To many of you you are probably wondering why the sudden attention to religion, with my previous post about John Paul the second. Now comes a post about how the historical Jesus of Nazareth is your cousin and you may say to yourself, the Rep. has gone religious on us. My reality is that religion or faith is always a part of my daily living. I believe it to be the essence of who we are as beings in this fleeting realm of existence, whether we chose to see it or not.This post however is not about religion, as most people would understand that term, but about an interesting article that I came across in Slate magazine that confirms a universal truth or religious principal, namely, that we are all children of the family of God. You see the article of which I speak more directly talks about how genetically speaking most of us are blood relatives of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. For those who do not believe in the divinity of Jesus, the universal truth is deeper still, that we are all connected. Centuries of racial and ethnic strife because of the fear of our brothers and sisters and our perceived differences and the reality is that we are not so different one from the other. Whether it be in the spirit or of the flesh, we are all brothers. We should open our eyes, not in the darkness that has seperated us from the beginning of our existence, but in the burning light that reveals the truth that lies within us.
Good reading, God bless you my brother.
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WHEN JESUS WAS ASKED IF HE WAS THE SON OF DAVID, HE REPLIED, IN HEAVEN DAVID CALLS ME FATHER.
WHEN JESUS WAS ASKED IF HE WAS THE SON OF DAVID, HE REPLIED, IN HEAVEN DAVID CALLS ME FATHER.
Thank you, Representative Peña, for this post! I couldn't agree more with both the science and the spirit of the Slate article!
One quibble I do have, though, is that the author of the piece is as breathless about talking about an ancestor's potential descendants as he is about all of our ancestors. Here's what I mean. The author was careful early on to include the disclaimer "and still have descendants living today." And he was scrupulous about invoking that disclaimer in the Jesus example: "If Jesus had children (a big if, of course) and if those children had children so that Jesus' lineage survived, then Jesus is today the ancestor of almost everyone living on Earth."
Unfortunately, in a later example the author is off to the races without invoking the critically important disclaimer. He writes:
Keep these observations in mind the next time you read about people being linked to famous ancestors. Newsweek recently gushed that "one in five males in northwest Ireland may be a descendant of a legendary fifth-century warlord." In fact, virtually everyone with any European ancestry is descended from that man.
As the author well knows but only mentions later, that's only true if the legendary fifth-century warlord still has descendants alive today. If the warlord's kids (or grandkids) all died without having kids, then, obviously, nobody is the descendant of that warlord. Here is where the author got back to including the disclaimer:
In addition to Jesus and the warlord, we're also all descended from Julius Caesar, from Nefertiti, from Confucius, from the Seven Daughters of Eve, and from any other historical figure who left behind lines of descendants and lived earlier than a few thousand years ago.
Again, I completely agree with the central premise of the author's piece. I just worry that too many readers are running around saying - potentially incorrectly - things like I'm related to Julius Caesar. If so, they set themselves up for being shot down, in the process taking with them the real message: we're all related to each other. It would be sad if that message gets lost.
On a related note, I wonder if the author has any estimates about what percentage of people alive at some given point in the past has descendants alive today.
Did all this make sense? I wrote it just to say I hear you! I am with you: we are all literally brothers. I hope we start acting that way.
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