Draft on the cross for 30 pieces of silver

By PHILIP OCHIENG

Judas readily came to mind when I read that our churches were pocketing American dollars to frustrate our constitution. The Iscariot – we now know – was third only to Mary Magdalene and Simon Magus among the zealots closest to Jesus.

It is not fortuitous, then, that these are the three most maligned by the European Church. For their Gnostic Christology – their version of what happened in Palestine 2,000 years ago – fully contradicts the Constantinian version called Christianity.

So detached Bible scholars now impugn the story that this Judas accepted “thirty pieces of silver” to betray the king-in-waiting – a story which, in any case, was filched, almost verbatim, from the Eleusian legend of Dionysus.

Scholars know why Judas’ enemies within the movement would cook up such a scandalous story. Judas stood in Jesus’ way to the top position of chief priest.

Instead, as “Satan” (his Qumran code-name), he “tempted” Jesus to accept the lower position of Mashiach (“messiah”, Greek Christos, English King).

But, if we take the gospel’s story for granted, the question arises: Why would anybody want to bribe Judas to perpetrate such a dastardly crime? Because – the Church asserts (and I agree) – as King, Jesus was undermining somebody’s authority.

Both Joseph Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, on the one hand, and Pontius Pilate and imperial Rome stood to lose greatly should the Jesus movement succeed. So both would have had a strong motive for paying somebody to betray Jesus.

However, to betray such a popular person, Judas would have demanded a great deal of money. Clearly, the authors did not understand what the Eleusian “thirty-pieces-of-silver” allegory meant.

Nevertheless, they borrowed it because it helped them to portray Judas as a cheap criminal.

What is the analogy? If you liken Kenyans to the Zealots, bent on liberating their country from Caesarian tyranny (the Lancaster constitution), you can liken the Church to the Jewish Sanhedrin (at that time dominated by Home Guards).

During Bomas, there were many charges that the extreme right-wing American evangelical churches were pouring money into Kenya to help defeat any concession at all that might be made to Islam.

For some reason, the American corporate family – with the Christian establishment as its integument – nurses unfathomable hatred of Islam. Now that Stalinism (alias “Communism”) is “dead”, the phobia for Islam has become schizophrenic.

WITH EUROPE’S DECLINE AS THE WORLD’S ECONO-STRATEGIC master, America – Europe’s illegitimate child – has never hidden its ambition to take over as the world’s undisputed economic, technological and military overlord.

It has fought hard – often at ruinous costs – to destroy all independent economies and all centres of potentially dangerous thought. With the fall of “communism”, Islam has emerged as such a centre – the only thought system militantly demanding cultural and financial autonomy.

That is why the American corporate family is scared stiff that all black Africa, next door to the Maghreb and Arabia, might soon fall to Islam.If, then, corporate America’s hatred of Islam is purely econo-strategic – and has exactly nothing to do with theology – what can the African Christian gain by fighting Islam with such “crude weapons” as to suborn witnesses against the kadhis’ courts?

The answer: Nothing. The African church is not fighting Islam for Africa. It is fighting it only for America. The mind of Africa’s educated elite has long been derailed into worshipping upper-class Western values.

Every dogma on democracy and salvation is sacrosanct just because it comes from London’s Whitehall or Lambeth Palace or Boston’s Watchtower redoubt. This is the same Lambeth that once scoured the Bible to find a justification for tethering black people into slavery and death by the million.

Ever since mercantile times, Christian buccaneers, slave drivers and colonial administrators have murdered a billion human beings – including in Kenya.

But, because we refuse to think for ourselves, the same foreign murderers have convinced us that God loves a foetus much more than He loved six million Jews and the entire Tasmanian population.

Because we refuse to think, after we have greedily swallowed the tripe that abortion is murder, we get so full and sleepy in the head, we just cannot remember to ask our foreign guru: If human life is sacrosanct, what about the Amerindian, the Aborigine, the women “witches”, the Saracen, the “heretic”?

Since then, indeed, the dollar has replaced Jesus as the godhead. That is why Pilate can so easily push a few coins – just thirty pieces of silver – into the pockets of Nairobi’s Judas Iscariot to help deliver our constitution to Golgotha, shouting: “Crucify it! Crucify it!”

ochiengotani@gmail.com
Source: Daily Nation May 9, 2010.