1 JEWISH YEHOSHUA, CYNIC JESUS
“If Christ should appear on earth he would on all hands be denounced as a mistaken, misguided man, insane and crazed.” –Thoreau, October 19, 1859
JOURNAL: Here comes Jesus again
mistaken, misguided
insane and crazed
1. The name “Jesus” (a Greeked variant of “Joshua”) was a popular names of the times. In fact the LCL index to Josephus lists 21 different men of prominence called by that name.
Compare that to John, another very popular name, with 11 different people, and Jonathan, with 15,and Joseph, with 18!
Most of these references are to public individuals simply because Josephus was writing public national history, which meant he focused attention upon the nationally prominent. In ancient Israel, to name a Jewish boy “Joshua” was like in 1950 in the USA, to name a Gentile boy “Dwight David something” or “George S. something.” Joshua had been the single most famous, most successful, most victorious Jewish general ever, bar none. My understanding was that for that reason it was one of the more fave famous names a boy might be given. In fact I consider it one of the little humor touches of all times, that a boy named with such a belligerent name could have grown up to be the Prince of Peace, could have turned out to be the sort of person who instead of taking lives gives up his own. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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At roughly this point in time, Yehoshua bar Yusef, Messiah claimant #6, having succeeded in living a life of compassion and nonviolence, was being remanded back and forth between the Romans under Pontius Pilate and the Jews under Herod Antipas in Jerusalem. After some torture, it seems, at the dump Golgotha outside Jerusalem, he was executed in the usual exemplary manner.
Following the death of Jesus Christ there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years. –Kurt Vonnegut, THE SIRENS OF TITAN
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That is, according to MARK 15: 34, Jesus, a Jewish religious leader, was executed on Friday, Nisan 14th, March 30th, 27 CE. –And at three o’clock, Jesus cried out in a loud voice in Aramaic, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani,” which translates to “My God, my God, why did you [desert? sacrifice?] me?” The Last Supper would have been on that Thursday evening. (Bear in mind that April 7, 30 CE and April 3, 33 CE also were Fri/14/Nisan dates that would correspond to MARK 15: 34.)
Jesus would be regarded as having said, “Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (MATTHEW 16:28). This would seem to imply that the Second Coming would occur within the lifetime of his contemporaries, and indeed the Apostles would expect Jesus to return before the passing of their generation. MILLENNIALISM
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Famous Last Words:
“What school is more profitably instructive than the death-bed of the righteous, impressing the understanding with a convincing evidence, that they have not followed cunningly devised fables, but solid substantial truth.” — A COLLECTION OF MEMORIALS CONCERNING DIVERS DECEASED MINISTERS, Philadelphia, 1787 “The death bed scenes & observations even of the best & wisest afford but a sorry picture of our humanity. Some men endeavor to live a constrained life — to subject their whole lives to their will as he who said he might give a sign if he were conscious after his head was cut off — but he gave no sign Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.” —Thoreau’s JOURNAL, March 12, 1853
399 BCE Socrates drinking the hemlock “Crito, I owe a cock to Æsclepius.”
27 CE Jesus being crucified “It is finished.” [John 19:30]
1415 John Huss being burned at the stake “O, holy simplicity!”
May 30, 1431 Joan of Arc being burned at the stake “Hold the cross high so I may see it through the flames.”
May 4, 1534 Father John Houghton as he was being disemboweled “And what wilt thou do with my heart, O Christ?”
July 6, 1535 Sir Thomas More being beheaded “The King’s good servant, but God’s First.”
1536 Anne Boleyn being beheaded “Oh God, have pity on my soul.”
February 18, 1546 Martin Luther found on his chamber table “We are beggers: this is true.”
July 16, 1546 Anne Askew being burned at the stake “There he misseth, and speaketh without the book” ... other famous last words ...
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62 CE
Paul (10-67 CE), the leader of the Paulist Cult, confirmed a harsh condemnation of woman that would perpetuate into the 21st Century. Based on the 2nd version of the creation of humankind encapsulated in GENESIS, he categorized woman as at best the reflection of man’s glory. He taught that woman came from man and existed for the sake of man. He proclaimed as Church Law that women were to remain silent at meetings and were to remain perpetually subject to their husbands and fathers. The Law (Judah) orders this, for it was woman’s tongue which caused the fall of man from God’s grace and therefore changed the nature of things so that what had been good is now experienced as ill. This divided the early church into two camps. The cult led by James the Just (deceased in 62 CE), a brother of Jesus, sought to remain faithful to the Judah Law. The cult led by Stephan sought to break away from this temple tradition. As a compromise the Roman Hellenistic Churches forced the Principle of Salvation through Faith in Christ thereby dispensing non-Judaic Christians from obeying the Law of Moses. This it is claimed had been established at the Council of Jerusalem in 49 CE.
These early Messianic sects of Jerusalem were socialistic, and later Roman Christian Church descendents would condemn their practices as being pagan and heathenistic. They shared food gladly and generously, and
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owned everything in common. They met by common consent. The Church of Rome would come to consider these traditions a squandering of one’s belongings. Those who continued these early Essene and Christian principles would be persecuted.
There are some stories that Joseph of Arimathea came through Glastonbury in this year on the first Christian mission to Britain.
The Romans captured the last remnants of the Babylonian Empire in Northern Syria. The Judo-Messianic sect of Nazareth believed that Satan resided to the Northwest of Nazareth. Rebels killed the High-Priest Ananus (Anas) II (62-63) of Jerusalem hoping to return the Priesthood to the traditional House of Zadokite.
70 CE
At about this point the gospel according to Mark was written. We suppose there was also a Greek text we refer to as the “Signs Gospel,” which would be used eventually in the gospel according to John to demonstrate that Jesus was the Messiah.
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The Emperor Vespasian’s eldest son, General Titus Flavian, heir to the Roman Imperial throne (79-81), and 80,000 legionaires put an end to all Jewish independence and destroyed the second temple of Jerusalem, sets it afire and tore down the walls. Some suggest it is Titus Flavian who carried off the Ark of the Covenant and the seven-branched candelabra, both sacred emblems of Judaism. Vespasian and Titus were of humble origin and strove to maintain peace within the Empire. The Judah debated, in the town of Yagnar, which books to include in the BIBLE. This is believed to be the first complete Old Testament. Some books included by Christian sects are not included by the Judah sects.
It is noteworthy that Jerusalem had a special access gate for the Essenes. This gate is past the place called Bethso in the southwestern corner of Jerusalem’s old first wall. It is believed the gate was installed about 30 BCE by Roman engineers and destroyed in 70 CE. According to the PBS Frontline special “Apocalypse!” the Essenes, a sect of Jewish ascetics with apocalyptic beliefs, may have considered the Jewish revolt against the Romans in 66-70 CE to be the final end-time battle. MILLENNIALISM
The Dead Sea Scrolls were completed by a Judo-Christian Monastic Sect called Essenes who lived 200 BCE to 70 CE around the Dead Sea. It is known that some early Judaeo-Christians withdrew into the desert to a Monistic existence. Some believe this Judah Sect eventually evolved into some of the early Eastern-Christians. The Greek Orthodox Christians as an example hold the Monastic tradition as an ideal. The last of the Dead Sea scrolls is written in Aramaic. The Messianic Essenes are also traced to 8th century Kerites a heretical Judah sect from Persia who followed the Essene writings. Some suggest that the Gospel and Letters of John could be written by the Essene or are based upon the Essene documents of Qumran. The Messianic Rule of the Essenes “when they shall gather for the common table the priest shall bless the first fruits of bread and wine, thereafter the Messiah of Israel (Judah) shall extend his hand over the bread, and all the congregation of the Community utter a blessing.
The Brotherhood of Jesus was still largely indistinguishable from Judaism in general during the first century after his death. A telling difference was the Brotherhood’s belief that the Messiah had come in the person of this Joshua (Jesus). The major theological difference was the failure of some Hellenistic Christians and Roman Paulists to follow Judah Law according to the Council of 49. During this period Judaism was extremely diverse in its beliefs and values. On the Orthodox side the people are awaiting the messiah to wage war against the forces of evil in a final Apocalyptic Battle, a forty-year struggle of the children of light vs. the children of darkness. According to the ancient tradition good would eventually triumph over all evil.
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Titus and Tiberious Alexander laid siege to Jerusalem, causing its complete destruction. The Roman Christians believed that this destruction revoked the special convenient between God and the Judah, and the Judo- Christians for that matter. This belief made the Judah people even more distrusting of the Roman Christians.
Some scholars suggest that John Mark of Jerusalem, who assisted Peter and Paul and Barnabas, was the first to recorded the Gospels, in this year in Rome, on the basis of the teachings of Peter. This is of course speculative. It is noteworthy that Barnabas, a companion and fellow preacher with the Paulist sect, is presumed to have authored the General Epistle of Barnabas, a writing which had canonical authority in the early Christian community, although it is likely that this writing was not produced until after the first century. Early Roman Christian writings show no knowledge of the Gospel attributed to Mark. The earliest known fragments, excluding the Dead Sea Scrolls, are dated about 125-150 CE. The Oldest surviving copy of the book of Mark dates to 225 CE. It is generally accepted that the Gospel according to Mark represents the oldest book and that
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the Matthew, Luke, and John books used Mark as their source. The first records (Quelle) presumably contained only the parables and the balance was later added, resulting in some conflicting accounts. The actual authors of the Gospels are quite unknown despite their attribution as Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. The gospel of Matthew is believed to have been written in Aramaic. Some suggest that Mark was written with the implicit purpose to clear Judo-Christians of any involvement in the Judah rebellion. Matthew 23:8-10 commands “you are not to be called Rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your Father on earth, for you have one Father, the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah.” This would tend to indicate that the Rabbi Pharisee sect was gaining in authority over the Matthean sect. The Epistles attributed to Paul that are rejected by the Roman Catholic Church are the ones to the Laodiceans, to the Seneca, and to Thecla. Some contend that the Acts of Paul and Thecla date o 492-
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496 CE.
The Jewish aristocratic class of priests (Sadducees) was destroyed forever and the scribal class of legal experts (Pharisee) inherited the Jewish leadership. They assembled at Yavneh, west of Jerusalem near the Mediterranean coast, to save Judaism. The Pharisee advocated religious fidelity and moral integrity and extended the lost Temple ritual into every Jewish home. The home regular meals will be observed as once was the Temple and its sacrificial meal. A group of Judeo-Christians (Epiphanius) returned to Jerusalem.
From this year until 361 CE, a special annual tax of 2 drachmas would be required of all Jews of the Roman
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Empire — due to the defeat of the God of Jerusalem by Jupiter Capitolinus.
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93 CE
The historian Flavius Josephus (37-100 CE) put out his ANTIQUITIES OF THE JEWS in the Aramaic language, with a translation into Greek, containing what purported to be the record of 3,833 years. He averred that the book of GENESIS had been written by Moses, but that he had authored the volume from a philosophical rather than a historical perspective. He identified the Seth of GENESIS as the Pharaoh Sesostris. He pointed out a scriptural injunction that “A woman is inferior to her husband in all things” (an injunction that has not survived into current copies of the Christian Old Testament) and drew an obvious inference, that she should be obedient in all things. Here is Josephus’s TESTIMONIUM FLAVIANUM passage, which is presumably a later interpolation: At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man. For he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people who receive the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and among many of Greek origin. And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so. And up until this very day the tribe of Christians (named
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after him) has not died out.
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800 CE
December 25, Christmas: Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Roman Empire of the West by Pope Leo III in St. Peter’s Church, Rome. An enormously good time was had by all.
On this auspicious occasion the emperor presented the pope with the authentic foreskin of Jesus Christ. Although this object may have been given to him as a wedding present by the Byzantine Empress Irene, the story the emperor told the pope was that it had been given to him by an angel while praying at the Holy Sepulchre. The pope would deposit this sacred piece of Jesus in the Sanctum sanctorum of the Lateran basilica in Rome, from which it would be looted during the Sack of Rome in 1527. CATHOLICS
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1527
This was a poor harvest year in Europe.
The first Protestant University was founded in Marburg.
German mercenary soldiers, troops in the pay of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, put Rome to fire and sword, killing 4,000 of its inhabitants and looting its art treasures — well, so much for the Renaissance. The Swiss guards transferred Pope Clement VII to safe custody at the Castel Sant’Angelo, with in the process 147 of them losing their lives. Benvenuto Cellini, participating in the unsuccessful defense of the city, at one point –if we are to take his word for it– slew the Constable of Bourbon and at another point slew the Prince of Orange, Philibert — he was, it seems, quite the slewer.
King Charles V himself also was slewed during this Roman holiday event. Also, the authentic foreskin of Jesus Christ, which had been passed along to the pope by the emperor Charlemagne upon the occasion of his coronation on Christmas Day, 800 CE, was taken by a German soldier from the Sanctum sanctorum of the Lateran basilica in Rome, in its jeweled reliquary. That soldier would soon be captured in the village of Calcata, just a day or two’s travel north of Rome, and taken into confinement, and would hide the precious object in his cell for the following three decades, until it would be discovered there in 1557 and taken to the local church. CATHOLICS
With the sack of Rome, Pope Clement was put to ignominious flight — and so Florence revolted against the Medici and restored its traditional republic. The Medici were expelled.The left arm of Michelangelo’s “David” was struck with a bench during a riot, and broken into three pieces (it would be reattached but the seams still show).
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Michelangelo completed the marble interior of the Medici family chapel devoted to the memory of their dear departed youths Giuliano and Lorenzo.
This was a fateful year for Anglican religion — King Henry VIII began the divorce proceedings against his wife Queen Consort Catherine of Aragón which would radically divorce London from Rome.
In London, Boccaccio’s THE FALL OF PRINCES, PRINCESSES, AND OTHER NOBLES was translated by John Lydgate and printed by Richard Pynson who, in addition to William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde, was among the 1st to bring printing to the British Isles. He had been Printer to the King since 1508 and would continue in that capacity until 1529. He was still using black-letter face, though this had long since been abandoned in Italy and elsewhere on the Continent. HISTORY OF THE PRESS
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1557
A German soldier had stolen the jeweled reliquary containing the authentic foreskin of Jesus from its basilica during the looting of Rome some three decades earlier, but had quickly been captured in the village of Calcata, just a day or two’s travel north of Rome. He had been concealing this in his cell, but at this point the precious object was discovered and taken to the local church. It would be a tourist attraction in the village for many centuries, and on the annual parade of the Feast of the Circumcision would be carried through the streets of the town in its jeweled reliquary. There were, however, in those times, embarrassingly, some 8 to 18 different authentic foreskins of Jesus Christ. One was at the Cathedral of Le Puy-on-Velay, one was at Santiago de Compostela, one was in Antwerp in the Brabant (brought there in 1100 CE as a gift from King Baldwin I of Jerusalem, who had purchased it in Palestine during the 1st Crusade, but then in 1566 this sacred object, which was still capable of bleeding, would mysteriously disappear), one was at Coulombs in the diocese of Chartres, one was in Chartres itself, one was in a church in Besançon, one was in a church in Newport, one was in a church in Metz, one was in a church in Hildesheim, one was in the abbey in Charroux (where it would be lost but then refound in 1856 by a workman repairing a wall), one was in a church in Conques, one was in a church in Langres, one was in a church in Fécamp, one was in a church in Stoke-on-Trent, and two were in churches in Auvergne (most of these Holy Prepuces would be destroyed during the Reformation and the French Revolution). CATHOLICS
1612
From this year to 1639 those Japanese who had turned Christian would be undergoing severe persecution.
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JAPANESE EMPERORS
1612-1629 Go-Mi-no-o
1630-1643 Meisho
1644-1654 Go-Komyo
1655-1662 Go-Saiin
1663-1686 Reigen
1687-1709 Higashi-yama
1710-1735 Nakamikado
1736-1746 Sakuramachi
1746-1762 Momozono
1763-1770 Go-Sakuramachi
1771-1779 Go-Momozono
1780-1816 Kokaku
1817-1846 Ninko
1847-1866 Komei
1866-1912 Mutsuhito
1912-1926 Yoshihito
1926-1989 Hirohito
1989-20?? Akihito
(Eventually those Japanese who had turned Christian would have an atom bomb dropped on their heads.)
Peasants who were unwilling to resume their status as serfs armed themselves and attempted a resistance, only to be hunted down by Tokugawa soldiers (this process would reach its completion in 1686, with the arrest of the final 300 members of the All-God group and execution of their leaders; the modern Japanese crime syndicates known as yakuza, or “losers,” date their origin to the officially sanctioned guilds of peddlers, gamblers, and strongarm guys formed in the wake of this repression).
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1613
October: Hasekura Tsunenaga (1571-1622), at the head of a crew of 180 Japanese, set out for Acapulco in a 500-ton galleon that had been built in six months under Spanish supervision by Japanese shipwrights. He would have audiences with the Mexican viceroy in 1614 and, after a voyage on a Western ship, with the Spanish monarch Philip III in 1615. While in Spain he would have himself baptized as a Christian:
There is still in Seville, Spain a family of surname “Japon” that has one or another of the 20 Japanese that made it that far, among its ancestors. The story is well told in “Relación breve, y sumaria del edito que mandó publicar en todo su Reyno del Bojö, uno de las mas poderosos del Iapon, el rey Idate Masamune, publicando la fé de Cristo, y del embaxador que embio a españa....”
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Hasekura Tsunenaga would voyage on to Rome where he would score an audience with Pope Paul V. Here he is in the attire he would don for his audience:
(Back home, however, the Japanese ruler Tokugawa Ieyasu would during February 1614 have issued an edict expelling all priests from Japan, and eventually this would result in a hardening of the Spanish attitude toward trade; thus Hasekura’s mission ultimately would come to nothing. After two years in the Philippines, Hasekura would return to Japan in September 1620.)
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1634
A quaint Catholic village in the Bavarian alps had begun staging, at least by this year, a quaint Christian piece of guerrilla theatre the explicit focus of which was the claim that it had been the Jews, not the Romans, who had offed Christ. This idea would prove so attractive that the piece of theater, in which all Jewish characters (other than Jesus himself, of course) wore horn nubs as part of their costumes, would from this point forward be restaged every ten years with a fresh generation of local actors. The village of Oberammergau dedicated itself to the moral principle of watchfulness, that never again would a filthy Semite be allowed to off a Christian.2 ANTISEMITISM
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1635
George Fox would in this year turn eleven years of age, and at least by his own account he was a promising lad:
When I came to eleven years of age I knew pureness and righteousness; for while a child I was taught how to walk to be kept pure. The Lord taught me to be faithful in all things, and to act faithfully two ways, viz., inwardly, to God, and outwardly, to man; and to keep to Yea and Nay in all things. For the Lord showed me that, though the people of the world have mouths full of deceit, and changeable affords, yet I was to keep to Yea and Nay in all things; and that my words should lie few and savoury, seasoned with grace; and that I might not eat and drink to make myself wanton, but for health, using the creatures [created things] in their service, as servants in their places, to the glory of Him that created them. As I grew up, my relations thought to have made me a priest [clergyman in the established Church, or any minister who receives pay for preaching], but others persuaded to the contrary. Whereupon I was put to a man who was a shoemaker by trade, and dealt in wool. He also used grazing, and sold cattle; and a great deal went through my hands. While I was with him he was blessed, but after I left him he broke and came to nothing. I never wronged man or woman in all that time; for the Lord’s power was with me and over me, to preserve me. While I was in that service I used in my dealings the word Verily, and it was a common saying among those that knew me, “If George says verily, there is no altering him.” When boys and rude persons would laugh at me, I let them alone and went my way; but people had generally a love to me for my innocency and honesty.
Rufus Jones comments that although this brief connection with a Nottingham shoemaker and cattle grazer has been effectively used by Thomas Carlyle in his famous characterization of Fox (SARTOR RESARTUS, Book iii., Chapter 1: “An Incident in Modern History”), there is simply no historical foundation whatever for such a conceit, any more than there is any historical foundation whatever for Carlyle’s conceit that Fox lived in a hollow tree. The only known reference would be to a passage in Fox’s writings, in which he comments that “I fasted much, walked abroad in solitary places many days; and often took my Bible, and sat in hollow trees and lonesome places till night came on,” and this of course would be evidence merely for a practice of frequent retirement for private devotional meditation and prayer not at all uncommon in Fox’s day and age, and as such entirely innocuous.
Also, it is merely conjectural, or imaginative, to suppose there to have been any connection between Fox’s leather outfit and his earlier apprenticeship — we might as well suppose that when Fox stopped off at an inn in Nottingham for a steak and kidney pie, the steak and the kidney would perhaps have been contributed by a
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descendant of a cow that the apprentice Fox had once herded!
Good morrow to thee, You who live in a tree; Dressed all in leather, You teach decency.
THOMAS CARLYLE
As a type case of The-Toil-Worn-Craftsman-Hero, perhaps Carlyle offers us the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, as type cases of The-Priestly-Great-Man, perhaps he offers us the Reverends Martin Luther and John Knox, and as a type case of The-Great-One-Who-Does-It-All, who combines the work of this material world with the work of the other immaterial one, perhaps he offers us (over and above Jesus the carpenter savior) his image of George Fox the worker in soles and souls. It is interesting that Carlyle supposes that he knows of no-one of this category in his own generation, when he is in contact with Waldo Emerson — and Emerson has been feeding him this and that piece of info about his Concord neighbor and confidant Henry
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Thoreau, who might have been eminently perceived as fitting into such shoes as these!
Two men I honour, and no third. First, the toil-worn Craftsman that with earth-made Implement laboriously conquers the Earth, and makes her man’s. Venerable to me is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable too is the rugged face, all weather- tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is the face of a Man living manlike. O, but the more venerable for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee! Hardly-entreated Brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed: thou were our Conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so marred. For in thee too lay a god-created Form, but it was not to be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and defacements of Labour: and thy body, like thy soul, was not to know freedom. Yet toil on, toil on: thou art in thy duty, be out of it who may; thou toilest for the altogether indispensable, for daily bread. A second man I honour, and still more highly: Him who is seen toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but the bread of Life. Is not he too in his duty; endeavouring towards inward Harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all his outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when his outward and his inward endeavour are one: when we can name him Artist; not earthly Craftsman only, but inspired Thinker, who with heaven-made Implement conquers Heaven for us! If the poor and humble toil that we have Food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return, that he have Light, have Guidance, Freedom, Immortality? —These two, in all their degrees, I honour: all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth. Unspeakably touching is it, however, when I find both dignities united; and he that must toil outwardly for the lowest of man’s wants, is also toiling inwardly for the highest. Sublimer in this world know I nothing than a Peasant Saint, could such now anywhere be met with. Such a one will take thee back to Nazareth itself; thou wilt see the splendour of Heaven spring forth from the humblest depths of Earth, like a light shining in great darkness.
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1646
October 28: The Reverend John Eliot of Roxbury had hired an old Indian man named Job Nesutan to live with his family and teach him the native language, which was accomplished “in a few months.” On this date he took the first meeting of his missionary career, by persuading a group of five or six native Americans “near Watertown mill, upon the south side of Charles River, about four or five miles from his own house, where lived at that time Waban, one of their principal men [but said to be no sachem], and some Indians with him,” to take him to their village Nonantum at a spot which was afterward renamed Newton.
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The name “Waban,” or “Wauban” or “Waaubon,” indicated “wind.” The name “Nonantum,” or “Noonatomen,” indicated “a place of rejoicing,” or “rejoicing.” A large number of native Americans assembled, and the Reverend Eliot prayed, ran through the Ten Commandments, and warned of “the dreadful
curse of God that would fall upon all who brake them.” He then explained who Jesus Christ was, and indicated that “he would one day come again to judge the world in flaming fire.” This pitch took about an hour. There followed a question-and-answer period.
The manner in which the Reverend Eliot instructed the Indians, per Governor Winthrop’s Journal:
Mention was made before of some beginning to instruct the Indians, etc. Mr. John Eliot, teacher of the church of Roxbury, found such encouragement, as he took great pains to get their language, and in a few months could speak of the things of God to their understanding; and God prospered his endeavors, so as
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he kept a constant lecture to them in two places, one week at the wigwam of one Wabon, a new sachem near Watertown mill, and the other the next week in the wigwam of Cutshamekin, near Dorchester mill. And for the futherance of the work of God, divers of the English resorted to his lecture, and the governor and other of the magistrates and elders sometimes; and the Indians began to repair thither from other parts. His manner of proceeding was thus; he would persuade one of the other elders or some magistrate to begin the exercise with prayer in English; then he took a text, and read it first in the Indian language, and after in English; then he preached to them in Indian about an hour; (but first I should have spoke of the catechising their children, who were soon brought to answer some short questions, whereupon he gave each of them an apple or a cake) then he demanded of some of the chiefs, if they understood him; if they answered, yea, then he asked them if they had any questions to propound. And they had usually two or three more questions, which he hid resolve. At one time (when the governor was there and about two hundred people, Indian and English, in one wigwam of Cutshamekin's) an old man asked him, if God would receive such an old man as he was; to whom he answered by opening the parable of the workmen that were hired into the vineyard; and when he had opened it, he asked the old man, if he did believe it, who answered he did, and was ready to weep. A second question was, what was the reason, that when all Englishmen did know God, yet some of them wee poor. His answer was, 1. that God knows it is better for his children to be good than be rich; he knows withal, that if some of them had riches, they would abuse them, and wax proud and wanton, etc. therefore he gives them no more riches than may be needful for them, that they may be kept from pride, etc. to depend upon him, 2. he would hereby have men know, that he hath better blessings to bestow upon good men than riches, etc., and that their best portion is in heaven, etc. A third question was, if a man had two wives, (which was ordinary with them,) seeing he must put away one, which he should put away. To this it was answered, that by the law of God the first is the true wife, and the other is no wife; but if such a case fell out, they should then repair to the magistrates, and they would direct them what to do, for it might be, that the first wife might be an adulteress, etc., and then she was to be put away. When all their questions were resolved, he concluded with prayer in the Indian language. The Indians were usually very attentive, and kept their children so quiet as caused no disturbance. Some of them began to be seriously affected, and to understand the things of God, and they were generally ready to reform whatsoever they were told to be against the word of God, as their sorcery, (which they call powwowing,) their whoredoms, etc., idleness etc. The Indians grow very inquisitive after knowledge both in things divine and also human, so as one of them, meeting with an honest plain Englishman, would needs know of him, what were the first beginnings (which we call principles) of a commonwealth.
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1665
From this year to 1703 the Reverend William Hubbard would serve as the minister to the church in Ipswich, Massachusetts.
The English took over some more Nipmuc lands by means of their Brookfield Purchase, from the natives of Quabaug to several inhabitants of Ipswich. The purchase was fair and square although there is some question as to what might have happened to the natives had they chosen to be “unreasonable.” Whites got the best farmlands in the river valleys, leaving the Nipmuc –who depended heavily on agriculture– with a serious difficulty in feeding themselves. The Nipmuc of course got Christianity in return for their title generosity, which any way you slice it is a really great deal. This would be the last land deal with the Nipmuc prior to “King Phillip’s War”.
1768
Death of Herman Samuel Reimarus, who as a professor of Oriental Languages in Hamburg had attempted to make a distinction between what Jesus had said about himself and what the authors of the gospels had said about him — and thus had initiated the scholarly tradition which has been termed “the quest for the historical Jesus.”
1807
September 7, Monday: A Presbyterian missionary sent to China by the London Missionary Society, the Reverend Dr. Robert Morrison, had declared his intention to be the bringing of “the light of science and revelation” to “peacefully and gradually shed their lustre on the Eastern limit of Asia and the islands of the rising sun,” lands which up to that point had been very much in the dark. He stood fresh off the boat on a Canton dock with the bee in his bonnet to convert all these teeming multitudes of Chinamen to the truth and power of Christianity and thus earn an entire galaxy of stars for his heavenly crown — and he bore in his hand a letter of introduction from then Secretary of State James Madison. He was wondering who to show this precious letter to first. Let us have a moment of silence, and contemplate the possibilities. [Moment of Silence]
In result of the bombardment of Copenhagen that had proceeded from August 16th to September 5th, and in return for an understanding that the British would attempt to leave Copenhagen within six weeks, Denmark signed a capitulation document surrendering all its navy and naval stores.
Under threat from France, King Gustaf IV Adolf ceded Pomerania to the French.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7 day / This Afternoon rode to Portsmouth with couzin Z C, spent
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the evening at P L’s with my dear H then returned & lodged at Z C’s the next morning returned to P L’s & walked with him to meeting where my mind was favord with access to the spring of life & to me is was a very favor’d tho’ silent meeting, Oh! that I may render due thanks from the heart to him from whon cometh every blessing, & those of this kind I esteem the greatest — After meeting, J Rodman & I went to H Almys & dined. I made a pleasant visit there, & left J & returned to P L, again where I lodged & this / 2 day [Monday] / morning rose at a little past 4 OClock & walked home in about two hours - It has been a day of tumult the Militia has paraded the Streets with the sound of Drums & Fifies which with their appearance allways affect my mind with seriousness & put me to inspecting the ground of my faith in the Christian Religion, & I have thought this day that my objections to appearing as a military man is founded & something more than meer traditional Religion, for I think I have seen that wars & fightings are an offence to the Almighty & that he hath no delight in them, Oh that the pure spirit of Christianity may more & more abound in my heart —- Called at Earls, & Sarah introduced me to a man who lived in the other part of the house that had a Galvance machine I examined it & took several Shocks, it is a wonderful thing & past my finding out that a few peaces of metal Should have such an effect on the human frame, but it is like many other things, that we are but ignorant beings, & to impress on our minds with the Greatness & goodness of God — Spent the remained of the evening at C R: with a precious covering over my mind. Oh that I may be thankful — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
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1814
January 1, Saturday: On the New York side of the Niagara River, Youngstown, Lewiston, Manchester, Schlosser, Black Rock, and Buffalo had been put to the torch. By holding Fort Niagara the British were in control not only of the mouth of the river but also of a safe haven for their warships and supply vessels.
The Emperor Napoléon I replied favorably to the allied offer of December 15th.
Hung Hsiu Ch’üan was born. After being disappointed in the Confucian civil service examinations, he would have visions and come to the conclusion that he must be Jesus Christ’s younger brother on a mission to redeem China (don’t laugh, 25,000,000 Chinese are going to die rancid deaths on account of this fantasizing).3 CHINESE CIVIL WAR
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day 1st of 1st M 1814 / Recd this eveng a leter from my beloved friend Micajah Collins Dated 12 M 23rd - which was a very agreeable NewYears gift.——4 RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
1820
February 14, Monday: In Vietnam, from this point until 1841, the emperor Minh Mang would be reversing the policies of Gia-Long, and expelling the Christians.5
3. For all that he was JC’s little brother, this guy wouldn’t actually have much use for anything peculiar to the New Testament — such as for instance kindness, or forgiveness, or redemption. Instead his Christianity was going to be long on obedience, and proper worshipfulness, and his dad was to be construed as a God of vengeance. But the Tai-p’ings did have a useful list of prohibitions: there was to be no prostitution in their Kingdom of Heaven, or even divorce, there was to be no enslavement or even foot-binding, there was to be no recreational use of opium or wine or tobacco — and of course there was to be no gambling! Both the Chinese Communists of the PRC (People’s Republic of China, on the mainland) and the Chinese Nationalists of the ROC (Republic of China, on Taiwan) now claim that they originated as this nativist resistance movement against the Manchu overlords in Beijing. 4. Stephen Wanton Gould Diary, 1812-1815: The Gould family papers are stored under control number 2033 at the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of Cornell University Library, Box 7 Folder 11 for July 1, 1812-August 20, 1815; also on microfilm, see Series 7 5. This policy was, of course, a mistake, since as we all know, in this world there is nothing quite as nice, or quite as rare, as a real Christian. 32 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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April 13, Thursday: Former President Thomas Jefferson was hard at work revising the Gospels. He wrote to William Short –his secretary and protégé– about Jesus Christ, that:
Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 13th of 4th M 1820 / Our first meeting was silent & to me a pretty good season. — At the close of it was held our Select Meeting for Ministers & Elders, which was to me a Solemn time, especially towards the close, when some feeling & pertinent remarks were made on the State of Society by our friends D Buffum & Hannanh Dennis - Our friend Abigail Robinson attended the first meeting but was unable from her delicate state of health to Sit in the last & this is the first time she has been out to meeting since last summer. - Susannah Hathaway dined with us RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
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1826
November 16, Thursday: The great Quaker Schism had been initiated earlier in this month. Thus when Friend Elias Hicks presented a sermon at Chester, Pennsylvania, certain other Quakers were primed to discover it patently offensive:
Now my whole drift is, to gather the minds of the people to the light within, which is the same as the grace of God, the manifestation of the Spirit that reproves for evil. It was this that Jesus recommended to his disciples, it was this light which George Fox preached — it is an emanation from God in the soul of man, by his power and Spirit; and he is every where, for in him we live, move, and have our being [ACTS 17:28]... how reasonable and plain a case it is. Because as God has all power and comprehends all knowledge; so he is in our souls and ready to open all knowledge that will do us good; for he has all knowledge of good and evil. Man never brought into the world any knowledge; and he has no power to decide correctly. It is only through the efficiency of the divine light and life or grace of God, that he can decide. And this is given to every one to profit with. Now it is called Light, especially by us of this Society, who profess to be Christians. This is the foundation which George Fox came out upon — he directed them to “mind the light.”
GEORGE FOX At the conclusion of Friend Elias’s sermon, first Friend Jonathan Evans, and following him Friend Isaac Lloyd, elders of the Pine Street Meeting in Philadelphia, rose in opposition and expressed evangelical sentiments about the atonement, mediation, and intercession of our blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, accusing the traveling minister of supposing that this King of kings and Lord of lords before whose judgment seat every soul shall be arraigned was a mere man who had perhaps come for Jews only:
We do not conceive him to be a mere man; and we therefore desire, that people may not suppose that we hold any such doctrines — or that we have any unity with them.
JESUS In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 16th of 11 M / Our Meeting was silent & a season of leanness to mee, as many have been of late. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
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1828
Leang-afa was the Dr. Robert Morrison’s 1st real, as opposed to rice-Christian, convert in all of China to the truth and power of Christianity, in all the hard years of struggle since this missionary had debarked from an American ship in 1807 in Canton with in his hand his precious letter of introduction from then Secretary of State James Madison. Things were looking up!
1832
Publication of Friend Joseph John Gurney’s THE MORAL CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST.
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It has been said that religion can function as an opiate for the masses, but in this year a religion-book was being prepared by a recently hooked Chinaman, Liang Afa, that would have made Karl Marx proud for its dopey influences. This Liang Afa had been the 1st Chinese convert to Christianity, in 1828, of the Dr. Robert Morrison who had in 1807 been sent to Canton by the London Missionary Society in an American ship with a letter of introduction provided by then Secretary of State James Madison. His treatise QUANSHI LIANGYAN or GOOD WORDS TO EXHORT THE AGES described in a manner which could be understood in China the basic elements of the belief structure, such as proselytization, I’m right and you’re wrong, etc.
Such truth-proclamation of course works almost everywhere. In this same year the Reverend Charles Grandison Finney was becoming the minister of the 2d Free Congregational Church and beginning an almost continuous revival in the city of New-York.
In a different category altogether was the publication in this year in London of the 2d edition of Rammohan Roy’s TRANSLATION OF SEVERAL PRINCIPAL BOOKS, PASSAGES, AND TEXTS OF THE VEDS, AND OF SOME 6 CONTROVERSIAL WORKS ON BRAHMUNICAL THEOLOGY.
This was not pap, or warmed-over Christian righteousness.
From the 12th page of this treatise, Henry Thoreau would extrapolate the following material for A WEEK:
A WEEK: It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ. I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too. “God is the letter Ku, as well as Khu.” Why need Christians be still intolerant and superstitious?
6. Rammohan Roy would be cited by name in draft E of the of WALDEN manuscript in late 1852 or in 1853 based upon Henry Thoreau’s reading of this material in April 1850. Refer to William Bysshe Stein’s 1967 recovery of the reference in TWO BRAHMAN SOURCES OF EMERSON AND THOREAU, published by Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints of Gainesville FL. 36 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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TRANSLATION
OF SEVERAL
PRINCIPAL BOOKS, PASSAGES, AND TEXTS
OF THE VEDS,
AND OF
SOME CONTROVERSIAL WORKS
ON
BRAHMUNICAL THEOLOGY.
————
BY
RAJAH RAMMOHUN ROY.
————
SECOND EDITION.
————
LONDON: PARBURY, ALLEN, & CO., LEADENHALL STREET. —— 1832.
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Also, from page 21 Thoreau would extrapolate the following materials (and the materials on the succeeding screens) for his WALDEN chapter on “Higher Laws”:
WALDEN: But to tell the truth, I find myself at present somewhat less particular in these respects. I carry less religion to the table, ask no blessing; not because I am wiser than I was, but, I am obliged to confess, because, however much it is to be regretted, with years I have grown more coarse and indifferent. Perhaps these questions are entertained only in youth, as most believe of poetry. My practice is “nowhere,” my opinion is here. Nevertheless I am far from regarding myself as one of those privileged ones to whom the Ved refers when it says, that “he who has true faith in the Omnipresent Supreme Being may eat all that exists,” that is, is not bound to inquire what is his food, or who prepares it; and even in their case it is to be observed, as a Hindoo commentator has remarked, that the Vedant limits this privilege to “the time of distress.”
TIMELINE OF WALDEN
(Rajah Rammohan Roy, unlike Thoreau, moved in the circles of power. He vigorously supported the Reform Bill — which was enacted. He visited Paris — and had an audience with King Louis Philippe.)
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I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject, –I care not how obscene my words are,– but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity. We discourse freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are silent about another. We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature. In earlier ages, in some countries, every function was reverently spoken of and regulated by law. Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. He teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles.
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WALDEN: The other day I picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. This creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. “That in which men differ from brute beasts,” says Mencius, “is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully.” Who knows what sort of life would result if we had attained to purity? If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity I would go to seek him forthwith. “A command over our passions, and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to be indispensable in the mind’s approximation to God.” Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.– “How happy’s he who hath due place assigned To his beasts and disaforested his mind! *** Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev’ry beast, And is not ass himself to all the rest! Else man not only is the herd of swine, But he’s those devils too which did incline Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse.” All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If you would be chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard. From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. An unclean person is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued. If you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, thought it be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome. What avails it that you are Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious? I know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites merely.
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1834
September 22, Monday: At 10AM, the School of Human Culture opened its doors for business in the Masonic Temple on Tremont Street directly across from the Tremont House and the Boston Common. The school occupied two rooms on the fourth floor, the top floor, at a rent of $300.00 per year. The furnishings, for which Bronson Alcott went further into debt, included not only a larger-than-life “bass-relievo” of Jesus Christ over a bookcase behind the schoolmaster’s enormous desk, and busts of Plato, William Shakespeare, Socrates, and Sir Walter Scott in the four corners of the classroom, but also a portrait of the Reverend William Ellery Channing (father of one of the pupils) and two geranium plants. Alcott had heard Waldo Emerson preach in 1828, and now Emerson was doing him the honor of visiting his school.
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Elizabeth Palmer Peabody became Bronson Alcott’s assistant at this Temple School, and began boarding with the Alcott family. There were, initially, 30 pupils.
The students used desks having individual shelves and a hinged blackboard that could swing forward or back. Evidently, this desk had been developed by Bronson’s cousin, Dr. William Andrus Alcott.
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October 27, Monday: A royal decree stripped Don Carlos of any right to the Spanish throne.
Bronson Alcott was working himself into a state of mind in which he was comparing himself to Jesus of Nazareth:
I shall redeem infancy and childhood; and if a Savior of Adults was given, in the person of Jesus, let me, without impiety or arrogance, regard myself as the children’s Savior.
Alcott was simply the kind of confidence man that, even now, one wishes one could be a friend of, and help support not only with encouragement but also with cash. But never forget in dealing with these records, he was a con man, true blue, he was a man who did know the truth of the old saying “The only thing you have to earn in this world is your own self-respect; everything else you can steal.” As we watch him go through life, we cannot help but notice that wherever he went, whatever he did, he was always on the lookout for someone new to impress, someone he could draw into his circle of supporters. MUMPERY
As to money, that you know, is one of the last of my anxieties. I have many friends, and am making more daily, and have only to be true to my principles, to get not only a useful name, but bread and shelter, and raiment.
1835
This year and the next saw publication of a 1,400-page opus DAS LEBEN JESU or THE LIFE OF JESUS CRITICALLY EXAMINED, and Professor David Friedrich Strauss would eventually be dismissed from his post at Tübingen — for the scholarly offense of having attempted to distinguish between an historical component in the Biblical record, and a mythic component.
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One of Massachusetts’s senators, Peleg Sprague, was in this year arguing for slavery by invoking the authority of Jesus Christ. Jesus meek and mild, who “would not interfere with the administration of the laws, or abrogate their authority,” it seemed, could have been no abolitionist — or at least, not according to Senator Peleg Sprague!
“It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141
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The Reverend William Henry Brisbane published the first Baptist periodical to be produced outside Philadelphia, The Southern Baptist and General Intelligencer printed by James S. Burges of Charleston, South Carolina, the stated mission of which was to support slavery as a biblically mandated social and economic institution. The periodical would attempt to refute the antislavery writings in THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY of the Reverend Francis Wayland, President of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
The Baptist reverend was struggling against himself: “I am no abolitionist.” Oh, no, he was a regular guy, he could not be one of those detested, deluded people! (Three years later, however, this abolitionism would overcome him — and a local historian would eventually write of him, because he had manumitted his slaves, that “He became, to the white population, the most hated man in the Beaufort District.”)
1836
At about this point it was published that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had dismissed the idea that China was involved in world civilization. Johann Peter Eckermann, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s conversational partner, pointed out that the lightness of wicker furniture might be the most appropriate symbolic representation for the import of Chinese culture.
In Canton in South China, the budding scholar Hung Hsiu Ch’üan encountered a fortune-teller who soothed him with “You will attain the highest rank. Do not be anxious about it for anxiety will make you ill. I congratulate your virtuous father!” Then the next day, some Christian missionary or other gave him a treatise which described the basic elements of Christianity: QUANSHI LIANGYAN or GOOD WORDS TO EXHORT THE AGES. The young man did not look at this point look at the gift book at all carefully, being a whole lot more interested at that point in doing well than in doing good — but of course books were valuable items and thus he didn’t just throw it away.7
7. This book had been written in 1832 by Liang Afa, who had been the very 1st convert, in 1828, of the Dr. Robert Morrison who had in 1807 been sent to Canton by the London Missionary Society in an American ship with a letter of introduction provided by then Secretary of State James Madison. What goes around comes around! “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 45 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1841
The first, and not the worst, in a long line of Jesus novels, William Ware’s JULIAN: OR SCENES IN JUDAEA:
• Nikos Kazantzakis, LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST • Walter Wangerin, JESUS, A NOVEL • D.H. Lawrence, THE MAN WHO DIED • Shusako Endo, A LIFE OF CHRIST • Anthony Burgess, MAN OF NAZARETH • Norman Mailer, THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE SON • Gore Vidal, LIVE FROM GOLGOTHA • Jose Saramango, THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS CHRIST • Jim Croce, QUARANTINE (40 days in the wilderness) • Robert Graves, KING JESUS: A NOVEL • Anne Rice, CHRIST THE LORD: OUT OF EGYPT (seven years old, in Egypt) • Walter Wangerin Jr., JESUS: A NOVEL
In New Orleans, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother the Reverend Charles Beecher was working as a clerk and accumulating evidences of the nature of plantation life: the character Simon Legree in sister Harriet’s UNCLE 8 TOM’S CABIN would be based in part on his reports of the way slavery actually operated in the deep South.
1842
June: The Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson, who was at this time attending the sermons of the Reverend William Henry Channing, composed his famous “open letter” to the Reverend William Ellery Channing, entitled THE MEDIATORIAL LIFE OF JESUS, in which he alleges that Jesus Christ is the sole mediator between God and humankind. It was this which initiated Brownson’s institutionalism, his concern to discover and sponsor that institution which was perpetuating, in human history, Christ’s mediatorial activity.
8. It has been suggested that the characterization of Uncle Tom himself is actually that of the first fictional Jesus in American literature, disregarding both William Ware’s novel and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s expressed intention to cast this figure as “The Martyr” rather than as “The Christ.” 46 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1843
US sailors and marines from the USS St. Louis were landed in Canton after a clash between Americans and Chinese at the trading post there. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS
In Canton, Hung Hsiu Ch’üan for the 4th and final time attempted, and flunked, his all-important government Mandarin examinations. When a friend pulled a forgotten book on Christianity off his bookshelf and was looking at it, the book QUANSHI LIANGYAN or GOOD WORDS TO EXHORT THE AGES describing the basic elements of Christianity, by Liang Afa, which had been given him by some Christian missionary or other, the distraught Hung decided that the book explained the experience which he had had under delirium in 1837, when he had failed his examinations for the 3d time. An old man with a golden beard had spoken to him in his dream, telling him that this world was overrun by demons. That old man must have been the Christian God. Then in the dream he had met a middle-aged man. That must have been Jesus Christ. Instead of being a failure in life, a reject, a retard, Hung actually had been selected for a most unique greatness!
Most impressed by the self-servingness of this sort of thinking, Hung proceeded to baptize himself (although, just between you and me and that lamppost over there, I would have preferred that he had proceeded to hang himself).
The New York State Mechanic failed, putting Ephraim George Squier out of a paycheck. He got a job as the editor of the Whig Daily Journal of Hartford, Connecticut. He prepared for publication George Tradescent Lay’s THE CHINESE AS THEY ARE; THEIR MORAL AND SOCIAL CHARACTER, MANNERS, CUSTOMS, LANGUAGE: WITH REMARKS ON THEIR ARTS AND SCIENCES, MEDICAL SKILL, THE EXTENT OF MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE, ETC. BY G. TRADESCENT LAY, ESQ., NATURALIST IN BEECHY’S EXPEDITION, LATE RESIDENT AT CANTON, AUTHOR OF “THE VOYAGE OF THE HIMMALEH,” ETC. CONTAINING ALSO, ILLUSTRATIVE AND CORROBORATIVE NOTES, ADDITIONAL CHAPTERS ON THE ANCIENT AND MODERN HISTORY, ANCIENT AND MODERN INTERCOURSE, POPULATION–GOVERNMENT–CIVILIZATION–EDUCATION–LITERATURE–ETC. OF THE CHINESE. COMPILED FROM AUTHENTIC SOURCES. BY E.G. SQUIER. ALBANY: PUBLISHED BY GEORGE JONES, MUSEUM BUILDING. BURGESS AND STRINGER, AND M.Y. BEACH, NEW YORK: REDDING AND CO. BOSTON: G.B. Z EIBER, PHILADELPHIA: WM. TAYLOR, BALTIMORE. THE CHINESE AS THEY ARE
The volume contained many illuminations, such as the following: The head of a Chinese is broad behind and narrow in front, when compared with the
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general standard of Europeans. If, according to a very general opinion, the forepart of the head represents intellectual capability, the advantage is in our favor; a conclusion which is warranted by everything that research brings to light.
1844
In South China, the newly self-baptized “Christian” Hung Hsiu Ch’üan and those of his persuasion were destroying the tablets to Confucius in the village schools in which they were teaching, and were of course as a consequence of this being terminated, whereupon he and his buddy Feng Yün-shan went off together on a preaching mission into the province of Kwangsi. Hung eventually would make himself the T’ien-wang, the Heavenly King, of the Chinese Christian movement that had been nurtured there by Feng, while Feng would remain the movement’s Nan-wang or Southern King and general of the advance guard. Setting out to do good, they would indeed do well, including the accumulation of quite sizeable harems.9 In “Character” in the collection of essays which Waldo Emerson published in this year, he commented that he found it more credible “that one man should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many men should know the world” (whatever that may mean), and then went on to cite the context in which he had discovered this supposedly Chinese “knows heaven” idiom: “The virtuous prince confronts the gods, without any misgiving. He waits a hundred ages till a sage comes, and does not doubt. He who confronts the gods, without any misgiving, knows heaven; he who waits a hundred ages until a sage comes, without doubting, knows men. Hence the virtuous prince moves, and for ages shows empire the way.” EMERSON AND CHINA
1846
January: Évariste Régis Huc and Joseph Gabet and their Tibetan convert to Christianity reached Lhasa, Tibet. They were well received by the Tibetans themselves, but —does this remind you of any news story of more recent vintage?— nevertheless Chinese Imperial commissioners obtained their expulsion.
9. The harems did not constitute the offensiveness which the white missionaries to China found so utterly offensive. The abomination committed by the Chinese Christian movement was that instead of remaining under the paternal guidance of the kindly white fathers from the other side of the planet, they began to provide themselves with yellow ministers of the gospel of their own local manufacture. You see, white overlordship wasn’t an incidental and temporary artifact of the missionary position, it was its essential element. It wasn’t the Apostles’ Creed which was the whole banana, it wasn’t the Lord’s Prayer which was the whole banana, it wasn’t the Sermon on the Mount which was the whole banana, and it wasn’t who got or who didn’t get a harem which was the whole banana. The missionary position, which is to say, white overlordship, was the whole banana. 48 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Before March 13: Henry Thoreau may well have lectured at the Concord Lyceum on his experiences at Walden Pond: “After I lectured here before this winter,10 I heard that some of my townsmen had expected of me some account of my life at the pond. This I will endeavor to give to-night.”
TIMELINE OF WALDEN
Here is Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau’s famous drawing:
10. February 4th, “Writings & style of Thomas Carlysle” (sic) in regard to CROMWELL and other Great Men of history, and in regard to the manner in which typical lists of Great Men exclude Jesus and exclude the working man: “Are we not all great men?”
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Here is Charles H, Overly’s version of Sister Sophia’s drawing:
March 13th The Songsparrow & Black bird heard today –the snow going off –the ice in the pond 1 foot thick. Men speak –or at least think much of cooperation nowadays –of working together to some worthy end– But what little there is, is as if it were not –being a simple result of which the means are hidden –a harmony inaudible to men– If a man has faith –he will cooperate with equal faith every where– If he has not faith he will continue to live like the rest of the world. To cooperate in the lowest & in the highest sense –thoroughly –is simply to get your living together. I heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over the world –the one making his way as he went, seeking his fortune, –before the mast –behind the plow –walking and sleeping on the ground –living from hand to mouth –and so come in immediate contact with all hands and nations –the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket as a resource in case of extremity– It was easy to see that they could not be companions to one another –or cooperate. They would part company at the first interesting crisis the most interesting point in their adventures I live about a mile from any neighbor no house is visible within a quarter of a mile or more–
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April 16, Thursday: At this point Henry Thoreau was reading Anacreon, Alcaeus, and Homer on birds in the spring. Bronson Alcott delivered a Conversation at the home of Elizabeth Sherman Hoar in Concord, attended by
Thoreau, at which the hostess held forth upon the idea that the present teachers of the nations were Jesus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, and Waldo Emerson.
This of course would have been strong stuff directed against the evangelicals, who would then as now be offended at the lack of a categorical difference in kind, let alone a pronounced qualitative difference in degree, noticed between Christ Jesus and the influential others –mere humans– on that short list. Thoreau, however, slyly developed this in the other direction by suggesting that Jesus did not belong in the exalted company of these other three important teachers.11
11. One might imagine various good defenses of such a position: Jesus wrote nothing whereas the other three were writers, Jesus spoke only to the individual conditions of persons he encountered whereas the others addressed an unknown mass audience, Jesus took considerable risks in engaging in his activities and was eventually punished for them whereas the others engaged in absolutely safe activities and were never at risk of retribution, etc. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 51 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1848
April 10, Monday: In Poland, Prussian troops attacked insurgents near Tremeszna.
In Sweden, Gustaf Sparre replaced Arvid Posse as Prime Minister for Justice, and Gustaf Nils Algernon Stierneld replaced Albrecht Ihre as Prime Minister for Foreign Affairs.
The Illinois and Michigan Canal opened between Chicago and LaSalle, connecting the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River (this was an enormous improvement, as henceforward any freshwater species that had become a pest in the Great Lakes could also plague the Mississippi River basin and any freshwater species that had become a pest in the Mississippi River basin could also plague the Great Lakes).12
Joseph Pulitzer, journalist and philanthropist, was born.
At Kennington Common an unarmed crowd of some 30,000 Chartist assembled for a march upon Westminster and the houses of the British Parliament. They were to be led by one Feargus O’Connor, who intended to use the occasion to make an impressive delivery of a petition bearing 5.7 million signatures to the House of Commons.
Facing this threat were a rabble of 170,000 “special constables” hastily deputized by representatives of the government and dispatched into the thoroughfares for the occasion. But, also, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of 12. Fast forward to the opening of the Suez Canal, whereby any saltwater species in the Red Sea could flow downstream to disrupt the saltwater biota of the Mediterranean. 52 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Wellington had caused seven full regiments of the British regular army to be dispositioned at various hidden locations in London, all government offices had been secured for the day, the Bank of England had been sandbagged, and the General Post Office had been barricaded and its employees supplied with weapons. Lord
Palmerston had sealed off the entrances to the Foreign Office with bound copies of the Times of London, – which would surely prove as effective in stopping bullets as in stopping thought– and was handing around among his clerks a variety of cutlasses and antique muskets.13 When Mr O’Connor arrived in Kennington Common, he immediately concurred with the Chief of Police that the affair was hopeless, and, rather than lead his marchers toward the forces assembled against them, began a rambling speech in which he very gradually revealed to that assembly of citizens that no such threatening movement was going to be authorized. Finally the determination of the Chartists was dissolved in a fortuitously steady, heavy London rain, enough to send even the diehards into the available pubs for a nip.14
MY CHILDREN, HAVE NOW FOR A QUARTER OF A CENTURY BEEN MIXED UP WITH THE DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT — IN IRELAND SINCE 1822, AND IN ENGLAND FROM THE YEAR 1833. I HAVE ALWAYS, IN AND OUT OF PARLIAMENT, CONTENDED FOR YOUR RIGHTS, AND I HAVE RECEIVED MORE THAN 100 LETTERS, TELLING ME NOT TO COME 13. At long last Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston (1784-1865), “Lord Pumice-Stone,” had found a situation entirely to his liking. 14. According to Waldo Emerson at the time, this made the man a “swindling leader” all set to “betray them in public and cheat them in private,” although it would seem to me at this distance that the way Mr O’Connor handled the situation probably saved some lives. Interestingly, there’s a very interestingly similar scenario depicted in the Martin Scorcese movie “The Last Temptation of Christ,” with Jesus Christ playing the role of Feagus O’Connor — check out this movie and see if you don’t agree. Carlyle, who had attended in order to witness some shedding of blood, was disappointed at Mr O’Connor’s restraint.
THOMAS CARLYLE
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HERE TODAY, OR MY LIFE WOULD BE SACRIFICED. MY ANSWER WAS, THAT I WOULD RATHER BE STABBED IN THE HEART THAN ABSTAIN FROM BEING IN MY PLACE. AND MY CHILDREN, FOR YOU ARE MY CHILDREN, AND I AM ONLY YOUR FATHER AND BAILIFF; BUT I AM YOUR FOND FATHER AND YOUR UNPAID BAILIFF. MY BREATH IS NEARLY GONE, AND I WILL ONLY SAY, WHEN I DESERT YOU MAY DESERT ME. YOU HAVE BY YOUR CONDUCT TODAY MORE THAN REPAID ME FOR ALL I HAVE DONE FOR YOU, AND I WILL GO ON CONQUERING UNTIL YOU HAVE THE LAND AND THE P EOPLE’S CHARTER BECOMES THE LAW OF THE LAND. This manufactured event had been in planning for some time. It was in Spring 1848 that O’Connor had decided on this new strategy as a combination of several tactics: a large public meeting, a procession, and the presentation of a petition to the House of Commons. He alerted the prime minister, Lord John Russell, to the fact that after the speeches he intended to lead the large crowd to Parliament to present a petition. This put the Lord in an awkward position because he had all his political life been campaigning for freedom of speech and for the universalization of suffrage. However, since becoming prime minister in 1846, he had been unable to persuade the majority of MPs in the House of Commons to indulge in parliamentary reform. Afraid that the meeting would result in a riot, Russell decided to make sure that there would be 8,000 soldiers and 150,000 special constables on duty in London that day. Russell asked O’Connor to guarantee that he would not attempt to move the crowd to the vicinity of the Parliament building. The meeting did take place without violence. O’Connor would claim that over 300,000 people had shown up, but others described this as a vast exaggeration. (The government alleged that the crowd had amounted to but 15,000 and the Times reporter estimated it at 20,000. Even a sympathetic paper would not go so far as to agree to 50,000. O’Connor also told the assembly that their petition contained 5,706,000 signatures, but, when examined at the Parliament it counted out at 1,975,496 and many of these were clear forgeries.) O’Connor’s many enemies in the parliamentary reform movement would accuse him of having destroyed their credibility as Chartists. His affair at Kennington Common would turn out not to have at all helped the reform movement and Chartism in general would go into rapid decline.
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1850
15 Dr. Robert Knox of Edinburgh, in THE RACES OF MEN: A FRAGMENT, disseminated knowledge he had attained by dissecting the purchased, hardly cold bodies of executed men of various races. “Race is everything,” he opinioned,
literature, science, art — in a word, civilization depends on it.
Who is our neighbor? –Dr. Knox inquired. The wisdom he had to offer was that here is no point in trying to be a Good Samaritan to a person who is of dark race rather than of Saxon blood, as for instance a Chinese:
Destined by the nature of their race to run, like all other animals, a certain limited course of existence, it matters little how their extinction is brought about.
He recommended the teachings of Jesus on the mount, for use on the white homefront, and abroad, he recommended the principles of Niccolò Machiavelli. When Waldo Emerson read this obvious self-serving drivel, he found in Knox’s pages not self-serving drivel but “pungent and unforgettable truths.” However, there was a difference between Knox’s approach and Emerson’s: temperamentally the Sage of Concord was more inclined to praise the excellence of the fittest to survive, at least in these earlier years,16 than he was to express
15. Doctor Knox’s treatise would be renewed in 1862 as THE RACES OF MEN: A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY INTO THE INFLUENCE OF RACE OVER THE DESTINIES OF NATIONS, again published in London by Renshaw). This is, incidentally, the same notorious physician whose repeated purchases of bodies for dissection had inspired William Burke and William Hare to lure into their Edinburgh boarding house, make drunk, and suffocate, some 15 persons in series in order to supply the ongoing market. He had managed due to his social position, despite the fact that he had been hanged in effigy by an indignant crowd outside his home, to evade formal prosecution. Eventually, this physician’s body would in its turn be dissected. 16. Later in life, the kindly Emerson grew less kindly toward the mass of humanity, when he discovered that the “calamity” was these “enormous populations, like moving cheese,” the “guano-races” in regard to which “the worst of charity is, that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 55 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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contempt for the incompetence of our unfit inferiors such as the Mexicans whom we overrun
and it will in the course of ages be of small import by what particular occasions and methods it was done.
And, by temperament, Emerson lovers down the decades have been inclined to overlook the fact that there is no practical difference between Emerson’s praising the excellence of “the strong British race” as the fittest to survive and Knox’s expressions of contempt for any group of colored pseudo-people which whom civilization could murder to dissect — as long as a culture-maven is legitimating this work, he or she is doing this work, he or she is a full-fledged co-conspirator in genocide.
In order to hold at arm’s length any accusation that a portion of the misery in Ireland might be due to some
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measure of misrule on the part of England, the physician Knox hypothecated that:
[T]he source of all evil lies in the race, the Celtic race of Ireland. Look at Wales, look at Caledonia; it is ever the same. The race must be forced from the soil; by fair means, if possible; still they must leave.
For the animadversions to be found in this 1850/1862 treatise, Philip Curtin has recently awarded to Doctor Knox a title of sorts: “the father of English racism.”17
August: Things were getting stranger and stranger. An alliance was being arranged between the Taiping or Chinese Christian Longhairs and another grouping in South China, known as the Triad Society. This secret group of freedom fighters was to be accepted into the Christian ranks on condition that they would conform to the worship of God, and so Hung Hsiu Ch’üan sent out two teachers to each of the eight subdivisions of the Triads, to instruct them in the true faith. Unfortunately, shortly afterward, the younger brother of Jesus Christ ordered that one of these sixteen Christian teachers of his, who had proved to be of lower than expected moral fiber, be publicly beheaded as an Ananias-style warning to all in the Pai Shang-ti Hui God Worshipers’ Society. Now, the Triads had had a rule of long standing in among their “Words of Exhortation,” a rule of great forgiveness. The Triad rule had been “If people insult you, injure you, revile you, — how ought you to take it? You ought to bear it, suffer it, endure it, and forgive it.” When the Triads saw this man being beheaded for what they considered a minor offense, they saw that these Christians were not going to abide by this rule of
17. Curtin, Philip. THE IMAGE OF AFRICA. BRITISH IDEAS AND ACTION 1780-1850 (Madison WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1964, page 377). It is worth noting, however, that this title “the father of English racism” is a disputed title, for Paul Fryer, in STAYING POWER: THE HISTORY OF BLACK PEOPLE IN BRITAIN (London: Pluto P, 1984, page 70), has awarded it to Edward Long, the slavemaster who in 1774 had authored a racist HISTORY OF JAMAICA. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 57 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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forgiveness of theirs, or anything remotely resembling it, and so they abandoned their hopes of an affiliation and allied themselves instead with the Ch’ing authorities out of Beijing.
These scary Christians, even the gangsters can’t cope with them! After recording a long list of the various peasant messiahs that had beset China down through the millennia, Ian Buruma, a modern author, cites this particular little brother of Jesus of the middle of the 19th Century as the one whose “crusade left 20 million dead. Mao Zedong fitted quite neatly in this long line of peasant messiahs. Like his predecessors, he led a rural revolt to expel the barbarians, punish evildoers, and unite the empire. He abhorred superstition, but his version of “scientific socialism” would reach the same degree of religious frenzy as Hong’s Heavenly Kingdom” (page xiv, Ian Buruma. BAD ELEMENTS: CHINESE REBELS FROM LOS ANGELES TO BEIJING. NY: Random House, 2001). CHINESE CIVIL WAR
November 1: In China, the emperor had dispatched Lin Tse-hsu, of Opium War fame, to exterminate the Christians — but on this day Lin, being old, died on his trip south, before any effective struggle could be begun.
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1859
February: Summoned to a downtown Cincinnati law office (always a warning sign), the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway was accused of having read and appreciated Professor David Friedrich Strauss’s 1,400-page two- JESUS volume 1835-1836 masterwork DAS LEBEN JESU KRITISCHE BEARBEITET, which had been reprinted in English 18 in 1846 as THE LIFE OF JESUS, CRITICALLY EXAMINED.
The three lawyers facing him pronounced that his religious attitudes were “disgusting.” They demanded that he cease and desist from using his sermons to “re-hash … other men’s thoughts,” and cease and desist from using his “position in a church, a Christian church, to pull it down.”
Lucky thing these suits couldn’t get their hands on Jesus, huh?
18. Moncure Daniel Conway. DAVID FRIEDRICH STRAUSS. COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES AT SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, FEBRUARY 22, 1874, WITH A DISCOURSE BY M.D. CONWAY. Pamphlet. South Place, Finsbury, 1874. READ THE FULL TEXT
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May 1: New York State began directly letting its contracts on canal work, no longer allowing that function to be performed by the supervisor of the Contracting Board.
At this point the Unitarian congregation of the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway, in Cincinnati, Ohio was at a low of a couple hundred, since the BIBLE believers of his congregation had recently separated themselves to constitute a “Church of the Redeemer,” and so he delivered his “East and West” sermon in which he described the Redeemer concept of Jesus Christ as “an idea out of the dark ages.” The Reverend Conway confessed he was no “believer in what the churches call Christianity” as it would be a “pious insult to the holiest relations of life” to suppose Jesus to have lacked a human biological father.19
20 Waldo Emerson lectured on ““WEALTH”,” a topic appropriate for downtown Boston, to the Parker Fraternity in the 1,500 comfortable seats of the Boston Music Hall, and wrote to Thomas Carlyle on the American race
19. Moncure Daniel Conway. EAST AND WEST: AN INAUGURAL DISCOURSE, DELIVERED IN THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, CINCINNATI, O., MAY 1, 1859, BY M.D. CONWAY, MINISTER OF THE CHURCH. Pamphlet. Cincinnati: Truman & Spofford, 1859. READ THE FULL TEXT
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problem:
I flatter myself I see some emerging of our people from the poison of their politics the insolvency of slavery begins to show, & we shall perhaps live to see that putrid Black Vomit extirpating by mere diking & planting. Another ground of contentment is the mending of the race here.
My curiosity about the origins and literary uses of this carefully observed, and carefully invented, Africanist presence has become an informal study of what I call American Africanism. It is an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served. I am using the term “Africanism” not to suggest the larger body of knowledge on Africa that the philosopher Valentine Mudimbe means by the term “Africanism,” nor to suggest the varieties and complexities of African people and their descendants who have inhabited this country. Rather I use it as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people. As a trope, little restraint has been attached to its uses. As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability. Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette, American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless. It provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom.
This “putrid Black Vomit” of which the Sage of Concord here speaks is of course the yellow fever, an infection which needs to be extirpated. The disease was called Yellow Fever because it damages the liver in such manner as to cause jaundicing of skin and eyes, and was called black vomit because a classic manifestations of severe
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infection was hemorrhage into the mucous membranes, with frightful vomiting of dark blood.
However, putrid Black vomit also was, of course, in the opinion of the Sage of Concord, the words that were coming out of the mouths of Americans of color, whose infectious thoughts and presumptions were as delusion-provoking in the white man as the fevers of this plague. What we would regard as two separate topics, the prevention of the tropical disease and the prevention of the tropical human, were quite conflated for a 19th- Century white man of Emerson’s mentality. The dark man and the dark vomit were predicting the same thing: the blackness of death. Preventing the one was preventing the other.
(Is it any wonder that this Emerson had blacklisted Frederick Douglass a decade earlier for membership in the Town and Country Club? His dark words would have been a “disabling virus” within polite literary discourse. Society, meaning white society, was not ready for that.)
May 1: Hear the ruby-crowned wren. We accuse savages of worshipping only the bad spirit, or devil, though they may distinguish both a good and a bad; but they regard only that one which they fear and worship the devil only. We too are savages in this, doing precisely the same thing. This occurred to me yesterday as I sat in the woods admiring the beauty of the blue butterfly. We are not chiefly interested in birds and insects, for example, as they are ornamental to the earth and
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cheering to man, but we spare the lives of the former only on condition that they eat more grubs than they do cherries, and the only account of the insects which the State encourages is of the “Insects Injurious to Vegetation.” We too admit both a good and a bad spirit, but we worship chiefly the bad spirit, whom we fear. We do not think first of the good but of the harm things will do us. The catechism says that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, which of course is applicable mainly to God as seen in his works. Yet the only account of its beautiful insects–butterflies, etc.– which God has made and set before us which the State ever thinks of spending any money on is the account of those which are injurious to vegetation! This is the way we glorify God and enjoy him forever. Come out here and behold a thousand painted butterflies and other beautiful insects which people the air, then go to the libraries and see what kind of prayer and glorification of God is there recorded. Massachusetts has published her report on “Insects Injurious to Vegetation,” and our neighbor the “Noxious Insects of New York.” We have attended to the evil and said nothing about the good. This is looking a gift horse in the mouth with a vengeance. Children are attracted by the beauty of butterflies, but their parents and legislators deem it an idle pursuit. The parents remind me of the devil, but the children of God. Though God may have pronounced his work good, we ask, “Is it not poisonous?” Science is inhuman. Things seen with a microscope begin to be insignificant. So described, they are as monstrous as if they should be magnified a thousand diameters. Suppose I should see and describe men and houses and trees and birds as if they were a thousand times larger than they are! With our prying instruments we disturb the balance and harmony of nature. P. M.–To Second Division. Very warm. Looking from Clamshell over Hosmer’s meadow, about half covered with water, see hundreds of turtles, chiefly picta, now first lying out in numbers on the brown pieces of meadow which rise above the water. You see their black backs shine on these hummocks left by the ice, fifty to eighty rods off. They would rapidly tumble off if you went much nearer. This heat and stillness draws them up. It is remarkable how surely they are advertised of the first warm and still days, and in an hour or two are sure to spread themselves over the hummocks. There is to-day a general resurrection of them, and there they bask in the sun. It is their sabbath. At this distance, if you are on the lookout, especially with a glass, you can discover what numbers of them there are, but they are shy and will drop into the water on a near approach. All up and down our river meadows their backs are shining in the sun to-day. It is a turtle day. As we sat on the steep hillside south of Nut Meadow Brook Crossing, we noticed a remarkable whirlwind on a small scale, which carried up the oak leaves from that Island copse in the meadow. The oak leaves now hang thinly and are very dry and light, and these small whirlwinds, which seem to be occasioned by the sudden hot and calm weather (like whirlpools or dimples in a smooth stream), wrench them off, and up they go, somewhat spirally, in countless flocks like birds, with a rustling sound; and higher and higher into the clear blue deeps they rise above our heads, till they are fairly lost to sight, looking, when last seen, mere light specks against the blue, like stars by day, in fact. I could distinguish some, I have no doubt, five or six hundred feet high at least, but if I looked aside a moment they were lost. The largest oak leaves looked not bigger than a five-cent-piece. These were drifting eastward,–to descend where? Methought that, instead of decaying on the earth or being consumed by fire, these were being translated and would soon be taken in at the windows of heaven. I had never observed this phenomenon so remarkable. The flight of the leaves. This was quite local, and it was comparatively still where we sat a few rods on one side. Thousands went up together in a rustling flock. Many of the last oak leaves hang thus ready to go up. I noticed two or more similar whirlwinds in the woods elsewhere this afternoon. One took up small twigs and clusters of leaves from the ground, matted together. I could easily see where it ran along with its nose (or point of its tunnel) close to the ground, stirring up the leaves as it travelled, like the snout of some hunting or rooting animal. See and hear chewink. See a little snake on the dry twigs and chips in the sun, near the arbutus, uniformly brown (or reddish-brown) above except a yellowish ring on the occiput, the head also lighter than the body; beneath vermilion, with apparently a row of light dots along each side. It is apparently Coluber amaenus (?), except that it has the yellowish ring. Luzula campestris. Also the Oryzopsis Canadensis by the Major Heywood path-side, say a day, or April 30th, six inches high or more, with fine bristle-like leaves. See a thrasher. What is that rush at Second Division? It now forms a dense and very conspicuous mass some four rods long and one foot high. The top for three inches is red, and the impression at a little distance is like that made by sorrel. Certainly no plant of this character exhibits such a growth now, i. e. in the mass. It surprises you to see it, carries your thoughts on to June. The climbing fern is persistent, i. e. retains its greenness still, though now partly brown and withered.
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October 19, Wednesday: Wilhelm Tempel discovered a diffuse nebula around the Pleid star Merope.
John Brown was being taken from Harpers Ferry to the nearby Charles Town jail. (Brown’s white jailer there, John Avis, it seems, had been a childhood friend of Dr. Martin Robison Delany.) Full reports of the event at Harpers Ferry were appearing in this day’s newspapers.
Henry Thoreau and Bronson Alcott were visiting Waldo Emerson when the news was brought in, of Captain John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry. Thoreau immediately began working over his materials about Brown.
“If Christ should appear on earth he would on all hands be denounced as a mistaken, misguided man, insane and crazed.” –Thoreau, October 19, 1859
JOURNAL: Here comes Jesus again
mistaken, misguided
insane and crazed
When Julia Ward Howe read in the Boston Transcript about the raid upon the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, her husband Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe would casually remarked to her “Brown has got to work.” The newspapers were beginning to carry an account of an intriguing set of papers that had been discovered where Brown had unaccountably left them behind, when he had gone off on the morning of the 16th to launch his raid on the Harpers Ferry arsenal. Among the papers, in addition to an envelope from Dr. Howe incriminatingly addressed to Brown, were a note from Gerrit Smith and two letters from Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson began to plan a rescue of Brown from the jail cell in Charles Town. He actually would succeed in raising aid for the Brown family. He would opinion, much later in life, after having had a chance to compare and contrast his ineffectiveness as a member of the Secret “Six” with the effectiveness of the revolutionary terror organized by the Communist Party in Russia, that: The Russian revolutionists, who were so efficient in making the tyrant Tsar Alexander II explode, have much to teach us about practical terror. Thoreau was being written to by Theophilus Brown in Worcester. Worcester Oct 19 Friend Thoreau— The book came duly to hand, and as it was not for me, you I intend to send ^ the money for it in this note—
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Blake must speak for him -self and not for me when speaking of that mountain walk of ours. I enjoyed it well enough, and aught to be ashamed of myself that I did, perhaps, since it yielded me so little. Our Cape Cod walk salts down better with me, & yet there was’nt much salt in that,—enough to save it perhaps, but not ^enough of the sea & sand & sky. The good things I got in it were rather incidental—[&]did not belong to the sea. But I did get
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Page 2 some glimpses of the sea. I remember a smoke we had on a little ^barren knoll where we heard the plover, in North Dennis, in the twilight after a long & hot days walk. We heard the pounding of the surf against a shore twenty miles off[,—(]so said the man at whose house we passed the night,—)—and we were expecting to arrive there the next day. I have been in the habit of thinking our journey culmin -ated in that smoke, if it did’nt end there, for, though we arrived at the beach the next day according to programme & found the thirty miles stretch of it, with its accompaniments too large to complain of, yet—our anticipations were immense. But now
Page 3 in thinking of it the actual sea & sky loom up larger, while our smoke & dreams —hold their own pretty well— Your friend Theo’s Brown
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October 19, Wednesday-October 28, Friday: Henry Thoreau prepared to celebrate John Brown’s famous dance on air, by writing “A Plea for Captain John Brown.”
The speaking notes Thoreau used during his impassioned plea for Captain Brown, he drafted in haste in his dire days and nights after October 18, from which to save precious time he would allow the publishers to set type directly. A transcript follows,
A Plea for Henry D. Thoreau. by Austin Meredith. I trust that you will pardon me for being here. I do not wish to force my thoughts upon you, but I feel forced myself. Little as I know of Henry Thoreau, I would fain do my part to correct the tone and the statements of the newspapers, and of my countrymen generally, re- specting his character and actions. It costs us nothing to be just. We can at least express our sympa- thy with, and admiration for, him and his companions, and that is what I now propose to do.
but immediately you will note that, for my own reasons which you will perhaps appreciate or not appreciate, I have made name substitutions. Quakers will note that Thoreau, in this famous speech in Concord on the evening of October 30th, then in Boston on November 1st, then in Worcester on November 3d, uses a characteristic Quaker idiom: rather than suggesting that his audience should submit to his discourse for their edification, he asks them to be with him while he follows a leading, that compels him, a need he has, to speak out.
Elza Maxson had come east from Springdale, Iowa when summoned by John Brown. Due to some uncertainty of dates, however, he had still been on his way when news that the attack had already occurred reached him.
October 19, Wednesday: When a government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours (especially to-day) to maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the slave, what a merely brute, or worse than brute, force it is seen to be! A demoniacal force! It is more manifest than ever that tyranny rules. I see this government to he effectually allied with France and Austria in oppressing mankind. One comment I heard of by the postmaster of this village on the news of Brown’s death: [IT HAD BEEN REPORTED THAT BROWN WAS KILLED AT THE TIME OF HIS CAPTURE.] “He died as the fool dieth.” I should have answered this man, “He did not live as the fool liveth, and he died as he lived.” Treason! where does treason take its rise? I cannot help thinking of you as you deserve, ye governments. Can you dry up the fountains of thought? High treason which is resistance to tyranny here below has its origin in, and is first committed by, the power that makes and forever re-creates man. When you have caught and hung all of these human rebels, you have accomplished nothing but your own guilt, for you have not struck at the fountainhead. You presume to contend with a foe against whom West Point cadets and rifled cannon point not. Can all the arts of the cannon-founder tempt matter to turn against its Maker? Is the form in which he casts it more essential than the constitution of it and of himself? I see that the same journal that contains this pregnant news from Harper’s Ferry is chiefly filled, in parallel
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columns, with the reports of the political conventions that are now being held. But the descent is too steep to them; they should have been spared this contrast. To turn from the voices and deeds of earnest men to the cackling of political conventions! Office-seekers and speechmakers, who do not so much as lay an egg, but wear their breasts bare upon an egg of chalk. Their great game is the game of straws, or rather that universal and aboriginal game of the platter, at which the Indians cried, Hub-bub. Some of them generals forsooth. It galls me to listen to the remarks of craven-hearted neighbors who speak disparagingly of Brown because he resorted to violence, resisted the government, threw his life away! –what way have they thrown their lives, pray? –neighbors who would praise a man for attacking singly an ordinary band of thieves or murderers. Such minds are not equal to the occasion. They preserve the so-called peace of their community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman’s billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So they defend themselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. There sits a tyrant holding fettered four millions of slaves. Here comes their heroic liberator; if he falls, will he not still live? C. says that he saw a loon at Walden the 15th. P. M. – To Lee’s Cliff. The tupelo berries have all fallen; how long? Alternate cornel about bare. Hardhack half bare. Many witch-hazel nuts are not yet open. The bushes just bare. The slippery elm is nearly bare, like the common near it. Cedar berries, how long? 14th at least; probably by the time they lost their leaves. There is one sizable tree west by north of Lee’s Cliff, near the wall. Lycopodium dendroideum (not variety) is just shedding pollen near this cedar. I see asparagus in the woods there near the cedar, four or five feet high! Find the seedling archangelica grown about two feet high and still quite green and growing, though the full- grown plants are long since dead, root and stalk. This suggests that no doubt much of the radical spring greenness is of this character, – seedlings of biennials, and perhaps more of them a persistent or late growth from a perennial root, as crowfoot, whiteweed, five-finger, etc. The scent of the archangelica root is not agreeable to me. The scent of my fingers after having handled it reminds me strongly of the musquash and woodchuck, though the root itself does not; so its odor must be allied to theirs. I find at Lee’s Cliff, on the shelves and sides of the rocks, a new fern, apparently Cystopteris fragilis, more than half decayed or withered, though some fresher and shorter fronds at the base of the others are still quite green. It curls up so in my hat that I have difficulty in examining it. It is abundant thereabouts. Paddling up the river the other day, those (probably canoe) birches on Mt. Misery on the edge of the hill a mile in, front looked like little dark clouds, for [I] could not distinguish their white trunks against the sky. Though the dark-blue, or ripe, creeping juniper berries are chiefly on the lower part of the branches, I see fresh green ones on old wood as big as a pipe-stem and often directly opposite to purple ones (!). They are strangely mixed up. I am not sure but some of this year’s berries are already ripe. See a black and rusty hedgehog (?) caterpillar in the path. The remarks of my neighbors upon Brown’s death and supposed fate, with very few exceptions, are, “He is undoubtedly insane,” “Died as the fool dieth,” “Served him right;” and so they proceed to live their sane, and wise, and altogether admirable lives, reading their Plutarch a little, but chiefly pausing at that feat of Putnam, who was let down into a wolf’s den (that is quite the strongest pap that Young America is fed on); and so they nourish themselves for brave and patriotic deeds. What is the character of that calm which follows when the law and the slaveholder prevail? A government that pretends to be Christian and crucifies a million Christs every day! Our foes are in our midst and all about us. Hardly a house but is divided against itself. For our foe is the all but universal woodenness (both of head and heart), the want of vitality, of man, –the effect of vice, –whence are begotten fear and superstition and bigotry and persecution and slavery of all kinds. Mere figure-heads upon a hulk, with livers in the place of hearts. A church that can never have done with excommunicating Christ while it exists. Our plains were overrun the other day with a flock of adjutant-generals, as if a brood of cockerels had been let loose there, waiting to use their spurs in what sort of glorious cause, I ask. What more probable in the future, what more certain heretofore, than in grinding in the dust four hundred thousands of feeble and timid men, women, and children? The United States exclaims: “Here are four millions of human creatures which we have stolen. We have abolished among them the relations of father, mother, children, wife, and we mean to keep them in this condition. Will you, O Massachusetts, help us to do so?” And Massachusetts promptly answers, “Aye!” The cause is the worship of idols, which at length changes the worshipper into a stone image himself. Every man worships his ideal of power and goodness, or God, and the New-Englander is just as much an idolater as the Hindoo. The momentary charge at Balaclava, in obedience to a blundering command, –proving what a perfect machine the soldier is– has been celebrated by a poet laureate; but the steady and for the most part successful charge against the legions of Slavery kept up for some years in Kansas by John Brown in obedience to an infinitely higher command is unsung, –as much more memorable than that as an intelligent and conscientious man is
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superior to a machine. The brutish, thick-skinned herd, who do not know a man by sympathy, make haste home from their ballot-boxes and churches to their Castles of Indolence, perchance to cherish their valor there with some nursery talk of knights and dragons. A whole nation will for ages cling to the memory of its Arthur, or other imaginary hero, who perhaps never assailed its peculiar institution or sin, and, being imaginary, never failed, when they are themselves the very freebooters and craven knights whom he routed, while they forget their real heroes. The publishers and the various boards of wooden-heads can afford to reprint that story of Putnam’s. You might open the district schools with the reading of it, because there is nothing about slavery or the church in it; unless it occurs to the reader that the pastors are wolves in sheep’s clothing. I have seen no hearty approbation for this man in any Abolition journal; as if it were not consistent with their policy to express it, or maybe they did not feel it. And as for the herd of newspapers, I do not chance to know one in the country that will deliberately print anything that will ultimately and permanently reduce the number of its subscribers. They do not believe it would be expedient. If we do not say pleasant things, they argue, nobody will attend to us. And so they are like some auctioneers, who sing an obscene song in order to draw a crowd around them. Another neighbor asks, Yankee-like, “What will he gain by it?” as if he expected to fill his pockets by this enterprise. They have no idea of gain but in this worldly sense. If it does not lead to a surprise party, if he does not get a new pair of boots and a vote of thanks, it must be a failure. Such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that, in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable and does not depend on our watering and cultivating; that when you plant, or bury, a hero in this field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such force and vitality that it does not ask our leave to germinate. Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perhaps, John Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which I rejoice to know is not without its links. The Republican editors, obliged to get their sentences ready for the morning edition, –and their dinner ready before afternoon, –speak of these men, not in a tone of admiration for their disinterestedness and heroism, not of sorrow even for their fate, but calling them “deluded fanatics,” “mistaken men,” “insane,” or “crazed.” Did it ever occur to you what a sane set of editors we are blessed with? –not “mistaken men;” who know very well on which side their bread is buttered! The noble Republican Party is in haste to exculpate itself from all sympathy with these “misguided men.” Even the very men who would rejoice if he had succeeded, though in spite of all odds, are estranged from and deny him because he failed. A “dangerous man”! All the worthies and martyrs were such dangerous men. We wish that these editors and ministers were a little more dangerous. It is mentioned against him and as an evidence of his insanity, “a conscientious man, very modest in his demeanor, that he was apparently inoffensive, until the subject of slavery was introduced, when he would exhibit a feeling of indignation unparalleled.” (Boston Journal, October 21, 1859. [Boston Daily Journal, reprinting from the New-York Herald]) If Christ should appear on earth he would on all hands be denounced as a mistaken, misguided man, insane and crazed. The Liberator calls it “a misguided, wild, and apparently insane ... effort.” “The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,” which have just met in Philadelphia, did not dare as a body to protest even against the foreign slave-trade, which even many domestic slave-traders are ready to do. And I hear of Northern men, women, and children by families buying a life-membership in this society. A life-membership in the grave! You can get buried cheaper than that. He was a superior man. He did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things; he did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them, as he was bid; and now he is called insane by all who cannot appreciate such magnanimity. He needed no babbling lawyer, making false issues, to defend him. He was more than a match for all judges that American voters, or office-holders of whatever grade, can create. He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist. When a man stands up serenely against the condemnation and vengeance of mankind, rising above them literally by a whole body, –though he were a slave, though he were a freeman, though he were of late the vilest murderer, who has settled that matter with himself, –the spectacle is a sublime one! –didn’t ye know it, ye Garrisons, ye Buchanans, ye politicians, attorney-generals? –and we become criminal in comparison. Do yourselves the honor to recognize him. He needs none of your respect. What though he did not belong to your clique! I do not believe in erecting statues to those who still live in our minds and hearts, whose bones have not yet crumbled in the earth around us, but I would rather see the statue of John Brown in the Massachusetts State- House yard than that of any other man whom I know. What a contrast, when we turn to that political party which is so anxiously shaking its skirts clean of him and his friends and looking round for some available slaveholder to be its candidate! The evil is not merely a stagnation of blood, but a stagnation of spirit. Of course, the mass of men, even the well-disposed but sluggish souls who are ready to abet when their conscience or sympathies are reached, cannot
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conceive of a man who is actuated by higher motives than they are. Accordingly they pronounce him insane, for they know that they would never act as he does as long as they are themselves. This most hypocritical and diabolical government looks up from its seat upon four millions of gasping slaves and inquires with an assumption of innocence, “What do you assault me for? Am I not an honest man?” “Ah, sir, but your seat –your footstool –my father and mother –get off! –get off!” But there sits the incubus with all his weight, and stretching ever more and more, and for all reply answers, “Why won’t you cease agitation upon this subject?” The only government that I recognize is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice. Suppose that there is a private company in Massachusetts that out of its own purse and magnanimity saves all the fugitive slaves that run to us, and protects our colored fellow-citizens, and leaves the other work to the government, so called. Is not that government fast losing its occupation and becoming contemptible to mankind? If private men are obliged to perform the offices of government, to protect the weak and dispense justice, then the government becomes only a hired man, or clerk, to perform menial or indifferent services. Of course, that is but the shadow of a government, whose existence necessitates a Vigilance Committee. But such is the character of our Northern States generally; each has its Vigilance Committee. And, to a certain extent, these crazy governments recognize and accept this relation. They say, virtually, “We’ll be glad to work for you on these terms, only don’t make a noise about it.” Such a government is losing its power and respectability as surely as water runs out of a leaky vessel and is held by one that can contain it.
“If Christ should appear on earth he would on all hands be denounced as a mistaken, misguided man, insane and crazed.” –Thoreau, October 19, 1859
JOURNAL: Here comes Jesus again
mistaken, misguided
insane and crazed
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1860
July 16: When the chairman of the prestigious International Statistical Congress, Lord Henry Peter Brougham, recognized and honored Martin Robison Delany in the course of the group’s first meeting, Augustus
Longstreet led an infuriated American delegation out of the hall –walking out actually on an assemblage that included Prince Albert– and so Delany seized the occasion to remind the august body:
“I am a man.” Frederick Townsend Ward had not gone to the Orient in order to be put off. His attack on the gate of the city of Sung-chiang had been detected and prevented by the Chinese Christian Army there, and many of his initial gang of rowdy sailors had been killed, but the reward offered him by the head of the Taki Bank of Shanghai, $133,000 for this adjoining city, still stood, and there were still Western cutthroats in port with nothing to do but carouse who had not yet gotten themselves killed. He persuaded everyone that the reason why his attack had failed was that he had had no cannon and had had no backup from regular Chinese footsoldiers. He managed to recruit another band, amounting to some 200. They attacked the gate again during the hours of darkness on this night, and this time, by the use of cannon and explosives to blow open the gates, and by the use of pistols, repeating rifles, and cutlasses, they managed to gain and maintain control over the gate structure and hold it until the morning. It was rough work, as the Christians on the stairs leading up to the tower presented them with a solid wall of meat that had to be hacked through body by body. Of the attacking force, 62 were killed and 101 wounded, among them Ward himself, leaving only 37 of the invaders entirely intact. Ward, however, had had his fun and would have his money.
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 3 “Ward and Gordon: Glorious Days of Looting” of Jonathan D. Spence’s TO CHANGE CHINA, WESTERN ADVISERS IN CHINA, 1620-1960 (pages 57-92; London: Penguin, 1969): First he accepted the service of Vincente Macanaya, a young Filipino soldier of fortune with a great following among the Manilamen on the docks of Shanghai. Macanaya was able to bring with him about two hundred of his followers. To these Ward added
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half a dozen Western drillmasters (mostly deserters from the British navy) and a small amount of artillery. By the middle of July 1860, he was back in front of the wails of Sungkiang. With the help of accurate artillery fire, and after fierce hand-to- hand fighting with the Taiping troops, the city was taken.
1861
October: The Chinese Christian forces of the Tai-p’ing T’ien-kuo or “Central Kingdom of Great Peace” out of South China were driven away from An-ch-ing, capital of Anhewi province, by the Confucian Buddhist forces of the Manchu Ch’ing emperor. But the rebel production base, the Chinese silk industry, was very very secure:
before for over a decade exports had been Baseline data. 1853 annually: 16,000 to 25,000 bales
1853 25,571 bales Christians controlled Nanjing in the silk district of China.
1854 61,984 bales
1860-1861 69,137 bales Christians controlled Soochow and almost the entire silk district.
1861-1862 88,754 bales
1862-1863 83,264 bales
1863-1864 46,863 bales
1864-1865 41,128 bales The Chinese Christians had been exterminated.
1863
François Pierre Guillaume Guizot’s parliamentary speeches were included in his 5-volume HISTOIRE PARLEMENTAIRE DE LA FRANCE. RECUEIL COMPLET DES DISCOURS PRONONCÉS DANS LES CHAMBRES DE 1819 À 1848. HISTOIRE PARLEMENTAIRE
Ernst Renan’s VIE DE JÉSUS was published to the greatest orchestration of outraged cries. JESUS
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In this year the scholar Wang T‘ao came to live in Hong Kong (he would assist the Reverend James Legge in many translations from the Chinese into English).
At the end of the journal entries for this year, Waldo Emerson listed his recent readings in Oriental materials: “Confucius, Book of Poetry, apud J. Legge;21 D’Herbelot, Bibliotèque Orientale; Saadi; Hafiz; Von Hammer Purgstall.” While reading in the James Legge translation, he had jotted into his journal an impression that in reading Confucius he was “reading a better Pascal,” and had declared that this ancient had “anticipated the speech of Socrates, and the Do as be done by, of Jesus.” EMERSON AND CHINA
21. It seems clear that the source that Emerson consulted in this year for the Chinese “Book of Poetry, apud J. Legge,” could not have been any one of the three editions that the Reverend Legge published in book form, for these would not be published until 1871, 1876, and 1879. Emerson must, therefore, have been referring to some earlier effort along this line as published in some local journal such as the North American Review. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 73 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1864
April: Since the Chinese Christian Army held only Nanjing and four outlying cities of the silk district, it was clear that they would not be able to withstand the forces of Beijing very much longer. Therefore in this month all the foreign-devil military adventurers were deserting their sinking ship, trying to reach the coastline of China.
.
KEY: Red = Christians Blue = Buddhists
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June 30: In besieged Nanjing, the ailing younger-brother-of-Jesus-Christ leader of the Chinese Christian Tai-p’ing T’ien-kuo or “Central Kingdom of Great Peace” movement, Hung Hsiu Ch’üan , who had repeatedly refused to provision his capitol against siege and had repeatedly refused to exit while he still could, at this point killed himself by swallowing gold leaf.22
MILLENNIALISM CHINA
22. Or so the sources say. But I simply do not understand. I do not understand how one might kill oneself with such a substance as gold, which I was supposing would be quite biologically inert. In a healthy young person, I would suppose off the top of my gourd, the ingestion of quantities of gold leaf would merely cause a balling up of the leaf in the intestines, and any quantity of this would pass through the body as pellets. –Perhaps, in an ailing, elderly person, if the gold leaf were accompanied by quantities of opium, an opium coma might result, and in addition to the constipation which is a normal concomitant of opium consumption, one’s absorption of nutrients might be somewhat retarded? I don’t know, I’m clueless, and I remain clueless after interrogating any number of knowledgeable Chinese on this topic. In such a case, I would suppose, the OD of opium would be what would be doing the real work of suicide, and the primary function of the gold leaf, it would seem, would be to mark the death as an important death? – Obviously, I’m guessing here.
(Here’s a thought. Sterling Seagrave suggests that causing someone to swallow gold leaf was a common enough method for murder in China at this time, but, he states, the gold did its work slowly and the process was agonizing. He indicates that the gold leaf method was thus not a good one for purposes of suicide, that for suicide the overdose of opium was much to be preferred. Does Seagrave know what he is talking about or is he merely blowing smoke up our butts?) “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 75 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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July 19, Tuesday: The longest and bloodiest Civil War of which we have ever had any information, the rebellion that had begun in China in 1850, reached a culmination as the Confucian and Buddhist forces of the Ch’ing emperor in Beijing recaptured Nanking, capital of the Tai-p’ing T’ien-kuo or “Central Kingdom of Great Peace.” The ailing leader Hung Hsiu Ch’üan , younger brother of Jesus Christ or not, had already offed himself, and now some 100,000 of his fellow Chinese Christian were following him to the grave. Approximately 10,000 Christians were alive as of the fall of the city, so many that it would require the following three days, July 20, July 21, and July 22, for the Beijing forces to exterminate them all.23
1868
At this point the central government in Beijing had managed to exterminate the last significant vestiges24 of the vicious Taiping millennialist Christian culture of the Pai Shang-ti Hui or God Worshipers’ Society which once had dominated the culture of South China, and which had created the longest (since like 1850 ) and bloodiest (some 25,000,000 deaths) Civil War in the history of the world — although in the course of this long campaign it had become so weakened that the Forbidden City inside its high wall at the core of Beijing would never again be able to summon the allegiance of the entire Central Kingdom.25 CHINESE CIVIL WAR
23. By way of contrast, during WWII the city, again a capital, would be just chockablock with refugees when the Japanese Army arrived, and so in the re-rape of Nanjing during the 20th Century approximately twice as many civilians would be put to the bayonet. WORLD WAR II 24. It is necessary to add the modifier “significant” because in fact there is a direct line of continuity between some of the abandoned beleaguered Christian military formations in rural areas, which were never chased down and destroyed by the Qing armies, and 20th-Century rogue formations active in SouthEast China today, who are acting as protectors of the drug production there! 76 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Michael Baxter, who had no idea what had been going on in China, and no interest in what had been going on in China, had claimed the Battle of Armageddon26 was to take place during this year (Abanes, Richard. END- TIME VISIONS. NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998, page 338; McIver, Tom. THE END OF THE WORLD: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY. Jefferson NC: McFarlane & Co., 1999 #349). MILLENNIALISM
25. Were you wondering why it happens to be the case that in the 1990s, the Communists of the PRC consider the proper place for a Chinese Christian to be in a prison labor camp for life without the possibility of parole? —The Central Committee has reason to know what Christians are like when they begin to become obstreperous. —They consider that they themselves had their origination as these rural peasant Han Chinese Christian superpatriots of the 19th Century! The Tai-p’ings did have a useful list of rigorous prohibitions: they tolerated no prostitution or divorce in their Kingdom of Heaven, they tolerated no enslavement or foot-binding, they tolerated no recreational use of opium or wine or tobacco, and of course they indulged in no gambling. They had simplified the Chinese language, as would happen again, they had decreed equality between men and women, as would happen again, they had held all property in common, as would happen again — some of their leaders had even proposed the development of industry and the building of democracy. Also, however, for all that their leader had considered that he was JC’s little brother, actually he hadn’t had much use for anything peculiar to the New Testament — such as for instance kindness, or forgiveness, or redemption. Instead his “Christianity” had been long on obedience, and proper worshipfulness, and his dad he construed as the Lord of vengeance. Had he been a commie? —a Quaker advocate of the Peace Testimony he most definitely had not been. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY 26.Armageddon = the place (possibly to be identified with Har Megiddo, the Mount of Megiddo, near Tel Aviv, near which many battles were fought) designated in Revelation 16:16 as the scene of the final battle between the kings of the earth at the end of the world. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 77 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1900
During the previous century, of course, the human population had been exploding:
As of 1790 the center of the human population of the USA had been a little town just about a day’s travel inland
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from Maryland. By this period the center of population had relocated.
(Nowadays, of course, we’ve all been coming from one or another center in Missouri.)
The 12th US national census counted 12 million Roman Catholics, 6 million Methodists, 5 million Baptists, 1.5 million Lutherans, 1.5 million Presbyterians, 1 million Jews, 700,00 Episcopalians, 350,000 Mormons,
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80,000 Christian Scientists, and 75,000 Unitarians. Here is a period statistic in regard to cause of death which did not appear in our federal census, a statistic allegedly tabulated by John Edward Bruce (Bruce Grit) of the Chicago Tribune: during this year 117 black Americans were lynched, which would make it that a lynching was occurring about every third day.
One strange fact that appears, in this record of one year’s lynchings, is that accusations of sexual misconduct play a remarkably small role. Whereas the usual story told about lynching was that it was motivated by a desire of the white man to restrict the black man’s access to white females, this usual story is not at all corroborated by the statistic for the year 1900.
The Holy Roman Catholic Church resolved once and for all in this year the vexing issue of contesting official foreskin relics of Jesus Christ (there had been some 8 to 18 such contending objects scattered across Europe) by warning that anyone who thenceforward wrote about or spoke about a Holy Prepuce would be excommunicated.
May 5, Saturday: Peking and Tientsin newspapers reported demands by the I-ho ch’üan “Righteous and Harmonious Fists,” known to the west as “Boxers,” that foreign devils be killed. Although the Boxers were indeed nativist, anti-foreign, specifically they were anti-Christian, and were antagonistic not merely toward foreign Christians but also toward Chinese ones.
General Arthur MacArthur (father of General Douglas MacArthur) replaced General Elwell S. Otis as military governor of the Philippines. He would set up his office at the Malacañang Palace in Manila.
May 17, Thursday: British forces at Mafeking, South Africa, were relieved after a Boer siege of 217 days.
Boxers destroyed three villages near Peking, killing 61 Chinese Christians.
Ruhollah Khomeini, who would become the Ayatollah religious leader of the Shi’ites of Iran, was born.
May 30, Wednesday: Boxers took control of Tientsin, marching through the streets with heads of Christian missionaries on their spears.
May 31, Thursday: 337 foreign troops arrived in Peking from Tientsin to protect the legations.
British troops occupied Johannesburg.
In the first official concert of the Paris Exhibition, Le feu céleste op.115 for narrator, soprano, orchestra and organ by Camille Saint-Saëns to words of Sylvestre was performed for the initial time.
The governing body of the Free Church of Scotland voted 592 over 29 to unite with the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland (which had already approved the merger), creating the United Free Church of Scotland.
June 1, Thursday: Two English Christian missionaries were tortured and killed by Boxers at Yung-ch’ing-hsien south of Peking.
June 4, Sunday: A group of Christian missionaries became the final foreigners to escape Peking.
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June 14, Wednesday: Territorial Government of the Hawaiian Islands began.
The foreign relief column lost contact with Tientsin. All Christian buildings in Peking were destroyed with the exception of the Peitang Cathedral, which was within the Imperial City.
June 15, Thursday: The relief column, finding Chinese resistance before and behind, began a retreat from Langfang towards Tientsin. Boxers attacked the Peitang Christian Cathedral in the Imperial City, but were beaten off by French Marines with heavy losses.
Otto Clarence Luening was born in Milwaukee, one of seven children born to Eugene Luening, a pianist, singer and composer, and Emma Jacobs, an amateur singer, whose father was a banker, singer, and state senator.
June 16, Friday: Boxers set fire to a large section of Peking wherein many businesses deal with foreigners. In Tientsin, Boxers attacked all Christian missions in the Chinese areas of the city. The Roman Catholic cathedral was destroyed. Boxers killed as many Chinese Christians as they could find. The Admirals of the foreign fleets off Tientsin agreed to demand that the Chinese hand over the Taku forts by 2:00AM on the following day.
Municipal elections were held in Cuba. These were the first since the war of 1898. Those parties favoring annexation by the United States were crushed.
June 20, Tuesday: For most years we don’t have any record, but early in 1901 someone at the Chicago Tribune made up a list of the lynchings which had occurred in America during the previous year. The list had 117 entries — a lynching, typically a white mob of some size hanging an adult black male, had been occurring every three days or so. Because of this list we know that on this day in Panasoffkee, Florida, James Barco, who had been accused of some offense now unknown to us, was lynched.
The German minister to China, Baron Klemens von Ketteler, was killed by a member of the Imperial army. All foreigners were besieged in the legations area. The number within the legations was about 4,000 from 18 countries, the great majority of them Chinese Christians. The relief force was still fighting its way back to Tientsin.
Isänmaalle (To My Country) for chorus by Jean Sibelius to words of Cajander was performed for the initial time, in Helsinki. Also performed, perhaps for the initial time, were Sibelius’ Tiera, a tone poem for brass septet and percussion, and Preludio for winds.
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July 9, Monday: For most years we don’t have any record, but early in 1901 someone at the Chicago Tribune made up a list of the lynchings which had occurred in America during the previous year. The list had 117 entries — a lynching, typically a white mob of some size hanging an adult black male, had been occurring every three days or so. Because of this list we know that on this day in Greene’s Bayou, Louisiana, Jefferson Henry, an unpopular black man, was lynched.
After being promised that they were being escorted to safety, the Christian missionary families of Taiyuan were brought before Governor Yu-Hsien of Shantung Province. Their minister, the Reverend George Farthing, was first to be beheaded, then the other men, then the minister’s wife and three young children, and the remaining foreigners along with some Chinese converts (a total of 34 Protestants and 12 Catholics).
A constitution for the Commonwealth of Australia, having received the approval of the British Parliament and voters in each of Australia’s colonies, was given royal assent by Queen Victoria.
July 15, Sunday: The village of Tchou-kia-ho (Zhujiahe) in Qin County of Hebei Province was besieged by the Boxers and by Imperial soldiers. The walled village had, since May, been a haven for 3,000 Chinese Christians, and held out for three days before being overrun, and a massacre followed. Some Catholic defenders, including Peter Zhu Rixing and Mary Zhu Wu, would later be canonized.
Chinese residents of the Russian city of Blagoveshchensk were slaughtered by Russian troops (over the following couple of days, thousands of Chinese residents would be forced into the flood-swollen Amur River where they would drown).
July 16, Monday: The London Daily Mail carried a story from its Shanghai correspondent that reported that all the foreigners in the Peking legations had been massacred by the Chinese.
Vladimir Lenin, who had been back in Russia for a few months from his exile in Siberia, departed for Munich, Germany and a self-imposed exile that would continue for five years.
August 14, Tuesday: An international force (France/Japan/Russia/UK/US) including US Marines fought its way into Peking (Beijing) to put down the Boxers.
During the duration of the siege, 66 foreigners had died and 150 had been wounded. Chinese Christians that had sought refuge with the foreigners had had untold numbers killed. The foreigners of course went on to plunder the city. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS
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August 15, Wednesday: US forces began an assault on the Imperial City in Peking. Just after midnight, the Imperial family slipped out of the city. French artillery began bombarding the Imperial City but unfortunately, the positions they hit had already been taken by the Americans. Close to conquering the city, the American troops had to withdraw for political reasons. Japanese troops rescued the remaining Christians within of the Peitang Cathedral within the Imperial City. Of the 3,420 people who had taken refuge in the cathedral at the beginning of the siege, 400 had died, including 166 children. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS
The Victorian Naval Brigade contingent to the Boxer Rebellion, from Australia, landed at Taku (they would advance to Tientsin on the following day, only to find that the real fighting had ended and be employed as mere police and firemen).
1906
Francis Henry Allen was co-editor with Bradford Torrey of the 1906 edition of Thoreau’s JOURNAL (Thoreau’s 47 holograph volumes containing some 2,000,000 words, which had accumulated on his shelf over a span of 24 years, condensed into 14 printed volumes, comprising volumes 7-20 of the Manuscript Edition of Thoreau’s writings). Allen had editorial responsibility for the first six of the volumes of that edition.
Literary history was being made, as this was the very 1st time that the full journal of an American author was being published as a part of his or her collected works.
Bradford Torrey, in the introduction to the 1906 edition of the JOURNAL, compared Henry Thoreau humorously with Jesus Christ:27 being a consistent idealist, he was of course an extremist, falling in that respect little behind the man out of Nazareth, whose hard sayings, by all accounts, were sometimes less acceptable than they might have been.
27. Henry Thoreau. THE JOURNAL OF HENRY D. THOREAU, ed. Torrey, Bradford and Francis Henry Allen (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1906; reprint NY: Dover, 1962); in part superseded by THE WRITINGS OF HENRY D. THOREAU, JOURNAL, VOLUME 1: 1837-1844, ed. Witherell, Elizabeth Hall, William L. Howarth, E. Robert Sattelmeyer, and Thomas Blanding. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1981, by THE WRITINGS OF HENRY D. THOREAU, JOURNAL, VOLUME 2: 1842-1848, ed. E. Robert Sattelmeyer, Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1984, by THE WRITINGS OF HENRY D. THOREAU, JOURNAL, VOLUME 3: 1848-1851, ed. E. Robert Sattelmeyer et al, Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1984, by THE WRITINGS OF HENRY D. THOREAU, JOURNAL, VOLUME 4: 1851-1852, ed. Neufeldt, Leonard N. and Nancy Craig Simmons, Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1992, and by THE WRITINGS OF HENRY D. THOREAU, JOURNAL, VOLUME 5: 1852-1853, ed. O’Connell, Patrick F., Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1997
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Here is Lawrence Buell, on page 341 of THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION: THOREAU, NATURE WRITING, AND THE FORMATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE: Around 1880, when Houghton, Osgood reorganized and renamed itself Houghton, Mifflin, Thoreau was accorded a distinctly second-rank status. “Our book list,” reads an 1879 circular, “includes the works of the most eminent and popular of American writers,” among whom nine are identified, including Longfellow and other leading poets of the New England group (James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier), as well as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Bret Harte, but not Thoreau. Indeed, there was no reason to name him; Thoreau’s seven volumes were selling a total of less than a thousand copies a year. By 1903, however, the company’s head, George H. Mifflin, was declaring that “Thoreau should be our next great author after Emerson.” This decision inaugurated the twenty-volume edition of Thoreau’s collected writings, published in 1906 — a historic event commonly taken as the point of Thoreau’s canonization. The inclusion of the JOURNAL in fourteen volumes made Thoreau the first American person of letters to have his diary published in full. [Emphasis added]
1922
The Unitarian Laymen’s League commissioned Newell Convers Wyeth to produce 20 illustrations for a book on the parables of Jesus.
1923
At this point Newell Convers Wyeth had completed six paintings on the parables of Jesus, and they were published in the Boston Traveler.
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1931
Newell Convers Wyeth illustrated an edition of John Fox, Jr.’s THE LITTLE SHEPHERD OF KINGDOM COME.
In 1922 the Unitarian Laymen’s League had commissioned him to produce 20 illustrations for a book on the parables of Jesus and at this point he had completed 10 of this series, which were published as THE PARABLES OF JESUS with commentary by S. Parkes Cadman.
1937
Newell Convers Wyeth donated to his Wilmington Unitarian church a painting of Jesus holding a baby.
Friend Henry Cadbury’s THE PERIL OF MODERNIZING JESUS (New York) warned of the risk one runs when one attempts to extrapolate from the historical record of the life of Yehoshua, to an ethic for living in the modern world. Nowhere in these records, he asserted, is there to be found an “unmistakable appeal to the rights or needs of the other party or even to the interests of society in general.” Instead Yehoshua was portrayed as being exclusively concerned with the being of the individual addressed. The “Good Samaritan” story is told, for instance, with little regard for the point of view of the person who was “the recipient of social service.” Now we may note that Cadbury’s point may be made with considerable force in regard to Henry Thoreau as well. Thoreau is always exclusively concerned with the being of the individual addressed. We must beware of the people who attach to him an adherence to their own principles of pacifism, socialism, or whatever, for in the sense in which many moderns are people of principle, motivated by a need for correct belief, Thoreau simply was not a man of principle. For even in the social struggles of his own day, such as for instance over the peculiar institution of human slavery, he simply was not motivated by a need for correct belief. His concern was always for who he was, and his exhortation toward others was always based on an appeal to the sort of people they needed to be.
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1940
Fall: Eight students at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, although eligible for deferment, refused to register for the draft. William Lovell, Richard Wichlei, Meredith Dallas, David Dellinger, Joseph Bevilacqua, George Mills Houser, Donald Benedict, and Howard Spragg would spend a year in prison.28
“Hell no, I won’t go.” MILITARY CONSCRIPTION
In a Columbia University laboratory on Manhattan Island, in what would become “the Manhattan Project,” Enrico Fermi’s team of physicists split the atom. ATOM BOMB
28. Michael Meyer has asserted that “There was not one American analysis of even article length on “CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE” ... prior to the 1940s.” However, at the Library of Congress there are about 17,000 books concerning Jesus (the second most favorite topic, Shakespeare, having merely some 8,000+ titles). You don’t suppose therefore that these students had been reading in one or another of the many books about Jesus, and that reading had turned them into subversives? 86 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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According to Warner Sallman, Jesus was Aryan rather than Semitic:29
“Have faith in me, folks, I’m a white man.”
29. Oh, come on now, if Jesus was Jewish, how come he had a Mexican name?
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1941
Mid-July: Führer Adolf Hitler, a Catholic, commented: “Christianity is the hardest blow that ever hit humanity. Bolshevism is the bastard son of Christianity; both are the monstrous issue of the Jews.” ANTISEMITISM
1954
The Holy Roman Catholic Church discerned that excommunication was too good for a person who impelled by curiosity or the need to understand would descend to loose talk or publication about the foreskin of Jesus Christ, and upped the ante on this religious crime so that thenceforward any Catholic who wrote about or spoke about a Holy Prepuce would be not merely excommunicated but also shunned (“vitandi”).
In MOTIVATION AND PERSONALITY, Professor Abraham Maslow, a humanistic psychologist at Brandeis University, proposed a tiered hierarchy of human values. In ascending order these were: 1) physiological needs such as food, oxygen, and water; 2) personal safety; 3) sense of community, to include love; 4) competence and prestige; 5) self-fulfillment; and 6) curiosity and the need to understand.
Although many religious leaders were offended by Maslow’s thesis that people did not seek self-fulfillment until after their other needs had been met, his theory became popular with such diverse entities as New Age philosopher Barbara Marx Hubbard and the US Army. Hubbard stressed the high-level functions that she called “self-actualization.” The Army stressed mid-level functions such as belonging and competence. As Richard Strozzi Heckler said in a book about training Special Forces soldiers, “The institution of the Army wants [soldiers] to achieve deeper levels of power and control, but [does not] want them necessarily to begin thinking and feeling too much on their own.”
1983
January 1, Saturday: The Holy Prepuce of Jesus Christ and its jeweled casket were stolen by a Catholic priest in Calcata, Italy during the village’s annual parade on the Feast of the Circumcision. The precious object hasn’t been seen since — which is extremely unfortunate since in this day of forensic tissue specimens we would immediately be able to use it to reconstruct the entire genome of Jesus, in the hope someday that we would be able to clone him like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park.
A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology:
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• The scheduled changeover from NCP to TCP/IP protocols. Host nodes on the Internet
DATE NODES May 1969 4 October 1969 5 April 1971 23 June 1974 62 March 1977 111 August 1981 213 May 1982 235 August 1983 562 October 1984 1,024 October 1985 1,961 February 1986 2,308 November 1986 5,089 December 1987 28,174 July 1988 33,000 October 1988 56,000 January 1989 80,000 July 1989 130,000 October 1989 159,000 October 1990 313,000 January 1991 376,000 July 1991 535,000 October 1991 617,000 January 1992 727,000 April 1992 890,000 July 1992 992,000 October 1992 1,136,000 January 1993 1,313,000 April 1993 1,486,000 July 1993 1,776,000 October 1993 2,056,000 January 1994 2,217,000 1995 5,000,000 predicted estimated
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1996
Professor Guy Davenport’s (with Benjamin Urrutia) THE LOGIA OF YESHUA: THE SAYINGS OF JESUS (Counterpoint).
... When I was translating these logia, it kept occurring to me that Yeshua was, in one sense, a fusion of Heraclitus (for whom there is an ethics to be discovered in nature) and Diogenes, who, like Yeshua, was a street preacher and for whom ethics was a minute-by-minute exercise of moral rectitude. When I learned from Benjamin Urrutia that he was working on a scholarly book about the logia of Yeshua, I suggested that he also do a little book like my Heraclitus and Diogenes — the sayings each by itself, without theological directing and without their biblical context. We would simply be locating a figure on a ground, lifting it out, and giving it a new chance for recognition and study. We would also make our own translation. Most Christians know what Yeshua said in the lovely and stately Reformation English of William Tyndale, the most gifted of translators since Jerome (who put the Greek text of the Bible into Latin). Tyndale’s translation, and its appropriation by the translators of the 1611 “King James version,” is truly hallowed, and any deviation from it makes us uncomfortable. We do not yet know if Jesus spoke koine (common-market Greek) or Aramaic. The writers of the gospels thought that their best hope for disseminating the Good News was to write in Greek, so a Greek-speaking Jesus is what the world got. There is a papyrus fragment of a lost gospel on which only a few sentences are legible. It was written in the first century and is therefore as close to Jesus’ time as the canonical gospels. Jesus is on the banks of the Jordan, speaking to a crowd. Because of the tatters in the papyrus, the effect of trying to read it is like being present but being too far back to hear well. This
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must have happened often enough. “Blessed are the who? Did he say the swineherd was welcomed home?” Jesus says something about a dark and secret place, and about weighing things that are weightless. That sounds like him. But then we are told that he threw a handful of seeds into the Jordan and that they became trees bearing fruit in the twinkling of an eye, and floated away down the river. This, too, is familiar in its unfamiliarity. If he could wither a tree, he could create one. If he could walk on water, he could make an orchard stand on it. If this gospel had been known before 1935, what wonderful paintings the Renaissance would have made of it--a Botticelli is easy to imagine. We also recognize the mythic accretion that had begun before the gospels were written. Jesus probably built a metaphor around the mystery of germination. In the retelling, and retelling, the metaphor turned into a magician’s illusion. His hearers understood hyperbole and parables as if by second nature. Faith should be so strong that it can move a mountain. Only a child would take that literally, and he kept asking us to become the kind of child who could believe it. He was remembered with this same kind of hyperbole that was native to the Hebraic imagination: They said he could magically multiply fish and bread (to praise his generosity), that he could walk on water, make the blind see and the dead come alive. He wrote nothing. It is as if Heraclitus had not written a book but told his philosophy to grocers, fish-sellers, and housewives. True, like Socrates, who wrote nothing either, he was surrounded by disciples who understood that they were to carry on. What they, or somebody, remembered were his sayings. When the gospels were written and by whom we do not know. “Matthew,” “Mark,” “Luke,” and “John” are probably fictitious names. Jesus’ life was already a myth (which can coincide with truth and be a more vivid and symmetrical presentation of truth). History, in a coup de theatre worthy of Beckett, swept away practically all traces of the historical Jesus. Our certainties are three: He joined as a man in his thirties a reform movement led by one John, called “the Dipper” as he had revived an ancient ritual of symbolically washing away sin by immersion in running water. He had a coherent and charismatic ethic that he preached along roads and in the open country for three years. He fell into the hands of the Roman colonial authorities, who reluctantly respected the charge against him that he was a revolutionary and disruptive presence. He was cruelly executed by being nailed alive to an upright stake with a crosspiece for the hands. Such a mode of execution is torture, not dispatch. In the logia, we see only the eloquent, wry, amused, and angry Jesus; or, rather, we hear him. The falsest myth about him may be the Romantic and Sunday school pictures of him as a pious matinee idol with a woman’s hair, neat beard, and flowing robes. History can tell us that he wore trousers of the kind we call Turkish, that he most certainly had oiled sidelocks and a full beard. A man so out-of-doors would have worn a wide-brimmed traveler’s hat, a caftan, or coat. His sandals are mentioned by John [the Baptist]. We can guess a witty smile (“Behold an Hebrew
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in whom is no guile!”) and eyes capable of extreme sternness and kindness. That he could hold an audience entranced goes without saying. Jesus was the real ironist Kierkegaard conceals behind the face of Socrates in his doctoral thesis. Irony was his constant mode; it awakens the reflective faculties. A father loves his wayward better than his obedient son. Finding lost things pleases us more than knowing where they are. Adhering strictly to the law is strangely to disobey it. Riches are worth nothing. Heaven is not up but inside. His ironic paradoxes and his often mystifying parables replicate the strategies of Diogenes centuries before. His paradox that stung worst was that religion anaesthetizes religion. Any two people, loving and agreeing with each other, was church enough, as it had been for Amos seven hundred years earlier. Identities aroused Swiftian satire in him, for “the kingdom of heaven” recognizes no identity but human.... In the logia we can scarcely discern the metaphysics and eschatology that the church, beginning with Paul, built around the vision Jesus had of a redeemed humanity.... • If you haven’t understood the alef, how can you teach others the beth? • Come with me and I’ll show you how to fish for people. • Let anyone who has power renounce it. • Those who obey my father are my mother and my brothers and my sisters. • The last will be first, and the first will be last. • If a blind man leads a blind man, both of them will stumble. • No one can rob a strong man’s house without first tying his hands. • Be as watchful as snakes and as innocent as doves. • If circumcision were useful, we would be born without foreskins. • Look, I’m always with you, until the end of time. Lift up a stone, you’ll find me there; split wood, I’m there.
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MEL GIBSON AND JESUS CHRIST,
JESUS CHRIST AND MEL GIBSON
The acrimonious debate over whether Jesus survived the cross has gone on for so long and has evoked such passions (humor alert :-) that I think it is time for me to insert my Quaker 2¢ worth. You know the story about the bloke who asked which was worse, ignorance or apathy, and was told “We don’t know and we don’t care.” I don’t know how or when Jesus died. The passion narratives are clearly made up after the fact by people who had then not much more real hard information to go on, than we have now. The “factual” details the gospels supply are entirely tendentious, which is to say, they are dominated by the faith conclusion which the gospel writers sought to legitimate. I don’t care how or when Jesus died. We all do die, and the details are not often of our own selection. What is important is how we had lived for that was something over which we had some control. That’s true not only in our own cases but also in the case of Jesus. Even if we knew the manner of his death, it wouldn’t tell us much about what he stood for, because by definition the process of dying is a context the details of which have entirely passed out of the dying person’s own control. The message of Jesus had to do with how he lived, period paragraph. The recent Gibson snuff movie exploiting the death of Christ has turned out to be the highest-grossing “R” film of all time. However, this passion stuff is and always was a distraction. Let’s pay attention where attention is due, period paragraph.
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2002
Mel Gibson, whose father is a Holocaust denier, donated $5,100,000 for construction of a “Holy Family Catholic Church” at 30188 West Mulholland Highway in Agoura Hills near Malibu, California:30
The ritual in this worship center, it was stipulated, was to be offered in Latin in accordance with the bell-and- smell preferences of the film-maker’s family.
The Catholic Diocese of Los Angeles promptly announced that this agenda lacked any point of connection with the actual Catholic Church.
30. I have been insufficiently motivated to add details about this man’s birth, family, early life, and deeds and misdeeds to this database. Sorry about that. If you have more interest in the man than I have, you can easily bring yourself up to date on all this by way of his Wikipedia web entry. 94 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2003
October 24, Friday: It was reported in the media that the actor James Caviezel, playing Christ, had been stricken by lightning during the filming of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion” but had been uninjured.
ANNE CATHERINE EMMERICH CATHOLICISM Oh my God!
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2004
The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson was shown in theaters and released on DVD. “It is as it was,” the Pope commented as he was coming out of a private screening at the Vatican. Never mind that the movie seemed somehow Antisemitic. His Eminence granted an audience to the actor who had been struck by lightning while portraying Christ (rumors have it that James Caviezel’s next movie appearance will be as Superman). A Vatican spokesperson pointed out to the media that Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich in being considered for beatification had been evaluated “not on the basis of the writing but only on the basis of her virtuous life.” –She had claimed to have been subsisting, for a decade until her death, for instance, on nothing other than communion wafers and water.
CATHOLICISM
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: Saturday, June 22, 2013
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 97 HDT WHAT? INDEX
CYNIC JESUS JEWISH YEHOSHUA
ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 98 HDT WHAT? INDEX
CYNIC JESUS JEWISH YEHOSHUA
Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place your requests with
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 99