Last night I did get my audio presentation files - as I call them - posted on my web site for my talk titled ‘My Belief Shared’. I do want to add the text for the read meditation, which will be the 'last straw’! Or, should I say the ‘final touch‘? It is interesting to juxtaposition these two standard expressions and their implied, but opposing meanings!

I also posted two daily entries. The one thing I forgot to do, was to update my home page with an announcement about my posted audio presentation. I also finished reading ‘Zealot’, but I am not done with this book as you may gather from my writings below.

Later this morn Don and I will meet to do due diligence on the ‘tape to disc’ audio converter. My little Sony tape recorder does ok, but the process is slow. I’m curious to see what this converter can do, how fast and to what level of quality.

I finished reading Reza Aslan’s ‘Zealot’. I had lost interest a bit in the middle chapters, in part because I felt he was wrong about Jesus being an uneducated peasant, but in the closing five chapters - from twelve on - the author peeked my interest again.

Here Aslan starts to show how the teachings of this simple peasant became a central message to the later Christian Orthodoxy, but then lost the centrality of the poor and ordinary folk. These do remain central to the teachings of ‘James the Just‘, but are lost in history, as they are displaced by Paul’s Hellenistic views.

I find Aslan interesting, because he does examine the formation process of this new belief as it emerges from its Jewish cum Hebrew roots. He does this by examining the early first century disagreements that are glossed over by Luke and the passed down church history.

This is where the outsider’s view is keener, because there are no vested interests to protect in regard to one’s own academic position or reputation within the community of believers.

I still have to read the notes and I may have to reread the chapters in Part II, where Aslan makes his case for Jesus as the man. In my one essay ‘Jesus The Man’, I make the case that as a person Jesus grew up in a lay Essene environment, became a dedicated Essene later and then broke with that movement and proceeded with his own message.
<8:31am~