© Eso Anton BenjaminsNOT-VIOLENT TERROR
2 Terror In The Wind 1



The story of Jesus as told by the New Testament, gives the Passion of Jesus  special attention to elicit from the reader the profoundest of empathy with the horror of it all. The event is alleged to have happened in the 33rd year of Jesus’ life in the city of Jerusalem. This is according to the calendar of the Catholic Church and subsequently all Christian churches. According to the belief of orthodox neo-Christianity, Jesus was born 2010 years ago (counting backward from 2009) in Bethlehem, Palestine.

How was the time of the death of Jesus established?

The Council of Trent (1545-1563) commissioned Joseph Scaligeri (1540-1609) to create for Christendom a new historical chronology. While the argument for the need to establish such a chronology is generally believed to be the prevailing chaos in the chronology of history at that time, an equally good reason for putting history “in order” is that it allowed the Catholic Church to rewrite chronology the way it would like it. Indeed, the 16th century is when centuries of strife by the Church on behalf of the ruling princes against arch-Christianity have ended. The princes of the world and the church have won against the arch-“pagans and heretics”. While the history of money has just begun, there are no further obstacles in the way. The secular forces may proceed with capital accumulation and personal aggrandizement as never before.

Scaligeri was selected not on the grounds of his scholarship, but on grounds of his sympathy with Catholic (neo-Christian) theology. Which is to say, though the chronology of Scaligeri and his followers is interesting and new, can we be sure that Scaligeri is objective? Long before Scaligeri was even born, many books and documents were burned to erase other chronologies and locations of events, and countless forgeries of works alleged to have happened in times imagined were released to the public. Thus, while according to Scaligeri, Jesus was born in the year 1, and died in 33 CE, according to the mathematician and historian Anatoly Fomenko, Jesus may in fact have died sometime between the years of 1084 and 1195.

However, what if Jesus’ name was in reality Basil? Who is Basil? Basil was a holy man living in the Byzantine Empire. He was summoned to Constantinople by the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I (said to have lived 1081-1118), and there executed by the Emperor for of his “heretical” beliefs. Basil however did not die on the cross, but Alexius I’s executioners threw him into a pit of fire. The possibility that Jesus may originally have been Basil may come as a shock some, but the case is worth considering even if there is no final proof. On our answer depends the future, because as many now see, the past is ending on a note not only of a financial and economic crisis (likely to end with a crash), but that the crisis has deep roots in the history of the West. If that history is told contrary to the way it really was and the falsity has affected the way we think and behave, the crash may imbed the falsity for eternity. In that case, our children will repeat our mistakes.

According to Anna Comnena, daughter of Alexius I and author of “The Alexiad of Anna Comnena”*, the “Church” was infiltrated during her father’s reign by “heretics” known as Bogomils (a Slavic word meaning “Lovers of God”). Wishing to trap Basil (the name Vasily is a cognate of)  Alexius I invited him to his quarters, pretended great interest in his teachings, and got Basil to tell him what he believes about God and how one should live under such a God. As they conversed, Alexius I hid behind a curtain a court secretary, who recorded all that Basil told the king.

At the end of the interview the Emperor of Byzantium  rend open the curtain. He then revealed to Basil the text recorded by his secretary, and summoned a conference of “army chiefs and elders of the Church”. After hearing the content of Basil’s teachings, everyone expressed shock and condemned him. Though Basil is not quoted, according Anna Comnena, he “looked askance at our doctrine of the Divine Nature of Christ and wholly misinterpreted His human nature. He even went so far as to call the holy churches the temples of demons and treated as of little importance what among us is believed to be the consecrated Body and Blood of our first High Priest and Sacrifice.”

Basil’s teachings to the king earned Basil “burning and other tortures…”, despite which he [Basil] “…clung with all his might to his devil…. So a huge fire was kindled in the Hippodrome. An enormous trench had been dug and a mass of logs, everyone a tall tree, had piled up to a mountainous height. Then the pyre was lit….”

Brought before the pit, Basil’s woolen cloak was ripped from his shoulders and thrown into the flames. “Let us see if the fire will catch your clothes,” Anna records the executioners as saying with an inflection of contempt for Basil. The heat rising from the pit was so intense that the flames took the cloak into the air. “Look! My cloak flies up to the sky!” Basil is said to have responded to the executioners, who then “…lifted him up and thrust him… into the fire…. The flames… so thoroughly devoured the wretch that there was no odor and nothing unusual in the smoke except one thin smoky line in the centre of the flame.”

We should note that Anna Comnena does not name Jesus or Christ, but presumes it sufficient to call him the “first High Priest and Sacrifice.” Such an avoidance of name makes one think that Anna knows Christ only as a symbol. In fact, in antiquity “Christ” is a name that comes with no other name attached, but was drawn as an X, a cross. In short, Christ is as yet a word that does not represent any one individual, but many individuals who helped to make X so significant and dear.

Anna Comnena writes the story of Basil’s conflict with her Emperor father as if it was a conflict over religious belief. Of course, men do kill each other because of verbal disagreements. At stake may be the Empire—if the Emperor allows his opponent to gain so much public attention as to threaten his position. On the other hand, verbal opponents may also be killed not so much for what they say, but because what they say may give one of the parties to kill him for lateral reasons: the opponent may be standing in the way of acquiring to one gaining more power and/or wealth.


Asterisk & Notes of Interest:

* “The Alexiad of Anna Comnena”, transl. by E.R.A. Sewter, Penguin Books, 1969.

When it comes to the chronology of history, this writer agrees, more or less, with the new chronology of history as proposed by AnatolyFomenko.  .