What Does "O Come All Ye Faithful" Mean? (Including the super-secret mystery verse)

What Does “O Come All Ye Faithful” Mean? (Including the super-secret mystery verse)

COMMENTARY:

Matthew is the outlier of the 4 Gospels in that it is a polemic composed to support the Judaizers that oppose Paul. HIs version of Jesus before His bar mitzvah is heavily influenced by the qualities of kabbalah that emerge from the study of the Torah. The Magi connect the dots between Melchizedek and, and for, the author of Hebrews via the 7 kings of Rome and Socrates’ cup of wrath, which is why it is included in the Roman canon.

The Roman canon is determined by a secret Christian society in the Praetoreon Guard. Apparently, it was dangerous to be associated with Christianity virtually from the get-go, that is, from the time Tiberius proposed Jesus as a legal deity as recorded by Tertullian. The author of Hewbrews is the authorized voice of this clandestine organization, probably the chairman of the intelligence committee that originally received the intelligence from Palestine regarding the Resurrection of Jesus as fast as any communication from Caesarea could get to Rome, probably no later than Pentacost if not before. Elements from the Gospel of Peter, with the angels and resurrected Jesus that stretched up to the sky that were part of the Q source. The Gospel of Mark is a follow-up report from Cornelius in Palestine during Caligula’s reign based on the de-briefing of Peter in Acts 10.

Theophilus is Luke’s connection to the Roman intelligence services, his handler, so to speak. Luke was already preparing a amicus brief while Paul was in custody and before Luke was introduced to Cornelius and was able to interview him and Peter regarding their interview. My inferrence from the two salutations in Luke and Acts is that Luke has a copy of both Mark and Matthew and he is specifically de-politicalizing Matthew’s polemic of the Judaizing stuff and shaping the narrative to not offend Roman theo-political sensibilities, number one, and number two, capturing the existing oral tradition of the living memory of the Christian community around 60 in Jerusalem and Galilee. Cornelius makes the same cameo as Matthew in order to establish the context of Acts X in the narrative. Cornelius is very clearly the centurion in Luke 7 and the centurion in Luke 7 is very clearly the centurion in Matthew 8. And Matthew 8:10 and Luke 7:9 is the only time besides Genesis 15:6 when God justifies someone by faith.

Cornelius is not the centurion in Mark 15:39. Cornelius is a centurion at the climax phase of his career, a product of the Praetorian Guard’s farm system for producing centurions for senior administrative position to support the diplomatic/executive track of the Praetorian Guard Pilate is on and where Julius Caesar got his start. The centurion in Mark 15:39 is at the entry level of the centuriate, the equivalent to the Sergeant First Class/Gunnery Sergeant/E-7 pay grade of the American NCO universe. Cornelius is like a Command Sergeant Major who has become elevated to a GS-15 level or even the Schedule C political executive to act as Pilate’s COS/Adminsitrative Head. Both Pilate and Cornelius survive the Sajanus purges in 31 and, while the reasons for Pilate’s recall are murky, I suspect he went to Capri to brief Tiberius on the whole Christian question and Tiberius died before Pilate could secure another patron to advance his career OR he went to ground because it was dangerous to be a Christian or associated with the Christians from the get-go due to resentment to Tiberius for the Sajanus purges or on general principles. Cornelius is careful to photoshop any Roman content out of the Gospel of Mark until Jesus is dumped into Pilate’s lap by the Sanhedrin. Except for Mark 15:28, which is generally considered a scribes addition like Mark 16:9 - 20, there is no Jewish theology in any of the Passion accounts, but, particularly Mark’s. And whatever Jewish theology is captured by Mark is coincidental to the narrative of His actions after being baptized, in contrast to Matthew, which connects all the dots Mark has included but is essentially ignorant. Cornelius was a God Fearer before Jesus appeared in his life and his introduction was through the president of the Caperium synagogue, Jairus, who provided the testimony of his own daughter as well as the woman with the chronic flow.

So, the Gospel of Mark was written by one of the faithful God Fearers in the Praetorian Guards (the Italian Cohort) to whom “O Come, Ye, All Faithful” refers and it reflects an effortless harmonizing of the Gospels in a genre far more expansive and relective of the nature of Christianity than history, History is a subordinate element of literature, generally, and narrative, in particular. Post modern deconstruction is designed to squeeze all the juice out of narrative in order to present an accurate post-mortem of the purely material elements of any given subject. The Jesus Seminar is an example of that agenda writ large, but it is basically Marxist epistemology, the product of the Dialectic Materialism. The difference between Matt’s historical model, the Jesus Seminar and Richard Carrier’s “Jesus as Myth” construct is one of degree and not of kind. They are all Marxist in aspect.

And “All Come, Ye, All Faithful” and Messiah aren’t.

The difference between Matt’s history and the narrative of the Gospel of Mark is the difference between the desert as a lifeless wasteland of T.S. Eliot and the desert as an ocean of T.E. Lawrence. In terms of his historical model, John Dominic Crossan is clearly an old school Marxist community organizer while Matt Wittman is the opposite side of the same coin as an Evangelical proponent of the Pro-Life heresy. 

Here’s an exercise you can do at home for yourself: when you read any pericope in the Gospels: what is the music that accompanies your experience of the scripture. Does this fit with the music of the Solo Scripture version of the same scripture? Is the music of the Solo Scriptura version the same as, similar to or antagonistic to your music?

As the Little Prince observed, “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly: what is essential is invisible to the eye”, a prospect that is anathema to the historical model of both Marx and Matt Wittman.