Ancient World Review

The Library Of St. Catherine's Monastery In Egypt

"Saint Catherine's Monastery ... officially 'Sacred Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai'  lies on the Sinai Peninsula, at the mouth of a gorge at the foot of Mount Sinai, near the town of Saint Catherine, Egypt. The monastery is named after Catherine of Alexandria" (Wikipedia) "

Note: Catherine of Alexandria probably never existed:

"Donald Attwater (English Catholic author, 1892-1977) dismisses what he calls the 'legend' of Saint Catherine, arguing for a lack of any 'positive evidence that she ever existed outside the mind of some Greek writer who first composed what he intended to be simply an edifying romance.' Harold Davis writes that 'assiduous research has failed to identify Catherine with any historical personage' and has theorized that Catherine was an invention inspired to provide a counterpart to the story of the slightly later pagan philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 350–370 – 415 CE)." (Wikipedia)

According to the UNESCO World Heritage List, "The [Greek Orthodox] monastery of St Catherine stands at the foot of Mount Horeb where, the Old Testament records, Moses received the Tablets of the Law. The mountain is known and revered by Muslims as Jebel Musa. The entire area is sacred to three world religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism." The monastery is controlled by "the autonomous Church of Sinai."

Even though St. Catherine's was named after a fictitious saint, this is still a remarkable and very old institution:

^"Built between 548 and 565, the monastery is one of the oldest working Christian monasteries in the world. The site contains the world's oldest continually operating library [next video], possessing many unique books including the Syriac Sinaiticus and, until 1859, the Codex Sinaiticus."

The incredible library filmed on a potato.

Note: The manuscript shown in the video above is the Ashtiname of Muhammed, "also known as the Covenant or Testament (Testamentum) of Muhammad (the Islamic Prophet) ... a document which is a charter or writ ratified by the Islamic Prophet Muhammad granting protection and other privileges to the followers of Jesus the Nazarene, given to the Christian monks of Saint Catherine's Monastery. It is sealed with an imprint representing Muhammad's hand."

The manuscript may be inauthentic. According to Wikipedia, "Since the 19th century, several aspects of the Ashtiname, notably the list of witnesses, have been questioned by scholars. There are similarities to other documents granted to other religious communities in the Near East. One example is Muhammad's alleged letter to the Christians of Najran, which first came to light in 878 in a monastery in Iraq and whose text is preserved in the Chronicle of Seert." It doesn't really matter, though, because even if the Ashtiname is a forgery -- something I don't think anyone is claiming -- it's still a priceless artifact from the period.

Recently renovated, the library at St. Catherine's was re-opened in 2017.

The manuscripts and books in the monastery's library go way back:

"When Egeria visited the Sinai in 383-384, she wrote approvingly of the way the monks read to her the scriptural accounts concerning the various events that had taken place there. Thus we can speak of manuscripts at Sinai in the fourth century. It is written of Saint John Climacus that, while living as a hermit, he spent much time in prayer and in the copying of books. This is evidence of manuscript production at Sinai in the sixth century. The library at the Holy Monastery of Sinai is thus the inheritor of texts and of traditions that date to the earliest years of a monastic presence in the Sinai. In earlier times, manuscripts were kept in three different places: in the north wall of the monastery, in the vicinity of the church, and in a central location where the texts were accessible." Source: The Sinai Monastery website.

Research has also revealed that some of the manuscripts in the library contain "hidden manuscripts" which were erased in order to reuse the parchment they were written on.

"The Sinai manuscripts comprise the oldest and most important Christian monastic library collection. Of its 3,300 manuscripts, two-thirds are in Greek. The rest are principally in Arabic, Syriac, Georgian, and Slavonic, through there are other manuscripts in Polish, Hebrew, Ethiopian, Armenian, Latin, and Persian. The New Finds correspond to these languages, and are stored adjacent to the library. The library also contains an important archive, containing letters, account books, charters, and other documents." Source: The Sinai Monastery website.

"...The most famous manuscript is the fourth century Codex Sinaiticus, of which the monastery retains twelve pages and some twenty-four fragments."

Comment: I'm not a Christian, but St. Catherine's and its library are priceless historical treasures which must be protected at all costs. The monastery has already been the target of at least one attempted terrorist attack back in 2015 and the Islamic State vermin are still waging a sporadic insurgency in the Sinai. I hate to say it, but if the situation deteriorates the Church of Sinai (which controls the monastery) should consider moving the library to a safer location, preferably somewhere out of the country.

Related: St. Catherine's Monastery, its Library and its Palimpsests.

The Satires Of Juvenal

"Perhaps more than any other writer, Juvenal (c. AD 55-138) captures the splendor, the squalor and the sheer energy of everyday Roman life. In The Sixteen Satires, he evokes a fascinating world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers, shameless sycophants, aging flirts and downtrodden teachers." -- Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires, Penguin Classics, Third Edition.

Note: An excellent, unabridged reading of the Satires is available from Audible.com.

"[Juvenal was] known primarily for the angry tone of his early Satires, although in later poems he developed an ironical and detached superiority as his satiric strategy," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised). "...virtually nothing is known of his life...the absence of dedication to a patron in Juvenal's Satires may suggest that he was a member of the elite. The few datable references confirm Syme's assessment that the five books were written during the second and third decades of the 2nd cent. AD (or later), at about the same time as Tacitus was writing his Annals."

Comment: Juvenal is my favorite Roman poet. Earthy, cynical, outraged, comically obscene, his poetry seems strangely modern and I can sympathize with his disgust at the corruption, stupidity and perversity of the world he lived in. In that regard, human nature being what it is, very little has changed over the last 2000 years.

Juvenal coined the phrase "bread and circuses" to describe the political system of Rome in his day, a system which still exists in modern America, a country where at least half the population is receiving some form of government benefits and tens of millions of plebs work themselves into a lather over mass sports spectacles like the Super Bowl every year. And if you think we're all that different from the mobs who attended the gladiatorial fights and animal hunts at the Colosseum, it should be noted that gladiator-like mixed martial arts arena fighting has seen a huge surge in popularity recently. Juvenal attended the games in Rome and he could be particularly acerbic about the degeneracy, excess and status-seeking of some of the spectators:

"To go to the games, Ogulnia hires dresses, attendants, a carriage, cushions, a baby-sitter, companions, and a little blonde slave-girl to carry her messages. Yet what's left of the family plate, down to the last salver, she'll hand out as a present to some smooth athlete. Many such women lack substance [wealth] - yet poverty gives them no sense of restraint, they don't observe the limits." -- Satire VI.  Note: I copied these passages in prose form in order to save space.

If Juvenal could see the crowds at a modern Super Bowl, he'd probably have a heart attack. An impoverished aristocrat -- at least when he was writing the early satires -- he was highly indignant about the way he was shoved aside to make way for wealthy low-lives at the games:

"The hardest thing that there is to bear about wretched poverty is the fact that it makes men ridiculous. 'You! Get out of those front-row seats,' we're told. 'You ought to be ashamed - your incomes are far too meager! The law's the law. Make way for some pander's son and heir, spawned in an unknown brothel; yield your place to the offspring of that natty auctioneer with the trainer's son and the ring-fighter's brat applauding beside him!'" -- Satire III.

Like so many other Romans, Juvenal's poverty reduced him to depending on a wealthy patron for the necessities of life. The second-class treatment he received at the hands of this patron didn't do much to improve his mood, especially when he considered the profligacy of his "betters:"

 "...when has there been so abundant a crop of vices? When has the purse of greed yawned wider? When was gambling more frantic? Today men face the table's hazards with not their purse but their strong-box open beside them...Isn't it crazy to lose ten thousand on a turn of the dice, yet grudge a shirt to your shivering slave? In the old days who'd have built all those country houses, or dined off seven courses, alone? Now citizens must scramble for a little basket of scraps on their patron's doorstep." -- Satire I.

Juvenal's Rome was a behavioral sink, a decadent and dangerous city where whores, criminals and morons rose to the top and lorded it over the ordinary citizens who probably counted themselves lucky if they could make it through the day without being robbed or stabbed to death. Most of the population lived in hazardous tenements run by greedy landlords who were only interested in swindling the tenants crammed together in fire-trap buildings that could collapse or burn to the ground at any minute:

"...here we inhabit a city largely shored up with gimcrack stays and props: that's how our landlords postpone slippage, and -- after masking great cracks in the ancient fabric -- assure the tenants they can sleep sound, when the house is tottering. Myself, I prefer life without fires, without nocturnal panics. By the time the smoke's reached the third floor -- and you're still asleep -- the heroic downstairs neighbor is roaring for water, shifting his stuff to safety. If the alarm's at ground-level, the last to fry is the wretch [on the upper floor] among the nesting pigeons with nothing but tiles between himself and the weather." - Satire III.

Juvenal was the misanthrope of his day, ranting about everything from the mobs on the street and the degenerates in high office to the promiscuity of Roman women and the grotesque spectacles of the theater and games. Later in his life, he apparently came into some money and mellowed a little -- but not much. He was essentially a conservative, but unlike Tacitus, who focused on the moral decline of the Rome aristocracy, Juvenal describes in lurid detail the day-t0-day life of the average citizen. I don't have the space to give more than a few quotes from the Satires, but they're full of juicy details and your view of ancient Rome will never be quite the same again after you read them. Highly recommended.

The great Auberon Waugh. In this interview, he seems kind of dismissive of Juvenal's scorn for Roman society, which is pretty odd coming from somebody like him. To see what I mean, you should check out The Diaries Of Auberon Waugh, a collection of his Private Eye writings (1976-1985), aptly described on Amazon as the "venomous, abusive, irrational, fantastical, hugely bigoted diary of a ranting maniac." Highly recommended.

Roman Satire And Hipponax - The Original Troll

"Although there were earlier Latin writers instrumental in developing the genre of satire, the official founder of this Roman genre is Lucilius, of whom we have only fragments. Horace, Persius, and Juvenal followed, leaving us many complete satires about the life, vice, and moral decay they saw around them." Source: Thought Company.

From a discussion of Horace's satirical poetry. Closed-captions helpful.

According to Wikipedia, "the first Roman to discuss satire critically was Quintilian, who invented the term to describe the writings of Gaius Lucilius. The two most prominent and influential ancient Roman satirists are Horace and Juvenal, who wrote during the early days of the Roman Empire. Other important satirists in ancient Latin are Gaius Lucilius and Persius. Satire in their work is much wider than in the modern sense of the word, including fantastic and highly coloured humorous writing with little or no real mocking intent. When Horace criticized Augustus, he used veiled ironic terms. In contrast, Pliny reports that the 6th-century-BC poet Hipponax wrote satirae that were so cruel that the offended hanged themselves."

Hipponax: The Original Troll

Horace's satire was relatively gentle. Juvenal, of course, was much harsher and Hipponax sounds like the ancient prototype of the modern cyberbully who occasionally drives unstable teenagers to suicide. Most of his work, unfortunately, has been lost, but here's a line from one of his poems:

"What navel-snipper [midwife] wiped and washed you as you squirmed about, you crack-brained creature?"

An early feminist, Hipponax said that "There are two days when a woman is a pleasure: the day one marries her and the day one carries out her dead body."

If Hipponax was alive today he would probably be a very popular speaker on university campuses. Strangely enough, his brand of progressive poetry seems to have evolved out of an earlier religious tradition:

"Hipponax composed within the Iambus tradition which, in the work of Archilochus, a hundred years earlier, appears to have functioned as ritualized abuse and obscenity associated with the religious cults of Demeter and Dionysus but which, in Hipponax's day, seems rather to have had the purpose of entertainment. In both cases, the genre featured scornful abuse, a bitter tone and sexual permissiveness. Unlike Archilochus, however, he frequently refers to himself by name, emerging as a highly self-conscious figure, and his poetry is more narrow and insistently vulgar in scope: 'with Hipponax, we are in an unheroic, in fact, a very sordid world', amounting to 'a new conception of the poet's function.'" (Wikipedia)

Hipponax was pretty popular in his day, but the Christians who came along later didn't like him for some reason and even the pagan emperor Julian told his priests not to read his stuff. In modern terms, Hipponax's poetry created so much butt-hurt than it was banned long before social media ever existed. That's probably why so little of it has survived.

The Philosophy Of Epicureanism

When the Greek philosopher Epicurus died in 270 BC, he left his house and garden in Athens to one of his disciples, Hermarchus of Mytilene. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), "[Hermarchus] and his followers lived together, secluding themselves from the affairs of the city and maintaining a modest and even austere standard of living, in accordance with the Master's teaching. They included slaves and women."

Their community was called the Epicurean School or "The Garden" after the house's garden. According to the OCD, "the school was much libeled in antiquity and later, perhaps because of its determined privacy and because of Epicurus' professed hedonism. The qualifications that brought this hedonism close to asceticism were ignored, and members of rival schools accused the Epicureans of many kinds of profligacy."

"In Christian times, Epicureanism was anathema because it taught that man is mortal, that the cosmos is the result of accident, that there is no providential god, and that the criterion for the good life is pleasure." (OCD)

According to Epicurus.net, "Epicurus's philosophy combines a physics based on an atomistic materialism with a rational hedonistic ethics that emphasizes moderation of desires and cultivation of friendships. His world-view is an optimistic one that stresses that philosophy can liberate one from fears of death and the supernatural, and can teach us how to find happiness in almost any situation."

"The philosophy of Epicurus (341–270 B.C.E.) was a complete and interdependent system, involving a view of the goal of human life (happiness, resulting from absence of physical pain and mental disturbance), an empiricist theory of knowledge (sensations, together with the perception of pleasure and pain, are infallible criteria), a description of nature based on atomistic materialism, and a naturalistic account of evolution, from the formation of the world to the emergence of human societies." Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Comment: Epicureanism sounds reasonable to me. It's not surprising that Christians would have attacked it so vehemently.

Pliny The Elder - "Life Is Being Awake"

Pliny the Elder was what we would now call a workaholic, totally absorbed in his writing. According to his nephew, Pliny the Younger, "the only time he took from his work was for his bath, and by bath I mean his actual immersion, for while he was being rubbed down and dried he had a book read to him or dictated notes. When traveling he felt free from other responsibilities to give every minute to work; he kept a secretary at his side with book and notebook; and in winter saw that his hands were protected by long sleeves, so that even bitter weather should not rob him of a working hour. For the same reason, too, he used to be carried about Rome in a chair. I can remember how he scolded me for walking; according to him I need not have wasted those hours, for he thought any time wasted which was not devoted to work. It was this application which enabled him to finish all those volumes of the Natural History." Source: Livius.

According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), "Pliny was no philosopher. It may indeed be thought refreshing to have a view of the ancient world from an author who did not have some claim to the philosophical viewpoint ... there is an engaging personality at work..." Pliny's writing in the Natural History is "highly individual: as is the style and the imagery, which was often misunderstood in later antiquity, and can still baffle today." An ancient encyclopedia may sound dry, but the Natural History is an absorbing mixture of facts and fantastic stories. I first read the Penguin Classics selection from the encyclopedia on a cross-country flight years ago and couldn't put it down.

Here's a typical entry:

"Beyond the Scythian Cannibals, in a certain large valley in the Himalayas, there is a region called Abarimon where some forest-dwellers live who have their feet turned back behind their legs; they run with extraordinary speed and wander far and wide with the wild animals. Baeton, Alexander the Great's road-surveyor, states that these people could not breathe in another climate, and for that reason none had been brought to the neighboring kings, or to Alexander himself." -- Natural History. Source: Strange Science.

The Natural History is a monumental achievement that opens a window into the ancient world as seen by an educated Roman. Pliny himself was the model writer and researcher and no matter what your personal interests might be his life represents a practical philosophy well-worth emulating today. In fact, I'd say that Pliny the Elder's approach to life is still the best philosophy available anywhere:

"Life is being awake. The Natural History is a monument to keeping alert, and to the useful employment of time. Pliny's energy and diligence astonished his nephew, were intended to impress his contemporaries, and still amaze today; they were, moreover, not a contingent habit of mind, but intended as an ethical statement. For all his defects of accuracy, selection, and arrangement, Pliny achieved a real summation of universal knowledge, deeply imbued with the mood of his time, and the greatness of his work was speedily recognized. It was a model for later writers ... and attained a position of enormous cultural and intellectual influence in the medieval west." -- OCD.

Pliny the Elder's died in 79 AD during the eruption of Vesuvius:

"Pliny had received from Emperor Vespasian ... the appointment of praefectus classis (fleet commander) in the Roman Navy. On AD August 24, 79, he was stationed at Misenum, at the time of the great eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which destroyed and buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. He was preparing to cross the Bay of Naples to observe the phenomenon directly when a message arrived from his friend Rectina asking to rescue [the senator] Pomponianus and her." (Wikipedia)

Pliny landed on the shore near Herculaneum and was apparently overcome by poisonous gases from the eruption. "The story of his last hours is told in a letter addressed 27 years afterwards to Tacitus by Pliny the Younger." This letter is a gripping read.

The Tradition Of Alchemy In Greece

Alchemy apparently originated in a fusion of Greek and Egyptian magical, religious and philosophical traditions. "Of ancient texts on Greek alchemy there survive two papyri, three vast corpora [large collection of writings] of differing date and content, and a few isolated treatises," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD), 3rd ed. revised.

The oldest alchemical text, according to the ancient alchemists, was the "Physika  kai mystika or 'Natural and Initiatory Matters,' ascribed to Democritus, the famous Greek philosopher who helped to formulate the atomic theory of the universe. He wasn't the author, however. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "credit cannot be given to the tale that Democritus spent his leisure hours in chemical researches after the philosopher's stone -- the dream of a later age ..." The real author -- the so-called "Pseudo-Democritus" -- lived hundreds of years later and wrote several books on the subject.

According to the OCD, "there were five main strands of Greek alchemy:

(1) The technical achievements of artisans in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt in producing convincing imitations of gold, silver, precious stone, and purple.

(2) The doctrine of mimesis, according to which the point of techne (craftmanship) was to reproduce nature, with the ultimate aim of matching, if not excelling it.

(3) The decline of Greek rationalism and the complementary rise in the power of revelation.

(4) The theory of "universal sympathy" renewed by Stoicism; everything in the cosmos is linked by occult ties of "sympathy" and "antipathy" -- a worldview integrating astrology and magic.

(5) The intuition of the unity of matter.

According to the OCD, the alchemical tradition based on the Physika kai mystika of the Pseudo-Democritus combined all these different elements. "In a temple in Memphis, Democritus and his friends put the recipes to work without achieving transmutation," so they apparently never made the breakthrough they were searching for.

Why Are Bible Scholars So Sure Jesus Existed?

This lecture is part of the Open Yale Courses lecture series "New Testament History and Literature," presented by Dale B. Martin. His talk here is about the historical Jesus in general, not the specific question of whether Jesus actually existed, but Martin does bring up the issue at one point and states categorically that Jesus was a real historical figure. His certainty about that -- and he's not the only biblical scholar convinced that Jesus actually existed -- is typical in the field and completely inexplicable considering the fact that his lecture is full of examples of how historically unreliable the gospels are.

Just to take one example, Martin raises an interesting question that had never occurred to me before. If none of the disciples were present at the trial of Jesus, then who was the source for the Biblical accounts of the trial itself? There are several conflicting versions of the trial (and crucifixion) in the gospels, so, as Martin points out, most historians have concluded that the stories of the trial were just made up by later Christian writers.

Martin doesn't extend the same level of skepticism to Jesus himself, however, and I'm not sure why. At one point, Martin says that serious scholars accept that Jesus was a real historical figure and that the evidence for this is incontrovertible, but what is this evidence exactly?  How can Martin and other scholars be so certain that the Jesus of the New Testament actually existed when the gospels are so unreliable?

"There is near unanimity among scholars that Jesus existed historically," according to Wikipedia. "... Nearly all New Testament scholars and Near East historians, applying the standard criteria of historical-critical investigation, find that the historicity of Jesus is effectively certain, although they differ about the beliefs and teachings of Jesus as well as the accuracy of the details of his life that have been described in the gospels."

There appears to be a near-total consensus that Jesus existed and the general feeling among scholars seems to be that anyone who questions Jesus' historicity must be incompetent or a crank or worse. For instance, one of the footnotes in this Wikipedia article quotes the bible scholar Bart Ehrman as saying that "[Jesus] certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees, based on clear and certain evidence." [Emphasis added]

Maybe all these mainstream scholars are right. Maybe there was a real Jesus, even if he wasn't a supernatural figure, but what is this "clear and certain evidence" that Ehrman refers to? Why are all these scholars so convinced that Jesus actually existed? I'm no expert but as far as I can tell there's almost no evidence at all. There is no archaeological evidence and very little documentary evidence other than the New Testament itself. Jesus is only mentioned in a few 1st or 2nd century pagan and Jewish sources, and the major non-Christian sources are essentially limited to Josephus and Tacitus.

Josephus wasn't exactly a reliable historian and there's some reason to believe that the passages in his history describing Jesus were inserted by later Christian writers. As for Tacitus, there is a famous passage in the Annals describing Nero's persecution of the Christians, who followed the teachings of a "Christus" (Chrestus?) who "paid the ultimate penalty" under Pontius Pilate. The authenticity of this passage has been challenged, but it doesn't really matter because the passage just describes the Christians and their beliefs. I'm not sure how this amounts to "clear and certain" evidence that Jesus himself actually existed.

Martin and Ehrman both point out that we have as much evidence for the existence of Jesus as we do for other figures like Socrates who are commonly believed to have been real people. That's true enough, but it could also be true that some of these other figures didn't exist. Socrates, for example, could have been invented by Plato. On the other hand, we have a fair amount of biographical information about Socrates from various sources, something we don't have for Jesus, and there's a lot of contemporary or near-contemporary documentary evidence that he wasn't just a literary invention:

"An enigmatic figure, [Socrates] made no writings, and is known chiefly through the accounts of classical writers writing after his lifetime, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. Other sources include the contemporaneous Antisthenes, Aristippus, and Aeschines of Sphettos. Aristophanes, a playwright, is the main contemporary author to have written plays mentioning Socrates during Socrates' lifetime, though a fragment of Ion of Chios' Travel Journal provides important information about Socrates' youth." (Wikipedia)

It's easier to believe that Socrates was a real person than it is to believe that Jesus was a real person. Socrates isn't a supernatural figure. He isn't described as a god in human form or anything like that, so based on the evidence we have it's safe to say that he probably existed. The question if whether we can even say that much about Jesus.

Socrates and Jesus have at least one thing in common: they are both enigmatic figures known to us only through the writings of their followers. In other words, everything we know about them comes to us through texts. There is documentary evidence (primarily the New Testament) for the existence of Jesus, but then again we also have what you could call documentary evidence for the existence of Jason and the Argonauts, Odysseus, Hercules and Beowulf, just to name a few. These legendary heroes are clearly mythological because they perform superhuman feats of strength, fight mythological monsters, etc. etc., but how is Jesus any different? According to the documentary evidence he could walk on water, heal the blind, drive out demons and raise the dead, not to mention the fact that he came back from the dead himself. As a person, we know almost nothing about him.

Now, I'm not a "serious scholar," but the figure of Jesus as described in the Bible is so similar to other dying-and-resurrected gods of the period, so obviously mythological, that I can't understand why anyone who doesn't believe in the supernatural would assume that he actually existed. At least, I don't see how anyone could be so certain that he existed. If the Jesus of the New Testament is based on a real Jesus, perhaps a famous rebel or teacher of the period, then the real, historical Jesus must've been a completely different person from the Jesus in the Bible.  Arguing that there was a real Jesus who inspired the New Testament stories is kind of like arguing that there was a real Achilles who inspired the legendary figure in the Iliad.

The odd thing about Martin and other scholars is that they're so certain that Jesus existed while all of their research shows that the New Testament is mostly ahistorical. Martin talks about how the birth stories don't make sense, how the stories about the trial don't make sense, etc. Ehrman has written excellent books describing how so many passages in the New Testament were forged or misquoted by later writers. The picture that emerges from all of their work is of a mythological literary tradition which has evolved over the centuries. But somehow, despite all of that, these scholars are convinced that the central figure in this tradition was real.

Maybe they're right. After all, what do I know? Their certainty bothers me, though. I've read a lot of the sources and none of them convinced me that Jesus was real. I'm not saying that it's certain that Jesus didn't exist, just that I can't see anything in the documentary evidence that would justify this near-universal academic consensus. In the absence of hard documentary evidence -- a Roman account of the trial, for instance -- it seems a lot more probable that the New Testament Jesus is exactly what he appears to be: a mythological figure.

Henry VIII's Hampton Court Palace

"The original Tudor palace was begun by Cardinal Wolsey in the early 16th century, but it soon attracted the attention of Henry VIII, who brought all his six wives here. Surrounded by gorgeous gardens and famous features such as the Maze and the Great Vine [1], the palace has been the setting for many nationally important events." Source: Historical Royal Palaces.

[1] " A nearby conservatory houses the 'Great Vine', planted in 1769; by 1968 it had a trunk 81 inches thick and has a length of 100 feet. It still produces an annual crop of grapes." (Wikipedia)

"The palace houses many works of art and furnishings from the Royal Collection, mainly dating from the two principal periods of the palace's construction, the early Tudor (Renaissance) and late Stuart to early Georgian period. In September 2015, the Royal Collection recorded 542 works (only those with images) as being located at Hampton Court, mostly paintings and furniture, but also ceramics and sculpture." Source: Wikipedia.

The palace was apparently built on top of other previous structures. "The archaeological remains on the site are integral to our understanding of the development of the palace. Partial excavation has shown that remains of the 12th century grange, 15th century house and many Tudor buildings survive below-ground. The site holds a high degree of potential for further investigation and will contain archaeological and environmental information relating to its occupation, use and history. " Source: Historic England.

Comment: According to Wikipedia, this beautiful palace is located "in the borough of Richmond upon Thames, 11.7 miles ... southwest and upstream of central London ..." (Emphasis added) More precisely, the palace is in East Molesey in Surrey, "a wealthy county due to economic, aesthetic, conservation and logistical factors." In other words, Hampton Court Palace is currently insulated to a large extent from the crime and rapid Islamification taking place in London, but I have to wonder how long that will last.

The UK's idiotic immigration policies have already transformed London out of all recognition and the problem continues to accelerate. According to Wikipedia, "[t]here were 607,083 Muslims reported in the 2001 census in the Greater London area. In the 2011 census Office for National Statistics, the proportion of Muslims in London had risen to 12.4% of the population (21% of England's Muslims). In the boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets, the percentages of Muslims were over 30%." I'm not sure what the current numbers are, but the trend is as obvious as it is suicidal. Islam is on the rise and Christianity is dying in England.

The national treasure of Hampton Court Palace is only around 12 miles from Central London. If present trends continue, how long will it be before the palace is turned into a mosque or simply blown up? Ten years? Twenty? If you think this is alarmism, you haven't been paying attention. London museums have already had to increase their security in response to the threat of bombs and back in 2016 the authority in charge of historical palaces requested additional funds to meet the threat of terrorism. And anti-terrorism pedestrian barriers were installed a couple of years ago in Surrey, the county where the palace is located.

Hampton Court Palace is a kind of time capsule haunted by ghosts. If things don't change in Britain, this incredible monument to the past may disappear completely even if it doesn't end up as a pile of rubble like the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.

Video from 2009.

The Book Of Revelation

The Book of Revelation is thought to have been written during the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian (81-96 AD). Many Christians believe the author was the apostle John, but the consensus among scholars is that the book was written by an unknown author they call John of Patmos, who either lived on the Greek island of Patmos or was exiled there during one of Domitian's alleged persecutions of the early Christians.

Note: According to Christian sources, Domitian carried out several harsh persecutions, especially towards the end of his reign, but "some historians ... have maintained that there was little or no anti-Christian activity during Domitian's time." (Wikipedia) "The lack of consensus by historians about the extent of persecution during the reign of Domitian derives from the fact that while accounts of persecution exist, these accounts are very cursory or their reliability is debated." (That's a polite way of saying that a lot of the Christian stories about how they were persecuted in the ancient world are myths.)

It's commonly believed that the Book of Revelation describes Armageddon, the end of the world, but it seems more likely that its author was prophesying the fall of the hated Roman empire:

"Many people look to the Book of Revelations for signs of the apocalypse," according to a now-defunct source I found a while ago. "This event represents the cumulative battle between good and evil, ends the world, ushers in the Age of God. The Book of Revelations was written during a trying time in Christian and Jewish history. The book’s target was not necessarily Satan, but Rome. As a result, the final battle and victory of God over Satan was actually predicting the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity."

A classic example of the apocalyptic literature of the period, the Book of Revelation was probably written in response to the spread of the Roman imperial cult under the Flavian emperors:

According to biblical scholar L. Michael White, "most scholars now think that the issue revolved around the inauguration of the Flavian imperial cult in Ephesus ... Our clearest indication of how this is reflected in Revelation is seen in the description of the two 'beasts' from Rev. 13. The first is called 'the beast from the sea' who is given his power by Satan himself. He is described as having 'seven heads and ten horns,' and people worshiped him (Rev. 13.1-4). Then there is a second, 'the beast from the land' who makes everyone worship the first beast and its 'image' (Rev. 13.11-18). The 'image' (13.14-15) and the mysterious number '666' (13.18) refer to statues and coins or inscriptions with the emperor's image and titles. The 'beast from the land' probably referred to either the provincial governor of Asia or to the high priest of the imperial cult, who jointly would have overseen the temple and its festivals in Ephesus at just this time."

In other words, the apocalypse predicted by the Book of Revelation actually refers to the hoped-for collapse of Rome. If this view is correct, then all the millennial cults and end-times Christians who are waiting for Armageddon based on their reading of Revelation are actually waiting for an event which happened almost 1500 years ago. But the strange truth of all of this is that the Roman empire was already Christian when it collapsed in the west. Gibbon was at least partially right when he blamed the fall of Rome (partly) on "barbarians and Christianity."

The Cave of the Apocalypse, Patmos Island.

Comment: It's strange and revealing that the New Testament, a collection of books about peace, love and redemption, should end with the apocalyptic bloodbath of Revelation. One minute, you have Jesus blessing the little children and talking about forgiving your enemies, then, the next minute, a beast with seven heads is slaughtering millions of sinners in a river of blood. That's quite a story arc, to say the least.

Revelation has always been my favorite book in the Bible because of its hallucinatory weirdness. Considering its surrealistic content, I've always wondered if John--assuming that was his real name--happened to stumble across some funny plants or mushrooms during his exile on Patmos, which, incidentally, was listed by Forbes (in 2014) as "modern Europe's most idyllic place to live." This has probably changed dramatically with the "refugee" invasion of the Greek islands, which has been an absolute disaster. The island probably wasn't that idyllic back in John's day, either, but the views must have been spectacular.

Note: The Monastery of St. John the Theologian and the Cave of the Apocalypse on Patmos are now World Heritage Sites.

Was Caligula A Victim Of Ancient Propaganda?

If immortality means that people remember your name, then the "mad Roman emperor" Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, more commonly known as Caligula, is definitely immortal. Everybody's heard of him even if they've never cracked a history book, which just goes to show that being a "good ruler" doesn't necessarily guarantee that your name will go down in posterity. Moral, competent leaders come and go, fading into obscurity, but villains like Caligula live on forever in movies, plays, novels and TV productions. The only problem is that most of what we think we know about Caligula -- the long litany of crimes that make him so famous -- probably isn't true.

Caligula is the most notorious Roman emperor, with a reputation for insanity, cruelty and sexual depravity based almost completely on his depiction in the media and in absurd sensationalized films like Bob Guccione's pornographic Caligula, one of the vilest, most degenerate and unhistorical movies I've ever seen. This image of Caligula as an insane emperor is so ingrained in popular culture that most people would automatically reject the idea that it's probably not accurate.

If you're interested in actual history instead of lurid Hollywood pseudo-history, you should read "Caligula: The Corruption of Power" by Anthony A. Barrett, a fantastic revisionist biography that I'm planning to review in more detail later. One of the interesting things you'll learn is that everything we know about Caligula is based on just a few biased and generally unreliable ancient sources:

"The quintessential mad despot, Caligula had inspired plays, films, several series for television. Yet while the public at large seems to find him irresistible, academic biographers have tended to give him a wide berth. Nor is this surprising. The loss of the relevant books of the most important ancient commentator on the Julio-Claudian period, the historian Tacitus, means that we have to rely for our information on markedly inferior sources, in particular the late historian Dio and the biographer Suetonius." -- Caligula: The Corruption of Power, Barrett, 1989, p. xv, Forward.

In other words, we don't know nearly as much about Caligula as we think we do. Most of his image is a masturbatory Hollywood concoction based very loosely on a few unreliable ancient sources. If you read those sources, then read Barrett, a hazy but very different picture of who he actually was starts to emerge.

Image based on period portraits and sculpture.

I don't have the time or space to get into all the details here, but if Barrett is correct, it would appear that Caligula was the victim of an ancient smear campaign designed to justify his assassination to the masses and bolster the reputation of his successor, Claudius. (Note: that's my own conclusion, not Barrett's). For instance, Suetonius' admittedly entertaining biography of Caligula is an obvious hit piece accusing him of the most outlandish crimes and atrocities, including incest with his sister, but as far as that last charge goes, it was common in Roman politics to accuse your political enemies of all kinds of sexual degeneracy. Spreading malicious rumors for political purposes isn't a modern invention.

Even Suetonius' biography isn't completely negative, however. Caligula is described as a fairly competent, though inexperienced, ruler who later turned into a "monster" for some unknown reason. The impression I get from reading Barrett and Suetonius is that Caligula wasn't really interested in running the empire; like Nero, he was much more interested in the arts, especially acting, music and singing, tastes which would have made him appear effeminate and decadent in the eyes of the elite. Early in his reign, he became seriously ill and Suetonius implies that his sickness may have unhinged his mind. Even if that's true, however, many of the crimes he is accused of are unbelievable and almost certainly never happened.

Caligula had his vices, no doubt, but even if they were exaggerated (or concocted) by ancient propagandists like Suetonius, that doesn't mean that he was actually a good emperor living a chaste and moral life. He wasn't, but it's doubtful if he would have been smeared so viciously if something else hadn't been going on. The fact that he was brutally assassinated by his own Praetorians after a few short years in power shows that he had made powerful enemies among the ruling elites.

A coin depicting Gaius Caligula.

Caligula was the victim of a political conspiracy. That's a historical fact. We'll never know for sure because of the scarcity and anecdotal nature of the sources, but it appears that he was murdered because he tried to eliminate the political enemies he suspected (with justification) were trying to get rid of him. In other words, they killed him before he could kill them, a common scenario in ancient and medieval monarchies. If Caligula was paranoid, he probably had good reason.

After his murder, his enemies had to justify his assassination to the people, who apparently had a great deal of affection for this "cruel tyrant:"

"Caligula began his reign as the darling of the masses--Suetonius speaks of the immensus civium amor ('the massive affection of his fellow-citizens'). It also seems clear that he stayed popular with the ordinary people right up to the end, and indeed their reaction to the news of his death seems to have caused the sources some embarrassment." -- Caligula: The Corruption Of Power, Barrett, p. 229

Caligula was popular with the masses (1). This is critical. His murder--and the murder of his family--had to be justified to the people and the best way to do that was to portray him as an insane monster who had to be put down like any mad dog. Politics back then wasn't so different than it is now. For example, look at the way Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi were demonized or the way the Germans were portrayed as inhuman baby killers during World War I. These days, the mass media handles the propaganda. Back in ancient Rome, they didn't have television or radio, but that's the only real difference.

(1) "Gaius' accession was greeted with widespread joy and relief, and his civility promised well." (Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. revised).

The popular image of Caligula isn't historical. His reputation as an insane monster was first created by ancient writers with a murder to justify and a talent for pandering to the decadent tastes of the mob, tastes that apparently haven't changed at all since the days of ancient Rome. The real Caligula, whoever he was, has been transformed into a sensationalized tabloid demon by the modern media and the mob laps it up, just like it did two thousand years ago.

The ironic thing is that if it weren't for this sensationalized image, most people wouldn't even know Caligula's name. It's one of those bizarre twists of history that his enemies, the very people who worked so hard to destroy him, ended up making him immortal.