Almost 2,000 years ago in Judea two men were brought to trial for selling a slave and evading the taxes that were due to Rome. The papyrus makes the case against them
ed note–as always, a cargo ship of important info that every war-weary Gentile with a vested interest in his/her own future survival needs to understand about all of this.
Firsto, ladies and Gentile-men, just as the opening to the title of the news piece itself illustrates, i.e. that ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’, meaning, that the more things change, the more they remain the same, likewise, we see in the news story below that the same obnoxious behaviors found in the Hebrews, SheBrews, Israelites, Judah-ites, Judeans, Jews of today are the same behaviors found in the Hebrews, SheBrews, Israelites, Judah-ites, Judeans, Jews of yesterday.
And what this means, ladies and Gentile-men, is that as much as the Hebrews, SheBrews, Israelites, Judah-ites, Judeans, Jews, whatever we want to call them, are constantly, CONSTANTLY, kvetching and complaining about ‘anti-Semitism’ and all the ‘old canards’ that have been ‘unfairly and viciously’ associated with them and their behavior throughout history as liars, fraudsters, cheats, thieves, etc, that, just as the old saying goes–
‘Where there is smoke, there is fire’…
They–the children of Israel’, have earned the ‘credit rating’ that they now possess (and have possessed throughout time immemorial) not because of ‘baseless’ Gentile hatred towards them, but because of their hatred and contempt of Gentiles, of Gentile morals and of Gentile social institutions, including the precepts of ‘thou shalt not steal’ and ‘thou shalt not lie’.
Indeed, ladies and Gentile-men, their characterization of ‘anti-Semitism’ as the ‘world’s oldest hatred’ is a lie, just as everything else that they say is to some degree rooted in untruth and deception.
The truth of the matter is that the ‘world’s oldest hatred’ (as they like to describe ‘anti-Semitism’) is in fact the ‘anti-Gentilism’ that has been/is now/always will be as intrinsic to their philosophy and attending behaviors as hunting and killing defenseless animals has been/is now/always will be intrinsic to the philosophy and attending behavior of crocodiles and alligators.
And notice that in the story, the primary ‘business’ in which the accused are involved is the slave-trafficking of other human beings for monetary gain, something that they have always done since the days of Abraham selling his wife Sarah to Egypt’s Pharaoh so that he would be ‘well treated’. Moving forward from there, we see them engaged in trafficking today by smuggling and/or moving war-weary refugees from whatever hell hole they are trying to escape for exorbitant fees, as well as their well-documented involvement in bringing young Gentile girls to Israel (and elsewhere) so that they can be sold as prostitutes.
And of course, we have the more insidious form of enslavement that they have mastered, which is the lending of money at usurious interest rates that reduce Gentiles to the enslavement of debt that is almost as evil, albeit less visible.
And, finalmente, we would be remiss if we did not point out the fact that the genuine roots of all of this ugly anti-Gentilism is the Torah Judah-ism itself, where the buying and selling of slaves is viewed not as much as permissible as it is necessary, given the Hebraic aversion to doing any type of manual labor, to wit–
‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you, and from them you may buy slaves…You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly…’
And no, ladies and Gentile-men, this did not come from the Talmud which a whole gaggle of self-declared ‘experts’ claim is the source of all Judaic misanthropy and bad behavior, but rather from the same Torah (Old Testament) which Christians consider to be every bit as much the ‘word of God’ as they do the words of Jesus Christ Himself.
Ruth Schuster for Haaretz
A papyrus found in the Judean Desert that has been sitting in storage with the Israel Antiquities Authority possibly since the 1950s isn’t a Nabataean document after all, as had been previously assumed.
This papyrus of uncertain provenance was in Greek and is the longest Greek papyrus ever discovered in the Judean Desert. It actually contains the prosecutor’s notes ahead of a fraud trial, plus the minutes of proceedings before a Roman official almost 2,000 years ago.
Its true nature was discovered in 2014 by Prof. Hannah Cotton Paltiel, co-writer of an article analyzing it in the journal Tychetogether with Anna Dolganov of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Fritz Mitthof of the University of Vienna and Avner Ecker of Hebrew University. Dolganov also published a blog on the extraordinary find, ‘Romans go home!’ in Der Standard.
Cotton Paltiel realized its initially mistaken classification when checking the state of publication of the papyri the Antiquities Authority had stored. ‘I volunteered to organize documentary papyri in the Israel Antiquities Authority’s scrolls laboratory, and when I saw it marked ‘Nabataean,’ I exclaimed, ‘It’s Greek to me!” she explained in a statement.
In recognition of her discovery, the papyrus has been named P. Cotton in line with papyrological convention.
1. Cotton’s beginning is gone, but more than 133 lines remain. It relates to a chain of events in roughly the year 131, before the outbreak of the Bar Kochba revolt a year later.
‘This is the best-documented Roman court case from Iudaea [Judea, aka Judaea] apart from the trial of Jesus,’ Ecker said in a statement.
Two thoroughly bad characters named Gadalias and Saulos stood accused of allegedly forging documents relating to the sale and manumission of a slave in order to dodge the Roman imperial tax.
The prosecutors’ names remain unknown. Maybe they were tax officials. In any case, the miscreants were exposed by an informant, the document shows.
The scoundrels Gadalias and Saulos, who both attested to poverty, were abetted by Chaereas and Diocles, and the case involves three slaves named Abaskantos, Onesimos and Niko.
Regarding the timing, they deduce that it was after a tour of the region by Roman Emperor Hadrian in 129-130 and before the Bar Kochba revolt began in 132. The papyrus contains the name ‘Iudaea’ (the furious Romans changed the name of the province to Syria Palaestina after the Bar Kochba debacle).
Why didn’t Chaereas pay the tax?
On the Roman side, we find a centurion named Lectus, an official named Postumus, a governor named Rufus – who is, the team suggests, presumably Iudaea Governor Quintus Tineius Rufus, and two men named Flaccus and Primus, whose roles are uncertain.
The Jewish identity of Gadalias and Saulos is assumed based on their names. Gadalias, for one, was not a plebe: he belonged to the ‘officeholding class.’ However, he is depicted as a crook through and through, with multiple offenses and convictions and banishments as well. Said centurion Lectus was one of his victims.
In fact, the list of Gadalias’ offenses was so copious that the authors assume it to be historic, in the sense of committed over a long time, not just around the year 131.
Saulos was his friend and accomplice in crime, the authors explain, although the prosecutor’s notes suggest each was capable of committing crime separately, and did so.
As for the abettors, Chaereas and Diocles may have been Jewish as well, since those were common Greek names also used among Hellenized Jews.
What Diocles did isn’t clear. As for the other, indebted to Saulos, Chaereas agreed to ostensibly buy slaves that Saulos would actually keep. Saulos subsequently manumitted one of the slaves seemingly on behalf of Chaereas (as the nominal owner) but didn’t pay the requisite tax on the manumission. ‘In initiating this scheme of fiscal fraud Saulos is said to be motivated by an intense hatred, the object of which is not specified,’ the authors write.
So, they conclude, Saulos was the prime mover behind the crime. And as much as Gadalias is described as a recidivist, here his role was confined to facilitating the fraud by virtue of his position as the son of the local chreophylax, or registrar.
Chaereas played the role of a straw man to whom Saulos could fictitiously transfer slaves that remained in his own possession, and without paying the requisite taxes.
The Jewish identity of Gadalias and Saulos is assumed based on their names. Gadalias, for one, was not a plebe: he belonged to the ‘officeholding class.’ However, he is depicted as a crook through and through.
The authors also note that the Roman world looked very darkly at cheating the state over slave taxes.
The men also stood accused of forgery: ‘manipulating’ a place-name in a document and presenting the forgery in court. The Romans also frowned on forgery.
Amnesty could be granted for ignorance or error in good faith, Cotton Paltiel and the team explain. But if done deliberately, penalties ranged from expropriation and exile to condemnation to the mines.
It isn’t germane to the case at stake but both Saulos and Gadalias were accused of counterfeiting coinage, which the prosecutors likely brought up because it cast both in a terrible light.
Apropos their relationship, in their papyrus the prosecutor foresees Saulos trying to shift the blame for the forgery to Gadalias. But as the document does not contain the verdict, we don’t know what became of Saulos and Gadalias.