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Jesus of Palestine Proposed term for an historical character who lived in the first Century CE, distinguished from Jesus of Nazareth, the character portrayed in the Gospels of the New Testament.

Technically speaking, the genre of the Gospels is known as "Hellenistic romance." This is a novelistic form embellished with miracle tales and supernatural aspects, very common in antiquity. Some other Hellenistic novels survive, such as the fantastic biographies of Apollonius of Tyana, an exact contemporary of the presumed Jesus, but most of them are lost, or perhaps destroyed to create the illusion of uniqueness for the Gospel narratives. In the NT the figure of Jesus is a composite, a collage of different characters: the radical rabbi who defies the Law of the Jews in order to fulfill it, the desert saint, the teacher who speaks in parables, the Zealot, the privileged scion of a Jewish royal family, the humble carpenter's son, the companion of Mary Magdalene, the freedom-fighter who takes on the Romans, the promised messiah, the mystic, the initiate from the Mysteries, the Egyptian magician and faith healer...

The most well-known composite of these diverse elements is "Jesus of Nazareth," but considered historically, the most plausible persona that can be constructed from the Gospels with the aid of existing textual and archeological evidence, particularly the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls, is "Jesus of Palestine." This character was a Jewish extremist supported by the Zealots and ideologically inspired by the Zaddakim, the extremist cult on the Dead Sea whose doctrines provided the kernal for the Christian salvationist program that dominates the world today. In all likelihood, Jesus of Palestine was a terrorist, or at the very least, he was protected and championed by terrorists, the Zealots.

The claim that Jesus was divine was not part of mainstream Jewish religion, but it did figure in the bizarre beliefs of the Zaddikim. For Jews who wished to see the Roman occupation overthrown and a Jewish homeland established in Palestine (the "Promised Land"), Jesus was a racial hero, a unique descendent of the House of David destined to inherit the role of King of the Jews. He was the national messiah, the man anointed to the status of kingship. Anointing with oil was a purely symbolic ceremony, a rite of empowerment for the Jewish King since the days of Saul, before 900 BCE. The King so anointed was called "Son of God," but he was not considered in any sense to be divine.

The Hebrew term messiah was translated in Greek as christos, from the verb chreien, "to anoint." Rather as happens with the parlor game Password, this conversion took the word messiah far beyond its original and literal meaning. In the mystical theology elaborated by Saint Paul and Saint John the Divine, Christos became the term for the divine being, "The Christ," embodied uniquely in the person of Jesus. The Pauline-Johannine elaboration on messiah/christos was a huge departure from the nationalist aspirations of mainstream Jews in Palestine, but it remained true to the hidden, sinister ideology of the Zaddikim cult. Over time, the Christos narrative expanded into a world-wide program of salvation. And so it remains today.

"Jesus of Nazareth" is the name that has come to be universally associated with Jesus Christ as a divine/human hybrid, the sole and unique incarnation of divinity on Earth. Who believes this will believe almost anything. As an imaginative tactic to get past this fiction, I propose "Jesus of Palestine" as an historically credible option to the human persona widely revered as the Christian Savior.

Judgement Day The day when you have to use your own judgement to decide who has the right to judge you, and by what standards. In this sense, it is every day of your life.

In a more specific sense, in Christian theology, Judgement Day is the moment at the end of linear history when the Father God, who sent his only-begotten son Jesus to redeem the sins of the world, will appear in heaven with his son and judge the world for its sins, condemning the guilty and taking the blessed up into heaven in the "Rapture." This is the apocalyptic scenario attached to the Second Coming. Those who believe in this scenario also believe that they live differently on Earth, and better than others, and so they await the final judgement with fervor, and perhaps even act to precipitate it, in full expectation that they will be judged favorably. Hence what lies concealed —or encoded, if you will — in the idea of Judgement Day is the assurance of moral superiority for those who deem themselves on God's side and consequently will be favored by God and saved in the last days.

The most extreme expression of moral superiority in world religion was focussed in the superhuman ideal of Tzaddik, "pure righteousness." This was the central element in the vindictive and xenophobic salvationist program of an ancient UFO contact cult whose members took refuge in caves by the Dead Sea: the sect of the Zaddakim. From the ideology and communal rites of this cult, Christianity was derived.