Suresh Shenoy

Nero's Minions (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

It is utterly insane even to imagine that the Greco-Roman Church was born with a 'Judas Kiss' at Rome in A.D. 64. Apparently, so it is until an investigative search for the historical evidence finds the basis for the unthinkable contention in the published works of the first century, albeit, it needs the persistence and the keen eye of a Sherlock Holmes.
Tacitus told us in his Annales that 'informants' framed the Christians for the Great Fire at Rome in July A.D. 64.
Clement of Rome wrote to the Corinthians of 'jealousy' of factional rivalry in the Roman Church that brought about the deaths of Peter and Paul.
The Acts of Apostles recorded that James the Elder humiliated Paul at Jerusalem when they met for the last time in A.D. 58.
Paul's five of the six personal Epistles show us how seriously vengeful he was. His tendency to rage and hate was extraordinary. Psychosis caused his hallucinatory visions made worse by physical ailments. In this context, events conspired to unleash Paul's pent up fury against the Elders in A.D. 64. The form it took is the subject of this book.
Paul was free from house arrest at Rome in A.D. 62. James the Elder was murdered in A.D. 63 at Jerusalem at the behest of Ananus ben Ananus, the new high priest. While Paul was free of James, he still had Peter and his faction to deal with at Rome.
Nero's henchmen caused the Great Fire of Rome, wrote Tacitus. The Emperor was looking for scapegoats to save himself from the lynching mobs. There was an urgent need for a set up with a 'Judas Kiss' perhaps.
By piecing together all the available bits of circumstantial evidence, the picture emerges of Paul and his Gentile faction jumping at their once in a lifetime chance. They 'informed' Nero's henchmen that Peter and his Judaic faction caused the fire. The bloodbath that followed is a gory tale of ancient Rome. It horrified and disgusted even the Roman mobs with deadened sensitivities, reported Tacitus.
Paul's coup against the Judaic faction, first led by James the Elder and lately by Peter, succeeded beyond his expectations.
Using subtle literary conventions, the Synoptic Evangelists told their readers about this awful crime with a subtext of irony and the ancient narrative technique of 'analepsis' in their foreground texts, the Gospels. These Gospels thus projected their contemporary historical events and practices into the past as if they had occurred in the life of Jesus. The shifting of the events into the past was merely fictional, while the events themselves were factual and personally experienced by the Evangelists.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Suresh Shenoy
• Erscheinungstermin: 8. Juli 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781311644046
• Artikelnr.: 69740396

Autorenporträt

I had been a secondary school teacher until my retirement in 2000. While planning for life after the gruelling work, I undertook a Masters course in Theology at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia. Graduation in M.Theol. coincided with the beginning of retirement. A course research paper on the Herod Narrative in the Jewish War by Josephus dramatically turned my life around. I'll explain how.

While close reading the Herod Narrative, with my previous acquaintance with Roman literature, I discovered that Josephus had carefully incorporated all the literary conventions of a five-Act tragedy in Seneca's Hercules Furens. That gained for me a high distinction and an invitation to research into the whole of the Jewish War for a Ph.D. That was the year 2000.

I began carefully reading the Jewish War as a history and where it fitted in the spectrum of classical histories. I found that Josephus fell closer to Herodotus than to Thucydides. I also noticed that the Senecan tragedy conventions were also present in the Jewish War side by side with the history. That indeed was an extension of the paper on the Herod Narrative.

The evidence of two texts in one work by Josephus was my discovery. I named it 'Genres Disjunction'. The term explained that it was an example of Quintilian's structual irony. It also clarified that Josephus hid his deep hatred of the Flavian Romans, his benefactors, and secretly asserted his loyalty to the Jewish nation. He made the Flavians the heroes of the history and villains of the tragedy as he changed the Jewish nation from villains of the history into hero-victims of the tragedy.

This is where my life began to change. I was baptized a Roman Catholic and lived a devout life of a Catholic until my reserch began. My curiosity took me from Josephus to the four Evangelists. I found to my utter disbelief that they too had 'Genres Disjunction' in their Gospels. All the Evangelists had the Gospel as the foreground text, but added other texts in the background. Mark had the classical history modeled on Livy's History of Rome. Matthew took Dionysius of Halicarnassus for his. Luke chose the Jewish War of Josephus for his background text and John had Herodotus for his second text.

The more I studied the Gospels the more shocks were in store for me. I found that Mark had a second background text of monomyths in the public life and the passion of Christ. Matthew had the same includ...