OFF-TOPIC BONUS : ASTROLOGY # 2 - Film Score Rundowns

and animals to occupy the same room. That was absolutely not done! The other gospel
said he was born in a house. Those gospels were accepted by the bishops in the 200’s as
the authentic ones, and everything else was considered non-authentic. The Gospel of
Thomas was not one of the ones that was accepted. It was lost for hundreds of years,
nearly a thousand years. But in this century, before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
a copy was discovered in Egypt. It’s pretty interesting.
http://home.epix.net/~miser17/Thomas.html
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/thomas.html
It’s just a bunch of sayings of Jesus. There is nothing in it about physical
miracles, prophecies, announcements of an apocalyptic kingdom about to disrupt the
world, no mention of dying for the sins of others. What he did say, among other things, is
that the kingdom of God is within and without, and what his disciples were looking for
had already comes, and they didn’t recognize it. It describes Jesus as a sort of peasant
Jewish cynic. The cynics were a term for philosophers who wandered the countryside,
speaking to anyone who would listen about their ideas, giving pithy aphorisms, little
sayings that supposedly helped people to live more effectively. They were more or less in
the philosophical tradition of Socrates as a social critic. The last couple of centuries of the
pre-Christian era, and the first couple of centuries after that, were turbulent times in that
area of the world. There were a series of revolutions of the Jews against Rome,
sometimes successful. Of course from the Roman point of view, the people leading these
revolutions were terrorists. What else? They hung out in the desert and they would strike
out against a limited number of Roman soldiers where they might have equal strength, or
they would strike into the towns and then retreat into the desert. The modern name for
them would be terrorists—fighting for freedom for their people. Rome was pretty strong
about [insisting] that if you are in the Roman world, you worship the Emperor. The Jews
said, “We don’t worship a human being. There’s only one God and we worship that one
God. That’s our God—our personal God!”
One of the publications that I was looking at the past couple days –my son, Mark,
says we have to keep up with the “enemy.” He gets a couple of different publications put
out by people who call themselves skeptics. They are not skeptics. They are true believers
in materialism, and anything that is not explainable by materialistic premises –the
premises of materialistic science—is anathema. It’s unacceptable. This particular issue
had an article about the evolution inward morality. They looked at the Ten
Commandments, and specifically the Jews were ordered in those days—and this is pre-
Christian, remember—that they were not to kill their fellow Jews. But it was all right to
kill anybody outside the group. In fact, the law very clearly stated that if you killed a Jew
but it was an accident (like you threw a rock at a non-Jew and it hit a Jew by mistake and
killed him) you were innocent. You were not convicted because you meant to kill
someone who was outside. So that’s the kind of world it was in those days. It was a very
dog-eat-dog, conflicted and destructive world. And the Jews were fighting for their own
personal belief system, and they went up in smoke when the Romans came in and said
you have to worship the Emperor. There are stories of heroism even of little kids who
despite of torture would not recant and worship a human being or a god other than their
own. So in one sense they were quite heroic, but in another sense they were incredibly
narrow, rigid, dogmatic, and parochial. They were non-Piscean! They were very
Capricorn-Aries. God told them they could come into this country—which was actually
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