Aunt Madeline was the epitome of the good catholic school girl, still studying into her spinster old age. My Mother, sister and Brother-in-law, four years after her passing, are still curating her neatly stored belongings, most of the heart of the soul. Yesterday, bored with the NASCAR races, I perused her handsome red Bible

The Holy Bible

Revised Standard Version

Second Catholic Edition

Ignatius Press

Translated from the Original Tongues

Being the Version Set Forth A.D. 1611

Compared with the most Ancient Authorities

Citations indicating variations in translations are in brief footnotes.

Electric Dan had texted me that Paul Wagener of the Wolves of Vinland had cited Psalm 82 in a podcast concerning multiple divinities. My current investigation into the actual appeal of Christianity among pagan and heathen folks finds a trace below which we will follow. I should note, that while Christianity holds little appeal to Modern Western Humans, and that atheism blooms in the wake of Protestant [a] Christianity like flowers after the rain, that pre-modern forms of Christianity held vast appeal among heathen folk. Witness the near total conversion in a few generations of Latin America under Catholicism while Native North American tribes took four hundred years to convert at less than 50%. A keystone of this study is the inference that something in earlier presentations of Christ to pre-Christians held an appeal, far beyond the prosperity Gospel of Modern Christianity. It being obvious from readings of pagan sources that there were many shared beliefs among Christians and Pagans in Antiquity, but few to none between scientific Modernity and extant heathenry, offers a direction for inquiry. [8]

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Notes

-a. Protestant Christianity, in all of its extant denominations, are strictly modern disciplines, developed under the eye of Science and in the shadow of Modernity.

-b. The accounts of father Andrew White, Maryland, 1635, and Increase Mather, 1676, make this clear, that Amerindians were attracted to Christianity and only balked when ALL aspects of their native faiths were rejected by New English Doctrine.

The full psalm is here quoted, with Quotation marks reserved for the Word of God, the voice of the Almighty.

A Plea for Justice

A Psalm of Asaph

82 [81]

God has taken his place in the divine council; [1]

in the midst of the angels he holds judgment: [2]

“How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? [3]

“Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; [4]

maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.

Rescue the weak and the needy;

deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

They have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken.

[5]

(God speaks)

I say, “You are gods,

sons of the Most High, all of you;

nevertheless, you shall die like men,

and fall like any prince.” [6]

Arise, O God, judge the earth;

for to you belong all nations!

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Psalm 82 Notes

-1. Council denotes a place were multiple parties conduct shared inquiry and arrive at a joint decision.

-2. The role of the angels here is indistinguishable from that of the lesser gods in Ovid, Hesoid, Homer and Virgil under the rule of Zeus Almighty.

-3. So speaks God, nearly identically to Zeus in Homer, to other powers who he accuses of afflicting humanity unjustly.

-4. The fatherless in all nations of antiquity were destined for slavery.

-5. Humanity, the subjects of creation, are lost and wandering, afflicted by events in the natural world beyond their understanding, very much as in Ovid’s Metamorpheses.

-6. In agreement with Hesiod, Ovid and Homer, particularly Zeus’ lone status as the one god who may not be killed, as he heals Aphrodite [Love] and Ares [War] from the wounds inflicted by the mortal Diomedes.

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Above, we see, in the semantic delusion of the post-rational world of science and monotheistic revisions for the Bible, that God Almighty has a capital G instead of a small g, not because he is the only suprahuman divine power, but because he is the greatest, as Zeus points out in the Iliad, that if he held one end of a chain and all the other powers in Heaven held the other, that he would drag them into his service.

Angels, in pagan and heathen terms are clearly analogous to the minor powers commanded by Zeus, who names them angels and gods, and who declares them to have powers to pass judgment over humanity, indeed wickedly so.

As I perused the kindly spaced type of this Bible, I make the other polytheistic Biblical notes.

Psalm 132

God is referred to as “the Mighty One of Jacob,”

Do note that Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord until dawn and that the attribution of Might is familiar to readers of the Hellenic tradition, from which God Almighty was derived from Zeus Almighty and Jove Almighty.

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Psalm 138

Psalm of David

‘before the angels I sing your praise,” prays David, obviously concerned with the opinion of God’s agents, the angels, which the modern scientific mind equates with the mere voice, thoughts and will of God projected down into the world, against all ancient evidence.

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Praise for God’s Universal Glory [A]

Psalm 148

Praise the Lord!

Praise the Lord from the heavens, [B]

praise him from the heights! [C]

Praise him. All his angels, [D]

Praise him, all his host! [E]

Praise him, sun and moon, [F]

praise him all you shining stars! [G]

Praise him you highest heavens,

and you waters above the heavens. [H]

[God is then named creator of the heavens who fixed their bounds that may not be passed… next comes a passage as if from Ovid, concerning lesser earthly powers that are supra human and in concord with heavenly creation.]

Praise the Lord from the earth,

you sea monsters and all deeps,

fire and hail, snow and frost,

stormy wind fulfilling his command.

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Notes to Psalm 148

-A. Glory requires the affirmation of witnesses, generally peers of lesser peers, particularly in a tribal context. The bible is a tribal document.

-B. Not to the heavens, but from, meaning by occupants of heaven.

-C. From the pinnacle of the human hierarchy.

-D. If these were merely facets of God, this prayer would be baseless. Angels are supranatural beings separate from God.

-E. Suggestive of other powers than angels subordinate to God.

-F. These two bodies vested with agency here and assumed to be gods in all pantheons of antiquity.

-G. Recalls such ascendant heroes as Orion and Heracles stationed as heavenly beacons, as indicated in Ovid.

-H. Sounding like a declaration out of Ovid, in which the higher powers occupy higher heavens and that the “waters” of “Milky Way” river of stars is the palace of the Almighty and his closest powers.

-I. These two passages, 7 and 8, are identical to passages in Ovid, concerning the winds as lesser gods and remind the reader of the most ancient book of the Bible, Job, in which God reminds his human subject that he holds the key to the storehouses of the snow.

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