Holy Week - Tradition and History.

Christians throughout the world are familiar with Holy Week, beginning on Palm Sunday, commemorating the Triumphant entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem.  The celebration begins in earnest with Holy Thursday, which commemorates the Last Supper and the washing of the disciples feet.  A vigil is held until Good Friday, commemorating the crucifixion, and concludes on Easter day, the most important feast in the Christian calendar.

And this timeline is all wrong, because of a misunderstanding on the part of gentile Christians regarding the Gospels.

What do we know?  In Matthew chapter 12, Jesus prophesied his time in the tomb: "But He answered and said to them, “An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign shall be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet; for just as Jonah was in the belly of the huge fish three days and three nights, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth."  (Matt 12:39-40)

But if Christ was crucified on Friday, he would have spent but two nights and only one full day in the earth.  There's been a lot of twisting and spinning done on the part of Christian apologists to reconcile this, and none of it has been necessary.

Nowhere in the Gospels was it said that Jesus was Crucified on a Friday.  What is conclusive is that the resurrection took place on a Sunday, the first day of the week (John 20:1).  The only other bit of evidence about the day of the crucifixion is that the high priests wanted the bodies off the cross before the beginning of the Sabbath (John 19:31, Luke 23:54, Mark 15:42 ).

To the early Gentiles who had converted to Christianity, the Sabbath meant one thing: Saturday, the Jewish day of rest.  Therefore, if the High Priests were worried about the beginning of the Sabbath, then Christ must have been crucified on a Friday, and the entire Holy Week schedule was based on this when the liturgical calendar was established.

The thing to remember, though, is that this was the Passover, a Great Sabbath; much different than the weekly Sabbath, and wasn't tied to a specific day of the week.  The Jewish Calendar was a Lunar Calendar.  A Jewish month begins at the new moon, and lasts 28 days.  Occasionally, they would throw an extra month into the year, just to keep the months more or less in synch with the seasons.  They also observed the equinoxes and solstices, which remained constant throughout the year.  The first month of the Jewish Calendar is Nisan, and it begins at the new moon closest to the spring equinox.  The Jewish day begins at sunset, i.e., Saturday begins at sundown Friday.

The Jewish Passover feast begins on the 14th day of Nisan, or the first full moon after the equinox (Exodus 12:2-6, Lev 23:5, Numbers 9:1-3). Of course, this can happen on any day of the week, and sundown on that day begins the Great Sabbath of Passover.  We are told many times in the Gospels that Jesus went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover.  There is great significance to this, as the day of preparation is the day the Passover lamb is slaughtered, as Jesus was to be killed to atone for the sins of many.

Tradition holds that Jesus was around 33 years old when He was crucified.  It's generally understood that Jesus was born in 4 BC.  The following shows the days of the week that Passover fell on for the years that Jesus may have been crucified, along with the Julian Day.

26 AD Wednesday, March 20

27 AD Monday, April 7

28 AD Saturday, March 27

29 AD Thursday, April 14

30 AD Monday, April 3,

31 AD Saturday, March 24

32 AD Saturday, April 12

33 AD Wednesday, April 1

34 AD Saturday, March 20

As we can see, the Great Sabbath of the Passover coincides with the weekly Sabbath on four of these years.  But does that square with the prediction of Matt 12:39-40?  If Jesus dies on a Friday, that leaves just one full day and two nights in the tomb.  But if Jesus was crucified in AD 29, he would have been 33 years old, according to tradition, he would have been Crucified on a Wednesday, the day of preparation, and would have spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday in the tomb, to be raised sometime after sundown Saturday.  Three full days and nights, as he foretold.  The dates and tradition align perfectly.  The mistake was when non-Jewish Early Christians interpreted the reference to the Sabbath to be the weekly Sabbath, not the Great Sabbath of Passover.

It's proper and right that we commemorate the Last Supper and Good Friday.  Just keep in mind that the last supper actually happened on Tuesday, and the Crucifixion on a Wednesday.  The church isn't going to change its liturgical calendar, but that's of little consequence.

The Christian celebration of Pascha, the resurrection (It's only called Easter in German and English), properly occurs on the Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.  The Eastern Orthodox religion still calculates the religious holidays off the Julian Calendar, which has slowly been going out of synchronization with the Gregorian calendar in use by the rest of the world.  This is why the Eastern Orthodox frequently celebrate Pascha on a different date than Western Christian traditions.  Unfortunately, the Orthodox feel that the appropriate change can only come through an ecumenical council, and the Orthodox believe that no ecumenical council can be valid without the Roman diocese being represented.  Since Rome and the Orthodox church are in schism, the Orthodox cannot hold what they believe is a valid ecumenical council.

COVID, Vaccines and Hydroxychloroquine

So I recently got into a discussion about vaccines, the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine when treating COVID19.  I was informed I was a conspiracy theorist who got my information from Facebook. It's kind of sad, really, because the person who said this knows me well enough to know better.

Natural hydroxychloroquine is quinine, first isolated in 1820 from the bark of a cinchona tree, which is native to Peru.  It was identified in 1820 as a preventative for malaria, and they figured out how to synthesize it in the lab in the 1940's, because so many of our soldiers in the Pacific theater were catching malaria.  Today it's an over the counter medication in much of the tropical world, referred to as the Sunday pill, because people take it on Sunday as a prophylactic against malaria. Its side effects are well known in that part of the world.  In the US it's  a prescription drug because we don't have a big malaria problem here and there can be interactions with other drugs, or side effects if taken indiscriminately in large doses, like some idiot gulping an aquarium additive.

HCQ is also used as an anti-inflammatory to treat the inflammation related to autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. This suggests a possible mechanism for preventing  severe COVID19 symptoms by keeping the airway inflammation under control.

COVID19 is a particularly nasty member of the corona virus family, but corona viruses are common and generally have mild symptoms. See https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/general-information.html.  Chances are you've already had a corona virus that you experienced as a common cold.  Like the common cold, there is no vaccine.  Corona viruses mutate very quickly, so even if a vaccine is developed for one strain, it's efficacy over time is highly questionable - one reason why the COVID19 vaccine is dubious. One of the problems that's been encountered is that corona viruses are quite common, and the antigen test to check for COVID19 doesn't discriminate.  It just says you had a corona virus recently, and it can't tell if it was COVID19 or just your run-of-the-mill coronavirus.

For what it's worth, I've been lied to by the media since 1972 at least.  I have no reason to trust anything on the news without corroboration.  I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I don't think 9/11 was an inside job, I don't believe in chem trails and yes, we did go to the moon. But I've seen a president railroaded out of office on innuendo and lies supported by a continuous false narrative promoted by the press, I've seen America go to war for no good reason, I've seen three years of a false narrative about Russian collusion, I've seen a media tell us that an election was honest when anyone with two working brain cells could see it was rigged, and I've seen much ado made about things that I've been personally involved in that was nothing like it was reported.

If you look at studies for hydroxychloroquine they're all over the map. The WHO has come out and decried HCQ, and my guess this was done to prevent a run on the existing supplies of HCQ, which is the specific reason India gave for making it a schedule H-1 prescription drug last year. Remember, in most countries, this is an over the counter medication. We saw what happened with toilet paper here, right?

My look at HCQ studies seems to fall into two categories: Studies where HCQ was used as a preventive, or administered when the first diagnosis was made or the symptoms were first noticed; and studies where HCQ was used to treat patients with full-blown, debilitating COVID19 as a last resort.  The reports of efficacy seem to break right along these categories, with the treatment of full-blown critical care COVID showing no efficacy (duh). I'm not the only one to notice this.

A team at Henry Ford Health System in Southeast Michigan said Thursday its study of 2,541 hospitalized patients found that those given hydroxychloroquine were much less likely to die.

A Yale epidemiologist said hydroxychloroquine could save up to 100K lives if used for coronavirus.

The reports of success varied internationally, as well.  37 percent of doctors internationally said that HCQ was the most effective treatment.

I was involved with the medical industry for 10 years with a prominent medical device manufacturer.  I know what it takes to take a treatment from concept to FDA approval.  There is no way in hell they did the necessary trials to declare this vaccine safe.  Read the disclaimer before you get it, and see if they don't have some legalese in there that absolves them of all responsibility if you get sick and die from the vaccine. I guarantee it's there, because they didn't do the necessary trials and they know it.

When studies of the effectiveness of a treatment contradict the experience in the field, I start looking for process errors in the controlled trials.  Having been involved with similar studies in a different field of science I know how initial assumptions and test protocol designs can give less than objective results - often the very results you're looking for.  I don't trust controlled trials as the final arbiter for that very reason.  They're not objective. Color me a skeptic, but I've seen it too many times. I can point you at a couple of books that show how studies have been engineered to give a predetermined result, especially if someone in control of that study has a vested interest in the result.

My question: why the campaign against HCQ?  Yes, if a bunch of idiots act like children and overdose on it, you're going to have complications and death.  You can say the same thing about aspirin, ibuprofen, Tylenol, Nyquil, or any other drug.  Those warning labels are there for a reason. But the reaction to HCQ has been over the top, with the media basically saying, "Don't take it at any cost!"  That doesn't pass the sniff test with me.  They're not saying it because of possible health complications.  If that were the case, they would say, "Don't take more than the manufacturer's recommended dosage, and see your doctor if you are on other medication."  But they're trying to make you think that HCQ is bad and WILL harm you if you take it, which isn't true at all.  Sorry, when a talking head starts lying like that, I start asking what their motivation is.  Are they trying to prevent a run on HCQ stockpiles?  Maybe. 

Or maybe they want you scared so you'll get the vaccine?  After all, they can't make money if the vaccine isn't in demand.  And yes, oh yes, they'll make money.  CNN business reports a possible $32 billion for Pfizer alone.  The BBC breaks down the players in the field.  Even though you're not paying for it, governments are buying it for as much as $40 a dose.  There's a LOT of money out there to be made, and if you don't think some of that isn't getting kicked back to the politicians and media who create the market for this, you're pretty naïve.

So, to sum up, COVID19 is a corona virus, and as such mutates as fast or faster than the common flu virus, so any vaccine is of limited effectiveness.  Since, according to Johns-Hopkins, you have a 98.2% of surviving COVID 19 if you catch it, and since, according to the CDC, only 6% of the COVID deaths have not involved a comorbidity, a healthy young American has a 99.892% chance of survival if they catch it. In a staggering case of medical negligence, numbers on deaths from side effects of the vaccine aren't being tracked, but if you sift the news they're not zero. Aix-Marseille University Faculty Member Dr. Herve Seligmann and Engineer Haim Yativ have done some research (PDF) with frightening results. The chance of a bad reaction to the Vaccine may be HIGHER than the natural COVID, assuming the vaccine can even defend against the COVID strain that you might catch.  The risk vs. reward calculus doesn't make sense.

CDC Admits: More Dead from COVID-19 Vaccine Than ALL Vaccines From Last 20 Years Combined