It has been known that the Great Flood detailed in Genesis is a descendant of earlier flood myths from Mesopotamia. Those earlier flood myths incorporated a tale about a boat onto which species of wild animals were sequestered to save them. This clearly shows that the Genesis story of Noah and the Ark isn’t true, but was simply an embroidery of earlier flood stories. Archaeologists have continued to find tablets in the once Mesopotamia region, where the Hebrews were enslaved, that contain stories later on claimed as originals, by the Jews in the Bible (The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood, by Irving Finkel).
Christ most probably knew about how the texts were concocted, since the readings of the Bible were taking place within the larger Greco-Roman emphasis on reason and related methods, and not from the perspective of the sacred value of a book. And that is why he was merciless with the Pharisees, and made such a good use of logic to tell the stone throwers to go ahead and kill the prostitute. This approach to thought and interpreting stories had to be followed by the Early Christians, leading them into writing their own and different versions of Christ’s acts and words. It is a fact that the Bible that is currently distributed was edited, created when the Romans made Christianity the State religion; eliminating from the “scene” the Primitive Christians approach to understanding how to live and be.
The processing mass that makes up the capacity to read includes a distinct comprehension corpus, resulting from previous readings, and larger cultural forces influencing the individual reader. The readings of the Bible by the Primitive Christians were informed and formed by the Greco-Roman conditions of their time; quite different from the more mythological approach brought in by the pagan-influenced Christianity of the Middle Ages. It seems as if for the Primitive Christians, living in communal settings, Jesus’s words were more of a guiding point than a dogma to be applied rigorously.
The processing mass that makes up the capacity to read includes a distinct comprehension corpus, resulting from previous readings, and larger cultural forces influencing the individual reader. The readings of the Bible by the Primitive Christians were informed and formed by the Greco-Roman conditions of their time; quite different from the more mythological approach brought in by the pagan-influenced Christianity of the Middle Ages. It seems as if for the Primitive Christians, living in communal settings, Jesus’s words were more of a guiding point than a dogma to be applied rigorously.
The 1960-70’s communes ranged from rigid dogma and free for all exploration groups. I experienced those possibilities in two different places, New York and Frankfurt, finding the German ones to be the most willing to face their own structures and ways, cultures; daring to confront, change and move on. These were the children of the Second World War and Nazism. I met some quality people there, and some of them later on became well known figures in politics, feminist studies, art and architecture, and participants in the colonization of Frankfurt’s river islands.
During one summer, Lillian Weber and Sherrin Hersch went to Frankfurt (they were the only ones from CCNY that I would have invited to know about such special component of my life) and met with a group that Günter Heins was working with in the City’s housing projects. It was a very dense discussion while sipping coffee and munching on lots of chocolate chips cookies.
At some point, I lived for three months with a group that can be considered as early evidence to argue in favor of Queer Theory, and then I had to go back to New York, completely shaken -it did not help that my amour was an anarchist at heart and a writer in need of a stable salary-. Each trip would lead me into the “ears” of my New York City friend Ariel. He used to say that I looked very bad whenever I came back from Germany, and it was not due to any abuse -on the contrary, I was given a space and understanding of culture that I could hardly experience in New York-, but to have gone through a very powerful approach to living.
The “queer theory” gay group living in a farm, two hours north of Frankfurt challenged me to deal not only with the “trillado” leftist narrative of the times, but my own sense of self as a gay man within a capitalist, phenotypical and class controlled society. Beds were not individualized, and sheep roamed throughout the 19th Century farm house; not much difference from the communes of the Early Christians that used animals during winters to keep their homes warm. (to be continued)
The “queer theory” gay group living in a farm, two hours north of Frankfurt challenged me to deal not only with the “trillado” leftist narrative of the times, but my own sense of self as a gay man within a capitalist, phenotypical and class controlled society. Beds were not individualized, and sheep roamed throughout the 19th Century farm house; not much difference from the communes of the Early Christians that used animals during winters to keep their homes warm. (to be continued)
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