“So yeah the son of God was on earth, but you just missed him. He was crucified about 50 years ago. Your dad might’ve met him.”

And then Mount Vesuvius fucking explodes

Edit: I meant Roman, I wrote this late at night.

  • xiaohongshu [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    40·
    19 days ago

    One of the greatest revelation from Michael Hudson’s research with the Harvard Peabody Museum archeology team is that Jesus was the leader of a debt cancellation movement in the ancient Near East who died revolting against the creditor-led oligarchic regimes.

    The Greek word (ὀφειλήματα/opheilēma) had been variously translated in different versions of the Bible as “(financial) debts” or “sins”, with scholars arguing whether they meant moral failure/sins (more formally παράπτωμα/paraptōma) or financial debts owed to creditors. The problem came when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, a religion centered around the Jubilee.

    From the blurb of …and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (Tyranny of Debt) (2018):

    The Real Message of Jesus: Jesus’s first sermon announced that he had come to proclaim a Clean Slate debt cancellation (the Jubilee Year), as was first described in the Bible (Leviticus 25), and had been used in Babylonia since Hammurabi’s dynasty. This message - more than any other religious claim - is what threatened his enemies, and is why he was put to death. This interpretation has been all but expunged from our contemporary understanding of the phrase, “…and forgive them their debts,” in The Lord’s Prayer. It has been changed to “…and forgive them their trespasses (or sins),” depending on the particular Christian tradition that influenced the translation from the Greek opheilēma/opheiletēs (debts/debtors).

    Contrary to the message of Jesus, also found in the Old Testament of the Bible and in other ancient texts, debt repayment has become sanctified and mystified as a way of moralizing claims on borrowers, allowing creditor elites and oligarchs the leverage to take over societies and privatize personal and public assets - especially in hard times. Historically, no monarchy or government has survived takeover by creditor elites and oligarchs (viz: Rome). Perhaps most striking is that - according to a nearly complete consensus of Assyriologists and biblical scholars - the Bible is preoccupied with debt forgiveness more than with sin.