Jesus the Nazarite

The Republican-evangelical heresy has just blessed alcoholism – as I predicted! Satan is lose in the world.

John ‘The Nazarite’

https://depts.drew.edu/jhc/eisenman.html

THERE are materials in the New Testament, early Church literature, Rabbinic literature, and Josephus which point to some connection between Paul and so-called “Herodians.” These materials provide valuable insight into problems related to Paul’s origins, his Roman citizenship, the power he conspicuously wields in Jerusalem when still a young man, and the “Herodian” thrust of his doctrines (and as a consequence those of the New Testament) envisioning a community in which both Greeks and Jews would enjoy equal promises and privileges.

By “Herodian” we mean a religio-political orientation not inimical to the aims of the Herodian family, not only in Palestine, but also in Asia Minor and even Rome, and possibly implying a genealogical connection as well. Examples of the effect of such an orientation expressed with retrospective historical effect in the Gospels would be the curious thematic repetitions portraying a Jewish Messiah desiring fellowship with “Sinners” (for Paul in Gal 2:l, “Gentiles”), “publicans” (presumably Jewish dietary regulations were of little consequence to such persons), “prostitutes” (in our view a euphemism for “fornicators” as per Jamesian/Qumran definition, i.e., those who defined technical rules of sexual purity differently or less strictly), and “tax-collectors” (persons fitting comfortably into the political philosophy enunciated by Paul in Rom 13), and a whole genre of other allusions such as “the first shall be last,” “these little ones”/”simple ones,” the Messiah as “wine-bibber” (presumably therefore distinguished from such well-known life-long Nazirite types as his brother James, John the Baptist, the mysterious “Banus,” and probably the Qumran Righteous Teacher).