  Even the son of God, though, doesn’t live by ambrosia and nectar alone.  The truth is that HF feels I messed up pretty badly.  HE is not the type to hold a grudge, but His body language when HE sees me tells it all.  Forgiveness is one thing; forgetting is another.’  

 

ADAM & EVE NUPTIALS