Eyeless on the Gaza Scrap

This morning, in response to a request from Bruce Charlton, I was brainstorming possible codewords for the current conflict in Philistia. (I'm the one who coined birdemic and peck, though not Fire Nation.) This is a tough one, because one of the parties in the conflict has a very long history of being nicknamed, and all of those nicknames are actually more likely than plain English to attract the attention of the hate police. An unusual degree of outside-the-boxness is called for, but it can't be so obscure that readers can't figure it out. So what are the options? The Garbanzos, as in hummus? (Sorry, Brits, garbanzo is just a superior word to chickpea.) Blues vs. Greens, as in the Byzantine chariot-race factions, a byword for pointless hostility?

One of the things that popped into my mind while brainstorming was Aldous Huxley's novel Eyeless in Gaza -- partly for the obvious reason, and partly because I've recently been watching old Beavis and Butt-Head sketches on YouTube. (I never really watched TV as a teenager, so it's all new to me.) I've never actually read Eyeless, but I do know that the main character's name is Anthony Beavis.

Then I suddenly remembered that shortly before the outbreak of hostilities -- 11 days before, to be precise -- I had randomly rewatched an old Onion News Network episode presenting "future news" in which the two factions, each reduced to a single person, were fighting over "the Gaza Scrap."

Here's a YouTube history screencap, showing that I watched this 2013 video on September 27, 2023:

I looked up the old Onion video for a kind of strange reason. I had thought of an exchange between the two newsreaders  Zesty Lewis and Vitamin Daniels, in which Lewis says, "How it do, Vitamin?" and he replies, "What it is, Zesty!" -- and my purpose in watching the video was to check whether she says "How it do" or "How it go." It's do, in case you were wondering.

Watching this reference to fighting in Philistia -- explicitly framed as future news -- just days before it became current news was an odd coincidence. It reminds me of how I began a post with a definition of the word corvid just months before the birdemic started.

The Onion "future news" video is very much in the spirit of the 2006 movie Idiocracy -- by Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head -- which in turn drew inspiration from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

The title of Eyeless in Gaza, Aldous Huxley's book about a man named Beavis, is taken from Milton's Samson Agonistes, which is based on the biblical Book of Judges.

The possibility of the current conflict going nuclear is often referred to as the "Samson Option."

Update: The codewords have dropped, pilfered from Frank Herbert. The war zone is Arrakis, the indigenes are Fremen, and the settlers are Choam. (These are Bruce's ideas, unrelated to my recent Freeman syncs.)

Westley, what about the A.L.S.W.'s?

These code-words are fun sometimes, but the meaning behind them is pretty grim -- and I think the odds are better than even that Bruce is right here.

It's getting kind of ridiculous how many things need to be coded, though. You have to be careful how you talk about even so general a concept as vexillological dissimulation, lest you be flagged as one of those perfidious connivance conjecturers.

The shit sandwich technique

The late Lyle Burkehead used to have a page on his site called "Why I Am Not a National Socialist," explaining his reasons in great detail. Now you've probably never heard of this person at all, but from what I've just told you, you've likely inferred that he was, well, pretty much a neo-Nazi. All respectable people are strictly Caesar's-wife when it comes to Nazism. You do not want "Are you a Nazi, and if not why not?" to be on your list of frequently asked questions.

On a completely different topic, if you search Google Propaganda for nuremberg code, the first hit right now is -- quelle surprise! -- an article called "Birdemic pecks don’t violate the Nuremberg Code. Here’s how to convince the doubters."

The article itself is just bog-standard peckprop. The only reason I'm even talking about it is because of their proposed method for convincing doubters: "If you come across someone claiming birdemic pecks are experimental, you can try the 'truth sandwich' to try to myth bust."

The idea, as they explain, is to lead off with approved government propaganda, then mention what some badthinkers are saying, and then end with more propaganda. That way, you can engage with badthinkers, but you hide problematic content in the less-memorable middle portion of your discourse, "sandwiching" their toxic ideas between two slices of wholesome FDA-approved bread. It's a classic PR technique, nothing new.

But this -- this -- is the graphic they chose to use to illustrate how a so-called "truth sandwich" works.

Now I'm no expert on sandwiches, but I always thought that a slice of baloney between two slices of bread was called a baloney sandwich, not a bread sandwich. Nomenclature aside, though, just look at that graphic without any context. What would you assume it represents?

Well, obviously, it's warning you about a method of deception. Someone offers you a delicious "truth sandwich," and it certainly looks like truth on the outside, so you eat it -- but, oh no! They had actually hidden some vile lies inside, and now you've swallowed them! That's why you need Jiminy Cricket, or a talking dill pickle, or whatever that is, to point out that, despite the legit-looking banner proclaiming this dish not just a truth sandwich but the truth sandwich, it's actually full of baloney.

But no, this is actually from an article advocating the "truth sandwich" not as a disinformation technique, but as a technique for fighting disinformation. Where the graphic labels the contents of the sandwich pretty straightforwardly as "LIE," the article explains that this actually means the part "where we talk about a false claim and how it relates to the truth." And when Jiminy Gherkin says, "Hey, you're full of baloney!" he actually means, "Hey! You're using a psychologically effective technique for addressing false claims without unduly emphasizing them!"

Is this just an example of jaw-droppingly inept propaganda, or is it possible that it was done on purpose? Is the writer blinking at us in Morse code, trying desperately to signal that the whole article is a lie, produced under duress?

⁂

Random coincidence: While searching for a Spinal Tap "shit sandwich" meme, I stumbled upon this. Funny how that phrase keeps turning up!

For daws to peck at

Shot through the heart

And you're to blame

-- Bon Jovi

Birdemic came from corvid. I had randomly posted about corvids -- birds of the crow family -- in June 2019, which served to remind people that the word existed. A few months later, Bruce Charlton started using expressions like "19 corvids" as a sort of punning code, and I mentioned that the connection he had made reminded me of worst movie ever made, Birdemic: Shock and Terror. Soon birdemic had become the established code-word in our group of bloggers.

Last December, when another code-word was needed, I said, "Given our corvid theme, the first thing that comes to mind is 'for daws to peck at' — so, the peck?" (The daw is a species of corvid.)

Now peck is just as well established as birdemic, but I don't think most people realize it originated as an Othello reference. The line, spoken by one of Shakespeare's most Sorathic characters, is: "But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve / For daws to peck at: I am not what I am." Only now to I realize how appropriate that is. The peck is administered through the arm and seems primarily to target the heart -- so anyone who submits to the peck is in a fairly straightforward sense "wearing his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at." And I am not what I am" is a motto for our time, when nothing officially-is what it actually-is.

⁂

I put together the chart below with data from the daily birdemic reports published by Focus Taiwan, which gets its numbers from the Taiwan CDC. Since June, when they started publicly reporting the number of peck deaths, every single week has seen more deaths from the peck than from the birdemic itself.

Of course both numbers are relatively small, but still it's a pretty clear-cut case of the cure being worse then the disease. And yet they keep pushing it, and the public is still on board.

If Newspeak for "Ministry of Truth" is Minitrue, then the Ministry of Health should be . . .

Minihell.

Start using it.

Also, although I think birdemic is here to stay, it occurred to me today that another good nickname would be the Cyranovirus -- since its main effect seems to be to make people's noses grow.

Juneteenth National Independence Day

I know, I know, I should just pass over this one in silence -- but I'm an English teacher, dammit, and I just can't not say something about that name!

No, I don't mean the Juneteenth bit, though lots of people are complaining that it's lazy or illiterate or mushmouthed or whatever. Do I care about this? No, I do not. I'm down with Halloween and workaholic and Frappuccino and all manner of other morphological rannygazoo. If anyone wants to start calling Cinco de Mayo Mayfth, they have my blessing. No, my beef is with the rest of it.

Some variant on Independence Day could have worked. A slave is a dependent, and on June 19, 1865, the last members of this particular class of dependents were emancipated and became personally independent. Personal Independence Day might have been a good name, to distinguish it from the Fourth of July and to connect it to the lives of modern people who have never been slaves. It could be a day to remember and celebrate personal independence, agency, and the responsibility to make one's own decisions and pull one's own weight.

But of course that's just about the last thing They want the holiday to be about, and calling it Racism Is Bad Day would be a bit too obvious.

I'm told that Black Independence Day is one of the holiday's informal names. Since the people who became (personally) independent on that day were black, I suppose that works. But that makes it sound like a holiday for black people, and They want it to be celebrated by everyone, even if they're not black. Especially if they're not black. So I guess that was the "thinking," such as it was, behind the decision to go with National Independence Day instead.

The problem, of course, is that "national independence" doesn't actually mean that.

An independent country isn't a country in which each adult citizen is personally independent; that's called a free country. (National Freedom Day could have worked.) An independent country is a country which is itself independent of other countries, regardless of how free its citizens and subjects peoples may or may not be. North Korea is an independent country. Nazi Germany was an independent country. National independence has absolutely nothing to do with not owning slaves. In fact, national independence -- so that they could continue to own slaves -- is precisely what the Confederacy was fighting for in the American Civil War!

No nation became independent on June 19, 1865. The United States had already been an independent nation for -- well, I guess by then it was fourscore and nine years -- and did not become any more nationally independent when the slaves were freed. I mean, it's not as if the American slaves had belonged to King George or something. Nor did the emancipated slaves gain national independence on that day; they continued to be under the government and sovereignty of the United States of America, as before.

⁂

I mentioned North Korea before, and I guess it's a perfect example of the same kind of thing. There are two countries on the Korean Peninsula: the Republic of Korea, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Which one is a democratic (as opposed to dictatorial) republic? The one that doesn't have the word democratic in its name.

There are now two Independence Days on the United States calendar: Independence Day, and Juneteenth National Independence Day. Which one is about national (as opposed to personal) independence? The one that doesn't say that on the tin.

The DPRK of holidays.

No, not "UAP"

So tell me, you-a friends, or you-a foes?

There's been a push from the USG to rebrand UFOs as UAPs -- unidentified aerial phenomena. This is all kinds of lame for the following reasons:

1. It's been immediately embraced by UFO buffs, defeating the presumed purpose of distancing "serious" discussion of UFOs from said buffs.
2. The most common assumption about UFOs is that they are spaceships and thus not "aerial" at all.
3. What are we supposed to call ufologists now? Uapologist sounds like someone who works for Campus Crusade for Christ.

Allow me to propose the adoption of a much cooler term coined by an appropriately "unidentified" (no byline) San Antonio Express-News reporter in a November 8, 1957 article:

Whatnik. Whatnik. Let it roll off your tongue a few times. What's not to like?

⁂

Shortly after composing the above post, but before publishing it, I saw a woman on the street wearing a T-shirt that said "Daymare Town." This caught my eye because the sync fairies recently drew my attention to the Piers Anthony novel Night Mare -- which, like many Piers Anthony novels, is constructed entirely of bad puns. The main character is Mare Imbrium, one of many night mares that work for the Night Stallion and deliver bad dreams. At the end of the novel (spoiler alert, I guess), the Day Stallion appears, and Imbri is transformed into a day mare, henceforth to deliver "daydreams and pleasant evening dreams" instead.

Searching the Internet for daymare town, I find that it is the name of a series of games and comics created by someone named Mateusz Skutnik. Whatnik? Skutnik.

What's a ghommid?

Lately I've been tagging some of my posts with the label "Ghommids," so I figure I should probably explain what I mean by that word.

The term was coined by the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka for The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, his 1968 English translation of D. O. Fagunwa's 1938 novel, the first novel ever written in the Yoruba language. Despite using daemons in his title, Soyinka considered that word misleading and avoided it in the text itself. As he explains in his introduction to Forest,

These beings who inhabit Fagunwa’s world demand at all costs and by every conceivable translator’s trick to be preserved from the common or misleading associations which substitutes such as demons, devils, or gods evoke in the reader’s mind. At the same time, it is necessary that they transmit the reality of their existence with the same unquestioning impact and vitality which is conveyed by Fagunwa in the original.

This concern for giving creatures of West African legend the same "non-exotic validity" in English that they have in Yoruba led Soyinka to adopt what I have elsewhere characterized as a Tolkienian approach to translation. The same logic that led Tolkien to "translate" the "original" word kuduk into hobbit, a coinage intended to sound more at home in an English text, led Soyinka to coin the word ghommid to refer to that motley assortment of folkloric creatures that might otherwise have been called gods, spirits, demons, fairies, goblins, elves, etc.

I have borrowed this word of his and use it in much the same way: to refer to any of the assortment of beings -- apparently intelligent, roughly humanoid, but certainly not in any straightforward sense human -- which the human race has from time to time encountered throughout our history. I use the term as a way of avoiding making unwarranted assumptions about the nature of these creatures -- good or evil, material or spiritual, terrestrial or extraterrestrial, real or hallucinatory.

Taking a stand against anti-Mormons

Yet I confess that sometimes I
Still manage to annoy
My dearest friends, but that’s a fault
Of many a Mormon boy.

-- a formerly-beloved Mormon song

I'm not sure why this seemingly trivial matter should seem so very important to me right now, but it has nevertheless become for me a matter of great spiritual urgency that I be done with tolerance and passive resistance and just nail my theses to the door already.

I will no longer link to anyone who employs euphemisms such as "Restored Christian" in order to avoid using the word "Mormon." Update: That would essentially mean not linking to any faithful church-Mormons, which has turned out to be too much of a constraint. I now link freely to these people, as to lots of other people I disagree with.

I will no longer publish comments that employ euphemisms such as "Restored Christian" in order to avoid using the word "Mormon."

To be clear, I have no problem whatsoever with calling the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by its full, revealed name -- but it is increasingly clear to me that the real thrust behind the current rectification-of-names campaign is not so much to encourage the use of the revealed name as to to suppress "the M-word."

In case you hadn't noticed, "Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square" does not include the revealed name of the church any more than the oldspeak "Mormon Tabernacle Choir" did. "Restored Christianity" is no more the revealed name of the Mormon religion than "Mormonism" is. These changes are being made for reasons other than those stated, and I do not support them.

Hatelove

George Orwell's Newspeak was in many ways prophetic of modern politically correct language, but he made two important errors. First, Orwell's Newspeak used crime in compound words (crimethink, crimestop, etc.) to indicate anything that was beyond the pale, whereas Nowspeak has found hate to be more effective for that purpose. Second, Orwell defined goodsex as "sexual intercourse only for procreation" and sexcrime as "sexual intercourse for pleasure" -- implying, to put it mildly, values somewhat different from those currently endorsed by real-world totalitarianism. So, in the spirit of updating and correcting Orwell, I offer this addition to the PC lexicon:

hatelove: biologically natural relations between a man and a woman within the bounds of marriage

⁂

It's a felicitous enough coinage, I think you'll agree, capturing something of the spirit of blackwhite ("the ability to believe that black is white, to know that black is white, and to forget that one ever believed the contrary") -- but, you might ask, what is actually so hateful about hatelove?

Glad you asked.

1. Being disproportionately practiced by privileged white people, hatelove is inherently racist and elitist. Furthermore, its procreative aspect (see 3 below) means that it leads to the production of more people of the hatelovers' own race and class, something only a white supremacist would want to do. In essence, hatelove boils down to a deliberate act of genocide directed against the Other.

2. Hatelovers may use the "consenting adults" excuse to argue that their predilections are their own business, but in fact each and every hatelove relationship contributes to the cancer of toxic heteronormativity. Heteronormativity is (as Studies Have Shown) one of the leading causes of suicide, so in a way hatelove is a kind of murder.

3. Worst of all, hatelove is known to produce fetuses -- parasitic and often dangerous growths which, conveniently enough, never affect white cisgender men. This makes hatelove a form of misogynistic and transphobic violence. Moreover, each fetus thus engendered will, if (foolishly and irresponsibly) allowed to develop to maturity, go on to release as much as 30 tons of deadly carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere, thus directly contributing to the destruction of the planet.

If that's not hate, what is?

⁂

This is, of course, satire, but we live in a world where satire dates very quickly, as it never takes long for reality to catch up with it. The SPLC already classifies pro-marriage organizations as hategroups (I recommend writing such terms as single words to emphasize their Newspeakiness), and I venture to predict that it won't be very long before we start hearing rhetoric very close to that used in this post.

Was the prophesied Messiah really Jesus?

First, some digressions. (Actually, this post is mainly digressions. Consider yourself warned.)

⁂

There were in the time of Elijah two rival cults in Israel. The first worshiped a God who may originally have had a name (contemporary scholarship suggests Hadad or Ishkur) but was generally known simply as "the Lord"; the second gave their God a proper name -- but, after centuries of superstitious refusal to pronounce that name or even to write it with its proper vowel points, its precise form is no longer known. Thus it has come about that, in our English Bibles, it is the second of these Gods that is called "the Lord"; while for the first -- the one that the Israelites called "the Lord" -- that Hebrew word is simply transliterated and used as if it were a proper name.

For my part, I shall use the title "Lord" as the Israelites did and deal with the uncertain name of the other God by means of the same expedient resorted to by Victor Hugo, Freud, and others when they had reason to avoid spelling out a particular proper name. Even choosing an initial presents some difficulties, since the Hebrew letter in question can be transliterated as I, J, or Y. Out of deference to Dante (see Paradiso XXVI, 133-138) and to English translations of Moses (Exodus 3:14), I have chosen the first option.

Regarding the detailed differences between the two cults, all we can say for sure is that the followers of the Lord used religious statuary in their worship, while those of I---- tended towards iconoclasm. Any other differences in religious belief or practice are a matter of conjecture.

Everyone will be familiar with the story of the showdown between these two cults on Mount Carmel, instigated by Elijah (whose name means "My God is I----"). The story is related in 1 Kings 18; except for punctuation, paragraphing, and the rectification of names explained above, I follow the King James Version.

And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, "How long halt ye between two opinions? if I---- be God, follow him: but if the Lord, then follow him."

And the people answered him not a word.

Then said Elijah unto the people, "I, even I only, remain a prophet of I----; but the Lord’s prophets are 450 men. Let them therefore give us two bullocks; and let them choose one bullock for themselves, and cut it in pieces, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under: and I will dress the other bullock, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under. And call ye on the name of your God, and I will call on the name of I----: and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God."

And all the people answered and said, "It is well spoken."

When the prophets of the Lord were unsuccessful in obtaining an "answer by fire," Elijah ridiculed them and their God.

And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called on the name of the Lord from morning even until noon, saying, "O Lord, hear us." 

But there was no voice, nor any that answered. And they leaped upon the altar which was made.

And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, "Cry aloud: for he is a God; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked."

Elijah was, of course, more successful in eliciting from his God an apparently supernatural conflagration. (We are told that the fire consumed even the stones of the altar!)

And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, "I----, he is the God; I----, he is the God." 

And Elijah said unto them, "Take the prophets of the Lord; let not one of them escape."

And they took them: and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there.

Of course that wasn't the end of the conflict. Magic tricks never really converted anyone, nor has making martyrs ever been an effective way of stamping out an unwanted religion. Attempts were naturally made to avenge the 450 murdered prophets, and the feud between the two religions continued for some centuries. In the end, though, so complete was the victory of I---- that in modern languages it is he who is known simply as "the Lord," while his onetime rival, his cult now long extinct, is remembered only as a cartoonish devil once worshiped by idiots in the distant past.

⁂

One or two centuries after Elijah, the prophet known as Epimenides appeared in Crete. No one really knows where he came from; the story that has come down to us is that he just emerged from a cave one day, having slept there for 57 years. Although his line "Cretans, always liars" later became the basis of a logical paradox ("If a Cretan says Cretans always lie, is he telling the truth?"), it seems highly unlikely that this tattoo-covered shaman was in fact an ethnic Cretan. We can only speculate as to his true origins, but to me such sparse information as we have suggests that he may have been of Scythian extraction. At any rate, he actually put the line "Cretans, always liars" in the mouth of Minos -- a genuine Cretan -- in one of his poems, so the paradox is saved. In the poem, Minos berates his countrymen for having dared to maintain a "tomb of Zeus."

They fashioned a tomb for you, holy and high one,
Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies.
But you are not dead: you live and abide forever,
For in you we live and move and have our being.

Zeus is supposed to have been born in Crete, and apparently he once had a tomb there as well! Could "Zeus" have been a real man who lived and died in Crete in the distant past, one of such blessed memory that he was gradually deified in the minds of those who survived him, coming to be thought of as a god, and eventually as God? It's interesting to speculate, but at any rate, by the time Epimenides came along, Zeus was God and God was Zeus, and a "tomb of Zeus" was blasphemous
nonsense.

Later, around the 3rd century BC, Aratus of Soli began his Phaenomena, a didactic poem on the rather unpromising subjects of astronomy and meteorology, with a prayer to Zeus:

From Zeus let us begin; him do we mortals never leave unnamed; full of Zeus are all the streets and all the market-places of men; full is the sea and the havens thereof; always we all have need of Zeus. For we are also his offspring; [. . .] Wherefore him do men ever worship first and last. Hail, O Father, mighty marvel, mighty blessing unto men. Hail to thee and to the Elder Race! Hail, ye Muses, right kindly, every one! But for me, too, in answer to my prayer direct all my lay, even as is meet, to tell the stars.

As readers versed in the New Testament will already have divined, the only reason such obscure figures as Epimenides and Aratus are on my radar is that they are quoted there, in Paul's sermon at the Areopagus in Athens as reported in Acts 17.

Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.

God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him "we live, and move, and have our being;" as certain also of your own poets have said, "For we are also his offspring." 

Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent: Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

Although Paul begins with his famous reference to the Unknown God -- implying that the true God is someone over and above the named and "known" gods of the Greek pantheon -- he goes on to quote with approval two different poems about Zeus as if they are about the true God -- which, in my judgment, they are. Where an Elijah would have held Zeus up to ridicule and insisted that his own, better God be worshiped instead, Paul took a different tack. Never did he say that Zeus was a false god, a devil, or a figment of his worshipers imagination. He did not stoop so low as to quibble over names. (As recently as the 18th century, certain French pamphleteers were maintaining that their Dieu -- etymologically, Zeus! -- was the true deity, while the English God was nothing but another name for Lucifer; before you laugh, think if you have ever been guilty of the same thing.) Paul took it for granted that the Athenians already worshiped God and attempted only to correct and expand their ideas regarding him. So Dante says of the Greek pagans not that they worshiped false gods but that "they did not worship God in fitting ways."

Paul, like Elijah, triumphed in the end. It took a century or two, but his God eventually supplanted Zeus entirely.

⁂

Well, whose approach was right? Was Zeus God? Was Baal? Is Allah? . . . Is Yahweh?

Logically, either answer to each of those questions can be made consistent with the same facts, since there is no logical difference between believing in something that does not exist and believing false things about something that does exist. When, as often happens, I receive a letter addressed to Mr. Tychanievich or Mr. Pychonievich, is that the name of a person who does not exist, or is it my own name, spelt wrong? Is it more correct for a Yuletide spoilsport to say "there's no such thing as Santa Claus" or "You have some inaccurate beliefs about Saint Nicholas of Myra"? Should I call myself an atheist (which I am, when theism is narrowly defined) or simply say that my beliefs about God are somewhat unorthodox?

The question of which approach to take, then -- of whether to be an Elijah or a Paul -- is a practical rather than a factual one, a question of rhetorical or pedagogical technique, and different situations may call for different approaches. Looking back, and setting aside our squeamishness about mass murder, we can perhaps say that both Elijah and Paul made the choices that were strategically "right."

⁂

Which brings me -- finally! -- to Jesus and to the question posed in the title of this post. My current understanding is that, no, the prophesied Messiah was not "really" Jesus. The Hebrew prophets did not foresee Jesus, did not write about Jesus, and did not expect the coming of anyone very much like Jesus. Nor did Jesus really do most of the things the anticipated Messiah was supposed to do -- which is why believers in his Messianic character have granted him an extension with the idea of a Second Coming.

The Messianic prophecies were about Jesus in the same sense that the poetry of Epimenides and Aratus was about God. Jesus could have said, "There's no Messiah coming. Instead you get me"; or he could with equal justice have said (and generally did say), "I'm the Messiah, but 'Messiah' doesn't quite mean what you think it does." This explains the fact that Jesus did sometimes claim directly to be the Messiah but at other times seemed to be uncomfortable with the title and to discourage its use. (Particularly in the Gospel of Mark, he seems always to be saying, "Now, don't go around telling everyone I'm the Messiah!")

I would go even farther and say that Yahweh was no more (and no less!) "God" than Zeus was -- but perhaps few would be willing to follow me quite that far from orthodoxy. If that makes me an atheist, so be it; I have never denied the charge.

⁂

Note: Synchronicity alert: Just after writing the Epimenides part of this post, which mentions in passing the Liar Paradox associated with his name, I checked Bruce Charlton's blog and read his then-new post "Does the I Ching have a personality?" He quoted an interview of Philip K. Dick by someone called Mike, including this exchange:

Phil: No, I don’t use the I Ching anymore. I’ll tell ya, the I Ching told me more lies than anybody else I’ve ever known. [. . .] One time I really zapped it. I asked it if it was the devil. And it said yes. And then I asked it if it spoke for God, and it said no. It said I am a complete liar. I mean that was the interpretation. 

In other words I set it up. I set it up. I asked two questions simultaneously and it said I speak with forked tongue, is what it said. And then it said, oops, I didn’t mean to say that. But it had already –

Mike: Then you get a paradox. [. . .] That’s the paradox. It’s lying when it says it’s lying.

⁂

Note added: I should make it clear that the form of my question is deliberate: not "Was Jesus really the Messiah?" but "Was the Messiah really Jesus?" I wanted it to have the same form as "Is Zeus really God?" -- where the status of Zeus is being questioned by asking if he is God, the status of God being taken for granted. In the same way, I am taking the divinity of Jesus for granted and questioning the idea of the Messiah, not vice versa.