Jesus' Perfume
Jesus' Perfume
Jesus’ disciple, Judas, discovering Jesus alone with a woman who was anointing him with the expensive perfume spikenard, voiced his spy canard, which was that Jesus should sell the perfume to raise money. Jesus’ reply was, ‘Leave her alone.’ (Mk: 14. 6) Judas’ response was to denounce Jesus to the Jewish religious police, the Pharisees, who gave him ‘thirty pieces of silver’ for his betrayal, and the judiciary of the Roman Empire, then occupying Jewish Palestine, that is, the judge Pontius Pilate, during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius Caesar Augustus (14-37 B.C.), sentenced Jesus to be executed.
The scene is familiar from the 8th century collection of Middle Eastern folktales, A Thousand and One Nights, the story of Scheherazade and Shah Jehan, who cut off his wife’s head for alleged unfaithfulness, which allegation was proven false. Although Jesus is executed, the bottle, from which the djinn appears, resembles many of the tales told by Scheherazade to gentle the king, who thereafter marries each day and has his bride beheaded before the next day’s wedding.
The perfume applied from a woman’s bottle is the reason for Jesus’ execution, that is, the aspersion is that Jesus is consorting with a djinn, which actor Larry Hagman, as astronaut Tony Nelson, does in the more contemporary US’ television (NBC) ‘sitcom’ series, I Dream Of Jeannie (1965-70), starring actress Barbara Eden as Jeannie from the bottle. Alternatively, the impugning centers upon Jesus’ own human status, that is, is he a djinn? Clearly Jesus is a magician who can turn water into wine, as he did at the wedding at Cana (John: 2. 9), and while aboard a ship he calmed a storm before walking on the water (Matt: 14. 25), so he’s depicted as an extraordinary character reminiscent of those in A Thousand and One Nights, while his surviving execution, and subsequent Resurrection and Ascension to heaven is typical fairytale. The justification for treating Jesus’ story as a departure from fantasy into reality is more than a curiosity. Born from his mother, the Virgin Mary, Jesus fulfilled a promise from God that the seed of Eve would be redeemed, because Jesus was born without Mary’s ovum being fertilized by male semen. As the futanarian species of women’s seed is capable of fertilizing ova, Jesus prefigures their future, which justifies taking the story seriously.
Although it isn’t clear that Jesus wasn’t married, it’s clear that Judas didn’t want him to have another bottle, because Jewish morality centered upon adultery, that is, being with more than one woman was against Judaic law. However, as Jesus said, when it was alleged that a woman was adulterous, ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ (John: 8. 7) If women’s seed are the human race, men are its adultery, whereas Jesus was woman’s seed, which it’s impossible for women to adulterate, because it’s theirs.
Although Christians believe that Jesus’ teaching supersedes the Old Testament of the Jews’ history and law, which is their Talmud and Torah, the New Testament of Judeo-Christianity doesn’t stretch to the abandonment of adultery, as the basis of its legal system, with regard to inheritance and property, etc., ‘Love your neighbor as you love yourself.’ (Mk: 12. 31) Jesus’ execution was because he represented a threat to law based on adultery, that is, in demonstrating that women were the human race, everything belonged to the ‘means of production’,1 which wasn’t an alien parasite. Roman law was based on the principle that property and inheritance was dependent upon marriage, that is, divorce meant a division of property, while death meant the inheritance of property, which system would be brought into question if women never married and, because of their capacity to sexually reproduce their own brains’ powers to develop the technologies needed to remain immortal, inheritance would be a matter of birth, that is, each new child inherited all of the species’ worth, as there’d be no extinction in parasitism for the geniuses.
1 Marx, Karl Das Kapital (1867) Bk II, The Process of Circulation of Capital, Pt I, The Metamorphosis of Capital and their Circuits, Chapter 1, The Circuit of Money Capital, I. First Stage M-C, Terlag von Otto Meisner (2nd edn.), Hamburg, 1885, p. 33.