Easter is What?
By Gene W. Edwards, the world’s best intuitive psychic.
Posted 4/7/2023.
First, I will view the era. Rome cruelly controlled the historical Roman world known about by us today, including Jesus’ time and place. The Jews were particularly rebellious. Understand that Jesus, in the popular mind then, represented the one person viewed by the common people as able to topple the Roman rulership of Judea (Galilee and Perea). Some Jewish zealots believed Jesus to be their prophesied Messiah, born in Bethlehem, as it says in the Bible book of Micah (Micah 5;2). Micah prophesied from 797–696 B.C.
The Roman Jewish Herod Antipas (he ruled from 4 BCE to 39 A.D.) was the successor of the Roman Jewish Herod the Great, who ruled from 37 BCE to 4 BCE or from 36 BCE to 1 BCE (BCE means before the common era, before Jesus). We are told, and I concur, that Jesus lived for 33 years. No one knows, to within a few years, what year Jesus was born and lived, but the best guesstimate is 4 BCE to 30 or 33 A.D. That makes Jesus’ birth year 4 BCE (before the Christian era) and Jesus’ death in 30 A.D. (there was no year 0 back then). Which Herod wanted the prophesied baby Messiah killed, after talking to the Wise Men looking for him? That would appear to be Herod the Great. Look at this file: https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/truth-or-fiction-did-herod-really-slaughter-baby-boys-in-bethlehem
I intuit Herod the Great. The “slaughter of the innocents,” of all baby boys up to two years old, only included Bethlehem and very near it, Jerusalem being a rugged five miles away. The population of Bethlehem was less than 600 people and infant mortality in Jesus’ day was very high, of babies naturally dead before the age of two. Here’s a learned discussion about Jesus’ full timeline: https://www.thechurchnews.com/history/2022/12/19/23512976/bethlehem-archaeological-insights-setting-jesus-birth
Edgar Cayce tells us Jesus was born on January 6, based on our present calendar. I get the words “time shift.” December 25, therefore, also suffices. Close enough, a time close to the winter solstice when the days start getting longer and night starts to diminish: the light of the world!
The crucifixion was in April, which is when we celebrate the crucifixion and resurrection. Writer T.S. Eliot called April “the cruelest month.” April is often associated with catastrophic tragedies, unseemly events, inspiration, the month of mental toughness, and old events extinguished and replaced by new beginnings. Spring comes alive with redemption once the old of winter dies off. It is a month of war, energy, and transformation, and of newness, birth, and fecundity in dynamism and thought, and often of brilliance in every field.
*****
Thus we come to the crucifixion and resurrection. I’ll look at the big picture. As follows:
Death of Jesus foretold as well. Awe inspiring story, almost beyond description! Zealous Judas was disappointed that the “Palm Sunday” we celebrate, with lowly and humble Jesus riding in Jerusalem on a “donkey” [even though he was not a Democrat, ha!], exemplified an apolitical man of peace, not a man o’ war. The back story is, the Jews wanted a general, whereas the Romans were bent on the powerful suppression of any hint of Jewish rebellion in Galilee and Perea (Judea; Israel to us). The two sides met on crucifixion day when the Jewish leadership avoided a Roman bloodbath by “sacrificing” their local charismatic leader, Jesus, to be crucified, this producing for the Romans a temporary peace — until 70 A.D. when the Romans decimated the Jewish resistance movement, overthrew it and scattered the Jews.
Value what Jesus did to promote peace and love, never war. The Romans crucified (as capital punishment) thousands over the years, as had other peoples. The bones of those being crucified were broken. Those on the cross died of spearing, pain, blood loss, and thirst after being picked over by birds of prey while still alive, their remains desecrated as well — all this as punishment for villainy, or of any rebellion against the new Roman Empire of Augustus. Crucifixion was par for the course in that time and place.
Value Jesus’ decision to be sacrificed for a temporary peace and natural near-end to His three-year ministry. Value what He gave up that He could have had: power; rulership! His death brought to a close His mission of inspiring Jewry to a new spirit of love and revelation after some 400 years since the Jews’ last minor prophet. His world was alive with religion, among His Essenes and among all those yearning for something better than the continued captivity of their homeland . . . captivity again, this time by Romans, but the Dead Scrolls were no more transformative in themselves than the Dead Sea itself. The Jews wanted a Messiah and they got one, a new love, law, and light than what they had that was flickering out, and they were only left living in expectation. Jesus’ mission extended to the world from had been a chauvinistic, ethnically isolated people — the Jews — in a hopeless arid land in a hopeless situation, no leader emerging to free them and chance for their belief in a sophisticated monotheism to encompass the spiritual yearnings of humanity itself.
Our world was at its lowest spiritual point during and just after Jesus’ time, particularly with the reigns of Caligula and Nero. The indomitable Christians managed to hold onto life and breath, and spread their Christian New Covenant — that ye love one another — until the reign of Constantine (he reigned 336–337 A.D.), who instituted Christianity — whether from passionate belief or only from expediency — as the Roman State religion, thus legitimizing it as a movement and credo. Christianity is now 2.4 billion people, the world’s largest religion, all because not of a Bethlehem birth of a great leader but the crucifixion and resurrection of that man, Jesus the Christ!
I’ll leave it up to others, and our scriptures, to describe the gore and glory of the crucifixion, three-days inclusive, and the 40 days of resurrection. An excellent source is Jeffrey Furst’s The Life of Jesus. Those were metaphysical events greater than words and philosophy can encompass. Ineffable! I generally accept Josephus’s history of Jesus’ time and place. Josephus lived from 37–100 A.D., so he was born after Jesus died — but he never mentioned Jesus. Pinpointing our religious history into a strict chronology and verifying who lived then and what they did in Jewry is relatively impossible after 2,000+ years. One has to understand that it is by faith in the unseen, despite the scoffs and diminutions of atheists and skeptics, who regard the whole Jesus saga as an ignorant fable, that the basic message of Jesus’ inner God and Kingdom, from His time to now, called Christianity, lives on unto time immemorial.
Posted 4/7/2023.
Gene W. Edwards is the world’s best intuitive psychic about the past, present, and future. I post on Facebook and on my blog: genewedwards.medium.com. Medium is a giant blogging-host website. Please Share all my postings, each time you see one!