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The current abhorrence with which radical Islam is today held by much of the Christian and Jewish world reveals something rather more significant, I think, than either religious intolerance or smug superiority. Embarrassment. The embarrassment of recognition. For in the wild lunacies of fundamentalist Islam both recognize something of the same zealotry which underlies the Jewish and the Christians faiths alike, but which normative Judaism and Christianity have, for the most part, disavowed, or tried to disavow. I refer here not to current examples of either extreme Jewish or Christian zealotry, though of course such examples are not wanting, (abortion clinic bombings, terrorist attacks on gay nightclubs, the attacking of Federal government buildings, etc.; how soon we forget!), --these momentary flare-ups of right-wing zealotry merely being symptoms of a deeper, underlying disorder. Rather, I refer to the origins of Islam as an offshoot of early Jewish-Christian zealot sects in the Near East, sects which both the Rabbinic Jews and the Pauline Christians completely disavowed and in fact tried to suppress, ---but which went on to directly influence Mohammed and his zealous doctrines as reflected in the Koran. The disavowal of the Jewish Zealots by Judaism was gradual, but virtually complete after the Zealots’ armies and leaders were decimated by Rome. There were, of course, occasional flare-ups of zealotry, as in Hassidic Judaism, the Karaites, in certain undercurrents preserved in medieval Jewish Cabbalism, and of course in the modern right-wing Zionist movement, but in general modern Judaism is basically inimical to the apocalyptic visions which nearly lead to its complete annihilation in the first and second centures C.E.. As for the Christians, an inimicality to Zealotry was part of Pauline Christianity from its very beginnings, as one would of course expect from Paul’s numerous Herodian familial and personal connections. Indeed, Paul’s Christianity, which still persists today, originated within the context of a polemical dispute between Paul and Jesus’ Zealot followers, Jesus’ doctrines being retrospectively altered in the New Testament to make them conform to the anti-Zealot line which was taken by Paul in his earlier teachings. Jesus, under Paul, thereby became a friend to Roman Centurions, his parables being used to cement subservience to Roman law, and the payment of Roman taxes. The opposite tendency, --seen throughout history--, of some Christians to revert to a form of fundamentalism despite this anti-Zealot origin, is a logical consequence both of Christianity’s own reliance on the xenophobic/nationalistic proof-texts and prophecies of the Old Testament as "holy scripture", as well as the tendency of Christians to regard the “Early Christian” or Jewish-Christian period as a “golden age” to be emulated, perhaps because of its chronological nearness to the lifetime of Jesus, ---this so-called “Primitive Christian" period being characterized, unfortunately, by an extreme apocalyptic messianism, resulting in the dangerous apocalyptic delusions of some recent fundamentalist sects. Nor did normative Christianity ever renounce the eschatological apocalypticism of its Zealot progenitors, but indeed, rather adopted it whole, along with other concepts, such as the concept of Christians being an “Elect” group destined for mercy and salvation at God’s hand, ideas which Christianity likewise shares with Islam. The situation in the Near East today, both in Palestine and in Iraq, presents striking parallels with the zealot-period of Roman occupation of Israel in the first century C.E., when these Jewish-Christian zealot groups were particularly active, although at that time it was the Jews who were in a state of religious agitation, schism, and ferment, and not the Moslems, who did not, as yet, exist. Long before the disastrous Zealot uprising against Rome, which eventually resulted in the razing of Jerusalem to the ground in its replacement by a pagan city called “Aelia Capitolina”, the presence of foreign “heathens” and pagans in the “holy land” of Israel drove the fundamentalist Jews into an absolute frenzy. The Judaism of this period, one must note, was quite different from the Judaism of today, Judaism then being split into many different sects, some of which, --the Jewish “terrorists” of this period, called “Zealots” or “Sicarri”--, were quite like the Islamic terrorists of today; ---religiously intolerant, apocalyptic, messianic, and believing devoutly in the resurrection of the dead and the immortality of the soul. It was from these two latter sects that Christianity as we know it can be seen to have evolved. The main enemies of these Zealots, ironically, --in addition to the Roman occupiers--, were the Herodians, --ironic because Herod himself rebuilt and refurbished the Jewish Temple, which was, at that time, at the center of Zealot veneration, ---Herod, at the same time he was rebuilding the Temple, having “Qumran”, the site of the fundamentalist Jewish Zealot Dead Sea sect, razed to the ground. Herod‘s reign, much like Sadaam Hussein’s in Iraq, was basically a police state. Extremely paranoid, even of his own family, Herod had spies everywhere, scouting out for signs of subversion, so that Israelites were even afraid to meet in groups, or to discuss political issues. According to Leon Bernstein, in his 1938 study of Josephus, “The suspicions of Herod against his sons became morbid. His whole life became disturbed. He hated everybody, trusted no one, and finally developed a fear of ghosts. ….. (…) …Herod, in his delirium, seized all persons of rank, and either put them to the torture, or executed them at once….“ (p. 92) In the beginning of the long Roman and Herodian struggle against Jewish “terrorist insurgents”, two Maccabean leaders were beheaded by Herod immediately after his takeover. The parallels with Iraq extend long after the time of Herod. In 64 C.E., the fear and terror in Israel was increased when Albinus, “Hearing the next governor, Florus, was coming to replace him, emptied the prisons, arbitrarily putting many to death, but letting others go with ‘the payment of bribes’ so that as Josephus ruefully observed, ‘the country was filled with Robbers.’ “ (Eisenman, James the Just, p. 487) Although Eisenman is quick to link this “emptying of prisons” with the New Testament’s use of similar prisoner-releases as the backdrop for Jesus’ crucifixion, ---we might also note the similarity here to the behavior of Saddam Hussein just before the American invasion, when he likewise emptied the prisons of their prisoners, resulting in a situation of complete lawlessness and anarchy upon the American invasion, so that “Bandits and murderers”, as Josephus says, infested the countryside. The cruelty of the Romans, meanwhile, toward the Jews was incredible. In one instance, Josephus writes: “During his stay in Caesara, Titus celebrated his brother Domitian’s birthday with great lavishness, reserving for this occasion the punishment of many Jewish captives, the number of whom destroyed in contests with wild beasts or with one another or in the flames exceeded 2,5000. To the Romans, however, the various forms in which these victims perished seemed all too light a penalty. After this Titus went on to Berytus [Beruit]… Here, too, innumerable captives perished in the same manner as before.” Elsewhere, Josephus describes the Roman campaign of anti-insurgent activity carried out by the Romans and Herodians, saying, “the number of Robbers he [Felix, the Roman governor] caused to be crucified, and the common people caught and punished with them were a multitude not to be enumerated.” Festus, after him, is likewise described by Josephus as sending “armed forces, horsemen and foot soldiers, to fall upon those seduced by a certain Imposter, who had promised them Salvation and Freedom from the troubles they suffered if they would follow him into the Wilderness”. In another case, a revolutionary named “Theudas”, who led his followers into the Wilderness and attempted to part the waters of the Jordan, was beheaded by Roman Governor Fadus in the middle of the first century. This background of “preemptive executions” in order to quell messianic agitation, described by Josephus in detail, likewise forms the backdrop for all of the events in the New Testament, including of course the beheading of “John the Baptist” and the crucifixion of Jesus, ----and it is notable that, even today, such “preventative” attacks form the basis for U.S. foreign policy’s application of force in the Middle East, as well as in the justification of the use of force by the various sides in the Palestinian struggle. The aim of these Zealot groups was the re-establishment of a line of Jewish priest-kings, emulating the line of the Maccabean “priest-kings” who ruled before Herod. The Zealots, like the Maccabeans before them, used as the blueprint for their movement the Torah and the Law of Moses. As in the Old Testament, and as in Islam today, the basis for the Maccabean movement was xenophobic, fundamentalist, unenlightened, and murderous, the apocryphal Book of Maccabbees telling the story of the leader of the Maccabean revolt, the priest Mattathias Maccabaeus, a prototypical Zealot, who “burned with Zeal for the Law”, and who, when ordered to sacrifice on a Pagan Hellenic altar, killed both a fellow Jew who complied as well as a Greek (pagan) officer. Citing the story of Phineas in the Book of Numbers, in which Phineas, who was both a priest and grandson of Moses, murders a fellow Jew who has taken a Pagan foreigner to wife, killing them both with one spear, --at which point “God” declares that Phineas, alone of all those in Israel, has “the same Zeal I have”---, Mattathias Maccabaeus and his son Judas lead a guerilla army into the wilderness, where, like both John the Baptist and the Dead Sea sect later, he “withdrew into the wilderness, and lived like wild animals in the hills with his companions, eating nothing but wild plants to avoid contracting defilement” (2Macc. 5.27) (The use of the name “Judas” here in the “Book of Maccabees”, should also be noted, the New Testament’s erroneous picture of a “Judas the Iscariot” “betraying” the “Son of God”, simply being, according to writer Robert Eisenman, a clumsy parody of the Jewish Zealot movement as a whole; while “Judas the Iscariot’s” later “suicide”, --either by hanging, as one gospel has it, or from a “fall”, as another gospel states--, would seem to simply be a parody of Zealot suicides like those described by Josephus and those which occurred at Masada, as well as a parody of the death of the leader of the Jewish-Christian Zealots, James the Just, who also died in a “fall” from the Pinnacle of The Temple. The later story of Jesus’ refusal to be “tempted” by Satan to “jump” off the Pinnacle of the Temple would likewise, Eisenman suggests, seem to partly be a later Pauline rebuke of James’ fall.) Leon Bernstein, in his book on Josephus, describes in detail the development of the later Sicarii terrorists from a form of Jewish, Maccabean-inspired zealotry: “Judas the Galilean--the son of the robber leader Ezekiah, whose extermination had been the first fruit of Herod’s public life-- formed a political association under the name of ‘Zealots’. They denounced the enrollment and the payment of taxes, and under the cloak of religion incited the people to rebellion against the ‘pagan Roman power.’ The infection of their doctrine spread rapidly and widely, especially among young criminals. The robberies, crimes and assassinations committed by them and their offshoot, the Sicarii, sometimes even among themselves, were countless. Their riots, which followed one another, and their devastation of whole cities reduced the nation to the last degree of despair. Right up to the destruction of Jerusalem, and even as late as Hadrian, who finally annihilated them, the Zealots or the Sicarii everywhere led the riots and revolts. Judas himself, according to a New Testament record, ‘perished’, and his followers were ‘dispersed’; while two of his sons Jacob and Simon, Josephus tells us, were crucified under the procuratorship of Tiberius Alexander (in 47 C.E.), ‘for raising seditions as their father did,’ and that a third son, Menahem, was put to death by opposing forces at the beginning of the war (in the year 66 C.E.). The last of the family, the leader of the Sicarii, Eleazar ben Jair, destroyed himself in the fortress of Masada…” (p. 104-05) Some of the riots led by the later Jewish Zealots are just as ridiculous, meanwhile, -- tragically ridiculous--, as any of the riots currently being led by Islamic mobs due to Mohammed-cartoons or Holy Qur’ans in toilet bowls. Josephus, for example, describes how, in 49 C.E., a riot and a deadly stampede in Jerusalem was caused by a Roman soldier who exposed his uncircumcised private parts to a Jewish crowd assembled at the Temple at Passover, ---the subsequent stampede killing “ten thousand“ according to Josephus in his Jewish War, and “twenty thousand“ according to this same author in his Antiquities of the Jews. According to Josephus, these Roman soldiers stood “at armed alert” as “guards” “on the Porticoes of the Temple to quell any attempts at Revolution that might occur” duing Passover, --this guard, through his deliberate religious insensitivity, causing the very thing his presence was supposedly intended to prevent. Very often, according to Robert Eisenman, “Most of these [revolutionary] disturbances took place at Passover time --probably because this could be looked upon as the Jewish National Liberation Festival when Moses led the ragtag group of former Jewish slaves out into the wilderness and, not only gave them freedom and the Law, but produced a nation” (James the Just p.117). As Eisenman elsewhere notes, “in the aftermath of this episode [of the fatal stampede],….the Roman soldiers tear up the books of the Law outside Lydda and disturbances break out between Galileans and Samaritans”, --very similar, one might say, to the Sunni/Shiite disturbances in Iraq today. The terrorist acts committed by the Zealot Jewish terrorists, meanwhile, were often just as awful as anything committed by their Roman occupiers, and Josephus details the atrocities of both sides with disturbing, if not unflinching, accuracy. The Sicarii, for example, whom Josephus calls “robbers”, and who were known for the sharp knives they carried in their cloaks for purposes of terrorism and assassination, were likewise known for the practice of forcible circumcision, a practice carried out by the prototypical Zealot Judas Maccabee in 1Macc. (1:15-1), and a practice which S. Paul directly alludes to in Galatians (5:12) in the New Testament , where he scoffs at Jewish-Christian Zealots like James the Just by comparing “circumcision” to “castration”, and jokes, “Would that those who are upsetting you [with regard to circumcision] might also castrate themselves!” Josephus attributes the assassination of the collaborationist High Priest Jonathan to these Sicarii in 55 C.E., the Sicarii, he says, having gone “up to the city [Jerusalem], as if they were going to worship God, while they had daggers under their garments, and by mingling in this manner among the crowds, they slew Jonathan.” Josephus likewise describes an incident in the first war against Rome in which a Roman garrison in Jerusalem are all killed except for their Captain, --who apparently agrees to be circumcised by his captors as the price for his freedom! Classical scholar Alexander Smith, meanwhile, draws a direct line between thse Sicarii terrorists and later Islamic terrorism in his entry on the “Sicarii” in his Classical Dictionary of 1881, comparing the “habits ….. of the Sicarii” with those of a “branch of the fanatic sect of Assassins” who “existed, at the time of the Crusades,“ ---although the later Assassins, he observes, “were of Arabian origin.” These Zealots, in another instance, and much like the Jews of today, demanded that a “Wall” be built, --the Wall (or “Fence”?) in this case being designed to prevent Agrippa the 2nd from being able to see down into the sacred precincts of the Temple as he “reclined” in his palace. In another instance, Josephus likewise preserves a story of a “Simon”, “the head of an Assembly of his own in Jerusalem”, who inspects Agrippa the 1st’s palace in order to determine whether or not it is “Righteous” according to the Law, this "Simon", scholar Robert Eisenman suggests, possibly being the same “Simon Peter” whose fictionalized adventures are preserved in the New Testament. In fact, Eisenman argues, this story of "Simon" inspecting Agrippa II's palace is preserved, in fictionalized form, in the story of Peter’s meeting with the Roman Centurion “Cornelius” in Acts, --where “Peter” suddenly sees the heavens open and a “tablecloth” appear (!) , “something resembling a large sheet coming down, lowered to the ground by its four corners” (10:11), after which he suddenly learns “not to call any man profane or unclean”, ---exactly the opposite position of the both “Simon” in Josephus and the “Peter” in The Recognitions of Clement. Not only does this demonstrate the manner, Eisenman argues, in which the polemical arguments in Paul’s letters are retrospectively absorbed into Gospel narratives, it also clearly demonstrates that insidious process of “gilding the lily” which undermines so many Gospel narratives. As Eisenman observes, “…Peter’s vision in Acts inadvertently demonstrates that Jesus never resolved the problem of ‘table fellowship with Gentiles’ during his lifetime, because if Jesus had, why would Peter, his purported closest associate, need a Pauline vision to confirm it? Still, it does have the force of demonstrating that whatever Jesus did teach, he did not teach this.” (James the Just, p. 669) Indeed, the New Testament ‘s description of this Centurion “Cornelius” being “Pious and God Fearing”, “doing many Righteous works to the people and praying to God continually”, and being a man “respected by the whole Jewish nation” (!) who is sent by an “angel” to see Peter, is not only a direct and conscious reversal of the Zealot-Dead Sea sect’s usage of such terms in application solely to those following the Law of Moses, but also a parody of early Church descriptions of James the Just himself, who is likewise called “Righteous”, and who is described as continually praying for the atonement of his people. The regiment from which this “Cornelius of Italica” in Acts is presented as coming, meanwhile, were, according to Josephus, “the very men that became the source of very great calamities for the Jews later on and sowed the seeds of the War which began under Florus.” As Eisenman shrewdly observes elsewhere, the New Testament never misses a chance to praise Roman centurions whenever its gets the chance, and it is all the more suspect when it does so as a parody of Zealot members of Jesus’ own family. After the final destruction of the Zealots, certain sects still persisted elsewhere in the Near East, Islam preserving many aspects of this vital formative contact with these Jewish-Christian groups. There is, of course, the story of Mohammed’s first revelation, when he was visited by the angel Gabriel in the cave at Hira’: this story thus preserving several aspects of Jewish-Christian mystical/zealot sects as we know them, including the importance of angels and the use of caves: both aspects of the Dead Sea sect, as well as of those “Magharian” sects, or “cave men”, described by later Muslim scholars as worshipping "angels" and keeping their holy books in caves. The intolerance of wine; the importance of female modesty and “Perfection”; the idea of Moslems being an “Elect” group; the ritualized cursing of the Devil; and the swift punishment of any form of idolatry or superstition which are all characteristic of Islam, meanwhile, are likewise aspects of Zealot groups like the Dead Sea sect and those led by James the Just which have been preserved until the present day. The great importance of alms to “The Poor” in Islam, likewise preserves a term of great importance to the Dead Sea sect and to James the Just, as well as the later Jewish Christian Ebionites (aka “The Poor”). As Maulana Muhammad explains in his hagiographic study of Mohammed, Muhammad the Prophet(1951), “Sympathy for the poor, the helpless, orphans and widows, was in short ingrained in his [Mohammed’s] very nature. The teachings of the Holy Qur’an clearly lay it down as the very essence of religion to look after the orphan and the helpless. Whoever discards the orphan or does not prompt others to feed the poor is spoken of as belying religion itself. The loftiest summit of human dignity consists, says the Qur’an, in tending the orphan and the poor. Whosoever does not show respect to the orphan has been threatened with degradation.” (47) The idea of the Seven “Pillars” of Islam, meanwhile, preserves the Early Christian terms regarding James the Just being a “Pillar”, a “bulwark”, whose Righteousness justified the foundation of Heaven and Earth, an idea which parallels the Dead Sea sect‘s own fundamentalist ideological notions. The idea of Mohammed being the “Prophet”, meanwhile, preserves the doctrine of early Christian groups of Jesus as being the “True Prophet”, works like the Recognitions of Clement, --which derives from same sources which are used in the New Testament’s Acts, but which preserves them in a much less altered and much more archaic form--, often using the term “True Prophet” as a term equivalent with that of both “Jesus” and the word “Christ”. Most important, however, in this connection between Islam and Early Christianity, is the polemical dispute between James the Just and S. Paul in the epistles of the New Testament, --Paul’s letters ironically having since become, for Christians, the same “dead letter of the Law” as Paul claimed the Mosaic Law was for the Jews, and from “slavery” to which Paul’s teaching was supposedly intended to “liberate” them. Here, in James' attacks on the Pauline Christian doctrine of the Trinity, --James associating it with an Unlawful “division” of God, --we find an idea which will be preserved, without alteration or compromise, in the fundamental Islamic insistence that there is “no God but Allah”, and that Allah has no son, but is undivided. Jesus’ brother writes: “Indeed someone [such as Paul?] might say, ‘You have Faith and I have Works.’ Demonstrate your Faith to me without Works, and I will demonstrate my Faith to you from my Works. You believe that God is one [i.e. undivided]. You do well. Even the demons believe that and tremble. Do you want proof, you ignoramus, that Faith without Works is useless? Was not Abraham our father justified by Works when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar? You see that Faith was active along with his works, and Faith was completed with the Work. Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as Righteousness,’ and he was called ‘the Friend of God.’” (James [2:18-22]) (This idea of Abraham’s Lawfulness making him the “Friend” of God , in addition to paralleling many similar Islamic notions concerning Abraham, also parallels James the Just’ related idea in his epistle that being “a lover of the world means enmity with God” (James [4:4]), ----this epithet, “The Enemy”, being directly applied to Paul in several archaic versions of Early Christian history, such as The Recognitions of Clement, where Paul is simply called “The Enemy”, and also in the "Parable of the Tares" in the New Testament, where Jesus describes an unnamed “Enemy” who will later come to sew discord in his congregation. (That Paul was aware of this epithet as applied to him is shown in his epistles, such as Galatians (4:16), where he contrasts himself with the followers of James the Just by saying, “so your Enemy I have become by speaking the Truth to you.” ) According to Robert Eisenman, The Koran likewise preserves a story fundamental to the early creation and spread of Christianity, --the Early Christian legend of the healing and conversion of King Abgar V by “Addai” and “Ananius” in Edessa, preserved in Eusibius, being preserved in the [b]Koran[/b] in the form of the story of the Kingdom of “Ad and Thamud” and the prophet “Hud”. Eisenman also relates this legend to a story preserved in Josephus, in the story of the “conversion” of Queen Helen of Adiabene and her sons to a form of extreme zealot-Judaism, in which Queen Helen’s son Izates is approached by a teacher Eleazar in his palace. Finding Izates reading “the Law of Moses”, Eleazar tells him that he can only become truly “Lawful” by becoming circumcised. According to Robert Eisenman, this story is later cruelly parodied in the New Testament in Acts’ account of the conversion of the “eunuch” “Treasurer of the Ethiopian Queen Kandakes”, ---the authors of Acts following Paul in his equation of circumcision with castration here by making Izates an Ethiopian “eunuch”. Queen Helen’s numerous oaths of penance, meanwhile, --which, according to Jewish sources, were exacted against her over a period of years for violations of Jewish ritual purity--, were, according to Robert Eisenman, later cruelly parodied in the New Testament in the story of the “woman suffering hemorrhages for twelve years”, and whose decade-long menstrual flow is suddenly and miraculously healed by the touching of Jesus’ cloak (Matthew [9:18]), Matthew here managing to combine similar legends of the people trying to touch the hem of James the Just’s robe in Early Christian literature, with the Dead Sea sect’s almost obsessive concern with menstrual blood and menstruation, --the supposed pagan laxness regarding which was one of the main Zealot arguments against collaboration with the Herodians. The mental straightjacket that the Islamic Zealots live within now is no different than the straightjacket that the Zealots of old lived within at the beginning of the first century: an attitude which derived, of course, not only from the story of Phineas in the Book of Numbers, but also from the story of the Lawgiver Moses himself in Exodus, whose “mission” arguably begins after he kills an Egyptian he sees struggling with a Hebrew: “One one occasion, after Moses had grown up, when he visited his kinsmen and witnessed their forced labo
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