Scripture, covenant and the lines of descent — read against what the sources actually carry.
The oldest mosaic programme in any Christian church, panel by panel. What is physically in each image, what it is said to depict and on whose authority, and what that rests on — with the nineteenth-century restoration record that governs any close reading of the lower register.
Read →Santa Maria Maggiore stands on ground that was a grove before it was a temple, a temple before it was a street of houses, and a consul’s hall before it was a church. A cluster of female cults, a king who moved his residence there and made it the register of every Roman birth, and two trees older than the temple whose deaths nobody recorded.
Read →Abraham’s three descent lines — Ishmael, Jacob, and Esau — and what they left: the Kaaba at Mecca, Judaism and Christianity, and Herod’s enclosure over the Cave of the Patriarchs at Hebron. Genesis, the Quran, and archaeology set side by side, kept separate.
Read →A Benjaminite of the house of Saul who stewarded the Persian court, refused to bow to Haman, and helped save his people — with the tradition, Hebrew and Iranian, that Esther’s line ran on into the kings of Persia.
Read →Sacred time in the ancient world was counted, and two numbers run through it: seven and fifty. The Hebrew calendar counts fifty days from Passover to Shavuot (Pentecost) in spring, and fifty years to the Jubilee, proclaimed on the Day of Atonement in autumn — the seven-day week written large, as a Sabbath of days, of years, and a Jubilee crowning seven sabbaths of years. This runs on a lunisolar frame: the Moon sets the months, the Sun sets the…
Read →Two billion Muslims and a claim that Islam itself is radical — tested against the counted number of violent jihadists, a terrorism death toll that falls overwhelmingly on Muslims, the formal verdict of Islam’s own senior scholars, the survey record, and a nation-by-nation comparison of how people actually live. The scorecard is mixed — which is the finding.
Read →The office itself — what was granted at Noah and how it was allocated, how it passes father to son and almost never to the firstborn, what it claims over other kings, and the line traced from the flood to the Mahdi. First of seven memos on the covenant, which do not agree on a conclusion.
Read →Benjamin gave Israel its first king in Saul; then David of Judah took the throne, and the record was shaped to fit. Read against itself, the Hebrew Bible shows a steady pro-Davidic hand lowering the house of Saul and raising Judah — the pledge that bound the tribes, the defamed Saulide names, a giant-killing reassigned to David, the textual damage falling on Saul, and a grave pulled south. The succession of Israel, read from the seams.
Read →The verse translated as “a wild ass of a man” — the oldest Greek reads agroikos anthrōpos, a man of the open country. The words, the versions, the household, and the dated entry of the bias. Part 1 of Bias Found, Bias Removed.
Read →A global church of nearly eighteen million that says it descends from Israel through Joseph — the Book of Mormon’s own story, a striking R1b marker among the northeastern tribes, the rise of Joseph Smith’s church, and where the Mormons stand now under a new prophet.
Read →The Buddha, a prince of the Solar-dynasty Shakya line, refused the throne to found Buddhism; the same royal bloodline rose through Chandragupta and Ashoka to build India’s greatest empire. Two wheels, one bloodline, meeting at Ashoka — and a closing comparison with Jesus.
Read →One event, on one stretch of road: Rachel dies bearing Benjamin, the last of Jacob’s twelve sons, and is buried where she falls. It should be among the most fixed and most honoured places in scripture — the death of a matriarch, the birth of the son who would give Israel its first king. Instead three things refuse to settle. The text places her grave in the lands of two different tribes. She is the only matriarch not laid in the…
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