h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hot Tips of the Day:

I'm enjoying a binge watch of Simcha Jacobovici's television series 'The Naked Archeologist'. Jacobovici is an Israeli-born Canadian filmmaker. He's hugely funny and quite informative on the latest trends, scandals, and controversies in Biblical archaeology. Watching him egg his skinny cameraman on to sneak past an official lock and invade the ancient mikveh possibly belonging to John the Baptist was just priceless. His search for 'biblical cows' is also a must-see. Find him on Amazon Prime, or just look around. Warning: as a friend said, 'When it comes to Simcha, it's just one outrage after another.'

All this talk of biblical archaeology led me, the way things do, to be noodling around this morning trying to find out more about lost gospels. You know, the ones we knew were there because the canonical people quoted them, but couldn't find because some censor disapproved for one reason or another, and started purging the libraries.

Here's a good one: a fragment of the Gospel of Peter, which they found in Egypt in 1884. It's translated and commented by MR James. Yes, *that* MR James. James was the Edgar Allan Poe of manuscript scholars.

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/gospelpeter-mrjames.html

I was interested in the account of the resurrection from the POV of Petronius' terrified soldiers. It has a great sort of X-Files vibe, don't you think?

Trying to find out more caused me to stumble across a book in the internet archive. The kind that's so bad it's good. It's an 1893 tome called 'The Safe Side', and it's written by a very prejudiced, stuffy, middle-class white Unitarian named Richard M Mitchell who finds the whole idea of Christianity very vulgar and disgusting and not for respectable people who are worried about property values.

http://archive.org/details/safesideatheist00mitcgoog

Here's a good bit:

'That book [i.e., the objectionable New Testament] exposes, what must necessarily have been the case, that there were depredations upon other people's property. Such a body also would naturally draw in the vicious class, whose greater depredations would contribute to Christ's unpopularity. But many, if not all, of those followers would look lightly upon the rights of others when the possession of property was to be of short duration. The frequent tirades against the rich in the New Testament indicate the spirit that actuated them.'

In other words, this writer objects to Jesus because he and his followers were not 'the right sort of people'. This might be termed the Hyacinth Bucket form of agnosticism.

By the way, 'the safe side' of the title refers to the author's version of Pascal's Wager. Mitchell seems to think it's safer to ignore this dangerously low-class type of religion than to risk offending his idea of God, who appears to be a Social Darwinist.

I thought you might enjoy taking a look at this marvelous work. It gave me a giggle or two.

~ Thanks ~ ~ A to you . .. ...

Skoal, you two!