Jesus Christ gives meaning to ancient history and geography

by

Damien F. Mackey

“After three days they found him in the Temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him

was amazed at his understanding and his answers”.

Luke 2:46-47

Jesus, who even as a child of twelve was skilfully able to teach Jerusalem’s teachers, would later, as an adult, correct many misconceptions and false traditions on a whole range of issues. ‘You have heard that it was said … but I tell you …’ (e.g. Matthew 5:38).

This was the voice of One who spoke words of unerring authority (Mark 1:21-22): “They went to Capernaum; and when the Sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes”.

Just as when he had been a boy of twelve, when his listeners were “amazed” (ἐξίσταντο) by his knowledge, so now, again, at Capernaum, were those who heard him “astounded” (ἐξεπλήσσοντο) by his authoritative speech.

And Jesus continues today to teach us, through the Scriptures, and in prayer.

For, in a mere two verses filled with meaning, Jesus will succinctly span BC history, from Creation down to his own approximate era, and will, in so doing, identify for us the location of the Garden of Eden (Luke 11:50-51): ‘Therefore this generation will be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets that has been shed since the beginning of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, this generation will be held responsible for it all’.

Eden was the holy place to which Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, had brought their sacrifices, and in whose vicinity Cain slew Abel (by cutting his throat like a sacrifice?) (cf. I John 3:12).

Jesus is telling us that the Jerusalemites who persecuted the prophets, and who even slew some of them (e.g., Zechariah son of Jehoiada and Urijah son of Shemaiah), including the last one, Zechariah son of Berechiah (cf. Matthew 23:35), were geographically of the same region as Cain and Abel had been, and were as well of the spirit of Cain, but not of the holy Abel.  

In other words, the long sought for location of Eden was the site of Jerusalem – obviously much altered topographically and greatly impoverished since the halçyon days prior to the Fall of Adam and Eve.

This has many ramifications, including for the proper identification of the four rivers – generated by the one Edenic river (Genesis 2:10).

Those four rivers, Pishon (פִּישׁוֹן), Gihon (גִּיחוֹן), Hiddekel (חִדֶּקֶל) and Perath (פְרָת), must have geographically en-framed Eden.

Jesus, the Lord of History (and Geography), easily encompasses history from the beginning (Abel) until modern times (Zechariah) in two telling verses.

In so doing, he helps us to know that this Zechariah was not the martyred Zechariah son of the High Priest, Jehoiada, since this Zechariah was not the most recent martyr. Urijah son of Shemaiah, for instance, had come after Zechariah son of Jehoiada.

But even that was not so recent.

Hence, Matthew 23:35 is not contradictory about Zechariah as many like to suggest.

Jesus Christ is the Key to Knowledge and he is not about to contradict the Truth.

That is done, instead, by the likes of the “experts”, the blind know-alls, the types who resisted Jesus and had him crucified (Luke 11:52): ‘Woe to you experts in the Law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering’.

We lose all fine meaning, then, when we shift Eden, the central point of Genesis 2, from the region of Jerusalem to east of the Tigris (חִדֶּקֶל) and Euphrates (פְרָת) rivers, which easterly re-orientation seems to be the preferred location today for the ancient Garden of Eden.

But:

Ezekiel 5:5: “This is what the Sovereign LORD says: ‘This is Jerusalem, which I have set in the centre of the nations, with countries all around her’.”

Editor Moses would have had only one place meaning in mind for “Cush”, when he wrote of the Gihon river that “it winds through the entire land of Cush” (Genesis 2:13).

Moses is traditionally said to have led Egyptian armies into Nubia, or Cush (Ethiopia).

That fixes the Gihon river as the Blue Nile.

And the Tigris and Euphrates are well known.

Those like Dr. David Rohl, who want to turn Moses’s “Cush” into the Kusheh Dagh in Iranian Azerbaijan:

and search in vain for the vestiges of the Garden of Eden in that NE region of the ancient world, succeed only in emptying the Scriptures of their meaning and import.

Some of the unhappy consequences of this are:

• The authoritative words of Jesus Christ about Abel and Zechariah then become meaningless, and even unjust for his Jerusalemite “generation”.

• The whole wonderful cosmic symmetry of the Fall of Man, and then the Redemption of Man, occurring in the same geographical location, is totally lost.

“O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen”.

• All the Garden of Eden symbolism at the Fall, of the tree and thorns and pain and sweat, ceases to be reflected by the same Garden symbolism at the Passion and Redemption:

It now becomes a case of poet John Donne’s And new philosophy calls all in doubt:

“Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.”

And it is interesting that John Donne aimed this famous statement at the new philosophies, which were mathematically and science-based and anti-metaphysical, reflecting a world largely of a priori theory, rather than one of studied reality.

The culmination of all of this would be a cosmography of models and numbers that has as much bearing upon reality as does the Kusheh Dagh location have for the Garden of Eden.

Our models of Astronomy today are cosmographies lacking an inherent meaning, lacking what pope Benedict XVI called “a cosmology discerning the visible inner logic of the cosmos”.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Our Lady of Fatima’s Historian

“Without Solzhenitsyn, the everyday reality and details of what

Our Lady at Fatima warned would be our personal imaginings.

His talent as a story-teller engaged readers worldwide”.

Mary O’Regan

Taken from:

http://thepathlesstaken7.blogspot.com/2010/02/solzhenitsyn-our-ladys-historian_23.html

SOLZHENITSYN: OUR LADY OF FATIMA’S HISTORIAN

What Our Lady Foretold: Solzhenitsyn Chronicled

When Solzhenitsyn’s died, the worldwide press were in a competition to out-do themselves in admiration of the literary giant. Solzhenitsyn was lauded as one of the greatest writers to have ever lived. He was accredited with having played a crucial intellectual role in the fall of Communism. And contrary to the usual candy-floss schmaltzy eulogizing the Western press doles out when a celebrity dies, the praise given Solzhenitsyn is deserved. Incredible. Yet since Solzhenitsyn’s death, there has been very little discussion of his real vocation in national newspapers and even on the blogosphere. No corner of the press – religious or secular has yet given Solzhenitsyn what is rightly his greatest honour. It is this: Solzhenitsyn was the artist who dramatized what Our Lady at Fatima foretold about Russia and the world. No comparison exists between Solzhenitsyn and the Queen of Heaven, there remains only an alliance. Solzhenitsyn (perhaps totally unwittingly) was Our Lady’s servant. 

….

Stalinism, Communism, the Gulags and societal Soviet persecution were the stuff of Solzhenitsyn’s writings, but they were also what Our Lady of Fatima termed Russia’s “errors”. Yes, the media correctly identified Solzhenitsyn’s writings as brave exposés of the horrors of Communist Russia.

But the media confined Solzhenitsyn’s apocalyptic analysis to Communist Russia. There is a continuing prevailing sense that the media is trying to establish a sense of superiority over the Russian chumps who made all the mistakes. A sort of “well if the Russians had done Lefty-liberalism-socialism our way, they wouldn’t have got themselves in the pickle Solzhenitsyn described!” In essence, the liberal media’s analysis of Solzhenitsyn has been insufferably, school-prefect-like patronizing. No attempt is made to see that what Solzhenitsyn described was of significance to everyone worldwide. As I will detail, we have not learned from the “errors”. 

Solzhenitsyn was informed by his own personal, first hand experience of eight years in the Gulag and had the integrity never to deviate from the truth. It was Solzhenitsyn’s credibility that made the Soviet Russian authorities flinch.

….

And the fact that he was a best-selling author who would eventually sell thirty million books worldwide. Without Solzhenitsyn, the everyday reality and details of what Our Lady at Fatima warned would be our personal imaginings. His talent as a story-teller engaged readers worldwide.

Solzhenitsyn’s meticulous attention to detail captivates attention, we are there with Ivan Denisovich prisoner of the Gulag when he must [choose] either socks or hard boots to scuttle around in the snow; he cannot have both.

Let us first explore Our Lady of Fatima’s urgent message. Before Our Lady appeared to the three shepherd children. ….

The children were taught to pray by the Guardian Angel of Portugal. The Angel told them, “to pray a great deal”. Our Lady appeared to them for the first time on the 13th of May 1917. On the 13th of July 1917, Our Lady showed the three seers a vision of Hell. St. Lucia depicted the vision as thus: “Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers”. The vision lasted an instant, but Our Lady told the children that poor sinners go there because they have no one to pray for them. Our Lady continued to notify the children that if people did not stop offending God, He would reprimand the world “by means of war, hunger and persecution of the Church and of the Holy Father,” using Russia as His chosen implement of punishment. In other words, Russia would be the means, but the consequences were for everyone. However, it was a precise consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart that Our Lady requested. Our Lady offered very specific instructions, that if not granted, “Russia will spread her errors throughout the world, raising up wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer and various nations will be annihilated.”

The “errors” of Russia were never clarified for the three seers. By “errors” Our Lady inferred that which is objectively wrong from a Catholic point of view. We can establish that, in Russia, the root “error” was the abrogation of Christianity, the denial of religious formation and the denunciation of religion as ever having played an important role. What Solzhenitsyn would describe as “the total surrender of the soul.” 

Firstly in Russian society, it was the concept of God as creator and judge that was utterly abolished.

Hence, the dominant ‘error’ of Soviet education.

The very first thing a Soviet child learned at school was the theory of evolution and where, as “animals”, they were on the evolutionary scale. There is much debate in Catholic circles about the validity of Evolutionary theories, but Catholics have never been taught by Mother Church to teach children that they are primarily animals. Under Stalin, the Soviet officials thought of the Russian people as animals with speech, and were content to treat them as such. In Solzhenitsyn’s novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the Gulag prisoners are like sub-humans in an abattoir. They scrounge for scraps of food, stand naked in a frozen field during a body search and every minute their survival is threatened. Solzhenitsyn peppers his prose with lots of ironies; how the Gulag guards are in defiance of the Communist ideology of equality for all men. How Communism was meant to eliminate social divides; when in fact total societal breakdown ensues because only the ordained alpha male authority figures are able to protect themselves. The weak are to be used, it’s their fault they are weak. The Gulag guards are atheists, believing in no higher Judge, nor do they have any concept of grace or even kindness for its own sake.

The Communist system has ensured the guards are aware of absolutely no biblical/Christian teaching that would lead them to think of themselves as other than vicious animals. Similarly, Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward, ends with a zoo scene, representing the Soviet culture that has reduced [human] society to a jungle.

Whilst not a Catholic, Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a true depiction of the accumulative effect of Russia’s errors on Russia herself. It is Stalin’s Russia in microcosm and portrays Stalin’s Russia as one huge prison camp. The character of Ivan Denisovich embodies the Soviet view of religion. He can only see what religion may do for him in material terms. The ‘Our Father’ is incomprehensible to him, because he does not see how it will give him daily bread. Prayers for Ivan are like the complaints one makes to the Soviet authorities, pieces of raggy paper put in a box that will never get the establishment’s attention and is merely a Pyrrhic exercise. A devout Baptist in the Gulag attempts evangelising Ivan. But for Ivan, talk of God’s love is meaningless babble.

Ivan’s only religious contact is a Russian Orthodox priest who Ivan resented, and thus he distrusts anyone religious, because for Ivan religion and the personality of his cruel and indifferent authority figures are the same.

Ivan’s rejection of religion signifies he is a product of the system he abhors. The challenge of bringing Ivan to the Christian faith is a taste of the challenge of bringing the entirety of Russia back to organised religion.

 

Solzhenitsyn not only revealed the deplorable conditions of Soviet Russia, he bared the souls of select Russian characters. As the spiritual nucleus of Solzhenitsyn’s works became more obvious, more and more did he stand alone. Solzhenitsyn was the “traitor” of the “nomenklatura”, upsetting Russia’s reputation, but simultaneously ‘\”progressive” politicians and writers found his traditionally religious outlook embarrassing. His devotion to orthodox Christianity and simultaneous rejection of westernization of Russian culture brooked no compromise. Throughout his writing career, Solzhenitsyn increasingly emphasized that the only antidote to Communism was a spiritual resurgence. This assaulted the West’s politically correct smarmy talk of democracy as the only solution. Solzhenitsyn wrote: “Our present system is terrible not because it is undemocratic and based on force but because it demands total surrender of the soul.”

Whilst Solzhenitsyn knew what medicine the world needed, Our Lady held the prescription pad. Part of the prescriptions given the whole world was to pray the Rosary everyday; indeed six times did Our Lady call for the daily recitation of five decades of the Rosary. Our Lady also advised “the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays”.