Columbus OH

When Lew got up this morning he had planned to write an entry for the blog. And initially he feared he again would have to report that there was nothing to report. And at the physical level this true: Bobbi and he continue to experience considerable back/back-related pain, but neither are about to undertake any surgery. Of course there has been the usual visits to doctors (no change) and PT (Bobbi continues to increase the strength in her lower extremities, Lew maintains).

And in between medical visits they continued the usual routine activities - Bobbi's prison ministry, her other church-related activities, visits to her church friends, trips to the supermarket and the hair salon etc. In between entertained herself with email correspondance. Nothing new, nothing unusual, no justification for boring readers.

However, as he was waking up, Lew suddenly realized that, like most assumptions, it was not true that there was nothing to report, that nothing had happened all summer. On the contrary, the entire time Lew has been very busy on family history - not genealogy so much as the evolution of religion - many nights staying up late.

Cousin Michael has remarked that there seems to be little to do on the Franke line. In Europe, Louis Franke' maternal ancestors were nobility (but not very noble). As the internet developed, family members worked together to ferret out that line back through Charlemagne to Gallo-Romans (as well as some more or less curious branches such as Pope Adrian VI and the medieval Negrone family). However, from there back, surviving records really are too fragmentary for anything but speculation and myth. More fundamental, the ancient concept of history simply doesn't overlap enough with modern concepts to be useful. So it is hard to see where any of us can contribute a whole lot more to that quest.

Nevertheless, plenty remains for amateur genealogists to do. The Franke line itself has run into the proverbial brick wall in the netherlands. Somewhere I have a note that the unnamed ur-Francke was born there, but we have no details. Another note (or is it in the same one?) states that Helen Franke once had a book that gave this information, along with the connection to AH Francke, but it was lost in the 1920's. However, with all the resources now available, and more increasing daily, I can't imagine that this barrier will stand for long. A worthy project for Samantha.

Another opportunity lies in the fact that the Francke's were a hereditary clerical family. In pre-WWII Germany this gave them at least semi-noble status, hence they were acceptable for aristocratic marriages. In tracing both the Franke and Romberg lines backward the family already has documented many links with other clerical families - Cothenius, Dihn, Stoll, etc. Only the Romberg-Cothenius-Negrone line has been traced as far as the 12th century (thanks to cousin Samantha). Each of these clerical families need further digging.

However, Lew has developed a different line of thinking. Some time ago he realized that the density of these clerical connections translated out to a near identity of this family with the history of the church. Thus, while the specific family line fades out in the mists of the fourth century, the tradition can be traced further back by examining the history of the church itself. Now this turns out to be a lot easier. Conveniently, around the beginning of the century Eusebius collected the pre-Constantinian data. Of course he has been criticized (justly) for bias and unreliability. But since there exists much other documentation to supplement his, that unreliability causes little difficulty.

Over the centuries, a number of scholars have remarked upon the resemblance between the teachings of Jesus and those of Buddha. Publications on this topic certainly have hypothesized some fantastic (but not necessarily impossible) mechanisms.

But following Eusebius et al. backward in time, a simpler and entirely credible mechaninsm - supported by some hard evidence - also has been proposed. First of all, some of the fathers of the church (for example, Clement of Alexandria), specifically noted that Buddhists had influenced Jesus. Secondly, recent scholars have revised the date of Buddha's death to approximately -400. Third, the Mauryan king Ashoka (a convert) is well documented to have sent a series of missionary groups all over Asia in the years following -265, including at least one group to Alexandria, and another to Antioch (perhaps it would help understanding to note that there had been extensive commerce between Egypt and the Malabar Coast). The continuing success of the Alexandrian mission is supported by Buddhist symbols (the wheel) found on Alexandrian gravestones, the establishment of the monastic group which Philo said labelled themselves "Therapeutae" (a corruption of "theraveda", the Buddhist school of Ashoka) in the desert behind Alexandria, and the testimony of Clement.

Consider the testimony of the Evangelists in light of these facts. In chapter 2, Matthew explicitly stated that at the time of the slaughter of the innocents, the Holy Family escaped to Egypt. This must have occured before -4 because it was Herod the Great who ordered the atrocity. We know that at that time the largest Jewish community in the world was that of Alexandria. Therefore, the odds are quite high the the Holy Family gravitated to that city.

The gospels do not state how long the Holy Family remained in Egypt. Matthew states that they returned to Nazareth at some non-specific later date - "when those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead". That is no real help because it could have been almost anytime between Herod the Great's Death in -4 and Jesus' baptism in 29/30 AD. Matthew does mention that Joseph was afraid to go to Judea because Herod Archelaus reigned there in place of his father. Since Archelaus was deposed in 6 AD, this suggests that the family left no later. Luke seems to corroborate this terminus when he states that Jesus was 12 when he met with the (Sadducee) teachers in the temple. Now, were he born in -7 or -6, his 12th birthday, and therefore this scene, would have occurred about the time Archelaus was deposed.

From the foregoing, one legitimately may infer that Jesus remained in Alexandria from about age 2 to his 12th year. Certainly that would have provided very adequate time for him to learn from both the Buddhist missionaries and the Jewish teachers there. No wonder that the questions and answers of this 12 year old boy astonished the teachers in the temple (a far less cosmopolitan place than Alexandria). And no wonder that the Sermon on the Mount and many of his other teachings sound so Buddhist.

What I get out of all of this is that religion is not a fixed and static body of knowledge. As time passes, our knowledge and understanding increase, and the faith(s) evolves.

There is much more to this - Akhenaten and Moses is just one example. But this already is way to long, so I am arbitrarily postponing that to a later note.