A Man Named Jesus, A Man Named Trump

Founding a Cult

Once upon a time a man named Jesus entered onto a collision course with the Jewish religious state.  Jesus was from Galilee, traditionally part of the northern kingdom of Israel. Today we know the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah mostly through the lens of the southern kingdom of Judah who have moved back into the area where they had resided oh so many years ago, but instead of calling their nation Israel, they named themselves Israel.

But in the more ancient past this had only briefly been so.  At one time this land of Canaan had mostly been peopled by nomadic shepherds.  Whether there was a loose alliance of tribes at the time can possibly never be determined as they had no written records.  But for our purposes, let’s assume there were twelve tribal affiliations organized by familial relationships.  This would not be in any way an unusual situation for allied kin groups of the past before kingships overtook them.  Now of course our main source for the history of these people is the Bible which many reject.  For awhile it was assumed that their history was made up and false by some scholars but there is beginning to be evidence that the story that begins around 1000 B.C.E. might be archaeological verifiable.  And in my opinion the story that begins with the King, the king named David is just so detailed that it is probably not very fabricated, or else we have the first really great novel thousands of years before novels were ever being written.  

There were of course, great mythical epics of heroic propensity, interactions with gods, etc.  But the story of David is the story of a man, and that man is a king, but a troubled man, a man who believes in a god, but (except in prayer) does not ever interact with that god.

So let’s go back just a few steps to before David and return to our kin-grouped tribes.  Let’s assume that somewhere in the time of these tribes there began a theory of worship of one god to whom each tribe performed a sacrifice.  The Bible says there were high places at this time, not yet a temple, not yet an ark of the covenant (oh I know it was supposedly built out in the desert where there was no food and manna magically appeared daily but there was plenty of gold laying around, plenty of dye for beautiful cloth to be spun, etc.---well, I will get to that story directly).  And it seems at this time that each tribe was mostly self-governing and that they each performed their sacrifices to their own “high places”, altars built on a plateauish peak.  Well sometime shortly before 1000 B.C.E., the tribes might have begun to come under attack from another group, possibly the Philistines (also reclaiming their historicity from recent archaeological finds).  Now I don’t think people want kings, or ever wanted kings, at least not kings with putting everyone under their thumb.  But if we examine the book of Judges we find there had been multiple instances where these tribes had selected a leader they felt could unite them in a defense to preserve themselves from being swallowed into another’s empire, and these judges never  came from any particular family, and then were expected to give up power after they had repulsed the invader.  But then it appears  that around 1000 B.C.E. a Benjamite named Saul decided that he was not about to give up the power he had been given to repel an enemy.  Now in the book of Samuel there is some confusion.  Saul is told he cannot remain king and then the people demand to “be like other nations'', so which is it?  More than likely, the former.  I say that because of what comes next.  Well in Samuel it came first, but if it had come prior to Saul being accepted as judge, then it could not have occurred because there would not have been a son of the tribe of Benjamin to be appointed leader.  This is why, and if you don’t know the passage see Judges 19-21, but the men of Benjamin are all killed but about sixty.  The tribes decide they will give none of these men a wife, and so they have no descendants.  Instead they take the remaining daughters and marry them.  The problem is this story is a subterfuge because the only “descendants” of Benjamin are incorporated into the tribe of Judah.  I say it is subterfuge because the story borrows heavily from the Sodom story (Genesis 19:24); in the beginning and combines the rape of Dianh (Genesis 34) for the latter part for the wholesale slaughter of the men.  They then try to claim “all” the tribes had agreed.  So this is what we can ascertain as probable.  Judah and Benjamin were proximal.  David appears to have been from Bethel (Bethlehem) which is described as a city given to Benjamin, and then in Judges, Deborah says it is on the southern border of Ephraim.  Next is the small tribal boundary of Benjamin and south of Benjamin is Judah.  But Jesse (David’s father) was a shepherd who lived in Bethlehem, and is declared in 1 Samuel 17:12 to be an Ephramite; and yet David’s genealogy in Ruth traces his genealogy and says Jesse was from Judah.  But Jesse is from Bethel and had to be an Ephramite; so Ruth is an obvious interpolation to make the first king of Judah to have had a Judaic lineage.  

My suggestion is this.  Ephraim had already encroached to some extent on Benjamin, probably through intermarriage.  Like almost all (if not all) kin related groups of ancient times, the kin groups traced their tribal kin through the mother and men married into the tribe of the wife.  (Officially even today one is Jewish only if the mother is Jewish, but other than the ultra-orthodox, not much practiced today).  So Bethlehem borders, or is in Ephraim, and David had probably met Saul's son Jonathan in the fields one day when they had been trying to sort whose sheep were whose. At any rate David is no child and his duel with Goliath is silly, because David is married  to Michel who is Saul’s daughter. Since all the Benjamite wives seem to have been taken into the tribe of Judah, it was probably only the  tribe of Judah who had attacked and fought Benjamin.  Whether Saul had really been “king” or  had attempted to become king, or was merely the chief judge (not-king, head of family) of Benjamin may not be certain.  But there is almost a parallel when David kills Saul and the trickery against the last surviving men holed up in Benjamin and resistant to being defeated.  So the most likely scenario is that somehow the Judeans found an Ephramite who already had a connection to Saul and enlisted him to get into Saul’s camp and kill Saul and Jonathan with the promise of becoming “king”.  

And if this is so then the rest of the story, the life of David, just seems so detailed I believe we are now talking history not myth.  God descends from active participation in the Jewish kingdom, worship is concentrated, the temple is built by David’s son and Judaism begins with the Jewish kingdom founded by David. The first order of business was to subdue all of the tribes under David’s rule and then conquer and expand the territory as is the wont of all kings to do.  If there is lack of evidence historically beyond  the Bible, you have to remember that as soon as David dies, his successor loses it all, he even loses the other ten tribes who now join in rebellion and set up their own kingdom and began practicing their older  tribal religion again. So the initial conquest of the Davidic empire would have been a blimp of possibly only twenty to thirty years so the likelihood of much extra-historic (non-Jewish) becomes minimal.

For the rest of his life David is consumed with guilt,with war.  David was certainly not as young as the Bible makes him seem, in fact one support for my thesis is that David’s first wife Michel, was Saul’s daughter,so his oldest son Absalom was technically a Benjamite.  But the internal struggles that David has is what gives me cause to believe in the historicity of David, and the fact that from this point in the Jewish (except through prophetic dreams), God ceases to be an active participant and that mythological mixing of man and gods seems to be in the past.  (Exceptions like Daniel notwithstanding since it is Christianity, not Judaism, that emphasized Daniel’s “prophetic” standing, the Jews themselves never claimed that and considered Daniel as a “writing” or an unprophetic story about how God had been able to release them from Persia to once again become one nation.

But David’s son Solomon—wow!.  The jewish canon certainly had a need to make the world’s dumbest king into a “wise”.  Corrupt, greedy, vain, and stupid—the narcissist supreme.  Certainly he thought women thought if he were rich and kingly they would let him do it.  A thousand women as wives and concubines.  And I don’t believe for an instant that they were daughters of powerful kings to ally himself politically with anyone because he didn’t have any allies and in short order lost all of the land that David had conquered beyond his own kingdom.  The only way to get his 1000 women was to abuse the daughters of the old Canaan allied tribes, and the only slaves he had to build his palaces and his temple were also from those tribes because the jewish history has to admit that.  If they trace themselves and the significance of their god in giving them their land, they are stuck with Solomon, one of the worst most insignificant kings in the historical record, and if there religion built around their singular god and the religion that developed around the Solomonic temple, then they are stuck with contradicting their own history to make this vain loser into a great man.  And of course upon his death his own sons systematically attempted to kill each other off until there were only one.  And during that conflict, even their own slaves, the “ten tribes”, not lost, but rebellious, became one of the first successful (the oldest I have awareness of) slave revolts.  

And here becomes the founding of Israel, not Judah. Israel means to contend with and prevail over “el”--god, not angel–and they named themselves as having prevailed over their slave master who had forced them into worshiping their “el” in the form created by the tyrannical Solomon.  Basically Israel named themselves to emphasize their successful revolt.  

But now each of the two began to develop theological support for their own religious right to support their individual kingdoms. From the Jewish perspective, Aaron was very important to support the cult of temple worship and the familiar relationship of the Jewish “selection” by their king’s God to that right as a kingdom.  But the north, the kingdom of Israel, was still somewhat tribal with each group still practicing and worshiping separately, needing to have a unifying connection born out of their common slave rebellion and Moses was born as the religious connection that had freed them from bondage.  Now this is not a “made-up” interpretation by Ken Taylor, it is beginning to gain prominence over older (J-E-P-D) interpretations to distinguish the contradictory “stories” in the Jewish pentateuch.  I have no wish to go into the long development that has led to this interpretation by Biblical scholarship,  or to show why I feel it is the best interpretation I have encountered that satisfies my own methodology for interpretation.  

So into this environment the man named Jesus was born,  albeit some 950 years later.  Much time had passed, and the contentions Jews had led Rome to believe they could deal with this contention by installing a satellite king (Herod the Great).  But Herod had under his control much more than just Judah of the Jewish adherents, but a territory that also included the old Israeli kingdom.  The Jews never accepted Herod as Jewish, and whether or not he even was “jewish” is also another story, but what happened is of some importance because it renewed a revival in the conflict between the jews and the “Samaritan” so called because the Jews had began calling their nation Israel after their return from the Babylonian captivity, and named after one of the largest Galilean cities.  And it is from this area that the man named Jesus was born, growing up and despising Judaism as the mortal religious enemies of his own locality (and vice-versa).  And Jesus of course, with almost every utterance contends with the adherents as being false and not the “true followers” of “god” culminating in his attack upon the Jewish temple that led directly to his death. 

Some have tried to place Jesus within the militant camp of Jewish zealots who still wished to break from Rome and reestablish their own kingdom, and at that time were engaged in “terroristic” actions  against Rome.  But Jesus, although militant, was not interested in attacking Roman rule at all, but in attacking the Jewish cult of belief.

The family of Trump

In the late nineteenth century a man named Friedrich (Frederick) Trump was born in the Palatinate, then a part of the Free State of Bavaria that would shortly join into the German empire, but maintain a semi-independence.  Friedrich’s father died young and in a great deal of debt and the family vineyards were sold in auction. Six of his seven children had to work in the grape fields as common slaves, excuse me as common laborers, but Friedrich was a sickly boy and unable to endure the labor.  Too poor to support a non-worker, his mother arranged to have him sent into an apprenticeship with a barber.  Friedrich apprenticed for two and a half years and then (whether he had actually completed his apprenticeship may not be certain, the usual apprenticeship in Germany at that time was usually three and half years,  so either Friedich ran away, or was release earlier is not determined, at any  rate he went back to the small village of Kallstadt to begin his own barber practice.  Most of the inhabitants were peasants and simply couldn’t afford a barber and so Friedrich found his livelihood unsustainable. He was also approaching the age of mandatory conscription into the German military.  The family history is that his mother agreed to “send him to America”.  His family members dispute that, claiming he left in the middle of the night, leaving only a note he was fleeing to avoid conscription, and it is on that basis that he was permanently banished from returning.

Friedrich managed to get to the port of Bremen.  How he paid for his passage to America, or even whether he paid, has remained unexplained, since he had no exit visit to leave Germany. When he arrived he moved in with his sister who had married Friedrich Schuster and had immigrated two years earlier.  Trump (listed on his admittance to the US as “Trumpf”) was sixteen years old.  He managed to get another apprenticeship and began once again practicing barbering.  This apprenticeship was six years in length.  At the end of that apprenticeship Friedrich moved to the state of Washington and used his life savings to buy a restaurant that he turned into a brothel with rooms for patrons after eating to engage with women.  Word of John D. Rockefeller buying mineral rights in Snohomish county led to rumors of vast deposits in gold and silver deposits and men began congregating to the area in anticipation.  Friedrich decided to follow but didn’t have enough money to buy a property near the rail station where he wanted to build a hotel, so instead he used the money from the sale of his restaurant to purchase a property in Lake Placid (the first Trump real estate investment) and filed a mineral rights claim(free) on the land he wished to build his hotel in Monte Cristo in Snohomish County where once again he established a restaurant-brothel.  There was only one problem, the land rights to the property had already been claimed by another.  The land office was somewhat corrupt however, and with a small bribe were often convinced to cook the books with duplicate claims to the same property and let the courts settle the rights later.  But before the other claimant had the opportunity to file in the courts, Friedrich constructed his hotel.  The brothel being quite popular, Friedrich  had himself  elected  justice of the peace and was able to ignore the summons to pay rent on the property.  

The land was not producing any gold or silver however, and Rockefeller withdrew his investment creating a depreciation in the land values.  Friedrich had anticipated the bubble burst and news of gold explorations in the Yukon were now circulating.  Friedrich paid two Canadians a smittance to go to the Yukon and lay a claim for him.  Friedrich  bought his land in Monte Cristo from the rightful owner, then sold it for a small profit just prior to the complete collapse of the economy in Snohomish and returned to Seattle in early 1897. Gold arrived from the early Yukon strikes to the ports of San Francisco and thousands flocked daily to Seattle to depart for the Yukon to earn their “fortunes”. (Unfortunately, all of the claims had already been staked and none of the later arrivals earned more than the minimal wages of their labors).  

In the meantime Trump had returned to Seattle and mortgaged a new property which he was able to pay off within a month from the swarm on their way to the Yukon. By 1898 Trump had made enough to travel to the Yukon himself where, never opening his own claim to mining, he constructed a “tent city” that housed his restaurants and abodes for his women that he once again sold to the lonesome miners.  The “dinners” mostly consisted of dead horses who had died on the notorious “Dead Horse Trail” and were scavenged already in a state of decomposition.

Well thusly did the Trump family fortune begin.  

The Second Son

Donald, as we know, was not supposed to be the heir of the business empire that had passed on from Friedrich to his son Fred, who in many crooked, controversial, and legally contentious “deals” had made a small fortune.  Fred himself, though born wealthy, had to go work early in life.  Still a minor when his father died,his mother who inherited Friedrich’s estate, didn’t just let Fred have the typical pampered path to fortune, but he did “inherit” (probably through encouragement and demand from his mother) his father’s deviousness and cutting corners.  But by the time of his majority he had been able to unite with his mother after being able to earn enough for his own first real estate venture.  But this was not to be the case with Fred’s own sons.  Fred Jr. was smart and talented and the obvious heir.  The second son, Donald was mostly determined, unworthy and lacking in the wily ability of either father or grandfather to be devious enough to successfully continue the Trump knack of staying a step ahead of the changes they foresaw would enable them to succeed.  Donald was at first very dependent and clingy and wanted a lot of attention.  His father denied him that attention and demanded his wife follow suit.  He felt the son needed to develop the strength necessary to be successfully resilient enough to succeed in borderline criminality–the path the family had followed to success. 

But it turned out that it was Fred Jr. who was incapable of following the family tradition.  Fred Jr. was a likable and popular person and valued friendship over self-reliance.  Unfortunately the conflict between his personableness and the family’s desire to use others turned him to drink and separation from the business.  So second son Donald became the inheritor of the business operations.  But second son Donald  still had the need to achieve love—but  no understanding that love cannot come from using others.  So his ideas of crookedness became intertwined with grandiose schemes to bring recognition to himself.  Love, unavailable to be achieved emotionally, could only be achieved through admiration and worship. But such grandiosity created a continual conflict between his need for being admired and his inability to intelligently comprehend that the others you cheat have to be artfully done and quietly behind the scenes.  

The Divinity of Jesus and Trump

Upon the death of Jesus his Galilean followers were at something of a loss.  Their leader had openly confronted the Jews, but they tried to convert the Jews who for the most part had no desire to become Samaritans, to whom they perceived to be the lowest of scummery.  But they did bring one Jewish convert into their midst, a man named Paul.  Exactly how this happened is probably not known if we discount his vision on the road to Damascus.  But we can assume that Paul (Saul) also,like Donald, had some type of grandiose desires of fame.  But Paul was not achieving too much success.  Luke says Paul studied under Hillel, but that’s impossible as Paul didn’t know Hebrew.  We may assume from the story presented of him that he was a Diaspora Jew and had probably come to Jerusalem expecting somehow to become a powerful force in Jerusalem.  Obviously his rise did not materialize, he remained an outsider to Jerusalem Judaism as were the Galilaens and so it is easy to see why he might have fallen in with them.  But Paul had already been rejected by his own faith, and to achieve his desire for grandiosity he decided to missionize the world.  He didn’t really found the Christian church as commonly claimed,because the church actually has little in common with the structures of Paul’s teachings, but he did found the Christian religion. To be successful, Paul used the death of Jesus as an indication of his divinity and it became a martyred sacrifice that he presented as a substitute to those feeling oppressed by the tyranny of both Roman authority and personal bondage to overseers.

Many Americans are feeling the same tyranny and they see in Donald Trump’s identification as victim what many early Pauline converts must have identified with in Paul’s use of Jesus as a martyr—the escape from the tyranny of feeling victimized by the society to a promise of a future relief.  Republican leaders today know their own followers (voters) see the promise of their own perceived victimhood is intertwined with the person of their savior from that tyranny, the one who promised to them the illegitimacy of American democracy that has failed to serve them.  Trumpism has already taken on dimensions of religiosity, and just as Christianity survived by intermingling with, and then surpassing Judaism; so Trumpists play on Christianity’s millennialism and roots to produce an immediate millennial confrontation to challenge the existing republican representative conception of a democracy they feel cannot represent them.  There are a multitude why they feel this way, but what has resulted is the obvious need by many to overthrow the existing, to radically transform the idea that democracy can be legitimately achieved through its current system of representation. If Trump is imprisoned or dies (and not saying he shouldn’t be) then the acolytes will be even more empowered.  If those acolytes are not to become Pauls, then it is essential to defeat the acolytes to prevent the spread of their transforming the future into a religion of future tyranny that they will use to create what they hope will become the power of the medieval church over the state.

And the problem is it will not relieve the pressure of the oppression but increase it.  This time it is up to those who wish to end this new oppressive cultism by actually transforming the society away from the oppressors of the cult.